“Ike wouldn’t want to talk about me in case it looked as if he was bragging about knowing someone who was on TV a lot,” Matthew guessed. “Nonsense, of course—but it’s often the people who would never dream of bragging who are most afraid of being caught.”
“I’ve seen you on TV myself,” Dulcie Gherardesca admitted. “I suppose we all did. Couldn’t really miss you in the mid-eighties, could we?”
“And you probably thought me less of a scientist because of it,” Matthew said, a little too glibly. “Bernal too, I dare say. Not our fault, really. Once the ecocatastrophe was well under way ecologists started getting the attention they’d always warranted, and a lot more besides. Pity the prophet whose prophecies begin to come true—what happens then makes living without the honor of one’s countrymen seem like a piece of cake. No wonder Bernal and I were so desperate to get away from it all.”
“I don’t think anyone here thinks any less of you for trying so hard to jerk the world out of its complacency,” she said, “or for trying to get remedial measures moving once the Crash hit hard. I brought you Bernal’s notepad. I figured that you’d be as anxious to get started as Inspector Solari. I’ve checked through it myself, of course—we all have. We can’t find anything epoch-making, but we didn’t really expect to. After all, when Archimedes leapt out of the bath he didn’t go looking for a stylus so he could write Eureka!on the nearest piece of papyrus—and even if he had, it wouldn’t have begun to tell anyone what he’d actually discovered. So even if we could figure out what skameans, it might not get us any closer to the truth.”
While she was speaking she pressed the keys of the notepad to bring up what Matthew presumed to be the last “page” of Bernal Delgado’s jottings. The last entries of all read:
NV correlated with ER?
Ans driver: ska?
“It’s a kind of music,” the anthropologist added. “But I don’t think that’s what it means here. Nobody knows what an ans driver is, although we favor the hypothesis that ansis short for answer and driverfor downriver. NVand ERcould be anything, although the general consensus is that NV probably stands for nutritional versatility. If you look back at earlier notes you’ll see that NV crops up several times and ER once, but skadoesn’t. We’ve always thought that the answers to our most urgent unanswered questions might be found downriver—that’s why we’ve been building the boat—but we’ve always known that it might be wishful thinking.”
“Which most urgent unanswered questions?” Matthew mumbled, his mouth half-full of manna that was proving difficult to swallow.
“Where did the city-builders come from—and where did they go, if they didn’t die here?”
“Why do you think they didn’t?”
“We don’t know whether they did or not. Even if they’d been human they might not have left much trace, and we think the bones of the local mammals are more prone to decay than ours. The only relics we’ve found were artifacts secreted in holes in the walls, and only the hardest kinds of glass have survived. We don’t know how old the city is, because we haven’t established any reliable yardstick that could tell us. We talk about a hundred thousand years, but it’s pure guesswork. It might be out by an order of magnitude. So far as we can tell, they settled here, established their fields, built their homes and their walls—all of which must have taken centuries—and then they vanished. If there were other upland settlements, we haven’t found them yet. If there are any settlements still in existence, we haven’t found them. If the humanoids still exist, it looks as if they’ve abandoned agriculture—and cooking, so far as cooking requires fire-making and fire-keeping. While we only have the one site to look at we’ve no basis for generalization.”
“But you’re convinced that they came up the river.”
“And then they stopped coming,” she agreed. “Whether the city-dwellers died here or left, their plains-dwelling cousins presumably decided to stay where they were. If they died out too, they died where they’d always lived, presumably as nomadic hunter-gatherers. Like all the hominid species of Earth, except one.”
Matthew thought that was a strange way of putting it—but then he saw what she was getting at. Nobody really knew what had happened to all the Australopithecine species that had coexisted with the remotest ancestors of Homo sapiens, or the other hominid species that had fallen by the evolutionary wayside in later eras. The conventional assumption was that they had been out-competed and driven to extinction by genus Homo, but nobody knew. There wasn’t enough evidence left to settle the question. Maybe they had died out for other reasons. How would anyone ever be sure?
“It took Homo sapiens hundreds of thousands of years to invent agriculture,” Dulcie Gherardesca pointed out, “and not much more than ten thousand to bring Earth’s ecosphere to the brink of rack and ruin. Maybe our ancestors should have figured out that it was a bad idea too, and returned to their hunter-gatherer roots as soon as possible.”
“We wouldn’t be here to worry about these guys if they had,” Matthew observed—but he knew that what she was really getting at was that if humans had returned to their hunter-gatherer roots after living for a while in the first cities of Egypt or Sumeria they would probably have died out in the next ecocatastrophe. Even as things were, humankind’s ancestors had squeezed through a desperately narrow population bottleneck.
Matthew handed back his bowl, having done his best to finish the meal. Dulcie made as if to leave, but he checked her retreat with another question. “When will the boat be finished?” he asked.
“Tomorrow, or the day after,” she told him. “We could have set out days ago if we’d been prepared to go without the last few frills, but we were instructed to wait for Solari to arrive, so that we could help with his inquiries. Some of us wanted to say no, if only on the grounds that the instruction came from people who had no authority to give us orders, but…. well, we’re just about getting used to the notion that we’re no longer united, even among ourselves. I suppose you want to come with us.”
“Yes, I do,” Matthew said.
“I suppose you even think you’re entitled, because you’re Bernal’s substitute.”
“That too.”
“But you’ve only been awake four days. You know next to nothing about this world. You’d be a passenger.”
“Sometimes,” Matthew said, mildly, “a fresh pair of eyes can be useful. Not to mention a fresh mind …”
“Bullshit,” she said. “Tang has the educated eye, the educated mind. If it were my boat, I’d want him.”
“And you need an ecologist,” Matthew continued. “All the people I talked to on Hopeare too narrowly focused, on scientific and political issues alike. They’re drowning in biochemical data—there’s so much of it, and it’s so resolutely peculiar, that they’ve almost lost sight of the actual living organisms.”
“That hasn’t happened here,” she snapped back—but then she blinked, and might even have displayed a blush had she not been wearing a surface-suit. “Well,” she conceded, after a pause, “maybe a little. Most of the animals hereabouts are slugs and worms—the mammal-analogues seem to steer clear of the ruins, and the presence of the domes must be even more inhibiting.”
“I wouldlike to go,” Matthew said, deciding that conciliation might be in order. “But I’d rather do it without upsetting anyone. Can we settle the matter amicably?”
“I don’t know,” Dulcie admitted. “The crew had the Revolution, but we’re the ones who can’t figure out who owns what and who has the authority to make decisions. Back in the system it was all cut and dried, but even if Shen Chin Che were still running things like the last of the great dictators we’d all have begun to wonder what gave him the right to keep on giving us orders. As things are, we don’t even have anything in place to overthrow. Can you imagine that we were stupid enough, at first, to think that we didn’t need to worry about it—that we were a community of scientists, all working for the common good? It’s taken us three years to begin putting the fundamental apparatus of a democracy in place at Base One—and it’ll be three years too late to command the respect and consent it needs. Whichever way the Base One vote on future policy goes, it’ll just be more poison in the system.”