Learning the World

The Eye pushed a paper toward each of them.

“Read, sign and thumbprint in blood, and seal,” he said. “Or die here.”

Five minutes later Darvin and Orro were sworn to Seloh’s Sight.

“This is outrageous,” said Darvin. “You’ve betrayed your country.”

They perched together at the top of the faculty’s tower, out of sight and earshot of anyone within view. Orro’s calm gaze didn’t deviate from the fog.

“I have not,” he said. “What would Gevork give, to have a Gevorkian within the Sight?”

“I’m sure they have agents in place already.”

“No doubt. So you see, I have nothing to worry about.”

“Seems to me you have everything to worry about.”

“It does get complicated,” said Orro. “There are mathematical functions for such matters.” He shrugged, and steepled his wings. “I can keep track.”

Darvin thought of spies spying on spies. It made him dizzy. Perhaps it was his duty to report on Orro. Perhaps this was a test, to see whether he did report on Orro. Perhaps Orro had all along been suborned to the Sight. Or, maybe, everything was as it seemed. That was something he could never again take for granted. He decided he would.

“All right,” he said. “You keep track. What worries me is what we’re both betraying.”

“And that is?”

“Science.”

Now Orro did turn to him, eyes bright. “Oh no,” he said. “Not at all. Isn’t this the most marvellous opportunity we could ever have been given, to discover new knowledge?”

“There can be no secret science,” said Darvin. It was one of the platitudes of the Dawn Age.

“Whoever tracked the comet,” said Orro, “and whoever designed the camera that took those pictures, worked in secret.”

“Well obviously military research—”

“Why is that an exception?”

“It’s engineering, not science.”

“Battle is the forge of tools,” said Orro. He said it like a Gevorkian proverb.

“Peace and not war is the father of all,” Darvin shot back. Another platitude.

They both laughed.

“But we’ve seen the pictures,” said Orro.

“Yes,” said Darvin. “We’ve seen the pictures.”

He had a lust to see more pictures. According to the Eye, the project promised more. More secrets, more hidden knowledge, the most knowledge and the deepest secret there had ever been.

“And we know how to build a heavier-than-air craft,” added Orro.

“In secret.”

“Yes.” A note of regret sounded in Orro’s voice. “But you know,” he went on, “Gevorkian though I am, noble though I am, when I think of the Regnal Air Force officers who laughed in my face, I can’t help gloating over the shock they’ll someday get.”

That worried Darvin, but he said nothing. The two of them were not, of course, agents of the Sight, not Eyes; their recruitment to it was a formality, whose only differences with, say, activating Darvin’s membership in the Reserve were that the Gevorkian too could be validly recruited, and that the penalties for betrayal or desertion were far more severe. What they had been recruited to was a project to investigate all aspects of the alien arrival. None of it would, they were assured, be compartmentalised: the whole point was to integrate all the diverse sources of information and insight. It was to be called Project Signal, which Darvin thought something of a giveaway, but one that had a certain ring to it.

There was a camp in the high desert. It consisted of four identical barrack roosts, a central lecture ring, a shooting range, a prey paddock, and a huddle of ruins used for close-quarter combat training. Except for a few guards, the troops had been moved out. By the first night there Darvin had a fair idea of where it was, just from looking at the stars and applying rudimentary navigation. This made the way he had arrived — in a windowless cabin of an airship — a quite futile exercise in security, but he knew better than to say so. The senior military and security officers of Seloh’s Reach were more flexible in their outlook than those of, by all accounts, Gevork, but they had as little sense of humour. To his relief the inaugural Project Signal meeting was organised not like a military briefing but an academic conference. About eight-by-eight scientists and engineers were present. On the first evening, everybody talked about anything but what they were here for.

The following morning, Darvin and Orro hung side by side on the lecture ring with the others and fixed their attention on the man standing in the middle.

“Good morning, colleagues,” he said. “My name is Markhan. I am a research scientist with the Flight. My field is one of which few of you will have heard, because its very existence is secret. I refer to telekinematography, the transmission of moving images by ether waves. Its potential use in military communications is self-evident; so much so that our own developments are closely paralleled in Gevork.”

Even Orro could not forbear to laugh.

“However,” Markhan went on, “we are, I venture to believe, a little ahead of our friends across the water in the matter of building sensitive receiving equipment. A few outer-months ago, during a routine test of this apparatus, one of our technicians — young Nollam over there — noted a strong source of etheric interference from a point in the sky. Now, it should be noted that celestial sources of etheric waves are not rare, and include the Sun Himself. To the best of our knowledge all of these sources are natural. What Nollam spotted was that this source was strong, had a distinct pattern, and moved from night to night. The pattern was a regular pulse, with a period of precisely 2.7 beats. It was moving in the plane of the ecliptic, and was thus, almost certainly, an astronomical object.”

Nollam had taken the data to Markhan, who had then made discreet enquiries and hasty searches through the stack of prints from the physics wire — which had turned up Darvin and Orro’s paper. More recently, extraordinarily faint echoes of the secret Selohic experimental transmissions had been detected from the sky — as if Ground had acquired a third moon, as Markhan put it — shortly followed by the detection of the high-altitude aerial vehicle.

“Does anyone dispute,” Markhan asked, “that all of this, taken together, is evidence that we are being visited and observed by travellers from another world?”

No one did. Darvin guessed that any who might have done so had been excluded — or had excluded themselves — from the Project.

“Very well,” said Markhan. “The question that now arises is: what are we to do about it?”

On this, opinion was divided. Only one voice, that of a stubborn old biologist, was raised in favour of opening the whole matter to the public and to the world. Markhan pointed out that Seloh already stood to gain some military advantage from the existing observations — he didn’t specify how, but Orro nudged Darvin at this point — and there was no telling what might be gained in the future. For the rest, the suggestions ranged from attempting communication with the aliens to building some unspecified gigantic weapon to shoot them out of the sky. The great majority, however, put forward practical suggestions for continuing to observe the craft — Orro, to Darvin’s surprise, urged an attempt to detect it visually, now that its location was continually betrayed by its emissions — and to build more sensitive etheric apparatus; to investigate further and if possible to emulate the powers of flight displayed by the aerial vehicle; and to establish a network to centralise reports of any other unknown aerial or celestial phenomena.

Markhan summed up the emergent near-consensus; the combat military and security officers present endorsed it; the token high political figure from Seloh’s Height made an inspiring speech; and the great project began.