Learning the World

“And a day in which many such as you and I cooperate like civilised men.”

“That’s true,” said Darvin. “Perhaps a new kind of comet — even if it was thought to be an alien spaceship — would result in wonder rather than fear.”

“How long,” Orro mused, “before amateurs with telescopes notice it?”

“Several eights of eight-days, even with the best private telescopes, I should imagine.”

“So there is no risk, really, of our discovery’s being preempted. We could hold back for a little while—”

“I said ‘private,’ ” said Darvin. “I’m not willing to see Seloh’s Reach being beaten by Gevork on this discovery. Or by any other country.”

“Nor me,” said Orro. He gave Darvin a troubled look. “Surely you don’t think I—”

“Oh, no, not at all,” said Darvin. “But some of your — their astronomers may already have noticed the anomaly.”

“I doubt it,” said Orro. “Gevorkian astronomy is focused, you might say, on the stars. Even the planets, leave alone comets, are regarded as almost beneath the notice of serious scientists.”

“The other realms—”

“Astrologers!”

“That’s the problem,” said Darvin. “The sky-watchers of the Court of the Southern Rule pay a great deal of attention to comets as portents — their priorities are rather the reverse of your Gevorkians’. And their telescopes — say what you like about the beliefs and motives of their builders — are of the highest craft. They were producing detailed sky maps before our Dawn Age — we have one in the university’s museum. I should take another look at it, to see if it shows any earlier comets in the Daughters region. It might suggest how the sky-watchers would interpret this one.”

“Well,” said Orro, with a shrug, “I doubt that we need worry about their panicking the populace. Or preceding us into print, for that matter.”

Darvin was not so sure about that. “Some of their younger sky-watchers are talented and educated men, and they do have their own version of a popular press,” he pointed out. “They invented it, after all.”

Orro wiped a hand across his tired eyes. “There’s one more thing we can do,” he said. “That is, to project the path of the… object, check it against your latest plates, and work out exactly when it will become visible to amateur astronomers, and indeed to the naked eye.”

“The naked eye!” Darvin had all along assumed that the comet that now bore his name would one day be visible to everyone, but the thought now brought him up short. Since confirming Orro’s calculations he’d begun to think of it almost as a secret.

“Why not?” said Orro. “A year or so from now, I’d guess. Let’s check it.”

’Tomorrow,” said Darvin.

In the morning a low fog from the sea overlay Five Ravines. Darvin had to rely more than usual on his proximity sense as he flew to the university. The world was a grey haze interrupted by red flashes. On one sideways turn he noticed how the fog curled away from his wing tip, and reflected on how something like fog — smoke? steam? — might be used in Orro’s wind-tube experiments.

But there were to be no such experiments that day. When he’d stepped along the hall, shaking drops of moisture from his fur, Darvin found Orro hanging asleep from the ceiling outside his door. Darvin tapped his wing joint. The other man shuddered, unfolded his wings, and blinked up. Inside his wings, he’d been clutching a satchel.

“Have you been here all night?” Darvin asked.

“No,” said Orro. “Not long. But I needed the sleep.”

He bent upward, caught the wooden slats of the ceiling with his hands, let go with his feet, and dropped upright and caught the satchel before it reached the ground. Scratching himself, he followed Darvin into the office. It took them an hour or so to work through Orro’s calculations and find where to look for the comet on the more recent plates, those from the past couple of eight-days. Darvin set up the pair of plates, adjusted the blink comparator, and found the comet, brighter than before. Orro noted the degrees of displacement along the vertical and horizontal axes, scribbled in his notebook, and nodded. “On target,” he said.

They repeated this for nine pairs of plates. The comet’s path was exactly as Orro’s calculation predicted.

On the tenth pair, there was no jump. Instead, the comet seemed to flash on and off in the same position. On closer examination, Darvin found that it was present on the earlier plate, but not on the later. On the eleventh pair, and all subsequent pairs, it was altogether gone.

5 — Fast Probes

14 364:07:06 08:12

It’s strange when something you have been unaware of all your life goes away. Something is missing, and you don’t know what it is. But of course, we know what it is. It’s the minute sideways tug of deceleration, that insensible inclination toward the forward wall that all our lives has troubled our i

I told myself that earlier this morning as I washed glasses and cleared up bottles. There were snoring bodies all over the place. Some of the younger children had to be cleaned and fed. Aren’t adults supposed to be responsible? Isn’t that the point?

I suppose once in four hundred years isn’t bad. Or once in fourteen, which is all I can vouch for.

14 364:07:08 22:15

Today the fast probes were launched to the i

The latest speculation is that they’re natural: check out Grey Universal’s sim of a pair of permanent electrical storms in stable, long-lasting Coriolis hurricanes.

There’s something really strange about that. I can see it in my mind’s eye more vividly than in the sim: a whirling tower of cloud, lit up by regular lightning-flashes, over the raging oceans of a terrestrial planet. Rain hissing into the white-topped black waves. Around that endless storm (and its counterpart in the other hemisphere) you might catch glimpses of blue sky through gaps in the clouds. And away from it, perhaps, the bald rock of continents, wet or dry, with here and there a yellow splash of lichen or a coppery or green slick of algae, if there’s life down there at all.