Learning the World

6 — The Queen of Heaven’s Daughters

The University Museum was a tall cylindrical structure, ringed within by galleries and bristled without by tubes of wood and ceramic that regulated the humidity of its air circulation. Inside, the drip and sigh of this great battery of devices merged to a single vast whisper like a giant librarian’s hush. The air was clean and clear, scented of timber and water, and carried the merest whiff of the green algae that flourished under the runoffs of the pipes.

Darvin paced along the Gallery of the Southern Rule, glancing at the treasures of leatherwork and metalwork, of chiselled stone and hammered steel on display. The single great continent south of the equator, on the other side of the Middle Channel’s hot, stormy, narrow sea, had laid the basis for an antiquity and continuity of civilization denied by a more fragmented geography to the reaches and realms of the north. No Long Night — and no Dawn Age, either — had interrupted its protracted and undivided day. Nature itself seemed grander and older there. Gigantic predators, similar to the long-extinct monsters whose log-sized, stone-soaked bones sometimes weathered out of the north’s ravines, still haunted its uplands, and preyed on horizon-darkening, earth-shaking herds of likewise gargantuan grazers, likewise long gone elsewhere.

At the cabinets of literature and painting — the distinction was contested, even by experts — Darvin stopped. Parchment scrolls many wingspans long were the main display; every day or two, a museum attendant would wind every scroll forward, to avoid excessive exposure to the daylight. Intricate and colourful, crowded with figurative scenes that sharpened into structures of glyphs before the eye, and with lines of lettering that rioted into characters and animalcules in lush symbolic landscapes even as one tried to descry their rhythm, they glittered with a sensibility at once grave and gay, an outlook solemn and frivolous, a theology horrific and humorous, a philosophy perceptive and pedantic. Darvin hurried past them, seeking another exhibit which he recalled having noticed on his introductory tour.

There it was, a broad dark backdrop to a tall glass-fronted case of astrolabes and orreries. Of a fine, hard-wearing and unfading opaque black cloth, three wingspans across by three high, it was worked with a multitude of minute, separate stitches of coloured wire — silver mostly, some copper, a few gold, and a whole palette of precisely coloured alloys and anodised metals. It could have been a banner, or a wall hanging, or a wrap. It was something altogether different, and more astonishing than even its breathtaking beauty might suggest. It was a map of the night sky, from the northern and the southern hemispheres both, a seamless rendition of an unseeable scene. Its construction must have taken spans of moons; its preparation, eights of eights of years. From a distance — from the opposite side of the gallery, across the well of the museum tower — it would have looked like a breath of fog, a silver shimmer; in the wrong light, a dull pewter grey.

Darvin peered at the label, a yellowed scrap of curling paper in the corner of the case, the Selohic words lettered in a shaky Gevorkian script, ink faded to brown. The map, looted in some raid on a temple on the northern coast of the Southern Rule back in the Long Night, was as nearly as could be determined one thousand and seven hundred and fifty years old. He nodded to himself and examined the celestial embroidery. The blue-green stars of the Daughters were quite distinct, as were their copper, gold, or silver neighbours. He searched for any wayward stitch that might represent a comet, and found none. As he assimilated this small disappointment, a quite different anomaly struck him. He knew that patch of sky well by now, and it looked wrong. He took a sheet of paper and a pen from his belt pouch and copied with great care the area of the Daughters, noting the colour of each prominent star. There were only twenty-seven green stars; he knew there were many more.

He gazed at the display for a long time, then folded away the paper, sheathed the pen, and vaulted off the gallery railing. His long swoop across the ground floor and out of the door was accompanied by indignant yells from the attendants, but he didn’t care. He flew back to the Department of Astronomy and stalked to his office. His hands were trembling as he riffled through the photographic plates, shaking as he compared one with his sketch. The plate was, of course, black and white, so he had to look the stars up in the ephemeris. He circled them, one by one, on the sheet of thin translucent paper that protected the photograph, and forced himself to count with great care. Of the most visible stars in the Daughters, fifty-eight were classified as green. On his sketch, the other thirty-one were marked as red, or yellow, or white. He telephoned Orro.

“This must have been noticed before,” said the Gevorkian.

“It has,” said Darvin, hunched over an old encyclopaedia of astronomy he’d tugged from a high shelf. “ ‘Southern Rule, astronomy of,’ ” he read out. “ ‘Impressive in the detail of its observations, especially of comets (q.v.) and the sophistication of its instruments (q.v.) but vitiated by its traditional association with astrology (q.v.) and the religious and symbolic basis of its systems of celestial classification, a characteristic instance of which can be seen in the Temple Sky Map (q.v.) with its misleading rendition of the Daughters.’ ”

Darvin flipped over pages, dislodging dust. “ ‘Temple Sky Map: Booty of glorious battle of’ blah blah… ‘astounding workmanship’ blah blah… ‘despite this the colours used for stars in some instances, e.g. the Daughters (q.v.) apparently chosen for aesthetic or symbolic reasons, related to astrology (q.v.)’ blah blah… ‘superstition’ blah blah… ‘sad instance of scholastic dogmatism reminiscent of Seloh’s own Long Night’ blah blah… ‘benighted priesthood’ blah blah… ‘nevertheless of great historical interest and remarkable beauty, currently on display in Five Ravines,’ etc.” He looked up. “Tickets, sweets and souvenirs at the door.”

Orro laughed. “ ‘A sad instance of scholastic dogmatism,’ indeed,” he said. “Even in the Long Night, it was believed that the Queen passes Her green gift to other gods, who become the Daughters.”

“That,” said Darvin, clapping the book shut, “is precisely why any idea that the stars could change colour in historical time is no longer believed. It’s regarded as a quaint superstition.”

“There are variable stars,” said Orro.

“Yes, but they’re cyclic. Well understood. Their fires flare and fade periodically.”

“Fires?” Orro looked sceptical, and rather as if he’d caught Darvin out.

“All right,” said Darvin. “The physics of stars is not well understood.”

“Nor is the physics of radioactivity,” said Orro, with apparent irrelevance. He fixed Darvin in a quizzical gaze for a moment, then sighed. “Oh well. I suppose we should next investigate some early modem observations — Dawn Age and onward.”

“I’ve done it,” said Darvin, tapping a finger-claw on a stack of open books on his desk. He stood up. “Predictably enough, it turns out that some of the Daughters were misidentified as other types of stars, back then. Inadequate telescopes, unskillful observations — you know how it is.”

He dragged one of the books across the desk, pointed at a reproduction of a crude woodcut illustration in which the stars were shown encircled by tiny flames, and marked by tinier letters. The key, written in Orkan but in Selohic script, classified forty-nine of the stars as green, and identified the nine others now included among the Daughters as yellow or red.

Orro laid the tracing of the recent photograph and Darvin’s sketch of the ancient map on opposite sides of the book. “It seems,” he said, “that we have identified a trend.”

“Is it possible,” Darvin asked, “that the modern classification is wrong?” He laughed. “I myself have never counted the Daughters. Actually, since I became an astronomer, I’ve hardly looked at the sky.”

“Let’s do that,” said Orro. “Let’s go out onto the high plain and count them for ourselves.”

“The high plain…” Darvin said. “Yes, let us do that tomorrow, and one thing else that we can only do in the day.”

“What’s that?”

Darvin grinned. “You’ll see.”

The main cable-car station was quiet the following morning, after the earlier incoming rush of travellers from the plains settlements had subsided. Darvin and Orro, carrying small packs of dried meat and dried fruit and with knives and electric torches clipped to their belts, climbed into a car and sat side by side. A trudge bolted the door and pushed the car around the curve of the terminus loop to face the exit, then tugged a lever to clamp the overhead to the active cable. The car lurched forward into the sunlight outside, rushed up above a steep slope to a stubby pylon at the top, jolted over it then settled into a more gradual ascent to the clifftop pylon that overlooked the town. Darvin poked his head through the open side window and gazed down at the crowded roosts and deep ravines, pondering how different they looked when one was borne aloft from how they looked when flying. The sensation was strange and dreamlike. After a few moments it made him feel queasy. He turned and faced ahead. The journey to the ochre cliffs of the high plains tableland took about an hour. Halfway up the long catenary that connected the final pylon on the grassland with that of the substation at the top of the cliff, Orro gave a grunt.

“What?” said Darvin.

“I calculate that if the cable were to snap now, we’d have time to take wing before the car hit the ground.”

“Thanks for that,” said Darvin.

The cliff-face loomed, closer and closer. It seemed incredible that they would not crash into it. The car’s ascent steepened. Darvin stared fixedly ahead. From this vantage, the ochre sandstone of the cliff was broken and blemished with scrubby bushes and clumps of plants in cracks and shelves, and by great shit-stains of flitter droppings.

Just before the car stopped at the substation Darvin stood up, swaying. “This is where we get out.”

“Here?”

“Yes.”

The substation was there to provide auxiliary power, but the cliff was something of a visitor attraction in its own right, so the cars always stopped there for a few minutes before continuing across the tableland. Darvin and Orro stepped out on the platform and watched the car’s grip glide along a rail and connect to the new loop of the cable. It jolted away, swaying. There was an open stairway to the ground, for those too laden or infirm to fly, and a short flight of steps up to a railed viewing platform overhanging the clifftop. With wordless assent the two scientists climbed to it. From there they had a view, uncluttered by the station or the cables, in all directions: across the grassland to the glittering sea; along the great sweep of the cliff; and northward, over the high desert tableland, sandy and barren, breaking in the near distance into wind-sculpted mesas; and down the eight-eights-of-eight drop of the cliff.

“I take it you want to visit the famous caves,” said Orro.

“Correct,” said Darvin.

He hitched his pack of provisions to his belt and clambered onto the rail. It was too narrow to grasp with his toe- and heel-claws, but he balanced on it easily, rocking back and forth on the soles of his feet as he sniffed the wind, scried the shimmer of the heat haze, espied the floating spiral paths of flitters, and formed somewhere between his brain and his spine a sense of the shape of the air. He spread his wings, tipped forward, thrust with his feet, and dived.

The cliff’s updraught, on this hot morning, was immense. He could have hung there like a carrion-eating flitter, almost without a wingbeat. To fly at this height without the effort of having climbed to it was exhilarating, with a pleasant sense of the unearned. The thrum of the airstream on his wings tempted him to cavort. Instead he tilted and glided downward. The extra weight he carried sped his descent and he flapped a vigorous wingbeat or two to adjust. At a couple of eights-of-eight spans clear of the cliff-face and about an eight-of-eight down, he banked, beginning to describe a slow spiral. A glance up showed him Orro following. The physicist waved. Flitters screamed and flocked away. Others, perhaps a different species, fluttered in and out of caves. Darvin scanned the caves. The one he sought was well known and often visited, but quite unmarked, except for the flitter-wire mesh of a gate set a little way back from its entrance, to keep out the wild flying animals.

He spotted it, gestured to Orro, and stooped towards it. He landed with a running thud on the lip of its ledge, and came to a halt up against the mesh. Orro crashed to the same terminus a few seconds later.

“Ha-ha-ha!” he barked. “That was enjoyable!”

Darvin nodded, panting a little. “Yes. Well, let our briefly brisker blood-surges power our arms…”

The gate was a crude and heavy wooden affair, three heights of a man high; its frame and crossbeams must have been let down from the top on ropes, and likewise with the roll of sturdy-wired fine-holed mesh, much stronger than normal flitter-wire. But rather to Darvin’s surprise, the latch was a simple metal hook and loop, and the door swung back on squeaking wooden hinges. The two men stepped through and hauled it back into place behind them, then looked around.

“Stinks in here,” said Orro.

“Dried flitter shit,” said Darvin. His nose wrinkled. “Perhaps not all dry…”

Ignoring what was soft underfoot, he unclipped his electric torch and thumbed the switch. Its heavy click, or perhaps the yellow beam, disturbed some things small and dark and swift, which flew chittering farther into the cave’s depth.

“What do they live on?” Orro wondered aloud, shining his own torch around.

“Dead people,” said Darvin, in a hollow voice. “Come on.”

A path on the floor of the cave had been worn smooth by the tread of previous visitors. In the electric torchlight, it almost shone. Darvin and Orro paced along it. The occasional droppings of the small flitters apart, the cave was dry, with nothing of the dankness and weed that Darvin had half-expected, from some dim association with sea caves. The air too was fresh; some of the caves were said to connect to sinkholes well behind the cliff-top, and their occupants — human visitors or animal tenants — in danger of being flushed out in the flash floods of rare rainstorms. The risk seemed small.

“I’m told it’s about two eights-of-eights of steps,” said Darvin.

“When did you start counting?”

“Good point,” said Darvin, and began his mental count at a double-eight.

But the sight they had come to see was hard to miss.

The cave widened not quite enough for the space to be called a chamber. High on its walls, and arching over its roof, were eights-of-eights of coloured drawings. The sketched outlines of humans were so crude that they could as well have delineated moths. Animals, prey and grazer, flitter and cursor, were rendered with a colour and tone and line that made one hallucinate that they breathed. Oddly, they were untouched by droppings; only a soot-stain here and there sullied them, from the guttering wooden torches of the first discoverers, scientists — and later, gaping, adventurous travellers — of the Dawn Age.

It was not the only, or the best, example of the cliff-men’s art in Seloh: new caves were being discovered all the time, right along the whole edge of the tableland. But it was famous, and close to wing, and Darvin knew what picture to look for. He scanned the walls with his beam.

“There!” he said, lighting on a patch about two wingspans up the wall.

“That pattern of dots?”

“Yes. It’s generally supposed to represent the Queen and the Daughters — they’re picked out in a green stain made from, I believe, some kind of copper salt. And of course, being ignorant cliff-men, our clumsy ancestors only bothered to pick out a few.”

He turned to Orro. “If you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to stand on your shoulders for a moment.”

Orro shrugged. “If you must.”

Darvin backed off, sprang into the air and flapped. He hovered for a few seconds, then lowered his feet on to Orro’s shoulders. He resisted the reflex to curl his toes. Keeping his wings outstretched for balance, clutching the heavy torch, he peered at the stone wall. The largest of the green markings was a precise circle about the size of the palm of a hand. He’d consulted the two most reputable books on cave paintings, and in the brief passages describing this cave the sharp outline was held as evidence that the patch represented the Queen (as well as, less reliably, that the cliff-men had had sharper eyesight than their modern descendants). Around Her was a seeming random speckle of green dots, each the size of a fingertip. They didn’t look like even the more prominent of the Daughters; it was indeed tempting to regard them as a crude indication.

He looked closer yet, leaning forward then almost toppling back, then forward again as he regained his balance. In among the green spots were others, fainter and smaller but definite. Some were made with ochre, some with what he guessed was sulphur, others perhaps with chalk; all of them ground into the sandstone with such force that the markings had left little pits. Red, yellow and white; there was no mistaking the intent.

“Take your time,” said Orro.

Contrite, Darvin hopped off and alighted on the floor. Orro rubbed his shoulders.

“Your turn,” Darvin said. He stepped forward and took a notebook and pencil from his belt pouch and handed them to Orro. “Hop up on my shoulders and draw what you see. Make a note of the colour of each spot. I’ll shine the torch up for you.”

A minute later Darvin was certain that Orro must be heavier than he was. He clenched his jaws and concentrated on keeping the light steady. After another few painful minutes Orro grunted and jumped off. Darvin felt for a moment light enough to fly, and too sore to do so. Orro returned the pad and pencil. Darvin looked at it in the electric light. It was spread across the opening of two pages, a score of annotated circles and dots.

“Neat,” he said. The electric light was fading and yellowing by the minute. “Let’s look at it outside.”

They squatted in the cave mouth, leaning back on the mesh doorway, facing an abyss of air, a shimmer of grassland, a horizon line of sea. Darvin felt his every muscle and nerve sing with relief.

“I don’t believe the cliff-men lived in caves at all,” he said. “They’re just too horrible.”

“That is a widespread scientific opinion,” said Orro. “They left their dead in them, or perhaps just their illustrious dead; they may have used the places as stores, or as places of worship and meditation; but the popular belief that they inhabited caves is ill-founded.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” said Darvin. He sighed; he was almost reluctant, now, to at last find out whether his own expectation of the caves was ill-founded. “Well, let’s see what we’ve got.”

He unfolded three pieces of paper: his tracing of the photograph, his sketch of the silk map, and his tracing of the antique woodcut. He spread them on the ground and weighted them with pebbles, then placed the notebook, open at Orro’s sketch, beside them. The patterns were not quite identical, and not all the stars shown in one were shown in the others, but as he looked from one drawing to the next, and back, again and again, it was obvious that they were all of the same familiar patch of sky.

The evidence before his eyes was as clear as the jump on a blink comparator: the cliff-men had recorded seven of the stars in the Daughters as green, and the rest as other colours.

“You were right,” he said. “We have a trend.”

He closed his eyes for a moment, and saw a drifting fleet of dots, as if the images he’d looked at were resonating in his optic nerves, fainter and more persistent than an afterimage. He blinked it away and gazed out at the sky.

“In prehistory, the cliff-men saw seven green Daughters. In antiquity, the astrologers of the South saw twenty-seven. In the Dawn Age, mere eights-of-eights of years ago, forty-nine. In the present day, we see fifty-eight with the naked eye, and more with telescopes. And it’s not that some are brighter now than they were then — our ancestors saw stars in the same positions, and saw them as red, yellow, or white. These stars have changed from other colours to green, in the lifetime of the human race.”

Orro jumped up and stalked about for a moment, to the very lip of the cave and back. “Stars evolve,” he said. “From white to yellow to red, isn’t it?”

“I know of that hypothesis,” said Darvin. “The fire analogy. It’s speculative, and going from every other colour to green would knock it right on the head.”

“Not necessarily,” said Orro. “If the green represents a different evolution: life spreading from star to star.”

“Ah, the comet plants!” said Darvin. “The vacuum forests!”

Orro shrugged. “Life is adaptable.” He glared down at Darvin. “You are testing me with your scepticism. You do not feel it yourself.”

“No,” said Darvin. “I don’t.” He folded the sheets of paper between the pages of the notebook and tucked it away. “Tell me what you suspect I suspect.”

Orro squatted down again. “Isn’t it obvious? You suspect that the green tinge is caused by life, yes, but by life in some artificial environment.” He outlined a circle with his hands. “Great globes of glass, perhaps, somehow launched into space, containing complete economies of nature, plants and animals alike, and whatever intelligent inhabitants have built them. That they multiply around a sun, to the extent that eventually they filter all of its light. And that as each sun’s environs become crowded, great ships are launched across the voids between the stars, to repeat the process around another sun. Your comet is of course such a ship, decelerating into orbit around the Sun Himself. In years to come, our sky will be crowded with the green globes, and we ourselves may look forward to meeting the mighty builders of worlds, should they deign to notice such as us.”

Darvin looked sidelong at his friend with admiration. “What a delightful fancy!” he said. “No, really. And it is a possibility, I concede. But as scientists rather than writers of engineering tales, we should seek explanations in the work of nature rather than the hand of mind whenever possible. I think it’s life, certainly, and that it is spreading, but I think it may be an entirely natural process. Because if life — a hardy spore that escaped the atmosphere, perhaps — were to gain a foothold on some rock or comet in space, it could spread. As it did so it would be modified by evolution, and its own actions would modify the paths of the bodies on which it grew. A decelerating comet seems much more plausible if we imagine its out-gassing to be controlled — mindlessly, it is true — by some life within.”

Orro was shaking his head. “A journey from star to star would take millions of years. We’re seeing stars changing over eights-of-eights.”

“I’m not talking about passive drifting, like spores or downy seeds on the wind. I imagine some much faster propulsion.” He swept his arms in a circle wider than the one Orro had outlined a moment earlier. “A sail of some sort.”

“Propelled by what wind?”

“Light exerts a pressure in vacuum,” said Darvin. “The Sun gives forth a fiery stream of other particles.”

“Too weak a one for star-sailing,” Orro said. “No, Darvin, we are looking at… spaceships. And artificial worlds in numbers that beggar the imagination.”

Darvin felt his knees shake. He did and did not want to believe it.

Orro took two strips of dried meat from his provisions pack, passed one to Darvin and started chewing on the other. “Here is an idea for further research. We find out the distance of each of the stars charted in the Daughters region, green or not. We can see whether the earlier green stars are closer together than the later ones. From this we can see if a spread from star to star is actually happening.”

Darvin nodded. “Obvious,” he said. “Go on.”

“And we check whether spectrographic analyses exist for any of these stars. If we were to find that they still show traces of the spectra from stars with lights of other colours than green and they match the ancient records, we’d have made our case. And then we should find out the composition of the green light itself.”

“Oh, I know what that is,” said Darvin. “Its spectra show the lines of oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen.”

Orro jumped up again. “But these are the constituents of life itself!”

“Yes,” said Darvin. “And that’s one reason why astronomers regard life around these stars as possible. That is not the surprise. The surprise, if we are right, is that we have evidence that it is spreading. Or at least,” he added, struck by an intellectual scruple, “that it is arising around more and more stars.”

“Why has more not been made of this?” Orro almost shouted. “Life around the stars would be the most significant finding of astronomy!”

Darvin thought about it, chewing on the strip. “Hmm,” he said. “I suppose because it’s all so wretched hypothetical, old chap, and so embarrassing to seem to confirm the myths of religion and the… sensationalism of the vulgar.”

He smiled at Orro and gestured at him to sit down. “Let’s eat,” he said. “And then let’s take wing, and fly over the high desert, and find some place of comfortable vantage to wait for nightfall and count the Daughters for ourselves.”

It goes all the way down, Darvin thought to himself. Out here in the pitch black of a night before either of the moons had risen, away from lights and smoke, the sky came all the way down to the ground. You could see stars blink into view as they rose above the horizon, and to the west you could watch them disappear beneath it. And in between, in the vault above, the sky was packed with stars. The whole sky shimmered with the massed twinkling in multiple colours. The Shining Path spanned the zenith. The constellations, lost in the crowd, were more difficult to identify than they were at night in Five Ravines.

The Queen dominated the ecliptic, the Warrior a distant second. Between the Shining Path and the ecliptic the Daughters shone green across the eastern sky. He had counted the fifty-eight, and wasn’t sure there weren’t more. Behind the visible green stars was a greenish haze. In the midst of them, like a ruby among emeralds, glowed the Blood-drop, known to astronomy as Stella Proxima, the Nearest Star.

Orro was staring at it. “That’s where your comet came from,” he said. “Stella Proxima.”

“If it was a spaceship,” said Darvin, “I suppose it must have done.”

“No!” said Orro. “There is no supposition about it. Can’t you see, man, that’s where the trajectory goes back to?”

“I can’t see it,” said Darvin. “I’m no mathematician. But I have no doubt you can show me it, when we get back.” He shivered. “Speaking of which.”

“The passenger cars aren’t running,” said Orro.

“What?” said Darvin, feeling stupid. “But the overnight mail—”

“Travels in what are known, technically, as mail cars,” said Orro. “So here we stay.”

“We can’t!” said Darvin, looking around. He could just about see. He could hear things.

“How are you going to get back?” jeered Orro. “Fly?”

Darvin wrapped his wings around himself. “What else can we do?”

Orro’s eyes showed their whites in the starlit dark. “You’ve never spent a night out of cover?”

“No.”

“I have,” said Orro. “Let me show you.”

He vanished into the dark. A few minutes — Darvin confirmed the time by the wheeling of the stars, but it seemed longer — he returned with a double armful of brushwood. He stacked some and set fire to it. Rising sparks replaced the stars, and the crackling of twigs muffled the distant scurries.

“We have some food left,” he said. “And water.”

“Not much water.”

Orro flourished a glass flask. “Firewater,” he said. “So called because it keeps us warm.”

Darvin joined him in a huddle over the small fire. Orro began turning a strip of dried meat above the flames. The smell became appetising.

“Where did you learn all this?” Darvin asked.

“Military training.”

“Ah,” said Darvin. He bit off a chunk of the now much more palatable meat and handed the remainder back. “This is a delicate question,” he said. “I hope I don’t offend.”

Orro waved the strip, munching. “Go ahead.”

“I didn’t know ironmongers’ sons had military training.”

“They don’t, generally,” said Orro. He unstoppered the firewater flask, swigged and passed it to Darvin. “But ‘scientific civil servant’ is a rank of nobility. Hence military training, from the Academy onward.”

The firewater burned in Darvin’s mouth and down his throat. “You’re a nobleman?”

“Indeed I am,” said Orro. “And a not very competent sabreur. I preened myself on being a somewhat more adequate scout.”

Darvin laughed. “I thought that to be a noble one had to own land.”

“Oh, I do,” said Orro. “I am entitled to the rent of an acre.”

“How much does that come to?”

“Nothing,” said Orro. “It’s a patch of uninhabited and barren desert.” He laughed. “Some have become rich from such fiefs. They found rock-oil.”

“So you have a chance.”

Orro shook his head. “Geologically speaking, and regretfully, no.” He threw more brush on the fire. The flask passed back and forth. Orro talked about his military training, and about his friend Holder, who had enjoyed it so much that he’d moved from the civil service to the Regnal Air Force. They had remained friends, and it was only Orro’s choice of exile that had severed the connection.

“Surely you could write to him,” said Darvin.

“I did,” said Orro. He stared into the fire and spread his hands. “Some have seen my departure as a betrayal. I don’t say he has, but he didn’t reply.”

They banked the fire and lay down beside it, wrapped in their wings. At some point in the night, when the moons had risen and crossed the sky and were sinking in the west, Darvin woke to find Orro’s wing over him. He wondered what to do, and decided to appreciate the added warmth and go back to sleep. In the morning it seemed like a dream. The two men awoke a wingspan apart, shook the dew off their fur and wings, and flew to the cable station.

“Isn’t this impressive!” Orro said.

Darvin gazed at the tangle of wires and torch-bulbs that hung from the ceiling of Orro’s laboratory like some demented festive decoration. Now that he noticed, some of the bulbs were decorative, coloured red and green. There were about eight eights of bulbs — no, more, because all of them were paired: one white or red, one green.

“Aha!” he said, as he got the point. “Now I’m impressed.”

“I thought you would be,” said Orro. “It took me five days to work out the positions of the stars, and four to wire all this up.” He pulled up a chair. “Sit here.”

He pulled down blinds at each of the windows, leaving the room as dark as the desert night. He sat down at a bank of switches, and threw one. The bulbs flashed on in a three-dimensional display of stars. Seven were green, a close cluster. Another switch, and twenty more turned green. Then there were forty-nine, and then fifty-eight. In each case the new green stars were farther from the original seven, and themselves adjacent within a ragged arc. Orro repeated the process several times, to display again and again the green spreading like a Shockwave. Through it all one small bulb, hanging at the near end of the display in front of Darvin’s nose, remained at red.

“The Nearest Star,” said Darvin. He stood up, shifted about, narrowed his eyes until he could see the green bulbs as the Daughters appeared in the night sky. “Now run it through again,” he said.

The green wave rushed at him. He almost flinched.

“Something is coming,” he breathed. He’d deduced it himself, in the patterns of light and light-years he’d constructed from the ephemiris and the catalogues, but until now he had not quite believed it.

Orro snapped the blinds back up. Light filled the room, leaving the bulbs tawdry.

“How long,” Darvin asked, “before the Nearest Star turns green? Will we see it, or our descendants?”

“I don’t think we can wait that long,” said Orro. He slid some stapled sheets of paper across the table. Darvin spun it around and looked at the title, above his name and Orro’s: A Distant, Decelerating Celestial Object; with Some Observations on the Daughters. “We must publish this,” said Orro. “Now.”