Ken MacLeod - Learning the World

“That and more,” said the agent. “That and more.”

He shook his head and sighed. “It’s a cold morning,” he said. “Brew us some tea, would you?”

Startled by the shift in tone, Darvin complied. As he wiped stains out of old mugs with a rag dirtier than the crockery, he tried to calm his thoughts. He was certain that nothing either he or Orro had done could count as a crime before any just tribunal, but the Sight was not reputed to be just. Nor, on the other wing, was it considered arbitrary. It did not persecute. It seldom pried. He suspected, therefore, that he and Orro were being given a shaking to see what fell out from under their wings. Or — aha, that was it — to soften them up for a softer approach.

The suspicion was soon confirmed. The agent at the door sat down on the table, the other returned to the window, and both sipped the tea with evident relaxation. The one who had spoken before spoke again.

“All right, gentlemen,” he said. “You seem to have got yourselves into some trouble. Quite innocently, I reckon, from what you’ve said. You don’t act like guilty men. But that’s just my opinion, and I don’t know if it’ll be shared by the higher-ups, if you see what I mean. So let’s see if I can help you to help yourselves, so to speak, and maybe matters will go no further.”

Orro flashed Darvin a warning look; Darvin nodded, unsure of what he was being warned.

“Good,” said the Eye, taking the nod as his. He laid down his mug on the windowsill and fingered a sheaf of fine, crackling papers from the largest of his belt pouches. Darvin and Orro peered over the first sheet as he spread it on the table. The other agent stared over their bowed heads, out of the window.

The paper was squared, with two numbered axes, and marked with minute, also numbered crosses in ink. The crosses had been joined with a pencilled shallow curve.

“What do you make of that?” said the Eye.

“It’s an arc of an ellipse,” said Orro.

The Eye looked at him. “That, I could have told you,” he said. “A little more detail, if you please.”

Darvin looked closer and recognised what he saw. The axes were the familiar celestial ones, and the numbers on the crosses were dates and times that registered a series of observations — a series that reached to the day before yesterday, and began half an eight of outer-months ago in early summer, around about the time when the comet had disappeared.

“Hey!” he said, straightening up so fast that the crown of his head almost collided with the Eye’s chin. He rushed to his desk and scrabbled through the papers there, and brought out an offprint of his and Orro’s article. Flicking through the pages, he found the diagram he sought, and laid it beside the new picture. The dates overlapped, the numbers matched, and the lines—

Orro needed no more than a glance to see what Darvin had seen. “Deceleration,” he said, “followed by a free elliptical orbit — deceleration to orbit! Orbital” — he sought a word — “ insertion .”

Damn’s hands shook. He reached for the paper to see what lay underneath. The Eye grabbed his wrist.

“Later, maybe,” he said. They all leaned back and looked at each other.

“So you recognise our intruder.”

“In principle,” said Orro. He reached for his tea and slurped. “You’ve shown us a plot of a path it could have taken. But it continues after it vanished from sight. How could the subsequent points be observations?”

“Never you mind,” said the Eye. “For now, let me assure you that they are. Or so I’ve been told, by people who don’t mess me about.”

The hitherto silent agent stifled a laugh.

“Not,” the Eye went on, “that many do.” He waved aside the sudden return to menace. “Anyhow. These very folks have also told me, most definite like, that this thing here is no natural object. No way, no how, no matter which way you turn it — and they have, gentlemen, they have.”

“This is wonderful,” said Orro.

“You could say that,” said the Eye. “What the Sight says, and the Might says, and the Flight says, and for all I know to the contrary, what her soaring majesty herself says, is that this thing is of — now, how did you put it? — defence significance.”

“Of more than that, surely,” said Darvin, appalled at this blinkered view. “It’s of world importance. It’s the most significant and exciting event in our history!”

The Eye gave him a look. “Examined it, have you?” he said. “Communed with it, perhaps? Confident, are you, that it means us no harm? Thought not.”

He leaned over the table again. “Next picture.”

The grey-and-black sheet he spread out might have been a photograph of a series of small photographs, arranged in three rows of six; Darvin had not seen its like, and was unsure how it had been done. The pictures showed a pointed cylindrical object with two rectangular attachments midway along it. A white line of smoke or steam began a little behind the blunt end. In the first pictures the object was foreshortened, then in the second row it appeared in full view, and in the final row it was foreshortened from the back, eventually dwindling to a dot. The trail was in all the photographs. The series gave the irresistible impression of something like a flechette hurtling past. Darvin imagined how they would look run as a series of kinematographic frames, and realised that that was what they were.

Orro looked so expressionless that Darvin suspected he recognised what he saw; but the Eye’s quizzical gaze was on Darvin, as though suspecting that he knew what it was.

Darvin shook his head. “I’m baffled,” he said. “What is this?”

The Eye turned a glare on Orro. “I’ll tell you one thing it isn’t,” he said. “It’s not one of your precious self-propelled flechettes .”

The Gevorkian started. “I know nothing of such.”

“As well you shouldn’t.” He twisted a smile at Orro, and jabbed a finger at the paper. “You know what altitude this was flying at? Five by eight by eight by eight wingspans.”

It was a figure you thought of as a distance, not a height.

“Travelling about that distance in about eight-and-two seconds,” the Eye went on. “Faster than a speeding crossbolt, you might say. Its length is reckoned to be about a wingspan and a half.”

“How were photographs of something so small taken at such a distance?” Darvin asked.

“None of your business.”

As soon as he said it Darvin formed a guess: a camera attached to a telescope, and tracking very fast — a new gunsight, no doubt. As secret on the Selohic side as the self-propelled flechettes — whatever they might be — were supposed to be on the Gevorkian. It saddened him that military technology was so much more advanced than he’d ever imagined.

“All right,” he said. “So… what is it?”

The Eye looked impatient. “We’re asking you.”

“You really don’t know?” Orro sounded disbelieving.

The Eye clasped his hands on the top of his head, in a gesture of frustration or surrender. “No,” he said. “We wrapping well don’t know, and that’s no ploy.”

It occurred to Darvin that the man, and whoever had sent him and his silent comrade, was afraid.

“I know what it is,” said Orro. “It’s a self-propelled aerial vehicle. A heavier-than-air flying machine, but one that flies without flapping.”

“We should have you in the service,” the Eye said.

The sarcasm was wasted on Orro.

“It must work on the same principle as the self-propelled flechette,” he said.

“And what might that be?” asked the Eye.

“It is not for me to say,” Orro said. “You no doubt know, in any case, but—” He passed his hand across his lips. Then scientific excitement seemed to overcome patriotic scruple. He snatched the paper and held it up to the light from the window, his head swaying as he scanned it, narrow-eyed, back and forth. “I think I see it.”