“Ah! Some reason we don’t know? You said we should stick to what we know. Now, I’m no medical man, nor no scientist either, but it seems to me that floating about weightless — and not even having wings to fly with — would cripple you from walking again. Muscles waste away when people have to be laid out, when they’re too sick even to hang. If you never need to walk, no problem. Float free as a fish or a flitter. But if you do mean to walk again, like I said, you have to keep in shape. These wingless wonders mean one day to walk on the ground, and I do mean Ground.”
There was a brief interruption while Nollam and his assistants changed the recording-tape. Everyone stared at the screen, as though to memorise whatever was missed.
“So what,” Darvin asked, “does it matter that they wish to come here?”
Bahron hunched, fingers curled. “When a shipload of adventurers from here or Gevork turns up on the coast of some wild area of the Southern Rule, they don’t usually have the well-being of the locals at the front of their minds. I don’t see why the wingless should be any different.”
“Oh, I object!” cried Orro. “That is speculative and unjust! Any race capable of the great achievement of crossing the space between the stars must surely be too advanced to merely wish to extend a reach! How could so great a project be compassed without a vast enterprise of cooperation? What mere material end could make so long a voyage profitable?”
“In any case,” added another scientist, one of the etheric specialists, “if they did invade us, or wish us ill, we could do nothing to stop them.”
“Fair questions, gentlemen,” said Bahron. “And, I’ll allow, they perplex me. What need brought the wingless here and, if Darvin and Orro are right, has brought them from star to star already? Curiosity or some such I could understand, but why so vast a ship, big enough to hold a great many of them?” He hesitated, then continued as if determined to have his say. “What first comes to my mind — a mind that’s paid and pledged to be speculative and unjust, I admit — is that it might be what’s brought people to every land of Ground: population pressure. Now there would be a reason for wanting a fine world like ours, a habitable world. As to what we could do to stop them — it’s true, as long as they are in the sky and we are here, there’s nothing. But if they’re here and we’re here, it’s a different story, is it not?”
“It is not,” said Orro. “We know the power of their engines, the scale of their work, the subtlety of their etheric communications, and the ingenuity of their contrivances. Their flying machines alone — the one we saw inside the ship, to say nothing of the one that was photographed high in the sky — could wreak havoc on us. Put aside all thought of fighting them. Our only chance is to communicate with them, to come to an accommodation, and to hope that their greater power is a sign of greater wisdom.”
“Fine sentiments,” said Bahron. “So, no doubt, thought the ancestors of the backcountry folk when the sails of the first Seloh’s fleet speckled the Broad Channel.”
“You sully the glorious future by equating it with a savage past!”
“Do I?” said Bahron. “So much the worse for the glorious future. My duties are to the present. If you will excuse me, gentlemen, ladies.”
After he’d left, the conversation continued, but it had lost its sparkle. Everybody knew that Bahron’s concerns would be mooted at a level far above their influence. Some might have shared his concerns. Darvin knew that the other scientists, most of them aligned with various military institutions, took a darker view of the alien arrival than he and Orro did. At the same time he found himself wrestling with a prejudice. It was difficult, having seen the aliens as wingless, to see them as a superior race. The Sightlessness that they shared with the despised trudges — about whose fate and use, dumb beasts though they were, he’d never been comfortable — reduced the aliens’ imputed stature and status. He wondered whether this would induce a dangerous contempt, or a more dangerous fear. The notion of an intelligent and articulate trudge — a rebellious trudge — was a staple of moralistic satire and engineering tale alike. Such tales betrayed, he thought, an unease that had haunted the conscience of his race since that terrible and glorious moment in the dawn of time when mankind had first battened upon the physical strength and mental weakness of his closest animal relative to make of that brother a beast of burden.
What, he wondered with a chill prickle of fur, would the aliens make of that relationship?
Another half hour of tape rolled by. Nollam was just changing the reels when Markhan returned, agitated.
“We’ve sent calls,” he said, “to other locations where telekinematography is being developed. They’ve tuned to the same etheric frequency and wavelength, and they’re receiving the same message.”
“What I’d expect, chief,” said Nollam, straightening. “This stuff must be beaming down from the third moon. Gives it quite a spread, I should imagine.”
“Indeed,” said Markhan. “Which means it’s also beaming down upon Gevork.”
Darvin noticed how all eyes turned to Orro, and didn’t like it.
“What reason,” Darvin asked, “do we have to think that the receivers of Gevork are also tuned — so to speak — to this message?”
“Why, none at all,” said Markhan. “Except the well-known scientific prowess of Gevork.”
“They’re a bit hidebound,” said Orro, sounding defensive. “That’s why I’m in Seloh’s Reach, after all.” His folded wings quivered. “Unless you refer to the fact that this very installation is, ah, in some respects arranged around the presumption that the eyes of the Realm are upon it?”
A silence — embarrassed in most cases, puzzled in others — fell on the gathering. The rocket scientists had no more of a clue than Kwarive did that their work was diversionary.
“No, no!” cried Markhan. “That’s a misunderstanding, Orro, for which I ask your pardon. The layers of subterfuge employed by the Sight and the Might are, I fear, far too subtle for mere scientists like us.” He flapped a wing. “Please don’t trouble yourself with them. All work here is secret, and truly so. No, I only speculate that Gevork might have learned of the visitation independently.”
“It’s certainly possible,” said Orro. “I don’t—”
“Look!” shouted Nollam.
The image on the screen was no longer of scrolling lines of symbols, but a jerky pattern of squares and rectangles. After a moment, it was replaced by a flicker of black and white, the random spume of etheric surf.
“Has the third moon gone below the horizon?” asked Markhan.
Nollam shook his head. “It’ll be up for hours.”
The hiss from the loudspeaker was drowned out by a loud fizzing and crackling from outside. Kwarive ran to the door. Darvin followed.
The communications tree smouldered. Smoke rose around its foot.
“Stay back!” Darvin shouted. Kwarive ignored the warning. She stooped over the small dungheap, and turned with something held between the claws of her thumb and forefinger. As he came up to her she held it out and dropped it on the palm of his hand.
Still almost too hot to hold, the dead shittle’s carapace was split and carbonized. The curious device inside it had melted to slag. “They’re all like that,” Kwarive said.
Behind her the tree caught fire.
They sat, that evening, around another fire and waited for the return airship to Five Ravines. Darvin, Orro, and Kwarive talked in low voices. After a while Nollam joined them. Behind them the camp went about its routine. The project would continue. News or rumours of the aborted contact had spread to everyone, and a late-afternoon emergency conference had thrashed out its implications to no one’s satisfaction. Bulletins on the Might’s wireless network had told of unexplained fires breaking out all over the country, and abroad. In the coastal cities, the seasonal rain and damp had ensured damage was slight. Elsewhere, brush and forest fires burned out of control. No explanation had been given, but no doubt some would be found. Darvin placed a mental bet on a coincidence of lightning-strikes and hunters careless with fires.