“They may be our cousins.”
“Makes no difference. The fact that they were getting ready to patch up Original Man’s beacon tells us all we need to know. Different species or different order entirely, they were preparing to spread their own image through the universe. It bears out that old idea we used to talk about long ago, before the Nar sped us on our way to this galaxy—that there comes a time in the life of every intelligent species when it begins to dawn on them that the means is at hand for species immortality.”
“Yes, I remember.”
“Now we’ve got three cases. Original Man, broadcasting his genetic code to the Virgo cluster and beyond. The Nar, sending us to the heart of their own galaxy to do the same job for them. And now these people with tails. Except that they’re a little premature. They were able to take advantage of an installation that somebody else built. Bram, I just had another thought!”
“What is it?”
’You said that these tailed people weren’t immortal. Neither were the Nar. Neither was Original Man when he started broadcasting. What if this compulsion to spread around your genetic code is a stage that a species goes through before it attains personal immortality?”
“Hmmm. The night doesn’t seem so dark, then. The universe isn’t a bottomless hole. There’s time. Time to travel to the ends of the universe yourself someday. At least that’s what the little nagging voice inside you would be saying. Trist, you don’t suppose…”
“That Original Man never became extinct? That he simply gave up, packed up and went home after he’d been infected with eternal life long enough for the idea to sink in?”
“Yes. And then, somewhere along the way, acquired an immunity to immortality. Forgot things. Evolved into a new species. And then one day set out on a path to the stars again. And found the old beacon.”
“As I said before, it hardly matters. Whoever they were, they’re not us.”
“I’d like to send an expedition to one of the inner disks. And to the next disk ahead of us in orbit—see how close a duplicate it is to this one. We may have landed in the wrong place.”
“I’d give my spare shirt to go. But Bram, there isn’t time—”
“I’m going to call a tree meeting and call for a vote to stay here an extra year. We’re digging up treasure troves of material—whole libraries of it, and we’ve only scratched the surface. I want to get as much material transferred to Yggdrasil as we can. We can’t abandon a working party here, no matter how many eager volunteers there’d be. Not when the only habitable body in the known universe also happens to be our only starship. And there’s no telling when we’ll be back this way. It may be centuries before we grow another Yggdrasil and outfit it and can spare a population to crew it.”
“A year.” Trist furrowed his brow. “I’ll have to work out some orbits. The distances are huge, of course, but it’s not like ordinary interplanetary travel here … hmmm, we’ve got a body whose own orbital period is a year as our catapult, with no gravity to speak of to fight … add a modest boost…deboost to end up a hundred twenty degrees ahead … and for the return trip, a retro-orbit to lose orbital energy and rendezvous with your starting point in somewhat less than a year.” He gave Bram an engaging smile. “But I get Nen to go along with me as a medical officer.”
“Done,” Bram said.
Mim appeared with a tray. “Don’t worry, it isn’t tea,” she said. “Just old-fashioned cornbrew and some snacks.”
“Mim watch out!” Bram shouted.
A little ball of fluff streaked between her ankles and almost tripped her. She recovered her balance and managed to keep the tray level without spilling anything.
“Loki!” she scolded.
The Cuddly scampered up Trist’s leg, paused at his knee to be patted, then climbed to his shoulder and pulled at his yellow hair.
“Loki, get down and behave yourself,” Bram said. He apologized to Trist. “He gets into everything.”
“Oh, that’s all right, we have one of our own,” Trist said. He scratched the little creatures’s neck. “Where’d you get the name?”
“Loki? It was an old human god who was always getting into mischief. It seemed to fit.”
“Nen named ours Fluff. If she doesn’t stop overfeeding it, we’ll have to rename it Sphere.”
“It’s hard to resist one,” Mim said. “They’re the best thing we’re taking with us from the diskworld.”
Loki sat up and chittered at her as if he knew what she was saying. Trist broke off a corner of one of his cornsnacks and gave it to the little beast, which held the morsel in both paws and began nibbling at it.
“Yes,” Bram said. “I think they mean more to us than we realize. They’re the first terrestrial life form that humans have ever seen, after all.”
“Other than vegetables,” Trist said, popping a potato crisp into his mouth.
“Vegetables that we engineered ourselves or the Nar engineered for us. But Trist, just think of it, these little creatures carry an unbroken line of DNA that goes all the way back to the world that gave us birth.”
“DNA calls out to DNA, is that it?”
“Something like that. We know without having to think about it that these little animals are a precious link with an earthly heritage.”
Idly, Trist scratched the Cuddly behind one ear. It made a contented sound and snuggled against him. “There’s something wrong there,” he said lazily. “The first human being, as far as we’re concerned, was mixed up in a test tube by a Nar bioengineer. From native materials.”
“Ravel is Ravel,” Mim said. “No matter what instruments play it.”
“Hah! Good for you, Mim!” Trist conceded. “I’ll desist.” He took a sip of his drink. Loki tried to poke his muzzle into the cup, and Trist let him have a taste. The Cuddly sputtered and spat it out. Everybody laughed.
“Abstemious,” Bram said. “Maybe we can learn something from them.”
Trist fed the little pet another fragment of cornsnack to appease it. “It would be nice,” he said, “to go home to an Earth that was inhabited by Cuddlies instead of those tailed people with the long skinny feet.”
“Not likely,” Bram said. “Ame says the Cuddlies evolved on the diskworld from more primitive forms. That isn’t to say that some collateral branch with similar traits couldn’t have evolved on Earth in the meantime.” He frowned. “But we know what life form achieved dominance on Earth, don’t we?”
“They were rats,” Ame said.
She stepped back to let Bram have a better look at the exhibit that she and her section had prepared. Two of her colleagues—Jorv, the bouncy baby-faced zoologist whom Bram had met before, and a tall bony young woman named Shira, who was something called a “paleobiologist”—stood by with eager expressions on their faces.
Bram raised an eyebrow. “Rats? The pests of the ‘Dappled Piper’ legend?”
He scuffed cautiously closer. He hadn’t had time to readjust to diskworld gravity yet, and he was still stiff and tired from the ferry trip to the surface, though it was down to five days now.
“Rattus norvegicus to be exact,” Ame said. “The most successful member of the family and the one that would have been in the best position to succeed Original Man after man’s activities had changed the environment. They were highly adaptable, they were omnivores as humankind’s ancestors were, and in fact they resembled some of the primitive specimens on our own family tree.”
The computer-generated hologram showed three skeletons in the same scale. The center one was a life-size projection of Ame’s most complete longfoot skeleton—the one Bram had noticed when he first entered the work-bay. He recognized the skeleton on the right, too. It was Doc Pol’s familiar ultrasound figurine, the textbook example that Doc had learned his own trade from and that he now required his apprentices to memorize.
The third skeleton was something else entirely. Though the computer had made the bones stand in an upright position, the proportions were grotesque. The to
rso was absurdly long, with tiny little hands and feet and a head that was much too large for it. The bones would have been too spindly to support the creature in normal gravity. Bram saw immediately that the creature must have been a very small animal that the computer had brought up to the size of the other two skeletons for purposes of comparison.
Ame touched a button, and lines flashed from the center skeleton to the other two, showing correspondences. Though the longfoot skeleton and the human skeleton were superficially similar, it was immediately apparent that the disproportioned skeleton on the left had more in common with the longfoot specimen.
“You can see that what appears to be a backward-bending knee is actually what became a heel,” Ame said. “The creature would have walked on its toes. The shaft of the leg bone became a long, narrow foot. And of course, the tail is there, bone for bone.”
“Ame, this is marvelous,” Bram said. “I’m enormously impressed. How did you do all this?”
She looked pleased. “We had a breakthrough. Literally. One of the digging machines broke through to a layer where the stratigraphy had been disturbed. The longfoots had been busy there. They had a—a sort of museum of their own there. And a library. And biosample vaults. They had brought up and catalogued a whole biological cornucopia preserved by Original Man. It must have come as a wonderful revelation to the longfoots. They were interested in their own ancestry, you see. Original Man’s records predated their own fossil records.”
Jorv’s plump face beamed complacency. “Original Man did all the work for them,” he said, “and they did all the work for us.”
“We don’t have enough archaeologists to go around,” Ame said, “but all the amateurs are well trained by now. As soon as the digging machine operator saw what he was bringing up, he stopped, roped off the place, and notified the proper people.”
“As soon as they saw they were bringing up biological specimens, they got us,” Jorv bubbled. “You wouldn’t believe it! There were mounted skeletons. Arranged in classifications. And metal plaques to explain them. And supplementary materials—actual books preserved in nitrogen. And tapes and holochips. In Inglex and Chin-pin-yin. The longfoots probably couldn’t read them, but we could—right away!”
The attenuated paleobiologist, Shira, ran nervous fingers through stringy brown hair. “And there were actual tissue samples, too, still in a remarkable state of preservation. The rat-people—longfoots—had broken some of the seals, but others were intact. We were able to extract enough DNA and protein for sequential analysis.”
“There’ll be more,” Jorv interrupted. “We’ve only scratched the surface with this find. We’re trenching now, looking for the rest of it. And they thought zoology was a theoretical science! Bram-companion, when we get to our world, we’ll be able to recreate species! Stock our streams with trout, our forests with trees other than poplar! Did you know that Original Man had his own bio-vehicles—a sort of walker called a horse!”
“Well, that’s certainly a program for the future,” Bram said noncommittally.
Shira continued serenely, as if used to interruptions. “Until now, we’ve lacked the capacity to do molecular taxonomy in any meaningful way. Oh, we’ve been able to use cytochrome c sequencing to demonstrate that human beings are very far removed indeed from yeast—forty-five amino acid differences—not quite as far removed from cabbages, and closer still to heterochronic eggs. But now, of course, we have all those lovely tissue samples.”
“Horses,” Jorv said dreamily. “Zebras. Giraffes. Rhesus monkeys. Wolves. Original Man preserved them all.”
“And of course we’ve brought up scads of mouse bones from our deeper excavations. Man inadvertently carried mice and other vermin to the diskworld with him—just as, I suppose, he carried them with him everywhere he went. The mice didn’t manage to survive for long after humans departed the diskworld. They never adapted for airlessness, they weren’t able to burrow deep enough, and they quickly exhausted the more easily available sources of food. We found no mouse bones more recent than seventy million years old. But they still contained traces of cytochrome c.”
“And we had ourselves and Cuddlies available as a source of hemoglobin and serum albumin,” Jorv said. “Oh, there was no doubt at all!”
Shira brushed her hair back. “The longfoots were at several removes from us and Cuddlies—well beyond the limits of family or genus, let alone species. Farther still from Jorv’s giraffes, though we were able to do only DNA sequencing in that case. But the molecular differences between longfoots and mice—”
“Mus musculus,” Jorv interjected. “Same family as rats. If you remember your childhood Chin-pin-yin, it’s the same word. Big-mouse.”
Shira spared a tolerant glance for Jorv and finished what she had been saying. “…but the molecular differences between longfoots and mice were practically nil.”
Bram nodded at the longfoot skeleton. “That seems to settle it, then. Man did become extinct. And the next dominant species was that.”
Ame said, “We found something else.”
“What’s that?”
“We know how the Cuddlies got here.”
Bram picked his way down the tunnel, following Jorv’s bobbing yellow light. Loose gravel under his feet started slow-motion cascades as he proceeded, coming to rest long after he had passed. The lanky paleobiologist was right behind him, shedding enough light of her own for him to see by, and Ame brought up the rear. Bram, as an escorted guest, went unburdened; the other three wore many-pocketed tabards over their space suits and lugged an assortment of picks, hammers, and other small tools.
After what seemed like an endless trek, the tunnel opened out into a wide, low-ceiling space shored up by timbers. Other tunnels branched off the space, glimmers of light from a couple of them showing the presence of other work parties.
The thick timbers were ordinary vacuum-poplar. Seeing them brought a lump of homesickness to Bram’s throat till he remembered that vacuum-poplar had originated here, in the Milky Way, not in the Whirlpool galaxy.
Ame saw him looking. “The longfoots dug up a human lumberyard near here and took advantage of it. The wood must have been in vacuum and still good. Before that—” She indicated the branching tunnels where archaeological work was in progress. “—the longfoots used columns of native stone as well as steel griders that they brought with them. Evidently they didn’t have much of a structural plastics industry. It bears out your theory that they were a young civilization, newly come to star travel, Bram-tsu.”
“What was this place?”
“The longfoots had some of their own storehouses here. And living areas close by. We gleaned some insight into their social habits. There was some limited pair bonding in our sense, but mostly they lived in aggregates of fifty to a hundred members in which females were available to males on some kind of schedule of dominance. The living arrangements pointed to that, anyway. The females raised their young separately and cooperated in keeping males at bay for a period after parturition.”
“They don’t sound like a very pleasant people.”
“Rats don’t make very pleasant ancestors.”
Bram shuddered, remembering the fragment of film Ame had been able to show him. It had been part of an exhibit associated with the mounted rat skeleton and had shown a bedraggled brown animal with beady eyes and a naked tail greedily eating its way thorugh a store of corn, excreting as it went. Bram had been ashamed of his instant and automatic revulsion, telling himself that the rat was a life form like any other, with a right to existence. But Ame had told him that his reaction wasn’t unique—that rats seemed to raise the hackles of most humans.
“You’re being narrow-minded, Ame,” Jorv protested. “Seeing it from a human point of view. Different species, different biological imperatives. They might have been a perfectly decent folk. They acted cooperatively, after all.”
“Come here, I want to show you something,” Ame said.
She led Bram to a cache where spe
cimens had been arranged with preliminary labels. There were bins of a dessicated, unfamiliar grain, shovel-size scoops, a broken ceramic jug.
But what caught Bram’s attention was a small animal skeleton on a slab of wood. The skull was crushed, pinned to the slab by a copper bar that was attached to a large spring. But enough could be seen of the jaw to show that it was still clenched around something that looked like a fossil nut, which was attached by a wire to a sort of pivoting tray.
“A trap,” Ame said. “The animal in it was a Cuddly.”
Shira tossed her lank hair back within the bowl of her helmet. “They poisoned them, too,” she said. “We’ve found piles of Cuddly bones around a feast of that same bait that one of them would have brought back to the burrow for the females and young ones.”
Bram was appalled. “But what a terrible thing to do.”
“No more terrible than what Original Man did to rats,” Jorv said.
“The longfoots carried their own vermin into space with them, just as man once carried rats and mice,” Ame said. “That’s what the vermin were. Cuddlies.”
“The Cuddlies’ ancestral form, actually,” Shira said. “They hadn’t evolved for airlessness yet. You can see that the rib cage isn’t enlarged for accessory lungs. And the toe of the rear foot is not fully opposable.”
“But I think that if we were to see one of these creatures in its fur,” Ame said, “we’d see it as a Cuddly.”
Bram studied the trap with distaste. “Ingenious and cruel,” he said. “The victim had to tug at the bait to pull it loose, and that released this strut that kept the spring armed. The animal’s head would be in position for the copper bar. Even if its reflexes were good and it drew back, it would still get its neck broken.”
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