Learning the World

by Ken MacLeod

  “What’s the big deal?” Horrocks asked.

  “Lightning spikes,” replied Awlin.

  “Thank you,” said Horrocks. He concentrated on the section of the data on the relevant portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. There it was: a recurring surge of activity that suggested an agitated atmosphere, in which a great deal of interesting stuff was going on. Research claims on the planet were sure to become a lucrative proposition. So Awlin thought, at any rate.

  Horrocks considered it for a moment, then patched to his broker and unloaded a hundred in waterworld phytochemicals for a thousand in terrestrials: blue-sky investments. As he worked his way through the capillaries of corridor to the main hollows he checked their progress by the minute. Their rating barely twitched. He sent a copy of the flat wavy line to Awlin, with a querying tic.

  “See?” Awlin flashed back. “You got in ahead of the rush!”

  Horrocks tried for a moment to compose a thinkable reply, gave up, and zapped a rude burst of static to the speculator. He hesitated over dropping the terrestrials, looking hard at his portfolio. His claims in mercurials — the tiny planet near the sun might someday be a power-beam construction site — were sound and edging upward. Bids were coming in for time on the training habitat he’d just completed. He could afford to gamble. He kept the claims.

  2 — Aeronautical Research

  Darvin placed his chin on the strap in front of him, and slid his feet into the stirrups behind him. The other straps of the harness pressed across his hips and the lower part of his rib cage. Ropes from all of them converged to a hook in the ceiling. The concrete floor was not far beneath him, but in this position it could be nothing but too close. He forced himself to look straight ahead at the blank concrete wall. The bright lights hurt his eyes. The glare was increased by reflection from the white paper sheets crisscrossed with black ribbon tapes tacked to the wall on his right.

  “Comfortable?” Orro asked, from off to his left.

  “No!”

  “Too bad. Oh well.” The Gevorkian made some minute adjustment to the tripod-mounted kinematographic apparatus over which he stooped. Apparently satisfied, he looked up with an encouraging grin and a thumbs-up. His other thumb was poised over the motor switch.

  “Ready?”

  Darvin stretched out his wings and folded back his ears.

  “Yes.”

  Thumbs went down, the switch clicked, clockwork whirred.

  “Flap!” shouted Orro.

  Darvin beat his wings up and down, imagining himself in level flight, facing into an imagined slipstream.

  “Flap harder!”

  Darvin realised he’d been subconsciously afraid of his wing tips hitting the floor. They were in fact well clear. He flapped harder, almost rising out of the harness, until a much faster flapping sound told him the reel of film had run out.

  “All right, stop,” said Orro. He dismounted the film from the camera, placed it in a round flat can and labelled it before stalking over to help Darvin out of the harness. Orro’s toe-claws, as usual overgrown, made scratching sounds on the floor that set Darvin’s teeth on edge.

  “How did it look?” asked Darvin, folding his wings behind his elbows and flexing his hands.

  “A start,” said Orro. “I can’t say it looked terribly realistic, but at least I got half a minute of wingbeats. We may have to try something else.”

  Darvin glanced sidelong at the harness. “As you say,” he said, “a start.”

  He walked out of the test area and into the main part of the lab. The walls, in between shelving, were almost covered with tacked-up pieces of paper scrawled with calculations or sketches of several failed designs. The long table was cluttered with hand tools, among the crumpled wings, smashed noses and cannibalised engines of at least a dozen crashed model chiropters. The smells of wood glue and solder hung over it like a miasma. In a corner lay the engine nacelle of a dirigible. The propeller was as wide as a human wingspan. Gods knew from where Orro had scrounged that piece of expensive junk. A fugitive thought stirred in Darvin’s mind as he gazed at it. Then the insight, whatever it had been, was gone. He shook his head. No doubt it would come back. He had a vague disquiet at the prospect.

  “When do I see the result?” he asked.

  Orro straightened, thrusting the can into his belt satchel. “Tomorow,” he said. “If I take it straight to the development lab.”

  “Oh,” said Darvin. He had forgotten that part of the kinematographic process. “All right. Give me a bell when you get it back.”

  “Of course,” said Orro. His face brightened. “It is just a start, but it’s a historic start.”

  “I wouldn’t want to miss it,” Darvin said, as they left the lab. Orro locked the door. The frosted wired glass bore, in barbed Gevorkian script, the legend Department of Aeronautical Research. KEEP OUT. There was no Department of Aeronautical Research, and Orro had not known that Gevorkian script was, in the cartoons and playbills of Seloh’s Reach, a conventional signifier of the at once scientific and sinister. Probably, Darvin reflected, he still didn’t. The exiled physicist still affected surprise at encountering journals and discourses written in Selohic.

  At the end of the corridor the two scientists paused at the ledge.

  “See you tomorrow, then,” said Darvin.

  Orro nodded. “Or tonight, perhaps.”

  “Perhaps,” said Darvin, with mild surprise. No doubt the usually sombre Gevorkian felt he had something to celebrate. “After you,” he added.

  Orro nodded again and stepped to the edge. He raised his arms and unfolded his wings and dived forward, swooping away down about a hundred feet and banking around and back in to the lower floor where the technical labs were located. Darvin sprang harder from the ledge and with vigorous downbeats lifted himself higher, riding the Physics Building’s updraft and soaring over the Modern Languages Tower, on whose flat roof idle students sunned themselves or groomed each other. He climbed higher; the midafternoon air was static and hot, caught between the sea and the mountains, from which the morning and evening breezes respectively came. Over the town it was trapped between the beach and the cliffs. Darvin ascended a few hundred feet to clifftop height, catching a cooler current as he gazed across miles of yellow grassland to the deeper ochre of the higher cliffs that marked the broader tableland of the ulterior. Pylons bearing transport and telephone cables marched across that distance like a single file of giants. Prey herds grazed the grass, great patches of dark like the shadows of absent clouds, clustered around the waterways that meandered across the plain to tumble into the five ravines which gave the town its name.

  He wheeled. The blue of the Broad Channel refreshed his sight as much as the high air cooled his skin. Sullied by steamship smoke, spotted by the black of sails, the Channel was still an immense and soothing body of water which even at this height went clear to the horizon. Darvin wondered whether Orro ever climbed high enough — thousands of feet — to see all the way across it to the Realm of Gevork. It struck him as unlikely. Nostalgia, to the best of Darvin’s knowledge, was not among his colleague’s pains. Glancing upward, to that fancied height, Darvin noted the dark speck of a dirigible of Seloh’s Right, patient in its patrol. An obscure sense that he had trespassed troubled him. It was not a feeling he associated with, or wished to have in, the sky. He dropped.

  From the top of his downward spiral, Five Ravines looked like a freak regular woodland, a vast elaboration of an abandoned enclosure on the grasslands where trees sprouted because their saplings could not be cropped by the prey. Trees lined its streets and filled its parks and gardens: fruit trees for the most part, not so much from deliberate planting as from seeds spat or (in ruder times) shat by people on the wing. Trudges hauled carts along the streets, here and there making way for the noisy, fuming motor vehicles. The town was divided by the watercourses of the rivers from the ravines, united by its roads and bridges and sky-wires. The ravines converged, the streams diverged; from a sufficient heigh
t they showed a pattern like outspread wings. Expensive roosting and offices covered the verdant cliffs of the ravines; cheaper and more recent buildings crowded the riversides to the shore, like wooden gulleys. Among such were the university’s faculties and departments; its charter, centuries old, was younger by far than that of the borough.

  Darvin’s own office was in the Faculty of Impractical Sciences, whose five-floor wooden building was little different from the town roosts on either side of it. Darvin skimmed the topmost branches of one of the street’s trees and swooped to the fourth-floor landing platform signboarded University of Five Ravines. Department of Astronomy. Sweating and panting from his exertions and the renewed heat, he strolled to the entranceway’s array of wicker baskets and checked his post. A broad and thick package awaited him. He hefted it with satisfaction as he hurried to his room. An eight-nights’ worth of photographic plates, despatched from the observatory in the high desert. Each night usually afforded at least eight plates. Checking them all could take up most of his working time for eight days, and then the next set would arrive by the cable-car post, just as impatiently awaited.

  A year’s accumulation of such packages and their plates made up a small proportion of the clutter in his room. First things first: he set the pot over the brazier and chewed some leaf while waiting for the tea to brew. The leaf relaxed his muscles and cleared his head, and the tea took away the aftertaste. He gazed absently at the old wall poster of the solar system, given away in a special issue of a children’s popular science magazine: the picture that had first inflamed his interest in astronomy.

  On the left of the picture was the Sun Himself, the smiling king. A little to His right was the Fiery Jester, so close to the Sun that a solar prominence sometimes smacked him about the head. Then, after a gap, was Ground, the Mother, with Her attendant maids, the two moons. But though Ground was without doubt humanity’s Mother, Who fed Her children with the milk of Her waters and with a rich variety of fruit and prey, She was not (except in some backward heathen mythologies) the Sun’s consort. She was, it was sometimes speculated, His Daughter, or (more daringly, in the racy poems of the Dawn Age) His illicit lover. It was the third planet, more than twice as far from the Sun as Ground, that was the undisputed Queen of Heaven. Even on the diagram, which was — as the inevitable small-print caption cautioned — Not To Scale, the Queen’s diameter was three times that of Ground, and this was no exaggeration. In real life Her blue-green light far outshone anything in the night sky. In the past five centuries telescopic inspection had revealed that the planet was blue with green patches which had at first been thought to be continents, but whose shifting coastlines and relative positions made more likely to be floating mats of vegetation. By imaginative analogy with floating islands, on which entire complex ecosystems could build up from an initial conglomeration of weeds and logs, the Queen’s floating continents had been planted with jungles and populated with all manner of creeping and flying things. How many fanciful tales had been told of the strange beasts and beings of that world! It was as sad as it was certain that they were false. After the telescope had come the spectroscope, and while it had revealed that the Queen was indeed a world of water, it had indicated that the floating mats were little more than thin layers of algal scum.

  Far out beyond the Queen was the Warrior. What intuition the ancient cliff-men had had, in so naming it, neither Darvin nor anyone else could guess — perhaps their eyesight had been better than those of the men of this latter day — but the telescope had confirmed that the Warrior had the appearance of being winged, and of clutching two bright weapons. Here on the diagram, this mythical representation was outlined beside the astronomical reality: a ringed gas giant, more than thirty times the diameter of the Queen, and within its ring two glinting, flinty-looking moons. Between the Queen and the Warrior marched a ragtag army of small worlds. The largest of them, a few hundred miles across, had been discovered not long after the invention of the telescope. It had been given the name of the Exile, and it still held the title of a planet, but was now classed among the many smaller asteroids — the Camp-Followers, to give their poetic name — discovered in its wake.

  What planets, if any, roamed the skies beyond the Warrior’s octades-long orbital patrol was not known. Darvin had spent the past two years, and was willing to spend many more, in finding out.

  He pushed aside the teacup, spat the wad of leaf out of the open window, and with his thumb-claw ripped open the package and eased out the contents: sheets of transparent acetate, separated by sheets of thin paper. He lifted the top sheet of acetate and held it up to the light from the window. A number and a date were written in tiny characters along the side. The plate was clear, but spattered with a mass of black dots of varying size and intensity. He turned over all the plates and their protective sheets one by one, double-checking their dates and numbers, and found them in order. Sixty-four altogether, as usual. He arranged sixteen along the side of a table, eight for the first night, eight for the second, in pairs matched by area of sky, and took the first pair to the bulky apparatus that filled a quarter of his room.

  The blink comparator looked, in a bad light, like some absurd, weighty abstract of a human form: two metal-framed translucent white platforms with a black metal crosspiece projecting from the sides like wings, their accompanying adjustment and positioning rods like forearms, and a cluster of knobs, levers, and eyepieces on the top of the central pillar like asymmetric features on a deformed face. Behind that face was the intelligence of the thing, a mirror that flipped the view through the eyepiece from one platform-mounted plate to the other in rapid succession, over and over. Any change in an object’s position, from one night to the next, could be detected by its apparent jump. Such was the principle. In practice the job was difficult; aligning the plates so that the stars didn’t all jump at once was a finicky matter, and once that was done many passes were necessary to make sure nothing — among the thousands of separate points of light in each long-exposure plate’s field — had been missed. Even then Darvin could not be sure. Any world beyond the Warrior — given that perturbations in the Warrior’s orbit were themselves minute and disputed — was certain to be a small one, and its proper motion tiny. So far, everything that had jumped out at him had turned out not to be that distant and hypothetical seventh planet. Eliminating known planets and asteroids should have been routine, but was not; Darvin had rediscovered several known asteroids, whose orbits had long since been calculated but whose current position no one bothered to track, and had added three new ones to the catalogue. His colleagues called them Darvin’s Little Bastards.

  He clipped the two plates on to their respective platforms and turned on the electric light that illuminated them from behind. The electric motor that flipped the mirror he set to its lowest speed, producing a blink rate of three per second. Then he perched on a stool and kicked off his sandals to grip a crossbar with his toes and clicked the lowest magnification of the monocular lenses into place. Peering through, he aligned the plates, by angle and by vertical and horizontal axes. Then he moved his hands to the paired knobs that shifted the view vertically and horizontally, and began in the top left-hand corner.

  By the middle of the afternoon he had finished examining the fourth pair of plates. As he carried the plates back to the table he gazed out of the window, focused on infinity, and noticed the spots that danced in front of his eyes. Time to take a break. At the same moment the half-shaped thought that had struck him when he’d looked at the dirigible engine and propeller came back to his mind, fully formed.

  He yelped. He laughed. “How stupid of us not to have thought of that!” he said aloud.

  Darvin wanted to share it at once. He couldn’t share it with Orro; the Gevorkian physicist would be lecturing or calculating, and in neither activity would he tolerate interruption, however well intended or urgent. Oh well — Orro might turn up at the drinking den in the evening, as he’d hinted. But still, but still — Darvin couldn’t
wait. Suppose he were to die at this moment, suppose his heart were to fail or brain to fuse, why then the great insight would be lost to the world! It was intolerable!

  With a sort of morbid solemnity, Darvin grabbed a pen and sheet of paper. He sketched out and described the notion, and clipped the note to one of the platforms on the blink comparator. Let fate do its worst now, he thought, this idea wouldn’t die with him. Unless a meteor or dirigible were to crash into his office… He smiled at his overheated fancies. The impulse to tell someone right now didn’t go away. He felt as if something would explode out of his chest if he didn’t tell someone.

  He looked at the clock on the wall, and at a timetable. He could tell Kwarive.

  Darvin clambered out of the window and threw himself into the air. He flew to the Life Sciences Building and swooped under the canopy of the Lecture Pit. A cone of light rose out of the dark; slides illustrating the lecture were projected from below onto the canopy. He circled outside the cone, looking down, letting his eyes adjust. The lecturer stood in the middle, at the bottom; above him rose twenty or so tiers of concentric wooden rings, scattered with students hanging upside down, wings enfolding them as though asleep, eyes in most cases open, ears pricked. Darvin circled until he spotted Kwarive, hanging on the fourth ring, and dropped in beside her to the mutters and sideways shuffles of her neighbours. He clamped his feet around the railing, swung down, grinned apologies to left and right, and nuzzled Kwarive’s shoulder through the warm skin of her whig.