Learning the World

I wonder what it would be like to walk on that world; to hear through my suit’s phones the crackle and roar of the lightning storm; modulated, regular, surging and waning; a sound you could mistake for a signal, and take for a voice.

Genetic machinery was falling out of the sky. It came packaged in tough spheroids a millimetre in diameter, surrounded by aerobraking structures consisting of long wispy cellulose filaments arranged in a radial pattern. The packages landed at random, most of them nowhere near a suitable substrate, or in places where that substrate was already occupied. Horrocks Mathematical thought it a most curious method of distributing genetic machinery. It reminded him of market stochastics, and he speculated that its design had been thus inspired.

As he clambered on all fours across the rubble in the foothills of the now dormant reaction-mass tip by the forward wall, Horrocks noticed the source of the genetic packages: plants with green photoreceptors and red insect-attractors. The wind carried the packages away from them in puffy clouds. The plants grew in quite improbable places, in cracks in stones and from crevices between blocks. The dispersal method might not be as wasteful as it looked.

He reached the edge of the tip and hesitated. Ahead of him stretched the monorail line, and beneath its pylons a long flat strip of grass that merged on both sides with the rolling hills and woods. He had almost had to crawl out of the lift station, and spent hours making his way over the rubble alongside the line. Now he had reached its end, and if he were to go farther he would have to call for transport, or walk.

He was sure he could walk: it was a guaranteed function in his genetic repertoire, though not one he had ever attempted to access. Like the free-fall adaptations of the groundhogs, it was included as a backup. Horrocks didn’t know how he’d acquired his conviction that to walk with his head two metres above a hard surface in a ten-newton acceleration field was to risk serious brain damage, but the conviction was there, and deep. On his hands and feet he made his way on to the grass. The substrate felt a little spongy and damp. No doubt it served some hydroponic function, which fortuitously made it fairly safe to fall on. He walked his hands backward, crooking his knees, until all his weight was borne on the soles of his feet. His calf muscles and Achilles tendons stretched as if he were about to thrust off. In a ma

He raised his hands from the ground and stretched out his arms. Keeping his back straight and facing straight ahead, he straightened his knees and slowly stood up. The view was breathtaking: he could see kilometres farther than he had a moment earlier. This was easier than he had thought. He looked down. The grass rushed up to his face, but it was the palms of his hands that it struck. He rolled, rubbing his wrists. The pain passed. It was just like misjudging a jump and hitting a wall too hard.

After a few more attempts he managed to stand, then to walk, and before he quite realised it he was a hundred metres along the strip and making progress, his head and arms swaying as he moved along. He had just grasped the kinetic feedback involved when he toppled again. When next he got up he walked without thinking about it, and this worked.

Ever so often a train whizzed past, in one direction or the other, buffeting him in its slipstream. At one point he noticed the light darkening. He looked up and saw that a mass of vapour had obscured the sunline. A minute or two later water started falling from the sky, in fast, fat drops. It was like a shower, except that the water came from only one direction, the vertical, and it was cold. Horrocks tugged the hood out of his collar and over his drenched hair, and turned up his heating. So much for the natural human environment, he thought. The default conditions of a sunliner’s final interior surface had been established many mille

After an hour or so it became evident that he had greatly underestimated the effort required to traverse a given distance by walking. Muscle groups that he seldom used in the axis and in the forward cone ached. Ahead he saw a monorail station. A little elementary trigonometry fixed its distance at about a kilometre. He reached it half an hour later and climbed the steps on hands and feet. When the next sternward train stopped he staggered across the platform, lurched through the door, and slumped on to a vacant seat beside a window, facing in the direction of travel. He threw back his hood and shook the water off his hair.

The doors hissed and thudded shut and the train accelerated. Horrocks spent the rest of the trip with his hands clamped to the back of his head, to prevent further injury to his neck. The speed at which the landscape flashed past the windows was another frightening surprise. After his first dozen or so flinches at the rushing approach of some blurred object, a tree or a tower, Horrocks concentrated on the middle distance or the far-off upward curve of the ground. Trees, here growing up rather than out, looked liable at any moment to be borne off on the breeze, like the drifting genetic packages. Habitats and storage units were constructed of heavy, durable substances — stone or wood walls, sheet-diamond windows — in permanent battle with the unpredictable atmospheric conditions and the relentless downward pull of the acceleration field.

He turned away from the window and eyed the other passengers, people for whom such conditions were normal. There were fourteen in the car. Four adult women, three adult men, and the others adolescents or younger children. Two of the women and two of the men gazed into space, their lips moving. The other three adults were sitting around a table, talking and laughing. The adolescents, four of them, were doing the same but louder, and the small children were playing some complicated game that involved ru

None of them made to get off the train at Horrocks’s destination, Big Foot. He uncurled himself from his seat and walked to the door with as much dignity as he could muster. The platform was empty. He noticed a lift to ground level, but decided to take the stairs, and this time to take them upright. Clutching the handrail and moving hand over hand, step by step, he made his way to the ground. There he sat on one of the lower steps and contemplated his surroundings and his next move. In front of the station stood a couple of self-driving wheeled vehicles with bubble canopies. One of them started up and rolled over to where he sat.

“Do you need a ride?” it asked.

“No, thank you.”

The machine backed off.

A path led from the station’s paved concourse through a couple of hundred metres of rolling grassland divided by a stream of water and dotted with clumps of trees and shrubs. Beyond that lay the Big Foot estate. Low wood or stone buildings set in gardens with lakes fed by the water stream formed its main living area. Its design drew the eye: curves and lines, light and shade, rough and smooth were integrated as in a complex abstract sculpture. This area was overlooked from a central rise by an imposing three-storey house about fifty metres long, built from wooden planks, with tall and wide windows and a verandah at the front. Somewhere a dog barked. Ponies cropped the park. Strange aromas, not all of them appetising, wafted from the low sheds that housed the food synthesisers. Off to one side lay a long semicylindrical segmented hut of glassy black ceramic. That would be the incubator, shielding racks of artificial wombs in a warm reddish dark. To Horrocks’s eyes there was something larval about it, almost sinister in its insectile insistence on reproduction. In the cones, women carried their own foetuses, but they didn’t have the acceleration field and the necessity of rapid increase to contend with.