Learning the World

The Queen dominated the ecliptic, the Warrior a distant second. Between the Shining Path and the ecliptic the Daughters shone green across the eastern sky. He had counted the fifty-eight, and wasn’t sure there weren’t more. Behind the visible green stars was a greenish haze. In the midst of them, like a ruby among emeralds, glowed the Blood-drop, known to astronomy as Stella Proxima, the Nearest Star.

Orro was staring at it. “That’s where your comet came from,” he said. “Stella Proxima.”

“If it was a spaceship,” said Darvin, “I suppose it must have done.”

“No!” said Orro. “There is no supposition about it. Can’t you see, man, that’s where the trajectory goes back to?”

“I can’t see it,” said Darvin. “I’m no mathematician. But I have no doubt you can show me it, when we get back.” He shivered. “Speaking of which.”

“The passenger cars aren’t ru

“What?” said Darvin, feeling stupid. “But the overnight mail—”

“Travels in what are known, technically, as mail cars,” said Orro. “So here we stay.”

“We can’t!” said Darvin, looking around. He could just about see. He could hear things.

“How are you going to get back?” jeered Orro. “Fly?”

Darvin wrapped his wings around himself. “What else can we do?”

Orro’s eyes showed their whites in the starlit dark. “You’ve never spent a night out of cover?”

“No.”

“I have,” said Orro. “Let me show you.”

He vanished into the dark. A few minutes — Darvin confirmed the time by the wheeling of the stars, but it seemed longer — he returned with a double armful of brushwood. He stacked some and set fire to it. Rising sparks replaced the stars, and the crackling of twigs muffled the distant scurries.

“We have some food left,” he said. “And water.”

“Not much water.”

Orro flourished a glass flask. “Firewater,” he said. “So called because it keeps us warm.”

Darvin joined him in a huddle over the small fire. Orro began turning a strip of dried meat above the flames. The smell became appetising.

“Where did you learn all this?” Darvin asked.

“Military training.”

“Ah,” said Darvin. He bit off a chunk of the now much more palatable meat and handed the remainder back. “This is a delicate question,” he said. “I hope I don’t offend.”

Orro waved the strip, munching. “Go ahead.”

“I didn’t know ironmongers’ sons had military training.”

“They don’t, generally,” said Orro. He unstoppered the firewater flask, swigged and passed it to Darvin. “But ‘scientific civil servant’ is a rank of nobility. Hence military training, from the Academy onward.”

The firewater burned in Darvin’s mouth and down his throat. “You’re a nobleman?”

“Indeed I am,” said Orro. “And a not very competent sabreur. I preened myself on being a somewhat more adequate scout.”

Darvin laughed. “I thought that to be a noble one had to own land.”

“Oh, I do,” said Orro. “I am entitled to the rent of an acre.”

“How much does that come to?”

“Nothing,” said Orro. “It’s a patch of uninhabited and barren desert.” He laughed. “Some have become rich from such fiefs. They found rock-oil.”

“So you have a chance.”

Orro shook his head. “Geologically speaking, and regretfully, no.” He threw more brush on the fire. The flask passed back and forth. Orro talked about his military training, and about his friend Holder, who had enjoyed it so much that he’d moved from the civil service to the Regnal Air Force. They had remained friends, and it was only Orro’s choice of exile that had severed the co

“Surely you could write to him,” said Darvin.

“I did,” said Orro. He stared into the fire and spread his hands. “Some have seen my departure as a betrayal. I don’t say he has, but he didn’t reply.”

They banked the fire and lay down beside it, wrapped in their wings. At some point in the night, when the moons had risen and crossed the sky and were sinking in the west, Darvin woke to find Orro’s wing over him. He wondered what to do, and decided to appreciate the added warmth and go back to sleep. In the morning it seemed like a dream. The two men awoke a wingspan apart, shook the dew off their fur and wings, and flew to the cable station.

“Isn’t this impressive!” Orro said.

Darvin gazed at the tangle of wires and torch-bulbs that hung from the ceiling of Orro’s laboratory like some demented festive decoration. Now that he noticed, some of the bulbs were decorative, coloured red and green. There were about eight eights of bulbs — no, more, because all of them were paired: one white or red, one green.

“Aha!” he said, as he got the point. “Now I’m impressed.”

“I thought you would be,” said Orro. “It took me five days to work out the positions of the stars, and four to wire all this up.” He pulled up a chair. “Sit here.”

He pulled down blinds at each of the windows, leaving the room as dark as the desert night. He sat down at a bank of switches, and threw one. The bulbs flashed on in a three-dimensional display of stars. Seven were green, a close cluster. Another switch, and twenty more turned green. Then there were forty-nine, and then fifty-eight. In each case the new green stars were farther from the original seven, and themselves adjacent within a ragged arc. Orro repeated the process several times, to display again and again the green spreading like a Shockwave. Through it all one small bulb, hanging at the near end of the display in front of Darvin’s nose, remained at red.

“The Nearest Star,” said Darvin. He stood up, shifted about, narrowed his eyes until he could see the green bulbs as the Daughters appeared in the night sky. “Now run it through again,” he said.

The green wave rushed at him. He almost flinched.

“Something is coming,” he breathed. He’d deduced it himself, in the patterns of light and light-years he’d constructed from the ephemiris and the catalogues, but until now he had not quite believed it.

Orro snapped the blinds back up. Light filled the room, leaving the bulbs tawdry.

“How long,” Darvin asked, “before the Nearest Star turns green? Will we see it, or our descendants?”

“I don’t think we can wait that long,” said Orro. He slid some stapled sheets of paper across the table. Darvin spun it around and looked at the title, above his name and Orro’s: A Distant, Decelerating Celestial Object; with Some Observations on the Daughters. “We must publish this,” said Orro. “Now.”

7 — Television

14 365:01:13 06:10

Have you seen the pictures have you seen the pictures have you seen the pictures???

14 365:01:13 08:12

Lights on the nightside. Nobody expected this. Nobody has any doubt what it means. Not even Grey Universal. Those sims he rattled up in minutes for volcanoes, brush fires, and — wait for it — the phosphorescence of rotting wood, are just to show he can. He just likes being contrary, and likes the attention. His Coriolis storm sims had everyone fascinated, for a while, and arguing. But he doesn’t believe his latest: I’ve asked him; he admitted it. He doesn’t even buy the other contrary hold-out minority view, that the lights are from some kind of Red Sun robot or download colonies that claim-jumped us. Nobody but nobody would be mad enough to plant colonies on a unique planet, a terrestrial with multicellular life — least of all robots. That’s what he told me. He’s as excited as everybody else.

Excited is not the word. My hands are shaking as I write this.

There are aliens down there on Destiny II.

I sat and looked at that sentence for ten minutes. I still don’t wholly believe it. I still have that particle of doubt. I still feel that I risk being very foolish. Though being as foolish as everybody else is at least not embarrassing. (No, it would be, actually, now that I come to think of it.) All right. If ever I am going to put together a team, and take the lead in setting up a habitat, I’m going to have to build a reputation for being level-headed and thoughtful, as well as of course being the wonderful personality you all know I am.