Learning the World

by Ken MacLeod

  Outside his office door a stranger waited. The man wore bright beads on the bristles of his ears and a belt made from the linked scales of some gigantic grazer around his hips. Within the belt was stuffed a curved scabbard, from which projected a chased handle. Around his neck hung a broad leather satchel, its lower corners secured by coloured tapes to the belt. Spider-silk ribbons were knotted below his knees. Silver sheathed his toe-claws. As Darvin approached he raised his arms and erected his wings in an excess of welcome.

  “Do I have the honour,” he asked in flawless but accented Selohic, “of the presence of the renowned astronomer Darvin of Five Ravines?”

  Darvin stopped before the stranger and spread his own hands. “You flatter my fame beyond all reason, sir, but I am Darvin.”

  The stranger pressed his palm against Darvin’s. “My name is Lenoen, sky-watcher to the superlunary survey of the court of Narr, a province of the land you call the Southern Rule and we” — at this point he smiled — “call the Roost of Man.”

  “Your presence honours me,” said Darvin. “My disorderly office, I fear, is unprepared for such a guest, but if you would deign to enter, the freedom of it is yours.”

  Another glint in Lenoen’s eye assured Darvin that he had caught the right note, and that the formality of self-deprecation amused the stranger as much as himself. He pushed the door open and ushered Lenoen within.

  “Take a perch,” he said. “Or a seat.”

  Lenoen chose a seat by the table, and watched in silence as Darvin prepared tea. It was only after his first sip — at which he failed to quite suppress a wince — that he spoke again. “You feigned surprise at your renown,” he said, “but I can affirm that you need do so no more. Your name is between the teeth of every sky-watcher in the South who is more than a scryer of portents.”

  “You astonish me,” said Darvin. He dreaded what was to come next. “My sole contribution to the science is the discovery of a handful of the Camp-Followers. Are they, perhaps, of some astrological significance unknown to me?”

  Lenoen’s beaded bristles rattled. “To fence well takes a balanced sword,” he said.

  Darvin set down his cup. “You catch me off guard,” he said.

  Lenoen nodded. He opened his satchel and withdrew a sheaf of papers, from which he selected a stiff, glossy sheet and placed it on the table. Darvin stepped over and looked at it. White spots speckled the shiny black background. In the centre, small but distinct, lay an irregular blob, whitish with dark spots. It was the clearest and largest picture of an asteroid that Darvin had ever seen. For a moment he hoped against hope that this impressive achievement was all that his visitor had come to show.

  “That is a photograph of one of what you call the Camp-Followers,” said Lenoen. He laid on top of it a similar sheet. “Here we see another.”

  In the centre of this one was a long rectangle with a triangular point at each end. Though fuzzy — it was at the limits of magnification — the object tantalised with a hint of internal structure, of lines and panels.

  “More of the same.”

  One after another, Lenoen slapped down eight-and-four more sheets. They showed the object — the Object, Darvin knew with cold certainty — from a variety of angles that made it obvious that it was a cylinder with two conical ends.

  “This,” said Lenoen, “is the distant, decelerating celestial object of which you spoke in the now justly famous paper by you and your esteemed colleague Orro.”

  “I’m astounded,” said Darvin. “Our best telescopes can resolve it to no more than a dot.”

  Lenoen leaned back and looked Darvin in the eye. “You are surprised at the resolution, but not at the shape revealed?”

  Darvin knew he had blundered. “Hints of structure have been inferred,” he said. “From, ah, changes in its albedo and… and so forth.”

  “And so forth,” said the Southerner. “I do not doubt it.” He tweaked the elaborate bow at his knee. “May I ask what the astronomers of this great Reach of mighty Seloh’s think it is?”

  “I don’t know,” said Darvin. “There has been little discussion of it. None, if I am honest.”

  Lenoen raised his brows.

  “I speak the truth,” said Darvin. He waved a hand at teetering stacks of offprints. “See for yourself — take the papers, I’ll be glad to have them off my hands.” A thought occurred to him. “How did you come across ours? Do you receive the physics wire?”

  “Not directly,” said Lenoen. “Until telegraph wires are strung across the equatorial ocean, we must perforce rely on copies of the prints. Which make their way to us, by one or other route.” He slapped his knee, setting the fixed ribbon ornament aflutter. “But enough. What is your own opinion?”

  “I suppose,” said Darvin, “that some gigantic crystal, formed in the far reaches of the system by processes beyond our ken, could perhaps account—”

  Lenoen guffawed. “I beg your pardon,” he said, “but I remind you of the proverb of the sword. You slash, you flail, you are in danger of spinning out of the sky.”

  “Sir,” said Darvin, “it is I who should ask pardon of you. Despite appearances, I do not trifle with you. Let me say only that an obligation heavier than that to science overshadows me.”

  “I quite understand,” said Lenoen. “I too am loyal to my lord. Hailed be the name of Narr! Very well. Let me tell you what the sky-watchers of the Southern Rule make of it, if I may.”

  “Please do,” said Darvin.

  “It’s a ship from another star,” said Lenoen. “Probably the one you call Stella Proxima.”

  Darvin said nothing. His mouth was too dry for speech anyway.

  “Its arrival in our system,” Lenoen went on, “is probably connected with a number of anomalous incidents of the last year or so — odd aerial phenomena, strange portents, the recent outbreaks of fire, malformed beasts, the birth of a trudge kit with the power of human speech, the—”

  “A trudge kit with — what?” asked Darvin.

  “Speech,” said Lenoen. He waved a hand. “A rustic rumour, I must admit, recounted in one of our sensational prints. Still, I am struck once more with what it takes to surprise you.”

  Darvin spread his hands. “In our fencing you leave me, I fear, a broken heap on the ground. But I am sworn to silence on such matters as you mention.”

  “Yes indeed,” said Lenoen. He stood up and began to pace around. “Let us talk about that silence of yours. I expected it. I encountered this week a similar silence on the other side of the channel.”

  “You’ve just been to Gevork?”

  “Yes. In the port of Low Lassir, and upriver to High Lassir, where I spoke both with Gevorkian astronomers and with the embassy of the Roost of Man. It is of the latter I would speak, for a moment.” He sighed and sat down again, his silvered claws tapping the floor in a manner that betrayed some unease. “You are aware, I take it, of the state of affairs between the Reach, the Realm, and the Rule?”

  Darvin shook his head. “I take small interest in politics,” he said. “The subject repels me.”

  “The ways of the starry heavens are indeed more uplifting,” said the Southerner. “However, as a court sky-watcher, it unfortunately behooves me to keep one eye on affairs here below. The merchants and adventurers of both your great reaches of the Sundered Continent knock upon the doors of our trade with ever greater importunity and, if I may say so, impertinence. And in those narrow doorways, and indeed in other entrances less regular, they jostle each other and trample the unwary. Their rivalry alarms the wise among us. Our emissaries and… travellers… to Northern shores have noted indications that the alien presence has become an object and occasion for a rivalry as intense as it is covert. On this, the wise among us are on the verge of beating their heads with clenched claws!”

  He raised a hand and rose again to his feet, then stooped over the table on which the astronomical photographs were spread, as if to spare Darvin the shame of avoiding his eyes. “You need not comment. I
come here only to pay my respects, and as a token of it to give you these photographs of your wonderful and never to be forgotten discovery of the extraordinary and remarkable ship.”

  “Thank you,” said Darvin. “Your kindness overwhelms me.”

  The Southerner placed some more paper on the table. “I have also,” said Lenoen, turning around and straightening, “left you a humble attempt at an interpretation of the object. A woodcut diagram, with captions, and a page or two of explication. Perhaps fanciful, but a preliminary effort, for your justly critical but, I hope, indulgent perusal.”

  “Once again, you are too kind.”

  “Not at all,” said Lenoen. He edged past the table. “On the contrary, I am clinging by a single claw to the limits of the courtesy due one scientist to another, let alone to my sense of honour and self-respect.” He pushed open the window and put a foot on the frame. “I tremble to tell you that even as we speak, copies of these photographs, and of our interpretation of them, are being distributed by our merchant seamen to the representatives of your local press at the quay, and at this same moment by our emissaries in Lassir to the popular press, such as it is, of Gevork.” He stood on the ledge, speaking over his shoulder. “I ask your pardon for the presumption, your understanding for its necessity, and offer my thanks for your time and your tea, and bid you, without further ado, farewell.”

  He dived off.

  Darvin stood for a few minutes studying the photographs and comparing them with the diagram on the front page of the document. When the telephone rang he ignored it. When a knock came to the door he rolled up the document, stuck it in his belt, and left the room by Lenoen’s route.

  The previous spring Kwarive’s sister had had five kits, of whom only two had died in their first year. When Darvin couldn’t find Kwarive around the university, it was a fair bet that she was at her sister’s roost. So it proved that afternoon. Darvin pushed aside the safety mesh and ducked under the awning of the side entrance to find Kwarive on her back on the slatted floor, batting up with her hands as the three yearlings flew around the room, yelling and bumping into the walls and each other. He sometimes suspected her of becoming broody, but she had always insisted on completing her studies before she’d consider taking a roost. “What’s the matter?” she asked, looking up at him. He told her. (“L’noen!” squeaked the kits. “Lassir! Emissary!” They grabbed new words like bright toys.) She sat up. “This is serious,” she said.

  “You’ve said it.” He laughed. “Now we’ll find out if the engineering tales got it right about mass panic.”

  “Oh, not that,” said Kwarive. “That’s all piffle anyway. No, I meant that story about a talking trudge kit.” Darvin clasped his hands across his head. “I don’t take that seriously! It’s all of a piece with portents and dead men’s ships and two-headed prey-calves. It’s the loss of secrecy that concerns me more. The whole project—”

  “Project! Project!” shrieked a kit whizzing past his ear.

  “Let’s take this somewhere else,” Darvin said.

  “Good idea.” Kwarive walked over to a barred cupboard, hauled out a struggling flitter, snapped one of its wings and tossed the hapless creature in the air. The kits brought it down and bit and clawed into it. Its screeches stopped in a second, the immediate feeding frenzy a few seconds later. The kits raised their heads.

  “Good Kwarive! Good Kwarive!” they called with Woody jaws.

  “I’m too good to them,” Kwarive grumbled on the way out. “My sister would have a fit. Breaking its wing like that.”

  “She objects to the cruelty?” Darvin asked.

  “No,” said Kwarive. “The loss of the chase. They need the exercise.”

  Darvin and Kwarive perched on the rail of the roost’s balcony.

  “You were saying?” said Kwarive.

  “The project won’t be secret anymore. That’s got to be a good thing.”

  “Wishful thinking,” said Kwarive. “The occasion for the project is no longer secret. The actual content of it is. Do you think Orro’s aeronautics will suddenly become open to public discussion? Nollam’s etherics? And whatever else is going on that even we don’t know about?”

  “I don’t know.” He pulled Lenoen’s document from his belt. “Have a look at this.”

  The document consisted of three sheets of paper, held together by a cunning cut and fold in the top left-hand corner. They peered at the top page. It was headed: A Grave and Truthful Discourse Upon Some Recent Unusual Events. Beneath that was a fine woodcut of side, front, and three-quarter views of the Object. The labelling gave the scale, and interpreted the front and rear cones as engines, and the central cylinder as spinning to provide an effect of weight. A brief note below recounted the discovery and location of the object, referring to Darvin and Orro’s paper and also to some reports in the various tongues of the Southern Rule. The vocabulary of the note, and the size of the print, gave every indication of being aimed at the simplest of readers.

  The second page listed a series of anomalous events, in the same straightforward style, as if taken from naive eyewitness accounts. The third page stated: From reliable reports of travellers and friends, the Wise of the Southern Rule believe that the esteemed overwatchers of the northern realms have been breathed upon by a great wind of invention and skillful work from their knowledge of these events. In the Reach of Seloh, honour to her name, those of craft and knowledge have set about the following mighty works: building flying machines of fixed wings; sending moving pictures through the ether; searching the sky for etheric messages from other worlds; new methods of reckoning the descrying of portents from numbers. In the Realm of Gevork, praise be to its ancient fame, the following: building large rockets of metal; sending moving pictures through the ether; obtaining heat and light from certain rare and poisonous minerals; building etheric machines for reckoning and comparing, and for the construction of subtle secret codes.

  It is the heavy dread of the Wise of the Southern Rule that these wonderful works, and more we wot not of, may be intended to improve the arts of war. It is our humble and fervent hope, upon which our holy men daily and nightly beseech the blessing of the Most High and the beloved gods below and above the moons, that our dread shall prove unfounded and that the realms remain at peace.

  The lower half of that page consisted of two woodcuts. One showed a fixed-wing flying machine with a propeller at its nose, the other a rocket of metal — someone had taken pains to show the plates and rivets — with flames shooting out of the back. They appeared to be on a collision course.

  Darvin’s hands shook as he turned the papers back to the front page and stared at the drawing of the ship from another star.

  “How did they find this out?” he said.

  “The Southern Rule,” said Kwarive, “must surely have something like the Sight.”

  “If I were in the Sight,” said Darvin, “I’d be searching now for Southern spies inside the Sight itself.”

  “You are in the Sight,” Kwarive pointed out.

  “So I am,” said Darvin, “to my rue, and perhaps my ruin.”

  “What do you mean?” cried Kwarive.

  “I’ll be under suspicion. So will you. So will we all.” He was thinking of Orro.

  “Perhaps we should disappear. Your relatives in the backcountry—”

  “No!” said Darvin. “That’s just about the worst thing we could do. If the Sight seeks us, it’ll find us — depend on it. The best we can do is act as if we’re innocent — which we are.”

  From the balcony they could see the Southern ship. Kwarive gazed at it.

  “Why did they have to do this?” she asked. “What did they hope to accomplish?”

  “Exactly what they said — peace.”

  She gaped at him. “That’s so naive!”

  “Is it? ‘Naive’ is not a word I associate with the Southern Rule. Superstitious, perhaps, traditional, yes, maddeningly set in their ways, certainly — but not naive.”

  “I
meant you are naive. They must have a hidden motive.”

  “This is why I have no politics,” said Darvin. “I can’t think in those terms.”

  “Then maybe it’s time you learned to, and fast!”

  Her anger sounded sodden with distress. Darvin wrapped a wing around her. “Tell me why you were concerned about the tale of the talking trudge,” he said.

  “It reminded me of the electric shittles,” she said.

  “How?” He didn’t see it at all.

  “If the wingless ones can influence the life force of a shittle, to make it grow an electrical device, why couldn’t they influence the life force of a trudge, to make it grow whatever part of the brain is needed for the power of speech?”

  “No reason why they couldn’t, I suppose, but why should they?”

  “The shittles have failed them,” she said. “We detected them, and we started sending messages back. That’s why they were destroyed — because the observation had become contaminated by our awareness of it. So now they’re trying again. What better way to watch us than through the eyes of trudges?”

  Darvin shuddered. “That thought gives me the creeps,” he said. “However, it doesn’t explain why they should want a trudge to speak, assuming it really happened and wasn’t some drunk farmer’s bad dream.”

  “Well, going along with that… I must admit it doesn’t fit.” She laughed. “So like a good scientist, I have another hypothesis: the aliens are sentimental like you, and think of the trudges as a sort of strong and very stupid people, and not as beasts.”

  “Ah!” said Darvin. “In that case, why should they give them speech? If they know they have no speech, they know they are beasts, so giving them speech wouldn’t be seen as helping people. It would be seen as turning beasts into people.”

  “They may not see speech as the issue. Perhaps it’s a side effect of raising the intelligence of the trudges.”

  “And why should they want to do that? Queen of Heaven! If trudges became intelligent, or if a coming generation of trudges were born intelligent, they would — they would—”