“The shittles have failed them,” she said. “We detected them, and we started sending messages back. That’s why they were destroyed — because the observation had become contaminated by our awareness of it. So now they’re trying again. What better way to watch us than through the eyes of trudges?”
Darvin shuddered. “That thought gives me the creeps,” he said. “However, it doesn’t explain why they should want a trudge to speak, assuming it really happened and wasn’t some drunk farmer’s bad dream.”
“Well, going along with that… I must admit it doesn’t fit.” She laughed. “So like a good scientist, I have another hypothesis: the aliens are sentimental like you, and think of the trudges as a sort of strong and very stupid people, and not as beasts.”
“Ah!” said Darvin. “In that case, why should they give them speech? If they know they have no speech, they know they are beasts, so giving them speech wouldn’t be seen as helping people. It would be seen as turning beasts into people.”
“They may not see speech as the issue. Perhaps it’s a side effect of raising the intelligence of the trudges.”
“And why should they want to do that? Queen of Heaven! If trudges became intelligent, or if a coming generation of trudges were born intelligent, they would — they would—”
“Slaughter us,” said Kwarive. “Without hesitation, without mercy, without scruple. And then, when they had wiped us from the face of the Ground, they would welcome — for a time, at any rate — their benefactors from above. And if they didn’t, they would have even less chance than we would of resisting the invasion.”
Darvin felt almost as shocked that Kwarive could imagine such a thing as he was by the sanguinary vision itself. The malevolence or incompetence it ascribed to the aliens also disturbed him, in part because it rang true with his own earlier dark suspicions. If the wingless aliens looked like trudges to human eyes, was it not possible that the aliens might themselves feel akin to the flightless trudges?
“This is a morbid fancy,” he said. “I will hear no more of it.”
“Not very scientific of you,” she chided. She clutched his shoulders and looked him in the eye. “Oh, Darvin, I’ve been thinking about what Bahron the Eye said, about how the aliens want our world. He may be right, you know. All life is a struggle for existence. Why should it cease to be a struggle if it spreads among the stars?”
15 — Hollow Spaces of the Forward Cone
14 365:11:02 10:43
Issue 100! That’s not a number I ever expected to reach when I switched to mailing. Nor did I then hope to have more readers than I ever did when anybody could access it. So thanks to all who’ve subscribed, and to all who’ve spread the word. I still miss the biologs, though. The newslines do their job but it’s all professionals and much less exciting than the buzz. So I appreciate all the mails that come to me, and the mailing lists, and so on. And I know it’s not just me — I know there are hundreds if not thousands out there writing and speaking and performing against the emergency and the embargo, people whom I’ve never heard of and who’ve never heard of me. (How do I know? From the number I do hear about, and how I hear about them — by chance, by word of mouth, and by the people I meet when I go to other towns or who come to Far Crossing, and I find whole communities of people in the same fight. And from the songs.) It’s not the same, but it gives us heart, it keeps up our spirits, and helps us realise that this dark time will soon be over.
Nearly six months of State of Emergency; just over six months to go. Soon? It seems a long time, I know, but remember that in that time even more of us will have turned sixteen, as I did a couple of months ago, and we’ll not just be able to vote in the referendum on the emergency but petition a recall and throw out the entire Council. Throw out the Council! I want to write that in virtual letters across the sunline. It’s going to happen. It’s unfair — most of the people on the Council are good people. (I’ll get hammered for saying that, I know, but it’s true, so don’t bother.) But it’s the price you pay. If you keep your ship generation cooped up in the ship, your ship generation grows up like grass under your feet and a huge cohort of it comes of age and votes you out.
What have we accomplished in the past six months?
There are those who’ll say, nothing much. We’re still stuck here, the embargo’s still in place, the emergency’s still in place. To those — I’m thinking of S____ and H____ here, and you know who you are — who think like that, just think back to how it was that midnight when the contact clause was invoked and the boom came down. Or think about the morning after it. It was worse than when we lost the virtualities. It was as if the sunline had gone out and then the lights had gone out. We were stumbling around in the dark. Suddenly everyone was all alone. We couldn’t see in an instant what others all over the world thought. All we had was the people around us and the talking heads on the newslines.
I remember that morning. I never wrote about it at the time because it was too depressing. But look back at it now, compare it with this morning, and it’s downright encouraging. Here is how it was.
Something woke me before the sunline came out, about six in the morning or so. I really needed a bite and a brew, so I climbed into some clothes and pulled on a pair of springy shoes and spiralled down the stairs and jogged off down Windy and on to Dark (is how it felt at the time) and didn’t even pause to pick up the day’s newslines at the hotspot. In the half-light of the farside I noticed people standing in small groups on the street, talking. I didn’t know, maybe I’d missed a big all-night party or something. There was an odd sense of quiet, and I couldn’t quite understand why. I could hear voices, the sounds of early risers rising and early birds reaffirming their property rights, the hum of an engine and the hiss of tyres in the next street.
And then I noticed. The quiet was in my head. Most times of course you don’t listen to the buzz. You don’t read the chat. But you know it’s there in the background, like distant surf, like far-off lights. I stopped for a moment, my heart thumping much harder than the running justified, and closed my eyes and interrogated my inner ear. Nothing. No sound, no lights, nothing in my head but me. I could taste myself like the roof of my mouth.
Maybe I hadn’t quite woken up. I didn’t think anything was seriously wrong. A vague, half-formed thought floated through my fuzzy mind that the comms might be down due to the previous day’s bonfire of the virtualities. An even vaguer thought drifted by that it served them right; “them” being, of course, the jury who’d pulled the plug and the Council that had endorsed their decision. It may have been the first time I ever thought of the founders, the older generation, as “them” with quite that emphasis.
As I jogged along a curious thing happened, which had nothing to do with anything that happened later, and nothing obvious to do with anything that had happened immediately before. Looking back, I can see that it may have had something to do with that alone-in-my-head feeling. What happened was this. I became very much aware of being me, and it felt strange. It was as if a wider, cooler mind had found itself in my head, and was surprised to be there behind my eyes. And yet that larger mind was mine. Very odd. It passed in a few moments, leaving me a little shaken, curious, and quite unable to recapture it. I have never found a name for this experience, and though I’ve had it several times since, I can neither induce it at will nor prevent its recurrence. When I tell people about it they either look blank or say: “Oh! You mean you have that too?” But it isn’t a bond between us, not a secret, just a peculiarity, an anomaly, perhaps as random a feature of our minds as the ability to roll one’s tongue is of our bodies. It solves no problem, conveys no insight, and yet leaves me with an impression of significance. It has an aftertaste, but no taste. That impression, that aftertaste, may be its empty secret: it may be a tiny glitch in the process by which our brains find meaning in sense.