Learning the World

by Ken MacLeod

  “Slaughter us,” said Kwarive. “Without hesitation, without mercy, without scruple. And then, when they had wiped us from the face of the Ground, they would welcome — for a time, at any rate — their benefactors from above. And if they didn’t, they would have even less chance than we would of resisting the invasion.”

  Darvin felt almost as shocked that Kwarive could imagine such a thing as he was by the sanguinary vision itself. The malevolence or incompetence it ascribed to the aliens also disturbed him, in part because it rang true with his own earlier dark suspicions. If the wingless aliens looked like trudges to human eyes, was it not possible that the aliens might themselves feel akin to the flightless trudges?

  “This is a morbid fancy,” he said. “I will hear no more of it.”

  “Not very scientific of you,” she chided. She clutched his shoulders and looked him in the eye. “Oh, Darvin, I’ve been thinking about what Bahron the Eye said, about how the aliens want our world. He may be right, you know. All life is a struggle for existence. Why should it cease to be a struggle if it spreads among the stars?”

  15 — Hollow Spaces of the Forward Cone

  Learning the World in exile # 100

  14 365:11:02 10:43

  Issue 100! That’s not a number I ever expected to reach when I switched to mailing. Nor did I then hope to have more readers than I ever did when anybody could access it. So thanks to all who’ve subscribed, and to all who’ve spread the word. I still miss the biologs, though. The newslines do their job but it’s all professionals and much less exciting than the buzz. So I appreciate all the mails that come to me, and the mailing lists, and so on. And I know it’s not just me — I know there are hundreds if not thousands out there writing and speaking and performing against the emergency and the embargo, people whom I’ve never heard of and who’ve never heard of me. (How do I know? From the number I do hear about, and how I hear about them — by chance, by word of mouth, and by the people I meet when I go to other towns or who come to Far Crossing, and I find whole communities of people in the same fight. And from the songs.) It’s not the same, but it gives us heart, it keeps up our spirits, and helps us realise that this dark time will soon be over.

  Nearly six months of State of Emergency; just over six months to go. Soon? It seems a long time, I know, but remember that in that time even more of us will have turned sixteen, as I did a couple of months ago, and we’ll not just be able to vote in the referendum on the emergency but petition a recall and throw out the entire Council. Throw out the Council! I want to write that in virtual letters across the sunline. It’s going to happen. It’s unfair — most of the people on the Council are good people. (I’ll get hammered for saying that, I know, but it’s true, so don’t bother.) But it’s the price you pay. If you keep your ship generation cooped up in the ship, your ship generation grows up like grass under your feet and a huge cohort of it comes of age and votes you out.

  What have we accomplished in the past six months?

  There are those who’ll say, nothing much. We’re still stuck here, the embargo’s still in place, the emergency’s still in place. To those — I’m thinking of S____ and H____ here, and you know who you are — who think like that, just think back to how it was that midnight when the contact clause was invoked and the boom came down. Or think about the morning after it. It was worse than when we lost the virtualities. It was as if the sunline had gone out and then the lights had gone out. We were stumbling around in the dark. Suddenly everyone was all alone. We couldn’t see in an instant what others all over the world thought. All we had was the people around us and the talking heads on the newslines.

  I remember that morning. I never wrote about it at the time because it was too depressing. But look back at it now, compare it with this morning, and it’s downright encouraging. Here is how it was.

  Something woke me before the sunline came out, about six in the morning or so. I really needed a bite and a brew, so I climbed into some clothes and pulled on a pair of springy shoes and spiralled down the stairs and jogged off down Windy and on to Dark (is how it felt at the time) and didn’t even pause to pick up the day’s newslines at the hotspot. In the half-light of the farside I noticed people standing in small groups on the street, talking. I didn’t know, maybe I’d missed a big all-night party or something. There was an odd sense of quiet, and I couldn’t quite understand why. I could hear voices, the sounds of early risers rising and early birds reaffirming their property rights, the hum of an engine and the hiss of tyres in the next street.

  And then I noticed. The quiet was in my head. Most times of course you don’t listen to the buzz. You don’t read the chat. But you know it’s there in the background, like distant surf, like far-off lights. I stopped for a moment, my heart thumping much harder than the running justified, and closed my eyes and interrogated my inner ear. Nothing. No sound, no lights, nothing in my head but me. I could taste myself like the roof of my mouth.

  Maybe I hadn’t quite woken up. I didn’t think anything was seriously wrong. A vague, half-formed thought floated through my fuzzy mind that the comms might be down due to the previous day’s bonfire of the virtualities. An even vaguer thought drifted by that it served them right; “them” being, of course, the jury who’d pulled the plug and the Council that had endorsed their decision. It may have been the first time I ever thought of the founders, the older generation, as “them” with quite that emphasis.

  As I jogged along a curious thing happened, which had nothing to do with anything that happened later, and nothing obvious to do with anything that had happened immediately before. Looking back, I can see that it may have had something to do with that alone-in-my-head feeling. What happened was this. I became very much aware of being me, and it felt strange. It was as if a wider, cooler mind had found itself in my head, and was surprised to be there behind my eyes. And yet that larger mind was mine. Very odd. It passed in a few moments, leaving me a little shaken, curious, and quite unable to recapture it. I have never found a name for this experience, and though I’ve had it several times since, I can neither induce it at will nor prevent its recurrence. When I tell people about it they either look blank or say: “Oh! You mean you have that too?” But it isn’t a bond between us, not a secret, just a peculiarity, an anomaly, perhaps as random a feature of our minds as the ability to roll one’s tongue is of our bodies. It solves no problem, conveys no insight, and yet leaves me with an impression of significance. It has an aftertaste, but no taste. That impression, that aftertaste, may be its empty secret: it may be a tiny glitch in the process by which our brains find meaning in sense.

  But I digress.

  I pushed in to the Yellow Wall and found the place crowded. Knowing how gradually it fills up even from about seven or so, this was a surprise. It was full of people who looked like they’d been up all night, and not at a party. Nobody talked much. The place reeked of coffee and inhaler fumes and sweat. The loudest noise came from the wheezing labour of the air conditioner. It was the most squalid atmosphere I’d breathed since my microgravity training. Most people looked down at visible or invisible comms or watched the video wall. The scene came from outside the Council Hall. As I made for the percolator I twitched my ears to pick up the audio. You know what I heard. The cup I dropped was empty. Its crash made everybody jump.

  Faces turned toward me.

  “You didn’t know?” asked Far Sun Park. One of the New Lamarck kids. I was with her at our last big shock, when we first received news of the transmissions. (Why all those flashbacks to training?) She cried then, and she looked like she’d been crying now, for all that she’d matured in the meantime.

  I shook my head. “Has it passed?”

  “Ninety-eight to thirty-five,” she said. “No abstentions.”

  I summoned a brave face. “Thirty-five? That’s more than we could have hoped.”

  Some people looked at me as if I was talking nonsense, but most looked like they wanted to hear what I had to say.
<
br />   “The emergency can only last a year,” I said. “We can design and train like we expect to go out tomorrow and by the time it’s up, we’ll be more ready to go out than we’ve ever been.”

  “They won’t let us go out,” said Far.

  “Who’s they?” I said. “A year from now, most of us will have the vote.”

  “By that time, they’ll have convinced most of us that the moratorium is a good idea.”

  “They’re not the only ones who can do convincing.”

  At that point everybody just laughed. I turned away and gathered the shards of the broken cup. Then I got myself the coffee and snack I’d come for. I sat down with it and wrote my first “exile” post and sent it to everyone who’d ever contacted me. I had plenty of time to do it, because nobody wanted to talk to me.

  Compare that to how it is now. This morning I rolled out of bed, leaving Grant to sleep, and grabbed my breakfast here. I went to the workshop and did a couple of hours on the habitat virtual tests. I wasn’t the first person in, and the loft filled up fast. When I looked around, the real and virtual spaces were more crowded than the desks, with projects big and wild. Grant’s waterworld resort no longer looks outrageous — there’s a scheme for farming the algae that has so far survived three feasibility studies; an even wilder project for exporting water by whipping waterspouts to escape velocity (don’t ask); some very neat work with using gas giant slingshot effects to get a head start on the long tube; all of which are attracting some founder capital — which of course does its bit to undermine the pro-embargo coalition, by vesting interests in colonization and getting out. On the cultural side there’s a small school of artists over in the corner data-mining Red Sun transmissions — four years behind, obviously, and four hundred years of cultural drift off, but that’s what makes what they make of it interesting, even beautiful.

  I’ll tell you a secret: we’ve gained by losing the virtualities. Without that distraction we’re more focused on our work and on our plans. Some of us. The truth is, the workshop is crowded not because too many people are working on projects, but because not enough are to justify opening another one.

  And therein lies a problem, one I was reminded of as I walked to the cafe just now for my morning break. The streets and parks were busy. What worries me is what they were busy with. Fun, games, music, talk talk talk. Half a dozen kids loafing, passing an inhaler around, giggling. Nothing wrong with that at a party, but this was ten in the morning! Saw one guy cross-legged on a bench, whittling a bit of bent branch into a vague semblance of an animal. Doubtless he thinks it’s art and that he’s accomplishing something. Not everyone is into starting projects. Some always take more initiative than others. That isn’t the problem. The problem is that too many people who should be initiating projects aren’t, and too many people who should be checking out which project they want to join aren’t bothering. They don’t have plans and they don’t bother even to study. They’re out there playing under the sunline.

  Who can blame them? Well, we can, and we do. We busy folk call them slackers and birthrighters, because they’re living on their birthrights and not earning or learning. But they didn’t just happen to be born with idle bones. They’re idle because they don’t believe they’ll ever get out, at least not for decades. So we should blame the founders, and all those who voted for the embargo?

  No! We should blame ourselves! We’re not doing enough to convince them that the embargo won’t last more than another six months. All we have to do is vote. The voting-age cohort of the ship generation is enough to tip the balance.

  I’ve just had an awful thought. If we don’t shift that crowd of slackers, they might vote to keep the embargo.

  Think about that. Actually, when I think about that, I get such a terrible sense of suffocation that I gasp. And I think about killing. I really feel as if I could go out and choke slackers with my bare hands.

  I’m as shocked as you are.

  Synchronic Narrative Storm was showing a group of five-year-olds the big machine that turned bales of mown grass into milkshakes and meat patties when a shadow darkened the sunlight from the doorway. She turned and saw Constantine.

  “You grace us with your real presence,” she said, in an electric message with a sharp edge. He smiled and stepped out of sight. Synchronic passed the five-year-olds to the charge of two ten-year-olds, who took over the demonstration so quickly that Synchronic could smell the sizzle before she was out of the door. She found Constantine leaning on the side of the barn, in a pose that needed only a chewed straw between his teeth to complete.

  “You have some nerve coming here,” she said.

  “Yes, my lady,” he said. He straightened away from the wooden wall and gestured to the pathways. “Care for a stroll?”

  “If you must.”

  “Thank you.”

  They walked between gnarled trees. Mowing machines like large trilobites with baskets on their backs trimmed the verges.

  “Feed for the nanotech cow,” remarked Constantine. “A cumbrous process. In the cones we grow food straight from the gunk.”

  “You didn’t come here to pass the time of day.”

  “No, my lady, I did not.”

  “I still haven’t forgiven you, and I’m not going to, so don’t ask.”

  The subterfuge of the surveillance still rankled; its exposure, at least, still embarrassed him. She could see his blush in the infrared.

  “I didn’t come to ask that,” he said. “Nor to offer mine.”

  “You think I need any?”

  “Not particularly.” He looked sidelong at her. “Business is business. Can we put all that aside for the moment? Accepting it as unfinished business?”

  She shrugged. “If you insist. So what did you come for?”

  “We’re in danger of losing the ship generation.”

  “I’m aware of the problems,” she said. “ ‘You can’t tell the boys from the girls, they have no respect for their elders, their user interfaces are garish and unwieldy, everybody is writing a book, and their music is just noise.’ Found scratched on a potsherd in Sumer.”

  “All true as it ever was,” he said, “but it’s more than that. They were ripe to go out, and now they’re overripe, to the point of becoming somewhat rotten. A significant number are demoralised. Another and better fraction are becoming angry and organised against the founders.”

  “And whose fault is that? They were conveniently distracted and constructively occupied with the virtualities until you crashed them.”

  He raised a hand in front of him, palm facing her. “I know, I know,” he said. “Let’s not recriminate. As we agreed, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “So the question is what’s to be done about it. I think we have to give them hope, and we have to give them constructive work. Real work and real hope.”

  “Planning and designing is real work.”

  “Yes, and it’s killing their spirits. The better they are, the more they yearn to put their plans into practice.”

  She stopped dead on the path. Constantine took a couple of oblivious steps forward, then noticed and turned around. She glared him in the face. “Don’t open again the question of colonisation. We’re not doing it until at least we get advice from the Red Sun system.”

  Constantine spread his hands. “You know you haven’t won the young people over to that. When the emergency goes to referendum they can vote it out, and vote your people off the Council, and colonise anyway.”

  “They can vote all they like,” she said. “They can’t force us to invest.”

  She thought she detected a flicker of amusement at this, but no note of it reached his voice. “Don’t put them to that test,” he said.

  “So do you have anything to propose?” she asked. “Some real work that isn’t virtual?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I propose that we let them get to work on real asteroids, but not out in the system.”

  “Oh?” she said. “And where would we
find these real asteroids? In the slag mountains?”

  “No,” said Constantine. “In the hollow spaces of the cones.”

  She knew about these asteroids, of course. It was because she had classified them in the wrong mental category that she hadn’t thought of them.

  “That sounds very tempting,” she said. “I think we could sell that to the Council. On one condition.”

  “Yes?”

  “That it counts as colonization, with the settlers emigrating as if they were going into free space. They are, after all, leaving the habitat.”

  Constantine smiled. “And therefore can’t vote? Yes, I had thought that aspect would appeal to you.”

  “I can see how we benefit,” said Synchronic. “What’s in it for the crew?”

  “Same as for the kids,” said Constantine. “Work. Something useful to be getting on with. Trade. Resource extraction.”

  “You know,” said Synchronic, “it might be best if the suggestion were to come from the ship generation themselves, and then be acceeded to by the Council. So that it seemed less like a palliative offered by us, and more like a concession won by them.”

  “I’ll take steps,” said Constantine.

  The town, or miniature city, of Far Crossing had changed since Horrocks had last visited it. This time he arrived in his own hired microlight. He dragged it across the field and parked it at the edge of town, then walked in along the same street he’d walked six months before. Sternward Avenue, that was it. Its familiarity underlined how much about it had changed. It was more crowded and less busy than he remembered. The paintings and writings on the walls were no longer harmonious and decorative. Angry slogans flared in jagged letters. Rock the founders. Rock the aliens. Room to live. Space for us. Elaborate illuminations of names and obscure words. Obsessive, detailed pictures of habitats, fantastically encrusted with weapons; of the aliens, with speech bubbles enclosing improbable dialogue. Trompe 1’oeil murals of climbing plants. The loss of much of the usual electronic buzz and background chatter had shifted illustration and emphasis and communication out to the actual.