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.
We all knew that Jukka Sarasti was a sociopath, of course. Most of us just didn't mention it in polite company.
Szpindel was never that polite. Or maybe it was just that he seemed to almost understand Sarasti; he could look behind the monster and regard the organism, no less a product of natural selection for all the human flesh it had devoured in eons past. That perspective calmed him, somehow. He could watch Sarasti watching him, and not flinch.
"I feel sorry for the poor son of a bitch," he said once, back in training.
Some would have thought that absurd. This man, so massively interfaced with machinery that his own motor skills had degraded for want of proper care and feeding; this man who heard x-rays and saw in shades of ultrasound, so corrupted by retrofits he could no longer even feel his own fingertips without assistance—this man could pity anyone else, let alone an infra-eyed predator built to murder without the slightest twitch of remorse?
"Empathy for sociopaths isn't common," I remarked.
"Maybe it should be. We, at least—" he waved an arm; some remote-linked sensor cluster across the simulator whirred and torqued reflexively— "chose the add-ons. Vampires had to be sociopaths. They're too much like their own prey—a lot of taxonomists don't even consider them a subspecies, you know that? Never diverged far enough for complete reproductive isolation. So maybe they're more syndrome than race. Just a bunch of obligate cannibals with a consistent set of deformities."
"And how does that make—"
"If the only thing you can eat is your own kind, empathy is gonna be the first thing that goes. Psychopathy's no disorder in those shoes, eh? Just a survival strategy. But they still make our skin crawl, so we—chain 'em up."
"You think we should've repaired the Crucifix glitch?" Everyone knew why we hadn't. Only a fool would resurrect a monster without safeguards in place. Vampires came with theirs built in: without his antiEuclideans Sarasti would go grand mal the first time he caught close sight of a four-panel window frame.
But Szpindel was shaking his head. "We couldn't have fixed it. Or we could have," he amended, "but the glitch is in the visual cortex, eh? Linked to their omnisavantism. You fix it, you disable their pattern-matching skills, and then what's the point in even bringing them back?"
"I didn't know that."
"Well, that's the official story." He fell silent a moment, cracked a crooked grin. "Then again, we didn't have any trouble fixing the protocadherin pathways when it suited us."
I subtitled. Context-sensitive, ConSensus served up protocadherin γ-Y: the magical hominid brain protein that vampires had never been able to synthesize. The reason they hadn't just switched to zebras or warthogs once denied Human prey, why our discovery of the terrible secret of the Right Angle had spelled their doom.
"Anyway, I just think he's—cut off." A nervous tic tugged at the corner of Szpindel's mouth. "Lone wolf, nothing but sheep for company. Wouldn't you feel lonely?"