The box was divided by loose cardboard partitions. Almost half had one for each outer-month, with the cuttings stacked vertically between them. There were already eight-and-one of them, taking the record back to the previous year. The other section was of everything from before that year, and thin stuff it was, though it went back many years and made up most of the bulk. Why the Sight had kept track of curious events for all that time Darvin didn’t know, but he could guess. It had nothing to do with a scrying of portents; it was that the circulation of strange teles and rumours gave clues to the popular mood: ripples of anxiety or hysteria, cold deep currents of belief and doubt.
In that early archival section he found a handful of trudge oddities: instances of albinism, of wingless freaks (there had been some speculation that the acquired characteristic was becoming inherited; Kwarive would have smiled); of travelling performers who showed off trudges capable of counting or other unusual feats; of nests and entire colonies of feral flying trudges that had reverted to their ancestral physique and mode of life. None mentioned the use of speech, though some claimed understanding. Most of the reports were of sports thrown up by other breeds of domestic beast — he lost count of two-headed calves — and of sightings in the wild: sea snakes, lake lizards, mysterious man-like beings of the mountains or deserts, great winged things in the sky. That there were unknown species in the world Darvin didn’t doubt, and Kwarive had told him of a growing interest among biologists in mutants, which some thought had a bearing on questions of evolution; but most of this was most likely clutter: misperception and misreporting, rumours hardened to fact and become precedent and template for others, and downright hoaxes and lies.
He sighed, wiped dust and ink from his fingers, and proceeded to the more recent files. The parade of monsters was now longer and weirder, capering across his inner vision and gibbering. He dismissed all but the odd trudges, who were present in the parade in force.
A veterinary surgeon had lost an eye when a trudge kit had lashed out with its foot when its turn came to be spayed. Another kit had screamed “No!” when its wings were slashed, had gone into a decline and died. An old woman who lived alone had been found strangled by powerful hands; suspicion had fallen on her (now missing) trudge. A trudge in an upland farm had unlocked its stable door, and had had to be stabbed by the farmer and his boy as it fled across the meadows. A second-generation (it was thought) feral trudge, wings unslashed, had haunted the skies above a back-country village for many a night, evading nets and dodging crossbolts. Mutilated carcasses of cattle had littered the vicinity.
That was in the first outer-month. Albeit that the reports came from all over Seloh and Gevork, and one (the strangling, recounted by a returned sailor) from the Southern Rule, it was a troubling tally. Over the next eight outer-months it increased, not month by month, but over all.
He leaned back and stared up at the ceiling mats, where tiny skitters ran upside down with sticky toes, catching mat bugs in long looped tongues. The real world was wonder enough, and seemed light-years distant from the crazy tales he’d read.
The woman Arrell’s face loomed above him. He rocked forward. “Finished?” she asked.
“For now,” said Darvin. “May we talk?” He tipped his head back a little.
She nodded. “Outside.” She led him down the corridor to another door, which opened to a small office. Flat panels of floatbark covered the walls. The room had more light fixtures than seemed necessary. Arrell switched on two of them, perched at the back of a desk, and motioned Darvin to a seat.
“We call this the interview room,” she said, with a slight smile.
“For debriefings with prejudice?”
“Yes. It’s not as sinister as you may have heard. Be that as it may, you’re assured of privacy.”
“All right,” said Darvin. “What I must ask you first is: how much analysis do you make of all these reports? How does the Sight handle them?”
“In ancient times,” said Arrell, “Anomalies was a department of divination. Today it remains a small but significant element of statecraft… I’m sure you understand why.”
“To gauge the susceptibility of the populace to rumours and alarms?”
“Not at all!” said Arrell, sounding surprised at the suggestion. “Because the Sight needs to know about all unusual and untoward events. We sift the dross for nuggets. To take some banal examples, a mysterious flying light could be a Gevorkian airship. A strange man of the mountains — an infiltrator or a rebel. A sea-snake — the wake of an unseen ship.”
“But — two-headed monsters!”
She shrugged. “A new disease? A false rumour? It doesn’t matter. The Sight wants to know of it.”
“What do you make of this year’s increase in unusual events involving trudges, then?”
“I don’t try to interpret,” she said. “My job — our job, rather — is to summarise, tabulate, and report.”
“So this matter has been reported?”
“Among others. Monster tales are many this year.”
“Why?”
“Why? Well. In my experience, any one strange event results in many spurious reports. One Gevorkian airship over the coast, whose presence we can confirm independently, gives rise to a double-eight of sightings from leagues around, from places that could not have seen it, and could not have heard of it at the time. Rumour flies faster than sound, as the saying goes.”
“Or is backdated in recollection?”
“That too.” The creases around her eyes quirked. “What is your theory about the trudges, by the way?”
He didn’t know how much she knew about the project. Possibly she had never heard of the ether-wave emissions from insects and trees. It was not his place to tell her. “I think,” he said, “that something connected to the event has begun to increase the intelligence of some of them.”
She didn’t quite conceal her surprise. “How could that happen?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “But I would very much appreciate if you were to bring all such reports to the specific attention of the higher ranks.”
“Of course,” she said. “Anything else, before you go?”
“I understand,” he said, “that the Sight, at times, finds it necessary for the security and stability of the Reach to… discourage public discussion of certain matters. I submit that this trudge business may be one of them.”
“I’ll pass your suggestion upward,” she said. “Will that be all?”
It was the second hint. He saw himself out.
Late-afternoon sunlight slanted through the heights and roosts. The first stirrings of the evening breeze off the Mount and the range behind Kraighor had begun to shift the day’s haze offshore. More people eddied among the shops and stalls, and the street didn’t smell so stale. As Darvin walked among them he felt his sense of himself shift, like the flip of a blink comparator, from lowly agent of the Sight to visitor to the capital, a free man with time on his hands. The city had a great and fine university. Its department of astronomy was a place he had long intended to see. His reputation now preceded him. He could be sure of a welcome, even at this hour, and a convivial evening. The dining hall would be ample, the alcohol-laden fruit abundant, the laughterburn mellow, the talk stimulating. It was all there, a few stops away on the Northeast Cable.
He considered it, and reckoned it would be an opportunity missed. He could meet scholars and students any day of the eight. The city’s temples, the complex, piled-up stone roost of the Height, the maze of back streets — these he had to see. He turned away from the thoroughfare and headed back along the side street, deeper into the city.