by Ken MacLeod
I pounced on a too obvious flaw. “It might just stop expanding.”
Grant shook his head. “You still get far more future humans than present humans, even if we stay with same population for say the ten million years it would take to fill the galaxy. And thus, the same desperate improbability of our existence among the first, unless we’re also among the last.” He looked around, shoulders hunched. “Doom lurks unseen.”
“That’s even more stupid than the last one!” I said. “Somebody has to be among the first. It’s just a brute fact.”
Grant leaned back, patted his belly, and smiled. “Exactly.”
If he’d made a point I didn’t see it.
“I mean, somebody could have made that argument when they were in the caves.”
“It was made before the caves, actually,” said Grant. “But don’t you see? Your argument is of the same type.”
“No, it is not,” I said. “That argument starts with a completely arbitrary notion, the ‘probability of being born,’ which is probably meaningless in the first place, and tries to deduce without any additional facts…”
At that point I ran out of road. I could see where I was going. “All right,” I said, with ill grace. “Point taken. So how do you explain it?”
A serving machine beeped. Grant took the coffee pot from its top and refilled our cups. He finger-tipped the machine and it wheeled on.
“Maybe it doesn’t have an explanation,” he said. “It doesn’t have to. We can in principle explain how life arose and developed and so on on both planets of origin. What else do we need to do? Do we need a separate explanation of why it arose on two so close together? Why? It’s just a brute fact. It happened. Things do. Events.”
“It’s still a big coincidence.”
“Yes,” he said. He gazed at me with a serious expression, unlike his habitual flippancy. “It’s a big coincidence. It’s something we can’t explain. But as far as we know that’s all it is. And if it isn’t, we’ll only find out by discovering more facts, not speculating, no matter how logical that speculation might seem. The way to learn the world is to look at the world.”
I could hear some criticism there, some tone of disappointment and reproof. And (sorry, Grant, if you’re reading this) I did not take it well, and I had no intention of letting him take it further. So I resorted to saying: “You’re a bit intense this morning, Grant Cornforth.”
“Yes,” he said. He sipped his coffee. “Sorry.”
I took this undeserved apology with a gracious wave of the hand. “That’s all right. Well, I have work to get on with. Same time tomorrow?”
“Of course,” he said. As I stood up he added: “Nice dress, by the way.”
I looked down at the rippling emerald satin shift. “Thank you,” I said, stepping away.
“Good choice,” he called after me.
“Yes, but the choice wasn’t mine,” honesty made me admit, over my shoulder. “My caremother sent it to me.”
10 — Above Top Secret
Kwarive on the telephone: “There’s something you might like to see.”
“I’ll be over,” said Darvin, and put the receiver down. He knew from her tone that nothing more effusive was expected, and that something important was up. They had agreed on how to convey such matters. Getting clearance to tell Kwarive a fraction of the truth had required a fight with the Sight of which he could tell her nothing. His security handler had been rather too enamoured of his own clever idea for a cover story, which was that Darvin should tell Kwarive that he and Orro had male-bonded. Darvin had sometimes speculated that Orro was a male-bonding male — in parts of the Gevorkian armed and civil services and nobility it was almost a requirement — but he had no wish whatsoever to violate his friend’s privacy and reticence. He had made this point with such vehemence that the handler had asked him, not in jest, if the suggested cover story was in fact true. Darvin assured him it was not. The tale was in fact tempting — it would have reassured Kwarive that Darvin and Orro were not using their frequent mysterious absences for any dangerous or unsavoury purpose — but it would have been, Darvin knew, intolerable to Orro. So, with great reluctance and much scratching of floors and stamping of papers, the handler had agreed that Kwarive, as Darvin’s girlfriend and prospective roost-partner, could not be kept out of the circle. He was still enjoined to tell her nothing of the aeronautics, telecommunications, and other projects that the discovery of the alien visitation had stimulated; and he had sworn to that effect.
The Life Sciences Building smelt of flitter and skitter droppings, of preserving fluids and warm hay. Skulls and skins decorated its corridor walls, as in the roost of a plains hunter. Kwarive, as a student, didn’t have an office, but she had a regular place of work, the laboratory annex of the department’s museum. Her part-time job there gave her valuable training in practical skills as well as a small wage.
Darvin hurried past the dusty glass cases and stoppered glass jars and into the room at the far end. Shelves lined its walls, laden with preserved animal parts, bones, chunks of mineral, and stacks of paper. Its door faced the window, and between door and window lay a long table that, except for the electrical lamps and dissection microscope, looked a lot like a prey-merchant’s counter. Bloodstains, gashes, sharp tools, animal parts. Kwarive looked up from the far end. She gestured to a shelf near the door.
“Pick up the telephone receiver,” she said. “Hold it to your ear.”
Puzzled, Darvin complied. He heard nothing but the expected whining whir. Kwarive, holding a closed basket, paced down the room towards him. As she approached, the telephone’s note changed, overlaid by a faint buzz that rose in volume with every step she took. When she held the basket beside the receiver, the buzz dominated the sound of the empty line. Kwarive smiled at him and retraced her steps. The buzz diminished.
Darvin returned the receiver to its cradle.
“What have you got in there?” he asked.
“Guess,” said Kwarive.
“Some electrical device?”
“Come and have a look.”
His hand on the basket lid, he hesitated. “No trick?” he asked.
Kwarive looked indignant. “Nothing’s going to jump out at you.”
On the floor of the basket was a shittle. A common grazer-dung-eating insect about the length of a thumb, it was in no way different from any other shittle Darvin had ever seen: stubby feelers, sturdy nippers, two camera eyes, four legs on the thorax, four on the metathorax, shiny blue wing-cases along the abdomen.
Darvin closed the lid and raised his brows. “Yes?”
“You asked me to tell you about anything unusual,” Kwarive said.
“Well, it’s certainly an interesting discovery,” Darvin said. “I bet nobody knew shittles have an electrical field. Maybe they use it to find their way around in the shit, like electric fish do in murky water, or perhaps it’s a defence—”
“Shittles don’t have an electrical field,” said Kwarive.
“How do you know?”
Kwarive jumped on to the perch at the end of the table and huffed. When her wings had settled she pointed to another identical basket on a shelf.
“There’s a whole basket of them there,” she said. “See for yourself.” Darvin checked that the basket indeed contained a crawling mass of the ugly brutes, and carried it to the telephone. He picked up the receiver and heard only the whir. He returned and put the basket back.
“Maybe it’s a different species.”
Kwarive chittered her teeth at him. “I’m the biologist here.”
“All right,” said Darvin, abashed. “Sorry. So tell me how you found this one.”
“The delivery trudge came in with the full basket — it’s a consignment for an insect-physiology practical — just as I was on the telephone to the administration office. That’s how I heard the buzz. Now, I immediately jumped to the same conclusion that you did — that I’d accidentally discovered a new fact about shittles. However, being
a good scientist, I decided to check it by putting half the shittles in an empty basket. One buzzed, the other didn’t. So I kept splitting them between various empty containers” — she gestured at a collection of jars, boxes, and dissection pans among the clutter — “and narrowed it down to this one specimen.”
Darvin found a stool and sat on it and looked up at Kwarive on her perch. “And you think an electric shittle is relevant to the, ah, big picture?”
He had a vague worry that he had let slip some information about the telecommunications aspect, to which — Kwarive might have thought — an electric-field-producing insect might be of interest. A dim notion floated past him of somehow training the little beasts to act as signalling devices for sabreurs in flight. A sort of portable wireless… yes indeed, the Flight might be interested in that.
“I think it came from up there,” Kwarive said. She rolled her eyes upward, as — with a different significance — did Darvin a moment later.
“Perhaps the visitors are very small,” he said.
She hopped off the perch and shook him by the shoulders. “Stop making fun of this!” she said. “It’s like you’re making fun of me!”
Darvin put his wings around her and nuzzled the top of her head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But it’s all so—”
She stepped out of his enfolding. “I know,” she said. “I find it hard to believe what you tell me, even though you’ve shown me some of the evidence. You know, there are times when I wonder whether your big secret story isn’t a cover for something even stranger.”
“I wouldn’t do that to you,” said Darvin.
“I know, I know. Anyway. Sometimes I swear it seems easier to believe that you’re a spy for Gevork or… or something, than that what you tell is true. Even though I do trust you.”
“You know I have not told you everything,” said Darvin.
“Oh, I know that. I’m sure the military are flapping their wings all over this.”
Darvin nodded. “It’s their job,” he said. “Their duty.”
“And it’s yours not to tell me about it. Now let’s dissect this bug.”
She could change course like a flitter, Darvin thought, but he was glad of it.
She tipped the shittle on to a bloodied square of board and flipped it on its back. Its legs waved. Kwarive reached for a long pin.
“Stop!” said Darvin.
“What?”
“It might give you an electrical shock.”
“That little thing?”
“There might be some kind of capacitor inside it.”
Kwarive looked dubious, but held the pin in a pair of wooden tongs when she skewered the shittle, and rummaged up a ceramic probe and knife. Then she took the board to the binocular dissection microscope and switched on the light. She slit the underside of the animal lengthwise, through the hard thoraxes and the soft, segmented abdomen, and eased the sides of the cut apart. The legs stopped twitching.
The tips of the probe and the blade stirred almost imperceptibly in the innards. Darvin recognised a tiny gut being lifted to one side. The probe’s tip snagged. Kwarive grunted and her hands made more minute, steady movements.
“Will you look at this,” she said, her voice calm. She stepped back from the instrument.
Darvin adjusted the eyepieces and the focus. The shittle in the magnified field filled his sight. Beside the teased-apart digestive and circulatory systems, amid the gunk and bits that biologists called connective tissue because they didn’t know what it did, lay a peculiar complex of red and green glassy-looking crystals and a thin copper-coloured strand, about the thickness of a fine hair. Darvin held out a hand and Kwarive placed the probe in it. He tapped the crystals. They were hard. He poked at the coppery strand. It was too strong for gentle pressure on the probe to break. He slid the tip toward the head end. The strand went all the way to the top of the thorax.
He relinquished the microscope to Kwarive. She placed the edge of the knife between the nippers and brought it down, cleaving the head.
“The strand bifurcates,” she said. “It goes to each of the eyes.”
Darvin looked and confirmed this.
“Can you lift the whole thing out?” he asked.
She could. She took a water bottle with a tube through the stopper and washed the thing a drop at a time. It lay gleaming on the slab beside its now headless and eviscerated host. They stood together and looked at it for a while.
“What sense do you make of it?” asked Darvin.
“Well,” said Kwarive, “it’s plainly artificial. That coppery strand is copper wire.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure as I can be without a materials lab.”
“Easy enough to check,” said Darvin. “But what could the rest of it be?”
“I have no idea,” said Kwarive. “No, I do have an idea, and I’ve had it ever since I noticed the electrical effect. But it’s too far-fetched.”
Darvin glanced again at the glittering mechanism. “Nothing could be too far-fetched to explain this.”
“Very well,” said Kwarive. “I think it’s a transmitter, of wireless telephonic or telekinematographic etheric waves. It is using the insect’s eyes as cameras.”
“That’s certainly far-fetched,” said Darvin. “No wireless telephone, let alone telekinematographic apparatus, could possibly be this small.”
“How do you know that? You might as well say that your object in space could not possibly be so large.”
“I suppose, if we are dealing with a technology so much more advanced…” A thought struck him. “But even so, the signal produced must have been very weak. How could it reach — so far away?”
“I wouldn’t know,” said Kwarive. “I know nothing about telekinematography.”
“Come to think of it,” said Darvin, “how do you know about it at all?”
“Orro told me,” she said. “He says it’s being developed by the military… in Gevork.”
“Hmm,” said Darvin. “That’s all right. I suppose. Please don’t talk about it loosely. Anyway… from the little I know, it involves rather heftier equipment than this.”
“I wonder if it’s still active,” Kwarive said.
They repeated the telephone experiment. The electrical interference was gone.
“It may have drawn its energy from the shittle’s body,” said Kwarive.
“Or we broke it,” said Darvin.
“That would be a shame. It would be irreplaceable. No, wait, it wouldn’t. We can find more, and I know just how to do it.”
“How?”
Kawarive smiled and shoved the empty basket to him. “Fill it up,” she said. “I’ll call Orro.”
Not being a biologist, Darvin didn’t have Kwarive’s confidence in statistics, and after an hour scooping shittles from the dung in the gutters of the wintry streets he didn’t like it either. He washed his hands and feet in the chill canal before returning with his reeking burden. By this time Orro had joined Kwarive and was hunched over a handful of scrawled paper. The telephone receiver had been dismantled. Parts of it lay beside the dissected shittle and its alien innards. Neither of them looked likely to be put back together any time soon.
“What are you doing?” Darvin asked.
Orro looked up. “Trying to work out wavelengths from the circuitry of the receiver.”
“Laudable but premature,” said Darvin, putting down the basket. “We need a working receiver right now.”
Orro fussed for a moment.
“Oh, good lady above,” said Kwarive. She snatched up a screwdriver and had every component in place and the receiver back on its flex within minutes.
“Now then,” she said, holding it up, “the basket, if you please.”
Darvin hefted the basket and walked towards her. Kwarive smiled. “The buzz is back!” she said.
This time the tedious sorting procedure sifted out two of the electric snittles (as they’d started calling them). The three scientists peered down at th
e two unprepossessing insects. The two insects — Darvin couldn’t but fancy — looked back.
“Hello,” he said. “Greetings from Ground.”
Orro grabbed his shoulder so hard that it hurt. “We could do that!” he said.
“Do what?”
“Use the electric snittles to communicate with the visitors.”
Darvin burst out laughing.
“What’s so funny?” demanded Kwarive.
“Oh, nothing,” Darvin said. “It’s just that I had a sudden vision of a conclave of scientists and security men jabbering and capering in front of a glass case floored with shit and crawling with shittles.”
“Well, why not?” asked Orro.
Darvin sat down on a stool and looked from Orro to Kwarive and back. He scratched the fur on the back of his calf. “No reason why not,” he said. “It’s just that I sometimes find it hard to believe. You both evidently don’t.” He stood up and paced around, scouting for tea. “For one thing,” he said, “the signal these little — and I stress little — blighters put out couldn’t possibly reach… its supposed recipients.”
“You’re doing it again,” said Kwarive. “Saying what they can and can’t do without evidence. We’ve just seen evidence that they can do things we can’t. The pot and the brazier are behind that stuff on the ledge, by the way.”
“Oh, thanks.”
“No, he’s right,” said Orro. “It’s a question of output power. There are theoretical limits to how much electrical power can be extracted from chemical processes.”
“And you know these limits, I suppose?” asked Kwarive.
“I do, as a matter of fact,” said Orro. He brushed at his eyes as if weary. “I wrote the paper on it. Nevertheless, there is a way in which such weak signals could reach our, ah, supernumerary moon, if not farther.”
Darvin fiddled with gas taps and water taps. “And what’s that?”
“Amplification,” Orro said.
“You astonish me,” said Darvin, sparking up the flame under the brazier. “The question we’re all agog to hear the answer to is what such an amplifier might be.” He waved a hand at the window, at the view of buildings and trees. “Given that we don’t see telekinematographic transmission towers mysteriously springing up all over the place.”