Learning the World

3 — Spectral Lines

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.

Horrocks darted to the centre of the tree’s interior space and we all clustered around him, clutching various handholds or leg-hoops. It was in a leg-hoop that I sat, my arms hooked over the upper part, my pack looped to my wrist. Horrocks himself just hung there in the air, now and then twisting or somersaulting to vary his address.

“Welcome,” he began, “and thank you all again for choosing my habitat. We’ll be here for a week or so. This tree is a typical first-generation home, nothing too elaborate. It’s a lot more comfortable than a free-fall construction shack, but we’ll get on to that in due course. For now, the main thing you have to learn is how to work in free fall, how to work in vacuum, and how to operate the machines…”

He went on for a bit, telling us what we were going to do, and then we suited up and went out and started to do it. We weren’t in vacuum, of course; the main reason for the suits was to acquaint us with their use, and secondarily to protect us from the dust thrown off by the machines. There’s no point in describing it all; you’ll either have done it, in which case it’ll be boring, or you haven’t, in which case you won’t understand. What I want to talk about is why we do it, because, as I huddle here with my muscles aching, I wonder too. Everybody who plans to homestead does basic training. It’s customary, yes, but that doesn’t explain it. Why are we doing things ourselves that could be done, and that we hope eventually to see done, by automata? Nobody has told me. So I have figured it out. It’s like camping. It builds character.

14364:06:1922:21

Having thought about it further, I now understand that it has much more to do with how far away we are from anyone else. We are four hundred years from help and four information-years (hence eight or more elapsed years, counting question, turnaround, and answer) from advice. Our automata are the result of generations of iteration: long enough for source code to mutate. The Destiny Star system will likely contain molecules no one has encountered before. Some of them could burn our machinery. Accidents happen.

So we have to be ready to work, with digging and forging tools, in free fall and raw vacuum, in space suits, just like primitive man. We all have to become like the Moon Cave People, for a while when we are very young, so that in an emergency we can be as tough and self-reliant as they were.

Oh yes. Why I hate Horrocks Mathematical:

We had just come off shift the first night and we were all brewing and cooking, and the others were all talking in their two little cliques. Horrocks turned up beside me. I offered him tea and he took it.

“I like your biolog,” he said. “ ‘Learning the World.’ ”

My ears burned. “You read it?”

“Now and again.”

He looked away, squirting the teabulb straight into his mouth. I still couldn’t do that without scalding.

“Constantine?” he went on. “You know who he is?”

“No,” I said. I bit some berrybread. Crumbs floated. I tried to avoid inhaling any; scooping them was difficult, like catching flies: they danced away from my fingers. “It’s funny, I never tried looking him up, even in memory. I suppose when you’re a child some things seem like a dream.”

“I suppose they do,” said Horrocks, looking amused for no reason I could discern. “And your caremother didn’t tell you about him?”

“No,” I said. “What about him?” I resented the tone of querulous suspicion in my voice.

“He’s one of your geneparents,” said Horrocks. “Your half-father, in fact. That’s why he was so solicitious of you.”

I said and did nothing for a minute. I must have squeezed a bulb too hard; tea floated past my face in little hot drops.

“This is not the time or the place,” I said.

“Sorry,” said Horrocks. He looked more baffled than sorry. “I’d forgotten how flatfooters—”

Then he shut his mouth, shook his head as if at himself, his beaded braids clattering, and with a flick of his foot was away and out of sight like a minnow in a pool.

I have never been so offended in my life.

Synchronic Narrative Storm flashed a note to Horrocks Mathematical, warning him to be more polite to her caredaughter, then summoned a presence of Constantine. He appeared in the garden seconds later. Not many could have bidden so swift a response from the Oldest Man. Synchronic was half-smiling at the thought as she straightened from a flower bed and made herself comfortable in a deck chair. Constantine was sitting, wherever he was; in her eye, in the garden, he seemed to be sitting on nothing. Small children ran oblivious through his presence.

“Hi, Synch,” he said. He looked around. “Nice place.”

The virtual image of Constantine could not, of course, see, but the real Constantine was no doubt perceiving a point of view built up from the inputs of various eyes scattered around the garden: a camera here, a bird there, an insect somewhere else. In the sunline light his skin looked as black as his suit. The effect was as easily gene-fixed as the trim bulk of his muscles, but was seldom so created; it would have been considered pretentious to appear thus ancient, though some of the ship generation affected it in adolescent bravado. Synchronic herself was happy that her deep tan manifested an age of mere centuries, older than the current voyage but far, far younger than the ship — and the Man.

“Hi yourself,” she said. “And yes, it is a nice place. But I didn’t call you to chitchat. Take a look at this.”

She flashed him a text version of the “Learning the World” biolog. While he was scanning it, Synchronic signalled to one of the children, who walked selfconsciously up a few moments later with a tall glass of lime juice on ice.

“Thanks,” she said. The child smiled and ran off.

Constantine focused again on Synchronic. “I’m flattered that she remembers me,” he said. “Adventurous little lass, wasn’t she?”

“Still is,” said Synchronic. “But I’m interested in the later entries. She and Horrocks…”

Constantine frowned. “She’s too young.”

“For now. But the signs are there.”

“Genome calls to genome, eh?” said Constantine. “I shall open a future on it.”

“You were always the romantic,” said Synchronic.

“That I was, my lady,” said Constantine. “That I was.”

Constantine the Oldest Man had told his story to Synchronic Narrative Storm half a millennium earlier, when she had been young and naive. She still believed it. The records were difficult to check, but he had had no manifest reason to lie: he was already in her bed, and they had already speculated profitably on their compatibility. The story he told was this:

Constantine was born a long way and a long time back on the Bright Road, in the Civil Worlds. In his early teens he had acquired some restlessness. In his early twenties he had acted on it. It was like dying. Nobody who had loved him would ever see him again, no matter how long they lived. In those days in the Civil Worlds life expectancy — untested, but actuarial — was ten thousand years and rising. This made no difference. People wept. Constantine left.

“It was too staid,” he’d said, “and too weird. That sounds paradoxical, I know. But talking to my parents was becoming like SETI. They had grown distant and strange. When I was a kid, my pet animals uplifted. My imaginary friends became virtual and autonomous. My real friends upgraded and diversified. They haunted the walls and sent me presences to converse with and meat puppets to fuck. I couldn’t evade the feeling that they were giving me less than their full attention. I lit out for the territories.”

“What’s it like,” Synchronic had asked, “lighting out?”

“Boring,” Constantine had told her. “Even with time dilation, it takes months to get anywhere in the long tubes. I worked my passage, stevedoring and whoring.”

“ ‘Passage,’ ” she’d sniggered.

“Tell me about it. Eventually, and I’m talking about years — decades, centuries — subjective, I arrived in a system where there were no electromagnetic acceleration tubes out front. No stars ahead were green. I’d reached the surface of civilization, from the inside. Everything was raw in the territories, even reality. It sufficed for a while.” He’d gone off in a dwam, at that point.

“And then what?” she’d prompted.

“And then? I was talking to a woman a thousand years older than I, much as we are now but the other way round, so to speak, when I listened to her for the thousandth time and I heard myself saying, ‘But the sky, my lady! The sky!’ ”

“What a romantic.”

Synchronic Narrative Storm was not a romantic. She was very maternal. This proclivity was in her genes. She could have fixed that: many of her cohorts had. She did not choose to do so, and she felt the decision was free. Brides and babies and strong dark men and intellectual and sensual women and the prospect of wide-open spaces to populate with humanity had always made her weak at the knees. She regarded that as a strength, knowing that this evaluation too was in her genes. Freedom, she had decided in a vehement childhood, long before the relevant genes had kicked in, was to be what you were. That changing what she was would change what she wanted to be she regarded as an irrelevant curiosity, a philosophical abstraction. (A predisposition to this conclusion, too, was in her genes. She knew it and didn’t mind.) She had fallen in love many times, married many times, borne many children and raised and generated more; sometimes — most times, to be honest — without having met the other geneparents in the flesh, but never without having fallen in love with all of them. She had no continuously cohabiting lover. Falling in love indicated that your genes were complementary to those of the loved one. It told you nothing about whether your personalities and sexualities were compatible. Constantine thought it did, about her and others. It was one evidence that he was a hopeless romantic. The world was another.

“I have to leave,” said Constantine the Oldest Man. “Something has come up.”

“Always the romantic,” said Synchronic Narrative Storm.

The Man sneered and left.

Awlin Halegap, the speculator, seldom let broader considerations override his pursuit of profit. When he saw the pattern in the supposed lightning spikes, right there in the raw data stream, and interpreted them before even the scientists had noticed, he was torn between alerting the relevant authorities and the tempting prospect of swift insider trading. He could have shifted the terrestrials in milliseconds. He sighed and did his duty. To his surprise the prospecting jury didn’t send one of its own members.

“Show me it,” said the Oldest Man, manifesting without warning in Halegap’s cramped brokerage. His apparent position was behind the speculator’s shoulder. Halegap felt the virtual presence more than he saw it. The back of his neck prickled.

Halegap ran the numbers. “Signal, not noise,” he said.

“I can see that,” said Constantine. His presence flipped, to perch on the edge of Halegap’s data table, and made a show of peering into its depths. He fingered his ebon chin. “Hmm,” he said. “Troubling.”

Halegap had nothing to fear from Constantine, but he felt the unease of the bearer of bad news to the great nonetheless.

“You think we’ve been jumped?” he hazarded. Being overtaken by fast probes was a minor but real hazard for travelling worlds. Rare because it was bad form, impolite and not the done thing, but sometimes a scientific enterprise in an origin system would become impatient and, as the expression went, gun the jump.

“Most likely,” said Constantine. “I’d have expected a priority-jumper to broadcast their claim, though. It’s only happened to me twice before, and a long time ago. Customs may have changed, manners coarsened. The youth of today.”

“Oh no!” said Halegap, stung. He had grown up in the system they’d left four centuries earlier. The obscure urge to defend it surprised him. “The latest information doesn’t bear that out. We’ve drifted apart, of course, but Red Sun is developing into a most polite society.”

“I’m sure it is,” said Constantine. “They all do, for a while. You know, my best heuristics can’t make head nor tail of these signals. They must be encrypted. Rather pointless, out here, one would think?” ”

Rival establishments?” suggested Halegap. “There are at least two sources in there, perhaps more.”

Constantine shot him a data-freighted glance. “Good thinking,” he said. “But for more than one scientific society to override its manners, well…”

“There is always the possibility of data colonies,” said Halegap, with an uneasy laugh. Very uneasy; the prospect disquieted him at a level he didn’t care to access.

“And if matters had reached such a pass, one might indeed see rivalry,” said Constantine, taking the notion in his stride. He smacked his fist on his palm again and again, a gesture made more disturbing by its lack of sound effects. “Damn! Damn! To be jumped by some degenerate offshoots just as we’re entering orbit, it’s most aggravating!”

“There is that,” said Halegap. He was already thinking of worse possibilities, his mind racing ahead of the facts, ahead of the curve, into the worst-case scenario. “But if Red Sun society were to go into fast burn… well, I wouldn’t want to be four light-years away from it. Not if I were a flatfooter, especially.”

“Rock the flatfooters,” said Constantine. “They can dig deep and ride it out, like they would a supernova. That’s what they’re bred for. It’s the rest of us who’d take the full blast of the thing.”

Halegap shivered, feeling as vulnerable as some drifting, soft-skinned sea creature before a landslide. Fast burn was rare, far rarer even than data colonies, but data colonies were among its first stigmata. A society undergoing exponential evolution was unstable; no persistent examples were on record. All that was left were dark spots in the green haze of the Civil Worlds: ashes of the fast burn. In the fifteenth millennium of the Space Age, the bulk of humanity with all its hacks and tweaks remained close to its terrestrial ancestral form, and the bulk of thinking machinery around or below the human level; there seemed to be an upper bound on the complexity a society or an individual could sustain.

Constantine’s presence refocused itself, brightening. “Let’s not run away with ourselves,” he said. “The most we have real evidence for is a couple of probes. If they’re data colonies, we’ll know soon enough. Either way, I suggest you release the news.” He chuckled. “Expect a momentary panic, then a boom in terrestrials.”

14 364:06:20 06:30

I’m scared. I’ve never seen a world slump before. The one last night lasted for hours. Down below I could see lights going out all over the place; it was as if people had lost the will to live. Today, things are picking up. Confidence returns, every newsline says, a bit too urgently. I don’t feel confident at all. I’m watching the Long Steading crowd waking up, stirring, red-eyed. I think some of them were crying last night; I’m sure I heard them.

I’m not going to do that myself. I’m not. I’m sure the signals, if that’s what they are — and as you can see here there are doubts about that — are just from fast probes from Red Sun, and not any of the nasty things some people say they could be. But to think that the system that we thought was all fresh and empty and untouched, waiting for us, our future, already has somebody else’s grubby fingerprints on it just makes me sad and sick.

And angry.

14 364:06:20 21:24

What a day. On the one hand, it’s been totally absorbing, tremendous fun. At least when I was totally absorbed in the work, which was most of the time. I excavated a small cavern, lined it and sealed it, and began work on its externals — the airlock’s machinery and such — with some metals I’d mined out yesterday. Only a small amount, of course, a few grammes of iron and trace elements, but for the refining and casting I got to use my first machine with a brain interface. Unlike an adult, I had to use a headband kit — trades and goggles — but it was exciting all the same. It makes a sort of tickle in your head — you know, like when you’ve solved a problem, made a new connection, but more intense.

“You’re feeling the dendrites growing,” Horrocks said, when I mentioned it. I’m not sure whether or not he was joking.

Which brings me to the other hand. Throughout the day Horrocks tried to cheer people up, and at first I thought this was him being kind. But then I realised that he really was cheerful himself. After we came off work and cleaned up and had dinner I asked him why.

He was a few metres away, sitting in a loop. A lot of us were listening. He looked around and grinned.

“I made a fortune today,” he said. “I have lots of claims on the terrestrial planet.” He laughed. “I should just leave you all to get on with it. I’ve made far more from these claims than I’m ever likely to from this place.”

“The value of the claims will go down,” said one of the New Lamarck girls, her quills bristling. “You wait.”

“Maybe they will,” said Horrocks. “But they might go right out the hatch. What if what’s down there is…” He dropped his voice to a low and hollow tone, like someone telling a scary story: “…aliens?”

Everybody laughed and felt better, except me. I felt patronised, treated like a child who is first scared then reassured by a story about frightening things that everybody knows don’t exist, like gods or ghosts or hideaways or, well, aliens. Aliens! I ask you.

I hate Horrocks Mathematical.