Ken MacLeod - Learning the World

“Now, that looks like a security risk,” said Darvin.

Kwarive shook her head. “It was Markhan who suggested it.”

Darvin shrugged and gave her the steaming cup. She nuzzled his hand and he returned, to sift through the day’s reports from the physics wire. It was the second time this outer-month that he and his friends had travelled to the camp. The university authorities had been told, by much higher authorities, that the two scientists’ and the student’s services were required for military training and preparation, and that no demurral would be brooked. In that outer-month the project, with a soldierly despatch that impressed and baffled Darvin, had set up the experiment with the transplanted tree. What he was doing now, though, could just as well have been done at Five Ravines, and — with no results from the experiment — Darvin chafed to get back. Under cover of his continuing planet search, he had accumulated a stock of paired plates that showed the Object. Now that its position was known, it was indeed, as Orro had guessed, detectable as a distant companion of the Camp-Followers, the asteroids, but one somewhat beyond the orbit of the Warrior. Ground’s much closer visitor, the third moon, though betrayed by its etheric echo, remained invisible.

An hour or two had passed when Kwarive laid a cold hand on his shoulder, making him jump.

“Come outside,” she said. “There’s something you might like to see.”

Darvin followed her out as she marched back to the foot of the tree. Her completed map hung from one of the wheeled screens. Eight eights of shittles faced the map.

“Watch,” said Kwarive.

She wheeled the screen a little way around the tree. As she did so, other shittles emerged and faced it. She wheeled it around and around, until the base of the tree was surrounded by a phalanx of outward-facing insect eyes.

Darvin stared at them, and then at Kwarive. She was shaking. “I think—” she began.

Through the open door of the barracks roost and across the square they heard Nollam’s yell.

14 365:05:22 22:15

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been neglecting my habitat planning and proposals lately. Yes, that was a joke. I can see from a glance at the markets that everyone’s doing it. Well, maybe not everyone, but a majority of the founders and a significant minority of the ship generation. Planet-watching eats your time and drains your sleep. I see the bat people in my dreams.

What follows is not a dream. It’s based on some notes I took last time I entered a virtuality of Destiny II.

It feels like real time. It isn’t, of course; what I’m seeing and hearing happened hours ago, the information from countless bugs in numerous disguises uplinked to the satellite and beamed thence to the ship, where it’s been processed and reconstructed and the gaps filled in by guesswork and best fit until it’s a seamless seeming, ready to be studied by science teams and traipsed through by the rest of us.

I’m in a coastal industrial town. The air is hazy with carbon particles. In the distance, at the edge of town, smoke drifts in thick streams from tall chimneys. My POV is at its default height off the ground, that of my own eyes, but I expect I’m going to vary that if I’m to see things from — literally — their point of view. I begin, though, at ground level. It’s an eerie feeling, as if moving among them unseen.

That in itself isn’t half as weird as standing on a surface that looks flat and is actually convex. It curves away down to a horizon, as I can see whenever I glimpse the sea between the buildings, instead of curving away up. And above that horizon is nothing but empty (well, cloudy and hazy) sky, instead of the other side of the world. About sixty degrees up in that sky I can see the Destiny Star, like a sunline rolled up into a ball.

(And this in turn, incidentally, isn’t half as unsettling as standing in a virtuality taken at night. Of course such virtualities are even more artificial and reconstructed than this one — our little bugs are for the most part not nocturnal, nor do their eyes focus to infinity — but I’m assured what we see is what we would see in that very position at that time of night. Now, in a sense it’s only what you see when you link to the ship’s outside view to look out through the ship, in the right direction (give or take a few AU difference in POV). But when you use your imagination and really think of yourself standing there, on the outside surface of a planet, with nothing but a thin skin of atmosphere between you and the raw vacuum… the Civil Worlds glowing green, the Red Sun in their midst burning red, and the rest of the stars in all their naked native glory winking at you… it shakes you to your CNS, that’s all I can say. So just try it, OK?)

But back to today.

I’m on what might be called a street. The road is metalled, the sidewalk elevated, and vehicles move on the one and pedestrians on the other. It’s filthy. Looking down I see the droppings of the big beasts that haul carts, and the different ordure of the slaves who carry loads and run errands and haul cabs. Add rotting rinds, bones, and scraps of paper — all of which receive close and competitive attention from a variety of insectoids and different species of flying rat — and it makes me very glad I’m not really setting foot here. All this garbage may serve to manure the peculiar paraboloid trees, which sprout everywhere. An open-topped car rushes toward me through the ruck and press of carts. I see its radiator grille like bared teeth, and the flat glass plate of the windscreen. I hear the roar of its internal-combustion petroleum engine, interpersed with the braying blare of its warning instrument. As it passes through my POV I glimpse the faces of its driver and two passengers, and the vehicle’s ulterior. The seating is two wooden bars. The driver operates controls with hands and feet. I turn to watch it. From behind, the occupants have a look of cowled people with high-set, pointed ears. The warning instrument sounds again, and one of the bat people leaps into the air in front of the car, takes wing and lets it pass beneath him or her, and settles again on the road. Then it hurries to the sidewalk.

I drift the POV to above the sidewalk and bob along at the local walking pace. I’m two or three heads taller than most of the bat people. Seen close-up, their faces are like a somewhat flattened face of a fox. They have more in the way of jaw and snout than most humans, balanced by much larger eyes. The fine fur on their faces is patterned with stripes and spots, and their fur colours vary — grey, white, black, brown, reddish, and so on. Some of these colours and patterns may be from artificial dyes. Their eye colour, oddly to our eyes, varies little. It’s a clear yellow, one of their many features — like walking along eating chunks of raw meat, or scratching each other’s fur, or cluttering their teeth — that strikes us as animal-like. Their speech comes across as a continuous trill of chirps and squeals, with some low growling notes.

The slaves, trudging along with their burdens and their slashed, atrophied wings, look even less human. Their eyes are duller, and they say little. Their jaws are heavier and more prominent, as are their sagittal crests. Their limb muscles are bulkier. But these differences, which may not even be genetic, are quite hard to spot. You have to watch a lot of bat people before you can tell instantly which is slave and which free — ignoring the mutilations, of course.

Slaves apart, many of the pedestrians are pregnant or nursing females. The former waddle with ponderous dignity and a certain ferocity of countenance. Everybody steps out of their way, even — especially — the slaves. The nursing mothers stride along more briskly, each with three or four tiny infants clinging to her chest fur and usually plugged in to her nipples. Three rows of paired nipples, litters of offspring, pregnancy itself — again, it all reminds us of beasts, and we have to watch out for any subconscious prejudices in this regard.