Learning the World

Inside, he found a broad corridor of fresh-painted wood, whose far end opened on a balcony above a courtyard. He could see daylight and a tree. Along the corridor suspended electric globes every few spans cast a clear cold light. On each side of the corridor were four doors, marked with the names of obscure commercial properties: import-export agencies, brokerages and the like. He knocked on the third left. It opened a little and an elderly woman peered around it.

“Come in,” she said. She had red fur and a dappled chest. “You must be the famous Darvin.”

He nodded. “And you?”

“Arrell,” she said, after a moment’s pause.

The room was long and wide, windowless and brightly lit. Shelves lined its walls. Racks interrupted the aisles between tables, over which the bright lights hung. Eight and two people worked there, most turning great stacks of newspapers and journals into scissored heaps of wastepaper and small neat files of clippings. Others processed letters and notes from (Darvin guessed) informants. Four of the people were middle-aged or older, the rest young. A teleprinter machine clattered in a far corner. Here and there, telephones flashed rather than rang, and were answered at once. Tea braziers smouldered and pots bubbled. It was a place where much leaf was chewed.

“Welcome to the Anomalies Room,” said Arrell. “Tea?”

“Thank you,” said Darvin. He looked around, marvelling. “Has the Sight always done this?”

“You should know better than to ask,” said Arrell, threading her way between tables. “But since you do,” she added over her shoulder, “yes. But not on this scale. This is our new office — with, as you see, some new staff.”

As he followed her Darvin glanced at the words lettered on the open boxes into which the researchers placed their clippings or reports; these he glimpsed: Sky. Water. Weather. Lights. Signs. Ground. Imponderables. Wonders. Powers. Dust. Falls. Foreigners. Monsters. Unusual Acts. Mental.

The system of classification eluded him.

“I regret,” Arrell said, over tea, “that you couldn’t tell us your area of interest.”

“It was something I didn’t want to mention on the phone.”

Arell laughed. “Who but the Sight would be listening?”

“Good question.”

She looked back at him with a minute increment of respect. “True,” she said. “So, what is it?”

“Trudges,” said Darvin. “Unusual behaviour of.”

“See under ‘Monsters,’ ” said Arrell.

She led him to a small table to one side and left, to return with a deep cardboard box, so heavy that he sprang to help her. The thump of box on table made people look up and frown.

“The file has grown,” she said. She reached up and pulled a cord to switch on the table’s overhead light. “Let me know if you need anything.”

The question of the trudges had preyed on Darvin’s mind ever since Lenoen had raised it. He had no one to talk with about it except Kwarive. He didn’t want to talk with anyone else about it. If anything could create the kind of mass panic that the news of aliens hadn’t, it had to be this. He himself had begun to give every trudge he passed a wary glance, and now and again had seen, or imagined he’d seen, a spark of thought or anger in their eyes. One day he looked back at such a trudge, to find that the trudge had turned its head to look back at him. That moment he had decided on the course that had brought him here.

The box was divided by loose cardboard partitions. Almost half had one for each outer-month, with the cuttings stacked vertically between them. There were already eight-and-one of them, taking the record back to the previous year. The other section was of everything from before that year, and thin stuff it was, though it went back many years and made up most of the bulk. Why the Sight had kept track of curious events for all that time Darvin didn’t know, but he could guess. It had nothing to do with a scrying of portents; it was that the circulation of strange teles and rumours gave clues to the popular mood: ripples of anxiety or hysteria, cold deep currents of belief and doubt.

In that early archival section he found a handful of trudge oddities: instances of albinism, of wingless freaks (there had been some speculation that the acquired characteristic was becoming inherited; Kwarive would have smiled); of travelling performers who showed off trudges capable of counting or other unusual feats; of nests and entire colonies of feral flying trudges that had reverted to their ancestral physique and mode of life. None mentioned the use of speech, though some claimed understanding. Most of the reports were of sports thrown up by other breeds of domestic beast — he lost count of two-headed calves — and of sightings in the wild: sea snakes, lake lizards, mysterious man-like beings of the mountains or deserts, great winged things in the sky. That there were unknown species in the world Darvin didn’t doubt, and Kwarive had told him of a growing interest among biologists in mutants, which some thought had a bearing on questions of evolution; but most of this was most likely clutter: misperception and misreporting, rumours hardened to fact and become precedent and template for others, and downright hoaxes and lies.

He sighed, wiped dust and ink from his fingers, and proceeded to the more recent files. The parade of monsters was now longer and weirder, capering across his i

A veterinary surgeon had lost an eye when a trudge kit had lashed out with its foot when its turn came to be spayed. Another kit had screamed “No!” when its wings were slashed, had gone into a decline and died. An old woman who lived alone had been found strangled by powerful hands; suspicion had fallen on her (now missing) trudge. A trudge in an upland farm had unlocked its stable door, and had had to be stabbed by the farmer and his boy as it fled across the meadows. A second-generation (it was thought) feral trudge, wings unslashed, had haunted the skies above a back-country village for many a night, evading nets and dodging crossbolts. Mutilated carcasses of cattle had littered the vicinity.

That was in the first outer-month. Albeit that the reports came from all over Seloh and Gevork, and one (the strangling, recounted by a returned sailor) from the Southern Rule, it was a troubling tally. Over the next eight outer-months it increased, not month by month, but over all.

He leaned back and stared up at the ceiling mats, where tiny skitters ran upside down with sticky toes, catching mat bugs in long looped tongues. The real world was wonder enough, and seemed light-years distant from the crazy tales he’d read.

The woman Arrell’s face loomed above him. He rocked forward. “Finished?” she asked.

“For now,” said Darvin. “May we talk?” He tipped his head back a little.

She nodded. “Outside.” She led him down the corridor to another door, which opened to a small office. Flat panels of floatbark covered the walls. The room had more light fixtures than seemed necessary. Arrell switched on two of them, perched at the back of a desk, and motioned Darvin to a seat.

“We call this the interview room,” she said, with a slight smile.

“For debriefings with prejudice?”

“Yes. It’s not as sinister as you may have heard. Be that as it may, you’re assured of privacy.”

“All right,” said Darvin. “What I must ask you first is: how much analysis do you make of all these reports? How does the Sight handle them?”

“In ancient times,” said Arrell, “Anomalies was a department of divination. Today it remains a small but significant element of statecraft… I’m sure you understand why.”

“To gauge the susceptibility of the populace to rumours and alarms?”

“Not at all!” said Arrell, sounding surprised at the suggestion. “Because the Sight needs to know about all unusual and untoward events. We sift the dross for nuggets. To take some banal examples, a mysterious flying light could be a Gevorkian airship. A strange man of the mountains — an infiltrator or a rebel. A sea-snake — the wake of an unseen ship.”