Learning the World

“But — two-headed monsters!”

She shrugged. “A new disease? A false rumour? It doesn’t matter. The Sight wants to know of it.”

“What do you make of this year’s increase in unusual events involving trudges, then?”

“I don’t try to interpret,” she said. “My job — our job, rather — is to summarise, tabulate, and report.”

“So this matter has been reported?”

“Among others. Monster tales are many this year.”

“Why?”

“Why? Well. In my experience, any one strange event results in many spurious reports. One Gevorkian airship over the coast, whose presence we can confirm independently, gives rise to a double-eight of sightings from leagues around, from places that could not have seen it, and could not have heard of it at the time. Rumour flies faster than sound, as the saying goes.”

“Or is backdated in recollection?”

“That too.” The creases around her eyes quirked. “What is your theory about the trudges, by the way?”

He didn’t know how much she knew about the project. Possibly she had never heard of the ether-wave emissions from insects and trees. It was not his place to tell her. “I think,” he said, “that something co

She didn’t quite conceal her surprise. “How could that happen?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I would very much appreciate if you were to bring all such reports to the specific attention of the higher ranks.”

“Of course,” she said. “Anything else, before you go?”

“I understand,” he said, “that the Sight, at times, finds it necessary for the security and stability of the Reach to… discourage public discussion of certain matters. I submit that this trudge business may be one of them.”

“I’ll pass your suggestion upward,” she said. “Will that be all?”

It was the second hint. He saw himself out.

Late-afternoon sunlight slanted through the heights and roosts. The first stirrings of the evening breeze off the Mount and the range behind Kraighor had begun to shift the day’s haze offshore. More people eddied among the shops and stalls, and the street didn’t smell so stale. As Darvin walked among them he felt his sense of himself shift, like the flip of a blink comparator, from lowly agent of the Sight to visitor to the capital, a free man with time on his hands. The city had a great and fine university. Its department of astronomy was a place he had long intended to see. His reputation now preceded him. He could be sure of a welcome, even at this hour, and a convivial evening. The dining hall would be ample, the alcohol-laden fruit abundant, the laughterburn mellow, the talk stimulating. It was all there, a few stops away on the Northeast Cable.

He considered it, and reckoned it would be an opportunity missed. He could meet scholars and students any day of the eight. The city’s temples, the complex, piled-up stone roost of the Height, the maze of back streets — these he had to see. He turned away from the thoroughfare and headed back along the side street, deeper into the city.

Clinging with both feet to a rattling cable bar that squealed for lack of oil, Darvin turned his head from the swaying bodies likewise suspended in front of him on this cheapest of transports and peered down at the market beneath his nose. A few stalls of cheap domestic stuff: mats, burners, brushes. Not worth a look, and in any case packing up. It was the end of the day’s third quarter, the hour halfway between noon and midnight, the time when people headed home. There was a peculiar division in the transport. Tired workers from the shops and factories clogged the cable bars and trolleys; civil servants from the Height darkened the sky, welcoming the chance to stretch their wings after a hard day behind the desk. Darvin had in just the past hour roamed the perimeter of the edifice, which he’d reached by cable car. He’d watched the regular wheelings of the sabreurs of Seloh’s Guard, and the comings and goings of airships at the skeletal copse of mooring-masts on the slope below. The Height was a busy place, but how much of its activity represented something real, and how much really symbolic, was another matter.

The cable bar swung over a square puddled with yellow lights around trees, tables and stalls. Smells of tea and stumblefruit wafted up. A few workers in the line ahead of him, who had dozed, feet reflex-locked to the bars, jolted awake and let go, gliding down. Darvin followed. The momentum of the cable’s rush carried him forward as his back flexed upward and his wings braced. Down he spiralled. Tiny green spearpoints of new growth bristled the dusty trees. He alighted on cobbles and strolled to a tea bar. There was room for his feet at the perch and for his elbows at the counter. The serving girl was bright and brisk. A trudge squatted just beyond the end of the counter, leashed to the leg of the stall and gnawing on a bone while its master drank with friends at an adjacent table. Some people at the counter talked and laughed; others, solitary like Darvin, sipped in silence.

From a nearby temple the sound of many voices singing echoed: there was a trick they had, of concentrating the sound by focusing the crowded singers’ wings. Darvin listened to the hymn with a mixture of enjoyment of its beauty and disdain of its content. He was no scoffer: at the sight of the galaxy, Deity seemed the most evident and insistent of deductions. Like most astronomers, he was devout. Like almost all, he had no truck with the cults. It was not only that they still held a grudge against astronomy, the science that had stolen heaven from their very hands, though the more enlightened were ever eager to honey-gum the antique myths in symbolism. For the priests, one god was never enough, nor a good life a sufficient offering. For them there had to be sacrifices, conducted with sickles and herbs at the new moons and knives and calves at the new year; and songs at evening and morning.

Varlun, a noted philosopher of the Dawn Age, who had lived three eights-of-eights of years ago in Gevork, had written of the passages from day to night, and night to day. At night, he wrote in his essay “What Is Dawn?,” the starry skies above told you all you needed to know about the might and mind of Deity. By day, the Sun’s kindly warmth told you all you needed to know of its creator’s goodness. And in the evening hours and in the dawn the promptings, indeed at times the pains, of conscience told you all you needed to know of right and wrong. For this the priests had had him locked up for seven years.

Darvin examined his conscience for stirrings and found nothing that pricked. His unease about the trudges had ceased to be a moral pang and become a practical concern. How different, he wondered, would life be if there had been no trudges? No tractable, versatile beast to do the heavy and dirty work? Some engineering tales had speculated on that. Sometimes they averred that the art of invention would have developed faster, culminating in a society little different from that of today, but with two-legged, two-armed machines in the place of trudges; for some tales of the future such machines had become a part of the furniture. Others, darker and more daring, had made the blunt point that if there had been no trudges to bear the load, some men would have been forced to bear it, slashed and lashed, leashed and chained, some gelded and spayed. And as that came to revolt the conscience, or became too clumsy a method to work in manufacture, why then they would have been turned loose, and hunger having taken the place of all other inducement, they would have done the same work for pay. The usual refinement of such tales was in finding ingenious ways to exclude the freed human trudges from nature’s bounty of fruit and prey. The crudest involved enormous fences and aerial barriers; the subtlest, debt.