Learning the World

He’s tall — or rather, long. About two metres from his heels to the top of his head, and a good half-metre more if you were to measure from his toes to the top of his hair. His hands are long too. Like his feet, they protruded bare from his red one-piece coverall. His hair is long and in numerous braids. Brown skin, blue eyes, angular features. It was sorely evident that he’s not six years older than most of us.

He waved, smiled, and beckoned us along the rope. I had some idea of how to handle myself, and kept close behind his feet, which waved in front of me like a skin diver’s. The others did a lot of giggling and screaming and fooling around, or so it sounded. I disdained to look back. At the entrance to the tree Horrocks turned around, and shook hands with everyone as they passed him. Then we all followed Horrocks through the branches and into the tree. Its interior space was crisscrossed with lianas and with branches extended and shaped to a clutter of grown furnishings: hoops of wood to put your legs through, flat tables, handholds, complex storage spaces, sleeping pods, a few opaque cylindrical chambers that I guessed were privies; and with optical and plastic tubing and modified leaves or nuts that formed translucent skins for great wobbling spheres of water.

Horrocks darted to the centre of the tree’s interior space and we all clustered around him, clutching various handholds or leg-hoops. It was in a leg-hoop that I sat, my arms hooked over the upper part, my pack looped to my wrist. Horrocks himself just hung there in the air, now and then twisting or somersaulting to vary his address.

“Welcome,” he began, “and thank you all again for choosing my habitat. We’ll be here for a week or so. This tree is a typical first-generation home, nothing too elaborate. It’s a lot more comfortable than a free-fall construction shack, but we’ll get on to that in due course. For now, the main thing you have to learn is how to work in free fall, how to work in vacuum, and how to operate the machines…”

He went on for a bit, telling us what we were going to do, and then we suited up and went out and started to do it. We weren’t in vacuum, of course; the main reason for the suits was to acquaint us with their use, and secondarily to protect us from the dust thrown off by the machines. There’s no point in describing it all; you’ll either have done it, in which case it’ll be boring, or you haven’t, in which case you won’t understand. What I want to talk about is why we do it, because, as I huddle here with my muscles aching, I wonder too. Everybody who plans to homestead does basic training. It’s customary, yes, but that doesn’t explain it. Why are we doing things ourselves that could be done, and that we hope eventually to see done, by automata? Nobody has told me. So I have figured it out. It’s like camping. It builds character.

14364:06:1922:21

Having thought about it further, I now understand that it has much more to do with how far away we are from anyone else. We are four hundred years from help and four information-years (hence eight or more elapsed years, counting question, turnaround, and answer) from advice. Our automata are the result of generations of iteration: long enough for source code to mutate. The Destiny Star system will likely contain molecules no one has encountered before. Some of them could burn our machinery. Accidents happen.

So we have to be ready to work, with digging and forging tools, in free fall and raw vacuum, in space suits, just like primitive man. We all have to become like the Moon Cave People, for a while when we are very young, so that in an emergency we can be as tough and self-reliant as they were.

Oh yes. Why I hate Horrocks Mathematical:

We had just come off shift the first night and we were all brewing and cooking, and the others were all talking in their two little cliques. Horrocks turned up beside me. I offered him tea and he took it.

“I like your biolog,” he said. “ ‘Learning the World.’ ”

My ears burned. “You read it?”

“Now and again.”

He looked away, squirting the teabulb straight into his mouth. I still couldn’t do that without scalding.

“Constantine?” he went on. “You know who he is?”

“No,” I said. I bit some berrybread. Crumbs floated. I tried to avoid inhaling any; scooping them was difficult, like catching flies: they danced away from my fingers. “It’s fu

“I suppose they do,” said Horrocks, looking amused for no reason I could discern. “And your caremother didn’t tell you about him?”

“No,” I said. “What about him?” I resented the tone of querulous suspicion in my voice.

“He’s one of your geneparents,” said Horrocks. “Your half-father, in fact. That’s why he was so solicitious of you.”

I said and did nothing for a minute. I must have squeezed a bulb too hard; tea floated past my face in little hot drops.

“This is not the time or the place,” I said.

“Sorry,” said Horrocks. He looked more baffled than sorry. “I’d forgotten how flatfooters—”

Then he shut his mouth, shook his head as if at himself, his beaded braids clattering, and with a flick of his foot was away and out of sight like a mi

I have never been so offended in my life.

Synchronic Narrative Storm flashed a note to Horrocks Mathematical, warning him to be more polite to her caredaughter, then summoned a presence of Constantine. He appeared in the garden seconds later. Not many could have bidden so swift a response from the Oldest Man. Synchronic was half-smiling at the thought as she straightened from a flower bed and made herself comfortable in a deck chair. Constantine was sitting, wherever he was; in her eye, in the garden, he seemed to be sitting on nothing. Small children ran oblivious through his presence.

“Hi, Synch,” he said. He looked around. “Nice place.”

The virtual image of Constantine could not, of course, see, but the real Constantine was no doubt perceiving a point of view built up from the inputs of various eyes scattered around the garden: a camera here, a bird there, an insect somewhere else. In the sunline light his skin looked as black as his suit. The effect was as easily gene-fixed as the trim bulk of his muscles, but was seldom so created; it would have been considered pretentious to appear thus ancient, though some of the ship generation affected it in adolescent bravado. Synchronic herself was happy that her deep tan manifested an age of mere centuries, older than the current voyage but far, far younger than the ship — and the Man.

“Hi yourself,” she said. “And yes, it is a nice place. But I didn’t call you to chitchat. Take a look at this.”

She flashed him a text version of the “Learning the World” biolog. While he was sca

“Thanks,” she said. The child smiled and ran off.

Constantine focused again on Synchronic. “I’m flattered that she remembers me,” he said. “Adventurous little lass, wasn’t she?”

“Still is,” said Synchronic. “But I’m interested in the later entries. She and Horrocks…”

Constantine frowned. “She’s too young.”

“For now. But the signs are there.”

“Genome calls to genome, eh?” said Constantine. “I shall open a future on it.”

“You were always the romantic,” said Synchronic.

“That I was, my lady,” said Constantine. “That I was.”

Constantine the Oldest Man had told his story to Synchronic Narrative Storm half a mille