Ken MacLeod - Learning the World

“Well,” said Orro, “to work!”

He signalled to the technician, who warned everyone — especially the kits — out of the way, and hauled on the starter. The engine coughed into life with a fart of petroleum smoke. The propeller began to turn, slowly at first, then faster, until it became a deadly flashing disc. The trestles shuddered but remained in position.

Orro stepped to the kinematograph, and Darvin walked around to the end of the tube and faced into the gale that blasted towards him. He threw himself forward, taking to the air, and laboriously flew halfway down the tube, to where a large black cross was marked on the floor and black lines gridded the side opposite the window. With some difficulty he managed to make himself fly above the spot, maintaining position without hovering but as though flying into headwind.

“That’s it!” he heard Orro shouting, through the window and above the howl of the engine. “Hold it there! Flap! Flap!”

14364:06:1801:25

I hate Horrocks Mathematical. He’s the crewman who runs the training habitat I had the bad luck to pick. Node 52 on the gamma ring. (It says here.) I’m sitting/lying in the branches of an air-tree, in a cocoon that’s like a sort of sleeping bag combined with a hammock. Everybody around me is snoring (or making even more disgusting and distracting noises) and I’m exhausted, my bones and muscles are aching, but I can’t sleep. Not yet.

The day started well. I decided long ago that I wasn’t going to take my training along with all my friends, or even with people I knew. It’s not like I intend to homestead with them, and besides, being with the same people as I’ve grown up with would not be exactly the Out There Experience.

I got up before sun-on, and walked out in the dimness of farlight to that copse from which I had once tried to climb the sky. The ladder was long since gone, along with all the rest of the leftover scaffolding of the world, its components recycled or perhaps added to the mountains of trash, now much diminished, piled against the forward wall for throwing as reaction mass into the maw of the drive. I found a comfortable enough place to lean my back against, on an ivy-grown cuboid structure that might have been the ladder’s base. Bats flitted and chirped among the trees. A few early birds stirred, and some small animal moved in the long grass. It didn’t look like anything that could harm me.

My virtuality genes haven’t kicked in yet. (This is an admission.) (The other stuff is happening, all right?) So I blinked up the sky opposite on my contacts. The world disappeared, like it does. The sky took its place. I chose a stable image, one not turning with the world. The Destiny Star is hard to pick out without cheating, but I did it, sighting carefully along where my memory placed the forward cone. It’s brighter than the others in its region, that’s all. The sight of it works a strange effect on my diaphragm, on what the ancients called the heart. Something between a gasp and a jump; something between home and hope . It’s like — all right, this is childish, but — it’s like I’ve all my life been an exile from some marvellous place, and now I can see it in the distance. I couldn’t see its comet-cloud around us, of course, not without magnification, but just burning there it looks haloed with glamour.

I turned carefully, my gaze sweeping along the Bright Road, and faced in the opposite direction, through the rearward cone. The Red Sun is easy to spot, of course, and around it — which is to say, behind it — one by one until they multiply in a haze, the green-tinged stars of the Civil Worlds. I tried to think of the trillions of worlds, some larger than ours, some smaller, that that green glow proclaimed, and the quadrillions of people and indeed of stranger beings that inhabit them. How vast it all was. And in the whole sky, how small.

14364:06:1920:35

I fell asleep writing that. I hope you stayed awake reading it. And I see I have told you nothing that I meant to tell you. Now I have more, and I have to catch up.

So: I walked back out of the copse to the estate, made over my business pro tem to my three-quarter-sister (I’m checking up on you, Magnetic Resonance Gale, don’t think I’m not), said goodbye to my caremother, and took the train to the forward wall. Just before it entered the wall it passed through a valley between two trash mountains. Never having looked at them up close, I was surprised (though I shouldn’t have been) to find that the trash isn’t just raw junk and clinker: you can see ruins in it, pipework, walls and spires, the rubble of cities built when there was less room in the world. Huge machines crawl over it like crabs, breaking the junk down small enough to chuck into the service lifts to the drive. I got out at a long, low-ceilinged station and after checking directions and assignments and a bit of hanging about while the rest of the contingent straggled in, took the lift to the upper levels. It was a much bigger lift than the one Constantine had taken me to, and the journey took about an hour. There were thirty other passengers, all of them booked for the same training habitat as myself. I hadn’t wanted to train with people I knew, and in this I’ve certainly been successful. I didn’t know any of them. What I hadn’t expected was that no one else I was with would have had the same idea. So the rest all know each other, or rather, they’re in two cliques from two estates, New Lamarck and Long Steading, adjacent to each other and distant from mine, Big Foot. (Does that name come from its once having been at the foot of a big ladder? Very likely; back when the estates were construction camps, their naming was quite arbitrary.)

The New Lamarck clique are into somatic hacks, some of them in questionable taste. But I’ll take their plumed scalps and cats’ eyes and particoloured skin any day over the Long Steading crowd’s conspicuous conformity. (If any of them are reading this, which I doubt, I make no apologies. I’ve told you this to your faces.) What they are into is each other . Their plan is to train together, homestead together and become a founder population together. There’s already at least one triple among them. That is just disgusting. It is behaving like old people.

Anyway, none of them talked to me on the way up, or in the scooter. I was first out of the airlock at the habitat. I emerged into the big bubble of air; it contained two roughly spherical objects, the air-tree and the rock. The sunline burned above, the downward view was dizzying, but my childhood experience, brief though it was, of free fall came back to me. I wasn’t disoriented. A guide-rope snaked from the airlock to the air-tree. Holding it, waiting to greet us, was Horrocks Mathematical.

He’s tall — or rather, long. About two metres from his heels to the top of his head, and a good half-metre more if you were to measure from his toes to the top of his hair. His hands are long too. Like his feet, they protruded bare from his red one-piece coverall. His hair is long and in numerous braids. Brown skin, blue eyes, angular features. It was sorely evident that he’s not six years older than most of us.

He waved, smiled, and beckoned us along the rope. I had some idea of how to handle myself, and kept close behind his feet, which waved in front of me like a skin diver’s. The others did a lot of giggling and screaming and fooling around, or so it sounded. I disdained to look back. At the entrance to the tree Horrocks turned around, and shook hands with everyone as they passed him. Then we all followed Horrocks through the branches and into the tree. Its interior space was crisscrossed with lianas and with branches extended and shaped to a clutter of grown furnishings: hoops of wood to put your legs through, flat tables, handholds, complex storage spaces, sleeping pods, a few opaque cylindrical chambers that I guessed were privies; and with optical and plastic tubing and modified leaves or nuts that formed translucent skins for great wobbling spheres of water.