Learning the World

10 — Above Top Secret

Kwarive on the telephone: “There’s something you might like to see.”

“I’ll be over,” said Darvin, and put the receiver down. He knew from her tone that nothing more effusive was expected, and that something important was up. They had agreed on how to convey such matters. Getting clearance to tell Kwarive a fraction of the truth had required a fight with the Sight of which he could tell her nothing. His security handler had been rather too enamoured of his own clever idea for a cover story, which was that Darvin should tell Kwarive that he and Orro had male-bonded. Darvin had sometimes speculated that Orro was a male-bonding male — in parts of the Gevorkian armed and civil services and nobility it was almost a requirement — but he had no wish whatsoever to violate his friend’s privacy and reticence. He had made this point with such vehemence that the handler had asked him, not in jest, if the suggested cover story was in fact true. Darvin assured him it was not. The tale was in fact tempting — it would have reassured Kwarive that Darvin and Orro were not using their frequent mysterious absences for any dangerous or unsavoury purpose — but it would have been, Darvin knew, intolerable to Orro. So, with great reluctance and much scratching of floors and stamping of papers, the handler had agreed that Kwarive, as Darvin’s girlfriend and prospective roost-partner, could not be kept out of the circle. He was still enjoined to tell her nothing of the aeronautics, telecommunications, and other projects that the discovery of the alien visitation had stimulated; and he had sworn to that effect.

The Life Sciences Building smelt of flitter and skitter droppings, of preserving fluids and warm hay. Skulls and skins decorated its corridor walls, as in the roost of a plains hunter. Kwarive, as a student, didn’t have an office, but she had a regular place of work, the laboratory annex of the department’s museum. Her part-time job there gave her valuable training in practical skills as well as a small wage.

Darvin hurried past the dusty glass cases and stoppered glass jars and into the room at the far end. Shelves lined its walls, laden with preserved animal parts, bones, chunks of mineral, and stacks of paper. Its door faced the window, and between door and window lay a long table that, except for the electrical lamps and dissection microscope, looked a lot like a prey-merchant’s counter. Bloodstains, gashes, sharp tools, animal parts. Kwarive looked up from the far end. She gestured to a shelf near the door.

“Pick up the telephone receiver,” she said. “Hold it to your ear.”

Puzzled, Darvin complied. He heard nothing but the expected whining whir. Kwarive, holding a closed basket, paced down the room towards him. As she approached, the telephone’s note changed, overlaid by a faint buzz that rose in volume with every step she took. When she held the basket beside the receiver, the buzz dominated the sound of the empty line. Kwarive smiled at him and retraced her steps. The buzz diminished.

Darvin returned the receiver to its cradle.

“What have you got in there?” he asked.

“Guess,” said Kwarive.

“Some electrical device?”

“Come and have a look.”

His hand on the basket lid, he hesitated. “No trick?” he asked.

Kwarive looked indignant. “Nothing’s going to jump out at you.”

On the floor of the basket was a shittle. A common grazer-dung-eating insect about the length of a thumb, it was in no way different from any other shittle Darvin had ever seen: stubby feelers, sturdy nippers, two camera eyes, four legs on the thorax, four on the metathorax, shiny blue wing-cases along the abdomen.

Darvin closed the lid and raised his brows. “Yes?”

“You asked me to tell you about anything unusual,” Kwarive said.

“Well, it’s certainly an interesting discovery,” Darvin said. “I bet nobody knew shittles have an electrical field. Maybe they use it to find their way around in the shit, like electric fish do in murky water, or perhaps it’s a defence—”

“Shittles don’t have an electrical field,” said Kwarive.

“How do you know?”

Kwarive jumped on to the perch at the end of the table and huffed. When her wings had settled she pointed to another identical basket on a shelf.

“There’s a whole basket of them there,” she said. “See for yourself.” Darvin checked that the basket indeed contained a crawling mass of the ugly brutes, and carried it to the telephone. He picked up the receiver and heard only the whir. He returned and put the basket back.

“Maybe it’s a different species.”

Kwarive chittered her teeth at him. “I’m the biologist here.”

“All right,” said Darvin, abashed. “Sorry. So tell me how you found this one.”

“The delivery trudge came in with the full basket — it’s a consignment for an insect-physiology practical — just as I was on the telephone to the administration office. That’s how I heard the buzz. Now, I immediately jumped to the same conclusion that you did — that I’d accidentally discovered a new fact about shittles. However, being a good scientist, I decided to check it by putting half the shittles in an empty basket. One buzzed, the other didn’t. So I kept splitting them between various empty containers” — she gestured at a collection of jars, boxes, and dissection pans among the clutter — “and narrowed it down to this one specimen.”

Darvin found a stool and sat on it and looked up at Kwarive on her perch. “And you think an electric shittle is relevant to the, ah, big picture?”

He had a vague worry that he had let slip some information about the telecommunications aspect, to which — Kwarive might have thought — an electric-field-producing insect might be of interest. A dim notion floated past him of somehow training the little beasts to act as signalling devices for sabreurs in flight. A sort of portable wireless… yes indeed, the Flight might be interested in that.

“I think it came from up there,” Kwarive said. She rolled her eyes upward, as — with a different significance — did Darvin a moment later.

“Perhaps the visitors are very small,” he said.

She hopped off the perch and shook him by the shoulders. “Stop making fun of this!” she said. “It’s like you’re making fun of me!”

Darvin put his wings around her and nuzzled the top of her head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But it’s all so—”

She stepped out of his enfolding. “I know,” she said. “I find it hard to believe what you tell me, even though you’ve shown me some of the evidence. You know, there are times when I wonder whether your big secret story isn’t a cover for something even stranger.”

“I wouldn’t do that to you,” said Darvin.

“I know, I know. Anyway. Sometimes I swear it seems easier to believe that you’re a spy for Gevork or… or something, than that what you tell is true. Even though I do trust you.”

“You know I have not told you everything,” said Darvin.

“Oh, I know that. I’m sure the military are flapping their wings all over this.”

Darvin nodded. “It’s their job,” he said. “Their duty.”

“And it’s yours not to tell me about it. Now let’s dissect this bug.”

She could change course like a flitter, Darvin thought, but he was glad of it.

She tipped the shittle on to a bloodied square of board and flipped it on its back. Its legs waved. Kwarive reached for a long pin.

“Stop!” said Darvin.

“What?”

“It might give you an electrical shock.”

“That little thing?”

“There might be some kind of capacitor inside it.”

Kwarive looked dubious, but held the pin in a pair of wooden tongs when she skewered the shittle, and rummaged up a ceramic probe and knife. Then she took the board to the binocular dissection microscope and switched on the light. She slit the underside of the animal lengthwise, through the hard thoraxes and the soft, segmented abdomen, and eased the sides of the cut apart. The legs stopped twitching.

The tips of the probe and the blade stirred almost imperceptibly in the innards. Darvin recognised a tiny gut being lifted to one side. The probe’s tip snagged. Kwarive grunted and her hands made more minute, steady movements.

“Will you look at this,” she said, her voice calm. She stepped back from the instrument.

Darvin adjusted the eyepieces and the focus. The shittle in the magnified field filled his sight. Beside the teased-apart digestive and circulatory systems, amid the gunk and bits that biologists called connective tissue because they didn’t know what it did, lay a peculiar complex of red and green glassy-looking crystals and a thin copper-coloured strand, about the thickness of a fine hair. Darvin held out a hand and Kwarive placed the probe in it. He tapped the crystals. They were hard. He poked at the coppery strand. It was too strong for gentle pressure on the probe to break. He slid the tip toward the head end. The strand went all the way to the top of the thorax.

He relinquished the microscope to Kwarive. She placed the edge of the knife between the nippers and brought it down, cleaving the head.

“The strand bifurcates,” she said. “It goes to each of the eyes.”

Darvin looked and confirmed this.

“Can you lift the whole thing out?” he asked.

She could. She took a water bottle with a tube through the stopper and washed the thing a drop at a time. It lay gleaming on the slab beside its now headless and eviscerated host. They stood together and looked at it for a while.

“What sense do you make of it?” asked Darvin.

“Well,” said Kwarive, “it’s plainly artificial. That coppery strand is copper wire.”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure as I can be without a materials lab.”

“Easy enough to check,” said Darvin. “But what could the rest of it be?”

“I have no idea,” said Kwarive. “No, I do have an idea, and I’ve had it ever since I noticed the electrical effect. But it’s too far-fetched.”

Darvin glanced again at the glittering mechanism. “Nothing could be too far-fetched to explain this.”

“Very well,” said Kwarive. “I think it’s a transmitter, of wireless telephonic or telekinematographic etheric waves. It is using the insect’s eyes as cameras.”

“That’s certainly far-fetched,” said Darvin. “No wireless telephone, let alone telekinematographic apparatus, could possibly be this small.”

“How do you know that? You might as well say that your object in space could not possibly be so large.”

“I suppose, if we are dealing with a technology so much more advanced…” A thought struck him. “But even so, the signal produced must have been very weak. How could it reach — so far away?”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Kwarive. “I know nothing about telekinematography.”

“Come to think of it,” said Darvin, “how do you know about it at all?”

“Orro told me,” she said. “He says it’s being developed by the military… in Gevork.”

“Hmm,” said Darvin. “That’s all right. I suppose. Please don’t talk about it loosely. Anyway… from the little I know, it involves rather heftier equipment than this.”

“I wonder if it’s still active,” Kwarive said.

They repeated the telephone experiment. The electrical interference was gone.

“It may have drawn its energy from the shittle’s body,” said Kwarive.

“Or we broke it,” said Darvin.

“That would be a shame. It would be irreplaceable. No, wait, it wouldn’t. We can find more, and I know just how to do it.”

“How?”

Kawarive smiled and shoved the empty basket to him. “Fill it up,” she said. “I’ll call Orro.”

Not being a biologist, Darvin didn’t have Kwarive’s confidence in statistics, and after an hour scooping shittles from the dung in the gutters of the wintry streets he didn’t like it either. He washed his hands and feet in the chill canal before returning with his reeking burden. By this time Orro had joined Kwarive and was hunched over a handful of scrawled paper. The telephone receiver had been dismantled. Parts of it lay beside the dissected shittle and its alien innards. Neither of them looked likely to be put back together any time soon.

“What are you doing?” Darvin asked.

Orro looked up. “Trying to work out wavelengths from the circuitry of the receiver.”

“Laudable but premature,” said Darvin, putting down the basket. “We need a working receiver right now.”

Orro fussed for a moment.

“Oh, good lady above,” said Kwarive. She snatched up a screwdriver and had every component in place and the receiver back on its flex within minutes.

“Now then,” she said, holding it up, “the basket, if you please.”

Darvin hefted the basket and walked towards her. Kwarive smiled. “The buzz is back!” she said.

This time the tedious sorting procedure sifted out two of the electric snittles (as they’d started calling them). The three scientists peered down at the two unprepossessing insects. The two insects — Darvin couldn’t but fancy — looked back.

“Hello,” he said. “Greetings from Ground.”

Orro grabbed his shoulder so hard that it hurt. “We could do that!” he said.

“Do what?”

“Use the electric snittles to communicate with the visitors.”

Darvin burst out laughing.

“What’s so funny?” demanded Kwarive.

“Oh, nothing,” Darvin said. “It’s just that I had a sudden vision of a conclave of scientists and security men jabbering and capering in front of a glass case floored with shit and crawling with shittles.”

“Well, why not?” asked Orro.

Darvin sat down on a stool and looked from Orro to Kwarive and back. He scratched the fur on the back of his calf. “No reason why not,” he said. “It’s just that I sometimes find it hard to believe. You both evidently don’t.” He stood up and paced around, scouting for tea. “For one thing,” he said, “the signal these little — and I stress little — blighters put out couldn’t possibly reach… its supposed recipients.”

“You’re doing it again,” said Kwarive. “Saying what they can and can’t do without evidence. We’ve just seen evidence that they can do things we can’t. The pot and the brazier are behind that stuff on the ledge, by the way.”

“Oh, thanks.”

“No, he’s right,” said Orro. “It’s a question of output power. There are theoretical limits to how much electrical power can be extracted from chemical processes.”

“And you know these limits, I suppose?” asked Kwarive.

“I do, as a matter of fact,” said Orro. He brushed at his eyes as if weary. “I wrote the paper on it. Nevertheless, there is a way in which such weak signals could reach our, ah, supernumerary moon, if not farther.”

Darvin fiddled with gas taps and water taps. “And what’s that?”

“Amplification,” Orro said.

“You astonish me,” said Darvin, sparking up the flame under the brazier. “The question we’re all agog to hear the answer to is what such an amplifier might be.” He waved a hand at the window, at the view of buildings and trees. “Given that we don’t see telekinematographic transmission towers mysteriously springing up all over the place.”

“Oh!” said Kwarive. She hopped on a perch and spread her wings. “We do!”

Darvin, unable to wait for the tea, pushed some leaf under his tongue and grunted a query.

“Trees,” said Kwarive. “Look at the shape: the tall central spire and the upward-curving floret of branches. Does that not remind you of something, Orro?”

“I concede the resemblance,” said Orro. “Doubtless it inspired the design of the transmission and reception antennae.”

“You never told me this,” said Darvin.

“No, I never did,” said Orro. “I was, ah, discussing Gevorkian science with Kwarive one day and it slipped out. I have since then guarded my tongue more carefully. However, this is not the point. The point is that I don’t see how trees could be so used. Wood is not, after all, renowned for its electrical conductivity.”

Kwarive hunched like a hunter watching prey from a branch. She scratched behind her ear. Darvin, knowing the signs, said nothing more until the pot had boiled and he had served the tea in three containers that (Kwarive assured him) were used only for that purpose, and not to hold any of the unsavoury liquids and pulps that the room’s other identical beakers contained.

“So, Kwarive. You were saying.”

“I think I have it now,” she said. She blew and sipped. “If copper wire can be formed inside a shittle, why can’t it — or some other metal — be formed inside the branches and spire of a tree? Along the capillaries, perhaps?”

“Why do you say it was formed?” asked Darvin. “I had imagined it was somehow implanted.”

“If it was implanted,” said Kwarive, “our visitors are a great deal closer than we think.” She laughed. “They fly among us.”

“That’s a possibility,” said Orro. “I can imagine, say, a mechanical flitter. Like one of my chiropter models, only successful. With tiny manipulative hands, like a real flitter.”

“Oh yes,” said Darvin. “I can see it now, preying on the shittles among a flock of real flitters, and stashing some away to vivisect in its nest!”

“Why not?” said Orro. “We are agreed that calculating machines may make great progress in ages to come.”

Kwarive extended and quivered her wings, almost spilling the tea. “And does it mine the copper and whatever substance the coloured crystals are made from? Or does it perhaps steal them from shops?”

Orro was immune to her sarcasm. “Some species of flitters are notorious for stealing odds and ends of material for their nests.”

“Oh, for the Queen’s sake, gentlemen,” said Kwarive, “will you stop this idle speculation and listen to my — to my—”

“Your idle speculation?” said Darvin.

Kwarive laughed. “Indeed. But listen. How I had imagined it was something quite different. Fix your attention on a congenial subject for a moment. Sex. The male, as you may know, produces a sticky fluid with which he impregnates the female.”

Darvin gaped at Orro. “So that’s what happens!”

“Shut up,” said Kwarive. “As you also know, the life-bearing seed is a microscopic animalcule. And yet somehow, from this tiny invisible seed comes, in due course, a litter of kits.”

“The seed has to combine with the female egg,” said Darvin, entering into the spirit of conveying no news.

“Which is larger but still microscopic,” said Kwarive. “And somehow, from one or both of these, come a clutch of living things, each large enough to hold in your hand. Which, as they grow up, display characteristics similar to those of their parents.”

“Fascinating,” said Darvin. “The mystery of life. The miracle of reproduction. I don’t know why I didn’t learn all this in school.”

“I did not,” said Orro. “I read it in an imaginative but broadly accurate illustrated treatise inscribed, if memory serves, on the wall of a municipal pissery.”

“Each to his own,” said Kwarive. “My point, if I can momentarily distract you, is that reproduction is not a miracle. The life principle in the germ-plasm somehow organises and controls a mass of matter that but yesterday was the mother’s food, and transforms it into another living organism. Forces that we do not understand shape every organ and limb, and in a manner which is inherited from the parents. The vehicles of that inheritance are without doubt the tiny egg and the still smaller seed.”

“I see,” said Orro. “You are suggesting that the seeds or eggs of the shittles have somehow been influenced to produce small electrical devices, as if they were bodily organs. And that a similar influence may be exerted on the growing-power of certain trees, albeit ones already mature, perhaps due to the greater plasticity of the botanical cell-plasm.”

“Yes!” said Kwarive, sounding surprised and relieved. “That’s exactly it.”

“But — copper wires!” said Darvin.

’That’s the easiest part of it,” said Kwarive. “There are copper salts everywhere. Other mineral salts form naturally on dung. We all have a tincture of iron in our blood.”

Darvin drained his dubious cup. “That,” he said, “is the wildest speculation I have heard today. It makes Orro’s intelligent mechanical flitters seem like a sound and sober possibility. That’s why I think you’re right, Kwarive.”

“You do?”

“Well, it’s that or something wilder. We must take this to the project.”

A few days later an airship of Seloh’s Flight flew slowly over Five Ravines. Adults spared it a glance, and gained from that glance a touch of reassurance. Gangs of kits tried and failed to reach its altitude. After crisscrossing the town a few times it flew away to the north. The following day, here and there about town, men with the municipal crest on the buckles of their crossed straps were observed, or rather, not noticed, flying into certain trees, sawing off the branches they perched on, and flying away. That evening, a telegraph machine rattled in Darvin’s office, and spat forth a message that, when decoded, read: FRUIT ON SCHED PREP DESP URGENT.

The device was like an enormous flechette or flighted crossbolt, several wingspans long. With its backswept wings — or stabilisers, as the techs insisted on calling them — it resembled a crude copy of the alien flying machine in the photograph. Pointed at one end, open at the other; rivets making small elliptical shadows on its burnished steel plates. It lay atop a trolley on a railed wooden ramp with an upward slope. Heavy electrical cables trailed from the ramp. Somebody counted backward. At zero, flames sputtered from the open end, then roared forth like an opened furnace door. The device rushed forward and hurtled into a shallow ascent of several eight-eights of wingspans on the horizontal and about two eights on the vertical, then tilted downward, hit the desert, performed a couple of spectacular cartwheels, and exploded with a deafening bang.

Ears still ringing, Darvin heard a cheer from the small crowd of project members who, with him, watched at a supposedly safe distance.

“Impressive, isn’t it?” said Nollam, the young telekinematography technician.

“You could say that,” said Darvin. “Also expensive, futile, and dangerous.”

“All of these,” said Nollam. He rubbed his hands and shook out his wings. “This is our top-secret self-propelled giant flechette project. Officially called Project Crossbolt. And us lowly types have been officially told to unofficially call it Project Piss-Crystal.”

“Saltpetre?”

“Yes,” said Nollam.

“Why?”

“In case any news of it leaks out.”

“I should have thought,” said Darvin, strolling back to the huts of the project’s desert camp, “that naming it after the device’s shape and after a component of bomb powder rather gave the show away.”

He stopped. “Oh,” he said. “I see.”

“You do,” said Nollam. “Gives great cover. The Gevorkians must know we’re up to something up here, and that’s just the sort of rind to throw to them. Besides,” he added, “it might just work.”

Orro, who had watched the display from the air, swooped to land beside them.

“Wonderful!” he said. “I must tell you, this is substantially better than what I know of such work in Gevork.”

“That’s a relief,” said Nollam.

“Of course my knowledge is years out of date,” said Orro, sounding worried. He brightened, and clutched the technician’s arm.

“Has anyone thought of launching the device straight upward?”

“Firing it at the sky?” said Nollam. “Whatever for?”

“It could be a method of reaching extreme altitudes.”

“I’ll pass it on,” said Nollam. He didn’t sound as if he meant it.

“Seriously,” said Orro. “It’s important.”

“All right, man, all right.”

The ground was hard. Their breaths puffed in front of them. The tips of Darvin’s ears, toes, and fingers ached. He still preferred the pale clear blue of the desert winter midmorning sky to the dripping clouds and fogs of the warmer and moister coast.

Kwarive, now seconded to the project since her biological discovery, had chosen to watch from the still safer distance of the camp. She met them at the gate. “It’s a good start,” she said. “But I don’t see it ever reaching the sky.”

“It doesn’t have to,” said Nollam. “It just has to reach a Gevorkian gasbag.”

Kwarive, Darvin gathered, was not to be told of the misdirection.

“How horrible!” she said. “I’m glad my — our part of the project isn’t so destructive.”

Her, or their, part of the project now dominated the barracks square, though to a casual observer, the transplanted tree by the lecture ring might merely have been there to provide a pleasant sight of home. The blimp, moored eight-eights wingspans above it and trailing cables, might have been a lookout over the flat dry plain. The grazer dung from the prey paddock heaped around the tree’s foot might have been to fertilise the barren soil in which this coastal tree improbably grew. A hardy evergreen, its lean spire and parabolic array of branches and leaves seemed almost to yearn for the sun. Instead, as Nollam’s telekinematographic reception apparatus cabled to a big wire frame in the tethered blimp monitored, the tree — or rather, the fine network of unknown alloy that permeated it from the roots up — was sending a continuous stream of incomprehensible etheric information skyward. None of Nollam’s equipment could make more of it than a flickering screen of snow.

Eights upon eights of electric shittles burrowed in the dung, and now and then poked their unblinking eyes out upon the world. No attempt to attract their attention — whether with bright-lit pictures, earnest discourses, or people jumping up and down — had elicited the slightest response. Kwarive had observed and recorded the insects’ reactions over two days and nights, and the best statistical methods she could apply showed that their gazes, as much as the radio waves which they continued to pulse forth, were random. They bore no relation to the putative objects of interest presented to them. At any given time there would be a few shittles peering outward, but that was what shittles did.

What the scientists working on the other aspects of the project made of all this bizzare activity Darvin, Orro, and Kwarive occasionally speculated on, but took care not to ask. Knowledge within the project was as compartmentalised as an insect’s body.

“I’m going to try something new today,” Kwarive said, stopping beside the wheeled screens that surrounded the base of the tree.

“What is it this time?” Nollam asked. “Obscene photographs? Religious texts? A careful heaping of stones in eights, to show them how we count?”

“No,” said Kwarive, in a tone that suggested she might have considered these. “Maps.”

“Isn’t that a security risk?” asked Darvin.

“Oh yes,” said Kwarive. “I’ve cleared it with Markhan.”

Orro and Darvin looked at each other and shook their heads. Neither of them had so much as spoken to the chief scientist since the project began.

“We’ll leave you to it,” said Darvin. “Good luck.”

“Bring me some tea,” said Kwarive, spreading a large sheet of paper on the frosty ground and kneeling beside it with ink bottle and brush. “Hot and soon.”

The three men made their way to one of the barrack roosts. Its sleeping racks empty by day, its interior space had been turned into a long laboratory. Cluttered tables filled the aisle. Between them snaked dangerous trailing cables that originated in the blimp and ended around the back of the cable-festooned mass of the telekinematographic receiver. This device was a wooden cabinet the size of a meat cupboard with a glass screen like a window, a couple of handspans wide, in the front near the top. The glass looked thick and somewhat convex, with rounded corners. At the moment it displayed a random flicker of spots and lines that hurt the eye if you watched too long. Nollam joined the technicians trying to make sense of the tree’s data stream, Orro studied the results of the latest aeronautical experiments — the real ones, being carried out far away at a place unknown — and Darvin headed down an aisle to the tea urn. He took tea out to Kwarive, who had already completed an impressive sketch-map of the Selohic coast. Just as he arrived she added, in the empty middle of the map, a stylised, chevron-winged flechette.

“Now, that looks like a security risk,” said Darvin.

Kwarive shook her head. “It was Markhan who suggested it.”

Darvin shrugged and gave her the steaming cup. She nuzzled his hand and he returned, to sift through the day’s reports from the physics wire. It was the second time this outer-month that he and his friends had travelled to the camp. The university authorities had been told, by much higher authorities, that the two scientists’ and the student’s services were required for military training and preparation, and that no demurral would be brooked. In that outer-month the project, with a soldierly despatch that impressed and baffled Darvin, had set up the experiment with the transplanted tree. What he was doing now, though, could just as well have been done at Five Ravines, and — with no results from the experiment — Darvin chafed to get back. Under cover of his continuing planet search, he had accumulated a stock of paired plates that showed the Object. Now that its position was known, it was indeed, as Orro had guessed, detectable as a distant companion of the Camp-Followers, the asteroids, but one somewhat beyond the orbit of the Warrior. Ground’s much closer visitor, the third moon, though betrayed by its etheric echo, remained invisible.

An hour or two had passed when Kwarive laid a cold hand on his shoulder, making him jump.

“Come outside,” she said. “There’s something you might like to see.”

Darvin followed her out as she marched back to the foot of the tree. Her completed map hung from one of the wheeled screens. Eight eights of shittles faced the map.

“Watch,” said Kwarive.

She wheeled the screen a little way around the tree. As she did so, other shittles emerged and faced it. She wheeled it around and around, until the base of the tree was surrounded by a phalanx of outward-facing insect eyes.

Darvin stared at them, and then at Kwarive. She was shaking. “I think—” she began.

Through the open door of the barracks roost and across the square they heard Nollam’s yell.