by Ken MacLeod
Which leaves the virtualities. These are not as entertaining a diversion, or as useful an occupation, as I’d expected. This is not because they aren’t vivid. They are.
There are two problems with them. The first, and the most annoying, is that the thrill of hearing translated words soon wears off when you find out how few words are translated. The trudges are learning language, but mainly language spoken to them. So you see a bat person and hear him or her shouting: “Pick that up and put it over there!”
And you see hands picking up some heavy object, a juddering walk, and hear a crash.
Then you hear a number of other words, including: “brute,” “stupid,” “fuck,” and “off.”
The other problem is that although you see streets and fields and so on, most of the time you’re seeing the inside of some dark, dull, and dingy place: a cellar, a barn, a factory, a back room. The work done by the trudges is brutal, physical, and repetitive. Even watching it is tedious and exhausting. The only bit that’s interesting, in a way, is seeing the viewpoint of a trudge pulling a passenger cart. And that’s just too distressing to watch, because all the time you hear the crack and see the lashing tip of a whip.
14 366:04:13 22:47
I wish I could delete that. But in a way it’s good that I posted it, because I got a flood of (well, seven) messages telling me I’d been looking in the wrong place, and pointing me to the newslines. Everything is so different here you don’t imagine newslines. You think, this is crew quarters, everything runs on hint and rumour and scuttlebutt and that’s why I’m out of the loop, and you never think, there are people here who make news their work. But I digress.
Something strange, fascinating, and disturbing is going on.
But before I get on to that — well, you know what I’m going to get on to. Everybody’s talking about it. Alien television.
Did they learn it from us? Did they somehow pick up from our download the idea that there’s more to be done with television than use it for two-way, point-to-point communication? That you can broadcast!
Because that’s definitely what they’re doing now. We know that because some of the trudges from whose bodies we get transmissions see the big public screens, though they can’t be said to watch them, exactly. Those that do watch tend to get cuffed about the face and yelled at. So it’s something glimpsed sidelong. But we can see them, direct, from the aliens’ television broadcasts.
And what broadcasts! I think the long boring bits are the most significant. They tell us what they find important. A slow sweep of a camera around a vast conical chamber ringed with concentric stepped circular bars gappily lined with bat people hanging upside down and now and again making a lot of noise and flapping — it has to be a council, a parliament. I know Grey Universal says it’s a lecture theatre, but that’s just him. What his interpretation has going for it, I admit, is all the other stuff: the quaint rockets that go fast and explode; the peculiar multiwinged box-kite aircraft not much bigger than our microlights and obviously, painfully heavier; the strange balloons and dirigibles.
It could be, I suppose, some enormous system of public lectures on aviation and rocketry.
Except that you see the same sort of thing in two different languages, from the two separate parts of the divided continent. (Nothing from the big continent in the other hemisphere.)
And what you see, through the trudges’ eyes, in and above the cities: the bomb-catapults and giant crossbows wheeled through the streets on carriages drawn by straining teams of trudges, or huge coughing steam engines; the new flying machines very occasionally, the dirigibles floating overhead much more often than they did on our first surveillance, and the coordinated flights of great masses of bat people, swooping and wheeling in unison.
I know I’ve sometimes been controversial, but never for the sake of it. I’m no contrarian. What I see there is what most people see there; what I see in front of my eyes.
What I see is two powers preparing for war.
But that isn’t the worst. The worst, the most sinister development, is what’s happening to the trudges.
Reports from all over, of course — check the newslines — but here are two from me.
First one: I was in one of those dull virtualities I complained about the other night. The trudge was working at the back of a shop where they sell fresh meat. A huge carcass of one of the grazing animals had been tipped from some kind of truck into a stone-flagged yard, where two of the bat people cut it up with knives that look too small for the job. Their skill was impressive — they slide the blades into the joints and slice through the ligaments, and suddenly a whole limb falls off; or they slit the belly and all the guts spill out — but, as you will by now appreciate, it was a bit disgusting to watch. Anyway, the trudge whose POV I was getting and another were lugging the chunks to the front of the shop, where they threw them down on a big marble-slab counter. Back and forth, back and forth. And “my” trudge leans over to the other and says: “Get knife.”
The other trudge looks back and grunts. My trudge looks away and goes on with the work. But every so often, the POV focuses on the two bat people’s bloody blades. I’m just beginning to wonder whether I’m about to see something exciting when two more bat people drop out of the sky. They land in the yard. Both are wearing smart belts. One of them has a chest harness on which is mounted a box. Cables go from the box to his ears. He tweaks some kind of knob on it and looks straight at me — as I can’t help feeling — and walks straight up to one of the aliens working on the carcass.
I hear something like this: “You [chirp growl] boss?”
“[Twitter] to you?”
Then a lot of stuff that doesn’t translate.
The new arrival hands the blade guy a bundle of pieces of paper. I recognise it as the stuff they use as money. They walk over to “my” trudge and point to the front of the shop. “Out.”
So the trudge shuffles out, past the counter, past a small queue of bat people, out into the street and into the back of a motor vehicle. Then the virtually crashes. No input. I replayed it, taking more care to look, freezing images now and then, and I noticed something interesting about the interior of the van. It contained a big box of metallic-looking mesh, with a door that stood open as the trudge was hustled in.
It might just be a coincidence, but that box would work as a Faraday cage. It would block all radio transmissions.
Shaken, I did some prowling around, and found a scene where I’m looking out of a wooden barred box. There are other trudges in the box. They look strange and out of proportion, and I realise all of a sudden that they’re juveniles.
A hand reaches in, there’s a second or two of going head over heels, and then an open metal cage and then nothing.
Check the newslines. It’s happening all over the place. Check the virtualities. They’re dropping like a stone in a gravity well.
Our inputs are being cut off one by one. The trudges infected by our nanotech are being rounded up. Beings to whom we have given language and self-awareness.
We can’t let this happen.
Grant is not so pleased. He’s just gone off to work in the tank, after having been told — along with everybody else — that salvage work is over for the duration. Instead, every available hand has been mobilised to coordinate a fleet of those big spidery crab-like machines in tearing up the carbonaceous chondrites and working the buckyfibre-spinarets to make twenty thousand kilometres of rope. Not to mention breaking stuff up for reaction mass.
14 366:04:14 07:10
Damn. Just checked my incoming. I’m on the reserve-tank work roster too. Well, at least they didn’t send one of these all-hands calls to my head. Fourteen-hour days for the next week. And in one gravity at that, as we boost across the system on main drive. No news as to the intervention plans as yet, but I think it’s a safe guess we’re going into geosynchronous orbit. Talk to you after the war, I guess.
14 366:04:14 06:08
We’re going in!
20 — Second Contact
The camp had changed. New launch-ramps had been built, a long balloon-cable ascended from the middle of the square, new sheds and barracks had been thrown up. Fresh craters and wreckage littered the test ranges. Flattened and tarred strips of what looked like roadway had the tiny crosses of airframes clustered at their near ends. An enormous parabolic structure of wood and wire mounted on an arrangement of iron-wheeled carriages on a circular rail turned hither and yon, like a hand-cupped ear to heaven. The greatest difference, Darvin reflected, was that he was looking down at all this from the cabin of the descending airship. The location was no longer a secret.
Along with the secrecy had gone the complacency. Not much room for that with an extra moon in the sky. Darvin glanced upward and sideways at the thought of it. He couldn’t see it in the bright daylight sky, but he knew it was there. Unlike the natural moons, and for that matter the invisible third, artificial moon, this new satellite did not rise or set. Its orbital period was one day, to the minute. Through even a good amateur telescope its conical structure was unmistakeable. Darvin wondered where the other cone from the gigantic world-ship had gone. The obvious presumption was that it was being held in reserve. Bahron, when he’d telephoned to summon Darvin to the camp, had made the point that if the aliens were holding back half their forces, this meant they thought there was a chance they might lose the other half. Darvin didn’t find this notion convincing, but he hoped Bahron was spreading it around. It might help morale.
The airship drifted, nudged by its rotors, to the perimeter mooring-mast. The engines feathered down. The door slid open. Eight-and-four passengers — the rest had all been close-mouthed scientists, leafing through pages of small-print formulae — made their way to the exit and dived out.
As he glided groundward Darvin spotted Nollam walking across the central square. He banked, flapped, sideslipped, and alighted beside Nollam in a puff of dust.
“Show-off,” said Nollam.
“Watch your lip, techie.”
“Less of that,” said Nollam, straightening so much he almost leaned back. “I’ve been awarded a degree, I have. Master Scholar.”
“You?” said Darvin. “Well, allow me to congratulate you. I’m a mere Scholar Ordinary. Have you been studying in your spare tune?”
Nollam gave him a look. “I got it for my work.” He waved a hand, indicating the giant parabolic aerial in the middle distance.
“Ah, for the design—”
“No,” said Nollam. “For founding a new discipline. Etheric astronomy.”
“First I’ve heard of it, but again, congratulations.”
“Oh, you won’t have heard of it,” said Nollam. “It’s all under wraps. Morale reasons. But they gave me the degree to keep me happy and quiet, knowing I was recognised and would be remembered even if the whole field stays a secret until after I’m dead.”
Darvin wasn’t sure if the young technician — correction, Master — wasn’t tugging his wing. “Serious?”
“Serious,” said Nollam. “Can’t even tell you. Lips stitched, and all that. Maybe someday.”
“I’ll take your word for it, Magister.”
“You do that, Scholar, you do that… How’s Kwarive?”
“Fine,” said Darvin. “She’s been called up to… a different part of the project.”
“And I shouldn’t ask what, right?”
“Right.”
In fact Darvin didn’t know either. That Kwarive had been urged to bring the trudge kit along suggested it had something to do with the Sight’s plans — whatever they were — for the articulate members of that species.
Their walk had converged with that of other arrivals and residents, at one of the larger barracks blocks. All furniture had been removed, except for a stage at the front with a table on top, a telekinematographic recorder and projector to one side, and a screen behind it. There was standing room only. As they crowded in, Darvin was surprised to see Nollam push ahead and walk up to the front, where he took a place beside Markhan at the table. The crowd shuffled and settled. Looking around, Darvin recognised Orro and Holder, and a few faces from the earlier days of the project.
“You all know why we’re here,” said Markhan. “The new arrival in the sky. What you may not know is that it has already made contact with us.”
The effect was like a gust through trees. Markhan stared it down.
“Nollam,” he said.
“It’s a repeating message,” said Nollam. “It definitely comes from the cone thing, it’s on the same wavelength as the first message that got aborted, and it’s definitely addressed to us. It’s… startling. Let me play you a tape of it. Pull the curtains, somebody.”
The moments of confusion and shouted advice and complaint that followed gave him plenty of time to adjust the volume and focus.
“Right,” he said. He threw a switch.
The tape deck whirred and the screen lit up.
The first image was of a white background with a flechette shape in the centre and a wavy, jagged line near the bottom. With a start and an intake of breath, Darvin recognised it as Kwarive’s sketch-map, that had been originally projected to the aliens by the electric shittles. But only about a third of the crowd — those who’d been there then — so recognised it. The others gasped and nudged each other at the next image, which faded in as the first faded out. It showed a picture from above of the same coastline and interior of Seloh’s Reach, immediately recognisable as such because it was superimposed for a few seconds on the black line on the map.
It pulled up, back and back, until the nearby facing coast of Gevork came into view, and the whole channel and the ocean, and then back farther to show the outline of the six great islands of the north. Cloud formations appeared as whorls of brilliant white. Farther and farther back, until the Southern continent filled the lower half of the screen, and then, almost unexpectedly, the image no longer filled the screen but became a circle, the whole globe of Ground, black and white and shades of grey against a background of solid black.
It was a view he had often imagined, but that no one had ever seen. For a moment Darvin thought it blurred, but then he blinked, and his vision cleared.
The process was reversed, as though the camera dropped again, hurtling down. The illusion of falling was so powerful that Darvin felt an atavistic urge to close his eyes and spread his wings. Noises in the crowd told him he was not alone in this; that others, indeed, had enacted the braking reflex.
The fall stopped. What now filled the screen was a view from above the camp they stood in, as if seen from a not very high-flying airship. The very building they were in could be identified. Darvin braced himself against a surge to the windows. It came, just for a moment, and then everyone stood still and looked embarrassed. Somebody laughed. Even Markhan smiled.
The view changed: first to a similar but not identical camp or military base, and then to a rapid series of brief images of aircraft and rockets, familiar images that must have been recorded from Selohic and Gevorkian telekinematographic news displays, because fragments of voice-over in both languages boomed from the speakers.
Another familiar image appeared: the alien who had appeared on the first, cryptic communication. He stood facing the camera, which pulled in to show his face, dark and hairless with the characteristic scalp-tuft of the wingless.
“We — see — you — now,” he said. The movement of his lips had no relation to the sounds.
Darvin stood transfixed. The hairs over his spine stood up. Chills rushed down his cheeks and the sides of his neck. It was as if the alien’s tiny eyes looked straight at him, and the words were literally true.
“We — say — not — hit — you — grrr — you.” A flash of aircraft and rockets again. “We — say — no.”
“Open — door — trudge.” This was accompanied by a picture of, indeed, a stable door
opening and a trudge shambling out. Darvin could only imagine that it was a view through the eyes of one of the trudges that gave off etheric transmissions.
“No — hit — trudge.” The picture was to the point.
“No — cut — trudge.” Again an illustration, a vivid one. A collective wince shuddered through the crowd. Darvin felt a stab of shame. He had speculated on this, but still it dismayed him to see it verified, that the aliens had seized on this accepted cruelty and thrown it back in humanity’s face.
“We — see — you,” the alien said again. The view pulled back. The alien walked over to a screen of its own and pointed. It was a map of the land hemisphere of Ground. He pointed at three places, locations marked with spots which the camera zoomed in on and then drew back from. At a first guess, they were Kraighhor, Lassir, and the Great City of the Southern Rule. Then a fourth: an island in the Equatorial Ocean.
The alien stepped aside. The map filled the screen. Black lines crept from the three cities to converge on the island.
“We — meet — you — there.”
On the quay at Kraighor in the middle of the night under the glint of the alien and artificial moon, Darvin felt around him for the first time a tremor of the panic that he had once imagined. He could smell it. There was no reason for the crowd to be there. Few would have friends or relatives among the project scientists and soldiery departing on the Southern ship. There was no reason for people to take wing, every so often, and wheel about like night-flitters above the dock. Yet he was tempted to do so himself. One of the main streets away from the dock opened on to a large square. Around that corner, out of his line of sight, stood a high public screen. Its grey light flickered on the sides of buildings and the faces of the crowds watching it like a cold flame. Whatever words boomed from its speakers were mangled by echoes and buried under the susurrus of murmurs and wing-rustlings as if under snow. Darvin knew what was being said, and wondered how this new word from the Height would be taken.