Learning the World

8 — Security Concerns

It was bad flying weather. The morning sea fog over Five Ravines tasted of smoke, and left black grains on the tips of fur. Frost nipped at feet. Most people walked on clogs which they gripped fore and aft by toe- and heel-claws. Some people walked wrapped in cloaks, like extra wings, made from the skins or woven from the hair of prey. Out in the Broad Channel foghorns sounded, like lonely grazers bellowing.

Darvin strode unshod, wrapped only in his wings and warmed by the memory of the past night with Kwarive. The warmth was emotional; as a matter of regrettable fact, thinking about the night sent blood coursing through his membranes; wasting its heat on the chill air. He didn’t mind, but he forced his thoughts to his work. Lecturing and demonstrating to students paid for some of his research. His stipend, and the rest of his research expenses, were covered, like those of most scholars, by obscure trickles from Seloh’s Bounty. As in most recent years, the Bounty had been pinched at Treasury level by the demands of the armed services, Seloh’s Might. Seloh herself — the Seloh, twenty-seventh of that name — had made pointed reference in her annual autumnal speech from the Height about the need for stringency in scientific and educational expenditure. Many of Darvin’s colleagues had hastened to rephrase their petitions for bounty in martial terms, with sometimes ludicrous results. Kwarive herself had told him, laughing, of how an entire anatomy course had been justified as research into the effects of lethal or anaesthetic gases. What military applications this could have, gods only knew: the use of gas in warfare was engineering-tales stuff and nonsense, but the air force, Seloh’s Flight, had accepted it. Orro’s aeronautical experiments had been too hopeless even for such a brazen camouflage, but his mathematical studies, to his surprise, obtained without demur a grant directly from not the Might, but the intelligence agency, Seloh’s Sight — alien and suspect though the Gevorkian was. Perhaps, he’d muttered, the Sight wanted to keep an eye on him. He had taken the money and at once used it to pay his debts to certain mechanics and artisans.

Which meant, Darvin guessed, that it had in turn gone straight into putting blood in the mouths of hungry kits. It might as well have come straight from that portion of the Bounty earmarked for relief.

Darvin’s own research had found no such excuse, as it had found no planet. His and Orro’s paper on the mysterious moving obect and on the historical increase in the number of the Daughters had appeared on the physics wire, drawn a wingful of puzzled, point-missing queries, and sunk without trace. It had not been a good summer, nor yet a good autumn, to press the point. The cheap prints buzzed with sensations: a moving star had been glimpsed, not by astronomers; Gevorkian airships had been spotted far inland, not by the Flight; reports of strange slow bolides flew in from here and there; thunderclaps had boomed from clear skies; a ship, its crew all dead of an unknown ghastly malady, had, not according to the navy, foundered on the Channel coast; merchants from Seloh and Gevork had brawled in some treaty port of the Southern Rule; and a prey calf with two heads had lived an outer-month.

The peril of being associated with such trash had left Orro and Darvin in seething silence.

Meanwhile, Darvin had his own research funding to worry about. He had spent two and a half years already on the blink comparator, and with nothing but the Little Bastards and the mysterious vanishing comet to show for it, he had little grounds for asking his senior to renew the grant, and small motive to. He had toyed with the thought of writing up his meagre results and abandoning the quest to some future junior astronomer with more patience and perhaps better instruments.

Too bedraggled and wearied by his damp walk to fly even the short hop to the astronomy storey, Darvin plodded up the unfamiliar staircase to the floor, and met Orro at the top. The Gevorkian returned a grim look to Darvin’s surprised greeting. Loitering behind Orro were two men, wings poised, arms folded, faces sharp and mouths closed. One of them detached himself from the wall and sauntered to where Orro stood in glum silence. From a pouch on his belt the stranger flashed a small bronze disc with an inset enamel eye. To present even an imitation of that sigil was a slashing offence; Darvin took it as seriously as Orro already had. “My office?” he said.

The Sight agent nodded. Darvin led the way. As he unlocked the door the keys rattled and jangled. He clenched his fist around them and stalked in. The second agent planted himself in front of the door as soon as it was closed; the first sat on the windowsill. Orro perched on the table, Darvin on his chair. An awkward party they made, distributed thus about the cluttered room.

“Well, officers, how can we help you?” asked Darvin.

The one on the windowsill gave his cheekbone a meditative rub with his wing wrist. “For you to say, I should think,” he said.

“I don’t understand.”

The Sight man looked around the room. “Did they pay you much?”

Darvin misunderstood. “I have my stipend, various Bounty grants, some teaching fees—”

“Not what I meant.”

The one at the door made a lurch. The other warned him back with a frown.

“Your friend here, now,” he went on, “he’s a Gevorkian. All quite understandable. But you, that’s the puzzle. Hasn’t Seloh given you enough? Hence the question.”

Darvin understood at last. “I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about,” he said.

Another lurch from the door, another frown from the window. The fog swirled outside.

Orro clapped a hand to the top of his head. His ears went back. “Oh!” he said. “I remember now.”

He extended a leg to the floor, stood on it, swung the other from the table, and paced behind the blink comparator, as though its brassy bulk could afford him some protection. He looked from one agent to the other, his glance pausing only for a remorseful fraction of a second on Darvin. “I wrote to my friend Holder, in the Regnal Air Force, about our… ah… results,” he said.

“Which results?” asked Darvin.

Orro waved upward. “The comet and the green stars.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all. He replied, and I discussed it further. Nothing else.”

Darvin let out a sigh of relief. He had been afraid Orro had noised abroad something about his aeronautics — which, futile though it was, might have made some unsleeping Eye prick up his ears.

“There you are, gentlemen,” he said. “No defence significance. A scientific enigma, that’s all, related to a former colleague across the water. My friend here hasn’t abused his position in the least.”

“What’s of defence significance,” said the Eye at the window, “and what’s an abuse of position, is not for you to judge. Nor me, come to that.” He combed an eyebrow tuft with a claw. “But you did sign the university charter, did you not?”

“Of course,” said Darvin.

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but that does include a clause or two about having due regard for the interests of the Reach?”

Darvin tried to remember a page or eight of small-print boilerplate. “If you say so.”

“I do say so, and rightly,” said the agent. He made a sad, sucking noise through his teeth. “And, in my layman’s opinion, some unknown object hurtling out of the outer darkness straight towards us might just possibly be of some moment to the weal of the Reach.”

Darvin felt like laughing with relief. “In that case, I’ve done my duty,” he said, “and so has Orro. We’ve published a full account of it.”

“That,” said the Eye, “is your problem.” He drummed his heel-claws on the wall, then slid down to stand again on the floor. “Published. You’ve no idea the trouble you’ve given us. If you’re feeling a bit put out that it didn’t get much of a response, don’t blame your colleagues. Except, maybe, for a certain lack of fortitude about having their arms twisted.”

“The Sight did that?” said Darvin, outraged. “Suppressed discussion?”

“That and more,” said the agent. “That and more.”

He shook his head and sighed. “It’s a cold morning,” he said. “Brew us some tea, would you?”

Startled by the shift in tone, Darvin complied. As he wiped stains out of old mugs with a rag dirtier than the crockery, he tried to calm his thoughts. He was certain that nothing either he or Orro had done could count as a crime before any just tribunal, but the Sight was not reputed to be just. Nor, on the other wing, was it considered arbitrary. It did not persecute. It seldom pried. He suspected, therefore, that he and Orro were being given a shaking to see what fell out from under their wings. Or — aha, that was it — to soften them up for a softer approach.

The suspicion was soon confirmed. The agent at the door sat down on the table, the other returned to the window, and both sipped the tea with evident relaxation. The one who had spoken before spoke again.

“All right, gentlemen,” he said. “You seem to have got yourselves into some trouble. Quite innocently, I reckon, from what you’ve said. You don’t act like guilty men. But that’s just my opinion, and I don’t know if it’ll be shared by the higher-ups, if you see what I mean. So let’s see if I can help you to help yourselves, so to speak, and maybe matters will go no further.”

Orro flashed Darvin a warning look; Darvin nodded, unsure of what he was being warned.

“Good,” said the Eye, taking the nod as his. He laid down his mug on the windowsill and fingered a sheaf of fine, crackling papers from the largest of his belt pouches. Darvin and Orro peered over the first sheet as he spread it on the table. The other agent stared over their bowed heads, out of the window.

The paper was squared, with two numbered axes, and marked with minute, also numbered crosses in ink. The crosses had been joined with a pencilled shallow curve.

“What do you make of that?” said the Eye.

“It’s an arc of an ellipse,” said Orro.

The Eye looked at him. “That, I could have told you,” he said. “A little more detail, if you please.”

Darvin looked closer and recognised what he saw. The axes were the familiar celestial ones, and the numbers on the crosses were dates and times that registered a series of observations — a series that reached to the day before yesterday, and began half an eight of outer-months ago in early summer, around about the time when the comet had disappeared.

“Hey!” he said, straightening up so fast that the crown of his head almost collided with the Eye’s chin. He rushed to his desk and scrabbled through the papers there, and brought out an offprint of his and Orro’s article. Flicking through the pages, he found the diagram he sought, and laid it beside the new picture. The dates overlapped, the numbers matched, and the lines—

Orro needed no more than a glance to see what Darvin had seen. “Deceleration,” he said, “followed by a free elliptical orbit — deceleration to orbit! Orbital” — he sought a word — “insertion.”

Damn’s hands shook. He reached for the paper to see what lay underneath. The Eye grabbed his wrist.

“Later, maybe,” he said. They all leaned back and looked at each other.

“So you recognise our intruder.”

“In principle,” said Orro. He reached for his tea and slurped. “You’ve shown us a plot of a path it could have taken. But it continues after it vanished from sight. How could the subsequent points be observations?”

“Never you mind,” said the Eye. “For now, let me assure you that they are. Or so I’ve been told, by people who don’t mess me about.”

The hitherto silent agent stifled a laugh.

“Not,” the Eye went on, “that many do.” He waved aside the sudden return to menace. “Anyhow. These very folks have also told me, most definite like, that this thing here is no natural object. No way, no how, no matter which way you turn it — and they have, gentlemen, they have.”

“This is wonderful,” said Orro.

“You could say that,” said the Eye. “What the Sight says, and the Might says, and the Flight says, and for all I know to the contrary, what her soaring majesty herself says, is that this thing is of — now, how did you put it? — defence significance.”

“Of more than that, surely,” said Darvin, appalled at this blinkered view. “It’s of world importance. It’s the most significant and exciting event in our history!”

The Eye gave him a look. “Examined it, have you?” he said. “Communed with it, perhaps? Confident, are you, that it means us no harm? Thought not.”

He leaned over the table again. “Next picture.”

The grey-and-black sheet he spread out might have been a photograph of a series of small photographs, arranged in three rows of six; Darvin had not seen its like, and was unsure how it had been done. The pictures showed a pointed cylindrical object with two rectangular attachments midway along it. A white line of smoke or steam began a little behind the blunt end. In the first pictures the object was foreshortened, then in the second row it appeared in full view, and in the final row it was foreshortened from the back, eventually dwindling to a dot. The trail was in all the photographs. The series gave the irresistible impression of something like a flechette hurtling past. Darvin imagined how they would look run as a series of kinematographic frames, and realised that that was what they were.

Orro looked so expressionless that Darvin suspected he recognised what he saw; but the Eye’s quizzical gaze was on Darvin, as though suspecting that he knew what it was.

Darvin shook his head. “I’m baffled,” he said. “What is this?”

The Eye turned a glare on Orro. “I’ll tell you one thing it isn’t,” he said. “It’s not one of your precious self-propelled flechettes.”

The Gevorkian started. “I know nothing of such.”

“As well you shouldn’t.” He twisted a smile at Orro, and jabbed a finger at the paper. “You know what altitude this was flying at? Five by eight by eight by eight wingspans.”

It was a figure you thought of as a distance, not a height.

“Travelling about that distance in about eight-and-two seconds,” the Eye went on. “Faster than a speeding crossbolt, you might say. Its length is reckoned to be about a wingspan and a half.”

“How were photographs of something so small taken at such a distance?” Darvin asked.

“None of your business.”

As soon as he said it Darvin formed a guess: a camera attached to a telescope, and tracking very fast — a new gunsight, no doubt. As secret on the Selohic side as the self-propelled flechettes — whatever they might be — were supposed to be on the Gevorkian. It saddened him that military technology was so much more advanced than he’d ever imagined.

“All right,” he said. “So… what is it?”

The Eye looked impatient. “We’re asking you.”

“You really don’t know?” Orro sounded disbelieving.

The Eye clasped his hands on the top of his head, in a gesture of frustration or surrender. “No,” he said. “We wrapping well don’t know, and that’s no ploy.”

It occurred to Darvin that the man, and whoever had sent him and his silent comrade, was afraid.

“I know what it is,” said Orro. “It’s a self-propelled aerial vehicle. A heavier-than-air flying machine, but one that flies without flapping.”

“We should have you in the service,” the Eye said.

The sarcasm was wasted on Orro.

“It must work on the same principle as the self-propelled flechette,” he said.

“And what might that be?” asked the Eye.

“It is not for me to say,” Orro said. “You no doubt know, in any case, but—” He passed his hand across his lips. Then scientific excitement seemed to overcome patriotic scruple. He snatched the paper and held it up to the light from the window, his head swaying as he scanned it, narrow-eyed, back and forth. “I think I see it.”

“See what?” asked Darvin.

“It’s undergoing a sort of… power-assisted gliding.”

“Artificial thermals?”

Orro shook his head. “Of course not.” He laughed harshly. “Not a bad idea in itelf, in terms of military applications. Burning towns provide thermals enough… but no, this is quite different. This line coming out of the back appears to be a jet of steam. Now, a jet of steam, under sufficient pressure, could propel the object forward — action and reaction, see?”

“Yes,” said Darvin, “I quite see that, but—”

“And what,” interrupted the Eye, “would be the heat source for this flying teakettle?”

“I don’t know,” said Orro. “Something beyond our present comprehension. It doesn’t matter. It could as well be… the mode of propulsion of the… ah… self-propelled flechette, but that has… um… certain practical limitations, which, um… Forget about that for the moment. The point is that one can separate the two functions of a wing — lift, and power.”

“That’s a difficult idea to wrap one’s mind around,” said Darvin.

“There’s a certain truth in the old saw,” said Orro, “that if the gods had meant us to build flying machines, they wouldn’t have given us wings.”

Darvin recalled flying in the wind tunnel, flapping hard into the blast of air from the cannibalised airship propeller. This conversation gave him the same strange, frustrating feeling of flying on the spot.

“You mean that chiroptery has all been a mistake?”

“Not entirely,” said Orro. “Now let us think. If this jet propulsion is impracticable for us, we need to devise, as well as the static wing, some other form of, of…”

“Propeller?” said the Eye.

Orro and Darvin rounded on him and shouted as one. “That’s it!”

The Eye backed away, taking all of the pieces of paper with him. His companion bristled and backed in the opposite direction, to the doorway.

“All right,” said the Eye. He picked up his cup again, sniffed at it, and put it down. “I’m sure you’ve both just made some remarkable leap of logic. Very gratifying, but not my immediate concern. Nor, right at this moment, should it be yours.”

“What do you mean?” Darvin tried to keep his excitement from leaking aggression into his voice. He wanted nothing more than to rush out this room to Orro’s laboratory.

“I mean, gentlemen, that you’re still in trouble. Not the trouble you thought you were, though that’s still hanging over you, so to speak. You’ve seen things, and had ideas, that we don’t want spread around.”

“I understand,” said Orro. “You have my word that none of this shall go to Gevork.”

The Eye shook his head. “Not good enough, I’m afraid. Which is sad. If I’d been sent to expel you as persona non grata, I’d have gladly taken your parole and not so much as bothered to escort you to the quay. But we’re in stormier skies here.” He sighed. “Stormier skies. This is where your troubles begin.”

Keeping his gaze on them, he stepped forward to the table and took from yet another pouch: a small folding knife, a thin iron rod with a curled end and a wooden handle, a box of matches, a dip pen, a candle stub, a stick of sealing wax, and two sheets of paper. He flicked the knife open and flourished it in their faces. The blade looked very sharp. Darvin wondered what he was about to do with it. He thought of Orro’s military training. Behind him, he heard the solid click of a handheld crossbow being cocked.

The Eye pushed a paper toward each of them.

“Read, sign and thumbprint in blood, and seal,” he said. “Or die here.”

Five minutes later Darvin and Orro were sworn to Seloh’s Sight.

“This is outrageous,” said Darvin. “You’ve betrayed your country.”

They perched together at the top of the faculty’s tower, out of sight and earshot of anyone within view. Orro’s calm gaze didn’t deviate from the fog.

“I have not,” he said. “What would Gevork give, to have a Gevorkian within the Sight?”

“I’m sure they have agents in place already.”

“No doubt. So you see, I have nothing to worry about.”

“Seems to me you have everything to worry about.”

“It does get complicated,” said Orro. “There are mathematical functions for such matters.” He shrugged, and steepled his wings. “I can keep track.”

Darvin thought of spies spying on spies. It made him dizzy. Perhaps it was his duty to report on Orro. Perhaps this was a test, to see whether he did report on Orro. Perhaps Orro had all along been suborned to the Sight. Or, maybe, everything was as it seemed. That was something he could never again take for granted. He decided he would.

“All right,” he said. “You keep track. What worries me is what we’re both betraying.”

“And that is?”

“Science.”

Now Orro did turn to him, eyes bright. “Oh no,” he said. “Not at all. Isn’t this the most marvellous opportunity we could ever have been given, to discover new knowledge?”

“There can be no secret science,” said Darvin. It was one of the platitudes of the Dawn Age.

“Whoever tracked the comet,” said Orro, “and whoever designed the camera that took those pictures, worked in secret.”

“Well obviously military research—”

“Why is that an exception?”

“It’s engineering, not science.”

“Battle is the forge of tools,” said Orro. He said it like a Gevorkian proverb.

“Peace and not war is the father of all,” Darvin shot back. Another platitude.

They both laughed.

“But we’ve seen the pictures,” said Orro.

“Yes,” said Darvin. “We’ve seen the pictures.”

He had a lust to see more pictures. According to the Eye, the project promised more. More secrets, more hidden knowledge, the most knowledge and the deepest secret there had ever been.

“And we know how to build a heavier-than-air craft,” added Orro.

“In secret.”

“Yes.” A note of regret sounded in Orro’s voice. “But you know,” he went on, “Gevorkian though I am, noble though I am, when I think of the Regnal Air Force officers who laughed in my face, I can’t help gloating over the shock they’ll someday get.”

That worried Darvin, but he said nothing. The two of them were not, of course, agents of the Sight, not Eyes; their recruitment to it was a formality, whose only differences with, say, activating Darvin’s membership in the Reserve were that the Gevorkian too could be validly recruited, and that the penalties for betrayal or desertion were far more severe. What they had been recruited to was a project to investigate all aspects of the alien arrival. None of it would, they were assured, be compartmentalised: the whole point was to integrate all the diverse sources of information and insight. It was to be called Project Signal, which Darvin thought something of a giveaway, but one that had a certain ring to it.

There was a camp in the high desert. It consisted of four identical barrack roosts, a central lecture ring, a shooting range, a prey paddock, and a huddle of ruins used for close-quarter combat training. Except for a few guards, the troops had been moved out. By the first night there Darvin had a fair idea of where it was, just from looking at the stars and applying rudimentary navigation. This made the way he had arrived — in a windowless cabin of an airship — a quite futile exercise in security, but he knew better than to say so. The senior military and security officers of Seloh’s Reach were more flexible in their outlook than those of, by all accounts, Gevork, but they had as little sense of humour. To his relief the inaugural Project Signal meeting was organised not like a military briefing but an academic conference. About eight-by-eight scientists and engineers were present. On the first evening, everybody talked about anything but what they were here for.

The following morning, Darvin and Orro hung side by side on the lecture ring with the others and fixed their attention on the man standing in the middle.

“Good morning, colleagues,” he said. “My name is Markhan. I am a research scientist with the Flight. My field is one of which few of you will have heard, because its very existence is secret. I refer to telekinematography, the transmission of moving images by ether waves. Its potential use in military communications is self-evident; so much so that our own developments are closely paralleled in Gevork.”

Even Orro could not forbear to laugh.

“However,” Markhan went on, “we are, I venture to believe, a little ahead of our friends across the water in the matter of building sensitive receiving equipment. A few outer-months ago, during a routine test of this apparatus, one of our technicians — young Nollam over there — noted a strong source of etheric interference from a point in the sky. Now, it should be noted that celestial sources of etheric waves are not rare, and include the Sun Himself. To the best of our knowledge all of these sources are natural. What Nollam spotted was that this source was strong, had a distinct pattern, and moved from night to night. The pattern was a regular pulse, with a period of precisely 2.7 beats. It was moving in the plane of the ecliptic, and was thus, almost certainly, an astronomical object.”

Nollam had taken the data to Markhan, who had then made discreet enquiries and hasty searches through the stack of prints from the physics wire — which had turned up Darvin and Orro’s paper. More recently, extraordinarily faint echoes of the secret Selohic experimental transmissions had been detected from the sky — as if Ground had acquired a third moon, as Markhan put it — shortly followed by the detection of the high-altitude aerial vehicle.

“Does anyone dispute,” Markhan asked, “that all of this, taken together, is evidence that we are being visited and observed by travellers from another world?”

No one did. Darvin guessed that any who might have done so had been excluded — or had excluded themselves — from the Project.

“Very well,” said Markhan. “The question that now arises is: what are we to do about it?”

On this, opinion was divided. Only one voice, that of a stubborn old biologist, was raised in favour of opening the whole matter to the public and to the world. Markhan pointed out that Seloh already stood to gain some military advantage from the existing observations — he didn’t specify how, but Orro nudged Darvin at this point — and there was no telling what might be gained in the future. For the rest, the suggestions ranged from attempting communication with the aliens to building some unspecified gigantic weapon to shoot them out of the sky. The great majority, however, put forward practical suggestions for continuing to observe the craft — Orro, to Darvin’s surprise, urged an attempt to detect it visually, now that its location was continually betrayed by its emissions — and to build more sensitive etheric apparatus; to investigate further and if possible to emulate the powers of flight displayed by the aerial vehicle; and to establish a network to centralise reports of any other unknown aerial or celestial phenomena.

Markhan summed up the emergent near-consensus; the combat military and security officers present endorsed it; the token high political figure from Seloh’s Height made an inspiring speech; and the great project began.