Learning the World

That in itself isn’t half as weird as standing on a surface that looks flat and is actually convex. It curves away down to a horizon, as I can see whenever I glimpse the sea between the buildings, instead of curving away up. And above that horizon is nothing but empty (well, cloudy and hazy) sky, instead of the other side of the world. About sixty degrees up in that sky I can see the Destiny Star, like a sunline rolled up into a ball.

(And this in turn, incidentally, isn’t half as unsettling as standing in a virtuality taken at night. Of course such virtualities are even more artificial and reconstructed than this one — our little bugs are for the most part not nocturnal, nor do their eyes focus to infinity — but I’m assured what we see is what we would see in that very position at that time of night. Now, in a sense it’s only what you see when you link to the ship’s outside view to look out through the ship, in the right direction (give or take a few AU difference in POV). But when you use your imagination and really think of yourself standing there, on the outside surface of a planet, with nothing but a thin skin of atmosphere between you and the raw vacuum… the Civil Worlds glowing green, the Red Sun in their midst burning red, and the rest of the stars in all their naked native glory winking at you… it shakes you to your CNS, that’s all I can say. So just try it, OK?)

But back to today.

I’m on what might be called a street. The road is metalled, the sidewalk elevated, and vehicles move on the one and pedestrians on the other. It’s filthy. Looking down I see the droppings of the big beasts that haul carts, and the different ordure of the slaves who carry loads and run errands and haul cabs. Add rotting rinds, bones, and scraps of paper — all of which receive close and competitive attention from a variety of insectoids and different species of flying rat — and it makes me very glad I’m not really setting foot here. All this garbage may serve to manure the peculiar paraboloid trees, which sprout everywhere. An open-topped car rushes toward me through the ruck and press of carts. I see its radiator grille like bared teeth, and the flat glass plate of the windscreen. I hear the roar of its internal-combustion petroleum engine, interpersed with the braying blare of its warning instrument. As it passes through my POV I glimpse the faces of its driver and two passengers, and the vehicle’s ulterior. The seating is two wooden bars. The driver operates controls with hands and feet. I turn to watch it. From behind, the occupants have a look of cowled people with high-set, pointed ears. The warning instrument sounds again, and one of the bat people leaps into the air in front of the car, takes wing and lets it pass beneath him or her, and settles again on the road. Then it hurries to the sidewalk.

I drift the POV to above the sidewalk and bob along at the local walking pace. I’m two or three heads taller than most of the bat people. Seen close-up, their faces are like a somewhat flattened face of a fox. They have more in the way of jaw and snout than most humans, balanced by much larger eyes. The fine fur on their faces is patterned with stripes and spots, and their fur colours vary — grey, white, black, brown, reddish, and so on. Some of these colours and patterns may be from artificial dyes. Their eye colour, oddly to our eyes, varies little. It’s a clear yellow, one of their many features — like walking along eating chunks of raw meat, or scratching each other’s fur, or cluttering their teeth — that strikes us as animal-like. Their speech comes across as a continuous trill of chirps and squeals, with some low growling notes.

The slaves, trudging along with their burdens and their slashed, atrophied wings, look even less human. Their eyes are duller, and they say little. Their jaws are heavier and more prominent, as are their sagittal crests. Their limb muscles are bulkier. But these differences, which may not even be genetic, are quite hard to spot. You have to watch a lot of bat people before you can tell instantly which is slave and which free — ignoring the mutilations, of course.

Slaves apart, many of the pedestrians are pregnant or nursing females. The former waddle with ponderous dignity and a certain ferocity of countenance. Everybody steps out of their way, even — especially — the slaves. The nursing mothers stride along more briskly, each with three or four tiny infants clinging to her chest fur and usually plugged in to her nipples. Three rows of paired nipples, litters of offspring, pregnancy itself — again, it all reminds us of beasts, and we have to watch out for any subconscious prejudices in this regard.

On the other hand… they’re disturbingly not alien. They don’t breathe methane or have twenty legs. They’re mammals like us. Clearly there’s been a lot of parallel — or is it convergent? I can never remember — evolution. They’re made by DNA coding for proteins, albeit by different pathways. Their amino acids even have the same handedness as ours. We could — viruses and bacteria aside — eat the same food. (After cooking it, something they don’t do much of, though they dry and salt meat and sometimes heat it up to eat.) Is this a coincidence, or is it evidence of some deeper co

OK. Street level is not where the action is. The buildings are tall and narrow. They go up to ten or more storeys and look rickety. Most of them are built of wood and are as if on stilts. The ground floor is usually open on all sides and, here at any rate, is used as a tip or as a shop or as a stable, heaped with the fodder for the huge beasts — they look more like hypertrophic rabbits than anything we might recognise as cattle — that the bat people eat. The real building begins at the next floor. Most floors are linked by ladders or stairs, but most of them have narrow landing-ledges where the bat people alight, to go in and out by the openings in the sides. These openings are fitted with awnings and screens of woven straw and basketwork, or of some kind of translucent parchment. Some of these screens are decorated with pictures of flowers and foliage. This decoration seems distinct from the big pictures that many of the buildings have on their frontage or sides, usually of bat people eating or drinking, or of devices and vehicles. They also bear symbols that is reckoned to be the aliens’ script, in very large font. They’re kind of like tags, but actual rather than virtual.

I levitate the POV and drift it into one of those first floors. The reception is patchier here — fewer vermin for our bugs to parasitise; all I can really make out is a row of bat people perched on a low bar and hunched over a long table, on which they are inscribing stuff in a paper book. In the corner there’s a big clunky machine that takes oblong cards in and spills a long roll of paper out. It could be a mechanical computer, or it could be a machine for printing wallpaper. I drift out the other side, over another and similar street, and look up. The streets are crisscrossed with cables, some of them electrical or telephonic (that’s power and comms) but most of them carrying little wood-frame cable-car contraptions that sometimes contain loads and sometimes have bat people sitting on, perching on, or clinging to them. I think most of the people on these are infirm in some way. Their bodies deteriorate with age. Their skin hangs loose, and they get diseases from bacteria and viruses. It’s amazing how deftly the flying bat people avoid the aerial obstructions, and each other in flight. Many fly much higher than the buildings, of course, and can ignore the traffic patterns below. Higher than them, very occasionally, I see dirigibles, but no other aircraft.

In among all the low flyers are the flying rats and flying insectoids. There are no birds in this sky, there is no birdsong in the air. Only the squeaks of the flying rats. The rats come in several sizes and one colour, a dirty dun. To my eyes and ears it’s a strangely impoverished sky. And in among the flying rats, dodging them and catching them and sometimes eating them, are the bat people’s young. They seem to start flying when they’ve grown to about a quarter the height of an adult — knee-high to a bat — and they roam the air in flocks, line the ledges of buildings, clutter and scream. We only know they’re the young and not some bigger species of flying rat from close observation, and seeing them fly back to their parental roosts in the evenings. (Where, it has to be said, the parents treat them with what looks like affection, enfolding them in their own big wings, stroking and grooming them and feeding them tidbits.) They have no adult supervision whatsoever, at least until they reach about half adult size, when you can see them lined up, upside down, on the rafters of some low buildings which are evidently a sort of primitive school.