Learning the World

10 — Above Top Secret

Kwarive on the telephone: “There’s something you might like to see.”

“I’ll be over,” said Darvin, and put the receiver down. He knew from her tone that nothing more effusive was expected, and that something important was up. They had agreed on how to convey such matters. Getting clearance to tell Kwarive a fraction of the truth had required a fight with the Sight of which he could tell her nothing. His security handler had been rather too enamoured of his own clever idea for a cover story, which was that Darvin should tell Kwarive that he and Orro had male-bonded. Darvin had sometimes speculated that Orro was a male-bonding male — in parts of the Gevorkian armed and civil services and nobility it was almost a requirement — but he had no wish whatsoever to violate his friend’s privacy and reticence. He had made this point with such vehemence that the handler had asked him, not in jest, if the suggested cover story was in fact true. Darvin assured him it was not. The tale was in fact tempting — it would have reassured Kwarive that Darvin and Orro were not using their frequent mysterious absences for any dangerous or unsavoury purpose — but it would have been, Darvin knew, intolerable to Orro. So, with great reluctance and much scratching of floors and stamping of papers, the handler had agreed that Kwarive, as Darvin’s girlfriend and prospective roost-partner, could not be kept out of the circle. He was still enjoined to tell her nothing of the aeronautics, telecommunications, and other projects that the discovery of the alien visitation had stimulated; and he had sworn to that effect.

The Life Sciences Building smelt of flitter and skitter droppings, of preserving fluids and warm hay. Skulls and skins decorated its corridor walls, as in the roost of a plains hunter. Kwarive, as a student, didn’t have an office, but she had a regular place of work, the laboratory a

Darvin hurried past the dusty glass cases and stoppered glass jars and into the room at the far end. Shelves lined its walls, laden with preserved animal parts, bones, chunks of mineral, and stacks of paper. Its door faced the window, and between door and window lay a long table that, except for the electrical lamps and dissection microscope, looked a lot like a prey-merchant’s counter. Bloodstains, gashes, sharp tools, animal parts. Kwarive looked up from the far end. She gestured to a shelf near the door.

“Pick up the telephone receiver,” she said. “Hold it to your ear.”

Puzzled, Darvin complied. He heard nothing but the expected whining whir. Kwarive, holding a closed basket, paced down the room towards him. As she approached, the telephone’s note changed, overlaid by a faint buzz that rose in volume with every step she took. When she held the basket beside the receiver, the buzz dominated the sound of the empty line. Kwarive smiled at him and retraced her steps. The buzz diminished.

Darvin returned the receiver to its cradle.

“What have you got in there?” he asked.

“Guess,” said Kwarive.

“Some electrical device?”

“Come and have a look.”

His hand on the basket lid, he hesitated. “No trick?” he asked.

Kwarive looked indignant. “Nothing’s going to jump out at you.”

On the floor of the basket was a shittle. A common grazer-dung-eating insect about the length of a thumb, it was in no way different from any other shittle Darvin had ever seen: stubby feelers, sturdy nippers, two camera eyes, four legs on the thorax, four on the metathorax, shiny blue wing-cases along the abdomen.

Darvin closed the lid and raised his brows. “Yes?”

“You asked me to tell you about anything unusual,” Kwarive said.

“Well, it’s certainly an interesting discovery,” Darvin said. “I bet nobody knew shittles have an electrical field. Maybe they use it to find their way around in the shit, like electric fish do in murky water, or perhaps it’s a defence—”

“Shittles don’t have an electrical field,” said Kwarive.

“How do you know?”

Kwarive jumped on to the perch at the end of the table and huffed. When her wings had settled she pointed to another identical basket on a shelf.

“There’s a whole basket of them there,” she said. “See for yourself.” Darvin checked that the basket indeed contained a crawling mass of the ugly brutes, and carried it to the telephone. He picked up the receiver and heard only the whir. He returned and put the basket back.

“Maybe it’s a different species.”

Kwarive chittered her teeth at him. “I’m the biologist here.”

“All right,” said Darvin, abashed. “Sorry. So tell me how you found this one.”

“The delivery trudge came in with the full basket — it’s a consignment for an insect-physiology practical — just as I was on the telephone to the administration office. That’s how I heard the buzz. Now, I immediately jumped to the same conclusion that you did — that I’d accidentally discovered a new fact about shittles. However, being a good scientist, I decided to check it by putting half the shittles in an empty basket. One buzzed, the other didn’t. So I kept splitting them between various empty containers” — she gestured at a collection of jars, boxes, and dissection pans among the clutter — “and narrowed it down to this one specimen.”

Darvin found a stool and sat on it and looked up at Kwarive on her perch. “And you think an electric shittle is relevant to the, ah, big picture?”

He had a vague worry that he had let slip some information about the telecommunications aspect, to which — Kwarive might have thought — an electric-field-producing insect might be of interest. A dim notion floated past him of somehow training the little beasts to act as signalling devices for sabreurs in flight. A sort of portable wireless… yes indeed, the Flight might be interested in that.

“I think it came from up there,” Kwarive said. She rolled her eyes upward, as — with a different significance — did Darvin a moment later.

“Perhaps the visitors are very small,” he said.

She hopped off the perch and shook him by the shoulders. “Stop making fun of this!” she said. “It’s like you’re making fun of me!”

Darvin put his wings around her and nuzzled the top of her head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But it’s all so—”

She stepped out of his enfolding. “I know,” she said. “I find it hard to believe what you tell me, even though you’ve shown me some of the evidence. You know, there are times when I wonder whether your big secret story isn’t a cover for something even stranger.”

“I wouldn’t do that to you,” said Darvin.

“I know, I know. Anyway. Sometimes I swear it seems easier to believe that you’re a spy for Gevork or… or something, than that what you tell is true. Even though I do trust you.”

“You know I have not told you everything,” said Darvin.

“Oh, I know that. I’m sure the military are flapping their wings all over this.”

Darvin nodded. “It’s their job,” he said. “Their duty.”

“And it’s yours not to tell me about it. Now let’s dissect this bug.”

She could change course like a flitter, Darvin thought, but he was glad of it.

She tipped the shittle on to a bloodied square of board and flipped it on its back. Its legs waved. Kwarive reached for a long pin.

“Stop!” said Darvin.

“What?”

“It might give you an electrical shock.”

“That little thing?”

“There might be some kind of capacitor inside it.”

Kwarive looked dubious, but held the pin in a pair of wooden tongs when she skewered the shittle, and rummaged up a ceramic probe and knife. Then she took the board to the binocular dissection microscope and switched on the light. She slit the underside of the animal lengthwise, through the hard thoraxes and the soft, segmented abdomen, and eased the sides of the cut apart. The legs stopped twitching.