Learning the World

And, as if from around a corner, voices.

High-pitched and fast but with almost recognisable syllables, quite other than the bat people’s chirruping patter.

As she strained to hear, the view before her tipped forward and filled with a crossbar and a pair of four-digited hands. The hands, encumbered about the wrists with a sort of ragged fleshy sleeve, squeezed between the bars and twisted around with a disregard to their own damage that made her flinch. Blood slicked the boards. There was grunt, and then a rattle and squeal of metal, and a hard rap.

The hands were wrenched back through the slats. For a second or her gaze fixed upon raised wrists, scratched and scored, spiked with splinters, bleeding back to the elbow. Then the wrists reversed and the hands slammed forward, thrusting the door open with a thud. The POV rushed straight ahead, jolting as if from a camera on the forehead or shoulder of someone ru

A shout from behind.

“Hey — the trudge is out!”

“After him!”

Before Synchronic could assimilate her shock at understanding the words, her vision became a confused, blurred rolling as the viewpoint topped the fence and fell down the other side, then more ru

Then wings, a glint of teeth, a clawed foot jammed straight into the viewpoint. A flurry and a welter. Sky and a sunlight flash on a downward-stabbing blade. A long, deep, full-throated scream that ended on a rising, resonant pitch, as if a soul had streaked upward to the bright, blank blue that was the last image to fill its sight.

Darkness and silence.

16 — The Anomalies Room

Kraighor, the capital of Seloh’s Reach, lay a long way around the coast from Five Ravines. Darvin had been there once, when he’d been a little kit, and his memories of it were an unstable mix of the vivid and the vague. Loud streets, sharp tastes, a smell of burning coal, a high and roost-encrusted hill, trees with dark and twisted leaves. He and his parents had arrived by cable car from inland, and it was his memories of the station that he felt were reliable: if it hadn’t changed much he could still find his way around it. The city itself was a blur.

This time he travelled there alone, and by the coastal packet steamer. It made the trip every three days; the voyage took from the early morning of one day to noon of the next, with three or four stops at small ports along the way. Such halts gave the passengers — about an eight of eights — a welcome opportunity to stretch their wings; flying off the side of the boat was discouraged, because of the danger of falling behind. Tedium, motion sickness, yelling kits, sleeping racks in which everyone swayed and bumped into each other like ill-matched pendulums, salted meat and bruised fruit, travelling salesmen who liked to talk… Darvin took with him plenty of reading matter.

The physics-wire offprints were there to salve his conscience. The bulk of the papers he stacked on the slopped table of the steamer’s saloon came from an eight-days’ worth of the press of the town and the reach. The local sheet, The Eye on Five, had been first with the story of the Southerners’ communique, which had been picked up a day later by the weighty Kraighor Voice and its popular counterpart, The Day. As he traced the story through the pages, Darvin found none of the reactions he’d have predicted, in part — he had to admit to himself — on the basis of his adolescent reading of engineering tales.

Scepticism hadn’t so much as twitched an eyebrow. All of the papers reported the Southerners’ story as serious and probably true. The Height had made no public comment as yet, but Darvin suspected that an official word had come down. Panic and hysteria had remained in their roosts, with barely a flutter. The news of the alien presence in the system was treated as Ground-shaking and portentous, but as an occasion for sober vigilance rather than alarm. Priests of the cults — who, to Darvin’s exasperation, were quoted as often as scientists — had hailed it as confirmation of the ancient dogmas of life’s plurality and the Queen’s fecundity. He himself was quoted too; having been referenced in the Southerners’ brochure, he could hardly avoid it; he had suffered several interviews, in which he’d presented the facts about his discovery, and no opinions. The government’s secrecy and continued silence on the subject was ascribed to caution and wisdom rather than any sinister purpose. Where worry was expressed, it was about not the aliens but Gevork. No persecution of Southerners had broken out, nor any suspicion fallen on the luckless trudges; at least, none that the press saw fit to report. This was consistent with his own experience, if not with his initial fears: Darvin had heard nothing from Orro, and his handler for the Sight had said nothing untoward at his most recent contact.

The engineering tales were false. That hadn’t stopped the most popular pulp in Five Ravines, Other Worlds, from rushing a special edition into print so fast that the ink still smelled sweet and fresh on the page, like honey-gum. The cover pirated the pictures on the Southern pamphlet and headlined a story whose title, “Invasion from Infinity!” bore witness to a brash disdain of doing right as much as of blithe contempt for having being proved wrong. Darvin noted the depiction of the invaders as giant wingless humanoids. He felt an irritated temptation to draw the Sight’s attention to it as evidence of a security lapse, more for the discomfiture this would inflict on the reckless editor than because it mattered. But he put away the unworthy impulse before he slept.

The ship rounded the eastern headland of Kraighor Bay under a high sun. Airships speckled the sky. His keen first glimpse of the city disappointed Darvin. Between the harbour and the foot of the central Mount most of it lay under a yellowish haze from which only the upper storeys of the taller buildings stood out. The Mount itself rose clear above it, crusted with the Height. The lower levels of that tall, spreading, ramshackle edifice were of stone, the upper and more recent of wood, almost as raw as scaffolding, a structure always growing and never finished, stone replacing wood from below as in a tree that calcified as it grew. The analogy of form and function had been a gift to satirists and a cliche of cartoonists.

As the ship drew closer the smell of waste fumes from the rock-oil distillate that fuelled the numerous motor vehicles became so pervasive that the keenest nose lost all sensitivity to it, and only the throat felt it, like grit. Darvin was so eager to get off the ship that he abandoned his papers and took wing a minute’s flight from the shore. He alighted coughing on the quay, pushed his way through waiting passengers — the ship would continue down the coast, to return the following morning — dodged the importunities of cabdrivers and trudge-handlers, and stalked into the city. He made his way to his destination by several stops of a cable trolley, a flight across a park, and a short walk, following a route he cribbed from a map he’d been told to burn. Where the Sight’s headquarters were he did not know, but he knew that the office to which he’d been directed was not it.

As he walked down a back street towards that address it occurred to him, not for the first time, that he might be heading into trouble: a debriefing with prejudice, as the Sight cant went. But short of turning back, there was nothing to be done. The entrance he sought was above a row of victuallers’ shops, not of the best quality. Flies buzzed in air haunted by the smells of meat that had hung too long, of fruit that was past ripe, and of dried herbs gone damp. Shopkeepers eyed Darvin through drifts of laughterburn, bored. He sprinted his last few steps, rose a few wingbeats, turned and swooped to the door. It opened, as instructed, without a knock.