Learning the World

It might just be a coincidence, but that box would work as a Faraday cage. It would block all radio transmissions.

Shaken, I did some prowling around, and found a scene where I’m looking out of a wooden barred box. There are other trudges in the box. They look strange and out of proportion, and I realise all of a sudden that they’re juveniles.

A hand reaches in, there’s a second or two of going head over heels, and then an open metal cage and then nothing.

Check the newslines. It’s happening all over the place. Check the virtualities. They’re dropping like a stone in a gravity well.

Our inputs are being cut off one by one. The trudges infected by our nanotech are being rounded up. Beings to whom we have given language and self-awareness.

We can’t let this happen.

Grant is not so pleased. He’s just gone off to work in the tank, after having been told — along with everybody else — that salvage work is over for the duration. Instead, every available hand has been mobilised to coordinate a fleet of those big spidery crab-like machines in tearing up the carbonaceous chondrites and working the buckyfibre-spinarets to make twenty thousand kilometres of rope. Not to mention breaking stuff up for reaction mass.

14 366:04:14 07:10

Damn. Just checked my incoming. I’m on the reserve-tank work roster too. Well, at least they didn’t send one of these all-hands calls to my head. Fourteen-hour days for the next week. And in one gravity at that, as we boost across the system on main drive. No news as to the intervention plans as yet, but I think it’s a safe guess we’re going into geosynchronous orbit. Talk to you after the war, I guess.

14 366:04:14 06:08

We’re going in!

This is the first time in my life that I have felt proud that Constantine is my half-father.

20 — Second Contact

The camp had changed. New launch-ramps had been built, a long balloon-cable ascended from the middle of the square, new sheds and barracks had been thrown up. Fresh craters and wreckage littered the test ranges. Flattened and tarred strips of what looked like roadway had the tiny crosses of airframes clustered at their near ends. An enormous parabolic structure of wood and wire mounted on an arrangement of iron-wheeled carriages on a circular rail turned hither and yon, like a hand-cupped ear to heaven. The greatest difference, Darvin reflected, was that he was looking down at all this from the cabin of the descending airship. The location was no longer a secret.

Along with the secrecy had gone the complacency. Not much room for that with an extra moon in the sky. Darvin glanced upward and sideways at the thought of it. He couldn’t see it in the bright daylight sky, but he knew it was there. Unlike the natural moons, and for that matter the invisible third, artificial moon, this new satellite did not rise or set. Its orbital period was one day, to the minute. Through even a good amateur telescope its conical structure was unmistakeable. Darvin wondered where the other cone from the gigantic world-ship had gone. The obvious presumption was that it was being held in reserve. Bahron, when he’d telephoned to summon Darvin to the camp, had made the point that if the aliens were holding back half their forces, this meant they thought there was a chance they might lose the other half. Darvin didn’t find this notion convincing, but he hoped Bahron was spreading it around. It might help morale.

The airship drifted, nudged by its rotors, to the perimeter mooring-mast. The engines feathered down. The door slid open. Eight-and-four passengers — the rest had all been close-mouthed scientists, leafing through pages of small-print formulae — made their way to the exit and dived out.

As he glided groundward Darvin spotted Nollam walking across the central square. He banked, flapped, sideslipped, and alighted beside Nollam in a puff of dust.

“Show-off,” said Nollam.

“Watch your lip, techie.”

“Less of that,” said Nollam, straightening so much he almost leaned back. “I’ve been awarded a degree, I have. Master Scholar.”

“You?” said Darvin. “Well, allow me to congratulate you. I’m a mere Scholar Ordinary. Have you been studying in your spare tune?”

Nollam gave him a look. “I got it for my work.” He waved a hand, indicating the giant parabolic aerial in the middle distance.

“Ah, for the design—”

“No,” said Nollam. “For founding a new discipline. Etheric astronomy.”

“First I’ve heard of it, but again, congratulations.”

“Oh, you won’t have heard of it,” said Nollam. “It’s all under wraps. Morale reasons. But they gave me the degree to keep me happy and quiet, knowing I was recognised and would be remembered even if the whole field stays a secret until after I’m dead.”

Darvin wasn’t sure if the young technician — correction, Master — wasn’t tugging his wing. “Serious?”

“Serious,” said Nollam. “Can’t even tell you. Lips stitched, and all that. Maybe someday.”

“I’ll take your word for it, Magister.”

“You do that, Scholar, you do that… How’s Kwarive?”

“Fine,” said Darvin. “She’s been called up to… a different part of the project.”

“And I shouldn’t ask what, right?”

“Right.”

In fact Darvin didn’t know either. That Kwarive had been urged to bring the trudge kit along suggested it had something to do with the Sight’s plans — whatever they were — for the articulate members of that species.

Their walk had converged with that of other arrivals and residents, at one of the larger barracks blocks. All furniture had been removed, except for a stage at the front with a table on top, a telekinematographic recorder and projector to one side, and a screen behind it. There was standing room only. As they crowded in, Darvin was surprised to see Nollam push ahead and walk up to the front, where he took a place beside Markhan at the table. The crowd shuffled and settled. Looking around, Darvin recognised Orro and Holder, and a few faces from the earlier days of the project.

“You all know why we’re here,” said Markhan. “The new arrival in the sky. What you may not know is that it has already made contact with us.”

The effect was like a gust through trees. Markhan stared it down.

“Nollam,” he said.

“It’s a repeating message,” said Nollam. “It definitely comes from the cone thing, it’s on the same wavelength as the first message that got aborted, and it’s definitely addressed to us. It’s… startling. Let me play you a tape of it. Pull the curtains, somebody.”

The moments of confusion and shouted advice and complaint that followed gave him plenty of time to adjust the volume and focus.

“Right,” he said. He threw a switch.

The tape deck whirred and the screen lit up.

The first image was of a white background with a flechette shape in the centre and a wavy, jagged line near the bottom. With a start and an intake of breath, Darvin recognised it as Kwarive’s sketch-map, that had been originally projected to the aliens by the electric shittles. But only about a third of the crowd — those who’d been there then — so recognised it. The others gasped and nudged each other at the next image, which faded in as the first faded out. It showed a picture from above of the same coastline and interior of Seloh’s Reach, immediately recognisable as such because it was superimposed for a few seconds on the black line on the map.

It pulled up, back and back, until the nearby facing coast of Gevork came into view, and the whole cha