Ken MacLeod - Learning the World

“See what?” asked Darvin.

“It’s undergoing a sort of… power-assisted gliding.”

“Artificial thermals?”

Orro shook his head. “Of course not.” He laughed harshly. “Not a bad idea in itelf, in terms of military applications. Burning towns provide thermals enough… but no, this is quite different. This line coming out of the back appears to be a jet of steam. Now, a jet of steam, under sufficient pressure, could propel the object forward — action and reaction, see?”

“Yes,” said Darvin, “I quite see that, but—”

“And what,” interrupted the Eye, “would be the heat source for this flying teakettle?”

“I don’t know,” said Orro. “Something beyond our present comprehension. It doesn’t matter. It could as well be… the mode of propulsion of the… ah… self-propelled flechette, but that has… um… certain practical limitations, which, um… Forget about that for the moment. The point is that one can separate the two functions of a wing — lift, and power.”

“That’s a difficult idea to wrap one’s mind around,” said Darvin.

“There’s a certain truth in the old saw,” said Orro, “that if the gods had meant us to build flying machines, they wouldn’t have given us wings.”

Darvin recalled flying in the wind tunnel, flapping hard into the blast of air from the cannibalised airship propeller. This conversation gave him the same strange, frustrating feeling of flying on the spot.

“You mean that chiroptery has all been a mistake?”

“Not entirely,” said Orro. “Now let us think. If this jet propulsion is impracticable for us, we need to devise, as well as the static wing, some other form of, of…”

“Propeller?” said the Eye.

Orro and Darvin rounded on him and shouted as one. “That’s it!”

The Eye backed away, taking all of the pieces of paper with him. His companion bristled and backed in the opposite direction, to the doorway.

“All right,” said the Eye. He picked up his cup again, sniffed at it, and put it down. “I’m sure you’ve both just made some remarkable leap of logic. Very gratifying, but not my immediate concern. Nor, right at this moment, should it be yours.”

“What do you mean?” Darvin tried to keep his excitement from leaking aggression into his voice. He wanted nothing more than to rush out this room to Orro’s laboratory.

“I mean, gentlemen, that you’re still in trouble. Not the trouble you thought you were, though that’s still hanging over you, so to speak. You’ve seen things, and had ideas, that we don’t want spread around.”

“I understand,” said Orro. “You have my word that none of this shall go to Gevork.”

The Eye shook his head. “Not good enough, I’m afraid. Which is sad. If I’d been sent to expel you as persona non grata , I’d have gladly taken your parole and not so much as bothered to escort you to the quay. But we’re in stormier skies here.” He sighed. “Stormier skies. This is where your troubles begin.”

Keeping his gaze on them, he stepped forward to the table and took from yet another pouch: a small folding knife, a thin iron rod with a curled end and a wooden handle, a box of matches, a dip pen, a candle stub, a stick of sealing wax, and two sheets of paper. He flicked the knife open and flourished it in their faces. The blade looked very sharp. Darvin wondered what he was about to do with it. He thought of Orro’s military training. Behind him, he heard the solid click of a handheld crossbow being cocked.

The Eye pushed a paper toward each of them.

“Read, sign and thumbprint in blood, and seal,” he said. “Or die here.”

Five minutes later Darvin and Orro were sworn to Seloh’s Sight.

“This is outrageous,” said Darvin. “You’ve betrayed your country.”

They perched together at the top of the faculty’s tower, out of sight and earshot of anyone within view. Orro’s calm gaze didn’t deviate from the fog.

“I have not,” he said. “What would Gevork give, to have a Gevorkian within the Sight?”

“I’m sure they have agents in place already.”

“No doubt. So you see, I have nothing to worry about.”

“Seems to me you have everything to worry about.”

“It does get complicated,” said Orro. “There are mathematical functions for such matters.” He shrugged, and steepled his wings. “I can keep track.”

Darvin thought of spies spying on spies. It made him dizzy. Perhaps it was his duty to report on Orro. Perhaps this was a test, to see whether he did report on Orro. Perhaps Orro had all along been suborned to the Sight. Or, maybe, everything was as it seemed. That was something he could never again take for granted. He decided he would.

“All right,” he said. “You keep track. What worries me is what we’re both betraying.”

“And that is?”

“Science.”

Now Orro did turn to him, eyes bright. “Oh no,” he said. “Not at all. Isn’t this the most marvellous opportunity we could ever have been given, to discover new knowledge?”

“There can be no secret science,” said Darvin. It was one of the platitudes of the Dawn Age.

“Whoever tracked the comet,” said Orro, “and whoever designed the camera that took those pictures, worked in secret.”

“Well obviously military research—”

“Why is that an exception?”

“It’s engineering, not science.”

“Battle is the forge of tools,” said Orro. He said it like a Gevorkian proverb.

“Peace and not war is the father of all,” Darvin shot back. Another platitude.

They both laughed.

“But we’ve seen the pictures,” said Orro.

“Yes,” said Darvin. “We’ve seen the pictures.”

He had a lust to see more pictures. According to the Eye, the project promised more. More secrets, more hidden knowledge, the most knowledge and the deepest secret there had ever been.

“And we know how to build a heavier-than-air craft,” added Orro.

“In secret.”

“Yes.” A note of regret sounded in Orro’s voice. “But you know,” he went on, “Gevorkian though I am, noble though I am, when I think of the Regnal Air Force officers who laughed in my face, I can’t help gloating over the shock they’ll someday get.”

That worried Darvin, but he said nothing. The two of them were not, of course, agents of the Sight, not Eyes; their recruitment to it was a formality, whose only differences with, say, activating Darvin’s membership in the Reserve were that the Gevorkian too could be validly recruited, and that the penalties for betrayal or desertion were far more severe. What they had been recruited to was a project to investigate all aspects of the alien arrival. None of it would, they were assured, be compartmentalised: the whole point was to integrate all the diverse sources of information and insight. It was to be called Project Signal, which Darvin thought something of a giveaway, but one that had a certain ring to it.

There was a camp in the high desert. It consisted of four identical barrack roosts, a central lecture ring, a shooting range, a prey paddock, and a huddle of ruins used for close-quarter combat training. Except for a few guards, the troops had been moved out. By the first night there Darvin had a fair idea of where it was, just from looking at the stars and applying rudimentary navigation. This made the way he had arrived — in a windowless cabin of an airship — a quite futile exercise in security, but he knew better than to say so. The senior military and security officers of Seloh’s Reach were more flexible in their outlook than those of, by all accounts, Gevork, but they had as little sense of humour. To his relief the inaugural Project Signal meeting was organised not like a military briefing but an academic conference. About eight-by-eight scientists and engineers were present. On the first evening, everybody talked about anything but what they were here for.