Masterpieces

by Orson Scott Card

  “I take your word for it,” Desan said earnestly. He felt the weight of the sky on his back. The leaden, awful sky, leprous and unhealthy cover between them and the star and the single moon. Gothon remembered homeworld. Remembered homeworld. Had been renowned in her field even there. The old scientist claimed to come to such a landscape and locate things by seeing things that robot eyes could not, by thinking thoughts those dusty skulls had held in fleshy matter—

  —how long ago?

  “We look for mounds,” Gothon said, continuing in her brittle gait down the aisle, past the bowed heads and shy looks of staff and students at their meticulous tasks. The work of tiny electronic needles proceeded about them, the patient ticking away at encrustations to bring ancient surfaces to light. “They built massive structures. Great skyscrapers. Some of them must have lasted, oh, thousands of years intact; but when they went unstable, they fell, and their fall made rubble; and the wind came and the rivers shifted their courses around the ruin, and of course the weight of sediment piled up, wind- and water-driven. From that point, its own weight moved it and warped it and complicated our work.” Gothon paused again beside a farther table, where holo plates stood inactive. She waved her hand and a landscape showed itself, a serpentined row of masonry across a depression. “See the wall there. They didn’t build it that way, all wavering back and forth and up and down. Gravity and soil movement deformed it. It was buried until we unearthed it. Otherwise, wind and rain alone would have destroyed it ages ago. As it will do, now, if time doesn’t rebury it.”

  “And this great pile of stone—” Desan waved an arm, indicating the imagined direction of the great dam and realizing himself disoriented. “How old is it?”

  “Old as the lake it made.”

  “But contemporaneous with the fall?”

  “Yes. Do you know, that mass may be standing when the star dies. The few great dams; the pyramids we find here and there around the world—One only guesses at their age. They’ll outlast any other surface feature except the mountains themselves.”

  “Without life.”

  “Oh, but there is.”

  “Declining.”

  “No, no. Not declining.” The doctor waved her hand and a puddle appeared over the second holo plate, all green with weed waving feathery tendrils back and forth in the surge. “The moon still keeps this world from entropy. There’s water, not as much as this dam saw—It’s the weed, this little weed that gives one hope for this world. The little life, the things that fly and crawl—the lichens and the life on the flatlands.”

  “But nothing they knew.”

  “No. Life’s evolved new answers here. Life’s starting over.”

  “It certainly hasn’t much to start with, has it?”

  “Not very much. It’s a question that interests Dr. Bothogi—whether the life making a start here has the time left, and whether the consumption curve doesn’t add up to defeat—But life doesn’t know that. We’re very concerned about contamination. But we fear it’s inevitable. And who knows, perhaps it will have added something beneficial.” Dr. Gothon lit yet another holo with the wave of her hand. A streamlined six-legged creature scuttled energetically across a surface of dead moss, frantically waving antennae and making no apparent progress.

  “The inheritors of the world.” Despair chilled Desan’s marrow.

  “But each generation of these little creatures is an unqualified success. The last to perish perishes in profound tragedy, of course, but without consciousness of it. The awareness will have, oh, half a billion years to wait—then, maybe it will appear; if the star doesn’t fail; it’s already far advanced down the sequence.” Another holo, the image of desert, of blowing sand, beside the holo of the surge of weed in a pool. “Life makes life. That weed you see is busy making life. It’s taking in and converting and building a chain of support that will enable things to feed on it, while more of its kind grows. That’s what life does. It’s busy, all unintended, of course, but fortuitously building itself a way off the planet.”

  Desan cast her an uncomfortable look askance.

  “Oh, indeed. Biomass. Petrochemicals. The storehouse of aeons of energy all waiting the use of consciousness. And that consciousness, if it arrives, dominates the world because awareness is a way of making life more efficiently. But consciousness is a perilous thing, Lord Desan. Consciousness is a computer loose with its own perceptions and performing calculations on its own course, in the service of that little weed; billions of such computers all running and calculating faster and faster, adjusting themselves and their ecological environment, and what if there were the smallest, the most insignificant software error at the outset?”

  “You don’t believe such a thing. You don’t reduce us to that.” Desan’s faith was shaken; this good woman had not gone unstable, this great intellect had had her faith shaken, that was what—the great and gentle doctor had, in her unthinkable age, acquired cynicism, and he fought back with his fifty-two meager years. “Surely, but surely this isn’t the proof, doctor, this could have been a natural calamity.”

  “Oh, yes, the meteor strike.” The doctor waved past a series of holos on a fourth plate, and a vast crater showed in aerial view, a crater so vast the picture showed planetary curvature. It was one of the planet’s main features, shockingly visible from space. “But this solar system shows scar after scar of such events. A many-planeted system like this, a star well-attended by debris in its course through the galaxy—Look at the airless bodies, the moons, consider the number of meteor strikes that crater them. Tell me, space-farer: am I not right in that?”

  Desan drew in a breath, relieved to be questioned in his own element. “Of course, the system is prone to that kind of accident. But that crater is ample cause—”

  “If it came when there was still sapience here. But that hammerblow fell on a dead world.”

  He gazed on the eroded crater, the sandswept crustal melting, eloquent of age. “You have proof.”

  “Strata. Pots. Ironic, they must have feared such an event very greatly. One thinks they must have had a sense of doom about them, perhaps on the evidence of their moon; or understanding the mechanics of their solar system; or perhaps primitive times witnessed such falls and they remembered. One catches a glimpse of the mind that reached out from here . . . what impelled it, what it sought.”

  “How can we know that? We overlay our mind on their expectations—” Desan silenced himself, abashed, terrified. It was next to heresy. In a moment more he would have committed irremediable indiscretion; and the lords-magistrate on the orbiting station would hear it by suppertime, to his eternal detriment.

  “We stand in their landscape, handle their bones, we hold their skulls in our fleshly hands and try to think in their world. Here we stand beneath a threatening heaven. What will we do?”

  “Try to escape. Try to get off this world. They did get off. The celestial artifacts—”

  “Archaelogy is ever so much easier in space. A million years, two, and a thing still shines. Records still can be read. A color can blaze out undimmed after aeons, when first a light falls on it. One surface chewed away by microdust, and the opposing face pristine as the day it had its maker’s hand on it. You keep asking me about the age of these ruins. But we know that, don’t we truly suspect it, in the marrow of our bones—at what age they fell silent?”

  “It can’t have happened then!”

  “Come with me, Lord Desan.” Gothon waved a hand, extinguishing all the holos, and, walking on, opened the door into yet another hallway. “So much to catalog. That’s much of the work in that room. They’re students, mostly. Restoring what they can; numbering, listing. A librarian’s job, just to know where things are filed. In five hundred years more of intensive cataloging and restoring, we may know them well enough to know something of their minds, though we may never find more of their written language than that of those artifacts on the moon. A place of wonders. A place of ongoing wonders, in Dr. Bothogi’s work. A little alga
e beginning the work all over again. Perhaps not for the first time—interesting thought.”

  “You mean—” Desan overtook the aged doctor in the narrow, sterile hall, a series of ringing steps. “You mean—before the sapients evolved—there were other calamities, other re-beginnings.”

  “Oh, well before. It sends chills up one’s back, doesn’t it, to think how incredibly stubborn life might be here, how persistent in the calamity of the skies—The algae and then the creeping things and the slow, slow climb to dominance—”

  “Previous sapients?”

  “Interesting question in itself. But a thing need not be sapient to dominate a world, Lord Desan. Only tough. Only efficient. Haven’t the worlds proven that? High sapience is a rare jewel. So many successes are dead ends. Flippers and not hands; lack of vocal apparatus—unless you believe in telepathy, which I assuredly don’t. No. Vocalizing is necessary. Some sort of long-distance communication. Light-flashes; sound; something. Else your individuals stray apart in solitary discovery and rediscovery and duplication of effort. Oh, even with awareness—even granted that rare attribute—how many species lack something essential, or have some handicap that will stop them before civilization; before technology—”

  “—before they leave the planet. But they did that, they were the one in a thousand—Without them—”

  “Without them. Yes.” Gothon turned her wonderful soft eyes on him at close range and for a moment he felt a great and terrible stillness like the stillness of a grave. “Childhood ends here. One way or the other, it ends.”

  He was struck speechless. He stood there, paralyzed a moment, his mind tumbling freefall; then blinked and followed the doctor like a child, helpless to do otherwise.

  Let me rest, he thought then, let us forget this beginning and this day, let me go somewhere and sit down and have a warm drink to get the chill from my marrow and let us begin again. Perhaps we can begin with facts and not fancies—

  But he would not rest. He feared that there was no rest to be had in this place, that once the body stopped moving, the weight of the sky would come down, the deadly sky that had boded destruction for all the history of this lost species, and the age of the land would seep into their bones and haunt his dreams as the far greater scale of stars did not.

  All the years I’ve voyaged, Dr. Gothon, all the years of my life searching from star to star. Relativity has made orphans of us. The world will have sainted you. Me it never knew. In a quarter of a million years—they’ll have forgotten; o doctor, you know more than I how a world ages. A quarter of a million years you’ve seen—and we’re both orphans. Me endlessly cloned. You in your long sleep, your several clones held aeons waiting in theirs—o doctor, we’ll recreate you. And not truly you, ever again. No more than I’m a Desanprime. I’m only the fifth lord-navigator.

  In a quarter of a million years, has not our species evolved beyond us, might they not, may they not, find some faster transport and find us, their aeons-lost precursors; and we will not know each other, Dr. Gothon—how could we know each other—if they had, but they have not; we have become the wavefront of a quest that never overtakes, never surpasses us.

  In a quarter of a million years, might some calamity have befallen us and our world be like this world, ocher and deadly rust?

  While we are clones and children of clones, genetic fossils, anomalies of our kind?

  What are they to us and we to them? We seek the Ancients, the makers of the probe.

  Desan’s mind reeled; adept as he was at time-relativity calculations, accustomed as he was to stellar immensities, his mind tottered and he fought to regain the corridor in which they walked, he and the doctor. He widened his stride yet again, overtaking Gothon at the next door.

  “Doctor.” He put out his hand, preventing her, and then feared his own question, his own skirting of heresy and tempting of hers. “Are you beyond doubt? You can’t be beyond doubt. They could have simply abandoned this world in its calamity.”

  Again the impact of those gentle eyes, devastating. “Tell me, tell me, Lord Desan. In all your travels, in all the several near stars you’ve visited in a century of effort, have you found traces?”

  “No. But they could have gone—”

  “—leaving no traces, except on their moon?”

  “There may be others. The team in search on the fourth planet—”

  “Finds nothing.”

  “You yourself say that you have to stand in that landscape, you have to think with their mind—Maybe Dr. Ashodt hasn’t come to the right hill, the right plain—”

  “If there are artifacts there they only are a few. I’ll tell you why I know so. Come, come with me.” Gothon waved a hand and the door gaped on yet another laboratory.

  Desan walked. He would rather have walked out to the deadly surface than through this simple door, to the answer Gothon promised him . . . but habit impelled him; habit, duty—necessity. He had no other purpose for his life but this. He had been left none, lord-navigator, fifth incarnation of Desan Das. They had launched his original with none, his second incarnation had had less, and time and successive incarnations had stripped everything else away. So he went, into a place at once too mundane and too strange to be quite sane—mundane because it was sterile as any lab, a well-lit place of littered tables and a few researchers; and strange because hundreds and hundreds of skulls and bones were piled on shelves in heaps on one wall, silent witnesses. An articulated skeleton hung in its frame; the skeleton of a small animal scampered in macabre rigidity on a tabletop.

  He stopped. He stared about him, lost for the moment in the stare of all those eyeless sockets of weathered bone.

  “Let me present my colleagues,” Gothon was saying; Desan focused on the words late, and blinked helplessly as Gothon rattled off names. Bothogi the zoologist was one, younger than most, seventeenth incarnation, burning himself out in profligate use of his years: so with all the incarnations of Bothogi Nan. The rest of the names slid past his ears ungathered—true strangers, the truly-born, sons and daughters of the voyage. He was lost in their stares like the stares of the skulls, eyes behind which shadows and dust were truth, gazes full of secrets and heresies.

  They knew him and he did not know them, not even Lord Bothogi. He felt his solitude, the helplessness of his convictions all lost in the dust and the silences.

  “Kagodte,” said Gothon, to a white-eared, hunched individual. “Kagodte—the Lord Desan has come to see your model.”

  “Ah.” The aged eyes flicked, nervously.

  “Show him, pray, Dr. Kagodte.”

  The hunched man walked over to the table, spread his hands. A hole flared and Desan blinked, having expected some dreadful image, some confrontation with a reconstruction. Instead, columns of words rippled in the air, green and blue. Numbers ticked and multiplied. In his startlement he lost the beginning and failed to follow them. “I don’t see—”

  “We speak statistics here,” Gothon said. “We speak data; we couch our heresies in mathematical formulae.”

  Desan turned and stared at Gothon in fright. “Heresies I have nothing to do with, doctor. I deal with facts. I come here to find facts.”

  “Sit down,” the gentle doctor said. “Sit down, Lord Desan. There, move the bones over, do; the owners won’t mind, there, that’s right.”

  Desan collapsed onto a stool facing a white worktable. Looked up reflexively, eye drawn by a wall-mounted stone that bore the blurred image of a face, eroded, time-dulled—

  The juxtaposition of image and bones overwhelmed him. The two whole bodies portrayed on the plaque. The sculpture. The rows of fleshless skulls.

  Dead. World hammered by meteors, life struggling in its most rudimentary forms. Dead.

  “Ah,” Gothon said. Desan looked around and saw Gothon looking up at the wall in his turn. “Yes. That. We find very few sculptures. A few—a precious few. Occasionally the fall of stone will protect a surface. Confirmation. Indeed. But the skulls tell us as much. With our
measurements and our holos we can flesh them. We can make them—even more vivid. Do you want to see?”

  Desan’s mouth worked. “No.” A small word. A coward word. “Later. So this was one place—You still don’t convince me of your thesis, doctor, I’m sorry.”

  “The place. The world of origin. A many-layered world. The last layers are rich with artifacts of one period, one global culture. Then silence. Species extinguished. Stratum upon stratum of desolation. Millions of years of geological record—”

  Gothon came round the end of the table and sat down in the opposing chair, elbows on the table, a scatter of bone between them. Gothon’s green eyes shone watery in the brilliant light, her mouth was wrinkled about the jowls and trembled in minute cracks, like aged clay. “The statistics, Lord Desan, the dry statistics tell us. They tell us centers of production of artifacts, such as we have; they tell us compositions, processes the Ancients knew—and there was no progress into advanced materials. None of the materials we take for granted, metals that would have lasted—”

  “And perhaps they went to some new process, materials that degraded completely. Perhaps their information storage was on increasingly perishable materials. Perhaps they developed these materials in space.”

  “Technology has steps. The dry numbers, the dusty dry numbers, the incidences and concentration of items, the numbers and the pots—always the pots, Lord Desan; and the imperishable stones; and the very fact of the meteors—the undeniable fact of the meteor strikes. Could we not avert such a calamity for our own world? Could we not have done it—oh, a half a century before we left?”

  “I’m sure you remember, Dr. Gothon. I’m sure you have the advantage of me. But—”

  “You see the evidence. You want to cling to your hopes. But there is only one question—no, two. Is this the species that launched the probe?—Yes. Or evolution and coincidence have cooperated mightily. Is this the only world they inhabited? Beyond all doubt. If there are artifacts on the fourth planet they are scoured by its storms, busied, lost.”