She lifted a drink-bulb almost to her lips and squeezed a few drops, looking at him all the while with suspicion, almost scorn. “I know you read my biolog,” she said. “So you know how I’m doing.”
Horrocks spread his hands and affected injured innocence. “Well, of course, but…”
“But you think I’m not telling all about myself?’
“People don’t, always.”
“People don’t, ever,” she said.
“It was just a friendly query,” said Horrocks. He could feel his face becoming hot. It was infuriating that this girl, six years his junior and still self-conscious about her breasts and hips, could make him feel awkward. “Anyway… I find what you write interesting.”
“That’s what people usually say when they disagree with it.”
Horrocks acknowledged the parry. “All right. All very interesting, but I don’t see why you make so much of it.”
“Then you haven’t—” she began, then caught herself. “I haven’t made myself clear.” She sawed her fingernails through her hair. “You remember when the transmissions were detected, you made a joke that they might be from aliens?”
“I did? I must have better foresight than I thought.”
She looked impatient. “The whole point of your joke was that there are no aliens. It wouldn’t have been funny otherwise. Just like if my caremother had said that something I’d lost in the garden had been taken by the fairies, or the hideaways. If we found fairies in the garden, or hideaways, it would tell us that the world was quite different from what we had imagined. It wouldn’t just be a world that had fairies in it, like a different kind of bird or something. It’d be a different kind of world, a world in which fairies could exist.”
“Yes,” said Horrocks. “So the world is different. So what?”
“So what happens here, around the Destiny Star, won’t just decide what happens between the human species and the bat people. I agree, that’s quite a responsibility. We’re standing in for all humanity here, we’re on our own, and we’d better get it right. But the point I’m making is that if one lot of aliens can exist, so close to us in space and time, then almost certainly other aliens do. Lots of them! Some of them may be more advanced than us by the time we reach them, with Civil Worlds of their own. But if they had that already, we’d know it — we’d see their green haze, we’d pick up their transmissions. In the next few thousand years, we may. But in the next few hundred years, it’ll be planets like this we encounter. Ones on the verge or just over the verge of spaceflight.”
Horrocks felt puzzled. “How do you know that?”
Atomic smiled for the first time, exposing a broad row of short white upper teeth. “I don’t,” she said. “Call it a hunch.”
Horrocks nodded. “It’s more than that,” he said. “It’s what we should plan for. A worst-case scenario. Aliens already exploring what they think of as their system, when we blunder in.” He laughed. “A good thing for us that the bat people don’t even have heavier-than-air flight.”
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.