SEQ_130 // STATUS: LINKED
I was the only pure spectator.
They all performed what duties they could. [Szpindel] ran Sarasti's sketchy silhouette through a series of filters, perchance to squeeze a bit of biology from engineering. Bates compared morphometrics between the cloaked artefact and the skimmers. Sarasti watched us all from overhead and thought vampire thoughts deeper than anything we could aspire to. But it was all just make-work. The Gang of Four was on center stage, under the capable direction of Susan James.
She grabbed the nearest chair, sat, raised her hands as if cueing an orchestra. Her fingers trembled in mid-air as she played virtual icons; her lips and jaw twitched with subvocal commands. I tapped her feed and saw text accreting around the alien signal:
[Rorschach] to vessel approaching 116°Az -23°dec rel. Hello Theseus. Rorschach to vessel approaching 116°Az -23°dec rel. Hello Theseus. Rorschach to vessel approachi
She'd decoded the damn thing. Already. She was even answering it:
[Theseus] to Rorschach. Hello Rorschach.
Hello Theseus. Welcome to the neighborhood.
She'd had less than three minutes. Or rather, they'd had less than three minutes: four fully-conscious hub personalities and a few dozen unconscious semiotic modules, all working in parallel, all exquisitely carved from the same lump of gray matter. I could almost see why someone would do such deliberate violence to their own minds, if it resulted in this kind of performance.
Up to now I had never fully convinced myself that even survival was sufficient cause.
Request permission to approach, the Gang sent. Simple and straightforward: just facts and data, thank you, with as little room as possible for ambiguity and misunderstanding. Fancy sentiments like we come in peace could wait. A handshake was not the time for cultural exchange.
You should stay away. Seriously. This place is dangerous.
That got some attention. [Bates] and Szpindel hesitated momentarily in their own headspaces and glanced into James'.
Request information on danger, the gang sent back. Still keeping it concrete.
Too close and dangerous to you. low orbit complications.
Request information on low orbit complications.
Lethal environment. Rocks and rads. You're welcome. I can take it but we're like that.
We are aware of the rocks in low orbit. We are equipped to deal with radiation. Request information on other hazards.
I dug under the transcript to the channel it fed from. Theseus had turned part of the incoming beam into a sound wave, according to the color code. Vocal communication, then. They spoke. Waiting behind that icon were the raw sounds of an alien language.
Of course I couldn't resist.
"Anytime between friends, right? Are you here for the celebration?"
English. The voice was human, male. Old.
"We are here to explore," replied the Gang, although their voice was pure Theseus. "Request dialog with agents who sent objects into near-solar space."
"First contact. Sounds like something to celebrate."
I double-checked the source. No, this wasn't a translation; this was the actual unprocessed signal coming from—Rorschach, it had called itself. Part of the signal, anyway; there were other elements, nonacoustic ones, encoded in the beam.
I browsed them while James said, "Request information about your celebration": standard ship-to-ship handshaking protocols.
"You're interested." The voice was stronger now, younger.
"Yes."
"You are?"
"Yes," the Gang repeated patiently.
"You are?"
The slightest hesitation. "This is Theseus."
"I know that, [baseline]." In Mandarin, now. "Who are you?"
No obvious change in the harmonics. Somehow, though, the voice seemed to have acquired an edge.
"This is [Susan James]. I am a—"
"You wouldn't be happy here, Susan. Fetishistic religious beliefs involved. There are dangerous observances."
James chewed her lip.
"Request clarification. Are we in danger from these observances?"
"You certainly could be."
"Request clarification. Is it the observances that are dangerous, or the low-orbit environment?"
"The environment of the disturbances. You should pay attention, Susan. Inattention connotes indifference," Rorschach said.
"Or disrespect," it added after a moment.
We had four hours before Ben got in the way. Four hours of uninterrupted nonstop communication made vastly easier than anyone had expected. It spoke our language, after all. Repeatedly it expressed polite concern for our welfare. And yet, for all its facility with Human speech it told us very little. For four hours it managed to avoid giving a straight answer on any subject beyond the extreme inadvisability of closer contact, and by the time it fell into eclipse we still didn't know why.
[Sarasti] dropped onto the deck halfway through the exchange, his feet never touching the stairs. He reached out and grabbed a railing to steady himself on landing, and staggered only briefly. If I'd tried that I'd have ended up bouncing along the deck like a pebble in a cement mixer.
He stood still as stone for the rest of the session, face motionless, eyes hidden behind his onyx visor. When Rorschach's signal faded in midsentence he assembled us around the Commons table with a gesture.
"It talks," he said.
James nodded. "It doesn't say much, except for asking us to keep our distance. So far the voice has manifested as adult male, although the apparent age changed a few times."
He'd heard all that. "Structure?"
"The ship-to-ship protocols are perfect. Its vocabulary is far greater than you could derive from standard nav chatter between a few ships, so they've been listening to all our insystem traffic—I'd say for several years at least. On the other hand, the vocabulary doesn't have anywhere near the range you'd get by monitoring entertainment multimede, so they probably arrived after the Broadcast Age."
"How well do they use the vocabulary they have?"
"They're using phrase-structure grammar, long-distance dependencies. FLN recursion, at least four levels deep and I see no reason why it won't go deeper with continued contact. They're not parrots, Jukka. They know the rules. That name, for example—"
"Rorschach," Bates murmered, knuckles cracking as she squeezed her pet ball. "Interesting choice."
"I checked the registry. There's an I-CAN freighter called Rorschach on the Martian Loop. Whoever we're talking to must regard their own platform the way we'd regard a ship, and picked one of our names to fit."
Szpindel dropped into the chair beside me, fresh from a galley run. A bulb of coffee glistened like gelatin in his hand. "That name, out of all the ships in the innersys? Seems way too symbolic for a random choice."
"I don't think it was random. Unusual ship names provoke comment; Rorschach's pilot goes ship-to-ship with some other vessel, the other vessel comes back with oh Grandma, what an unusual name you have, Rorschach replies with some off-the-cuff comment about nomenclatural origins and it all goes out in the EM. Someone listening to all that chatter not only figures out the name and the thing it applies to, but can get some sense of meaning from the context. Our alien friends probably eavesdropped on half the registry and deduced that Rorschach would be a better tag for something unfamiliar than, say, the SS Jaymie Matthews."
"Territorial and smart." Szpindel grimaced, conjuring a mug from beneath his chair. "Wonderful."
Bates shrugged. "Territorial, maybe. Not necessarily aggressive. In fact, I wonder if they could hurt us even if they wanted to."
"I don't," Szpindel said. "Those skimmers—"
The major waved a dismissive hand. "Big ships turn slowly. If they were setting up to snooker us we'd see it well in advance." She looked around the table. "Look, am I the only one who finds this odd? An interstellar technology that redecorates superJovians and lines up meteoroids like elephants on parade, and they were hiding? From us?"
"Unless there's someone else out here," James suggested uneasily.
Bates shook her head. "The cloak was directional. It was aimed at us and no one else."
"And even we saw through it," Szpindel added.
"Exactly. So they go to Plan B, which so far amounts to nothing but bluster and vague warnings. I'm just saying, they're not acting like giants. Rorschach's behavior feels—improvised. I don't think they expected us."
"'Course not. [Burns-Caulfield] was—"
"I don't think they expected us yet."
"Um," Szpindel said, digesting it.
The major ran one hand over her naked scalp. "Why would they expect us to just give up after we learned we'd been sniped? Of course we'd look elsewhere. Burns-Caulfield could only have been intended as a delaying action; if I was them, I'd plan on us getting out here eventually. But I think they miscalculated somehow. We got out here sooner than they expected and caught them with their pants down."
Szpindel split the bulb and emptied it into his mug. "Pretty large miscalculation for something so smart, eh?" A hologram bloomed on contact with the steaming liquid, glowing in soft commemoration of the Gaza Glasslands. The scent of plasticised coffee flooded the Commons. "Especially after they'd surveilled us down to the square meter," he added.
"And what did they see? I-CANNs. Solar sails. Ships that take years to reach the Kuiper, and don't have the reserves to go anywhere else afterwards. [Telematter] didn't exist beyond Boeing's simulators and a half-dozen protypes back then. Easy to miss. They must've figured one decoy would buy them all the time they needed."
"To do what?" James wondered.
"Whatever it is," Bates said, "We're ringside."
Szpindel raised his mug with an infirm hand and sipped. The coffee trembled in its prison, the surface wobbling and blobbing in the drum's half-hearted gravity. James pursed her lips in faint disapproval. Open-topped containers for liquids were technically verboten in variable-gravity environments, even for people without Szpindel's dexterity issues.
"So they're bluffing," Szpindel said at last.
Bates nodded. "That's my guess. Rorschach's still under construction. We could be dealing with an automated system of some kind."
"So we can ignore the keep-off-the-grass signs, eh? Walk right in."
"We can afford to bide our time. We can afford to not push it."
"Ah. So even though we could maybe handle it now, you want to wait until it graduates from covert to invulnerable." Szpindel shuddered, set down his coffee. "Where'd you get your military training again? Sporting Chance Academy?"
Bates ignored the jibe. "The fact that Rorschach's still growing may be the best reason to leave it alone for a while. We don't have any idea what the—mature, I guess—what the mature form of this artefact might be. Sure, it hid. Lots of animals take cover from predators without being predators, especially young ones. Sure, it's—evasive. Doesn't give us the answers we want. But maybe it doesn't know them, did you consider that? How much luck would you have interrogating a Human embryo? Adult could be a whole different animal."
"Adult could put our asses through a meatgrinder."
"So could the embryo for all we know." Bates rolled her eyes. "Jesus, Isaac, you're the biologist. I shouldn't have to tell you how many shy reclusive critters pack a punch when they're cornered. Porcupine doesn't want any trouble, but he'll still give you a faceful of quills if you ignore the warning."
Szpindel said nothing. He slid his coffee sideways along the concave tabletop, to the very limit of his reach. The liquid sat there in its mug, a dark circle perfectly parallel to the rim but canted slightly towards us. I even thought I could make out the merest convexity in the surface itself.
Szpindel smiled faintly at the effect.
James cleared her throat. "Not to downplay your concerns, Isaac, but we've hardly exhausted the diplomatic route. And at least it's willing to talk, even if it's not as forthcoming as we'd like."
"Sure it talks," Szpindel said, eyes still on the leaning mug. "Not like us."
"Well, no. There's some—"
"It's not just slippery, it's downright dyslexic sometimes, you noticed? And it mixes up its pronouns."
"Given that it picked up the language entirely via passive eavesdropping, it's remarkably fluent. In fact, from what I can tell they're more efficient at processing speech than we are."
"Gotta be efficient at a language if you're going to be so evasive in it, eh?"
"If they were human I might agree with you," James replied. "But what appears to us as evasion or deceit could just as easily be explained by a reliance on smaller conceptual units."
"Conceptual units?" Bates, I was beginning to realize, never pulled up a subtitle if she could help it.
James nodded. "Like processing a line of text word by word, instead of looking at complete phrases. The smaller the units, the faster they can be reconfigured; it gives you very fast semantic reflexes. The down side is that it's difficult to maintain the same level of logical consistency, since the patterns within the larger structure are more likely to get shuffled."
"Whoa." Szpindel straightened, all thoughts of liquids and centipetal force forgotten.
"All I'm saying is, we aren't necessarily dealing with deliberate deception here. An entity who parses information at one scale might not be aware of inconsistencies on another; it might not even have conscious access to that level."
"That's not all you're saying."
"Isaac, you can't apply Human norms to a—"
"I wondered what you were up to." Szpindel dove into the transcripts. A moment later he dredged up an excerpt:
Request information on environments you consider lethal. Request information on your response to the prospect of imminent exposure to lethal environments.
Glad to comply. But your lethal is different from us. there are many migrating circumstances.
"You were testing it!" Szpindel crowed. He smacked his lips; his jaw ticced. You were looking for an emotional response!"
"It was just a thought. It didn't prove anything."
"Was there a difference? In the response time?"
James hesitated, then shook her head. "But it was a stupid idea. There are so many variables, we have no idea how they—I mean, they're alien..."
"The pathology's classic."
"What pathology?" I asked.
"It doesn't mean anything except that they're different from the Human baseline," James insisted. "Which is not something anyone here can look down their nose about."
I tried again: "What pathology?"
James shook her head. Szpindel filled me in: "There's a syndrome you might have heard about, eh? Fast talkers, no conscience, tend to malapropism and self-contradiction. No emotional affect."
"We're not talking about human beings here," James said again, softly.
"But if we were," Szpindel added, "we might call Rorschach a clinical sociopath."
Sarasti had said nothing during this entire exchange. Now, with the word hanging out in the open, I noticed that nobody else would look at him.