Learning the World

by Ken MacLeod

  The cable bar swung over a square puddled with yellow lights around trees, tables and stalls. Smells of tea and stumblefruit wafted up. A few workers in the line ahead of him, who had dozed, feet reflex-locked to the bars, jolted awake and let go, gliding down. Darvin followed. The momentum of the cable’s rush carried him forward as his back flexed upward and his wings braced. Down he spiralled. Tiny green spearpoints of new growth bristled the dusty trees. He alighted on cobbles and strolled to a tea bar. There was room for his feet at the perch and for his elbows at the counter. The serving girl was bright and brisk. A trudge squatted just beyond the end of the counter, leashed to the leg of the stall and gnawing on a bone while its master drank with friends at an adjacent table. Some people at the counter talked and laughed; others, solitary like Darvin, sipped in silence.

  From a nearby temple the sound of many voices singing echoed: there was a trick they had, of concentrating the sound by focusing the crowded singers’ wings. Darvin listened to the hymn with a mixture of enjoyment of its beauty and disdain of its content. He was no scoffer: at the sight of the galaxy, Deity seemed the most evident and insistent of deductions. Like most astronomers, he was devout. Like almost all, he had no truck with the cults. It was not only that they still held a grudge against astronomy, the science that had stolen heaven from their very hands, though the more enlightened were ever eager to honey-gum the antique myths in symbolism. For the priests, one god was never enough, nor a good life a sufficient offering. For them there had to be sacrifices, conducted with sickles and herbs at the new moons and knives and calves at the new year; and songs at evening and morning.

  Varlun, a noted philosopher of the Dawn Age, who had lived three eights-of-eights of years ago in Gevork, had written of the passages from day to night, and night to day. At night, he wrote in his essay “What Is Dawn?,” the starry skies above told you all you needed to know about the might and mind of Deity. By day, the Sun’s kindly warmth told you all you needed to know of its creator’s goodness. And in the evening hours and in the dawn the promptings, indeed at times the pains, of conscience told you all you needed to know of right and wrong. For this the priests had had him locked up for seven years.

  Darvin examined his conscience for stirrings and found nothing that pricked. His unease about the trudges had ceased to be a moral pang and become a practical concern. How different, he wondered, would life be if there had been no trudges? No tractable, versatile beast to do the heavy and dirty work? Some engineering tales had speculated on that. Sometimes they averred that the art of invention would have developed faster, culminating in a society little different from that of today, but with two-legged, two-armed machines in the place of trudges; for some tales of the future such machines had become a part of the furniture. Others, darker and more daring, had made the blunt point that if there had been no trudges to bear the load, some men would have been forced to bear it, slashed and lashed, leashed and chained, some gelded and spayed. And as that came to revolt the conscience, or became too clumsy a method to work in manufacture, why then they would have been turned loose, and hunger having taken the place of all other inducement, they would have done the same work for pay. The usual refinement of such tales was in finding ingenious ways to exclude the freed human trudges from nature’s bounty of fruit and prey. The crudest involved enormous fences and aerial barriers; the subtlest, debt.

  None had given thought to what a future without trudges would be like; a future that did not begin with a convenient mechanical analogue to take the trudges’ place. Darvin stayed at that counter for three-quarters of an hour, drinking two glasses of tea, his ear cocked to conversations. He heard not a word about trudges or aliens, Gevorkians or Southerners. Gossip and shop talk, and the party politics of the Reach. He moved on when he became convinced that the trudge tethered to the stall was listening too.

  “Bahron! Arrell!”

  Bahron sprang toward him and clapped him on the shoulder.

  “In the name of the Sun and the Queen,” the Eye hissed in his ear, “shut the fuck up. We aren’t called that around here.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” Darvin heard his apology coming out slurred. He’d had one too many stumblefruits.

  “What’ll you have?” asked Bahron, louder.

  “A sharpfruit, thanks.”

  “Coming down,” said Bahron. He shoved Darvin towards a table. “Talk to the lady.”

  Darvin sat down so hard it hurt his buttocks. “Hello.”

  “A whiff, I think,” said Arrell. She waved under his nose a smoking bowl of laughterburn. Darvin inhaled. On the instant the world became lucid and wondrous. Stars flickered in the gaps between tree branches. Rings of poisonous-looking fungi probed up from ground littered with leaves and rinds. He was in a stumblefruit orchard in the university area, to which his ramble had, quite without conscious intent, taken him.

  “So much for avoiding scholars and students,” he said.

  She didn’t get it, but Bahron, returning with three small ripe fruits, did. “Hah!” he said, sitting down. “Been trying to pick up clues to the popular mood, have we?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not your job,” Bahron said. “But I don’t doubt you’ve done it well. Let’s see now…” He bit into the fruit and let the juice dribble into his upturned mouth. “Ah, that’s better. You heard very little about the subjects on your mind, but what you did hear told you that people are pretty sceptical about this so-called alien craft, think the claim about it is some kind of manoeuvre by our friends in the South, and if they’re worried about anything beyond their own troubles, it’s Gevork. Trudges? Far from becoming smarter, all you’ve heard is the odd grumble about how some trudge or other is acting even more stupid and recalcitrant than usual.”

  Darvin almost choked on his own first sip of the bitter juice. “Exactly!” he spluttered. “How did you know?” He had the sudden, embarrassing suspicion that the Sight had been tracking him ever since he’d left its secret offices.

  “From the letters column of The Day,” said Bahron. He waved his hand over the smouldering bowl, inhaled, and regarded Darvin with narrowed eyes through the smoke he breathed out. “A lesson, eh, astronomer?”

  Darvin laughed. “Lesson learned,” he said.

  “Cabdrivers are another useful source,” said Arrell.

  “I don’t suppose,” Darvin said, “you have any idea when we are going to get, you know, some definite view from the Height?”

  Bahron ran a finger-claw up and down the side of his nose. “Watch the skies, astronomer,” he said. “Watch the skies.”

  Later that evening Darvin noticed a public telephone near the orchard’s exit. When she was on her own Kwarive had the habit of working late in the museum annexe. Sometimes she even slept there. It seemed like a good idea to call her. Darvin fumbled for coins and fed them in, connected to the operator, and told him the number of the room. After much clicking and clunking the call went through.

  “Hello?” Kwarive’s voice sounded sleepy.

  “Hello, it’s me.”

  “You woke me up. Is everything all right?”

  “Yes, everything’s fine. I just wanted to hear your voice.”

  “You’re juiced, Darvin.”

  “Well, yes, but—”

  At that point the line went noisy with a buzz that became louder. Darvin held the earpiece away and looked at it. The connections seemed secure. He could still hear the noise. He recalled how the electric shittles had been detected, and glanced around, half-expecting to see one nearby. A trudge walked past, wheeling a barrow of stumblefruit gourds. The buzz peaked and faded.

  Shocked back to sobriety, Darvin returned the receiver to his ear.

  “What was that?” Kwarive asked.

  “Nothing, darling,” Darvin said. “Just some interference. Look, my coins are running out. Good night. I’ll see you the day after tomorrow.”

  “You mean tomorrow,” said Kwarive. “It’s after midnight. Good night. Sleep well.”
<
br />   “You too.”

  He hung up the receiver and walked back to the table. Bahron and Arrell were licking the stickiness off their hands and clearly getting ready to leave.

  “Everything all right at home?” Bahron asked.

  “Yes,” said Darvin. “Everything’s fine.”

  Darvin spent the night in a cheap lodging — little more than a bowl to wash in and a rack to hang from — and at dawn, wakened by a prearranged and persistent telephone, waited at the quay for the return packet. The sky was red and the air was cold. Trudges lugged packages and bales to the quayside. None of the trudges showed a glint of intelligence, but, Darvin reflected, nor did many of the humans there. He doubted that he did so himself.

  The steamer rounded the western headland. As he gazed at it, Darvin’s attention was caught by a golden gleam high in the sky, far out above the Broad Channel. It came from the low sun reflected off an airship, a big one, moving fast in the morning wind off the sea. After a few minutes, and long before the steamer had crossed half the bay, the dirigible was in plain sight, sinking towards Kraighor. On its underside at the front was a greenish dot, which Darvin knew to be the blue and green roundel of Gevork. The steady note of the airship’s engines sounded from the sky.

  A louder, harsher throb came from the air in the shoreward direction. Darvin heard shouts. He turned and looked up, and shouted too.

  Four flying machines with double wings passed overhead. They looked like the aeroplanes he had imagined, and the experimental airframes Orro had described. Painted on their red wings was the black claw of the Reach. A thrill shook Darvin from head to foot. Nobody here, he was sure, was as amazed as he.

  The four craft buzzed seaward and climbed with a rising snarl to meet the descending Gevorkian. They passed it and turned around, sunlight flashing off their tilting wings. Their engine note changed, like that of a motor car throttling back. Two above, two below, they took position on either side of the airship and escorted it down. They looked like flitters beside a grazer, but that was a matter of mere size: the relatively tiny machines gave an impression of concentrated power that the vast wallowing gasbag couldn’t begin to match. Even their engines were louder.

  The aircraft passed overhead again, the four aeroplanes pacing the dirigible as it dove toward the mooring masts high on the Mount. A cheer rose from the quay, and from the esplanade, and from the houses round about. The steamer left a half hour late that day.

  17 — Pies in the Sky

  “You did what?”

  Not in five hundred years had Synchronic felt such fury. Her hands shook and the world darkened in her sight. Constantine looked back at her with a calm she was certain he would not have dared to affect if his presence before her had been physical.

  “Reverse-engineered from the language module,” he repeated.

  Synchronic’s hands mimed strangling him. Shocked, she calmed herself with several deep breaths and a moment of flash meditation. This could be dealt with. This disaster was not irrecoverable. This was not beyond her power. She could get on top of this. They all could.

  Futile rage gave way to urgent inquiry.

  “How?” she asked. “How is that possible?” The anger again. Another moment of the hard-learned mental discipline. Calm.

  “Quantum-level effects,” he said. He shrugged, waggling his spread hands, palms down. “Crew scientists, you know what they’re like. I don’t claim to understand it. I’m told it’s a refinement of brain interface techniques. If that helps.”

  “ ‘If — that — helps’!”

  Brain interface techniques, indeed! I’ll give you brain interface, you arrogant fool! Her brain interface was right now transmitting all she saw and heard to her fellow-members of the Circle, and thereby to the Council, on which two of its members sat. Anger flared and calm restored. She returned a serene gaze to the spectre in the sunny garden. She had to keep it this way. They were sharing information. They were solving a problem together. Constantine was not on trial. Not yet.

  She reviewed what he had told her, replaying the words and sentences her anger had whited out and shouted down the first time.

  The problem, the intellectual problem, was this. No Rosetta stone existed for the bat people’s language. No amount of observation, no iteration of linguistic heuristics, could decode an unknown language from recordings alone. For mutual understanding, there had to be mutual interaction. One had to know directly what one side of the conversation was trying to say, and that meant one side of it had to be you. Faced with this impasse, the crew’s scientists had, in all too characteristic a fashion, worked around it. Their solution had all the grubby fingerprints of a brute-force kludge.

  The neural structure of the human brain’s language-processing module, named in deep antiquity Chomsky’s Conceit, had been known since the Caves. The genetic code of the Destiny II biosphere was known from aerial microorganisms returned to the stealth orbiter. The amount of information and genetic instruction that could be packed in a nanoassembler was vaster by far than even the vast amount stored in natural genomes and machinery, cluttered as they were with redundancy and junk. The information-processing hardware capacity of the ship was beyond all human conception, and the amount of information its science software could extract from the slenderest and most fragile of evidence was limited only by the ingenuity of the human inquiry that initiated it.

  So… they’d had the means to install Chomsky’s Conceit on any big enough brain down below. They had the means to generate radio transmitters within host bodies, as they’d done with the dung-beetles. And faced with the crash-and-burn and banning of that project, they’d skipped blithely ahead to a bolder one. They couldn’t install Chomsky’s Conceit on the brains of bat people — the aliens’ brains already had a language module of their own. That would have given rise to wetware conflicts and deep grammar errors, and anyway, ethically, that would never have done. Oh no. That would have been wrong. That would have interfered. What they had done, bless their reckless little souls, was to set up the machinery to install the module on the brains of the slaves, who had (they’d figured) no language module (and who were, therefore, not slaves but beasts). And once they’d received and filtered and processed and quantum-handwaved the information coming back from brains learning the bat people’s languages, the translation protocols had been—

  Reverse-engineered from the language module!

  Holy rocking shit.

  It was turning into a big day for flash meditation. Much more of this and she might attain flash enlightenment. “You realise what you’ve done?” she demanded. “Do you have the faintest conception of the harm this will cause?”

  Constantine nodded. “The disruption will be immense. It’ll destroy the entire slave economy.”

  “But they’re not slaves!” Synchronic said. “If they had been, I could see why we might want to interfere, But you’ve taken what are by your own admission mute brutes, and given them language. Deep grammar. Self-awareness. Human consciousness. You’ve made them slaves.”

  “Yes,” said the Oldest Man. “Slaves that will try to free themselves.”

  Synchronic had already shown him the breakout she had witnessed. She flashed him a pointer to the file.

  “Like that?” she said. “When these poor creatures become aware of what they are and what has been done to them, they will suffer terribly. They will flee, they will fight — kill their owners—”

  Constantine agreed again. “That may all happen,” he said. “The owners have it coming.”

  Synchronic just stared at him. “How can you say that? How can you be so destructive?”

  “We didn’t do this to be destructive,” said Constantine. “We did it to reduce suffering, and to increase intelligence.”

  “The suffering of brutes? When did that become urgent?”

  “The last time I visited you,” said Constantine, “you were showing the kids the meat and milk machine. Why don’t we just raise and slaughter cattle?”
/>
  “Hah!” said Synchronic. “Convenience.”

  “No moral reason? Perhaps a mere shudder of distaste, a fastidiousness we can afford. Very well. I can still tell you that these brutes suffer, whether they’re conscious of it or not. They are treated with cruelty and disdain. Their situation is much worse than that of the grazing animals the bat people prey on. These are predators and prey after all, it’s a natural relationship and the beasts have natural lives. The relationship between the bat people and their related species is nothing like that. It’s artificial, it’s unnatural, it’s wicked and it’s got to stop.”

  “As no doubt it will,” said Synchronic, “in a few decades when we’ve made contact. By then, they might have invented robots for themselves. They’re an inventive lot.”

  “Indeed they are,” said Constantine. “Well, we are not willing to wait a few decades. We’re here now, we have the means to stop the suffering and therefore the duty to act.”

  “For all you know, the bat people might be able to keep them in slavery. I’m sure they’ll come up with all kinds of rationalizations, if the human precedent is anything to go by.”

  “Then they’re no worse off, and they have the benefit of intelligence and language to help them escape or resist.”

  “That poor thing I heard called a trudge didn’t exactly benefit, from what I saw and you saw.”

  “Oh no?” said Constantine. “It lived five minutes as a free man. That’s five minutes more than it would ever have had without us.”

  Synchronic was astonished at the ruthlessness of that argument. It was so outrageous and unexpected that she couldn’t begin to answer it. She concentrated instead on the appalled promptings now pouring in from her allies.