Ken MacLeod - Learning the World

“What I’d expect, chief,” said Nollam, straightening. “This stuff must be beaming down from the third moon. Gives it quite a spread, I should imagine.”

“Indeed,” said Markhan. “Which means it’s also beaming down upon Gevork.”

Darvin noticed how all eyes turned to Orro, and didn’t like it.

“What reason,” Darvin asked, “do we have to think that the receivers of Gevork are also tuned — so to speak — to this message?”

“Why, none at all,” said Markhan. “Except the well-known scientific prowess of Gevork.”

“They’re a bit hidebound,” said Orro, sounding defensive. “That’s why I’m in Seloh’s Reach, after all.” His folded wings quivered. “Unless you refer to the fact that this very installation is, ah, in some respects arranged around the presumption that the eyes of the Realm are upon it?”

A silence — embarrassed in most cases, puzzled in others — fell on the gathering. The rocket scientists had no more of a clue than Kwarive did that their work was diversionary.

“No, no!” cried Markhan. “That’s a misunderstanding, Orro, for which I ask your pardon. The layers of subterfuge employed by the Sight and the Might are, I fear, far too subtle for mere scientists like us.” He flapped a wing. “Please don’t trouble yourself with them. All work here is secret, and truly so. No, I only speculate that Gevork might have learned of the visitation independently.”

“It’s certainly possible,” said Orro. “I don’t—”

“Look!” shouted Nollam.

The image on the screen was no longer of scrolling lines of symbols, but a jerky pattern of squares and rectangles. After a moment, it was replaced by a flicker of black and white, the random spume of etheric surf.

“Has the third moon gone below the horizon?” asked Markhan.

Nollam shook his head. “It’ll be up for hours.”

The hiss from the loudspeaker was drowned out by a loud fizzing and crackling from outside. Kwarive ran to the door. Darvin followed.

The communications tree smouldered. Smoke rose around its foot.

“Stay back!” Darvin shouted. Kwarive ignored the warning. She stooped over the small dungheap, and turned with something held between the claws of her thumb and forefinger. As he came up to her she held it out and dropped it on the palm of his hand.

Still almost too hot to hold, the dead shittle’s carapace was split and carbonized. The curious device inside it had melted to slag. “They’re all like that,” Kwarive said.

Behind her the tree caught fire.

They sat, that evening, around another fire and waited for the return airship to Five Ravines. Darvin, Orro, and Kwarive talked in low voices. After a while Nollam joined them. Behind them the camp went about its routine. The project would continue. News or rumours of the aborted contact had spread to everyone, and a late-afternoon emergency conference had thrashed out its implications to no one’s satisfaction. Bulletins on the Might’s wireless network had told of unexplained fires breaking out all over the country, and abroad. In the coastal cities, the seasonal rain and damp had ensured damage was slight. Elsewhere, brush and forest fires burned out of control. No explanation had been given, but no doubt some would be found. Darvin placed a mental bet on a coincidence of lightning-strikes and hunters careless with fires.

“You know,” said Orro, turning a joint of dried meat on the embers with a stick, “we now have no evidence of what happened. It could all have been a dream.”

“We have the tapes,” said Kwarive.

“The Might has the tapes,” said Orro. “I am certain we shall never see them again.”

“Too right,” said Nollam. “Markhan’s stashed them in a safe in his office.”

“There’s still the Object,” said Darvin. “And the third moon. Speaking of which.” He turned to Nollam. “Something you and Markhan said, about the third moon having to be in the sky?”

“We did, did we?”

Darvin ignored the ploy. “Which means that the ether waves used in teleltinematography are line-of-sight only.”

“I couldn’t say,” said Nollam. “Here, Orro, pass me that meat. The smell’s making me dribble.”

He bit off a chunk of the fragrant meat and passed the hunk to Kwarive. It made its way around the circle, becoming gnawed to the bone. Darvin laid the bone at the edge of the fire, alert for the sound of a crack that would let whoever snatched first get at the marrow.

“I wonder,” he said, staring up at the rising sparks, “what practical use a line-of-sight communication system could have. One even more unwieldly than wireless telephony, and without its range and versatility. Pictures, yes — but if it’s only line-of-sight, what’s wrong with a telescope?”

“Forward artillery spotting,” said Orro. “Among others. Or so it is said in Gevork.”

“Let your fancies run free,” said Nollam. “I’m not telling you a thing. Mind you, they do have some sharp thinkers over there in the Realm. So it’s said.”

Darvin saw out of the corner of his eye a red glint in the sky and thought it was the landing-light of the airship they awaited, but as he looked up he saw it was only the gleam of the fire reflecting off the tethered blimp. It reminded him of the etheric reflection off the third moon. That passing thought stirred the same obscure excitement in his mind that he’d felt the day he’d invented the wind tunnel, and failed to invent the aeroplane.

He rocked forward on his haunches. Orro’s hand darted for the bone, then returned it disappointed. Darvin twitched his lips at his friend and stood up and walked slowly away into the dark. This time, he was determined not to let whatever insight he’d glimpsed flash away like a fish. Once outside the firelight he could see the stars, and the underside of the blimp. He sprang into the air and flapped upward, and turned. He soared above the fire — his friends looked up and called out — then began circling it, climbing in the warm thermal updraught until he was almost at the height of the blimp. He flew back and forth above the quiet, busy camp. Flying helped him to think, and there was objectivity in that view from a height. Height! That was it! Height and sight! He dropped.

He landed beside the fire in a whoosh of wings and a flurry of smoke and ash.

“Hey!” complained Kwarive, fanning the air in front of her eyes.

“Sorry.” Darvin settled beside her, put a wing around her, and spread the other wing and both hands before the fire to feel the warmth.

“What was that all about?” asked Nollam, who had meantime won the bone.

“Just a thought,” said Darvin. “One that might occur to a bright young tech like yourself. An idea that could get a man noticed.”

Nollam sucked a greasy finger and regarded him. “I’d be interested.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Darvin. “Maybe I’ll keep it to myself. Guard it, you might say, like some tasty morsel.”

Nollam tossed him the charred femur. “There’s some left.”

With a show of gallantry Darvin handed it to Kwarive.

“All right,” he said. “Far be it from me to pick your brains for military secrets. But the marrow of the thing, one might say, is point-to-point, line-of-sight communication. Hilltop to hilltop, like beacon fires. Now, I don’t ask you to say that’s what it is. All I’m saying is, if that’s all the Might is using it for they’re missing a trick.”

“Go on,” said Nollam, ears pricking.

“Today the message from the sky was received over a wide area, or so Markhan gave us to suppose. By receivers that were nowhere near within sight of each other.”

“They were all within sight of the third moon,” said Nollam. His ear twitched and his brows rose. “Aha! I see what you’re getting at, but we can’t put transmitters or transmission aerials in the sky.”