Learning the World

“Make yourselves at home,” he said when they crowded into his office, and left them to sort themselves out while he made tea. The stacks of unopened envelopes of celestial exposures, still sent every eight-days from the observatory, nagged at his conscience. He’d kept the order up for the sake of some future student who wanted to take up the search for the outer planet, and had never bothered to examine them himself. A packet had been in his basket as they came in. He thumb-clawed it open as the pot heated up. There was no room to spread them out. He flicked through them pair by pair. Orro’s arm reached over his shoulder.

“That one,” he said.

“How do you know?”

Orro gave him a puzzled look. “We solved the equations last year.”

“So we did, Orro, so we did.” He sighed. “Could you take care of the tea, old chap, and I’ll fire up the blink comparator.”

He positioned the plates and adjusted the focus and started sca

He wondered how much difference there was between his mind and Orro’s. Where did any normal person stand in relation to someone who could visualise orbits from equations and recognise small patches of sky from memory and place the orbiting body in the right patch after half a year? Orro wasn’t doing mathematics quickly; he found calculation as laborious as the next fellow; but once he’d done it, he saw. Was the working of Orro’s mind as different from Darvin’s as his was from that of a trudge? It wasn’t a superiority in reasoning. It was like having another faculty, as alien to the normal human as language to the brute.

He looked up. “It’s confirmed,” he said. “I’ll have the photographs sent daily, so we can track what’s going on.”

“That would be good,” said Bahron, from the windowsill. “Going to the observatory would be better.”

Orro handed Darvin the tea.

“Thanks. What next?”

Bahron jerked his head at Holder. “Ask the sabreur.”

Holder, standing by the door holding a mug as if not quite sure whether to drink from it or piss in it, glanced around all the expectant faces.

“As a Gevorkian I feel somewhat awkward giving directions to—”

“Don’t,” said Orro.

“Thank you,” said Holder. “Forgive me. This is all very new. Once the treaty is proclaimed, the whole security aspect changes. The new project will be public. Much more work will be done openly. Our etheric calculators and systems of rocket guidance may prove invaluable, when combined with Seloh’s advances in aviation and etheric telekinematography. The secret sites will still be used, but it will be possible to ship in far more perso

“Excuse me,” said Kwarive. She looked up from giving drops of tea on her fingertip to Handful.

“Yes?” Holder didn’t sound like a man used to being interrupted.

“You say there’s nothing to hide. That’s true — between us humans. We have nothing to hide from each other. What about hiding from the aliens?” She stroked Handful’s back. “This little creature, for example, is transmitting etheric waves as we speak. I don’t know if it’s getting back to the third moon, but it could be. Other trudges are doing the same, on a scale we don’t yet know. It’s going to be bad enough dealing with intelligent trudges, without worrying about trudge… intelligence, if you see what I mean! If we’re going to keep what we’re doing secret from the aliens, we have to do it out of the sight and hearing of trudges.”

“What do you mean, hearing?” asked Holder.

Darvin recalled Lenoen the Southerner’s comment about what it took to surprise him.

“Well,” said Kwarive, “if this little one is learning our language, and transmitting to the aliens, who’s to say the aliens aren’t learning it too?”

“That is a good point,” said Holder. “I have seen etheric calculators, and I am not inclined to set limits to what a more advanced science may do. However, it changes little, because we have no intention of concealing our activities from the aliens.”

“What?” cried Darvin.

Holder made a helpless gesture. “Bahron? You can explain it better.”

“Don’t know about that,” said Bahron. “But I’ll try. See, I and the science boss, Markhan, and smarter folks than me, like Arrell, we’ve talked a lot about this. Especially after the shittle affair. Other parts of the project have looked long and hard at what that germ-plasm fiddling tells us about what our friends up there can do. We never forget that they’re up there, looking down, seeing us as sharp as a hunter fixing on a skitter. We never forget that their eyes are down here — maybe in the trudges, maybe shittles again, maybe things we can’t see at all. When I was a little kit, and even a big kit, we knew there was ether, right, it’s self-evident, but we had no idea there was such a thing as etherics. Invisible waves passing right through us and all that. We know the aliens use etherics, but don’t know what else they may use. In other invisible realms, so to speak. So we could be hiding away in caves and under roofs and screening for all the things we know about, and the wingless could be just watching us and smiling behind their big hands.”

He slid off the windowsill and laughed. “You ever get that creepy feeling of being watched from above? Like, when you were little? Kwarive tells me it’s nature’s way of overprotecting us, if I understand her right. You’re safer to be wrong that way lots of times than wrong the other way once. Well. There’s no point trying to hide from the aliens. We’re not going to try. We’re going to do everything right out in the open. It’s our only chance.”

“For what?” asked Kwarive. “Scaring them off?”

“In a word,” said Bahron, “yes.”

Darvin and Kwarive laughed. None of the others did.

“It’s not as mad as it sounds,” said Bahron. “The wingless may be driven by population pressure, like anyone else, but there’s no reason to think Orro was wrong about their being peaceful — at least in their past experience. That big world-ship of theirs doesn’t look like it was expecting trouble. Markhan and Nollam have had a chance to go through the pictures and do some calculations, and it looks like a big tin drum full of their women and children. It’s not the sort of thing you’d send first into an unknown system if you had any idea there might be somebody shooting back. So regardless of what their capabilities are, they might not have much stomach for a fight. If they see us tooling up, building rockets and aeroplanes and such, they might just back off.”

Kwarive laughed again. “That’s quite a supposition!”

“Like I said,” Bahron replied, “it’s our only chance. And anyway, what have we got to lose?”

“Lose!” echoed Handful. “Lose!”

Bahron fixed a glare on the kit. “There is that, of course. I don’t see how turning trudges into men is anything but hostile. But now we know what’s going on, we can deal with it.”

“How?” Kwarive asked. She held the kit closer as she said so, wrapping a wing around it, Darvin noticed.

“The Sight is on the case,” Bahron said. “What the Height intends to do has to be kept secret from the public until the last minute. That’s all I can say for now. I would advise you all very strongly to say nothing on the subject.”

With that ominous admonition he left.

Darvin had last spent time at the observatory when he was a student. The popular image of the astronomer as nightly stargazer had never had much truth in it, and in modern times it had even less. Observation was still the basis, but the long-exposure camera had become a much more fruitful source of observation than the telescope alone. Much observation could be done by poring over photographs and spectroscope readings, and besides, it was in the application of mathematics to the results that such progress as occurred was being made. The science was in one of its difficult periods, when new observations didn’t so much solve problems as raise them. What fuelled the stars? Why did they show such a regular sequence of colours? What was the nature of the nebulae? What subtle property of the ether made the light of distant stars and nebulae shift toward the red end of the spectrum? Compared with such questions as these, Darvin’s search for the outermost planet had been trivial: a postgraduate project carried too far into the early part of his professional career, more out of a certain stubbor