Learning the World

by Ken MacLeod

  The Eye pushed a paper toward each of them.

  “Read, sign and thumbprint in blood, and seal,” he said. “Or die here.”

  Five minutes later Darvin and Orro were sworn to Seloh’s Sight.

  “This is outrageous,” said Darvin. “You’ve betrayed your country.”

  They perched together at the top of the faculty’s tower, out of sight and earshot of anyone within view. Orro’s calm gaze didn’t deviate from the fog.

  “I have not,” he said. “What would Gevork give, to have a Gevorkian within the Sight?”

  “I’m sure they have agents in place already.”

  “No doubt. So you see, I have nothing to worry about.”

  “Seems to me you have everything to worry about.”

  “It does get complicated,” said Orro. “There are mathematical functions for such matters.” He shrugged, and steepled his wings. “I can keep track.”

  Darvin thought of spies spying on spies. It made him dizzy. Perhaps it was his duty to report on Orro. Perhaps this was a test, to see whether he did report on Orro. Perhaps Orro had all along been suborned to the Sight. Or, maybe, everything was as it seemed. That was something he could never again take for granted. He decided he would.

  “All right,” he said. “You keep track. What worries me is what we’re both betraying.”

  “And that is?”

  “Science.”

  Now Orro did turn to him, eyes bright. “Oh no,” he said. “Not at all. Isn’t this the most marvellous opportunity we could ever have been given, to discover new knowledge?”

  “There can be no secret science,” said Darvin. It was one of the platitudes of the Dawn Age.

  “Whoever tracked the comet,” said Orro, “and whoever designed the camera that took those pictures, worked in secret.”

  “Well obviously military research—”

  “Why is that an exception?”

  “It’s engineering, not science.”

  “Battle is the forge of tools,” said Orro. He said it like a Gevorkian proverb.

  “Peace and not war is the father of all,” Darvin shot back. Another platitude.

  They both laughed.

  “But we’ve seen the pictures,” said Orro.

  “Yes,” said Darvin. “We’ve seen the pictures.”

  He had a lust to see more pictures. According to the Eye, the project promised more. More secrets, more hidden knowledge, the most knowledge and the deepest secret there had ever been.

  “And we know how to build a heavier-than-air craft,” added Orro.

  “In secret.”

  “Yes.” A note of regret sounded in Orro’s voice. “But you know,” he went on, “Gevorkian though I am, noble though I am, when I think of the Regnal Air Force officers who laughed in my face, I can’t help gloating over the shock they’ll someday get.”

  That worried Darvin, but he said nothing. The two of them were not, of course, agents of the Sight, not Eyes; their recruitment to it was a formality, whose only differences with, say, activating Darvin’s membership in the Reserve were that the Gevorkian too could be validly recruited, and that the penalties for betrayal or desertion were far more severe. What they had been recruited to was a project to investigate all aspects of the alien arrival. None of it would, they were assured, be compartmentalised: the whole point was to integrate all the diverse sources of information and insight. It was to be called Project Signal, which Darvin thought something of a giveaway, but one that had a certain ring to it.

  There was a camp in the high desert. It consisted of four identical barrack roosts, a central lecture ring, a shooting range, a prey paddock, and a huddle of ruins used for close-quarter combat training. Except for a few guards, the troops had been moved out. By the first night there Darvin had a fair idea of where it was, just from looking at the stars and applying rudimentary navigation. This made the way he had arrived — in a windowless cabin of an airship — a quite futile exercise in security, but he knew better than to say so. The senior military and security officers of Seloh’s Reach were more flexible in their outlook than those of, by all accounts, Gevork, but they had as little sense of humour. To his relief the inaugural Project Signal meeting was organised not like a military briefing but an academic conference. About eight-by-eight scientists and engineers were present. On the first evening, everybody talked about anything but what they were here for.

  The following morning, Darvin and Orro hung side by side on the lecture ring with the others and fixed their attention on the man standing in the middle.

  “Good morning, colleagues,” he said. “My name is Markhan. I am a research scientist with the Flight. My field is one of which few of you will have heard, because its very existence is secret. I refer to telekinematography, the transmission of moving images by ether waves. Its potential use in military communications is self-evident; so much so that our own developments are closely paralleled in Gevork.”

  Even Orro could not forbear to laugh.

  “However,” Markhan went on, “we are, I venture to believe, a little ahead of our friends across the water in the matter of building sensitive receiving equipment. A few outer-months ago, during a routine test of this apparatus, one of our technicians — young Nollam over there — noted a strong source of etheric interference from a point in the sky. Now, it should be noted that celestial sources of etheric waves are not rare, and include the Sun Himself. To the best of our knowledge all of these sources are natural. What Nollam spotted was that this source was strong, had a distinct pattern, and moved from night to night. The pattern was a regular pulse, with a period of precisely 2.7 beats. It was moving in the plane of the ecliptic, and was thus, almost certainly, an astronomical object.”

  Nollam had taken the data to Markhan, who had then made discreet enquiries and hasty searches through the stack of prints from the physics wire — which had turned up Darvin and Orro’s paper. More recently, extraordinarily faint echoes of the secret Selohic experimental transmissions had been detected from the sky — as if Ground had acquired a third moon, as Markhan put it — shortly followed by the detection of the high-altitude aerial vehicle.

  “Does anyone dispute,” Markhan asked, “that all of this, taken together, is evidence that we are being visited and observed by travellers from another world?”

  No one did. Darvin guessed that any who might have done so had been excluded — or had excluded themselves — from the Project.

  “Very well,” said Markhan. “The question that now arises is: what are we to do about it?”

  On this, opinion was divided. Only one voice, that of a stubborn old biologist, was raised in favour of opening the whole matter to the public and to the world. Markhan pointed out that Seloh already stood to gain some military advantage from the existing observations — he didn’t specify how, but Orro nudged Darvin at this point — and there was no telling what might be gained in the future. For the rest, the suggestions ranged from attempting communication with the aliens to building some unspecified gigantic weapon to shoot them out of the sky. The great majority, however, put forward practical suggestions for continuing to observe the craft — Orro, to Darvin’s surprise, urged an attempt to detect it visually, now that its location was continually betrayed by its emissions — and to build more sensitive etheric apparatus; to investigate further and if possible to emulate the powers of flight displayed by the aerial vehicle; and to establish a network to centralise reports of any other unknown aerial or celestial phenomena.

  Markhan summed up the emergent near-consensus; the combat military and security officers present endorsed it; the token high political figure from Seloh’s Height made an inspiring speech; and the great project began.

  9 — Red Sun Circle

  14 365:05:12 11:17

  It is now a year since I started this biolog. Happy birthday to Learning the World! Last night I stayed up all night reading it. Well, skimming it, to be honest. So much in it is self-absorbed and self-indulgent. Somet
imes I gave you all too much information. Any fully adult reader must have found it painfully limited. I can see that now.

  But, you know, it’s surprising. Seeing is seeing; reading is reading; and being able to see through everything and read anything is still seeing and reading. You can have the illusion that you’re thinking faster, but it’s not you who carries out the calculation, or the search, or the transformation — it’s the system doing it for you. So, now that I have more of my adult faculties, I will not be patronising toward those who have not. Which isn’t to say that I don’t appreciate the added richness, the texture, the depth that the virtuality genes (and, I suppose, in due course television and all the rest) give to the world. (Or do they? Is knowing (that you can know all that is known about) what you are looking at, is the labelling and tagging and indexing an impoverishment of experience? Does it carry the risk that we miss what might be new and unknown and fresh, even about familiar things? Whenever I test that seductive thought by turning off the virtual overlay, I seldom experience any enrichment: the world just loses a dimension, and looks flat.)

  But I’ve told you all that already, in now embarrassing breathy excitement when the genes at last kicked in a couple of months ago. Enough.

  To serious business. Life has become strange. It is not how I had expected it to be. I and everybody I know are working on their plans and proposals and trying to pull together a team or find one they’d like to join, just as we always expected to be doing. But overlaying all this — kind of like the virtual overlay, now that I come to think of it — is our preoccupation with Destiny II. In one sense it’s the most exciting thing that could have happened. In another it’s a big distraction from what we all thought was all we wanted in life.

  The first probe images were distracting and fascinating enough. Since the probe returned to the orbiter with its atmosphere samples (high partial pressure of oxygen, which supposedly explains how the bat people fly and the megafauna are so, well, mega), and the analysers got busy sequencing the aerial bacteria (they have (yawn) a unique genetic code) and the orbiter started spraying out glass-beaded atmosphere-entry assembler packages to build microprobes with compatible chemistries and the little bugs started reporting back… well! You know what it’s like. You can get lost in exploring Destiny II.

  I hesitate to say this, but the bat people are horrible.

  The filthy roosts they live in are bad enough. What really disgusts me is that they keep slaves. It’s a word I’d only encountered before in the context of ants. I have since found out that originally this usage was a metaphor, and the term “slave” applied in the first instance to human beings — the prehistoric races used to do it to people. And the bat people do it to these poor mutilated drudges. But still, I suppose we should not be too sweeping in our condemnation: human beings used to keep human slaves almost up until the time of the Moon Caves. So our ancestors were just as disgusting when they only lived on the surface of the primary. It may become important to bear this in mind.

  This morning at breakfast in the cafe with Grant and as usual talking about the big argument — is there really anything more to say? if so, I’ll find it — when I wondered what the Contract has to say about resolving disputes that divide the whole ship. (Notice how we all now think of it as the ship? And not the world?) So I looked it up. Part of my mind, I guess, must have been on the subject of contact, because I must have subvocalised the word, and that was what came up:

  11378(b): Alien contact shall be treated as an emergency. “Alien contact” means the acquisition of information in any form direct or indirect which indicates or suggests the presence in any region within operational or communications range of the ship of any form of intelligence not of human or posthuman origin. “Emergency” means a situation as defined in Clause 59 paragraph (f) above; wherein it is declared, that the duly constituted Council at the time of the declaration or discovery of emergency may take any action internal or external which it deems fit with a view to resolving the emergency; such action to be answerable to the entire Complement and to the Civil Worlds in due course. In a situation of urgency (q.v.) within a state of emergency executive action may be taken by appropriate members of the Crew. Such urgent action shall be referred at once to the Council. A state of emergency may not be maintained for more than one calendar year as heretofore defined unless renewed by express permission of a poll of the entire Complement, normal canvassing procedures being available on a regular and non-emergency basis for the duration of the pre-poll discussion, which shall not be less than seven calendar days.

  “Look at this!”

  Grant was in a trance of his own, doubtless refining the design of his waterworld scheme (it now has a name, the Last Resort) or (hah!) his novel, but I overrode it with a zap. He came out blinking and shaking his head as if he’d really been swimming in his ludicrous ten-gravity water.

  “What?”

  “Look at this.” I patched him the link.

  Breath indrawn through teeth. Trouble is, he was chewing at the time. (Yes, Grant, this is to embarrass you.)

  He swallowed and came back into focus.

  “Does this mean what I think it means?” I asked.

  “If what you’re thinking is: ‘Has the ship been in a state of undeclared emergency for the past four months?’ and if ‘shall’ and ‘or discovery of emergency’ mean what they normally mean, yes,” he said.

  “Oh good,” I said. “So the Council is a lawless dictatorship with only eight months to go before it has to put all its actions up for scrutiny.”

  “I don’t see what’s good about that,” said Grant.

  “The ‘only eight months to go’ part.”

  “Do you think the Council is aware of this?”

  “Of course it is,” I said. “It has to be. What amazes me is that the Contract has a clause about alien contact at all.”

  “It has clauses for all sorts of unlikely events,” said Grant. “Fast burns inside or out, capture of ship, memetic plague, meteor strikes, you name it. Even war.”

  I had to look the word up, but the internal dictionary is so fast it just looks like a blink, not a trance.

  “You mean, something other than clade conflict with fast-burn spinoffs?”

  “Yes,” said Grant. “Organised hostilities between relatively stable societal entities.”

  “But there hasn’t been one of these for thousands of years!”

  “Not in the Civil Worlds, sure. But some societies may have fallen out of them. Fast-burn survivors and so forth. And some ships go bad, we know that. So yeah, mad as it seems, the Contract has the appropriate provisions.” Grant grinned. “War is a state of emergency.”

  I can’t really imagine war. I can imagine having to fight some swarm of zombie machines or snarling horde of posthuman fast-burn wreckage or whatever, but not two or more actual human societies actually fighting each other. I’m aware that people did that, before history, before the Moon, but it seems irrational. One side would have to believe they had something to gain from destroying or damaging the other, which just doesn’t make sense: it runs up against the law of association. And more to the point, each individual on any side would have to believe that they benefited from participating even if they died, which doesn’t make sense either. I suppose kin selection could make genes prevalent that made people vulnerable to that kind of illusion, but that only makes sense with animals that don’t have foresight. Even crows aren’t that stupid, at least not the ones that can talk. You have to get down to ants and such like before you see that kind of genetic mechanical mindlessness.

  But this is a digression. I wrenched the conversation back on topic.

  “All right,” I said. “And alien contact is, too.”

  “The Council hasn’t behaved like we’re in a state of emergency,” Grant said. He waved a hand at the wall screens. “Everybody’s still arguing, there have been no decrees or anything.”

  “That is not the point,” I said. “Everybody should k
now what the real situation is.”

  Grant shrugged. “If you say so. The emergency looks more virtual than real at the moment.”

  “To be honest, I’m not sure why this bugs me so much,” I said.

  But it did. So I sent my message — you may have seen it — to every newsline I could reach: Are We in an Undeclared State of Emergency?

  And I await an answer.

  It was a place of blue tiled domes and white stone walls; of arches and arbours, orchards and courtyards, of narrow alleys and broad avenues and wide stairways, of aqueducts and fountains; of limes and oranges, figs and pomegranates. The fruit was eaten by birds and monkeys or rotted where it fell. (It had something to do with recycling.) White City was a haunt of the older generation. That made it a more happening place than the child-rearing suburbs or the teen-cohort towns. In that respect it reminded Horrocks of the free-fall cones. Some of the house prices that appeared in discreet virtual tags here and there showed higher numbers than any of his deals. He walked its streets with caution, taking care not to collide with even virtual presences. He took care, too, to keep his balance. Since his first adventure in walking he had become competent and confident, though here in White City the smoothness of the paving was as reassuring as the hardness of its stone was troubling.

  The founder generation, the First Hundred Thousand as they sometimes styled themselves, dominated the streets and plazas. Salons discoursed in shaded sidewalk cafes, as much meaning carried in virtuality-freighted glances as was conveyed in speech. In other cafes business was done, under an aspect of leisure. Lovers strolled arm in arm, or entwined each other in nooks. Musicians of heartbreaking talent performed in small green patches of park. Sculpture and murals were displayed or in the process of creation, in processes that struck Horrocks as contrived in their difficulty. In the cones the subtle arts of the matter-composer were carried on with refinement and panache; what went on down here, he thought with some disdain as his sandals crunched marble chippings, was cutting edge stuff.