Ken MacLeod - Learning the World

The girl sat staring into the spaces behind her eyes, shaping and tweaking her design with her hands and mind. She wore, Horrocks noticed as he padded up behind her, a green dress that looked identical to the one Synchronic had worn the night she’d seduced him. Stepping closer, he fancied he caught a faint whiff of Synchronic’s unmistakable and unforgettable scent. He wondered if it was the same garment. The ancient and cunning caremother was, he reckoned, quite capable of such a gesture, or a manipulation; capable, even, of weaving her characteristic pheromones into the fibres for time-release. But on the other hand, if that was the case the card had been palmed with a flourish so blatant it was difficult to credit her with it, or to imagine her imagining its not being noticed. Unless—

He stopped, smiled to himself, and shook his head. Trying to outflank the twisted ploys of one of the First Hundred Thousand was as pointless as it would be unprofitable. Let the law of unintended consequences take its course — that was what she’d said, before she had, with doubtless intended consequence, taken care of him. Some involuntary movement of his — a shift of stance, a sigh, a grunt — must have alerted Atomic to his presence. She snapped out of her dwam and spun her seat around, looking startled, then recovered almost at once to a polite incuriosity, a mask of cool.

“You can walk!” she said. The way she said it, she regretted she didn’t have a wider audience.

“It’s taken me a lot of hard work,” said Horrocks. “And a few falls.”

“So what, besides your legs, brings you here?”

“I wanted to talk to you.”

“That’s sweet. What about?”

Horrocks temporised. “Rather a lot, actually. Perhaps over lunch?”

“Be my guest.”

He wasn’t familiar with the phrase, but it sounded like agreement. He gazed above her head. “That’s a beautiful habitat—”

“I hear a ‘but’ coming.”

“It’s too exposed.”

She enhanced a cluster of sensors, a battery of lasers and a cluster of missiles. “Meteor defence, see?”

Horrocks shook his head. “Beside the point,” he said. “People straight out of a ship need the sense of substrate — a good few metres of regolith at least — between themselves and the hard stuff.”

“Ah, but do they?” Atomic jumped to her feet. “That’s what I think might be changing, with so many of us jaunting in virtualities where we walk under sky.”

The thought made Horrocks uneasy. Despite his interest in the planet, he’d shirked the terrestrial virtualities. “I’ve only just got used to walking on ground,” he said, “and I’m not so sure.”

“I’ll tell you all about it,” said Atomic. “Walk with me.”

“Do you realise,” she said, looking up from the foot of the stairs as he made his way down, “that for thousands of years people have been living in caves?”

Horrocks didn’t answer until they were out on the street. He handwaved upward.

“This doesn’t feel like a cave. It doesn’t feel enclosed.”

“That’s just because you’re used to living in the cone. It feels open but it’s like you said, it’s the reassurance of regolith. Compared with this, standing on a planetary surface is, like, totally exposed.”

“And living in a habitat with a glass roof isn’t?”

She laughed. “It isn’t glass, it’s diamond. And it’s less exposed than a surface. Especially one like Destiny II, which doesn’t even have asteroid defence. Yet that’s what lots of us are subconsciously getting used to.”

“I don’t think so,” said Horrocks. “At a deeper level we know it’s virtual.”

“Imagination can overcome that,” said Atomic.

They walked on down Fourth. The street was quiet. Music throbbed from nodes in the air. It made Horrocks yearn for wide spaces and pioneer toil. Music could do that. “Do you imagine the bat people feel exposed?” he asked.

“I suppose they do,” Atomic said. “Those of them who understand what the sky is, at least. I guess some of them still think the sky is a roof.”

“They don’t seem that primitive.”

“Some of them are, in the backcountry.”

“All right,” said Horrocks. “What worries me is the more advanced ones. How do you think they would feel, under that open sky, if they saw us colonizing? Changing their asteroid belt, the moons of their water-world and gas giant? Some of the solar power collectors would look like new planets even to the naked eye. To say nothing of fusion reactors.”

“New stars!” Atomic laughed.

“Yes indeed,” said Horrocks. “And your diamond habitat would shine like—” Like your eyes, he almost said.

“Like an asteroid with a high albedo,” said Atomic.

“Yes.”

She walked so fast that the green shift didn’t ripple, like it had on her caremother: it shook. Horrocks thought he could see every bone and curve of her small energetic body inside it if he looked long enough. He almost tripped.

“Sorry,” he said. “Could you slow down a bit?”

She slackened her pace.

“I’ve been thinking about that too,” she said. “But perhaps the idea of other intelligent life isn’t as strange to them as it is to us. Not as alien, you might say. After all they’ll have seen the Civil Worlds for millennia. They’ll have seen the green scum on the waterworld. They might even think we come from there. Oh! And I almost forgot — they have television, so they may have detected our deep-space radar. Anything interesting shown up on their transmissions?”

“Not really,” said Horrocks. “Some grainy shots of scenery, sometimes with bat people flitting across it, then back to someone talking to camera. The heuristics think he’s talking numbers, and they’ve got some consistent results, but the rest of what’s said is as obscure as ever. The other source, funnily enough, looks very similar — scenery, talking head — but sounds somewhat different. Two languages, almost certainly.”

“Here we are,” said Atomic, stopping outside a cafe with a big front window and yellow interior walls. She lifted her hem to go up the step and Horrocks opened the door for her, almost falling through it in the process. The cafe was about half full of ship generation kids, talking loud. Horrocks blinked to a particular perceptual mode and saw the air was as filled with data-interchange streams as it was with food smells. The data streams were almost all between handheld or head-worn machines rather than heads. He closed his eyes and opened them, back to normal sight. Atomic turned at once to the table by the window, where a young ship-generation man sat drinking coffee. He stood up and smiled at Atomic, stuck out a hand to Horrocks.

“Grant Cornforth Dialectical.” Chunky muscles, firm grip, a wavy straggle of beard, wary eyes.

“Horrocks Mathematical.”

“The micro-gee trainer?”

“The same.” Horrocks turned to Atomic. “What’ll you have?”

“My treat,” she said.

“Thanks. Black coffee and whatever you recommend.”

She went to the counter and Horrocks sat down.

“So,” said Grant, “what brings you among us flat-footers?”

“Getting flat feet,” said Horrocks. He rubbed his calf muscles.

Grant laughed. “But really.”

“Delivering a personal message to Atomic,” he said.

Grant glanced down at his cup. “Do you want me to leave?”

“No, no, not at all!” said Horrocks. “Please.” He waved a hand at the rest of the clientele. “I’d have everyone around the table if I could.”

“But you can’t?” said Grant.

Horrocks tightened his lips for a moment and nodded. “Call it semiprivate. You’re her friend, you’re definitely welcome.”