by Ken MacLeod
“Oh!” said Kwarive. She hopped on a perch and spread her wings. “We do!”
Darvin, unable to wait for the tea, pushed some leaf under his tongue and grunted a query.
“Trees,” said Kwarive. “Look at the shape: the tall central spire and the upward-curving floret of branches. Does that not remind you of something, Orro?”
“I concede the resemblance,” said Orro. “Doubtless it inspired the design of the transmission and reception antennae.”
“You never told me this,” said Darvin.
“No, I never did,” said Orro. “I was, ah, discussing Gevorkian science with Kwarive one day and it slipped out. I have since then guarded my tongue more carefully. However, this is not the point. The point is that I don’t see how trees could be so used. Wood is not, after all, renowned for its electrical conductivity.”
Kwarive hunched like a hunter watching prey from a branch. She scratched behind her ear. Darvin, knowing the signs, said nothing more until the pot had boiled and he had served the tea in three containers that (Kwarive assured him) were used only for that purpose, and not to hold any of the unsavoury liquids and pulps that the room’s other identical beakers contained.
“So, Kwarive. You were saying.”
“I think I have it now,” she said. She blew and sipped. “If copper wire can be formed inside a shittle, why can’t it — or some other metal — be formed inside the branches and spire of a tree? Along the capillaries, perhaps?”
“Why do you say it was formed?” asked Darvin. “I had imagined it was somehow implanted.”
“If it was implanted,” said Kwarive, “our visitors are a great deal closer than we think.” She laughed. “They fly among us.”
“That’s a possibility,” said Orro. “I can imagine, say, a mechanical flitter. Like one of my chiropter models, only successful. With tiny manipulative hands, like a real flitter.”
“Oh yes,” said Darvin. “I can see it now, preying on the shittles among a flock of real flitters, and stashing some away to vivisect in its nest!”
“Why not?” said Orro. “We are agreed that calculating machines may make great progress in ages to come.”
Kwarive extended and quivered her wings, almost spilling the tea. “And does it mine the copper and whatever substance the coloured crystals are made from? Or does it perhaps steal them from shops?”
Orro was immune to her sarcasm. “Some species of flitters are notorious for stealing odds and ends of material for their nests.”
“Oh, for the Queen’s sake, gentlemen,” said Kwarive, “will you stop this idle speculation and listen to my — to my—”
“Your idle speculation?” said Darvin.
Kwarive laughed. “Indeed. But listen. How I had imagined it was something quite different. Fix your attention on a congenial subject for a moment. Sex. The male, as you may know, produces a sticky fluid with which he impregnates the female.”
Darvin gaped at Orro. “So that’s what happens!”
“Shut up,” said Kwarive. “As you also know, the life-bearing seed is a microscopic animalcule. And yet somehow, from this tiny invisible seed comes, in due course, a litter of kits.”
“The seed has to combine with the female egg,” said Darvin, entering into the spirit of conveying no news.
“Which is larger but still microscopic,” said Kwarive. “And somehow, from one or both of these, come a clutch of living things, each large enough to hold in your hand. Which, as they grow up, display characteristics similar to those of their parents.”
“Fascinating,” said Darvin. “The mystery of life. The miracle of reproduction. I don’t know why I didn’t learn all this in school.”
“I did not,” said Orro. “I read it in an imaginative but broadly accurate illustrated treatise inscribed, if memory serves, on the wall of a municipal pissery.”
“Each to his own,” said Kwarive. “My point, if I can momentarily distract you, is that reproduction is not a miracle. The life principle in the germ-plasm somehow organises and controls a mass of matter that but yesterday was the mother’s food, and transforms it into another living organism. Forces that we do not understand shape every organ and limb, and in a manner which is inherited from the parents. The vehicles of that inheritance are without doubt the tiny egg and the still smaller seed.”
“I see,” said Orro. “You are suggesting that the seeds or eggs of the shittles have somehow been influenced to produce small electrical devices, as if they were bodily organs. And that a similar influence may be exerted on the growing-power of certain trees, albeit ones already mature, perhaps due to the greater plasticity of the botanical cell-plasm.”
“Yes!” said Kwarive, sounding surprised and relieved. “That’s exactly it.”
“But — copper wires!” said Darvin.
’That’s the easiest part of it,” said Kwarive. “There are copper salts everywhere. Other mineral salts form naturally on dung. We all have a tincture of iron in our blood.”
Darvin drained his dubious cup. “That,” he said, “is the wildest speculation I have heard today. It makes Orro’s intelligent mechanical flitters seem like a sound and sober possibility. That’s why I think you’re right, Kwarive.”
“You do?”
“Well, it’s that or something wilder. We must take this to the project.”
A few days later an airship of Seloh’s Flight flew slowly over Five Ravines. Adults spared it a glance, and gained from that glance a touch of reassurance. Gangs of kits tried and failed to reach its altitude. After crisscrossing the town a few times it flew away to the north. The following day, here and there about town, men with the municipal crest on the buckles of their crossed straps were observed, or rather, not noticed, flying into certain trees, sawing off the branches they perched on, and flying away. That evening, a telegraph machine rattled in Darvin’s office, and spat forth a message that, when decoded, read: FRUIT ON SCHED PREP DESP URGENT.
The device was like an enormous flechette or flighted crossbolt, several wingspans long. With its backswept wings — or stabilisers, as the techs insisted on calling them — it resembled a crude copy of the alien flying machine in the photograph. Pointed at one end, open at the other; rivets making small elliptical shadows on its burnished steel plates. It lay atop a trolley on a railed wooden ramp with an upward slope. Heavy electrical cables trailed from the ramp. Somebody counted backward. At zero, flames sputtered from the open end, then roared forth like an opened furnace door. The device rushed forward and hurtled into a shallow ascent of several eight-eights of wingspans on the horizontal and about two eights on the vertical, then tilted downward, hit the desert, performed a couple of spectacular cartwheels, and exploded with a deafening bang.
Ears still ringing, Darvin heard a cheer from the small crowd of project members who, with him, watched at a supposedly safe distance.
“Impressive, isn’t it?” said Nollam, the young telekinematography technician.
“You could say that,” said Darvin. “Also expensive, futile, and dangerous.”
“All of these,” said Nollam. He rubbed his hands and shook out his wings. “This is our top-secret self-propelled giant flechette project. Officially called Project Crossbolt. And us lowly types have been officially told to unofficially call it Project Piss-Crystal.”
“Saltpetre?”
“Yes,” said Nollam.
“Why?”
“In case any news of it leaks out.”
“I should have thought,” said Darvin, strolling back to the huts of the project’s desert camp, “that naming it after the device’s shape and after a component of bomb powder rather gave the show away.”
He stopped. “Oh,” he said. “I see.”
“You do,” said Nollam. “Gives great cover. The Gevorkians must know we’re up to something up here, and that’s just the sort of rind to throw to them. Besides,” he added, “it might just work.”
Orro, who had watched the display from the air, swooped to land
beside them.
“Wonderful!” he said. “I must tell you, this is substantially better than what I know of such work in Gevork.”
“That’s a relief,” said Nollam.
“Of course my knowledge is years out of date,” said Orro, sounding worried. He brightened, and clutched the technician’s arm.
“Has anyone thought of launching the device straight upward?”
“Firing it at the sky?” said Nollam. “Whatever for?”
“It could be a method of reaching extreme altitudes.”
“I’ll pass it on,” said Nollam. He didn’t sound as if he meant it.
“Seriously,” said Orro. “It’s important.”
“All right, man, all right.”
The ground was hard. Their breaths puffed in front of them. The tips of Darvin’s ears, toes, and fingers ached. He still preferred the pale clear blue of the desert winter midmorning sky to the dripping clouds and fogs of the warmer and moister coast.
Kwarive, now seconded to the project since her biological discovery, had chosen to watch from the still safer distance of the camp. She met them at the gate. “It’s a good start,” she said. “But I don’t see it ever reaching the sky.”
“It doesn’t have to,” said Nollam. “It just has to reach a Gevorkian gasbag.”
Kwarive, Darvin gathered, was not to be told of the misdirection.
“How horrible!” she said. “I’m glad my — our part of the project isn’t so destructive.”
Her, or their, part of the project now dominated the barracks square, though to a casual observer, the transplanted tree by the lecture ring might merely have been there to provide a pleasant sight of home. The blimp, moored eight-eights wingspans above it and trailing cables, might have been a lookout over the flat dry plain. The grazer dung from the prey paddock heaped around the tree’s foot might have been to fertilise the barren soil in which this coastal tree improbably grew. A hardy evergreen, its lean spire and parabolic array of branches and leaves seemed almost to yearn for the sun. Instead, as Nollam’s telekinematographic reception apparatus cabled to a big wire frame in the tethered blimp monitored, the tree — or rather, the fine network of unknown alloy that permeated it from the roots up — was sending a continuous stream of incomprehensible etheric information skyward. None of Nollam’s equipment could make more of it than a flickering screen of snow.
Eights upon eights of electric shittles burrowed in the dung, and now and then poked their unblinking eyes out upon the world. No attempt to attract their attention — whether with bright-lit pictures, earnest discourses, or people jumping up and down — had elicited the slightest response. Kwarive had observed and recorded the insects’ reactions over two days and nights, and the best statistical methods she could apply showed that their gazes, as much as the radio waves which they continued to pulse forth, were random. They bore no relation to the putative objects of interest presented to them. At any given time there would be a few shittles peering outward, but that was what shittles did.
What the scientists working on the other aspects of the project made of all this bizzare activity Darvin, Orro, and Kwarive occasionally speculated on, but took care not to ask. Knowledge within the project was as compartmentalised as an insect’s body.
“I’m going to try something new today,” Kwarive said, stopping beside the wheeled screens that surrounded the base of the tree.
“What is it this time?” Nollam asked. “Obscene photographs? Religious texts? A careful heaping of stones in eights, to show them how we count?”
“No,” said Kwarive, in a tone that suggested she might have considered these. “Maps.”
“Isn’t that a security risk?” asked Darvin.
“Oh yes,” said Kwarive. “I’ve cleared it with Markhan.”
Orro and Darvin looked at each other and shook their heads. Neither of them had so much as spoken to the chief scientist since the project began.
“We’ll leave you to it,” said Darvin. “Good luck.”
“Bring me some tea,” said Kwarive, spreading a large sheet of paper on the frosty ground and kneeling beside it with ink bottle and brush. “Hot and soon.”
The three men made their way to one of the barrack roosts. Its sleeping racks empty by day, its interior space had been turned into a long laboratory. Cluttered tables filled the aisle. Between them snaked dangerous trailing cables that originated in the blimp and ended around the back of the cable-festooned mass of the telekinematographic receiver. This device was a wooden cabinet the size of a meat cupboard with a glass screen like a window, a couple of handspans wide, in the front near the top. The glass looked thick and somewhat convex, with rounded corners. At the moment it displayed a random flicker of spots and lines that hurt the eye if you watched too long. Nollam joined the technicians trying to make sense of the tree’s data stream, Orro studied the results of the latest aeronautical experiments — the real ones, being carried out far away at a place unknown — and Darvin headed down an aisle to the tea urn. He took tea out to Kwarive, who had already completed an impressive sketch-map of the Selohic coast. Just as he arrived she added, in the empty middle of the map, a stylised, chevron-winged flechette.
“Now, that looks like a security risk,” said Darvin.
Kwarive shook her head. “It was Markhan who suggested it.”
Darvin shrugged and gave her the steaming cup. She nuzzled his hand and he returned, to sift through the day’s reports from the physics wire. It was the second time this outer-month that he and his friends had travelled to the camp. The university authorities had been told, by much higher authorities, that the two scientists’ and the student’s services were required for military training and preparation, and that no demurral would be brooked. In that outer-month the project, with a soldierly despatch that impressed and baffled Darvin, had set up the experiment with the transplanted tree. What he was doing now, though, could just as well have been done at Five Ravines, and — with no results from the experiment — Darvin chafed to get back. Under cover of his continuing planet search, he had accumulated a stock of paired plates that showed the Object. Now that its position was known, it was indeed, as Orro had guessed, detectable as a distant companion of the Camp-Followers, the asteroids, but one somewhat beyond the orbit of the Warrior. Ground’s much closer visitor, the third moon, though betrayed by its etheric echo, remained invisible.
An hour or two had passed when Kwarive laid a cold hand on his shoulder, making him jump.
“Come outside,” she said. “There’s something you might like to see.”
Darvin followed her out as she marched back to the foot of the tree. Her completed map hung from one of the wheeled screens. Eight eights of shittles faced the map.
“Watch,” said Kwarive.
She wheeled the screen a little way around the tree. As she did so, other shittles emerged and faced it. She wheeled it around and around, until the base of the tree was surrounded by a phalanx of outward-facing insect eyes.
Darvin stared at them, and then at Kwarive. She was shaking. “I think—” she began.
Through the open door of the barracks roost and across the square they heard Nollam’s yell.
11 — Alien Space Bats
14 365:05:22 22:15
I don’t know about you, but I’ve been neglecting my habitat planning and proposals lately. Yes, that was a joke. I can see from a glance at the markets that everyone’s doing it. Well, maybe not everyone, but a majority of the founders and a significant minority of the ship generation. Planet-watching eats your time and drains your sleep. I see the bat people in my dreams.
What follows is not a dream. It’s based on some notes I took last time I entered a virtuality of Destiny II.
It feels like real time. It isn’t, of course; what I’m seeing and hearing happened hours ago, the information from countless bugs in numerous disguises uplinked to the satellite and beamed thence to the ship, where it’s been processed and reconstructed and the gaps fille
d in by guesswork and best fit until it’s a seamless seeming, ready to be studied by science teams and traipsed through by the rest of us.
I’m in a coastal industrial town. The air is hazy with carbon particles. In the distance, at the edge of town, smoke drifts in thick streams from tall chimneys. My POV is at its default height off the ground, that of my own eyes, but I expect I’m going to vary that if I’m to see things from — literally — their point of view. I begin, though, at ground level. It’s an eerie feeling, as if moving among them unseen.
That in itself isn’t half as weird as standing on a surface that looks flat and is actually convex. It curves away down to a horizon, as I can see whenever I glimpse the sea between the buildings, instead of curving away up. And above that horizon is nothing but empty (well, cloudy and hazy) sky, instead of the other side of the world. About sixty degrees up in that sky I can see the Destiny Star, like a sunline rolled up into a ball.
(And this in turn, incidentally, isn’t half as unsettling as standing in a virtuality taken at night. Of course such virtualities are even more artificial and reconstructed than this one — our little bugs are for the most part not nocturnal, nor do their eyes focus to infinity — but I’m assured what we see is what we would see in that very position at that time of night. Now, in a sense it’s only what you see when you link to the ship’s outside view to look out through the ship, in the right direction (give or take a few AU difference in POV). But when you use your imagination and really think of yourself standing there, on the outside surface of a planet, with nothing but a thin skin of atmosphere between you and the raw vacuum… the Civil Worlds glowing green, the Red Sun in their midst burning red, and the rest of the stars in all their naked native glory winking at you… it shakes you to your CNS, that’s all I can say. So just try it, OK?)