She reached for his gloved hand and gave it a clumsy squeeze. “I know. Life will never be the same again.” She darted a a mischievous glance at him. “The food, for one thing. Marg’s been experimenting with some of those frozen seeds that were found in storage. She says we’ll soon be eating something called an artichoke.”
Bram laughed. “She’ll have us eating King James’s forbidden fruit next.”
“We already are,” Mim said quite seriously. “Wasn’t that the fruit of the tree of knowledge?”
Bram sobered. “More knowledge than we can absorb during our stay here. We’ll have to come back someday, Mim, after we find our world and get settled.” He took her by the arm. “Come on, we’d better find Ame and find out what she has to tell us.”
The archaeologists had chosen the big sports arena as their headquarters. It was the only place large enough to reassemble some of their finds. Most of it was still underground, a tall interior space that the diggers had gained access to after excavating only a couple of layers.
Bram and Mim followed the vehicle ramp downward to a domed receiving area where several of the monstrous Nar digging machines were parked awaiting service and a number of heavy-duty walkers were being carefully unloaded under supervision. A driver going off duty let them in through one of the small prefabricated personnel locks that had been ferried down from the tree and installed here.
The living quarters were a careless jumble of plastic cubicles around the perimeter of the dig. Bram and Mim gratefully accepted an offer of showers and fresh tunics before going on through to the huge cylindrical cavity proper; several hours in a space suit doesn’t do much to make a person presentable.
Banks of powerful lamps had been mounted far overhead as work lights. In their harsh glare, the cavernous interior took on a stark pattern of bright surfaces outlined by black shadow. Small groups of people in smocks or tabards were scattered across the immense broken floor, working at some of the hundreds of long tables where fragments of artifacts were being sorted and cataloged. More treasures were on display along the tiers of former spectator balconies in arrangements that made sense to the various specialists.
The larger reconstructions, some of them fairly complete, rose at intervals from the floor. Bram saw an articulated eight-wheeled surface vehicle taking shape—a series of portholed balls connected by flexible access tubes—and a towering plinth with the legs of a colossal metal statue still attached to it. Elsewhere, a section of wall with an engraved gate was being put together from a pile of stone blocks.
Bram pointed upward. “You can see where we patched the roof to pressurize the place—and we only had to do that because we broke through it ourselves. Otherwise, we only had to put in a few minor seals to make the place airtight again. They built well, these former humans. The supporting walls were fused stone and carbon, yards thick.”
“What kind of games did they play here?”
“We’ve found clues to that in some bas-reliefs we dug up. One game was played with a ball and paddles. You struck the ball with a paddle or kicked it with a foot while flapping the paddles to try to stay aloft as long as possible. There was a variation played only with a stick—the players dropped faster, and the plays were shorter. If you’ll look way up toward the ceiling past the lights, you’ll see the remnants of the drop grid. At the beginning of each play the teams were released simultaneously at a signal, in their starting positions.”
They continued threading their way between the tables across the wide floor. Progress was tricky because the floor was not smooth enough for a low-gravity scuff, and there was a tendency to bounce too high when surmounting some block of rubble—but they couldn’t sail over the obstacles, either, because they had to be careful of the tables.
“They drank out of strange cups,” Mim said, pausing at a table spread with shards of plastic ware.
Bram examined one of the more complete cups, a two-handled affair whose top tapered into a sort of spout that one could put into one’s mouth, almost like a nipple.
“Actually, that’s not such a bad design for a low-gravity environment. Prevents sloshing. Better than our own lidded cups,” Bram observed.
“That’s not what I meant. It’s the handles. They don’t seem to fit the hand very well. I’d find it very awkward to drink from one.”
Instead of being designed for one or two fingers and an opposing thumb, the handles were fat knobs with five vertical grooves. Bram could see what Mim meant. If one were going to hold a cup with two hands as if it were a bowl, the natural tendency would be to cradle it laterally, in the direction the wrists faced. If handles were needed at all, the grooves ought to have been horizontal—and there ought to have been only four of them, with a depression for the thumb on the opposite side.
“Maybe their wrists were more supple than ours,” he said. He smiled at a sudden comic image. “Or maybe they had no elbow room at their tables.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I. About the wrist joints, anyway. Mim, what if Original Man didn’t become extinct seventy-odd million years ago, as we’ve always thought? What if he evolved past us—past the image of himself that he transmitted to the Virgo cluster?”
“Have you talked to Edard about the musical instruments?”
“What? No, Edard leads his own life these days. I haven’t seen him for a ten of Tendays.”
“They put him on one of the evaluation committees. Asked for his thoughts on fragments that seemed to belong to musical instruments. There’s a sort of pottery … flute, I’d guess you’d call it, in the shape of a tapered ovoid. It has finger grooves like the cups. And Edard says that the finger holes are placed in a peculiar way. It would make it almost impossible to play.”
“Well, perhaps Ame has an answer. Here we are. This is her bailiwick over here.”
He steered Mim toward one of the open bays on the perimeter of the floor, under the overhang of the first balcony. The bay was perhaps a quarter acre in extent. The bones didn’t take up as much room as the artifacts.
Ame came over to greet them. Her handful of assistants were working at tables with brushes and scrapers and buckets of plaster. One bushy-headed fellow was glued to a computer screen that showed animated images comparing the ways hip joints rotated.
“Bram-tsu-fu, Mim-tsu-mu!” she said, her face radiant with pleasure. “I’m so glad you could come!”
“How are the twins?” Mim asked, giving her a matriarchal kiss.
“Jabbering. And getting into things. Smeth’s watching them now. We have rooms at the guest house across the moon plaza. But I think I’m going to ask him to take them back to the tree. The low gravity isn’t good for their bones while they’re growing.” She laughed. “Besides, they’re enough trouble in two dimensions without having them flying through the air as well.”
Bram looked across at the row of skeletons wired upright to metal stands. “It looks as if you’ve put together some fairly complete specimens since I was here last.”
“Yes,” Ame said, looking pleased. “We were lucky enough to stumble across a burial ground. They seem to have interred their dead with much ceremony. That was a bonus. We’re learning quite a lot about their technology from the grave-objects. Don’t be deceived, though. The skeletons aren’t quite as complete as they look. We’ve filled in a few missing parts with plaster and resin by mirror-imaging, inference, trading bones, and so forth.”
Bram stopped the eager flow of words with a raised eyebrow. “Burial ground?” he repeated. “What did they die of?”
“Accidents, some of them. Degenerative diseases. Old age.”
“Old age!” Mim exclaimed. “But human beings are immortal!”
“Not always, Mim,” Bram reminded her. “The immortality virus was an addition to Original Man’s message. It came somewhere between the cycles of the transmission.” He turned expectantly to Ame. “The burial ground must have dated from the earlier epoch of the diskworld, then?”
“No,�
� Ame said. “That’s the problem. We haven’t dug down that far yet. Though the levels are mixed in ways they ought not to be—they’ve been disturbed.”
“How recent, then?”
“From everything we can surmise from the skeleton remains, the grave objects, the kitchen middens, and all the rest—the most recent habitation of this city was only about twenty-eight to thirty million years ago.”
“Original Man’s heyday was more than twice as long ago as that. Could you be mistaken?”
“Radiometric dating confirms that figure pretty much.”
“Original Man’s civilization fell,” Mim offered. “They lost their immortality. Forgot everything. Struggled up from barbarism. Then a new civilization emerged. Went star traveling again. Found humanity’s old beacon and began digging through the ruins—same as we’re doing.”
“That might fit,” Bram said. “The mixed levels. And some of the artifacts. They’re more primitive than the diskworld itself would suggest. That eight-wheeled jointed machine with the armored portholes and those crude metal-spring tires to absorb bounce in low gravity, for instance. Even we’re beyond that, with our Nar technology. Doesn’t it suggest a race with reborn self-confidence in the first flush of star travel?”
“Come over here,” Ame said. “I want to show you something.”
They followed her to the row of skeletons. A young assistant looked up from her work, smiled, and went back to wiring vertebrae together on a half-completed specimen.
“I’ve never seen a human skeleton, of course,” Ame said. “Just Doc Pol’s ultrasonic hologram of one. But you don’t have to be an expert to see that these skeletons aren’t right.”
She switched on the hologram, which appeared in a tinted plastic booth at the end of the row of skeletons, like one more skeleton frozen in a block of ice. Bram glanced at it for comparison, then turned his attention to the others.
The long-footed skeletons were approximately human size and shape and looked remarkably similar to Doc Pol’s study model if you discounted the long tail. But even without recourse to the hologram, Bram could spot the anomalies.
“They have the same general body plan as we do,” Ame said, “and the same major bones in the same places. But the arms are too short. The upper and lower leg bones are in the wrong proportion. The thumb opposes, but it’s the same length as the fingers. The cranial structures are wrong—the skull has about the same volume as ours, but it’s long rather than domed. And the dentition is very different.”
“And then there’s the tail,” Mim put in.
“Yes,” Ame said. “Evolution might have made many changes in man over a forty-million-year period, but surely it would not have given him back his tail.”
Bram chewed his lip. “It is possible, you know. There’s such a thing as back mutation or reversion. The mechanism isn’t well understood. But in this case you might envision it as the loss of a ‘switch-off’ gene that was an earlier mutation causing taillessness in some hominoid ancestor of man. The loss would leave the redundant tail genes that were still part of the DNA free to express themselves again.”
“You mean we could all grow tails again?” Mim said, wide-eyed. “I don’t think I’d like that!”
She cast a distinctly worried look at the short-armed, long-footed skeletons with their long whiplashes of added vertebrae.
Bram laughed. “It must have complicated their space-suit design, I’ll say that.”
“Oh, we’ve found an almost intact space suit,” Ame said. “The tail sheath was quite ingenious, with a whole series of little bleeder valves that allowed the tail to curl all the way around in a prehensile grip. Even in moderate gravity, they could have hung from their tails, leaving both hands free. We turned the suit over to one of the technology evaluation committees. You can see it on the upper balcony if you like.”
“Ame, how large a population of them was there?”
“It’s too early to answer that, but it must have been in the tens of thousands.”
“Too few to have filled this city, too many to have been just a scientific expedition. Ame, what were they doing here?”
“I can’t tell you that, either. We know that one of the things they were doing was exploring these ruins—just as we are. In fact, they’ve made our work a little easier. We’ve found at least one of their digs and its repository. They seem to have brought things up from a lower level one where the artifacts definitely were made for hands like ours—and they’ve arranged and cataloged their finds most conveniently.”
“Longfoot archaeologists.”
“Yes. They seem to have been just as interested in Original Man as we are. But the level of archaeological activity wasn’t high enough to explain their numbers. Otherwise, the whole place would have been dug up.”
“And yet they lived and died here.”
“For several generations, at least. We’ve found parts of children’s skeletons, too, and fetal bones along with the skeleton of one pregnant female. Bram-tsu, they gave birth to a dozen young at a time.”
“That doesn’t sound like human beings,” Mim said.
“No, not even after thirty million more years of evolution. But on the other hand, thirty million years before our line diverged from the hominids, our most probable direct ancestor was a small tree-dwelling animal called Aegyptopithecus. It was about the size of a Cuddly and looked something like a cat.” She halted. “Do you know what a cat was?”
“Yes. The little furry animals in the Goya painting.”
Ame nodded. “So you see, a lot can happen in thirty million years, even in the human line. Tail aside, the longfoots don’t seem that different from us.”
Bram said, “Ame, what were they?”
“We’re going to do some DNA studies and protein sequencing as soon as we can scrape together enough material. I’ll let you know.”
He got the answer to one of his questions a couple of Tendays later.
He was sitting in the cubbyhole he used as an office, going over Yggdrasil’s accounts—one of the more onerous chores he had to do as year-captain. Enyd had sent him an enormous stack of tally sheets—glucose balance; starch reserves; projected production of fats, oils, alcohol, and glycine over the next kiloday; currently available hydrogen and oxygen—and he was expected to okay the allocations today, if not yesterday.
The rasp of the intercom made him wince.
“I’ll get it!” Mim called. He heard her speak to someone, then she poked her head in and said, “That was Smeth from the trunk. The expedition’s just docked. Trist is on his way down now.”
“What’s his hurry? You’d think he’d want a little time to collapse first and get reacquainted with Nen. Or at least allow himself to be lionized for a few hours.”
Bram had been back on board Yggdrasil for only a few days himself; he’d left the disk city with the question of longfoot ancestry still unresolved. He’d had to plunge immediately into his accumulated paperwork and other duties, with no time to think about the matter further.
“Nen’s in surgery with Doc Pol,” Mim said. “Somebody managed to fall down a tracheid and smash an ankle. Trist prepared a preliminary report on the trip back. But he said he thought you’d want to know right away.”
“Know what?”
“That,” she said, “is what he’s on his way down to tell you.”
Trist arrived twenty minutes later; he must have been in free fall all the way. His yellow hair was disheveled, and he had a ripe space suit aroma—Lydis was still making her passengers suit up for drops and dockings—but he was full of unleashed energy, and his blue eyes, though rimmed with fatigue, sparkled.
He refused Mim’s offer of tea—a new custom instituted by Marg after she had read about it in some of the library material that had been brought up from the diskworld, subsequently experimenting with infusions brewed from Yggdrasil’s bark—and got right to the point.
“We did a thorough survey from space, of course,” he said. “Went as close
to the hub as Lydis dared. Spotted over a hundred of the sites over a nine-hundred-billion-square-mile area. Some of the structures were still inflated after all this time; others were flat as corncakes. It was pretty obvious what they’d been up to. But we couldn’t be absolutely certain till we made a landing and deployed the climbers. We managed to visit four locations—brought back some goodies for the archaeologists, too.”
“And,” Bram said, knowing the answer, “what were they?”
“Camps,” Trist said promptly. “Work camps. They must have lived there deciyears at a time, repairing antenna elements, installing their own equipment to fill in the breaks.”
“They were trying to make the system operational again?”
“That’s the only conclusion that can be drawn.”
Bram leaned back and stared into space for a moment. “That would have been a tremendous undertaking, even with a work force of tens of thousands—or many times more than that, it may turn out. It would have meant committing themselves for generations.”
“They were willing to do that, apparently. Bram, can you imagine the conditions they must have endured in those inflatable camps? The ones closer to the horizontal gravity sectors were built out on scaffolding—with no place even to stand for kilodays, except for the tents and stringers. Dangling over eternity all that time while they worked. It wasn’t much better closer to the hub. Trying to adjust to the crazy angles, under heavy gravity with your weight tearing sideways at you. With the danger of falling with every step and an awareness of the penalties if you did. We didn’t set foot within ten million miles of some of the farther camps, and I can tell you, I still didn’t like it!”
Trist hadn’t heard about the tails. Bram told him.
“Whew!” Trist whistled. “That explains it. You’d need a tail to work in a place like that.”
“Ame thinks they may have been a species other than man. But the verdict isn’t in yet.”
“A new species to supersede man. I’m not sure I like that idea. It was one thing to deal with the idea that human beings were extinct. We’ve more or less accepted that from the beginning. But the idea of another species taking our place—that’s something else again. Gives us competition in this neck of the galaxy, Bram. The planet Earth may be overrun by these long-footed characters. Where do we go, then?”
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