Ken MacLeod - Learning the World

“Assuming we make contact at all,” Genome pointed out.

“All right,” said Horrocks. “Assume we don’t. Assume even that we go away—”

He flinched at the chorus of disapprobation.

“I said, assume ,” he persisted. “What then? An astronomical and… atmospheric anomaly enters their records. No harm done.”

“Perhaps not,” said Grey Universal. “We will have changed their history nonetheless. A minute change, you may say. True. But not therefore necessarily insignificant.”

“I’ve seen your chaos sims,” Horrocks said. “I’m unconvinced.”

Grey Universal shook his head and squirted wine into his mouth. He savoured it, pursing his lips, and swallowed. “As a contrarian, I naturally hope you are right.”

The discussion was bypassed a moment later as the cruciform atmosphere probe detached itself from the orbiter and dropped away. A cheer sounded across the room as the view switched to the probe’s camera and the planet’s atmosphere filled the view in an arc of blue and white. The event shown had happened hours earlier, Horrocks reflected, but still he had the sense that something irrevocable had just taken place.

He had the same uneasy feeling when, a couple of hours later, the probe entered the atmosphere. It went in on the dayside, where its friction flare would not be conspicuous, and within minutes it had stabilised in steady, ramjet-powered flight. Around the bulky glass lens of its ground camera the probe had been designed; that, unlike the hardware and software behind it, could not be miniaturised. But it was these that processed and enhanced the images, and that selected — according to the well-established algorithm for interestingness — which to zoom in on, and to show as though from hundreds rather than thousands of metres up.

Over the next hours Horrocks drifted about the room, occasionally joining in one of the formal three-dimensional dance acrobatics that usually ended with all or most participants recoiling off the wall or drifting helplessly and laughing. Every so often a hush would traverse the spherical room at the speed of sound, as the camera viewpoint soared over a mountain range, or panned a herd of gigantic beasts, or zoomed in on a city, or tracked a dirigible, or scanned the horizon-spanning row of volcanic islands in the hemispheric ocean opposite the continents. For much of the time, of course, there was nothing to see but cloud, or the deceptive fractal surface of the sea, or monotonous plains or snowfields.

He was already a little drunk, and more than a little dazed with wonder, when he bumped into the party’s host.

“Hello, Awlin,” he said, as they disentangled and reoriented. “Congratulations. And thanks for the stock tip.”

Awlin waved a langorous hand, incidentally shaking a ribbed cape of blue silk. “Not at all.”

They talked business for a while, drinking and observing the scene from the probe, and then the talk turned to gossip: who was in, who was out, who was up, who was down, who was with whom, who was here and who was not.

“It’s been a good party,” Awlin said. “I didn’t get everyone I wanted — some of the teams are of course hunched in their cubicles, but that’s scientists for you. Still, I’ve got a lot. From Constantine to the mouthy kid.”

“Who?”

“Atomic Discourse Gale. Something of a rising star among the ship generation. She’s been making a name for herself as a writer, with her biolog. In terms of provoking odd-angled thought she is rather snapping at the heels of Grey Universal.”

“Ah, yes,” said Horrocks. “The mouthy kid.”

She had changed a little in the six months since her microgravity training, having become taller and more mature, but she was still the same wiry young woman with a tight mass of curly black hair and a characteristic flatfooter tendency to hunch up as though inclined to curl up into a ball. When Horrocks saw her, a few minutes after leaving Awlin to another guest, she was leaning over her knees. Her fingers rippled as she wrote on a virtual keyboard, then flexed as she straightened and stretched and stared at the enclosing screen. She wore shorts and a long-sleeved top, both green. Her keyboard and eyescreen projector stuck out in front of one temple, held in her hair with a fancy jewelled clip.

She saw him and said, “Hello, Horrocks.”

He smiled at her unsmiling face. “Atomic, isn’t it? Pleased to see you. How are you doing?”

She lifted a drink-bulb almost to her lips and squeezed a few drops, looking at him all the while with suspicion, almost scorn. “I know you read my biolog,” she said. “So you know how I’m doing.”

Horrocks spread his hands and affected injured innocence. “Well, of course, but…”

“But you think I’m not telling all about myself?’

“People don’t, always.”

“People don’t, ever,” she said.

“It was just a friendly query,” said Horrocks. He could feel his face becoming hot. It was infuriating that this girl, six years his junior and still self-conscious about her breasts and hips, could make him feel awkward. “Anyway… I find what you write interesting.”

“That’s what people usually say when they disagree with it.”

Horrocks acknowledged the parry. “All right. All very interesting, but I don’t see why you make so much of it.”

“Then you haven’t—” she began, then caught herself. “I haven’t made myself clear.” She sawed her fingernails through her hair. “You remember when the transmissions were detected, you made a joke that they might be from aliens?”

“I did? I must have better foresight than I thought.”

She looked impatient. “The whole point of your joke was that there are no aliens. It wouldn’t have been funny otherwise. Just like if my caremother had said that something I’d lost in the garden had been taken by the fairies, or the hideaways. If we found fairies in the garden, or hideaways, it would tell us that the world was quite different from what we had imagined. It wouldn’t just be a world that had fairies in it, like a different kind of bird or something. It’d be a different kind of world, a world in which fairies could exist.”

“Yes,” said Horrocks. “So the world is different. So what?”

“So what happens here, around the Destiny Star, won’t just decide what happens between the human species and the bat people. I agree, that’s quite a responsibility. We’re standing in for all humanity here, we’re on our own, and we’d better get it right. But the point I’m making is that if one lot of aliens can exist, so close to us in space and time, then almost certainly other aliens do. Lots of them! Some of them may be more advanced than us by the time we reach them, with Civil Worlds of their own. But if they had that already, we’d know it — we’d see their green haze, we’d pick up their transmissions. In the next few thousand years, we may. But in the next few hundred years, it’ll be planets like this we encounter. Ones on the verge or just over the verge of spaceflight.”

Horrocks felt puzzled. “How do you know that?”

Atomic smiled for the first time, exposing a broad row of short white upper teeth. “I don’t,” she said. “Call it a hunch.”

Horrocks nodded. “It’s more than that,” he said. “It’s what we should plan for. A worst-case scenario. Aliens already exploring what they think of as their system, when we blunder in.” He laughed. “A good thing for us that the bat people don’t even have heavier-than-air flight.”

It was bad flying weather. The morning sea fog over Five Ravines tasted of smoke, and left black grains on the tips of fur. Frost nipped at feet. Most people walked on clogs which they gripped fore and aft by toe- and heel-claws. Some people walked wrapped in cloaks, like extra wings, made from the skins or woven from the hair of prey. Out in the Broad Channel foghorns sounded, like lonely grazers bellowing.