He dived off.
Darvin stood for a few minutes studying the photographs and comparing them with the diagram on the front page of the document. When the telephone rang he ignored it. When a knock came to the door he rolled up the document, stuck it in his belt, and left the room by Lenoen’s route.
The previous spring Kwarive’s sister had had five kits, of whom only two had died in their first year. When Darvin couldn’t find Kwarive around the university, it was a fair bet that she was at her sister’s roost. So it proved that afternoon. Darvin pushed aside the safety mesh and ducked under the awning of the side entrance to find Kwarive on her back on the slatted floor, batting up with her hands as the three yearlings flew around the room, yelling and bumping into the walls and each other. He sometimes suspected her of becoming broody, but she had always insisted on completing her studies before she’d consider taking a roost. “What’s the matter?” she asked, looking up at him. He told her. (“L’noen!” squeaked the kits. “Lassir! Emissary!” They grabbed new words like bright toys.) She sat up. “This is serious,” she said.
“You’ve said it.” He laughed. “Now we’ll find out if the engineering tales got it right about mass panic.”
“Oh, not that,” said Kwarive. “That’s all piffle anyway. No, I meant that story about a talking trudge kit.” Darvin clasped his hands across his head. “I don’t take that seriously! It’s all of a piece with portents and dead men’s ships and two-headed prey-calves. It’s the loss of secrecy that concerns me more. The whole project—”
“Project! Project!” shrieked a kit whizzing past his ear.
“Let’s take this somewhere else,” Darvin said.
“Good idea.” Kwarive walked over to a barred cupboard, hauled out a struggling flitter, snapped one of its wings and tossed the hapless creature in the air. The kits brought it down and bit and clawed into it. Its screeches stopped in a second, the immediate feeding frenzy a few seconds later. The kits raised their heads.
“Good Kwarive! Good Kwarive!” they called with Woody jaws.
“I’m too good to them,” Kwarive grumbled on the way out. “My sister would have a fit. Breaking its wing like that.”
“She objects to the cruelty?” Darvin asked.
“No,” said Kwarive. “The loss of the chase. They need the exercise.”
Darvin and Kwarive perched on the rail of the roost’s balcony.
“You were saying?” said Kwarive.
“The project won’t be secret anymore. That’s got to be a good thing.”
“Wishful thinking,” said Kwarive. “The occasion for the project is no longer secret. The actual content of it is. Do you think Orro’s aeronautics will suddenly become open to public discussion? Nollam’s etherics? And whatever else is going on that even we don’t know about?”
“I don’t know.” He pulled Lenoen’s document from his belt. “Have a look at this.”
The document consisted of three sheets of paper, held together by a cunning cut and fold in the top left-hand corner. They peered at the top page. It was headed: A Grave and Truthful Discourse Upon Some Recent Unusual Events. Beneath that was a fine woodcut of side, front, and three-quarter views of the Object. The labelling gave the scale, and interpreted the front and rear cones as engines, and the central cylinder as spinning to provide an effect of weight. A brief note below recounted the discovery and location of the object, referring to Darvin and Orro’s paper and also to some reports in the various tongues of the Southern Rule. The vocabulary of the note, and the size of the print, gave every indication of being aimed at the simplest of readers.
The second page listed a series of anomalous events, in the same straightforward style, as if taken from naive eyewitness accounts. The third page stated: From reliable reports of travellers and friends, the Wise of the Southern Rule believe that the esteemed overwatchers of the northern realms have been breathed upon by a great wind of invention and skillful work from their knowledge of these events. In the Reach of Seloh, honour to her name, those of craft and knowledge have set about the following mighty works: building flying machines of fixed wings; sending moving pictures through the ether; searching the sky for etheric messages from other worlds; new methods of reckoning the descrying of portents from numbers. In the Realm of Gevork, praise be to its ancient fame, the following: building large rockets of metal; sending moving pictures through the ether; obtaining heat and light from certain rare and poisonous minerals; building etheric machines for reckoning and comparing, and for the construction of subtle secret codes.
It is the heavy dread of the Wise of the Southern Rule that these wonderful works, and more we wot not of, may be intended to improve the arts of war. It is our humble and fervent hope, upon which our holy men daily and nightly beseech the blessing of the Most High and the beloved gods below and above the moons, that our dread shall prove unfounded and that the realms remain at peace.
The lower half of that page consisted of two woodcuts. One showed a fixed-wing flying machine with a propeller at its nose, the other a rocket of metal — someone had taken pains to show the plates and rivets — with flames shooting out of the back. They appeared to be on a collision course.
Darvin’s hands shook as he turned the papers back to the front page and stared at the drawing of the ship from another star.
“How did they find this out?” he said.
“The Southern Rule,” said Kwarive, “must surely have something like the Sight.”
“If I were in the Sight,” said Darvin, “I’d be searching now for Southern spies inside the Sight itself.”
“You are in the Sight,” Kwarive pointed out.
“So I am,” said Darvin, “to my rue, and perhaps my ruin.”
“What do you mean?” cried Kwarive.
“I’ll be under suspicion. So will you. So will we all.” He was thinking of Orro.
“Perhaps we should disappear. Your relatives in the backcountry—”
“No!” said Darvin. “That’s just about the worst thing we could do. If the Sight seeks us, it’ll find us — depend on it. The best we can do is act as if we’re innocent — which we are.”
From the balcony they could see the Southern ship. Kwarive gazed at it.
“Why did they have to do this?” she asked. “What did they hope to accomplish?”
“Exactly what they said — peace.”
She gaped at him. “That’s so naive!”
“Is it? ‘Naive’ is not a word I associate with the Southern Rule. Superstitious, perhaps, traditional, yes, maddeningly set in their ways, certainly — but not naive.”
“I meant you are naive. They must have a hidden motive.”
“This is why I have no politics,” said Darvin. “I can’t think in those terms.”
“Then maybe it’s time you learned to, and fast!”
Her anger sounded sodden with distress. Darvin wrapped a wing around her. “Tell me why you were concerned about the tale of the talking trudge,” he said.
“It reminded me of the electric shittles,” she said.
“How?” He didn’t see it at all.
“If the wingless ones can influence the life force of a shittle, to make it grow an electrical device, why couldn’t they influence the life force of a trudge, to make it grow whatever part of the brain is needed for the power of speech?”
“No reason why they couldn’t, I suppose, but why should they?”