Learning the World

by Ken MacLeod

  “Something to tell you,” he said. “Really exciting.”

  She smiled and shushed him. “I’m listening,” she whispered. “To the lecture,” she added.

  Darvin pulled a disappointed face and settled to listen too. The illustration in light above him was of a human, all limbs outspread, matched with the smaller but similar shape of a flitter.

  “ — philosopher Dranker, in the Classical Age of Orkana, was the first to classify humanity with the Chiropterae,” the lecturer said, “in his great work De Vita, which comes up to us in regrettably fragmentary form. It was only in the Dawn Age that Nargo, in his Tabulae Animalia, took the bolder step of subsuming man and flitter within the order Octomana — the eight-handed. Why was this bold?”

  Because we don’t have eight hands, Darvin thought, but the question was rhetorical.

  “This is why.” The slide projector rattled through a dozen or so pictures, all of them crowded with photographs or engravings of diverse animals: trudges, various other species of flitter, cursors, grazers, hunters, swimmers; it settled on a bright and much-enlarged photograph of a skitter, its beady red eyes staring, its bristles in mid-twitch, its hands clutching a nut and a berry and clinging to the twig on which it crouched. “This lowly little beast is the third member of that order, and close — as we would now put it — to the ancestral form. The bifurcate distal portion of the anterior and posterior limb—”

  Why, Darvin wondered, did lecturers insist on larding their language with Orkanisms?

  “ — and eight manipulative extremities are in fact the primitive condition, from which those of the Chiropterae including ourselves are derived. In the chiropteran arm one hand and forearm has become the wing; in the foot, the two are fused, but the condition is still evident though relict, in our heel-claws. All of the land vertebrates — amphibians, reptiles, and mammals — and the sea mammals and reptiles are descended from octomanal ancestors, as can be shown by comparative anatomy—”

  More slides.

  “ — embryology, and teratology.”

  “Ugh!” grunted Kwarive, as the slides illustrating the last-mentioned study flashed past.

  “In conclusion then: far from being the crown of creation, as our illustrious ancestors fondly imagined, humanity is a minor offshoot of one of the most primitive of the mammalian classes. An outline of human evolution will be the subject of my next lecture, here tomorrow at noon sharp. Suggested readings are given in the handouts. Dismissed.”

  With that he leapt into the air, flapped spiralling up the lecture pit, and flew out. The room filled with flapping wings and chattering voices. Darvin’s overloaded proximity sense made him see red. He clung to the rail until the air was clearer, then glanced at Kwarive.

  “After you,” he said. She launched and he followed her, out of the building and into the nearest of Five Ravines’ many small public parks. Kwarive landed on a long bare branch of an ancient tree and perched upright on it. Darvin perched beside her. They looked at each other for a moment. Kwarive groomed behind Darvin’s ear. He stroked her neck, admiring as always the subtle shading of the fur, from red at the ear to pale gold below the jaw. He wanted to enfold her in his wings, but this was too public a place.

  “What’s your exciting news?” Kwarive asked.

  Darvin told her about his experiments with Orro, and she laughed. He went on to tell her of his idea. She clapped her hands and flapped her wings. “Brilliant!” she said. “Using the propeller like that is very ingenious.”

  “Isn’t it indeed,” said Darvin. “I can’t wait to see Orro’s face when I tell him.”

  Orro’s face did not disappoint, when Darvin told him the following morning. He’d gone round as soon as Orro had telephoned him to say that the film was ready.

  “How stupid of me not to have thought of that,” Orro said. “We’ll definitely try that next. But let’s have a look at the film anyway.”

  Orro closed the slat blinds on the windows and started up the film projector. The jerky kinematographic record of Darvin’s imitated flight made it all too clear that static flapping was not the same as flying. The film ran out and the tail end of it slapped at the wheel. Orro sighed and turned the projector off.

  “So much for that,” he said, opening the blinds again, blinking. “I’ll keep it for comparison purposes, of course.” He strolled to the engine nacelle and stroked the propeller blade. “I’ll rig up something so that we can test your idea,” he went on. Abstracted, he didn’t look at Darvin. “I may be some time.”

  “I’ll see myself out,” said Darvin.

  He wasn’t offended. The Gevorkian exile could be a little socially inept sometimes — he was quite unaware, for example, of the effect his glossy black fur and striking white chest-streak had on certain female colleagues and students, and his conversation tended to the intermittent — but once you understood that no disrespect or disdain was intended you could see it as an aspect of his genius. That Orro was a genius Darvin did not doubt. The rest of the faculty and the university regarded the physicist as either a prize catch or a prize nuisance.

  Orro had begun his research in Lassir, the capital city of Gevork. The son of an ironmonger, he had shown an early devotion to tinkering. Its first result had been a two-wheeled vehicle, which was of no use to anyone. Casting around for a more practical application of its ingenious pedal-and-gear-chain mechanism, he had, at the age of ten, become obsessed with heavier-than-air flight. Some bold spirit in the Lassir Academy had sponsored the lad. Orro’s scholarly career had been brilliant, and he had soared up the military-scientific civil service, but the old sabreurs of the Regnal Air Force had shown no interest in his schemes for chiropters. Dirigibles and sky warriors had been good enough for their fathers and grandfathers, and were therefore good enough for them. If the gods had meant us to build flying machines, they’d chortled, they wouldn’t have given us wings. It was not that the sabreurs were hidebound: much of their military research budget was dedicated to etheric communication. Command and control was the key to modernising warfare, they believed, but the projects in that new and fascinating area were secret.

  Orro had decided to pursue his research in the freer air of Seloh; he had money from the patents of various inventions; he was a fine lecturer in his way; his pure and applied mathematics were beyond reproach; and winning a Gevorkian scientist was a matter of some prestige for a Selohic university. Five Ravines had taken him into its wings. But his persistence in his fruitless pursuit was beginning to give people pause. Aeronautical research was not likely to bring credit to the university, let alone results.

  There were times, Darvin admitted to himself as he landed in the astronomy department, when he felt dubious about it himself; when he wondered if, perhaps, his childhood fascination with engineering tales had not warped his sense of the possible. The cheap-paper magazines of the genre were heavy on heavier-than-air (there was even a standard abbreviation for it: HTA) and illustrated with garish etchings of gigantic, multiwinged chiropters, carrying passengers across the great channels or dropping bombs on defenceless towns (usually Gevorkian) while dirigibles plunged in flames and entire squadrons of aerial sabreurs fell to deadly blizzards of flechettes.

  Darvin walked into his office and made his habitual acquaintance with the leaf-wad and the teacup. Then, with a mixture of excitement and resignation, he set up the first pair of plates for the third and fourth nights’ observations. He worked his way down and up, across and back. He reached the centre of the plate.

  Something jumped. Back and forth, back and forth.

  Darvin swallowed his thrill. He leaned back and reached for the well-thumbed ephemeris. It fell open at almost the right page; the region of sky covered by these plates was one of the most thoroughly mapped and examined, containing as it did the most conspicuous constellation of the green-tinged stars, known as the Queen of Heaven’s Daughters. He ran a finger-claw down columns and along rows of numbers. He checked equations, the data becoming orbits in h
is mind as he laboured through the calculations. When he’d satisfied himself that the moving speck was not a known planet or asteroid, he rotated higher-magnification lenses into place on the two objectives, and reapplied his eye to the eyepiece.

  At ten-times-higher magnification the speck was a definite streak, though mere hairsbreadths across. The object must be moving quite fast, to show up thus on even a long-exposure photograph. This time it was disappointment that Darvin swallowed. Whatever it was, it wasn’t a hitherto undetected outer planet. Nor an asteroid: it was too fast for that, too.

  A comet? That might at least make up for the disappointment. Darvin’s Comet! It would do him no harm for his name to be blazoned on the skies. He indulged the fantasy for a moment. Then he shook it off, stood up and removed the plates, and carefully fitted the plates for the same region for the next two nights, the fifth and sixth. He focused on the centre of the field. Nothing moved.

  His held breath escaped, his finger-claws dug into his palms. His shoulders slumped, his folded wings drooped. A flaw in the photograph, that was all. A flaw. Or maybe — Moving by intuition, he shifted the plates up and to the left; still gazing through the eyepiece, fingers twirling the knurled knobs of the vertical and horizontal axes. Dots streaked past his vision. He stopped moving the plates. The view settled.

  And there it was. Larger now, by an eyelash, its jump wider by the width of a claw tip: Darvin’s Comet.

  He repeated the process for the seventh and eighth, then sat back, wrapping his wings around himself with a shiver of delight. After a minute’s indulgence he stood up and telegraphed his discovery to the observatory. Then he returned to the earlier pair of plates, and resumed his search for the unknown planet that he had already in his own mind named the Wanderer.

  “I’ve found a comet,” he told Orro, a few days later when the discovery had been confirmed.

  “So I hear,” said Orro. “Congratulations.”

  “You’ve heard?”

  “A note on the physics wire.”

  “Ah. Very good. At least I’ll be remembered for something more than Darvin’s Little Bastards.”

  “It would be better if you find Darvin’s Planet,” said Orro.

  Darvin wasn’t sure if this was a jibe or a kind word. He chose to take it well.

  “Still looking, of course,” he said. “I’ll have the current batch finished in a couple of days, and then the next eight-days’ worth will come in. So it goes.”

  “I’d like a look at these, if I may,” said Orro. “It might be possible to work out the comet’s path, and where it’s going.”

  “That would be wonderful,” said Darvin. “Where are we going, by the way?”

  Orro stopped and looked around as if lost. They had emerged onto a small plaza from an alleyway between the student roosts and the back of the Study of Ancient Times Building. Orro closed his eyes and shook his head.

  “I’ll just take you there,” he said.

  The Gevorkian set off again with confident stride. Darvin hurried after him, though the scratch of his friend’s claws made him want to take wing. After crossing the plaza and negotiating another couple of alleys, through which trudges were hauling carts of fresh-killed prey for the refectory, they arrived at a patch of waste ground before the slope to the riverbank.

  The air was heavy, loud with insects and the laughter of students wing-sailing on skiffs on the water. Yells rose when someone fell off.

  On the patch of waste ground, surrounded by a sparse crowd of idle students and curious town kits, and watched over by a stern technician, stood a contraption that Darvin recognised as the realization of his inspiration and his sketch. He spread his arms and wings in exultation. “Brilliant!” he said.

  It was a long cylinder of rough white fabric, about two wingspans in diameter, made rigid by eight rings of bendwood, and held in place by guy-ropes like a tent. At one of its open ends stood the dirigible engine, mounted on sturdy trestles, its propeller facing the entrance to the tube. Halfway along it was a large acetate window, into which peered the kinematographic camera on its tripod.

  “Well,” said Orro, “to work!”

  He signalled to the technician, who warned everyone — especially the kits — out of the way, and hauled on the starter. The engine coughed into life with a fart of petroleum smoke. The propeller began to turn, slowly at first, then faster, until it became a deadly flashing disc. The trestles shuddered but remained in position.

  Orro stepped to the kinematograph, and Darvin walked around to the end of the tube and faced into the gale that blasted towards him. He threw himself forward, taking to the air, and laboriously flew halfway down the tube, to where a large black cross was marked on the floor and black lines gridded the side opposite the window. With some difficulty he managed to make himself fly above the spot, maintaining position without hovering but as though flying into headwind.

  “That’s it!” he heard Orro shouting, through the window and above the howl of the engine. “Hold it there! Flap! Flap!”

  3 — Spectral Lines

  14364:06:1801:25

  I hate Horrocks Mathematical. He’s the crewman who runs the training habitat I had the bad luck to pick. Node 52 on the gamma ring. (It says here.) I’m sitting/lying in the branches of an air-tree, in a cocoon that’s like a sort of sleeping bag combined with a hammock. Everybody around me is snoring (or making even more disgusting and distracting noises) and I’m exhausted, my bones and muscles are aching, but I can’t sleep. Not yet.

  The day started well. I decided long ago that I wasn’t going to take my training along with all my friends, or even with people I knew. It’s not like I intend to homestead with them, and besides, being with the same people as I’ve grown up with would not be exactly the Out There Experience.

  I got up before sun-on, and walked out in the dimness of farlight to that copse from which I had once tried to climb the sky. The ladder was long since gone, along with all the rest of the leftover scaffolding of the world, its components recycled or perhaps added to the mountains of trash, now much diminished, piled against the forward wall for throwing as reaction mass into the maw of the drive. I found a comfortable enough place to lean my back against, on an ivy-grown cuboid structure that might have been the ladder’s base. Bats flitted and chirped among the trees. A few early birds stirred, and some small animal moved in the long grass. It didn’t look like anything that could harm me.

  My virtuality genes haven’t kicked in yet. (This is an admission.) (The other stuff is happening, all right?) So I blinked up the sky opposite on my contacts. The world disappeared, like it does. The sky took its place. I chose a stable image, one not turning with the world. The Destiny Star is hard to pick out without cheating, but I did it, sighting carefully along where my memory placed the forward cone. It’s brighter than the others in its region, that’s all. The sight of it works a strange effect on my diaphragm, on what the ancients called the heart. Something between a gasp and a jump; something between home and hope. It’s like — all right, this is childish, but — it’s like I’ve all my life been an exile from some marvellous place, and now I can see it in the distance. I couldn’t see its comet-cloud around us, of course, not without magnification, but just burning there it looks haloed with glamour.

  I turned carefully, my gaze sweeping along the Bright Road, and faced in the opposite direction, through the rearward cone. The Red Sun is easy to spot, of course, and around it — which is to say, behind it — one by one until they multiply in a haze, the green-tinged stars of the Civil Worlds. I tried to think of the trillions of worlds, some larger than ours, some smaller, that that green glow proclaimed, and the quadrillions of people and indeed of stranger beings that inhabit them. How vast it all was. And in the whole sky, how small.

  14364:06:1920:35

  I fell asleep writing that. I hope you stayed awake reading it. And I see I have told you nothing that I meant to tell you. Now I have more, and I have to catch up.

  S
o: I walked back out of the copse to the estate, made over my business pro tem to my three-quarter-sister (I’m checking up on you, Magnetic Resonance Gale, don’t think I’m not), said goodbye to my caremother, and took the train to the forward wall. Just before it entered the wall it passed through a valley between two trash mountains. Never having looked at them up close, I was surprised (though I shouldn’t have been) to find that the trash isn’t just raw junk and clinker: you can see ruins in it, pipework, walls and spires, the rubble of cities built when there was less room in the world. Huge machines crawl over it like crabs, breaking the junk down small enough to chuck into the service lifts to the drive. I got out at a long, low-ceilinged station and after checking directions and assignments and a bit of hanging about while the rest of the contingent straggled in, took the lift to the upper levels. It was a much bigger lift than the one Constantine had taken me to, and the journey took about an hour. There were thirty other passengers, all of them booked for the same training habitat as myself. I hadn’t wanted to train with people I knew, and in this I’ve certainly been successful. I didn’t know any of them. What I hadn’t expected was that no one else I was with would have had the same idea. So the rest all know each other, or rather, they’re in two cliques from two estates, New Lamarck and Long Steading, adjacent to each other and distant from mine, Big Foot. (Does that name come from its once having been at the foot of a big ladder? Very likely; back when the estates were construction camps, their naming was quite arbitrary.)

  The New Lamarck clique are into somatic hacks, some of them in questionable taste. But I’ll take their plumed scalps and cats’ eyes and particoloured skin any day over the Long Steading crowd’s conspicuous conformity. (If any of them are reading this, which I doubt, I make no apologies. I’ve told you this to your faces.) What they are into is each other. Their plan is to train together, homestead together and become a founder population together. There’s already at least one triple among them. That is just disgusting. It is behaving like old people.