Learning the World

He landed beside the fire in a whoosh of wings and a flurry of smoke and ash.

“Hey!” complained Kwarive, fa

“Sorry.” Darvin settled beside her, put a wing around her, and spread the other wing and both hands before the fire to feel the warmth.

“What was that all about?” asked Nollam, who had meantime won the bone.

“Just a thought,” said Darvin. “One that might occur to a bright young tech like yourself. An idea that could get a man noticed.”

Nollam sucked a greasy finger and regarded him. “I’d be interested.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Darvin. “Maybe I’ll keep it to myself. Guard it, you might say, like some tasty morsel.”

Nollam tossed him the charred femur. “There’s some left.”

With a show of gallantry Darvin handed it to Kwarive.

“All right,” he said. “Far be it from me to pick your brains for military secrets. But the marrow of the thing, one might say, is point-to-point, line-of-sight communication. Hilltop to hilltop, like beacon fires. Now, I don’t ask you to say that’s what it is. All I’m saying is, if that’s all the Might is using it for they’re missing a trick.”

“Go on,” said Nollam, ears pricking.

“Today the message from the sky was received over a wide area, or so Markhan gave us to suppose. By receivers that were nowhere near within sight of each other.”

“They were all within sight of the third moon,” said Nollam. His ear twitched and his brows rose. “Aha! I see what you’re getting at, but we can’t put transmitters or transmission aerials in the sky.”

Darvin looked upwards, slowly enough to let Nollam track his gaze. The blimp glowed red above them.

“Can we not?” he said.

13 — Contact Clause

The summons had a priority override that lasered it through layer after layer of firewall: from the No-Trace on the recipient’s location, through the Do Not Disturb aura around his room and several subtler obstacles in his head, to finally penetrate the last barrier, sleep. Horrocks woke with heart pounding and eyes staring. In the dark a ghastly hallucination of the Oldest Man blazed in front of him, demanded his presence, and vanished.

The jolt of his awakening had disturbed Genome. She rolled, mumbling. Horrocks caressed her shoulders.

“It’s all right,” he said. “Conference call.”

“Talk quiet,” she said.

Her fingertips trailed across his back and thigh as he pushed away. He split the side of the permeable cocoon they’d shared and drifted across the still-dark room to the utility wall. The cocoon sealed itself again behind him. He docked with his clothes while sucking a hot-enough coffee. Its dim infrared lit his way to the hatch. The corridor’s daylight strip struck him like a rush, its wavelengths rebooting wakefulness faster than the black drug. He finger-thrust the wall and launched himself along; grabbed a handhold outside the first unoccupied nook, fifty metres along; swung in, braced himself against its curving walls like a child between the trunk and branch of a tree, and closed his eyes.

The summons’s track-back pulsed in front of him like a migraine. He tagged it and was yanked into a hasty telepresence. Constantine glowered from the far pole. Eleven other people were already there, of whom Horrocks recognised two by sight: Awlin Halegap, the speculator, and Amend Locke, the science-team boss for the Destiny II probe. A quick scan of their tags identified the others as team members or brokers in terrestrials. All science and finance, then; and all crew. All except himself were old hands.

“Jury is quorate,” said Constantine. “We thank the youngest member for his prompt arrival, all things considered.” The spark of humour faded as fast as Horrocks’s surge of alarm flared. A jury! And not one chosen by lot! Whatever this was, it was serious.

“We must proceed with all despatch,” Constantine continued. “Not fifteen minutes ago I learned, to my great displeasure and dismay, that the Destiny II probe has made contact with the inhabitants. More precisely, the inhabitants have made contact with it, and it has responded.”

Shouts rose all round; if it had been a real space, they would have echoed. Constantine ignored them and flashed a file into common view. The clamour died in a moment of silent study. The first picture was a white rectangle unequally divided by a jagged, curving black line with an isolated arrow-like shape well above it, somewhere about the middle. On to the rectangle, a second or two later, a coloured picture was overlain: a planetary survey photograph. Blue sea, green coast, brown desert. The jagged line fitted the coast, the arrow marked a spot in the desert. The image zoomed to the spot. Under maximum resolution it picked out a dusty polygon of low structures, which on enhancement resolved to buildings and ramps.

“The sketch-map was the signal, and the spot you’re looking at was the source,” said Constantine. The view pulled back from the first picture to include it, as a piece of white card or paper, in a raw bug’s-eye view of two of the bat people staring straight into camera. “The natives are using our own surveillance devices to communicate with us. The response from the orbiter was this…”

Horrocks almost laughed to see a prerecorded image of the Oldest Man himself in his best silk formals, a

“Who is responsible for this?” Constantine demanded.

“I am,” said Amend Locke. “You recorded the introduction for me about three hundred years ago. It’s the standard courtesy call to a claim-jumper or a data colony.”

“Yes, yes,” said Constantine. “I remember that. What I don’t remember is authorising its use here and now.”

“It’s a default,” said Amend Locke. “As soon as the probe detects a clear attempt to hail it, however obscure, it fires off the standard message.”

A flicker of corroborating data interchange accompanied the dialogue. Horrocks didn’t bother to do more than glance at it, but filed it for later.

“If there was a wall here,” said Constantine, “I swear I should now be banging my head against it. We knew by the time the probe went into orbit that we weren’t dealing with a claim-jump or a data colony. Why wasn’t that default… amended, Locke?”

“It was overlooked,” she said. “The responsibility is mine. The default is buried deep in the probe’s software and, well, with all the new information coming in we…”

“All right,” said Constantine, with a wave of the hand. “Next question. From a swift study of these latest pictures I see that the bugs are borne by some kind of beetle, big enough and common enough for the inhabitants to notice. How did that happen? And why didn’t we notice?”

“That’s straightforward,” said Hardcastle Wood, the biologist. “The bugs are adaptive and opportunistic. In all hitherto existing situations they’ve never had anything bigger to work with than single-celled organisms or slime moulds, and natural prominences — rocks, essentially — for their amplifiers. When the assemblers encountered a fast-breeding and ubiquitous insectoid they seized upon it. Likewise with trees. As for why we didn’t notice… the virtuality software is seamless independently of the quality of the incoming data, and, ah, the lay viewers just referred casually to ‘bugs,’ and we ourselves—”

“Defaults, defaults, everyone’s got defaults,” chanted Constantine. “Tell me about it. Don’t tell me about it. I know what fifteen thousand years of confirmed conjecture can do to harden paths and bury assumptions. And speaking of assumptions — I take it there is a size limit on these bugs? We are not talking about bat people, or even the little bat beasts, fluttering around with wires in their optics?”