Brain Ships - Anne McCaffrey [231]
"Who?"
Micaya must have looked surprised enough to convince Blaize.
"My predecessor here—my supervisor now. Crooked enough to hide behind a spiral staircase," Blaize explained briefly. "He's the reason—well, one of the reasons—I had to do things in this way. Although even an honest PTA supervisor probably wouldn't have approved. I have bent a few regulations," he admitted. "But just do me the favor of taking a brief tour of the settlement. I think you'll understand a lot better after I show you a few things."
Micaya looked at Forister and shrugged. "I don't see any harm in it."
"I suppose if we don't go along, you'll apply for a mistrial on the grounds that you weren't allowed to show evidence in your defense?" Forister inquired.
Blaize's face turned almost as red as his hair. "Look. You're in contact with your brainship via that button. If it's inactivated, or if she sees anything she doesn't like, the full recording can go over the Net to Central at once. What will it cost you to listen to me for once in your life, Uncle Forister? God knows nobody else in our family ever bothered," he added, "but I used to think you were different."
Forister sighed. "I'm listening. I'm listening."
"Good! Just come this way, please." Blaize pushed between Forister and Micaya and flung the door of the hut open. Sunlight and gaudy flowers and a thousand shades of green danced before them, all the brighter for the contrast with the shabby interior of the hut. Blaize started down the path, talking a mile a minute over his shoulder as the other two followed him. Nancia activated the failsafe double recording system that would transmit every word and image directly to Vega Base as well as to her own storage centers.
"The Loosies never developed spoken language because they're telepaths," Blaize explained. "I know, I know, that's hard to prove directly, but just wait till you watch them work together! When the CenDip team gets here, they should bring some top Psych staff. Open-minded ones, who'll arrange tests without assuming from the start that I'm lying. Mind you, it took me a while to figure out myself," he babbled cheerfully, turning from the main path to a secondary one that wound through head-high reeds, "especially at the beginning, when they all looked alike to me. I was so damn bored, and those croaking noises they make got on my nerves, so I started trying to teach a couple of them ASL."
"What?" Micaya interrupted.
"It's an antique hand-speech, used for the incurably deaf back before we learned how to direct-install auditory synapses on metachip and hook them into the appropriate brain centers," Forister told her. "Blaize always did have strange hobbies. But teaching the Loosies a few signals in sign language doesn't prove they're intelligent, boy. A couple of twentieth-century researchers did that much with chimpanzees."
"Yeah, well, that's all I hoped to achieve in the beginning," Blaize said. "Believe me, after a couple of months on Angalia, a signing chimp would have seemed like real good company! But they picked it up like—like a brainship picks up Singularity math. That was the first surprise. I was teaching three of them who sort of hung around—Humdrum and Bobolin and Gargle." He flushed briefly. "Yeah, I know they're damn silly names, but I didn't know they were people then. I was just copying some of the strangled noises they made when I would talk to them and they'd try to talk back, before I realized they'd never developed the vocal equipment for true speech—that was when I started on the sign language—sorry, I'm getting mixed up. Where was I?"
"Teaching Humdrum to sign 'Where ration bar?'" Forister told him.
Blaize laughed. "Not bloody likely. His first sentence was more like, 'Why did Paunch Man throw ration bars in mud and treat us like animals, and why do you make stacks and hand them to us one at a time with proper respect?'"
He stopped and turned to face them, his freckled face dead serious for once. "Can you imagine how it felt to hear a question like that coming from somebody