Learning the World

The tips of the probe and the blade stirred almost imperceptibly in the i

“Will you look at this,” she said, her voice calm. She stepped back from the instrument.

Darvin adjusted the eyepieces and the focus. The shittle in the magnified field filled his sight. Beside the teased-apart digestive and circulatory systems, amid the gunk and bits that biologists called co

He relinquished the microscope to Kwarive. She placed the edge of the knife between the nippers and brought it down, cleaving the head.

“The strand bifurcates,” she said. “It goes to each of the eyes.”

Darvin looked and confirmed this.

“Can you lift the whole thing out?” he asked.

She could. She took a water bottle with a tube through the stopper and washed the thing a drop at a time. It lay gleaming on the slab beside its now headless and eviscerated host. They stood together and looked at it for a while.

“What sense do you make of it?” asked Darvin.

“Well,” said Kwarive, “it’s plainly artificial. That coppery strand is copper wire.”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure as I can be without a materials lab.”

“Easy enough to check,” said Darvin. “But what could the rest of it be?”

“I have no idea,” said Kwarive. “No, I do have an idea, and I’ve had it ever since I noticed the electrical effect. But it’s too far-fetched.”

Darvin glanced again at the glittering mechanism. “Nothing could be too far-fetched to explain this.”

“Very well,” said Kwarive. “I think it’s a transmitter, of wireless telephonic or telekinematographic etheric waves. It is using the insect’s eyes as cameras.”

“That’s certainly far-fetched,” said Darvin. “No wireless telephone, let alone telekinematographic apparatus, could possibly be this small.”

“How do you know that? You might as well say that your object in space could not possibly be so large.”

“I suppose, if we are dealing with a technology so much more advanced…” A thought struck him. “But even so, the signal produced must have been very weak. How could it reach — so far away?”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Kwarive. “I know nothing about telekinematography.”

“Come to think of it,” said Darvin, “how do you know about it at all?”

“Orro told me,” she said. “He says it’s being developed by the military… in Gevork.”

“Hmm,” said Darvin. “That’s all right. I suppose. Please don’t talk about it loosely. Anyway… from the little I know, it involves rather heftier equipment than this.”

“I wonder if it’s still active,” Kwarive said.

They repeated the telephone experiment. The electrical interference was gone.

“It may have drawn its energy from the shittle’s body,” said Kwarive.

“Or we broke it,” said Darvin.

“That would be a shame. It would be irreplaceable. No, wait, it wouldn’t. We can find more, and I know just how to do it.”

“How?”

Kawarive smiled and shoved the empty basket to him. “Fill it up,” she said. “I’ll call Orro.”

Not being a biologist, Darvin didn’t have Kwarive’s confidence in statistics, and after an hour scooping shittles from the dung in the gutters of the wintry streets he didn’t like it either. He washed his hands and feet in the chill canal before returning with his reeking burden. By this time Orro had joined Kwarive and was hunched over a handful of scrawled paper. The telephone receiver had been dismantled. Parts of it lay beside the dissected shittle and its alien i

“What are you doing?” Darvin asked.

Orro looked up. “Trying to work out wavelengths from the circuitry of the receiver.”

“Laudable but premature,” said Darvin, putting down the basket. “We need a working receiver right now.”

Orro fussed for a moment.

“Oh, good lady above,” said Kwarive. She snatched up a screwdriver and had every component in place and the receiver back on its flex within minutes.

“Now then,” she said, holding it up, “the basket, if you please.”

Darvin hefted the basket and walked towards her. Kwarive smiled. “The buzz is back!” she said.

This time the tedious sorting procedure sifted out two of the electric snittles (as they’d started calling them). The three scientists peered down at the two unprepossessing insects. The two insects — Darvin couldn’t but fancy — looked back.

“Hello,” he said. “Greetings from Ground.”

Orro grabbed his shoulder so hard that it hurt. “We could do that!” he said.

“Do what?”

“Use the electric snittles to communicate with the visitors.”

Darvin burst out laughing.

“What’s so fu

“Oh, nothing,” Darvin said. “It’s just that I had a sudden vision of a conclave of scientists and security men jabbering and capering in front of a glass case floored with shit and crawling with shittles.”

“Well, why not?” asked Orro.

Darvin sat down on a stool and looked from Orro to Kwarive and back. He scratched the fur on the back of his calf. “No reason why not,” he said. “It’s just that I sometimes find it hard to believe. You both evidently don’t.” He stood up and paced around, scouting for tea. “For one thing,” he said, “the signal these little — and I stress little — blighters put out couldn’t possibly reach… its supposed recipients.”

“You’re doing it again,” said Kwarive. “Saying what they can and can’t do without evidence. We’ve just seen evidence that they can do things we can’t. The pot and the brazier are behind that stuff on the ledge, by the way.”

“Oh, thanks.”

“No, he’s right,” said Orro. “It’s a question of output power. There are theoretical limits to how much electrical power can be extracted from chemical processes.”

“And you know these limits, I suppose?” asked Kwarive.

“I do, as a matter of fact,” said Orro. He brushed at his eyes as if weary. “I wrote the paper on it. Nevertheless, there is a way in which such weak signals could reach our, ah, supernumerary moon, if not farther.”

Darvin fiddled with gas taps and water taps. “And what’s that?”

“Amplification,” Orro said.

“You astonish me,” said Darvin, sparking up the flame under the brazier. “The question we’re all agog to hear the answer to is what such an amplifier might be.” He waved a hand at the window, at the view of buildings and trees. “Given that we don’t see telekinematographic transmission towers mysteriously springing up all over the place.”

“Oh!” said Kwarive. She hopped on a perch and spread her wings. “We do!”

Darvin, unable to wait for the tea, pushed some leaf under his tongue and grunted a query.

“Trees,” said Kwarive. “Look at the shape: the tall central spire and the upward-curving floret of branches. Does that not remind you of something, Orro?”

“I concede the resemblance,” said Orro. “Doubtless it inspired the design of the transmission and reception ante

“You never told me this,” said Darvin.

“No, I never did,” said Orro. “I was, ah, discussing Gevorkian science with Kwarive one day and it slipped out. I have since then guarded my tongue more carefully. However, this is not the point. The point is that I don’t see how trees could be so used. Wood is not, after all, renowned for its electrical conductivity.”