Ken MacLeod - Learning the World

The descending box was now visible without binoculars. It was obvious from the exclamations around him that most people still shared his first assumption, that the thing levitated. As it drew closer the line became apparent to the naked eye, and the marvel at the sight only increased. The box now looked in parts transparent. Wisps of vapour puffed from its sides every few seconds: course corrections, Darvin guessed. Its speed seemed to increase as it descended, but Darvin knew for certain that this was an illusion. After another couple of minutes and several more corrections, it came to rest on the rocky plain a few eights-of-eights of paces away from them.

No shouts of command could stop the civilians walking forward. The soldiers too, after an urgent argument, ran to keep pace. The order they obeyed was to keep their crossbows slung.

As though at an unseen barrier, everyone stopped at the same place. The box now looked much bigger than it had seemed before. The afternoon heat hung heavy. The lurid pools stank like ammonia. Creaking and cracking noises echoed across the rocky flats. A door opened in the side of the box. With one accord everyone took a couple of paces back.

A wingless giant stepped out. Its body was black with a dull gleam. Around its head was a glassy globe. The alien stopped, the globe moving this way and that. It seemed to see them. It raised both hands slowly from its sides, above its head, and walked forward.

The urge to flee almost possessed Darvin. Eight eights of steps — its steps — away, the alien stopped. It lifted the globe from around its head, and placed it in the crook of one arm. The other hand it kept upraised. Black-faced, fuzz-scalped, this was to all appearances the same alien who had spoken on the screen.

Someone remembered to take a photograph. Nollam, huddled over his apparatus, muttered curses to himself.

The alien reached to the round collar upon which the helmet had sat. It pulled something like a stiff cord to one of its small flat ears, and another to the front of its lips. Its lips moved.

“Good day,” it said.

Nobody moved or said anything. It struck Darvin that in all their planning for this encounter, no one had thought to establish that priority. He glanced sideways at Markhan. The chief scientist stood with knees trembling and wings furled tight. Darvin noticed that the same was true of himself. He tried, just as an experiment, to take a step forward. His foot would not move.

As he looked down he glimpsed a forward movement and heard a voice. “I’m a biologist,” said Kwarive. “This is a new species.”

She was on her way before he could stop her. She walked straight up to the giant. She stopped just beyond his reach and spread out her wings.

“Good day,” she said, her voice firm and loud. “Welcome to Ground.”

“Welcome,” repeated the alien.

“You spoke of trudges,” said Kwarive. “Here is a trudge kit.”

The alien reached forward and took the small shape in its huge hands.

“This is a trudge?” said the alien.

“I trudge, me,” came Handful’s thin voice. “You man smell bad.”

The alien’s shoulders shook. Its voice made a deep repeated bark that might have been laughter. Darvin could see the kit flinch and squirm. The alien handed him back to Kwarive. Handful immediately buried his nose in her shoulder, as Darvin could detect from Kwarive’s movements. The alien was looking down at its hands.

“Shit,” said the alien.

For the past two eight-days, all over Seloh and Gevork, scientists and Sight agents and civil servants had been talking to trudges. They had been doing so in confined but comfortable spaces, none of which were barred with metal or surrounded with mesh. Some of the trudges had been old and angry, bitter at being made conscious at a time when they had nothing to look forward to but death, and nothing to look back on but a maimed and brutish life. There had been suicides. There had been attacks, some fatal. Others of the trudges had been young, some even younger than Handful, some older. A few had been mature, wary and wise. They had kept their understanding to themselves, and only their etheric emissions had betrayed them. Some of them could not be coaxed to speak. Others talked until they and their interlocutors dropped with exhaustion.

Signals beamed forth from cunning secret coils an alien alchemy had spun close to their spines. The ever-extended vocabulary of the trudges reached the sky.

Beside that etheric flood was another. Every TK transmitter in Seloh’s Reach repeated the proclamation from the Height, and every one in Gevork the new decree from the Rock of Lassir. They repeated it until every citizen had heard that trudges were no longer to be mutilated, that any trudge who could speak was to be sold at a good price to the Reach or the Realm and then emancipated as a free worker, with compensation; that all trudges, articulate or not, were to be treated without violence. More to the point, they repeated it until even the aliens could not fail to understand it.

“I do not understand it,” said the alien to Markhan. The two stood at the focus of a silent semicircle. “You are to let go the trudges?”

“Yes.”

“Like—” The alien threw out his hands.

“Yes.”

“With no kick or hit among you?”

“With some hurt,” said Markhan. The vocabulary the alien had learned was still restricted and concrete. “But we must. The trudges speak. They too are men.”

The alien was silent for a while.

“Your fight men make ready,” he said. He pointed to the soldiers. He made zooming movements with his spread hands. “Fight in the sky. Drop hurt on you and them roosts. We say no.”

“We make ready to fight men from the sky,” said Markhan. “Ground is ours.”

The alien squatted down. His hands touched the ground. “Ground is yours,” he said. “We men from the sky will not fight you. Ground is yours.”

“Good,” said Markhan. “Then we will not fight you men from the sky. But other men come from the sky. We make ready for them.”

The alien rotated his head from side to side. “No, no,” he said. “No other men come from sky. Only us men from sky.”

“We hear other voices from the sky,” said Markhan. “Not only your voice.”

“Ah!” said the alien. He looked about for a moment, then pointed to the sky in the east. “Green suns are our roost. You hear voices from green suns.”

“No,” said Markhan. He glanced over his shoulder and beckoned to Nollan, then pointed west and then north. “We hear a voice from a white sun, and from a yellow sun.”

The alien rocked back on his heels. “What?” he said.

Interlude: White Air

Synchronic stood in the garden for the last time, and looked out over a drab and depleted landscape. The only living thing in sight was grass. The trees had been felled or dug up. The lakes and rivers had been drained. The animals had been slaughtered or herded indoors. The grass itself was torn or stamped by the tracks and treads of the huge machines that now stalked across the devasted scene like alien invaders. Domes had replaced many buildings, or covered those of special significance. Other buildings had sprouted new equipment: aerials and defence batteries, solar-power collectors, long tubular connecting corridors, closed-system recycling plant. Windows had been sealed, roofs diamond-plated, doors replaced by airlocks. The whole terrible process followed a standard schematic, for preparing the habitat for an almost unthinkable combination of drive failure and unavoidable collision. It had taken four months.

The warning sirens echoed through the now barren habitat like a shout inside an empty drum. Synchronic sighed and walked back to the house. The airlock closed behind her. She entered one of the rooms where the children watched from behind the reinforced windows and moved to spread reassurance, picking up one child after another, touching heads and shoulders.