Ken MacLeod - Learning the World

“The delivery trudge came in with the full basket — it’s a consignment for an insect-physiology practical — just as I was on the telephone to the administration office. That’s how I heard the buzz. Now, I immediately jumped to the same conclusion that you did — that I’d accidentally discovered a new fact about shittles. However, being a good scientist, I decided to check it by putting half the shittles in an empty basket. One buzzed, the other didn’t. So I kept splitting them between various empty containers” — she gestured at a collection of jars, boxes, and dissection pans among the clutter — “and narrowed it down to this one specimen.”

Darvin found a stool and sat on it and looked up at Kwarive on her perch. “And you think an electric shittle is relevant to the, ah, big picture?”

He had a vague worry that he had let slip some information about the telecommunications aspect, to which — Kwarive might have thought — an electric-field-producing insect might be of interest. A dim notion floated past him of somehow training the little beasts to act as signalling devices for sabreurs in flight. A sort of portable wireless… yes indeed, the Flight might be interested in that.

“I think it came from up there,” Kwarive said. She rolled her eyes upward, as — with a different significance — did Darvin a moment later.

“Perhaps the visitors are very small,” he said.

She hopped off the perch and shook him by the shoulders. “Stop making fun of this!” she said. “It’s like you’re making fun of me !”

Darvin put his wings around her and nuzzled the top of her head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But it’s all so—”

She stepped out of his enfolding. “I know,” she said. “I find it hard to believe what you tell me, even though you’ve shown me some of the evidence. You know, there are times when I wonder whether your big secret story isn’t a cover for something even stranger.”

“I wouldn’t do that to you,” said Darvin.

“I know, I know. Anyway. Sometimes I swear it seems easier to believe that you’re a spy for Gevork or… or something, than that what you tell is true. Even though I do trust you.”

“You know I have not told you everything,” said Darvin.

“Oh, I know that. I’m sure the military are flapping their wings all over this.”

Darvin nodded. “It’s their job,” he said. “Their duty.”

“And it’s yours not to tell me about it. Now let’s dissect this bug.”

She could change course like a flitter, Darvin thought, but he was glad of it.

She tipped the shittle on to a bloodied square of board and flipped it on its back. Its legs waved. Kwarive reached for a long pin.

“Stop!” said Darvin.

“What?”

“It might give you an electrical shock.”

“That little thing?”

“There might be some kind of capacitor inside it.”

Kwarive looked dubious, but held the pin in a pair of wooden tongs when she skewered the shittle, and rummaged up a ceramic probe and knife. Then she took the board to the binocular dissection microscope and switched on the light. She slit the underside of the animal lengthwise, through the hard thoraxes and the soft, segmented abdomen, and eased the sides of the cut apart. The legs stopped twitching.

The tips of the probe and the blade stirred almost imperceptibly in the innards. Darvin recognised a tiny gut being lifted to one side. The probe’s tip snagged. Kwarive grunted and her hands made more minute, steady movements.

“Will you look at this,” she said, her voice calm. She stepped back from the instrument.

Darvin adjusted the eyepieces and the focus. The shittle in the magnified field filled his sight. Beside the teased-apart digestive and circulatory systems, amid the gunk and bits that biologists called connective tissue because they didn’t know what it did, lay a peculiar complex of red and green glassy-looking crystals and a thin copper-coloured strand, about the thickness of a fine hair. Darvin held out a hand and Kwarive placed the probe in it. He tapped the crystals. They were hard. He poked at the coppery strand. It was too strong for gentle pressure on the probe to break. He slid the tip toward the head end. The strand went all the way to the top of the thorax.

He relinquished the microscope to Kwarive. She placed the edge of the knife between the nippers and brought it down, cleaving the head.

“The strand bifurcates,” she said. “It goes to each of the eyes.”

Darvin looked and confirmed this.

“Can you lift the whole thing out?” he asked.

She could. She took a water bottle with a tube through the stopper and washed the thing a drop at a time. It lay gleaming on the slab beside its now headless and eviscerated host. They stood together and looked at it for a while.

“What sense do you make of it?” asked Darvin.

“Well,” said Kwarive, “it’s plainly artificial. That coppery strand is copper wire .”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure as I can be without a materials lab.”

“Easy enough to check,” said Darvin. “But what could the rest of it be?”

“I have no idea,” said Kwarive. “No, I do have an idea, and I’ve had it ever since I noticed the electrical effect. But it’s too far-fetched.”

Darvin glanced again at the glittering mechanism. “Nothing could be too far-fetched to explain this.”

“Very well,” said Kwarive. “I think it’s a transmitter, of wireless telephonic or telekinematographic etheric waves. It is using the insect’s eyes as cameras.”

“That’s certainly far-fetched,” said Darvin. “No wireless telephone, let alone telekinematographic apparatus, could possibly be this small.”

“How do you know that? You might as well say that your object in space could not possibly be so large.”

“I suppose, if we are dealing with a technology so much more advanced…” A thought struck him. “But even so, the signal produced must have been very weak. How could it reach — so far away?”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Kwarive. “I know nothing about telekinematography.”

“Come to think of it,” said Darvin, “how do you know about it at all?”

“Orro told me,” she said. “He says it’s being developed by the military… in Gevork.”

“Hmm,” said Darvin. “That’s all right. I suppose. Please don’t talk about it loosely. Anyway… from the little I know, it involves rather heftier equipment than this.”

“I wonder if it’s still active,” Kwarive said.

They repeated the telephone experiment. The electrical interference was gone.

“It may have drawn its energy from the shittle’s body,” said Kwarive.

“Or we broke it,” said Darvin.

“That would be a shame. It would be irreplaceable. No, wait, it wouldn’t. We can find more, and I know just how to do it.”

“How?”

Kawarive smiled and shoved the empty basket to him. “Fill it up,” she said. “I’ll call Orro.”

Not being a biologist, Darvin didn’t have Kwarive’s confidence in statistics, and after an hour scooping shittles from the dung in the gutters of the wintry streets he didn’t like it either. He washed his hands and feet in the chill canal before returning with his reeking burden. By this time Orro had joined Kwarive and was hunched over a handful of scrawled paper. The telephone receiver had been dismantled. Parts of it lay beside the dissected shittle and its alien innards. Neither of them looked likely to be put back together any time soon.

“What are you doing?” Darvin asked.

Orro looked up. “Trying to work out wavelengths from the circuitry of the receiver.”

“Laudable but premature,” said Darvin, putting down the basket. “We need a working receiver right now.”