Learning the World

I see one of these down the road, and in sudden curiosity I zip towards it. Inside it’s quite bright and the floor is covered with straw and droppings. The view is quite clear. The young bat people hang from beams overhead, bright eyes swivelling as they follow the actions of an adult who struts and frets beneath them, pointing to diagrams on the floor — scratched in the dust, often, with the foot-claw or some tool clutched in the foot — shouting and pointing. Sometimes the adult flies up and attacks some hapless youngster, beating fists against its huddled wings. I turn away and zip out, feeling nauseous, and blink out of the session. This sight has upset me. It makes me want to teach them a lesson.

A temptation we must learn to resist.

“Thanks,” said Horrocks, swinging off the rear saddle of the two-seater.

“Any time,” said the pilot, whose name Horrocks had failed to catch. The pilot glanced back and gu

Horrocks waved, turned away, and looked across a couple of hundred metres of parkland to the edge of Far Crossing. Complex voluted towers, tall trees, radial streets whose roadways ran out in a dribble of macadam on the grass as though their builders had lost heart. Atomic Discourse had called it a town, but she had been mistaken. It was a concentrated, condensed city. It had all the exciting parts of a city: the shops and studios and theatres and cafe’s, the lofts and cellars, the laboratories and nanofactories, and none of the dull bits: the dormitory suburbs, the marshalling yards, the car ports, the residential streets, the industrial parks. What White City and its like were for the older generation, Far Crossing and its like were for the young.

Horrocks followed floating virtual tags to the loft where Atomic worked. It was in a building near the centre, above a row of shops. Up two flights of stairs, which he negotiated with a firm grip on the handrail. The loft was about thirty metres long, with high sloped windows at either end. In this dim space a score of people worked on design units. Those old enough for their virtuality genes to have kicked in could have done it all in their heads, but all of them used screens or holograms: display, advertising, was part of the process. One or two showed modules or specialised areas — recycling plant, gardens — or mining schematics tagged to particular claims. Others had conjured up more ambitious schemes, for orbital habitats or surface projects for one or other of the system’s moons, or gas-mining processes for the ringed gas giant, or power stations for the mercurial. One even had a wild scheme for lifting water from the waterworld. For most of those here, as for most of the ship generation, such schemes and dreams would never be realised. They would be tested to destruction in the ship’s memory, stocked as it was with mille

It was heartbreaking to watch.

Atomic, not to his surprise, sat beneath a vivid display of an entire habitat. Though built around a typical carbonaceous chondrite, it was unusual in having a transparent exterior and an outward orientation of the living space. Bright and beautiful, but too open and vulnerable.

The girl sat staring into the spaces behind her eyes, shaping and tweaking her design with her hands and mind. She wore, Horrocks noticed as he padded up behind her, a green dress that looked identical to the one Synchronic had worn the night she’d seduced him. Stepping closer, he fancied he caught a faint whiff of Synchronic’s unmistakable and unforgettable scent. He wondered if it was the same garment. The ancient and cu

He stopped, smiled to himself, and shook his head. Trying to outflank the twisted ploys of one of the First Hundred Thousand was as pointless as it would be unprofitable. Let the law of unintended consequences take its course — that was what she’d said, before she had, with doubtless intended consequence, taken care of him. Some involuntary movement of his — a shift of stance, a sigh, a grunt — must have alerted Atomic to his presence. She snapped out of her dwam and spun her seat around, looking startled, then recovered almost at once to a polite incuriosity, a mask of cool.

“You can walk!” she said. The way she said it, she regretted she didn’t have a wider audience.

“It’s taken me a lot of hard work,” said Horrocks. “And a few falls.”

“So what, besides your legs, brings you here?”

“I wanted to talk to you.”

“That’s sweet. What about?”

Horrocks temporised. “Rather a lot, actually. Perhaps over lunch?”

“Be my guest.”

He wasn’t familiar with the phrase, but it sounded like agreement. He gazed above her head. “That’s a beautiful habitat—”

“I hear a ‘but’ coming.”

“It’s too exposed.”

She enhanced a cluster of sensors, a battery of lasers and a cluster of missiles. “Meteor defence, see?”

Horrocks shook his head. “Beside the point,” he said. “People straight out of a ship need the sense of substrate — a good few metres of regolith at least — between themselves and the hard stuff.”

“Ah, but do they?” Atomic jumped to her feet. “That’s what I think might be changing, with so many of us jaunting in virtualities where we walk under sky.”

The thought made Horrocks uneasy. Despite his interest in the planet, he’d shirked the terrestrial virtualities. “I’ve only just got used to walking on ground,” he said, “and I’m not so sure.”

“I’ll tell you all about it,” said Atomic. “Walk with me.”

“Do you realise,” she said, looking up from the foot of the stairs as he made his way down, “that for thousands of years people have been living in caves?”

Horrocks didn’t answer until they were out on the street. He handwaved upward.

“This doesn’t feel like a cave. It doesn’t feel enclosed.”

“That’s just because you’re used to living in the cone. It feels open but it’s like you said, it’s the reassurance of regolith. Compared with this, standing on a planetary surface is, like, totally exposed.”

“And living in a habitat with a glass roof isn’t?”

She laughed. “It isn’t glass, it’s diamond. And it’s less exposed than a surface. Especially one like Destiny II, which doesn’t even have asteroid defence. Yet that’s what lots of us are subconsciously getting used to.”

“I don’t think so,” said Horrocks. “At a deeper level we know it’s virtual.”

“Imagination can overcome that,” said Atomic.

They walked on down Fourth. The street was quiet. Music throbbed from nodes in the air. It made Horrocks yearn for wide spaces and pioneer toil. Music could do that. “Do you imagine the bat people feel exposed?” he asked.

“I suppose they do,” Atomic said. “Those of them who understand what the sky is, at least. I guess some of them still think the sky is a roof.”

“They don’t seem that primitive.”

“Some of them are, in the backcountry.”

“All right,” said Horrocks. “What worries me is the more advanced ones. How do you think they would feel, under that open sky, if they saw us colonizing? Changing their asteroid belt, the moons of their water-world and gas giant? Some of the solar power collectors would look like new planets even to the naked eye. To say nothing of fusion reactors.”