Learning the World

On the other side of the bubble, making a rocky counterpart to the air-tree, hung a tethered lump of asteroid clinker about a hundred metres across. A thrust of his feet took Horrocks towards it. As he drifted he tugged on his cuffs. The fabric slid over his hands and fingers, to form tough gloves by the time he impacted the rock’s side. He worked his way over and around the rock, checking each of the scores of machines he’d spent the past few days bolting to its surface. They jutted out a metre or so; their display and control panels — some of them simple touch screens, others elaborate but rugged arrangements of knobs, push buttons, and dials, and a few remote brain interfaces — were already filmed or crusted with dust. All in order, however. The tenebrific shade had passed over him many times, and half the morning had passed, before he was satisfied with that.

Ready for the kids to play with. Horrocks tweaked a final bolt and took a deep breath. He pulled his collar up over his head and down over his face until it sealed under his chin, and launched himself towards the bubble’s airlock. The scooter on the other side of it took him, on a spiralling trajectory that would have dizzied and sickened a flatfooter, around and along the sunline to the airlock of the forward wall. Once inside, he pulled his hood off his face, gasped a couple of times, and relaxed into his own world, the world of the forward cone.

Immediately the corner of his eye filled with messages. It was not that they were unavailable outside, but that they were easier to ignore. He blinked through them rapidly, discarding most as routine. One from his friend Awlin Halegap, a speculator, urged him to check one of the latest observations of the new system into which the ship was decelerating.

Horrocks smiled — Awlin’s speculations were often indeed speculative, and had already cost Horrocks and other acquaintances almost as much credit as they had profited them in the last couple of years — but tuned in to the list anyway. Most of the observations were of the first tranche of asteroids detected, and of the moons of the ringed gas giant and the waterworld that were the most prominent bodies in the system, and a few of the planets. The one Awlin had tagged was of the least immediately usable of the planets: the habitable-zone terrestrial. When he expanded the data he could see nothing of note; its amount and resolution, from a distance of several light-hours, were sparse. He made contact with Awlin.

“What’s the big deal?” Horrocks asked.

“Lightning spikes,” replied Awlin.

“Thank you,” said Horrocks. He concentrated on the section of the data on the relevant portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. There it was: a recurring surge of activity that suggested an agitated atmosphere, in which a great deal of interesting stuff was going on. Research claims on the planet were sure to become a lucrative proposition. So Awlin thought, at any rate.

Horrocks considered it for a moment, then patched to his broker and unloaded a hundred in waterworld phytochemicals for a thousand in terrestrials: blue-sky investments. As he worked his way through the capillaries of corridor to the main hollows he checked their progress by the minute. Their rating barely twitched. He sent a copy of the flat wavy line to Awlin, with a querying tic.

“See?” Awlin flashed back. “You got in ahead of the rush!”

Horrocks tried for a moment to compose a thinkable reply, gave up, and zapped a rude burst of static to the speculator. He hesitated over dropping the terrestrials, looking hard at his portfolio. His claims in mercurials — the tiny planet near the sun might someday be a power-beam construction site — were sound and edging upward. Bids were coming in for time on the training habitat he’d just completed. He could afford to gamble. He kept the claims.

2 — Aeronautical Research

Darvin placed his chin on the strap in front of him, and slid his feet into the stirrups behind him. The other straps of the harness pressed across his hips and the lower part of his rib cage. Ropes from all of them converged to a hook in the ceiling. The concrete floor was not far beneath him, but in this position it could be nothing but too close. He forced himself to look straight ahead at the blank concrete wall. The bright lights hurt his eyes. The glare was increased by reflection from the white paper sheets crisscrossed with black ribbon tapes tacked to the wall on his right.

“Comfortable?” Orro asked, from off to his left.

“No!”

“Too bad. Oh well.” The Gevorkian made some minute adjustment to the tripod-mounted kinematographic apparatus over which he stooped. Apparently satisfied, he looked up with an encouraging grin and a thumbs-up. His other thumb was poised over the motor switch.

“Ready?”

Darvin stretched out his wings and folded back his ears.

“Yes.”

Thumbs went down, the switch clicked, clockwork whirred.

“Flap!” shouted Orro.

Darvin beat his wings up and down, imagining himself in level flight, facing into an imagined slipstream.

“Flap harder!”

Darvin realised he’d been subconsciously afraid of his wing tips hitting the floor. They were in fact well clear. He flapped harder, almost rising out of the harness, until a much faster flapping sound told him the reel of film had run out.

“All right, stop,” said Orro. He dismounted the film from the camera, placed it in a round flat can and labelled it before stalking over to help Darvin out of the harness. Orro’s toe-claws, as usual overgrown, made scratching sounds on the floor that set Darvin’s teeth on edge.

“How did it look?” asked Darvin, folding his wings behind his elbows and flexing his hands.

“A start,” said Orro. “I can’t say it looked terribly realistic, but at least I got half a minute of wingbeats. We may have to try something else.”

Darvin glanced sidelong at the harness. “As you say,” he said, “a start.”

He walked out of the test area and into the main part of the lab. The walls, in between shelving, were almost covered with tacked-up pieces of paper scrawled with calculations or sketches of several failed designs. The long table was cluttered with hand tools, among the crumpled wings, smashed noses and ca

“When do I see the result?” he asked.

Orro straightened, thrusting the can into his belt satchel. “Tomorow,” he said. “If I take it straight to the development lab.”

“Oh,” said Darvin. He had forgotten that part of the kinematographic process. “All right. Give me a bell when you get it back.”

“Of course,” said Orro. His face brightened. “It is just a start, but it’s a historic start.”

“I wouldn’t want to miss it,” Darvin said, as they left the lab. Orro locked the door. The frosted wired glass bore, in barbed Gevorkian script, the legend Department of Aeronautical Research. KEEP OUT. There was no Department of Aeronautical Research, and Orro had not known that Gevorkian script was, in the cartoons and playbills of Seloh’s Reach, a conventional signifier of the at once scientific and sinister. Probably, Darvin reflected, he still didn’t. The exiled physicist still affected surprise at encountering journals and discourses written in Selohic.

At the end of the corridor the two scientists paused at the ledge.