Blindsight

You argued and advocated as forcefully as you could, back when Sarasti was soliciting input. But he ignored yours, abandoned any attempt at communication and preemptively invaded foreign territory. He knew that Rorschach might contain living beings and still he tore it open without regard for their welfare. He may have killed helpless i

All you know is, you've been helping him do it.

You've seen this kind of arrogance before, among your own kind. You had hoped that smarter creatures would be wiser ones. Bad enough to see such arrogant stupidity inflicted on the helpless, but to do it at these stakes beggars belief. Killing i

Your dissent has changed nothing. So you rein it in; all that slips out now is the occasional pointless question with no hope of an answer, its inherent insubordination so deeply buried you don't even see it yourself. If you did see it, you'd keep your mouth shut entirely—because the last thing you want is to remind Sarasti that you think he's wrong. You don't want him dwelling on that. You don't want him to think you're up to something.

Because you are. Even if you're not quite ready to admit it to yourself.

Amanda Bates is begi

The laceration of my suit had done a real number on the gears. It took three solid days for Theseus to bring me back to life. But death was no excuse for falling behind the curve; I resurrected with a head full of updates clogging my inlays.

I flipped through them, climbing down into the drum. The Gang of Four sat at the galley below me, staring at untouched portions of nutritionally-balanced sludge on her plate. Cu

Theseus orbit had widened during my absence, and most of its eccentricities had been planed away. Now we kept our target in view from a more-or-less constant range of three thousand kilometers. Our orbital period lagged Rorschach's by an hour—the alien crept implacably ahead of us along its lower trajectory—but a supplementary burn every couple of weeks would be enough to keep it in sight. We had specimens now, things to be examined under conditions of our own choosing; no point in risking any more close approaches until we'd wrung every useful datum from what we had.

Cu

Not that he visited any part of the new wing in person, of course. Not that he was even able to, not without suiting up and jumping across the hold. The whole compartment had been disco

Theseus saw me coming and pushed a squeezebulb of sugary electrolytes from the galley dispenser. The Gang didn't look up as I passed. One forefinger tapped absently against their temple, the lips pursed and twitched in the characteristic mode that said internal dialog in progress. I could never tell who was on top when they were like that.

I sucked on the squeezebulb and looked in on the pens. Two cubes suffused in pale red light: in one a scrambler floated center stage, waving its segmented arms like seaweed in gentle surge. The occupant of the other cage was squeezed into a corner, four arms splayed across the converging walls; four others extended, waving again, into open space. The bodies from which those arms sprouted were spheroids, not flattened disks as our first—sample had been. They were only slightly compressed, and their arms sprouted not from a single equatorial band but from across the whole surface.

Fully-extended, the floating scrambler was over two meters across. The other seemed roughly the same size. Neither moved, except for those drifting arms. Navy-blue mosaics, almost black in the longwave, rippled across their surfaces like the patterns of wind on grass. Superimposed graphics plotted methane and hydrogen at reassuring Rorschach norms. Temperature and lighting, ditto. An icon for ambient electromagnetics remained dark.

I dipped into the archives, watched the arrival of the aliens from two days past; each tumbling unceremoniously into its pen, balled up, hugging themselves as they bounced gently around their enclosures. Fetal position, I thought—but after a few moments the arms uncoiled, like the blooming of calcareous flowers.

"Robert says Rorschach grows them," Susan James said behind me.

I turned. Definitely James in there, but—muted, somehow. Her meal remained untouched. Her surfaces were dim.

Except for the eyes. Those were deep, and a little hollow.

"Grows?" I repeated.

"In stacks. They have two navels each." She managed a weak smile, touched her belly with one hand and the small of her back with the other. "One in front, one behind. He thinks they grow in a kind of column, piled up. When the top one develops to a certain point, it buds off from the stack and becomes free-living."

The archived scramblers were exploring their new environment now, climbing gingerly along the walls, unrolling their arms along the corners where the panels met. Those swollen central bodies struck me again. "So that first one, with the flattened…"

"Juvenile," she agreed. "Fresh off the stack. These ones are older. They, they plump out as they mature. Robert says," she added after a moment.

I sucked the dregs from my squeezebulb. "The ship grows its own crew."

"If it's a ship." James shrugged. "If they're crew."

I watched them move. There wasn't much to explore; the walls were almost bare, i

James had noticed it too. "It seems awfully systematic, doesn't it?"

"What does Robert say about that?"

"He says the behavior of honeybees and sphex wasps is just as complex, and it's all rote hardwiring. Not intelligence."

"But bees still communicate, right? They do that dance, to tell the hive where the flowers are."

She shrugged, conceding the point.

"So you still might be able to talk to these things."

"Maybe. You'd think." She massaged her brow between thumb and forefinger. "We haven't got anywhere, though. We played some of their pigment patterns back to them, with variations. They don't seem to make sounds. Robert synthesized a bunch of noises that they might squeeze out of their cloacae if they were so inclined, but those didn't get us anywhere either. Harmonic farts, really."

"So we're sticking to the blood-cells-with-waldoes model."

"Pretty much. But you know, they didn't go into a loop. Hardwired animals repeat themselves. Even smart ones pace, or chew their fur. Stereotyped behaviors. But these two, they gave everything a very careful once-over and then just—shut down."