Learning the World

by Ken MacLeod

  “I couldn’t agree more,” said Darvin.

  “Oh, you could,” said Bahron. “You’ll agree a lot more when you see this.”

  The paper was of poor quality, the picture poorer. It was all dots. Narrowing his eyes, Darvin could just about make out a rectangle and two triangles. “It’s the Object!” said Kwarive, over his shoulder. “And it’s broken up!”

  “Well done,” said Bahron. “The two conical bits are moving very fast. Not our way, thank the gods. To the little rubbish planets — the Camp-Followers.”

  Darvin held up the sheet of paper. “Where did this come from?”

  “It’s a wireless photograph from our embassy in the Southern Rule. The Gevorkians also have a copy. The original was handed in by one of the court astrologers. I understand it’s a lot more detailed. Like I said, you should have watched the skies.”

  “Indeed I should,” said Darvin. “When did this breakup happen?”

  “Four days ago, I gather.”

  “Then there may be photographs from the observatory in my office—”

  “Yes,” said Bahron. “I was kind of hoping there would. What have you been doing lately, if I may ask?”

  Darvin gestured at Kwarive. “We’ve been investigating the trudges.”

  “Brilliant,” said Bahron. “And what have you found?”

  Kwarive held up an earpiece in one hand and the loop antenna in the other. “Listen,” she said.

  Bahron came over and put his ear to the buzz.

  “Is this some kind of trick?” asked Bahron.

  “Trick,” said Handful. “Trudge trick. Bad trudge!”

  In the moments that followed, the midge kit heard some new words, which Darvin rather hoped it wouldn’t learn.

  They walked between the towers to the Faculty of Impractical Sciences. They walked as a courtesy to Kwarive, for whom Handful was now an armful. When they’d made to leave the annexe the little beast had set up such a pathetic wail that nobody could bear to leave him behind. Kwarive walked beside Bahron, in earnest conversation. Behind them Darvin walked with Orro and Holder. Darvin observed on the faces of people walking the other way a predictable shift of expression. As they approached their faces tended to bestow the standard vague indulgent smile of noticing a young woman and small kit. As they came closer and passed, the faces of those who noticed what Handful was froze, intrigued or shocked or outright disgusted. Darvin maintained a strut and glare that defied remark. It seemed to work, though he allowed on reflection that Holder’s swords and Orro’s martial bearing helped.

  “Make yourselves at home,” he said when they crowded into his office, and left them to sort themselves out while he made tea. The stacks of unopened envelopes of celestial exposures, still sent every eight-days from the observatory, nagged at his conscience. He’d kept the order up for the sake of some future student who wanted to take up the search for the outer planet, and had never bothered to examine them himself. A packet had been in his basket as they came in. He thumb-clawed it open as the pot heated up. There was no room to spread them out. He flicked through them pair by pair. Orro’s arm reached over his shoulder.

  “That one,” he said.

  “How do you know?”

  Orro gave him a puzzled look. “We solved the equations last year.”

  “So we did, Orro, so we did.” He sighed. “Could you take care of the tea, old chap, and I’ll fire up the blink comparator.”

  He positioned the plates and adjusted the focus and started scanning, faster and with less care than usual. By luck or intuition, he found the three adjacent moving dots within a minute. He spent longer staring at them.

  He wondered how much difference there was between his mind and Orro’s. Where did any normal person stand in relation to someone who could visualise orbits from equations and recognise small patches of sky from memory and place the orbiting body in the right patch after half a year? Orro wasn’t doing mathematics quickly; he found calculation as laborious as the next fellow; but once he’d done it, he saw. Was the working of Orro’s mind as different from Darvin’s as his was from that of a trudge? It wasn’t a superiority in reasoning. It was like having another faculty, as alien to the normal human as language to the brute.

  He looked up. “It’s confirmed,” he said. “I’ll have the photographs sent daily, so we can track what’s going on.”

  “That would be good,” said Bahron, from the windowsill. “Going to the observatory would be better.”

  Orro handed Darvin the tea.

  “Thanks. What next?”

  Bahron jerked his head at Holder. “Ask the sabreur.”

  Holder, standing by the door holding a mug as if not quite sure whether to drink from it or piss in it, glanced around all the expectant faces.

  “As a Gevorkian I feel somewhat awkward giving directions to—”

  “Don’t,” said Orro.

  “Thank you,” said Holder. “Forgive me. This is all very new. Once the treaty is proclaimed, the whole security aspect changes. The new project will be public. Much more work will be done openly. Our etheric calculators and systems of rocket guidance may prove invaluable, when combined with Seloh’s advances in aviation and etheric telekinematography. The secret sites will still be used, but it will be possible to ship in far more personnel and equipment now that there is nothing to hide—”

  “Excuse me,” said Kwarive. She looked up from giving drops of tea on her fingertip to Handful.

  “Yes?” Holder didn’t sound like a man used to being interrupted.

  “You say there’s nothing to hide. That’s true — between us humans. We have nothing to hide from each other. What about hiding from the aliens?” She stroked Handful’s back. “This little creature, for example, is transmitting etheric waves as we speak. I don’t know if it’s getting back to the third moon, but it could be. Other trudges are doing the same, on a scale we don’t yet know. It’s going to be bad enough dealing with intelligent trudges, without worrying about trudge… intelligence, if you see what I mean! If we’re going to keep what we’re doing secret from the aliens, we have to do it out of the sight and hearing of trudges.”

  “What do you mean, hearing?” asked Holder.

  Darvin recalled Lenoen the Southerner’s comment about what it took to surprise him.

  “Well,” said Kwarive, “if this little one is learning our language, and transmitting to the aliens, who’s to say the aliens aren’t learning it too?”

  “That is a good point,” said Holder. “I have seen etheric calculators, and I am not inclined to set limits to what a more advanced science may do. However, it changes little, because we have no intention of concealing our activities from the aliens.”

  “What?” cried Darvin.

  Holder made a helpless gesture. “Bahron? You can explain it better.”

  “Don’t know about that,” said Bahron. “But I’ll try. See, I and the science boss, Markhan, and smarter folks than me, like Arrell, we’ve talked a lot about this. Especially after the shittle affair. Other parts of the project have looked long and hard at what that germ-plasm fiddling tells us about what our friends up there can do. We never forget that they’re up there, looking down, seeing us as sharp as a hunter fixing on a skitter. We never forget that their eyes are down here — maybe in the trudges, maybe shittles again, maybe things we can’t see at all. When I was a little kit, and even a big kit, we knew there was ether, right, it’s self-evident, but we had no idea there was such a thing as etherics. Invisible waves passing right through us and all that. We know the aliens use etherics, but don’t know what else they may use. In other invisible realms, so to speak. So we could be hiding away in caves and under roofs and screening for all the things we know about, and the wingless could be just watching us and smiling behind their big hands.”

  He slid off the windowsill and laughed. “You ever get that creepy feeling of being watched from above? Like, when you were little? Kwarive tells me it’s nature’s way of overprotectin
g us, if I understand her right. You’re safer to be wrong that way lots of times than wrong the other way once. Well. There’s no point trying to hide from the aliens. We’re not going to try. We’re going to do everything right out in the open. It’s our only chance.”

  “For what?” asked Kwarive. “Scaring them off?”

  “In a word,” said Bahron, “yes.”

  Darvin and Kwarive laughed. None of the others did.

  “It’s not as mad as it sounds,” said Bahron. “The wingless may be driven by population pressure, like anyone else, but there’s no reason to think Orro was wrong about their being peaceful — at least in their past experience. That big world-ship of theirs doesn’t look like it was expecting trouble. Markhan and Nollam have had a chance to go through the pictures and do some calculations, and it looks like a big tin drum full of their women and children. It’s not the sort of thing you’d send first into an unknown system if you had any idea there might be somebody shooting back. So regardless of what their capabilities are, they might not have much stomach for a fight. If they see us tooling up, building rockets and aeroplanes and such, they might just back off.”

  Kwarive laughed again. “That’s quite a supposition!”

  “Like I said,” Bahron replied, “it’s our only chance. And anyway, what have we got to lose?”

  “Lose!” echoed Handful. “Lose!”

  Bahron fixed a glare on the kit. “There is that, of course. I don’t see how turning trudges into men is anything but hostile. But now we know what’s going on, we can deal with it.”

  “How?” Kwarive asked. She held the kit closer as she said so, wrapping a wing around it, Darvin noticed.

  “The Sight is on the case,” Bahron said. “What the Height intends to do has to be kept secret from the public until the last minute. That’s all I can say for now. I would advise you all very strongly to say nothing on the subject.”

  With that ominous admonition he left.

  Darvin had last spent time at the observatory when he was a student. The popular image of the astronomer as nightly stargazer had never had much truth in it, and in modern times it had even less. Observation was still the basis, but the long-exposure camera had become a much more fruitful source of observation than the telescope alone. Much observation could be done by poring over photographs and spectroscope readings, and besides, it was in the application of mathematics to the results that such progress as occurred was being made. The science was in one of its difficult periods, when new observations didn’t so much solve problems as raise them. What fuelled the stars? Why did they show such a regular sequence of colours? What was the nature of the nebulae? What subtle property of the ether made the light of distant stars and nebulae shift toward the red end of the spectrum? Compared with such questions as these, Darvin’s search for the outermost planet had been trivial: a postgraduate project carried too far into the early part of his professional career, more out of a certain stubbornness — and the lure of knowing that, if he did find the planet, it would forever be associated with his name — than any true scientific urgency.

  Now he had his fame, for what that was worth.

  In the observatory, what it was worth was that he had had complete control over the telescope for four outer-months. All other work had been set aside for the project’s priorities. Night after night Darvin and his colleagues scanned the skies and took photographs. Day after day they inspected the plates in a blink comparator. The diminished Object — the cylinder, according to the Southern data — remained close to the orbit of the Warrior. Of the two cones that had broken away, no trace could be found. None of Orro’s calculations — and there had been many — had successfully predicted their new location. There had been moments of excitement, whenever a new body was found among the Camp-Followers. But when its location was sent by radio to the Southern Rule, to be viewed through the superior telescopes of the antipodean astrologers, it was always resolved as yet another natural asteroid.

  While Darvin cursed his luck, every other aspect of the project raced ahead. The treaty proclamation had been greeted more with relief about the prospect of a lasting peace with Gevork than anxiety about the aliens. People still, Darvin suspected, didn’t quite believe in the aliens. Not even the publication of pictures from the aliens’ indecipherable message had shaken the popular complacency. The existence of aliens had for so long been the subject of a lax assent — or article of faith, for cults and pulps alike — that its confirmation unsettled no prejudice and provoked no panic. It was quite possible that what people thought they saw in their everyday lives was progress stimulated, perhaps inspired, by the aliens, rather than the massive, coordinated military mobilization that it was. Taxes had gone up, prices risen, but the great manufactories and their penumbra of backstreet workshops had full order books. The sight of an aeroplane over a town no longer brought all activity to a halt. The most visible sign of great change was the sight of the tethered balloons that had sprung up on every horizon as TK relay stations. All the larger towns now had at least one huge public screen, upon which every night telekinematographic pictures were projected. They showed the work at the desert camps and proving grounds: the rockets rising and crashing, the vast arrays of etheric aerials, the test flights of experimental airframes; they gave nightly glimpses of the day’s debates in Seloh’s Roost; they had begun to carry lighter, more trivial news items and even theatrical performances later in the evening.

  Whatever was going on among the trudges had stirred no unrest. The question was never raised in the Roost, nor discussed in the papers. The Sight was no doubt kept busy. What it was busy doing, Darvin did not want to think about. He felt himself a coward for that. In the cluster of buildings around the observatory, there seemed no grounds for worry. Handful had become something of a mascot. Kwarive’s instructions for her part of the project had simply been to go on studying the infant trudge’s language acquisition, and she had moved to the same accommodation block as Darvin in order to study it discreetly. Handful flew around freely indoors and out, picked up new words and formed short sentences, and thrived. The only danger he faced, and that was slight, was of being attacked by one of the long-winged, long-necked flitters — carrion-eaters and opportunistic predators — that circled the thermals of the high desert.

  It was a hot evening, after a hotter day, near the turning of the outer-month. The sun had set, and the pylons of the cable-car system clicked and rang as their metal cooled. Nocturnal animals stirred and chittered in the scrub and sand. Soon the sky would be dark, the air chill. Darvin looked forward to it as he prepared the night’s observations. His eyelids were gritty with lack of sleep, his fur damp with sweat. The technician working beside him was equally exhausted.

  Handful flew in through the open window and perched on the telescope’s circular railing.

  “Darvin! Darvin!”

  “Hello, Handful.”

  “New moon! New moon!”

  Darvin smiled, the technician laughed. “That’s a smart trudge all right.”

  “Clever Handful,” said Darvin. He reached over and scratched the trudge’s ear. “Clever boy, Handful.”

  “No,” said Handful, grabbing the hair on Darvin’s wrist and tugging. “New moon. See new moon.”

  “I’ve seen them lots of times, Handful. Please go away. Be a good boy.”

  “New moon!” The tugging became painful.

  “Give me a minute,” said Darvin to the technician. “I’ll just take the little pest back to his — back to Kwarive.”

  He scooped the trudge into the crook of his elbow and stalked out. Handful pointed to the blue-black sky, in which the first stars pricked into visibility and, just above the last glow of sunset, the Fiery Jester burned bright. Darvin’s exasperated glance followed the pointing finger to the south. The inner and outer moons hung like sections of white rind. Close to them and a little above, a tiny but distinct triangle glinted like a faceted gem brighter than the Queen.

  “New
moon,” said Handful.

  19 — A Full and Frank Exchange of Views

  14 366:02:25 11:37

  Even after two days—

  There are several lines of thought and conversation that could begin with these words.

  So let me start with the easy one.

  Even after two days, crew quarters are a strange environment. It’s unlike the habitat or the settlements. The habitat is a ground environment, a pseudogravity environment, an imitation — strange as it may seem — of a planet’s surface. Yes, the ground curves up and over your head, which I know from the virtualities would seem as strange to anyone from a real planet as a real planet with sky overhead would to us. But that difference is less than it might seem — all on the surface, you might say. Think of the things they have in common, lakes, vertical building, plains, forests and parks, tame and wild animals roaming about, trees growing upward, rain falling downward, sun(line)-light from above. The eye and the inner ear tell you the same thing, most of the time.

  The microgravity homesteads were different again. The living spaces are small. They feel like site huts, not yet like homes. Everything was a bit raw, even though we were beginning to grow plants. Everywhere smelled of rock dust, except where it stank of leakage from organic cycles. And no, living in spacesuits or smart-fabric clothes all the time is not a solution.

  The crew quarters of the cone are quite unlike either. This is a mature free-fall environment. It’s like a rainforest canopy. And it’s old. The habitat’s present landscape has existed for only a few decades. The settlements, only a few months. This place is thousands of years old, almost as old as the ship, and behind it stretches another ten thousand or so years of precedent and practice. Millennia of trial and error, of artificial and natural selection, of genetic and mechanical engineering, until the long backward view fades out in the haze of legend: of Skylab and Mir, of the Space Stations and the Moon Caves. You see trees that buckle steel plate. You see ecosystems that have grown up around a water leak or a warm spot. You see sculptures whose details have eroded in the flow of air from a ventilator. You meet people who have lived thousands of years and never been outside — not just the ship, but — this cone. You encounter activities that are either immensely slow, subtle tasks or symptoms of wetware crashes. You see women with foetuses growing inside them. You hear children talking and not sounding like children, nor acting like them, but working together with adults. There are no child-raising estates here, no teen cities, no full-time careparents. Small children zoom around in a chaotic, tumbling, noisy and unsupervised way that reminds me of the bat people’s young. Of course there are not many children, but they make their presence felt out of all proportion.