Ken MacLeod - Learning the World

Kwarive laughed. “See how much we’re learning? We know they’re wingless quadrimanal bipeds, that their speech comes from their breath like ours, that they have binocular vision, poor eyesight and hearing, and that they make a sorry fist of arithmetic!”

“But possibly more dextrous than us,” someone said. “With the extra fingers.”

“Good point,” said Kwarive. “Any more ideas?”

Others began throwing in their own shaky deductions: that the deep voice showed a more resonant, and thus larger, chest cavity; that the aliens saw in the same wavelengths as humans; that from a biomechanical analysis of their gait it might be possible to work out their mass; that the same could be cross-checked against their flying machines; that they had slower reflexes than humans…

“Seeing we’re playing this game,” said Bahron, “I can tell you they’re warm-blooded, too.”

“I’d assumed they were,” said Kwarive, “but why do you say that?”

“No fur,” said Bahron. “Except on top of the head. But they wrap themselves in some kind of insulating material.”

Kwarive looked at him with a little more respect. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Tell you something else,” said Bahron. He climbed up on a rack, spread his wings, and hopped off to alight on the floor again. “They can’t do this. They can’t fly, except in machines, right? So they must be afraid of falling, and ground must matter a lot to them. I mean, you could keep them out of any patch of ground with just a fence or a wall, like grazers and trudges.” He gave an evil smile. “Or in. So what I figure from that, see, is they’re likely to be very interested in our world: in… Ground.” Another nasty grin. “See, this is my job after all.”

“Wait a moment,” said Darvin, alarmed at the drift of Bahron’s deductions. “They have an enormous vessel in which they’ve lived in space for a long time.”

“Yes,” said Bahron. “A long time. And in all that time, they’ve been spinning their vessel, to give them ground to walk on and weight to carry. Now, Orro, how long do you reckon they’ve been in space, if they did come from another star?”

“Oh, many eights-of-eights of years, at the very least.”

“Generations, then?”

“They might have very long lifespans,” said Orro.

Bahron turned to Kwarive. “You reckon that’s possible?”

She shrugged. “I wouldn’t rule it out, but it seems fanciful.”

“Words out of my mouth, lady. In any case, they’ve had plenty of time to adapt to living in space, weightless you might say, and what do they do? They live as much like on the ground as possible. They give themselves artificial weight. Now, what reason could they have for doing that, if they don’t intend to walk again on a world?”

“There could be all kinds of reasons,” said Kwarive. “Perhaps all animals need gravity for some reason we don’t know.”

“Ah! Some reason we don’t know? You said we should stick to what we know. Now, I’m no medical man, nor no scientist either, but it seems to me that floating about weightless — and not even having wings to fly with — would cripple you from walking again. Muscles waste away when people have to be laid out, when they’re too sick even to hang. If you never need to walk, no problem. Float free as a fish or a flitter. But if you do mean to walk again, like I said, you have to keep in shape. These wingless wonders mean one day to walk on the ground, and I do mean Ground.”

There was a brief interruption while Nollam and his assistants changed the recording-tape. Everyone stared at the screen, as though to memorise whatever was missed.

“So what,” Darvin asked, “does it matter that they wish to come here?”

Bahron hunched, fingers curled. “When a shipload of adventurers from here or Gevork turns up on the coast of some wild area of the Southern Rule, they don’t usually have the well-being of the locals at the front of their minds. I don’t see why the wingless should be any different.”

“Oh, I object!” cried Orro. “That is speculative and unjust! Any race capable of the great achievement of crossing the space between the stars must surely be too advanced to merely wish to extend a reach! How could so great a project be compassed without a vast enterprise of cooperation? What mere material end could make so long a voyage profitable?”

“In any case,” added another scientist, one of the etheric specialists, “if they did invade us, or wish us ill, we could do nothing to stop them.”

“Fair questions, gentlemen,” said Bahron. “And, I’ll allow, they perplex me. What need brought the wingless here and, if Darvin and Orro are right, has brought them from star to star already? Curiosity or some such I could understand, but why so vast a ship, big enough to hold a great many of them?” He hesitated, then continued as if determined to have his say. “What first comes to my mind — a mind that’s paid and pledged to be speculative and unjust, I admit — is that it might be what’s brought people to every land of Ground: population pressure. Now there would be a reason for wanting a fine world like ours, a habitable world. As to what we could do to stop them — it’s true, as long as they are in the sky and we are here, there’s nothing. But if they’re here and we’re here, it’s a different story, is it not?”

“It is not,” said Orro. “We know the power of their engines, the scale of their work, the subtlety of their etheric communications, and the ingenuity of their contrivances. Their flying machines alone — the one we saw inside the ship, to say nothing of the one that was photographed high in the sky — could wreak havoc on us. Put aside all thought of fighting them. Our only chance is to communicate with them, to come to an accommodation, and to hope that their greater power is a sign of greater wisdom.”

“Fine sentiments,” said Bahron. “So, no doubt, thought the ancestors of the backcountry folk when the sails of the first Seloh’s fleet speckled the Broad Channel.”

“You sully the glorious future by equating it with a savage past!”

“Do I?” said Bahron. “So much the worse for the glorious future. My duties are to the present. If you will excuse me, gentlemen, ladies.”

After he’d left, the conversation continued, but it had lost its sparkle. Everybody knew that Bahron’s concerns would be mooted at a level far above their influence. Some might have shared his concerns. Darvin knew that the other scientists, most of them aligned with various military institutions, took a darker view of the alien arrival than he and Orro did. At the same time he found himself wrestling with a prejudice. It was difficult, having seen the aliens as wingless, to see them as a superior race. The Sightlessness that they shared with the despised trudges — about whose fate and use, dumb beasts though they were, he’d never been comfortable — reduced the aliens’ imputed stature and status. He wondered whether this would induce a dangerous contempt, or a more dangerous fear. The notion of an intelligent and articulate trudge — a rebellious trudge — was a staple of moralistic satire and engineering tale alike. Such tales betrayed, he thought, an unease that had haunted the conscience of his race since that terrible and glorious moment in the dawn of time when mankind had first battened upon the physical strength and mental weakness of his closest animal relative to make of that brother a beast of burden.

What, he wondered with a chill prickle of fur, would the aliens make of that relationship?

Another half hour of tape rolled by. Nollam was just changing the reels when Markhan returned, agitated.

“We’ve sent calls,” he said, “to other locations where telekinematography is being developed. They’ve tuned to the same etheric frequency and wavelength, and they’re receiving the same message.”