Learning the World

by Ken MacLeod

  Metal cables squealed on winches as supplies and apparatus were craned on board. The ship had already been to New Lassir. Gevorkian and Southern faces lined the rails. Darvin recognised Lenoen, the astrologer, and Orro, but neither were looking bis way. The quay was too crowded for Darvin to leap into the air. He shouldered his way toward the gangplank.

  “Darvin!”

  A tiny figure skittered over indignant heads, leapt to his chest, grabbed the fur, and nuzzled his collarbone.

  “Oh! Hello, Handful—” He looked around. “Kwarive!”

  She sidled through a gap toward him. He caught her neck and stroked.

  “It’s great to see you! Thanks for coming all this way, you shouldn’t—”

  “I’m not here to see you off,” said Kwarive.

  “Then why—” He stopped, shocked and delighted. “You’re coming on the expedition?”

  “I most certainly am,” she said. “Sight’s orders.” She retrieved Handful. “I’ve been told it’s very important to talk to him a lot.”

  “You’ll have plenty of time for that,” said Darvin.

  “Oh, it’s not just me,” said Kwarive. “All of us. Don’t shirk it.”

  “What can I talk to him about? Astronomy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Astronomy!” said Handful. “New moon!”

  “You’re off to a good start,” said Kwarive.

  They had at last reached the gangplank.

  “Cold bad meat,” said Handful, sniffing the air.

  “No, that’s salt,” said Kwarive. “Salt water.”

  “Salt water cold bad.”

  “Yes,” said Darvin, looking down at the black gap beside his feet. “Keep that in mind.”

  The deck was made of long planks of a soft, resilient wood, like floatbark. The superstructure and fittings were of hardwood and brass. Southern crewmen leapt and flitted in the rigging. The air smelled of tar and rock-oil derivatives. Selohics and Gevorkians mingled, eyeing each other, trying out phrases. Grenadiers and sabreurs debated tactics and contrasted weapons in their martial Creole. Scientists of the three powers quibbled in ungrammatical Orkan. Stewards and clerks stalked the deck, fussed over ladings and fastenings, fluttered frantic pages of lists on clipboards.

  Chains rattled. Late arrivals and departures took wing to or from the ship. Sails snapped to the wind’s attention. The deck began to vibrate. Water churned at the stern. The quay glided past. The town diminished. The western headland displayed its black muzzle and white teeth. The horizon became a line beneath the stars, that within two hours encircled the world.

  After that it was just a sea voyage.

  Black above the ocean rose the eroded volcanic sea mount. White around the foot of its pleated basaltic cliffs boomed the surf. A cloud floated high above the island’s plateau like a watercolour of ancient smoke. A hazy sun burned a line across the sea to the left.

  Through binoculars Darvin watched the soaring white specks of cliff-dwelling sea flitters, and the broader and darker shapes of the island’s dwellers, some already wingbeating their way out to meet the ship. The distance, though diminishing as the ship approached, looked terrifying.

  “Fly over water bad,” said Handful, from Darvin’s shoulder.

  “Yes,” said Darvin, who had been impressing this on the kit for the past fortnight.

  An unlikely looking harbour, a black-sand beach at the bottom of a steep cove, became visible as the ship angled in. Locals descended on the deck, neck bags and belt baskets laden with lewd or cute carvings of pumice, or with unknown fruits of dubious hue. The island was a Southern possession, languidly disputed by Gevork; the inhabitants, for the most part, the descendants of Selohic mutineers and maroons. They spoke all three main languages, but at the same time.

  “These people are going to be a problem,” said Kwarive. “What if they’re superstitious?”

  “No ‘if’ about it,” said Darvin. He inclined his head to the forward deck. Already the chief scientist and the ship’s priest busied themselves with explanations and invocations.

  “Fortunately there are only a few eights of them,” said Lenoen. “A supply of stumblefruit has been set aside for their benefit.”

  “Doesn’t it grow on the island?”

  “A sour vintage,” said Lenoen. “The little carved idols are worth having, by the way. The prices drop on landfall.”

  The originals of the carvings hove into view as the ship rounded into the harbour: on a slope that reached from the top of the cove to the lip of the plateau, gigantic statues, priapic or comic, leered down on the huddle of roosts around the tiny stone quay.

  Sea beasts, like flitters but the size of a man, plump and streamlined, swimming with webbed feet and short fleshy wings, escorted the ship in and leapt for scraps. Kwarive was almost as delighted with the sight as Handful.

  “Waterwing! Waterwing!”

  “Clever Handful,” Kwarive murmered. She grinned at Darvin. “It’s the same word as the scientific name: aquopter.”

  Darvin looked down at the darting, splashing animals.

  “They have big heads,” he said. “Let’s hope the aliens don’t try to educate them.”

  “Time to educate you,” said Kwarive. “The cranial bulge contains oil, not brain.”

  “Reputedly delicious,” said Lenoen, “and it burns with a clear and smokeless flame.”

  Kwarive pretended to cover Handful’s ears.

  “That’s… horrible.”

  “They swarm in the seas around the Southern pole,” said Lenoen, sounding defensive.

  The ship hove to, dwarfing the quay, the top deck overlooking the native roosts. The turbines reversed and fell silent. Ropes were flung and caught, and inexpertly wound around boulders. After some commotion the expedition disembarked.

  “There will be no flying,” said Markhan, addressing the teams. “The air currents and thermals around the cliffs are unpredictable and dangerous to all but the locals.”

  Everyone gazed with envy at a brace of soaring natives, scouting high above for nests to rob.

  “So how do we get up?” Darvin shouted.

  Markhan pointed to a barely detectable zigzag of steps hewn in the side of the cove. “Climb.”

  Two hours later they collapsed exhausted on the sharp grass of the cliff top. After a rest and a snack they made their way on, a long straggling line of four eights or so, mostly scientists, with here and there pairs of soldiers lugging etheric devices or sacks of supplies.

  “We should have brought an aeroplane,” gasped Orro.

  “And taken off from exactly where?” asked Darvin.

  “A ramp built at the prow of the ship. Possibly assisted with… a catapult. Or rockets.”

  Holder looked thoughtful.

  “Big prick,” said Handful, touching a statue as they laboured past it.

  “New word,” said Kwarive.

  “Curiously,” said Lenoen, shaking sweat from his brows, “the stone of the statues is not native to the island. Its nearest quarries are on our northern coast.”

  “Hence your claim,” scoffed Holder. “Despite the first historical sighting—”

  “First in whose history?”

  “Gentlemen,” said Kwarive. “Do spare your breath.”

  A call from Markhan brought the line to a welcome halt. Soldiers lowered their loads. Nollam cranked up a generator and sent a taped etheric message into the sky. He had kept this up day after day since leaving Kraighor, to no response from above. None came this time either.

  “Onward!” shouted Markhan.

  The slope was worse than the cliff. It seemed endless, without even risks and slips and panicked flapping and flying to break the monotony. Darvin’s legs ached. Handful whined, demonstrating that he had learned a small vocabulary of complaint. Small lizards and skitters scuttled through the grass and cringed from circling patrols of predatory flitters.

  After another hour the plateau spread out before them, black and bare, littered with
boulders, crusted with salt, spotted with semi-saline pools above which minute endemic insects buzzed in sinister clouds. Everyone slumped down. Water bottles were passed back and forth, dried fruit and meat munched. The sun, now past noon, had dispersed the cloud and glared down from almost directly overhead in a deep blue sky. The heat was intense, the wind nugatory, every zephyr welcome. People stood and spread their wings, flapping slowly to cool their blood.

  An etheric receiver buzzed. Nollam crouched before a tiny TK screen, shading it with his wings, then jumped up. “They’re coming!”

  Yells of triumph and delight gave way to apprehension. Nobody knew how the aliens would arrive. Orro had talked about a gliding vehicle, Holder about a rocket descending on a pillar of fire. Soldiers, their movement sluggish in the heat and stumbling on the rough rock, spread banners across boulders: the golden lizard of the South, the claw of the Reach, the roundel of the Realm. People made their way behind large rocks, low pinnacles, and banks and little cliffs where the ground had slipped aeons ago. They stood or crouched in that notional shelter and scanned the sky. Binoculars were reluctantly lent and eagerly borrowed. Markhan circulated like an anxious teacher, warning against looking through the lenses at the sun. The sun slipped away from the zenith.

  It was Orro who spotted the arrival first. He shouted and pointed straight up. Darvin swung his binoculars around and saw a black dot. Sunlight flashed on it, and it became a still-tiny shape, with a hint of rectangularity. With a great effort of goodwill he handed the binoculars to Kwarive.

  “Wow,” she said. “No rockets, no jets, no wings.”

  “The wingless have mastered gravity,” said Darvin, restraining himself from grabbing back the glasses.

  “They have not,” said Orro, with better eyesight or better binoculars. “I see a rope above it. It is descending like a load on a crane.”

  “Where might such a crane be mounted?” said Holder. “On the moon?”

  “On a moon,” said Kwarive. “Remember how the alien moon appeared last night — directly overhead? That’s what it’s hanging from.”

  Darvin stifled a laugh, embarrassed by his companion’s ignorance of physics; Holder guffawed. Orro removed the glasses from his eyes to frown, and without thinking relinquished them to Darvin’s grasp. This time he saw the now fast-descending thing as a tall box, and saw too the line stretching into the blue above it.

  “She’s right,” Orro was saying. “Why should that be more absurd than a satellite staying above the same spot on the ground? Even you, Darvin, were wondering aloud not too long ago why it didn’t fall down. Oh, and the binoculars, if you please, old chap.”

  Darvin passed them back with as much grace as he could.

  “It isn’t that,” he said, trying not to let irritation infiltrate his voice. “I’m not saying it’s absurd, or impossible in principle. But in practice! The length of line that would be involved is simply inconceivable.”

  “One wonders why the aliens bother coming here,” said Kwarive. “You know so much about them already.”

  The descending box was now visible without binoculars. It was obvious from the exclamations around him that most people still shared his first assumption, that the thing levitated. As it drew closer the line became apparent to the naked eye, and the marvel at the sight only increased. The box now looked in parts transparent. Wisps of vapour puffed from its sides every few seconds: course corrections, Darvin guessed. Its speed seemed to increase as it descended, but Darvin knew for certain that this was an illusion. After another couple of minutes and several more corrections, it came to rest on the rocky plain a few eights-of-eights of paces away from them.

  No shouts of command could stop the civilians walking forward. The soldiers too, after an urgent argument, ran to keep pace. The order they obeyed was to keep their crossbows slung.

  As though at an unseen barrier, everyone stopped at the same place. The box now looked much bigger than it had seemed before. The afternoon heat hung heavy. The lurid pools stank like ammonia. Creaking and cracking noises echoed across the rocky flats. A door opened in the side of the box. With one accord everyone took a couple of paces back.

  A wingless giant stepped out. Its body was black with a dull gleam. Around its head was a glassy globe. The alien stopped, the globe moving this way and that. It seemed to see them. It raised both hands slowly from its sides, above its head, and walked forward.

  The urge to flee almost possessed Darvin. Eight eights of steps — its steps — away, the alien stopped. It lifted the globe from around its head, and placed it in the crook of one arm. The other hand it kept upraised. Black-faced, fuzz-scalped, this was to all appearances the same alien who had spoken on the screen.

  Someone remembered to take a photograph. Nollam, huddled over his apparatus, muttered curses to himself.

  The alien reached to the round collar upon which the helmet had sat. It pulled something like a stiff cord to one of its small flat ears, and another to the front of its lips. Its lips moved.

  “Good day,” it said.

  Nobody moved or said anything. It struck Darvin that in all their planning for this encounter, no one had thought to establish that priority. He glanced sideways at Markhan. The chief scientist stood with knees trembling and wings furled tight. Darvin noticed that the same was true of himself. He tried, just as an experiment, to take a step forward. His foot would not move.

  As he looked down he glimpsed a forward movement and heard a voice. “I’m a biologist,” said Kwarive. “This is a new species.”

  She was on her way before he could stop her. She walked straight up to the giant. She stopped just beyond his reach and spread out her wings.

  “Good day,” she said, her voice firm and loud. “Welcome to Ground.”

  “Welcome,” repeated the alien.

  “You spoke of trudges,” said Kwarive. “Here is a trudge kit.”

  The alien reached forward and took the small shape in its huge hands.

  “This is a trudge?” said the alien.

  “I trudge, me,” came Handful’s thin voice. “You man smell bad.”

  The alien’s shoulders shook. Its voice made a deep repeated bark that might have been laughter. Darvin could see the kit flinch and squirm. The alien handed him back to Kwarive. Handful immediately buried his nose in her shoulder, as Darvin could detect from Kwarive’s movements. The alien was looking down at its hands.

  “Shit,” said the alien.

  For the past two eight-days, all over Seloh and Gevork, scientists and Sight agents and civil servants had been talking to trudges. They had been doing so in confined but comfortable spaces, none of which were barred with metal or surrounded with mesh. Some of the trudges had been old and angry, bitter at being made conscious at a time when they had nothing to look forward to but death, and nothing to look back on but a maimed and brutish life. There had been suicides. There had been attacks, some fatal. Others of the trudges had been young, some even younger than Handful, some older. A few had been mature, wary and wise. They had kept their understanding to themselves, and only their etheric emissions had betrayed them. Some of them could not be coaxed to speak. Others talked until they and their interlocutors dropped with exhaustion.

  Signals beamed forth from cunning secret coils an alien alchemy had spun close to their spines. The ever-extended vocabulary of the trudges reached the sky.

  Beside that etheric flood was another. Every TK transmitter in Seloh’s Reach repeated the proclamation from the Height, and every one in Gevork the new decree from the Rock of Lassir. They repeated it until every citizen had heard that trudges were no longer to be mutilated, that any trudge who could speak was to be sold at a good price to the Reach or the Realm and then emancipated as a free worker, with compensation; that all trudges, articulate or not, were to be treated without violence. More to the point, they repeated it until even the aliens could not fail to understand it.

  “I do not understand it,” said the alien to Markhan. The two s
tood at the focus of a silent semicircle. “You are to let go the trudges?”

  “Yes.”

  “Like—” The alien threw out his hands.

  “Yes.”

  “With no kick or hit among you?”

  “With some hurt,” said Markhan. The vocabulary the alien had learned was still restricted and concrete. “But we must. The trudges speak. They too are men.”

  The alien was silent for a while.

  “Your fight men make ready,” he said. He pointed to the soldiers. He made zooming movements with his spread hands. “Fight in the sky. Drop hurt on you and them roosts. We say no.”

  “We make ready to fight men from the sky,” said Markhan. “Ground is ours.”

  The alien squatted down. His hands touched the ground. “Ground is yours,” he said. “We men from the sky will not fight you. Ground is yours.”

  “Good,” said Markhan. “Then we will not fight you men from the sky. But other men come from the sky. We make ready for them.”

  The alien rotated his head from side to side. “No, no,” he said. “No other men come from sky. Only us men from sky.”

  “We hear other voices from the sky,” said Markhan. “Not only your voice.”

  “Ah!” said the alien. He looked about for a moment, then pointed to the sky in the east. “Green suns are our roost. You hear voices from green suns.”

  “No,” said Markhan. He glanced over his shoulder and beckoned to Nollan, then pointed west and then north. “We hear a voice from a white sun, and from a yellow sun.”

  The alien rocked back on his heels. “What?” he said.

  Interlude: White Air

  Synchronic stood in the garden for the last time, and looked out over a drab and depleted landscape. The only living thing in sight was grass. The trees had been felled or dug up. The lakes and rivers had been drained. The animals had been slaughtered or herded indoors. The grass itself was torn or stamped by the tracks and treads of the huge machines that now stalked across the devasted scene like alien invaders. Domes had replaced many buildings, or covered those of special significance. Other buildings had sprouted new equipment: aerials and defence batteries, solar-power collectors, long tubular connecting corridors, closed-system recycling plant. Windows had been sealed, roofs diamond-plated, doors replaced by airlocks. The whole terrible process followed a standard schematic, for preparing the habitat for an almost unthinkable combination of drive failure and unavoidable collision. It had taken four months.