"Learning The World" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacLeod Ken)

On the left of the picture was the Sun Himself, the smiling king. A little to His right was the Fiery Jester, so close to the Sun that a solar prominence sometimes smacked him about the head. Then, after a gap, was Ground, the Mother, with Her attendant maids, the two moons. But though Ground was without doubt humanнity's Mother, Who fed Her children with the milk of Her waters and with a rich variety of fruit and prey, She was not (except in some backward heathen mythologies) the Sun's consort. She was, it was someнtimes speculated, His Daughter, or (more daringly, in the racy poems of the Dawn Age) His illicit lover. It was the third planet, more than twice as far from the Sun as Ground, that was the undisputed Queen of Heaven. Even on the diagram, which wasЧas the inнevitable small-print caption cautionedЧNot To Scale, the Queen's diameter was three times that of Ground, and this was no exaggeration. In real life Her blue-green light far outshone anything in the night sky. In the past five centuries telescopic inspection had reнvealed that the planet was blue with green patches which had at first been thought to be continents, but whose shifting coastlines and relative positions made more likely to be floating mats of vegetation. By imagнinative analogy with floating islands, on which entire complex ecosystems could build up from an initial conglomeration of weeds and logs, the Queen's floatнing continents had been planted with jungles and popнulated with all manner of creeping and flying things. How many fanciful tales had been told of the strange beasts and beings of that world! It was as sad as it was certain that they were false. After the telescope had come the spectroscope, and while it had revealed that the Queen was indeed a world of water, it had indiнcated that the floating mats were little more than thin layers of algal scum.

Far out beyond the Queen was the Warrior. What inнtuition the ancient cliff-men had had, in so naming it, neither Darvin nor anyone else could guessЧperhaps their eyesight had been better than those of the men of this latter dayЧbut the telescope had confirmed that the Warrior had the appearance of being winged, and of clutching two bright weapons. Here on the diagram, this mythical representation was outlined beside the astroнnomical reality: a ringed gas giant, more than thirty times the diameter of the Queen, and within its ring two glinting, flinty-looking moons. Between the Queen and the Warrior marched a ragtag army of small worlds. The largest of them, a few hundred miles across, had been discovered not long after the invention of the telescope. It had been given the name of the Exile, and it still held the title of a planet, but was now classed among the many smaller asteroidsЧthe Camp-Followers, to give their poetic nameЧdiscovered in its wake.

What planets, if any, roamed the skies beyond the Warrior's octades-long orbital patrol was not known. Darvin had spent the past two years, and was willing to spend many more, in finding out.

He pushed aside the teacup, spat the wad of leaf out of the open window, and with his thumb-claw ripped open the package and eased out the contents: sheets of transparent acetate, separated by sheets of thin paper. He lifted the top sheet of acetate and held it up to the light from the window. A number and a date were writнten in tiny characters along the side. The plate was clear, but spattered with a mass of black dots of varyнing size and intensity. He turned over all the plates and their protective sheets one by one, double-checking their dates and numbers, and found them in order. Sixty-four altogether, as usual. He arranged sixteen along the side of a table, eight for the first night, eight for the second, in pairs matched by area of sky, and took the first pair to the bulky apparatus that filled a quarter of his room.

The blink comparator looked, in a bad light, like some absurd, weighty abstract of a human form: two metal-framed translucent white platforms with a black metal crosspiece projecting from the sides like wings, their accompanying adjustment and positioning rods like forearms, and a cluster of knobs, levers, and eyeнpieces on the top of the central pillar like asymmetric features on a deformed face. Behind that face was the intelligence of the thing, a mirror that flipped the view through the eyepiece from one platform-mounted plate to the other in rapid succession, over and over. Any change in an object's position, from one night to the next, could be detected by its apparent jump. Such was the principle. In practice the job was difficult; aligning the plates so that the stars didn't all jump at once was a finicky matter, and once that was done many passes were necessary to make sure nothingЧamong the thousands of separate points of light in each long-exposure plate's fieldЧhad been missed. Even then Darvin could not be sure. Any world beyond the WarriorЧgiven that perturbations in the Warrior's orнbit were themselves minute and disputedЧwas certain to be a small one, and its proper motion tiny. So far, everything that had jumped out at him had turned out not to be that distant and hypothetical seventh planet. Eliminating known planets and asteroids should have been routine, but was not; Darvin had rediscovered several known asteroids, whose orbits had long since been calculated but whose current position no one bothered to track, and had added three new ones to the catalogue. His colleagues called them Darvin's Little Bastards.

He clipped the two plates on to their respective platнforms and turned on the electric light that illuminated them from behind. The electric motor that flipped the mirror he set to its lowest speed, producing a blink rate of three per second. Then he perched on a stool and kicked off his sandals to grip a crossbar with his toes and clicked the lowest magnification of the monocular lenses into place. Peering through, he aligned the plates, by angle and by vertical and horizontal axes. Then he moved his hands to the paired knobs that shifted the view vertically and horizontally, and began in the top left-hand corner.

By the middle of the afternoon he had finished exнamining the fourth pair of plates. As he carried the plates back to the table he gazed out of the window, foнcused on infinity, and noticed the spots that danced in front of his eyes. Time to take a break. At the same moment the half-shaped thought that had struck him when he'd looked at the dirigible engine and propeller came back to his mind, fully formed.

He yelped. He laughed. "How stupid of us not to have thought of that!" he said aloud.

Darvin wanted to share it at once. He couldn't share it with Orro; the Gevorkian physicist would be lecturнing or calculating, and in neither activity would he tolнerate interruption, however well intended or urgent. Oh wellЧOrro might turn up at the drinking den in the evening, as he'd hinted. But still, but stillЧDarvin couldn't wait. Suppose he were to die at this moment, suppose his heart were to fail or brain to fuse, why then the great insight would be lost to the world! It was intolerable!

With a sort of morbid solemnity, Darvin grabbed a pen and sheet of paper. He sketched out and described the notion, and clipped the note to one of the platнforms on the blink comparator. Let fate do its worst now, he thought, this idea wouldn't die with him. Unless a meteor or dirigible were to crash into his office ... He smiled at his overheated fancies. The impulse to tell someone right now didn't go away. He felt as if something would explode out of his chest if he didn't tell someone.

He looked at the clock on the wall, and at a timetable. He could tell Kwarive.

Darvin clambered out of the window and threw himнself into the air. He flew to the Life Sciences Building and swooped under the canopy of the Lecture Pit. A cone of light rose out of the dark; slides illustrating the lecture were projected from below onto the canopy. He circled outside the cone, looking down, letting his eyes adjust. The lecturer stood in the middle, at the bottom; above him rose twenty or so tiers of concentric wooden rings, scattered with students hanging upside down, wings enfolding them as though asleep, eyes in most cases open, ears pricked. Darvin circled until he spotted Kwarive, hanging on the fourth ring, and dropped in beside her to the mutters and sideways shuffles of her neighbours. He clamped his feet around the railing, swung down, grinned apologies to left and right, and nuzzled Kwarive's shoulder through the warm skin of her whig.

"Something to tell you," he said. "Really exciting."

She smiled and shushed him. "I'm listening," she whispered. "To the lecture," she added.

Darvin pulled a disappointed face and settled to listen too. The illustration in light above him was of a huнman, all limbs outspread, matched with the smaller but similar shape of a flitter.

"Чphilosopher Dranker, in the Classical Age of Orkana, was the first to classify humanity with the Chiropterae," the lecturer said, "in his great work De Vita, which comes up to us in regrettably fragmentary form. It was only in the Dawn Age that Nargo, in his Tabulae Animalia, took the bolder step of subsuming man and flitter within the order OctomanaЧthe eight-handed. Why was this bold?"

Because we don't have eight hands, Darvin thought, but the question was rhetorical.

"This is why." The slide projector rattled through a dozen or so pictures, all of them crowded with photographs or engravings of diverse animals: trudges, various other species of flitter, cursors, grazers, hunters, swimmers; it settled on a bright and much-enlarged photograph of a skitter, its beady red eyes staring, its bristles in mid-twitch, its hands clutching a nut and a berry and clinging to the twig on which it crouched. "This lowly little beast is the third member of that orнder, and closeЧas we would now put itЧto the ancesнtral form. The bifurcate distal portion of the anterior and posterior limbЧ"

Why, Darvin wondered, did lecturers insist on lardнing their language with Orkanisms?

"Чand eight manipulative extremities are in fact the primitive condition, from which those of the Chiнropterae including ourselves are derived. In the chiropteran arm one hand and forearm has become the wing; in the foot, the two are fused, but the condition is still evident though relict, in our heel-claws. All of the land vertebratesЧamphibians, reptiles, and mammalsЧand the sea mammals and reptiles are descended from octomanal ancestors, as can be shown by comparative anatomyЧ"

More slides.

"Чembryology, and teratology."

"Ugh!" grunted Kwarive, as the slides illustrating the last-mentioned study flashed past.

"In conclusion then: far from being the crown of creation, as our illustrious ancestors fondly imagined, humanity is a minor offshoot of one of the most primнitive of the mammalian classes. An outline of human evolution will be the subject of my next lecture, here tomorrow at noon sharp. Suggested readings are given in the handouts. Dismissed."

With that he leapt into the air, flapped spiralling up the lecture pit, and flew out. The room filled with flapнping wings and chattering voices. Darvin's overloaded proximity sense made him see red. He clung to the rail until the air was clearer, then glanced at Kwarive.