Learning the World

The second page listed a series of anomalous events, in the same straightforward style, as if taken from naive eyewitness accounts. The third page stated: From reliable reports of travellers and friends, the Wise of the Southern Rule believe that the esteemed overwatchers of the northern realms have been breathed upon by a great wind of invention and skillful work from their knowledge of these events. In the Reach of Seloh, honour to her name, those of craft and knowledge have set about the following mighty works: building flying machines of fixed wings; sending moving pictures through the ether; searching the sky for etheric messages from other worlds; new methods of reckoning the descrying of portents from numbers. In the Realm of Gevork, praise be to its ancient fame, the following: building large rockets of metal; sending moving pictures through the ether; obtaining heat and light from certain rare and poisonous minerals; building etheric machines for reckoning and comparing, and for the construction of subtle secret codes.

It is the heavy dread of the Wise of the Southern Rule that these wonderful works, and more we wot not of, may be intended to improve the arts of war. It is our humble and fervent hope, upon which our holy men daily and nightly beseech the blessing of the Most High and the beloved gods below and above the moons, that our dread shall prove unfounded and that the realms remain at peace.

The lower half of that page consisted of two woodcuts. One showed a fixed-wing flying machine with a propeller at its nose, the other a rocket of metal — someone had taken pains to show the plates and rivets — with flames shooting out of the back. They appeared to be on a collision course.

Darvin’s hands shook as he turned the papers back to the front page and stared at the drawing of the ship from another star.

“How did they find this out?” he said.

“The Southern Rule,” said Kwarive, “must surely have something like the Sight.”

“If I were in the Sight,” said Darvin, “I’d be searching now for Southern spies inside the Sight itself.”

“You are in the Sight,” Kwarive pointed out.

“So I am,” said Darvin, “to my rue, and perhaps my ruin.”

“What do you mean?” cried Kwarive.

“I’ll be under suspicion. So will you. So will we all.” He was thinking of Orro.

“Perhaps we should disappear. Your relatives in the backcountry—”

“No!” said Darvin. “That’s just about the worst thing we could do. If the Sight seeks us, it’ll find us — depend on it. The best we can do is act as if we’re i

From the balcony they could see the Southern ship. Kwarive gazed at it.

“Why did they have to do this?” she asked. “What did they hope to accomplish?”

“Exactly what they said — peace.”

She gaped at him. “That’s so naive!”

“Is it? ‘Naive’ is not a word I associate with the Southern Rule. Superstitious, perhaps, traditional, yes, maddeningly set in their ways, certainly — but not naive.”

“I meant you are naive. They must have a hidden motive.”

“This is why I have no politics,” said Darvin. “I can’t think in those terms.”

“Then maybe it’s time you learned to, and fast!”

Her anger sounded sodden with distress. Darvin wrapped a wing around her. “Tell me why you were concerned about the tale of the talking trudge,” he said.

“It reminded me of the electric shittles,” she said.

“How?” He didn’t see it at all.

“If the wingless ones can influence the life force of a shittle, to make it grow an electrical device, why couldn’t they influence the life force of a trudge, to make it grow whatever part of the brain is needed for the power of speech?”

“No reason why they couldn’t, I suppose, but why should they?”

“The shittles have failed them,” she said. “We detected them, and we started sending messages back. That’s why they were destroyed — because the observation had become contaminated by our awareness of it. So now they’re trying again. What better way to watch us than through the eyes of trudges?”

Darvin shuddered. “That thought gives me the creeps,” he said. “However, it doesn’t explain why they should want a trudge to speak, assuming it really happened and wasn’t some drunk farmer’s bad dream.”

“Well, going along with that… I must admit it doesn’t fit.” She laughed. “So like a good scientist, I have another hypothesis: the aliens are sentimental like you, and think of the trudges as a sort of strong and very stupid people, and not as beasts.”

“Ah!” said Darvin. “In that case, why should they give them speech? If they know they have no speech, they know they are beasts, so giving them speech wouldn’t be seen as helping people. It would be seen as turning beasts into people.”

“They may not see speech as the issue. Perhaps it’s a side effect of raising the intelligence of the trudges.”

“And why should they want to do that? Queen of Heaven! If trudges became intelligent, or if a coming generation of trudges were born intelligent, they would — they would—”

“Slaughter us,” said Kwarive. “Without hesitation, without mercy, without scruple. And then, when they had wiped us from the face of the Ground, they would welcome — for a time, at any rate — their benefactors from above. And if they didn’t, they would have even less chance than we would of resisting the invasion.”

Darvin felt almost as shocked that Kwarive could imagine such a thing as he was by the sanguinary vision itself. The malevolence or incompetence it ascribed to the aliens also disturbed him, in part because it rang true with his own earlier dark suspicions. If the wingless aliens looked like trudges to human eyes, was it not possible that the aliens might themselves feel akin to the flightless trudges?

“This is a morbid fancy,” he said. “I will hear no more of it.”

“Not very scientific of you,” she chided. She clutched his shoulders and looked him in the eye. “Oh, Darvin, I’ve been thinking about what Bahron the Eye said, about how the aliens want our world. He may be right, you know. All life is a struggle for existence. Why should it cease to be a struggle if it spreads among the stars?”

15 — Hollow Spaces of the Forward Cone

14 365:11:02 10:43

Issue 100! That’s not a number I ever expected to reach when I switched to mailing. Nor did I then hope to have more readers than I ever did when anybody could access it. So thanks to all who’ve subscribed, and to all who’ve spread the word. I still miss the biologs, though. The newslines do their job but it’s all professionals and much less exciting than the buzz. So I appreciate all the mails that come to me, and the mailing lists, and so on. And I know it’s not just me — I know there are hundreds if not thousands out there writing and speaking and performing against the emergency and the embargo, people whom I’ve never heard of and who’ve never heard of me. (How do I know? From the number I do hear about, and how I hear about them — by chance, by word of mouth, and by the people I meet when I go to other towns or who come to Far Crossing, and I find whole communities of people in the same fight. And from the songs.) It’s not the same, but it gives us heart, it keeps up our spirits, and helps us realise that this dark time will soon be over.

Nearly six months of State of Emergency; just over six months to go. Soon? It seems a long time, I know, but remember that in that time even more of us will have turned sixteen, as I did a couple of months ago, and we’ll not just be able to vote in the referendum on the emergency but petition a recall and throw out the entire Council. Throw out the Council! I want to write that in virtual letters across the sunline. It’s going to happen. It’s unfair — most of the people on the Council are good people. (I’ll get hammered for saying that, I know, but it’s true, so don’t bother.) But it’s the price you pay. If you keep your ship generation cooped up in the ship, your ship generation grows up like grass under your feet and a huge cohort of it comes of age and votes you out.