Learning the World

Physically, it was secure. Socially, it was a sealed vessel with pressure building up. Enough pressure to—

Enough pressure to blow the place apart.

She smiled. “I think we’ll do the same,” she said. “Keep in touch.”

She cut the link before Constantine could do more than open his mouth.

14 366:04:10 12:32

Six weeks since separation. Grant’s been working in salvage a lot. We have a place in one of these complicated arboreal arrangements. Even the water supply oozes rather than flows. Capillary effects, right? Grant says it’s like working in a cave and coming home to a tree. He seems to enjoy it.

I’ve been doing what I can with our diminished funds, scouring the exchanges every day, and talking to as many people as I can reach back in the ship. It’s good to make contact again, but with the comms lag old friends seem oddly distant. Well, not just the comms lag. We may be growing apart as fast as we’re moving apart. They feel, for now at any rate, that they’re in it together with the founders, but more than that (and I can tell there are tensions with the founders already), they feel that we have somehow abandoned them and let them down. We feel we’re in it together with the crew. The main reason I keep in touch is to reduce that feeling of abandonment, but it’s a struggle.

Which leaves the virtualities. These are not as entertaining a diversion, or as useful an occupation, as I’d expected. This is not because they aren’t vivid. They are.

There are two problems with them. The first, and the most a

And you see hands picking up some heavy object, a juddering walk, and hear a crash.

Then you hear a number of other words, including: “brute,” “stupid,” “fuck,” and “off.”

The other problem is that although you see streets and fields and so on, most of the time you’re seeing the inside of some dark, dull, and dingy place: a cellar, a barn, a factory, a back room. The work done by the trudges is brutal, physical, and repetitive. Even watching it is tedious and exhausting. The only bit that’s interesting, in a way, is seeing the viewpoint of a trudge pulling a passenger cart. And that’s just too distressing to watch, because all the time you hear the crack and see the lashing tip of a whip.

14 366:04:13 22:47

I wish I could delete that. But in a way it’s good that I posted it, because I got a flood of (well, seven) messages telling me I’d been looking in the wrong place, and pointing me to the newslines. Everything is so different here you don’t imagine newslines. You think, this is crew quarters, everything runs on hint and rumour and scuttlebutt and that’s why I’m out of the loop, and you never think, there are people here who make news their work. But I digress.

Something strange, fascinating, and disturbing is going on.

But before I get on to that — well, you know what I’m going to get on to. Everybody’s talking about it. Alien television.

Did they learn it from us? Did they somehow pick up from our download the idea that there’s more to be done with television than use it for two-way, point-to-point communication? That you can broadcast!

Because that’s definitely what they’re doing now. We know that because some of the trudges from whose bodies we get transmissions see the big public screens, though they can’t be said to watch them, exactly. Those that do watch tend to get cuffed about the face and yelled at. So it’s something glimpsed sidelong. But we can see them, direct, from the aliens’ television broadcasts.

And what broadcasts! I think the long boring bits are the most significant. They tell us what they find important. A slow sweep of a camera around a vast conical chamber ringed with concentric stepped circular bars gappily lined with bat people hanging upside down and now and again making a lot of noise and flapping — it has to be a council, a parliament. I know Grey Universal says it’s a lecture theatre, but that’s just him. What his interpretation has going for it, I admit, is all the other stuff: the quaint rockets that go fast and explode; the peculiar multiwinged box-kite aircraft not much bigger than our microlights and obviously, painfully heavier; the strange balloons and dirigibles.

It could be, I suppose, some enormous system of public lectures on aviation and rocketry.

Except that you see the same sort of thing in two different languages, from the two separate parts of the divided continent. (Nothing from the big continent in the other hemisphere.)

And what you see, through the trudges’ eyes, in and above the cities: the bomb-catapults and giant crossbows wheeled through the streets on carriages drawn by straining teams of trudges, or huge coughing steam engines; the new flying machines very occasionally, the dirigibles floating overhead much more often than they did on our first surveillance, and the coordinated flights of great masses of bat people, swooping and wheeling in unison.

I know I’ve sometimes been controversial, but never for the sake of it. I’m no contrarian. What I see there is what most people see there; what I see in front of my eyes.

What I see is two powers preparing for war.

But that isn’t the worst. The worst, the most sinister development, is what’s happening to the trudges.

Reports from all over, of course — check the newslines — but here are two from me.

First one: I was in one of those dull virtualities I complained about the other night. The trudge was working at the back of a shop where they sell fresh meat. A huge carcass of one of the grazing animals had been tipped from some kind of truck into a stone-flagged yard, where two of the bat people cut it up with knives that look too small for the job. Their skill was impressive — they slide the blades into the joints and slice through the ligaments, and suddenly a whole limb falls off; or they slit the belly and all the guts spill out — but, as you will by now appreciate, it was a bit disgusting to watch. Anyway, the trudge whose POV I was getting and another were lugging the chunks to the front of the shop, where they threw them down on a big marble-slab counter. Back and forth, back and forth. And “my” trudge leans over to the other and says: “Get knife.”

The other trudge looks back and grunts. My trudge looks away and goes on with the work. But every so often, the POV focuses on the two bat people’s bloody blades. I’m just begi

I hear something like this: “You [chirp growl] boss?”

“[Twitter] to you?”

Then a lot of stuff that doesn’t translate.

The new arrival hands the blade guy a bundle of pieces of paper. I recognise it as the stuff they use as money. They walk over to “my” trudge and point to the front of the shop. “Out.”

So the trudge shuffles out, past the counter, past a small queue of bat people, out into the street and into the back of a motor vehicle. Then the virtually crashes. No input. I replayed it, taking more care to look, freezing images now and then, and I noticed something interesting about the interior of the van. It contained a big box of metallic-looking mesh, with a door that stood open as the trudge was hustled in.