Learning the World

Kwarive, now seconded to the project since her biological discovery, had chosen to watch from the still safer distance of the camp. She met them at the gate. “It’s a good start,” she said. “But I don’t see it ever reaching the sky.”

“It doesn’t have to,” said Nollam. “It just has to reach a Gevorkian gasbag.”

Kwarive, Darvin gathered, was not to be told of the misdirection.

“How horrible!” she said. “I’m glad my — our part of the project isn’t so destructive.”

Her, or their, part of the project now dominated the barracks square, though to a casual observer, the transplanted tree by the lecture ring might merely have been there to provide a pleasant sight of home. The blimp, moored eight-eights wingspans above it and trailing cables, might have been a lookout over the flat dry plain. The grazer dung from the prey paddock heaped around the tree’s foot might have been to fertilise the barren soil in which this coastal tree improbably grew. A hardy evergreen, its lean spire and parabolic array of branches and leaves seemed almost to yearn for the sun. Instead, as Nollam’s telekinematographic reception apparatus cabled to a big wire frame in the tethered blimp monitored, the tree — or rather, the fine network of unknown alloy that permeated it from the roots up — was sending a continuous stream of incomprehensible etheric information skyward. None of Nollam’s equipment could make more of it than a flickering screen of snow.

Eights upon eights of electric shittles burrowed in the dung, and now and then poked their unblinking eyes out upon the world. No attempt to attract their attention — whether with bright-lit pictures, earnest discourses, or people jumping up and down — had elicited the slightest response. Kwarive had observed and recorded the insects’ reactions over two days and nights, and the best statistical methods she could apply showed that their gazes, as much as the radio waves which they continued to pulse forth, were random. They bore no relation to the putative objects of interest presented to them. At any given time there would be a few shittles peering outward, but that was what shittles did.

What the scientists working on the other aspects of the project made of all this bizzare activity Darvin, Orro, and Kwarive occasionally speculated on, but took care not to ask. Knowledge within the project was as compartmentalised as an insect’s body.

“I’m going to try something new today,” Kwarive said, stopping beside the wheeled screens that surrounded the base of the tree.

“What is it this time?” Nollam asked. “Obscene photographs? Religious texts? A careful heaping of stones in eights, to show them how we count?”

“No,” said Kwarive, in a tone that suggested she might have considered these. “Maps.”

“Isn’t that a security risk?” asked Darvin.

“Oh yes,” said Kwarive. “I’ve cleared it with Markhan.”

Orro and Darvin looked at each other and shook their heads. Neither of them had so much as spoken to the chief scientist since the project began.

“We’ll leave you to it,” said Darvin. “Good luck.”

“Bring me some tea,” said Kwarive, spreading a large sheet of paper on the frosty ground and kneeling beside it with ink bottle and brush. “Hot and soon.”

The three men made their way to one of the barrack roosts. Its sleeping racks empty by day, its interior space had been turned into a long laboratory. Cluttered tables filled the aisle. Between them snaked dangerous trailing cables that originated in the blimp and ended around the back of the cable-festooned mass of the telekinematographic receiver. This device was a wooden cabinet the size of a meat cupboard with a glass screen like a window, a couple of handspans wide, in the front near the top. The glass looked thick and somewhat convex, with rounded corners. At the moment it displayed a random flicker of spots and lines that hurt the eye if you watched too long. Nollam joined the technicians trying to make sense of the tree’s data stream, Orro studied the results of the latest aeronautical experiments — the real ones, being carried out far away at a place unknown — and Darvin headed down an aisle to the tea urn. He took tea out to Kwarive, who had already completed an impressive sketch-map of the Selohic coast. Just as he arrived she added, in the empty middle of the map, a stylised, chevron-winged flechette.

“Now, that looks like a security risk,” said Darvin.

Kwarive shook her head. “It was Markhan who suggested it.”

Darvin shrugged and gave her the steaming cup. She nuzzled his hand and he returned, to sift through the day’s reports from the physics wire. It was the second time this outer-month that he and his friends had travelled to the camp. The university authorities had been told, by much higher authorities, that the two scientists’ and the student’s services were required for military training and preparation, and that no demurral would be brooked. In that outer-month the project, with a soldierly despatch that impressed and baffled Darvin, had set up the experiment with the transplanted tree. What he was doing now, though, could just as well have been done at Five Ravines, and — with no results from the experiment — Darvin chafed to get back. Under cover of his continuing planet search, he had accumulated a stock of paired plates that showed the Object. Now that its position was known, it was indeed, as Orro had guessed, detectable as a distant companion of the Camp-Followers, the asteroids, but one somewhat beyond the orbit of the Warrior. Ground’s much closer visitor, the third moon, though betrayed by its etheric echo, remained invisible.

An hour or two had passed when Kwarive laid a cold hand on his shoulder, making him jump.

“Come outside,” she said. “There’s something you might like to see.”

Darvin followed her out as she marched back to the foot of the tree. Her completed map hung from one of the wheeled screens. Eight eights of shittles faced the map.

“Watch,” said Kwarive.

She wheeled the screen a little way around the tree. As she did so, other shittles emerged and faced it. She wheeled it around and around, until the base of the tree was surrounded by a phalanx of outward-facing insect eyes.

Darvin stared at them, and then at Kwarive. She was shaking. “I think—” she began.

Through the open door of the barracks roost and across the square they heard Nollam’s yell.

11 — Alien Space Bats

14 365:05:22 22:15

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been neglecting my habitat pla

What follows is not a dream. It’s based on some notes I took last time I entered a virtuality of Destiny II.

It feels like real time. It isn’t, of course; what I’m seeing and hearing happened hours ago, the information from countless bugs in numerous disguises uplinked to the satellite and beamed thence to the ship, where it’s been processed and reconstructed and the gaps filled in by guesswork and best fit until it’s a seamless seeming, ready to be studied by science teams and traipsed through by the rest of us.

I’m in a coastal industrial town. The air is hazy with carbon particles. In the distance, at the edge of town, smoke drifts in thick streams from tall chimneys. My POV is at its default height off the ground, that of my own eyes, but I expect I’m going to vary that if I’m to see things from — literally — their point of view. I begin, though, at ground level. It’s an eerie feeling, as if moving among them unseen.