Matthew noted that the bat-analogues were all tiny, though not as tiny as insects. Some of the monkey-analogues grew quite tall—though none were human-sized—but they were very lean and lithe, and somehow rather mercurial. There was nothing reminiscent of a cow or a hippopotamus, still less of a large dinosaur. The top predators seemed to be stealth-hunters. There were shots of creatures resembling glorified weasels pouncing on their prey and stunning them with the aid of stings mounted in their tongues like hypodermic syringes.
Matthew found the lemuroids strangely unsettling, because rather than in spite of the fact that they were uncannily similar in most respects to the extinct Earthly lemurs he had seen on film. It wasn’t so much that they had the same huge forward-looking eyes and the same gripping hands. It was the strangely elastic way they moved—slowly when contented, rapidly when panicked by the advent of a weasel-analogue—and their perpetual nervous alertness. There was obviously something strange about the way their limbs were articulated, but that was only part of it. Although he knew that he had to be even more careful of the dangers of anthropomorphic thinking here than he had on Earth, the lemuroids seemed to Matthew to be perfect incarnations of an anxiety so deep as to be blatant paranoia. Their feet were mostly equipped with elongated toes that reminded Matthew of the feet of the crewpeople, modified for a way of life that humans had never been able to follow in Earth’s gravity-well.
On Earth, Matthew knew, the genus Homohad descended from a long line of tough and sturdy apes: apes that had learned to swagger like baboons; stand-up-and-fight apes; playground-bully apes. Their near cousins the gorillas—yet another species Matthew had only seen on film—had taken the gentle giant route, while the hominids had clung most steadfastly to the mad psycho alternative, but the whole family had been unmistakably butch. There were no butch lemuroids in the movies taken by Hope’s flying eyes—so what kind of ancestry had the humanoids had? Had they been the last of a line to go down to inglorious extinction? If so, why had the entire batch of strategies failed? If not, how had the ancestors of the seemingly timorous extant lemuroids contrived to produce something as amazing as a city-builder?
If adaptive radiation had ever been as prolific here as it had been on Earth, Matthew thought, an extremely high fraction of its inventions must have been consigned to the dustbin of paleontology. Perhaps it hadn’t been. Perhaps, if this had alwaysbeen a much quieter world, nature had never had to be so recklessly ingenious in making up for mass extinctions. Perhaps this ambiguous home-from-home had not required nearly so many trials and errors before discovering the phylum and the family that human vanity had always placed at the pinnacle of creation.
“What do you think?” Solari asked, as the sequence finally cut out of its own accord, having presumably run to one of its potential termini.
“Maybe we came in late and missed the arthropods,” Matthew mused. “If not, there’s a conspicuous shortage of exoskeletons. Maybe the local coding systems can’t make chitin. On the other hand, the whole animal kingdom seems a trifle anemic, except for slugs and squishy worms, so maybe it’s not much good at bone either. On the whole, there seems to be a noticeable lack of tough stuff, of no-nonsense leverage and substantial solidity.” “How odd would that be?” Solari asked, although he wore the expression of a man who didn’t expect to be able to understand the answer.
“It’s hard to say, when we have only one other case for comparison,” Matthew admitted. “An adult insect is only a maggot’s way of making more maggots, of course, but if the gimmick worked so well on Earth, why not here, where there certainly doesn’t seem to be any shortage of maggoty things? The lack of birds and mammals might not be surprising if the mammals that do exist hadn’t contrived to evolve a humanoid—albeit one that may no longer exist.”
“Maybe Earth was the beetle planet, and this one’s the slug and snail capital of the universe,” Solari suggested. “It couldhave been worse.” Matthew guessed that he was probably thinking about spiders again.
Matthew nodded sympathetically. “It certainly looks like it,” he agreed. “Unless we only got half the story. It’s difficult to believe that nothing flies down there but a few itty-bitty bats and the time.”
The door of their room opened, making them both start slightly. Time had indeed flown while they were engrossed. Eight-zero had apparently arrived, and the someone Leitz had promised had arrived to lead them to the captain. The way Solari nodded to the newcomer told Matthew that it must be Riddell, the man who had been standing guard outside their door.
Matthew inspected the holstered sidearm, and decided that it was indeed a darter. The armed man’s suitskin was the same color as Frans Leitz’s, but its present shape had been organized to give the impression of sharper edges and physical efficiency. On the whole, though, he looked like a soft person pretending to be solid, not a natural tough guy. As such, he seemed to fit the general situation surprisingly well.
It was not until Matthew raised himself up, putting all his weight back on his feet, that he realized how soft he too seemed to have become. He cursed himself for not taking the opportunity to lie down and get some proper rest, but he knew that he still had an enormous amount to learn, and not much time to learn it, if he were to be able to take a significant hand in the unfolding history of the new world.
“Okay,” he said to their appointed protector. “Take us to your leader.” It wasn’t until he saw the blank look on Riddell’s face, signaling a complete failure to recognize and appreciate the cliché, that Matthew finally began to feel the width and depth of the cultural gulf that separated the two of them.
SEVEN
The corridors through which Matthew and Vince Solari were conducted were narrow and mazy, with no ninety-degree turns. They reminded Matthew of the subsurface lunar habitat in which he’d stayed before joining the frozen Chosen, but that wasn’t surprising. That too had been a mini-ecosphere located within a much larger, essentially inhospitable, mass. He guessed that the principal differences between the two habitats would only be obvious on a much larger scale—a scale that was difficult to appreciate from within.
The Mare Moscoviense maze had been a cone whose sharp end pointed toward the moon’s center of gravity; life on the kind of space-habitat that Hopenow was had to be organized in cylindrical layers, in which “down” was also “out” because gravity was simulated by spin. Knowing this, Matthew found nothing surprising in the fact that the spaces inhabited by Hope’s mini-Gaea were curved and intricately curled. Nor was there anything particularly startling about the fact that so many of the side passages were dark; many parts of Mare Moscoviense had been fitted with human-responsive switches that provided light where and when it was needed and allowed darkness to fall when there were no human eyes.
What did surprise him, a little, was the dust. Mare Moscoviense had not been an unduly tidy environment, and its walls had accumulated a rich heritage of ingeniously stubborn graffiti, but it had been relentlessly swept clean by resident nanobots programmed to collect flakes of human skin and other associated organic debris for recycling. Hopemust have started out on its long journey equipped with similar nanobots, but they seemed to have fallen into disrepair. Dust had been allowed to accumulate on surfaces and in countless nooks and crannies, to the extent that it supported its own ecosystems of mites and predatory arachnids. Cobwebs could been seen dangling from ceilings and masking high-set corners.