“You?” said Darvin. “Well, allow me to congratulate you. I’m a mere Scholar Ordinary. Have you been studying in your spare tune?”
Nollam gave him a look. “I got it for my work.” He waved a hand, indicating the giant parabolic aerial in the middle distance.
“Ah, for the design—”
“No,” said Nollam. “For founding a new discipline. Etheric astronomy.”
“First I’ve heard of it, but again, congratulations.”
“Oh, you won’t have heard of it,” said Nollam. “It’s all under wraps. Morale reasons. But they gave me the degree to keep me happy and quiet, knowing I was recognised and would be remembered even if the whole field stays a secret until after I’m dead.”
Darvin wasn’t sure if the young technician — correction, Master — wasn’t tugging his wing. “Serious?”
“Serious,” said Nollam. “Can’t even tell you. Lips stitched, and all that. Maybe someday.”
“I’ll take your word for it, Magister.”
“You do that, Scholar, you do that… How’s Kwarive?”
“Fine,” said Darvin. “She’s been called up to… a different part of the project.”
“And I shouldn’t ask what, right?”
“Right.”
In fact Darvin didn’t know either. That Kwarive had been urged to bring the trudge kit along suggested it had something to do with the Sight’s plans — whatever they were — for the articulate members of that species.
Their walk had converged with that of other arrivals and residents, at one of the larger barracks blocks. All furniture had been removed, except for a stage at the front with a table on top, a telekinematographic recorder and projector to one side, and a screen behind it. There was standing room only. As they crowded in, Darvin was surprised to see Nollam push ahead and walk up to the front, where he took a place beside Markhan at the table. The crowd shuffled and settled. Looking around, Darvin recognised Orro and Holder, and a few faces from the earlier days of the project.
“You all know why we’re here,” said Markhan. “The new arrival in the sky. What you may not know is that it has already made contact with us.”
The effect was like a gust through trees. Markhan stared it down.
“Nollam,” he said.
“It’s a repeating message,” said Nollam. “It definitely comes from the cone thing, it’s on the same wavelength as the first message that got aborted, and it’s definitely addressed to us. It’s… startling. Let me play you a tape of it. Pull the curtains, somebody.”
The moments of confusion and shouted advice and complaint that followed gave him plenty of time to adjust the volume and focus.
“Right,” he said. He threw a switch.
The tape deck whirred and the screen lit up.
The first image was of a white background with a flechette shape in the centre and a wavy, jagged line near the bottom. With a start and an intake of breath, Darvin recognised it as Kwarive’s sketch-map, that had been originally projected to the aliens by the electric shittles. But only about a third of the crowd — those who’d been there then — so recognised it. The others gasped and nudged each other at the next image, which faded in as the first faded out. It showed a picture from above of the same coastline and interior of Seloh’s Reach, immediately recognisable as such because it was superimposed for a few seconds on the black line on the map.
It pulled up, back and back, until the nearby facing coast of Gevork came into view, and the whole channel and the ocean, and then back farther to show the outline of the six great islands of the north. Cloud formations appeared as whorls of brilliant white. Farther and farther back, until the Southern continent filled the lower half of the screen, and then, almost unexpectedly, the image no longer filled the screen but became a circle, the whole globe of Ground, black and white and shades of grey against a background of solid black.
It was a view he had often imagined, but that no one had ever seen. For a moment Darvin thought it blurred, but then he blinked, and his vision cleared.
The process was reversed, as though the camera dropped again, hurtling down. The illusion of falling was so powerful that Darvin felt an atavistic urge to close his eyes and spread his wings. Noises in the crowd told him he was not alone in this; that others, indeed, had enacted the braking reflex.
The fall stopped. What now filled the screen was a view from above the camp they stood in, as if seen from a not very high-flying airship. The very building they were in could be identified. Darvin braced himself against a surge to the windows. It came, just for a moment, and then everyone stood still and looked embarrassed. Somebody laughed. Even Markhan smiled.
The view changed: first to a similar but not identical camp or military base, and then to a rapid series of brief images of aircraft and rockets, familiar images that must have been recorded from Selohic and Gevorkian telekinematographic news displays, because fragments of voice-over in both languages boomed from the speakers.
Another familiar image appeared: the alien who had appeared on the first, cryptic communication. He stood facing the camera, which pulled in to show his face, dark and hairless with the characteristic scalp-tuft of the wingless.
“We — see — you — now,” he said. The movement of his lips had no relation to the sounds.
Darvin stood transfixed. The hairs over his spine stood up. Chills rushed down his cheeks and the sides of his neck. It was as if the alien’s tiny eyes looked straight at him, and the words were literally true.
“We — say — not — hit — you — grrr — you.” A flash of aircraft and rockets again. “We — say — no.”
“Open — door — trudge.” This was accompanied by a picture of, indeed, a stable door opening and a trudge shambling out. Darvin could only imagine that it was a view through the eyes of one of the trudges that gave off etheric transmissions.
“No — hit — trudge.” The picture was to the point.
“No — cut — trudge.” Again an illustration, a vivid one. A collective wince shuddered through the crowd. Darvin felt a stab of shame. He had speculated on this, but still it dismayed him to see it verified, that the aliens had seized on this accepted cruelty and thrown it back in humanity’s face.
“We — see — you,” the alien said again. The view pulled back. The alien walked over to a screen of its own and pointed. It was a map of the land hemisphere of Ground. He pointed at three places, locations marked with spots which the camera zoomed in on and then drew back from. At a first guess, they were Kraighhor, Lassir, and the Great City of the Southern Rule. Then a fourth: an island in the Equatorial Ocean.
The alien stepped aside. The map filled the screen. Black lines crept from the three cities to converge on the island.
“We — meet — you — there.”
On the quay at Kraighor in the middle of the night under the glint of the alien and artificial moon, Darvin felt around him for the first time a tremor of the panic that he had once imagined. He could smell it. There was no reason for the crowd to be there. Few would have friends or relatives among the project scientists and soldiery departing on the Southern ship. There was no reason for people to take wing, every so often, and wheel about like night-flitters above the dock. Yet he was tempted to do so himself. One of the main streets away from the dock opened on to a large square. Around that corner, out of his line of sight, stood a high public screen. Its grey light flickered on the sides of buildings and the faces of the crowds watching it like a cold flame. Whatever words boomed from its speakers were mangled by echoes and buried under the susurrus of murmurs and wing-rustlings as if under snow. Darvin knew what was being said, and wondered how this new word from the Height would be taken.
Metal cables squealed on winches as supplies and apparatus were craned on board. The ship had already been to New Lassir. Gevorkian and Southern faces lined the rails. Darvin recognised Lenoen, the astrologer, and Orro, but neither were looking bis way. The quay was too crowded for Darvin to leap into the air. He shouldered his way toward the gangplank.