Learning the World

“It was the leaf,” said Darvin, plodding across the road.

“No,” said Kwarive. “They are less sensitive to pain than we are. Their skin is thicker, and has fewer nerve endings.”

“How do you know that?”

She looked at him. “Dissection.”

At the Bard’s Bad Behaviour every tree branch and other perch was crowded. Electric lights blazed from cables strung across the treetops. Pulleys drew cables bearing fruit-laden or empty baskets. Darvin squelched across a floor littered with discarded stumblefruit rinds and laughterburn ash to the stall and bought a double wingful of fruit. Kwarive joined him halfway back and relieved him of half the burden. As they gazed around and up looking for a perch or for anyone they knew, a cry came from above. “Up here!” shouted Orro.

“Not likely!” Darvin yelled back. “We’re loaded! Come on down!”

Grumbled assent was followed by Orro’s arrival, crashing and swinging one-handed, a half-used fruit in his free hand. He dropped in front of them and straightened, swaying. His white chest fur was yellow and sticky-looking with juice. He slapped Darvin’s shoulder and, with the exaggerated gallantry of the drunk, touched his nose to the crook of Kwarive’s wing.

“To the wall!” he said. “Only perch left in this dive.” The three made their way through the crowd and hopped up onto one of the few remaining available spaces on the top of the wall around the grove. By unspoken agreement, Darvin and Kwarive let the unsteady Orro sit between them. Sitting cross-legged, they could hold the fruits in their laps, freeing their folded wings for balancing and their hands for holding. Darvin passed a fresh fruit to Orro, lifted his own with both hands, and bit in. He spat away the first chunk of rind and tipped the fruit to let the first flow of fermented juice flood into his mouth. His belly warmed and the world became more cheerful. Orro scooped the last of the pulp from his almost empty fruit, stuffed it in his mouth, and threw away the husk. With hardly a pause to chew and swallow he tore into the new fruit.

“Hmm,” he said, juices trickling down his chin, “good. Thanks, Darvin. You’re a pal, you are. And a colleague.”

“Think nothing of it,” said Darvin, hoping Kwarive, to whom he’d praised Orro’s genius many times, wasn’t utterly disillusioned by the physicist’s unwonted excess. He looked at her over the back of Orro’s hunched shoulders and waggled his ears and rolled his eyes. She gri

“Didn’t expect to find you so, ah…”

“Drunk?” Orro guffawed and sat up straighter. “Not drunk. Seriously. Just badly behaved. Place for it, yes?”

“I suppose so,” said Darvin.

“I have a reason,” said Orro, staring up into the night sky. The two moons hung like curved blades. The priests of the cults would be scrying the angles and sharpening their sickles for the bilunar sacrifices of green herbs to the blue-green Queen.

“You always have a reason for doing things,” said Darvin. “So what is it?”

“Take your little student here,” said Orro.

“Ye-es,” said Darvin, no longer relaxed. The word came out like a half-drawn blade.

“Nothing to worry about, has she? Have you, young lady?”

“Nothing you need know about,” said Kwarive.

“Ah. Indeed. No offence meant. Still. For a student, life is simple. Study. Make love. Eat and drink. Learn. And what you learn, Kwarive, you and your cohorts, is what is known.”

“We learn what is known,” said Kwarive. “Now, there’s a surprise.”

“What I said is not empty,” said Orro. “Unlike this fruit.”

He cast away the rind. Darvin passed him another drink.

“Thanks,” Orro mumbled, munching in. “Hmm. Right. Now, for us scientists, on the other wing, life is not quite so simple. Because we learn the unknown. Unlike, hah-hah, our esteemed friends the philosophers, who learn the unknowable.” He waved skyward, almost losing his balance. “The great flapping unknowable, like the wings of God.”

There had been a charming legend that night was the result of the Sun’s enfolding Ground with His wing. So charming was it that even today a disrespectful allusion to it could cause offence. Of all the sciences, astronomy was the one the superstitious liked least.

“Leave the unknowable alone,” said Darvin.

“Sound advice. Well, my friends, imagine my discomfiture to discover, this very day, that by investigating the unknown I had diminished the known. That, in short, I did not know all I had thought I knew. That, to make it even shorter, I did not know how to calculate correctly. That I do not. That I can’t count. I am pitiable.”

“Don’t be silly,” said Kwarive. “Everybody makes mistakes.”

“I do not make mistakes,’ said Orro. “Not in arithmetic. Not in measurement. Not in calculation.”

“Did you use a calculating machine?” asked Darvin.

“Of course,” said Orro.

“There you are,” said Darvin. “A bug. They’re everywhere this time of year.”

Orro looked at him morosely. “I thought of that. I sprayed insecticide. I cleaned the gears. I oiled. I ran test calculations. All was well. And when I turned to my own calculations, I could not make them come out right.”

“What were they?” asked Kwarive.

“Ah!” said Orro. “That is where your friend and my colleague here drops into the clearing, so to speak. I was trying to calculate the orbit of his comet.”

Darvin felt a rush of relief as potent as the first spurt from a stumblefruit.

“That’s all right,” he said. “You’re a physicist, not an astronomer. There are always disturbances in the paths of comets. You can’t expect some perfect trajectory, you know.”

“I know that,” said Orro. He had dropped his husk, and not so much as hinted at wanting another fruit. Agitated, he began licking his hands and the juice-matted fur of his arms. “I do not expect a perfect trajectory. But nor do I expect to find every equation I try for the path disproven by the next night’s plates.”

He stopped, stared upward again for a moment, then sighed and reached a hand sideways. Without demur, Darvin passed him the last fruit in his lap.

“So that’s why you find me here,” said Orro. “Badly behaved, in the Bard’s Bad Behaviour. Trying to jolt my brain loose from whatever stupid misconception is giving me this stupid anomaly in my results.”

“What anomaly?” asked Darvin.

“A comet slowing down,” said Orro.

They took him home.

The following morning, Darvin sat in his office and waited for the chewed leaf and the tea to dispel his stumblefruit headache, and mulled over a deeper unease. He hadn’t given the comet much thought in the weeks since its discovery, having persisted in the quest for the unknown outer planet, and he’d assumed that Orro was concentrating likewise on his own major research. The photographs from the wind-tube kinematography had provided a plausible intuitive basis for a rigorous mathematical account of wing-flapping flight. Orro had talked about little else for days after the film had been processed. It was disquieting to discover that he was wasting time and passion in hunting down what he himself had called a stupid anomaly. It was unworthy of the man.

Darvin sighed. Perhaps not. The very rigour that made Orro’s work so promising was doubtless the reason why he couldn’t let this problem go unsolved. Darvin berated himself for letting Orro investigate the comet’s orbit in the first place, without giving him any help or advice. No doubt some assumption or premise, second nature to an experienced astronomer, had been overlooked by the physicist.

He stood up and dived out of the window and flew to the Physics Building. There was no response when he knocked on Orro’s office door, not to his surprise. He tested the door, found it unlocked, and let himself in.

At first glance the place looked reassuring: long strips of film tacked to the walls, showing moment-by-moment frames of himself in flight; a complex, incomplete model of a chiropter, the fine paper of its wings still undoped; sheets of scribbled reckoning on the tables. A second look revealed that these sheets had been brushed aside, and a space cleared for a rack of Darvin’s night-sky images, in between an electric lamp and an apparatus of mounted lenses: he guessed it was Orro’s jury-rigged approximation to a blink comparator. Beside these devices lay a current ephemeris and a closed notebook bound in black grazer leather. Darvin opened it, and found page upon page of crabbed, jagged Gevorkian script. Equations and formulae, arithmetic, results from… ah yes, there was the calculating machine, behind the swivel perch on which Orro would have sat.