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Learning the World

McLeod Ken (EN)

The blink comparator looked, in a bad light, like some absurd, weighty abstract of a human form: two metal-framed translucent white platforms with a black metal crosspiece projecting from the sides like wings, their accompanying adjustment and positioning rods like forearms, and a cluster of knobs, levers, and eyepieces on the top of the central pillar like asymmetric features on a deformed face. Behind that face was the intelligence of the thing, a mirror that flipped the view through the eyepiece from one platform-mounted plate to the other in rapid succession, over and over. Any change in an object’s position, from one night to the next, could be detected by its apparent jump. Such was the principle. In practice the job was difficult; aligning the plates so that the stars didn’t all jump at once was a finicky matter, and once that was done many passes were necessary to make sure nothing — among the thousands of separate points of light in each long-exposure plate’s field — had been missed. Even then Darvin could not be sure. Any world beyond the Warrior — given that perturbations in the Warrior’s orbit were themselves minute and disputed — was certain to be a small one, and its proper motion tiny. So far, everything that had jumped out at him had turned out not to be that distant and hypothetical seventh planet. Eliminating known planets and asteroids should have been routine, but was not; Darvin had rediscovered several known asteroids, whose orbits had long since been calculated but whose current position no one bothered to track, and had added three new ones to the catalogue. His colleagues called them Darvin’s Little Bastards.

He clipped the two plates on to their respective platforms and turned on the electric light that illuminated them from behind. The electric motor that flipped the mirror he set to its lowest speed, producing a blink rate of three per second. Then he perched on a stool and kicked off his sandals to grip a crossbar with his toes and clicked the lowest magnification of the monocular lenses into place. Peering through, he aligned the plates, by angle and by vertical and horizontal axes. Then he moved his hands to the paired knobs that shifted the view vertically and horizontally, and began in the top left-hand corner.

By the middle of the afternoon he had finished examining the fourth pair of plates. As he carried the plates back to the table he gazed out of the window, focused on infinity, and noticed the spots that danced in front of his eyes. Time to take a break. At the same moment the half-shaped thought that had struck him when he’d looked at the dirigible engine and propeller came back to his mind, fully formed.

He yelped. He laughed. “How stupid of us not to have thought of that!” he said aloud.

Darvin wanted to share it at once. He couldn’t share it with Orro; the Gevorkian physicist would be lecturing or calculating, and in neither activity would he tolerate interruption, however well intended or urgent. Oh well — Orro might turn up at the drinking den in the evening, as he’d hinted. But still, but still — Darvin couldn’t wait. Suppose he were to die at this moment, suppose his heart were to fail or brain to fuse, why then the great insight would be lost to the world! It was intolerable!

With a sort of morbid solemnity, Darvin grabbed a pen and sheet of paper. He sketched out and described the notion, and clipped the note to one of the platforms on the blink comparator. Let fate do its worst now, he thought, this idea wouldn’t die with him. Unless a meteor or dirigible were to crash into his office… He smiled at his overheated fancies. The impulse to tell someone right now didn’t go away. He felt as if something would explode out of his chest if he didn’t tell someone.

He looked at the clock on the wall, and at a timetable. He could tell Kwarive.

Darvin clambered out of the window and threw himself into the air. He flew to the Life Sciences Building and swooped under the canopy of the Lecture Pit. A cone of light rose out of the dark; slides illustrating the lecture were projected from below onto the canopy. He circled outside the cone, looking down, letting his eyes adjust. The lecturer stood in the middle, at the bottom; above him rose twenty or so tiers of concentric wooden rings, scattered with students hanging upside down, wings enfolding them as though asleep, eyes in most cases open, ears pricked. Darvin circled until he spotted Kwarive, hanging on the fourth ring, and dropped in beside her to the mutters and sideways shuffles of her neighbours. He clamped his feet around the railing, swung down, gri

“Something to tell you,” he said. “Really exciting.”

She smiled and shushed him. “I’m listening,” she whispered. “To the lecture,” she added.

Darvin pulled a disappointed face and settled to listen too. The illustration in light above him was of a human, all limbs outspread, matched with the smaller but similar shape of a flitter.

“ — philosopher Dranker, in the Classical Age of Orkana, was the first to classify humanity with the Chiropterae,” the lecturer said, “in his great work De Vita, which comes up to us in regrettably fragmentary form. It was only in the Dawn Age that Nargo, in his Tabulae Animalia, took the bolder step of subsuming man and flitter within the order Octomana — the eight-handed. Why was this bold?”

Because we don’t have eight hands, Darvin thought, but the question was rhetorical.

“This is why.” The slide projector rattled through a dozen or so pictures, all of them crowded with photographs or engravings of diverse animals: trudges, various other species of flitter, cursors, grazers, hunters, swimmers; it settled on a bright and much-enlarged photograph of a skitter, its beady red eyes staring, its bristles in mid-twitch, its hands clutching a nut and a berry and clinging to the twig on which it crouched. “This lowly little beast is the third member of that order, and close — as we would now put it — to the ancestral form. The bifurcate distal portion of the anterior and posterior limb—”

Why, Darvin wondered, did lecturers insist on larding their language with Orkanisms?

“ — and eight manipulative extremities are in fact the primitive condition, from which those of the Chiropterae including ourselves are derived. In the chiropteran arm one hand and forearm has become the wing; in the foot, the two are fused, but the condition is still evident though relict, in our heel-claws. All of the land vertebrates — amphibians, reptiles, and mammals — and the sea mammals and reptiles are descended from octomanal ancestors, as can be shown by comparative anatomy—”