Learning the World

Kwarive hunched like a hunter watching prey from a branch. She scratched behind her ear. Darvin, knowing the signs, said nothing more until the pot had boiled and he had served the tea in three containers that (Kwarive assured him) were used only for that purpose, and not to hold any of the unsavoury liquids and pulps that the room’s other identical beakers contained.

“So, Kwarive. You were saying.”

“I think I have it now,” she said. She blew and sipped. “If copper wire can be formed inside a shittle, why can’t it — or some other metal — be formed inside the branches and spire of a tree? Along the capillaries, perhaps?”

“Why do you say it was formed?” asked Darvin. “I had imagined it was somehow implanted.”

“If it was implanted,” said Kwarive, “our visitors are a great deal closer than we think.” She laughed. “They fly among us.”

“That’s a possibility,” said Orro. “I can imagine, say, a mechanical flitter. Like one of my chiropter models, only successful. With tiny manipulative hands, like a real flitter.”

“Oh yes,” said Darvin. “I can see it now, preying on the shittles among a flock of real flitters, and stashing some away to vivisect in its nest!”

“Why not?” said Orro. “We are agreed that calculating machines may make great progress in ages to come.”

Kwarive extended and quivered her wings, almost spilling the tea. “And does it mine the copper and whatever substance the coloured crystals are made from? Or does it perhaps steal them from shops?”

Orro was immune to her sarcasm. “Some species of flitters are notorious for stealing odds and ends of material for their nests.”

“Oh, for the Queen’s sake, gentlemen,” said Kwarive, “will you stop this idle speculation and listen to my — to my—”

“Your idle speculation?” said Darvin.

Kwarive laughed. “Indeed. But listen. How I had imagined it was something quite different. Fix your attention on a congenial subject for a moment. Sex. The male, as you may know, produces a sticky fluid with which he impregnates the female.”

Darvin gaped at Orro. “So that’s what happens!”

“Shut up,” said Kwarive. “As you also know, the life-bearing seed is a microscopic animalcule. And yet somehow, from this tiny invisible seed comes, in due course, a litter of kits.”

“The seed has to combine with the female egg,” said Darvin, entering into the spirit of conveying no news.

“Which is larger but still microscopic,” said Kwarive. “And somehow, from one or both of these, come a clutch of living things, each large enough to hold in your hand. Which, as they grow up, display characteristics similar to those of their parents.”

“Fascinating,” said Darvin. “The mystery of life. The miracle of reproduction. I don’t know why I didn’t learn all this in school.”

“I did not,” said Orro. “I read it in an imaginative but broadly accurate illustrated treatise inscribed, if memory serves, on the wall of a municipal pissery.”

“Each to his own,” said Kwarive. “My point, if I can momentarily distract you, is that reproduction is not a miracle. The life principle in the germ-plasm somehow organises and controls a mass of matter that but yesterday was the mother’s food, and transforms it into another living organism. Forces that we do not understand shape every organ and limb, and in a ma

“I see,” said Orro. “You are suggesting that the seeds or eggs of the shittles have somehow been influenced to produce small electrical devices, as if they were bodily organs. And that a similar influence may be exerted on the growing-power of certain trees, albeit ones already mature, perhaps due to the greater plasticity of the botanical cell-plasm.”

“Yes!” said Kwarive, sounding surprised and relieved. “That’s exactly it.”

“But — copper wires!” said Darvin.

’That’s the easiest part of it,” said Kwarive. “There are copper salts everywhere. Other mineral salts form naturally on dung. We all have a tincture of iron in our blood.”

Darvin drained his dubious cup. “That,” he said, “is the wildest speculation I have heard today. It makes Orro’s intelligent mechanical flitters seem like a sound and sober possibility. That’s why I think you’re right, Kwarive.”

“You do?”

“Well, it’s that or something wilder. We must take this to the project.”

A few days later an airship of Seloh’s Flight flew slowly over Five Ravines. Adults spared it a glance, and gained from that glance a touch of reassurance. Gangs of kits tried and failed to reach its altitude. After crisscrossing the town a few times it flew away to the north. The following day, here and there about town, men with the municipal crest on the buckles of their crossed straps were observed, or rather, not noticed, flying into certain trees, sawing off the branches they perched on, and flying away. That evening, a telegraph machine rattled in Darvin’s office, and spat forth a message that, when decoded, read: FRUIT ON SCHED PREP DESP URGENT.

The device was like an enormous flechette or flighted crossbolt, several wingspans long. With its backswept wings — or stabilisers, as the techs insisted on calling them — it resembled a crude copy of the alien flying machine in the photograph. Pointed at one end, open at the other; rivets making small elliptical shadows on its burnished steel plates. It lay atop a trolley on a railed wooden ramp with an upward slope. Heavy electrical cables trailed from the ramp. Somebody counted backward. At zero, flames sputtered from the open end, then roared forth like an opened furnace door. The device rushed forward and hurtled into a shallow ascent of several eight-eights of wingspans on the horizontal and about two eights on the vertical, then tilted downward, hit the desert, performed a couple of spectacular cartwheels, and exploded with a deafening bang.

Ears still ringing, Darvin heard a cheer from the small crowd of project members who, with him, watched at a supposedly safe distance.

“Impressive, isn’t it?” said Nollam, the young telekinematography technician.

“You could say that,” said Darvin. “Also expensive, futile, and dangerous.”

“All of these,” said Nollam. He rubbed his hands and shook out his wings. “This is our top-secret self-propelled giant flechette project. Officially called Project Crossbolt. And us lowly types have been officially told to unofficially call it Project Piss-Crystal.”

“Saltpetre?”

“Yes,” said Nollam.

“Why?”

“In case any news of it leaks out.”

“I should have thought,” said Darvin, strolling back to the huts of the project’s desert camp, “that naming it after the device’s shape and after a component of bomb powder rather gave the show away.”

He stopped. “Oh,” he said. “I see.”

“You do,” said Nollam. “Gives great cover. The Gevorkians must know we’re up to something up here, and that’s just the sort of rind to throw to them. Besides,” he added, “it might just work.”

Orro, who had watched the display from the air, swooped to land beside them.

“Wonderful!” he said. “I must tell you, this is substantially better than what I know of such work in Gevork.”

“That’s a relief,” said Nollam.

“Of course my knowledge is years out of date,” said Orro, sounding worried. He brightened, and clutched the technician’s arm.

“Has anyone thought of launching the device straight upward?”

“Firing it at the sky?” said Nollam. “Whatever for?”

“It could be a method of reaching extreme altitudes.”

“I’ll pass it on,” said Nollam. He didn’t sound as if he meant it.

“Seriously,” said Orro. “It’s important.”

“All right, man, all right.”

The ground was hard. Their breaths puffed in front of them. The tips of Darvin’s ears, toes, and fingers ached. He still preferred the pale clear blue of the desert winter midmorning sky to the dripping clouds and fogs of the warmer and moister coast.