Details emerged.
First a faint sliver of shadow, a tiny dimple all but lost in the seething equatorial cloud bands. It had just barely rotated into view around the edge of the disk—a rock in the stream perhaps, an invisible finger stuck in the clouds, turbulence and shear stress shredding the boundary layers to either side.
Szpindel squinted. “Plage effect.” Subtitles said he was talking about a kind of sunspot, a knot in Ben’s magnetic field.
“Higher,” James said.
Something floated above that dimple in the clouds, the way a ground-effect ocean-liner floats above the depression it pushes into the water’s surface. I zoomed: next to an Oasa subdwarf with ten times the mass of Jupiter, Rorschach was tiny.
Next to Theseus, it was a colossus.
Not just a torus but a tangle, a city-sized chaos of spun glass, loops and bridges and attenuate spires. The surface texture was pure artifice, of course; ConSensus merely giftwrapped the enigma in refracted background. Still. In some dark, haunting way, it was almost beautiful. A nest of obsidian snakes and smoky crystal spines.
“It’s talking again,” James reported.
“Talk back,” Sarasti said, and abandoned us.
So she did: and while the Gang spoke with the artefact, the others spied upon it. Their vision failed over time—mirrors fell away along their respective vectors, lines-of-sight degraded with each passing second—but ConSensus filled with things learned in the meantime. Rorschach massed 1.8×1010 kg within a total volume of 2.3×108 cubic meters. Its magnetic field, judging by radio squeals and its Plage Effect, was thousands of times stronger than the sun’s. Astonishingly, parts of the composite image were clear enough to discern fine spiral grooves twined around the structure. (“Fibonacci sequence,” Szpindel reported, one jiggling eye fixing me for a moment. “At least they’re not completely alien.”) Spheroid protuberances disfigured the tips of at least three of Rorschach’s innumerable spines; the grooves were more widely spaced in those areas, like skin grown tight and swollen with infection. Just before one vital mirror sailed out of range it glimpsed another spine, split a third of the way along its length. Torn material floated flaccid and unmoving in vacuum.
“Please,” Bates said softly. “Tell me that’s not what it looks like.”
Szpindel grinned. “Sporangium? Seed pod? Why not?”
Rorschach may have been reproducing but beyond a doubt it was growing, fed by a steady trickle of infalling debris from Ben’s accretion belt. We were close enough now to get a clear view of that procession: rocks and mountains and pebbles fell like sediment swirling around a drain. Particles that collided with the artefact simply stuck; Rorschach engulfed prey like some vast metastatic amoeba. The acquired mass was apparently processed internally and shunted to apical growth zones; judging by infinitesimal changes in the artefact’s allometry, it grew from the tips of its branches.
The procession never stopped. Rorschach was insatiable.
It was a strange attractor in the interstellar gulf; the paths along which the rocks fell was precisely and utterly chaotic. It was as though some Keplerian Black Belt had set up the whole system like an astronomical wind-up toy, kicked everything into motion, and let inertia do the rest.
“Didn’t think that was possible,” Bates said.
Szpindel shrugged. “Hey, chaotic trajectories are just as deterministic as any other kind.”
“That doesn’t mean you can even predict them, let along set them up like that.” Luminous intel reflected off the major’s bald head. “You’d have to know the starting conditions of a million different variables to ten decimal places. Literally.”
“Yup.”
“Vampires can’t even do that. Quanticle computers can’t do that.”
Szpindel shrugged like a marionette.
All the while the Gang had been slipping in and out of character, dancing with some unseen partner that—despite their best efforts—told us little beyond endless permutations of You really wouldn’t like it here. Any interrogative it answered with another—yet somehow it always left the sense of questions answered.
“Did you send the Fireflies?” Sascha asked.
“We send many things many places,” Rorschach replied. “What do their specs show?”
“We do not know their specifications. The Fireflies burned up over Earth.”
“Then shouldn’t you be looking there? When our kids fly, they’re on their own.”
Sascha muted the channel. “You know who we’re talking to? Jesus of fucking Nazareth, that’s who.”
Szpindel looked at Bates. Bates shrugged, palms up.
“You didn’t get it?” Sascha shook her head. “That last exchange was the informational equivalent of Should we render taxes unto Caesar. Beat for beat.”
“Thanks for casting us as the Pharisees,” Szpindel grumbled.
“Hey, if the Jew fits…”
Szpindel rolled his eyes.
That was when I first noticed it: a tiny imperfection on Sascha’s topology, a flyspeck of doubt marring one of her facets. “We’re not getting anywhere,” she said. “Let’s try a side door.” She winked out: Michelle reopened the outgoing line. “Theseus to Rorschach. Open to requests for information.”
“Cultural exchange,” Rorschach said. “That works for me.”
Bates’s brow furrowed. “Is that wise?”
“If it’s not inclined to give information, maybe it would rather get some. And we could learn a great deal from the kind of questions it asks.”
“But—”
“Tell us about home,” Rorschach said.
Sascha resurfaced just long enough to say “Relax, Major. Nobody said we had to give it the right answers.”
The stain on the Gang’s topology had flickered when Michelle took over, but it hadn’t disappeared. It grew slightly as Michelle described some hypothetical home town in careful terms that mentioned no object smaller than a meter across. (ConSensus confirmed my guess: the hypothetical limit of Firefly eyesight.) When Cruncher took a rare turn at the helm—
“We don’t all of us have parents or cousins. Some never did. Some come from vats.”
“I see. That’s sad. Vats sounds so dehumanising.”
—the stain darkened and spread across his surface like an oil slick.
“Takes too much on faith,” Susan said a few moments later.
By the time Sascha had cycled back into Michelle it was more than doubt, stronger than suspicion; it had become an insight, a dark little meme infecting each of that body’s minds in turn. The Gang was on the trail of something. They still weren’t sure what.
I was.
“Tell me more about your cousins,” Rorschach sent.
“Our cousins lie about the family tree,” Sascha replied, “with nieces and nephews and Neandertals. We do not like annoying cousins.”
“We’d like to know about this tree.”
Sascha muted the channel and gave us a look that said Could it be any more obvious? “It couldn’t have parsed that. There were three linguistic ambiguities in there. It just ignored them.”