Learning the World

12 — View from a Height

“Tapes!” Nollam shouted. “Tapes!”

As Darvin and Kwarive rushed in to join the growing huddle around the telekinematographic receiver, two of Nollam’s fellow-technicians scrambled and fumbled to load and thread what looked like two kinematograph reels, one full and one empty, with no projector between them.

Darvin peered over Orro’s shoulder, conscious of Kwarive’s chin and hand-claws digging into his.

“We should have had them ready to roll,” he heard Orro grumble. He paid no attention. The screen demanded it all. The press was still growing. Behind and around him people were clambering up racks and leaning forward.

The moving picture was a grainier black-and-white than a kinematographic film, yet less jerky, more fluid and realistic. It showed the map Kwarive had drawn, and peering over it their own staring faces from a minute earlier, then them turning and running out of view. An uneasy laugh went up.

The image changed again, to a figure like a human being without wings, and with small eyes, ears, and nose. The face appeared hairless, with a tuft on the crown of the head. Its mouth was moving, it seemed in synchrony with the sound that boomed from the loudspeakers of the apparatus: EEE UUUUMMMM III-IHHH EEESSS EEEEE… It went on like that, a sound like surf in a cave. It was hard to hear, for a moment, as everybody in the room gasped or cried out, Kwarive loudest of all. Darvin shook with astonishment. Thus far he had not so much as imagined the aliens, and the vague swirl of images in his head that he’d associated with them had been of things far more alien than this.

The alien turned and pointed. What had seemed baggy, wrinkled skin on his arms and chest slipped and moved, revealing itself to be a body covering, like a cloak but fitted and shaped. The picture became for a moment incomprehensible, a patchwork of varied shapes interspersed with bright surfaces and overlaid with fuzzy white blobs. It rotated about a vivid white line drawn from the top of the screen to near the middle, and gave way to a much darker area dotted with clumps of bright spots. This was repeated several times, alternating light and dark.

“It’s the inside of a cylinder,” said Kwarive.

The view snapped into perspective. A cylinder: of course.

Orro jumped. “It’s the inside of the ship!”

“That’s ridiculous!” said one scientist. “Where are the occupants? Where is the machinery?”

“Too small to see!” shouted Orro above the hubbub. “The white puffs are clouds. The bright patches are lakes. We’re looking at a landscape rolled like a map.”

At that point everyone fell silent. The similarity of the scene to a view, from a greater height than any of them had flown, of an entire country curving upward and wrapped around overhead was irresistible.

“The thing is vast,” breathed Markhan, pushing forward from the back of the crowd.

“We knew that already,” said Darvin. “For it to be visible by telescope at its distance,”

The alien voice continued. The viewpoint zoomed downward. As it sank they all saw what seemed to be a gliding man, which as it passed closer turned out to be a small flying machine with a propeller at the front. Orro turned and grinned into Darvin’s face. The viewpoint reached ground level and settled on an open space, beyond which lay low buildings. A few of the aliens walked in and out of view, their legs long, their gait limber. They showed no awareness of the viewpoint, which Darvin presumed to be a camera.

The voice stopped and the picture changed again, to a scrolling display of line diagrams and row upon row of symbols. After some minutes of this the crowd began to relax and break up. Some who had rushed in drifted away, or hastened to their neglected duties. Some of the scientists went into immediate huddled conferences. Others remained transfixed by the incomprehensible sigils on the screen. The telekinematograph technicians paid more attention to the apparatus than to the display.

Markhan called one of them over. “More tapes!”

“Sorry, chief, we only have a couple more reels, and they’re right here.”

“How long does a tape last?”

“About half an hour.”

“Put out a call for more. Airship them in. Meanwhile, scrounge around for any used tapes. I don’t care what’s on them. Have them ready to tape over.”

The technician left, muttering under his breath.

“Might be a waste of time,” said Nollam. “Begging your pardon, chief, but even if we could read that, which we can’t, it’s flying up the screen too fast.”

“Couldn’t we run the tapes slowly?” asked Kwarive. A couple of the technicians laughed. Nollam gave them a sharp look and nodded to Kwarive.

“We couldn’t do it now,” he said, “but maybe with a bit of tinkering… I’ll think about it.”

“If necessary,” said Orro, “we could film the screen and then analyse the film frame by frame.”

“Not much use if we can’t read the script,” said Darvin.

“Forget the script,” said Markhan. “These diagrams we glimpse here and there might tell us much.”

Kwarive scratched Darvin’s back and moved away from behind him. She walked over and stood beside the receiver.

“What,” she asked Nollam, “was the first clear picture that came up?”

“Ah!” he said. “That map thing you drew.”

Kwarive smacked one hand onto the other. “As I thought,” she said. “What we’re seeing here is a reply. Somebody recognised the map as a communication, and sent it back as an acknowledgment, then responded with its own message: first the wingless alien, then a view of the interior of the ship, then all this data.”

“But that map wasn’t your first stab at communicating,” said Markhan.

“No,” said Kwarive, “but it was the first one they recognised. They recognised the map because it corresponded to something they’d already seen — the coastline of Seloh’s Reach, from space.”

“You’re right,” said Orro. He stalked forward and joined her. “And I’ll tell you something else: this is not a communication with us.”

“I don’t follow,” said Markhan.

“If it were,” said Orro, “I should expect, perhaps, some simple pictograms. A series of numbers, like that idea we had about stacks of stones. A diagram of the solar system, a drawing of the ship, a sketch of the aliens’ anatomy. Instead, we get what may be a greeting in the aliens’ own language, followed by screeds of text, also in their own language. It’s as if it’s addressed to somebody on Ground, all right, but somebody who understands.”

“Maybe it’s meant for the electric shittles,” said Darvin, in a tone lighter than he felt.

Orro shook his head. “No. If it were, it would be on the same etheric wavelength as the previous transmissions. This is on the same wavelength as our own telekinematography, and is evidently intended—”

“No,” said Nollam. “Same wavelength and frequency. Started coming through clear, that’s all.”

“That makes my point just as strongly. It’s not directed at the shittles. It’s directed at us, or rather, at someone or something else for which they mistake us.” Darvin felt the fur on his back prickle. “You’re saying that someone or something else is among us?”

“No,” said Orro. “Merely that the aliens think there is.”

“Perhaps,” said Kwarive, “they think others of their species, but not of their… expedition, are here?”

Orro laughed. “They may have rival powers, like us! It’s as if a ship from Seloh saw a signal from a beach in the wilder parts of the Southern Rule, and thought it came from a Gevorkian landing party, whereas in fact it was from the natives.”

“Very neat,” said Markhan. “And entirely speculative. Please watch the screen, record with as few interruptions as possible, while I confer. Let me know at once of any developments.”

He hurried out. The remaining two eights or so of people in the room stood or perched around the receiver.

“Well,” said Kwarive, after another glance at the enigmatic screen, “at least we know what they look like.”

“Or what they want us to think they look like,” said a familiar voice.

Darvin turned to see the Sight agent who’d recruited him. Bahron, he called himself. He hung around the camp and gave vague explanations about site security. Everybody knew who he was and what he did, but kept the pretence that they didn’t. Darvin hadn’t noticed him in the room earlier, and guessed he’d just arrived, or that his penchant for the shadows had kept him unseen.

“Why do you see deception everywhere?” said Orro.

“It’s my trade,” said Bahron.

“In this case, you’re letting it get in the way of… seeing,” said Kwarive. The tiny barb drew smiles from the scientists and techs, and a flicker of irritation from Bahron. “Why should the aliens wish to deceive us?”

“If they’re big ugly monsters, or little ones for that matter, they might want us to think they looked more like ourselves.”

“Then why wingless?”

Bahron shrugged. “For the very reason you raise the question. If they looked too much like us, we’d be suspicious.”

Kwarive folded her arms and steepled her wings. “Fine,” she said. “It’s your job, as you say, to look for lies. It’s ours to look for truth, and until we have more to go on, we’ll go by what we’ve got.” She looked around. “Did anyone spot how many fingers the alien had?”

“Five digits on each hand,” said Orro. “One of them opposable.”

“You’re sure?” asked Kwarive.

“Positive.”

“Good,” said Kwarive.

“We can check later,” Nollam called out. “Soon as we can play back the first tape.”

“All right. So we can guess that their number system has an eight-and-two base.”

“Awkward for arithmetic,” Orro chuckled. “For the base to divide into odd numbers.”

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.”

“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.”

Darvin looked upwards, slowly enough to let Nollam track his gaze. The blimp glowed red above them.

“Can we not?” he said.