Learning the World

by Ken MacLeod

“After him!”

  Before Synchronic could assimilate her shock at understanding the words, her vision became a confused, blurred rolling as the viewpoint topped the fence and fell down the other side, then more running.

  Then wings, a glint of teeth, a clawed foot jammed straight into the viewpoint. A flurry and a welter. Sky and a sunlight flash on a downward-stabbing blade. A long, deep, full-throated scream that ended on a rising, resonant pitch, as if a soul had streaked upward to the bright, blank blue that was the last image to fill its sight.

  Darkness and silence.

  16 — The Anomalies Room

  Kraighor, the capital of Seloh’s Reach, lay a long way around the coast from Five Ravines. Darvin had been there once, when he’d been a little kit, and his memories of it were an unstable mix of the vivid and the vague. Loud streets, sharp tastes, a smell of burning coal, a high and roost-encrusted hill, trees with dark and twisted leaves. He and his parents had arrived by cable car from inland, and it was his memories of the station that he felt were reliable: if it hadn’t changed much he could still find his way around it. The city itself was a blur.

  This time he travelled there alone, and by the coastal packet steamer. It made the trip every three days; the voyage took from the early morning of one day to noon of the next, with three or four stops at small ports along the way. Such halts gave the passengers — about an eight of eights — a welcome opportunity to stretch their wings; flying off the side of the boat was discouraged, because of the danger of falling behind. Tedium, motion sickness, yelling kits, sleeping racks in which everyone swayed and bumped into each other like ill-matched pendulums, salted meat and bruised fruit, travelling salesmen who liked to talk… Darvin took with him plenty of reading matter.

  The physics-wire offprints were there to salve his conscience. The bulk of the papers he stacked on the slopped table of the steamer’s saloon came from an eight-days’ worth of the press of the town and the reach. The local sheet, The Eye on Five, had been first with the story of the Southerners’ communique, which had been picked up a day later by the weighty Kraighor Voice and its popular counterpart, The Day. As he traced the story through the pages, Darvin found none of the reactions he’d have predicted, in part — he had to admit to himself — on the basis of his adolescent reading of engineering tales.

  Scepticism hadn’t so much as twitched an eyebrow. All of the papers reported the Southerners’ story as serious and probably true. The Height had made no public comment as yet, but Darvin suspected that an official word had come down. Panic and hysteria had remained in their roosts, with barely a flutter. The news of the alien presence in the system was treated as Ground-shaking and portentous, but as an occasion for sober vigilance rather than alarm. Priests of the cults — who, to Darvin’s exasperation, were quoted as often as scientists — had hailed it as confirmation of the ancient dogmas of life’s plurality and the Queen’s fecundity. He himself was quoted too; having been referenced in the Southerners’ brochure, he could hardly avoid it; he had suffered several interviews, in which he’d presented the facts about his discovery, and no opinions. The government’s secrecy and continued silence on the subject was ascribed to caution and wisdom rather than any sinister purpose. Where worry was expressed, it was about not the aliens but Gevork. No persecution of Southerners had broken out, nor any suspicion fallen on the luckless trudges; at least, none that the press saw fit to report. This was consistent with his own experience, if not with his initial fears: Darvin had heard nothing from Orro, and his handler for the Sight had said nothing untoward at his most recent contact.

  The engineering tales were false. That hadn’t stopped the most popular pulp in Five Ravines, Other Worlds, from rushing a special edition into print so fast that the ink still smelled sweet and fresh on the page, like honey-gum. The cover pirated the pictures on the Southern pamphlet and headlined a story whose title, “Invasion from Infinity!” bore witness to a brash disdain of doing right as much as of blithe contempt for having being proved wrong. Darvin noted the depiction of the invaders as giant wingless humanoids. He felt an irritated temptation to draw the Sight’s attention to it as evidence of a security lapse, more for the discomfiture this would inflict on the reckless editor than because it mattered. But he put away the unworthy impulse before he slept.

  The ship rounded the eastern headland of Kraighor Bay under a high sun. Airships speckled the sky. His keen first glimpse of the city disappointed Darvin. Between the harbour and the foot of the central Mount most of it lay under a yellowish haze from which only the upper storeys of the taller buildings stood out. The Mount itself rose clear above it, crusted with the Height. The lower levels of that tall, spreading, ramshackle edifice were of stone, the upper and more recent of wood, almost as raw as scaffolding, a structure always growing and never finished, stone replacing wood from below as in a tree that calcified as it grew. The analogy of form and function had been a gift to satirists and a cliche of cartoonists.

  As the ship drew closer the smell of waste fumes from the rock-oil distillate that fuelled the numerous motor vehicles became so pervasive that the keenest nose lost all sensitivity to it, and only the throat felt it, like grit. Darvin was so eager to get off the ship that he abandoned his papers and took wing a minute’s flight from the shore. He alighted coughing on the quay, pushed his way through waiting passengers — the ship would continue down the coast, to return the following morning — dodged the importunities of cabdrivers and trudge-handlers, and stalked into the city. He made his way to his destination by several stops of a cable trolley, a flight across a park, and a short walk, following a route he cribbed from a map he’d been told to burn. Where the Sight’s headquarters were he did not know, but he knew that the office to which he’d been directed was not it.

  As he walked down a back street towards that address it occurred to him, not for the first time, that he might be heading into trouble: a debriefing with prejudice, as the Sight cant went. But short of turning back, there was nothing to be done. The entrance he sought was above a row of victuallers’ shops, not of the best quality. Flies buzzed in air haunted by the smells of meat that had hung too long, of fruit that was past ripe, and of dried herbs gone damp. Shopkeepers eyed Darvin through drifts of laughterburn, bored. He sprinted his last few steps, rose a few wingbeats, turned and swooped to the door. It opened, as instructed, without a knock.

  Inside, he found a broad corridor of fresh-painted wood, whose far end opened on a balcony above a courtyard. He could see daylight and a tree. Along the corridor suspended electric globes every few spans cast a clear cold light. On each side of the corridor were four doors, marked with the names of obscure commercial properties: import-export agencies, brokerages and the like. He knocked on the third left. It opened a little and an elderly woman peered around it.

  “Come in,” she said. She had red fur and a dappled chest. “You must be the famous Darvin.”

  He nodded. “And you?”

  “Arrell,” she said, after a moment’s pause.

  The room was long and wide, windowless and brightly lit. Shelves lined its walls. Racks interrupted the aisles between tables, over which the bright lights hung. Eight and two people worked there, most turning great stacks of newspapers and journals into scissored heaps of wastepaper and small neat files of clippings. Others processed letters and notes from (Darvin guessed) informants. Four of the people were middle-aged or older, the rest young. A teleprinter machine clattered in a far corner. Here and there, telephones flashed rather than rang, and were answered at once. Tea braziers smouldered and pots bubbled. It was a place where much leaf was chewed.

  “Welcome to the Anomalies Room,” said Arrell. “Tea?”

  “Thank you,” said Darvin. He looked around, marvelling. “Has the Sight always done this?”

  “You should know better than to ask,” said Arrell, threading her way between tables. “But since you do,” she added over her shoulder, “yes. But not on this scale. This is our new
office — with, as you see, some new staff.”

  As he followed her Darvin glanced at the words lettered on the open boxes into which the researchers placed their clippings or reports; these he glimpsed: Sky. Water. Weather. Lights. Signs. Ground. Imponderables. Wonders. Powers. Dust. Falls. Foreigners. Monsters. Unusual Acts. Mental.

  The system of classification eluded him.

  “I regret,” Arrell said, over tea, “that you couldn’t tell us your area of interest.”

  “It was something I didn’t want to mention on the phone.”

  Arell laughed. “Who but the Sight would be listening?”

  “Good question.”

  She looked back at him with a minute increment of respect. “True,” she said. “So, what is it?”

  “Trudges,” said Darvin. “Unusual behaviour of.”

  “See under ‘Monsters,’ ” said Arrell.

  She led him to a small table to one side and left, to return with a deep cardboard box, so heavy that he sprang to help her. The thump of box on table made people look up and frown.

  “The file has grown,” she said. She reached up and pulled a cord to switch on the table’s overhead light. “Let me know if you need anything.”

  The question of the trudges had preyed on Darvin’s mind ever since Lenoen had raised it. He had no one to talk with about it except Kwarive. He didn’t want to talk with anyone else about it. If anything could create the kind of mass panic that the news of aliens hadn’t, it had to be this. He himself had begun to give every trudge he passed a wary glance, and now and again had seen, or imagined he’d seen, a spark of thought or anger in their eyes. One day he looked back at such a trudge, to find that the trudge had turned its head to look back at him. That moment he had decided on the course that had brought him here.

  The box was divided by loose cardboard partitions. Almost half had one for each outer-month, with the cuttings stacked vertically between them. There were already eight-and-one of them, taking the record back to the previous year. The other section was of everything from before that year, and thin stuff it was, though it went back many years and made up most of the bulk. Why the Sight had kept track of curious events for all that time Darvin didn’t know, but he could guess. It had nothing to do with a scrying of portents; it was that the circulation of strange teles and rumours gave clues to the popular mood: ripples of anxiety or hysteria, cold deep currents of belief and doubt.

  In that early archival section he found a handful of trudge oddities: instances of albinism, of wingless freaks (there had been some speculation that the acquired characteristic was becoming inherited; Kwarive would have smiled); of travelling performers who showed off trudges capable of counting or other unusual feats; of nests and entire colonies of feral flying trudges that had reverted to their ancestral physique and mode of life. None mentioned the use of speech, though some claimed understanding. Most of the reports were of sports thrown up by other breeds of domestic beast — he lost count of two-headed calves — and of sightings in the wild: sea snakes, lake lizards, mysterious man-like beings of the mountains or deserts, great winged things in the sky. That there were unknown species in the world Darvin didn’t doubt, and Kwarive had told him of a growing interest among biologists in mutants, which some thought had a bearing on questions of evolution; but most of this was most likely clutter: misperception and misreporting, rumours hardened to fact and become precedent and template for others, and downright hoaxes and lies.

  He sighed, wiped dust and ink from his fingers, and proceeded to the more recent files. The parade of monsters was now longer and weirder, capering across his inner vision and gibbering. He dismissed all but the odd trudges, who were present in the parade in force.

  A veterinary surgeon had lost an eye when a trudge kit had lashed out with its foot when its turn came to be spayed. Another kit had screamed “No!” when its wings were slashed, had gone into a decline and died. An old woman who lived alone had been found strangled by powerful hands; suspicion had fallen on her (now missing) trudge. A trudge in an upland farm had unlocked its stable door, and had had to be stabbed by the farmer and his boy as it fled across the meadows. A second-generation (it was thought) feral trudge, wings unslashed, had haunted the skies above a backcountry village for many a night, evading nets and dodging crossbolts. Mutilated carcasses of cattle had littered the vicinity.

  That was in the first outer-month. Albeit that the reports came from all over Seloh and Gevork, and one (the strangling, recounted by a returned sailor) from the Southern Rule, it was a troubling tally. Over the next eight outer-months it increased, not month by month, but over all.

  He leaned back and stared up at the ceiling mats, where tiny skitters ran upside down with sticky toes, catching mat bugs in long looped tongues. The real world was wonder enough, and seemed light-years distant from the crazy tales he’d read.

  The woman Arrell’s face loomed above him. He rocked forward. “Finished?” she asked.

  “For now,” said Darvin. “May we talk?” He tipped his head back a little.

  She nodded. “Outside.” She led him down the corridor to another door, which opened to a small office. Flat panels of floatbark covered the walls. The room had more light fixtures than seemed necessary. Arrell switched on two of them, perched at the back of a desk, and motioned Darvin to a seat.

  “We call this the interview room,” she said, with a slight smile.

  “For debriefings with prejudice?”

  “Yes. It’s not as sinister as you may have heard. Be that as it may, you’re assured of privacy.”

  “All right,” said Darvin. “What I must ask you first is: how much analysis do you make of all these reports? How does the Sight handle them?”

  “In ancient times,” said Arrell, “Anomalies was a department of divination. Today it remains a small but significant element of statecraft… I’m sure you understand why.”

  “To gauge the susceptibility of the populace to rumours and alarms?”

  “Not at all!” said Arrell, sounding surprised at the suggestion. “Because the Sight needs to know about all unusual and untoward events. We sift the dross for nuggets. To take some banal examples, a mysterious flying light could be a Gevorkian airship. A strange man of the mountains — an infiltrator or a rebel. A sea-snake — the wake of an unseen ship.”

  “But — two-headed monsters!”

  She shrugged. “A new disease? A false rumour? It doesn’t matter. The Sight wants to know of it.”

  “What do you make of this year’s increase in unusual events involving trudges, then?”

  “I don’t try to interpret,” she said. “My job — our job, rather — is to summarise, tabulate, and report.”

  “So this matter has been reported?”

  “Among others. Monster tales are many this year.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Well. In my experience, any one strange event results in many spurious reports. One Gevorkian airship over the coast, whose presence we can confirm independently, gives rise to a double-eight of sightings from leagues around, from places that could not have seen it, and could not have heard of it at the time. Rumour flies faster than sound, as the saying goes.”

  “Or is backdated in recollection?”

  “That too.” The creases around her eyes quirked. “What is your theory about the trudges, by the way?”

  He didn’t know how much she knew about the project. Possibly she had never heard of the ether-wave emissions from insects and trees. It was not his place to tell her. “I think,” he said, “that something connected to the event has begun to increase the intelligence of some of them.”

  She didn’t quite conceal her surprise. “How could that happen?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But I would very much appreciate if you were to bring all such reports to the specific attention of the higher ranks.”

  “Of course,” she said. “Anything else, before you go?”

  “I understand,” he said, �
��that the Sight, at times, finds it necessary for the security and stability of the Reach to… discourage public discussion of certain matters. I submit that this trudge business may be one of them.”

  “I’ll pass your suggestion upward,” she said. “Will that be all?”

  It was the second hint. He saw himself out.

  Late-afternoon sunlight slanted through the heights and roosts. The first stirrings of the evening breeze off the Mount and the range behind Kraighor had begun to shift the day’s haze offshore. More people eddied among the shops and stalls, and the street didn’t smell so stale. As Darvin walked among them he felt his sense of himself shift, like the flip of a blink comparator, from lowly agent of the Sight to visitor to the capital, a free man with time on his hands. The city had a great and fine university. Its department of astronomy was a place he had long intended to see. His reputation now preceded him. He could be sure of a welcome, even at this hour, and a convivial evening. The dining hall would be ample, the alcohol-laden fruit abundant, the laughterburn mellow, the talk stimulating. It was all there, a few stops away on the Northeast Cable.

  He considered it, and reckoned it would be an opportunity missed. He could meet scholars and students any day of the eight. The city’s temples, the complex, piled-up stone roost of the Height, the maze of back streets — these he had to see. He turned away from the thoroughfare and headed back along the side street, deeper into the city.

  Clinging with both feet to a rattling cable bar that squealed for lack of oil, Darvin turned his head from the swaying bodies likewise suspended in front of him on this cheapest of transports and peered down at the market beneath his nose. A few stalls of cheap domestic stuff: mats, burners, brushes. Not worth a look, and in any case packing up. It was the end of the day’s third quarter, the hour halfway between noon and midnight, the time when people headed home. There was a peculiar division in the transport. Tired workers from the shops and factories clogged the cable bars and trolleys; civil servants from the Height darkened the sky, welcoming the chance to stretch their wings after a hard day behind the desk. Darvin had in just the past hour roamed the perimeter of the edifice, which he’d reached by cable car. He’d watched the regular wheelings of the sabreurs of Seloh’s Guard, and the comings and goings of airships at the skeletal copse of mooring-masts on the slope below. The Height was a busy place, but how much of its activity represented something real, and how much really symbolic, was another matter.