Learning the World

14 364:06:20 06:30

I’m scared. I’ve never seen a world slump before. The one last night lasted for hours. Down below I could see lights going out all over the place; it was as if people had lost the will to live. Today, things are picking up. Confidence returns, every newsline says, a bit too urgently. I don’t feel confident at all. I’m watching the Long Steading crowd waking up, stirring, red-eyed. I think some of them were crying last night; I’m sure I heard them.

I’m not going to do that myself. I’m not. I’m sure the signals, if that’s what they are — and as you can see here there are doubts about that — are just from fast probes from Red Sun, and not any of the nasty things some people say they could be. But to think that the system that we thought was all fresh and empty and untouched, waiting for us, our future, already has somebody else’s grubby fingerprints on it just makes me sad and sick.

And angry.

14 364:06:20 21:24

What a day. On the one hand, it’s been totally absorbing, tremendous fun. At least when I was totally absorbed in the work, which was most of the time. I excavated a small cavern, lined it and sealed it, and began work on its externals — the airlock’s machinery and such — with some metals I’d mined out yesterday. Only a small amount, of course, a few grammes of iron and trace elements, but for the refining and casting I got to use my first machine with a brain interface. Unlike an adult, I had to use a headband kit — trades and goggles — but it was exciting all the same. It makes a sort of tickle in your head — you know, like when you’ve solved a problem, made a new co

“You’re feeling the dendrites growing,” Horrocks said, when I mentioned it. I’m not sure whether or not he was joking.

Which brings me to the other hand. Throughout the day Horrocks tried to cheer people up, and at first I thought this was him being kind. But then I realised that he really was cheerful himself. After we came off work and cleaned up and had di

He was a few metres away, sitting in a loop. A lot of us were listening. He looked around and gri

“I made a fortune today,” he said. “I have lots of claims on the terrestrial planet.” He laughed. “I should just leave you all to get on with it. I’ve made far more from these claims than I’m ever likely to from this place.”

“The value of the claims will go down,” said one of the New Lamarck girls, her quills bristling. “You wait.”

“Maybe they will,” said Horrocks. “But they might go right out the hatch. What if what’s down there is…” He dropped his voice to a low and hollow tone, like someone telling a scary story: “…aliens?”

Everybody laughed and felt better, except me. I felt patronised, treated like a child who is first scared then reassured by a story about frightening things that everybody knows don’t exist, like gods or ghosts or hideaways or, well, aliens. Aliens! I ask you.

I hate Horrocks Mathematical.

4 — A Moving Point of Light

Third Finger Street was the axis of nightlife in Five Ravines. Stumblefruit groves and laughterburn grottoes lined it. Trudge-drawn cabs jostled motor vehicles in its metalled way; unsteady walkers thronged the pavements. Cable seats whizzed overhead, carrying the elderly or pregnant above this louche promenade, and those already too intoxicated to safely fly away from it. To look up was to risk a headache-inducing fireworks display of proximity-sense overload. To fly above it was to risk worse, and plenty did. Flitters, small and deft, dodged between the lumbering flights of humans.

Darvin and Kwarive walked along the pavement, heading for the Bard’s Bad Behaviour, a popular copse. Kwarive, as usual, teased Darvin about his refusal to take a cab. “Too tightfisted for a fare,” she said. “You don’t know how to impress a lady.”

“It isn’t that,” Darvin said. “I think it’s cruel.”

“Now you’re just being sentimental.”

It was a joke between them. Darvin was tiring of it. Needled, he needled back.

“And I wouldn’t be if I cut up animals?”

“Instead of looking at stars? Sure you wouldn’t.”

“I eat prey,” he pointed out.

“Oh, that,” said Kwarive. “Everybody eats prey. It’s dissection that makes you understand.”

Darvin resisted the urge to quibble that not everyone ate prey; he intuited that calling mystics from the South to the witness perch would not help his case.

“Understand what!” he asked. “That the beasts have bones like ours, blood like ours, nerves like ours, and who is to say they don’t have feelings like ours? Doesn’t a flitter squeal when you flay it?”

Dissecting flitters was a cheap and moral way of learning human anatomy, he had gathered.

“We kill or anaesthetise them first,” Kwarive said.

“Ah-hah!” said Darvin. “So you admit they feel pain? That not anaesthetising them would be inhumane?”

“No,” said Kwarive. “It would be difficult, because they would struggle and might bite, and their physiology would be that of an animal in pain. Which is not what we want to examine.”

“So most of what we know of physiology is based on that of drugged animals? Interesting.”

“You have a point there,” Kwarive said. “But what I’ve learned from dissections and other studies is that humans really are different from other animals. Brain size, speech, self-awareness, use of tools…”

“Trudges use tools,” Darvin said, “and they can speak. That’s why what we do to them is cruel, and that’s why I won’t—”

“ — take a cab?” Kwarive snorted. “You make my point for me. Trudges can be trained to hammer or hoe, but they don’t invent—”

“Oh, it’s inventing now?”

“ — don’t invent new uses, and they can utter a few simple phrases and understand a few dozen more, but they don’t converse. They don’t even use human speech to talk amongst themselves. They use their own grunts and cries. What they have is signals, not speech.”

“A fine distinction!”

“One that makes all the difference in the world,” said Kwarive.

They had stopped at a crossroads. Traffic was tangled up; a street warden swooped and circled overhead, screaming imprecations and instructions at drivers and trudges. Darvin glanced sidelong at Kwarive. Her face was stern and earnest. This was not their usual banter.

“All right,” he said. He jutted his chin at a brace of cab-hauling trudges who stood panting at the junction. Their hands clutched the T-bar of the cab’s yoke; their feet, claws trimmed, were shod in thick rubber; their wings, the webs slashed in kithood from joint to trailing edge, hung atrophied and useless at their sides. Their arms and legs seemed by human standards grossly overmuscled, with tendons like cables. Their jaws champed leaf and their lips dribbled saliva. Their eyes, glazed by the drug, rolled, their gaze darting hither and thither. Behind them and the driver, in the two-seater cab, a couple held hands and giggled over a smouldering bunch of laughterburn. With one wing the boy enfolded and hooded the girl, with the other he wafted the smoke into the tent thus created. The driver, perched in front of the cab, paid this unseemly display no attention.

“Do you think,” said Darvin, “that the trudges really don’t suffer? That they don’t miss using their wings?”

“They wouldn’t be trudges if they could fly.”

There was something maddening in the unassailable logic of this missed point.

“Forget flying, there’s enfolding to consider too.” Kwarive shrugged. “Doesn’t seem to stop them pairing and breeding.”

“Those we don’t geld or spay, at any rate.”

“Exactly. So I don’t think they miss their wings.”

The traffic became unsnarled. The warden swooped, and hooted an order. The cabdriver flicked his whip across the shoulders of the two trudges. They trotted off. “See?” said Kwarive. “They didn’t even wince.”