PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 80 Blindsight
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