Learning the World

by Ken MacLeod

  But back to today.

  I’m on what might be called a street. The road is metalled, the sidewalk elevated, and vehicles move on the one and pedestrians on the other. It’s filthy. Looking down I see the droppings of the big beasts that haul carts, and the different ordure of the slaves who carry loads and run errands and haul cabs. Add rotting rinds, bones, and scraps of paper — all of which receive close and competitive attention from a variety of insectoids and different species of flying rat — and it makes me very glad I’m not really setting foot here. All this garbage may serve to manure the peculiar paraboloid trees, which sprout everywhere. An open-topped car rushes toward me through the ruck and press of carts. I see its radiator grille like bared teeth, and the flat glass plate of the windscreen. I hear the roar of its internal-combustion petroleum engine, interpersed with the braying blare of its warning instrument. As it passes through my POV I glimpse the faces of its driver and two passengers, and the vehicle’s ulterior. The seating is two wooden bars. The driver operates controls with hands and feet. I turn to watch it. From behind, the occupants have a look of cowled people with high-set, pointed ears. The warning instrument sounds again, and one of the bat people leaps into the air in front of the car, takes wing and lets it pass beneath him or her, and settles again on the road. Then it hurries to the sidewalk.

  I drift the POV to above the sidewalk and bob along at the local walking pace. I’m two or three heads taller than most of the bat people. Seen close-up, their faces are like a somewhat flattened face of a fox. They have more in the way of jaw and snout than most humans, balanced by much larger eyes. The fine fur on their faces is patterned with stripes and spots, and their fur colours vary — grey, white, black, brown, reddish, and so on. Some of these colours and patterns may be from artificial dyes. Their eye colour, oddly to our eyes, varies little. It’s a clear yellow, one of their many features — like walking along eating chunks of raw meat, or scratching each other’s fur, or cluttering their teeth — that strikes us as animal-like. Their speech comes across as a continuous trill of chirps and squeals, with some low growling notes.

  The slaves, trudging along with their burdens and their slashed, atrophied wings, look even less human. Their eyes are duller, and they say little. Their jaws are heavier and more prominent, as are their sagittal crests. Their limb muscles are bulkier. But these differences, which may not even be genetic, are quite hard to spot. You have to watch a lot of bat people before you can tell instantly which is slave and which free — ignoring the mutilations, of course.

  Slaves apart, many of the pedestrians are pregnant or nursing females. The former waddle with ponderous dignity and a certain ferocity of countenance. Everybody steps out of their way, even — especially — the slaves. The nursing mothers stride along more briskly, each with three or four tiny infants clinging to her chest fur and usually plugged in to her nipples. Three rows of paired nipples, litters of offspring, pregnancy itself — again, it all reminds us of beasts, and we have to watch out for any subconscious prejudices in this regard.

  On the other hand… they’re disturbingly not alien. They don’t breathe methane or have twenty legs. They’re mammals like us. Clearly there’s been a lot of parallel — or is it convergent? I can never remember — evolution. They’re made by DNA coding for proteins, albeit by different pathways. Their amino acids even have the same handedness as ours. We could — viruses and bacteria aside — eat the same food. (After cooking it, something they don’t do much of, though they dry and salt meat and sometimes heat it up to eat.) Is this a coincidence, or is it evidence of some deeper connection? After my talking-to from Grant the other day, I’m not sure whether to speculate. No, I positively don’t want to speculate. I want to observe and record.

  OK. Street level is not where the action is. The buildings are tall and narrow. They go up to ten or more storeys and look rickety. Most of them are built of wood and are as if on stilts. The ground floor is usually open on all sides and, here at any rate, is used as a tip or as a shop or as a stable, heaped with the fodder for the huge beasts — they look more like hypertrophic rabbits than anything we might recognise as cattle — that the bat people eat. The real building begins at the next floor. Most floors are linked by ladders or stairs, but most of them have narrow landing-ledges where the bat people alight, to go in and out by the openings in the sides. These openings are fitted with awnings and screens of woven straw and basketwork, or of some kind of translucent parchment. Some of these screens are decorated with pictures of flowers and foliage. This decoration seems distinct from the big pictures that many of the buildings have on their frontage or sides, usually of bat people eating or drinking, or of devices and vehicles. They also bear symbols that is reckoned to be the aliens’ script, in very large font. They’re kind of like tags, but actual rather than virtual.

  I levitate the POV and drift it into one of those first floors. The reception is patchier here — fewer vermin for our bugs to parasitise; all I can really make out is a row of bat people perched on a low bar and hunched over a long table, on which they are inscribing stuff in a paper book. In the corner there’s a big clunky machine that takes oblong cards in and spills a long roll of paper out. It could be a mechanical computer, or it could be a machine for printing wallpaper. I drift out the other side, over another and similar street, and look up. The streets are crisscrossed with cables, some of them electrical or telephonic (that’s power and comms) but most of them carrying little wood-frame cable-car contraptions that sometimes contain loads and sometimes have bat people sitting on, perching on, or clinging to them. I think most of the people on these are infirm in some way. Their bodies deteriorate with age. Their skin hangs loose, and they get diseases from bacteria and viruses. It’s amazing how deftly the flying bat people avoid the aerial obstructions, and each other in flight. Many fly much higher than the buildings, of course, and can ignore the traffic patterns below. Higher than them, very occasionally, I see dirigibles, but no other aircraft.

  In among all the low flyers are the flying rats and flying insectoids. There are no birds in this sky, there is no birdsong in the air. Only the squeaks of the flying rats. The rats come in several sizes and one colour, a dirty dun. To my eyes and ears it’s a strangely impoverished sky. And in among the flying rats, dodging them and catching them and sometimes eating them, are the bat people’s young. They seem to start flying when they’ve grown to about a quarter the height of an adult — knee-high to a bat — and they roam the air in flocks, line the ledges of buildings, clutter and scream. We only know they’re the young and not some bigger species of flying rat from close observation, and seeing them fly back to their parental roosts in the evenings. (Where, it has to be said, the parents treat them with what looks like affection, enfolding them in their own big wings, stroking and grooming them and feeding them tidbits.) They have no adult supervision whatsoever, at least until they reach about half adult size, when you can see them lined up, upside down, on the rafters of some low buildings which are evidently a sort of primitive school.

  I see one of these down the road, and in sudden curiosity I zip towards it. Inside it’s quite bright and the floor is covered with straw and droppings. The view is quite clear. The young bat people hang from beams overhead, bright eyes swivelling as they follow the actions of an adult who struts and frets beneath them, pointing to diagrams on the floor — scratched in the dust, often, with the foot-claw or some tool clutched in the foot — shouting and pointing. Sometimes the adult flies up and attacks some hapless youngster, beating fists against its huddled wings. I turn away and zip out, feeling nauseous, and blink out of the session. This sight has upset me. It makes me want to teach them a lesson.

  A temptation we must learn to resist.

  “Thanks,” said Horrocks, swinging off the rear saddle of the two-seater.

  “Any time,” said the pilot, whose name Horrocks had failed to catch. The pilot glanced back and gunned forward, and the microlight bumped across the gra
ss and rose into the sky.

  Horrocks waved, turned away, and looked across a couple of hundred metres of parkland to the edge of Far Crossing. Complex voluted towers, tall trees, radial streets whose roadways ran out in a dribble of macadam on the grass as though their builders had lost heart. Atomic Discourse had called it a town, but she had been mistaken. It was a concentrated, condensed city. It had all the exciting parts of a city: the shops and studios and theatres and cafe’s, the lofts and cellars, the laboratories and nanofactories, and none of the dull bits: the dormitory suburbs, the marshalling yards, the car ports, the residential streets, the industrial parks. What White City and its like were for the older generation, Far Crossing and its like were for the young.

  Horrocks followed floating virtual tags to the loft where Atomic worked. It was in a building near the centre, above a row of shops. Up two flights of stairs, which he negotiated with a firm grip on the handrail. The loft was about thirty metres long, with high sloped windows at either end. In this dim space a score of people worked on design units. Those old enough for their virtuality genes to have kicked in could have done it all in their heads, but all of them used screens or holograms: display, advertising, was part of the process. One or two showed modules or specialised areas — recycling plant, gardens — or mining schematics tagged to particular claims. Others had conjured up more ambitious schemes, for orbital habitats or surface projects for one or other of the system’s moons, or gas-mining processes for the ringed gas giant, or power stations for the mercurial. One even had a wild scheme for lifting water from the waterworld. For most of those here, as for most of the ship generation, such schemes and dreams would never be realised. They would be tested to destruction in the ship’s memory, stocked as it was with millennia’s worth of contingency and circumstance. Most of the minority that survived however many iterations of that it took to weed out the unfeasible wouldn’t attract enough interest or venture capital to make them viable. In developing them, however, their young creators would learn their own interests and abilities, their strong and weak points, perhaps to change or improve them, or to bring them to whatever project they eventually joined.

  It was heartbreaking to watch.

  Atomic, not to his surprise, sat beneath a vivid display of an entire habitat. Though built around a typical carbonaceous chondrite, it was unusual in having a transparent exterior and an outward orientation of the living space. Bright and beautiful, but too open and vulnerable.

  The girl sat staring into the spaces behind her eyes, shaping and tweaking her design with her hands and mind. She wore, Horrocks noticed as he padded up behind her, a green dress that looked identical to the one Synchronic had worn the night she’d seduced him. Stepping closer, he fancied he caught a faint whiff of Synchronic’s unmistakable and unforgettable scent. He wondered if it was the same garment. The ancient and cunning caremother was, he reckoned, quite capable of such a gesture, or a manipulation; capable, even, of weaving her characteristic pheromones into the fibres for time-release. But on the other hand, if that was the case the card had been palmed with a flourish so blatant it was difficult to credit her with it, or to imagine her imagining its not being noticed. Unless—

  He stopped, smiled to himself, and shook his head. Trying to outflank the twisted ploys of one of the First Hundred Thousand was as pointless as it would be unprofitable. Let the law of unintended consequences take its course — that was what she’d said, before she had, with doubtless intended consequence, taken care of him. Some involuntary movement of his — a shift of stance, a sigh, a grunt — must have alerted Atomic to his presence. She snapped out of her dwam and spun her seat around, looking startled, then recovered almost at once to a polite incuriosity, a mask of cool.

  “You can walk!” she said. The way she said it, she regretted she didn’t have a wider audience.

  “It’s taken me a lot of hard work,” said Horrocks. “And a few falls.”

  “So what, besides your legs, brings you here?”

  “I wanted to talk to you.”

  “That’s sweet. What about?”

  Horrocks temporised. “Rather a lot, actually. Perhaps over lunch?”

  “Be my guest.”

  He wasn’t familiar with the phrase, but it sounded like agreement. He gazed above her head. “That’s a beautiful habitat—”

  “I hear a ‘but’ coming.”

  “It’s too exposed.”

  She enhanced a cluster of sensors, a battery of lasers and a cluster of missiles. “Meteor defence, see?”

  Horrocks shook his head. “Beside the point,” he said. “People straight out of a ship need the sense of substrate — a good few metres of regolith at least — between themselves and the hard stuff.”

  “Ah, but do they?” Atomic jumped to her feet. “That’s what I think might be changing, with so many of us jaunting in virtualities where we walk under sky.”

  The thought made Horrocks uneasy. Despite his interest in the planet, he’d shirked the terrestrial virtualities. “I’ve only just got used to walking on ground,” he said, “and I’m not so sure.”

  “I’ll tell you all about it,” said Atomic. “Walk with me.”

  “Do you realise,” she said, looking up from the foot of the stairs as he made his way down, “that for thousands of years people have been living in caves?”

  Horrocks didn’t answer until they were out on the street. He handwaved upward.

  “This doesn’t feel like a cave. It doesn’t feel enclosed.”

  “That’s just because you’re used to living in the cone. It feels open but it’s like you said, it’s the reassurance of regolith. Compared with this, standing on a planetary surface is, like, totally exposed.”

  “And living in a habitat with a glass roof isn’t?”

  She laughed. “It isn’t glass, it’s diamond. And it’s less exposed than a surface. Especially one like Destiny II, which doesn’t even have asteroid defence. Yet that’s what lots of us are subconsciously getting used to.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Horrocks. “At a deeper level we know it’s virtual.”

  “Imagination can overcome that,” said Atomic.

  They walked on down Fourth. The street was quiet. Music throbbed from nodes in the air. It made Horrocks yearn for wide spaces and pioneer toil. Music could do that. “Do you imagine the bat people feel exposed?” he asked.

  “I suppose they do,” Atomic said. “Those of them who understand what the sky is, at least. I guess some of them still think the sky is a roof.”

  “They don’t seem that primitive.”

  “Some of them are, in the backcountry.”

  “All right,” said Horrocks. “What worries me is the more advanced ones. How do you think they would feel, under that open sky, if they saw us colonizing? Changing their asteroid belt, the moons of their waterworld and gas giant? Some of the solar power collectors would look like new planets even to the naked eye. To say nothing of fusion reactors.”

  “New stars!” Atomic laughed.

  “Yes indeed,” said Horrocks. “And your diamond habitat would shine like—” Like your eyes, he almost said.

  “Like an asteroid with a high albedo,” said Atomic.

  “Yes.”

  She walked so fast that the green shift didn’t ripple, like it had on her caremother: it shook. Horrocks thought he could see every bone and curve of her small energetic body inside it if he looked long enough. He almost tripped.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Could you slow down a bit?”

  She slackened her pace.

  “I’ve been thinking about that too,” she said. “But perhaps the idea of other intelligent life isn’t as strange to them as it is to us. Not as alien, you might say. After all they’ll have seen the Civil Worlds for millennia. They’ll have seen the green scum on the waterworld. They might even think we come from there. Oh! And I almost forgot — they have television, so they may have detected our deep-space radar. Anything interesting shown up
on their transmissions?”

  “Not really,” said Horrocks. “Some grainy shots of scenery, sometimes with bat people flitting across it, then back to someone talking to camera. The heuristics think he’s talking numbers, and they’ve got some consistent results, but the rest of what’s said is as obscure as ever. The other source, funnily enough, looks very similar — scenery, talking head — but sounds somewhat different. Two languages, almost certainly.”

  “Here we are,” said Atomic, stopping outside a cafe with a big front window and yellow interior walls. She lifted her hem to go up the step and Horrocks opened the door for her, almost falling through it in the process. The cafe was about half full of ship generation kids, talking loud. Horrocks blinked to a particular perceptual mode and saw the air was as filled with data-interchange streams as it was with food smells. The data streams were almost all between handheld or head-worn machines rather than heads. He closed his eyes and opened them, back to normal sight. Atomic turned at once to the table by the window, where a young ship-generation man sat drinking coffee. He stood up and smiled at Atomic, stuck out a hand to Horrocks.

  “Grant Cornforth Dialectical.” Chunky muscles, firm grip, a wavy straggle of beard, wary eyes.

  “Horrocks Mathematical.”

  “The micro-gee trainer?”

  “The same.” Horrocks turned to Atomic. “What’ll you have?”

  “My treat,” she said.

  “Thanks. Black coffee and whatever you recommend.”

  She went to the counter and Horrocks sat down.

  “So,” said Grant, “what brings you among us flatfooters?”

  “Getting flat feet,” said Horrocks. He rubbed his calf muscles.

  Grant laughed. “But really.”

  “Delivering a personal message to Atomic,” he said.

  Grant glanced down at his cup. “Do you want me to leave?”

  “No, no, not at all!” said Horrocks. “Please.” He waved a hand at the rest of the clientele. “I’d have everyone around the table if I could.”