by Chad Oliver
“Yeah,” said Tino. “Anything can happen. That includes extinction. They don’t have a culture yet, for my money. We can’t just abandon them.”
“I don’t know.” Art Embree rubbed his balding head. “I just don’t know.”
“Some of our cultures haven’t worked,” Kitemu reminded them. “We don’t have all the answers.”
Paul Edmondson groped for words, trying to express what he believed. He felt that he had betrayed those people once. That time, the choice had not been his. This time, it was. Those people had beaten fearful odds. They had earned a crack at their own destiny, whatever it was. He recognized the irony in his choice. He wanted to leave them again.
But this time it was different. They were different. Perhaps he too had changed.
“Look,” he said. “Those are our kids down there, in a way. All these years, all these countries, all these thousands and thousands of years, we have tried to figure out what was best for them. We were the elders. We meant well, sometimes we did well. But now, maybe for the first time, we can see what they can do. I say let’s step aside and give them their chance. Don’t they deserve it, on just one world in all the universe?”
There was a long silence.
“I remind you that there are alternate targets,” Art Embree said finally. “We will have to proceed elsewhere in any case, to seed our blanks. The choice concerns what we do here. Do we build a lifeway for them, or do we let them go it alone? We’ll need a vote, I think. Are we ready?”
The men nodded.
The vote was taken.
Tino Sandoval alone voted for interference.
The starship would not land.
First One had returned to the high rocky hill, where the cool wind blew and the sights were long. He went there often. It was a good place to think.
He seemed taller now, and leaner. His weathered body was hard and scarred. The cunning of experience was in his eyes.
He could see the grove of trees where his people were. He knew that they were safe. He thought of his mate and his young one. The memory warmed him.
He heard the distant thunder of the departing starship above the sky. The sound faded. It meant nothing to him.
He smiled with a happiness he could not name. He stood there, on the hill, a rock in his fist, looking out at his world.
GHOST TOWN
Caroth knew that they were coming.
He felt an anticipation that went beyond hate or joy or hope. The years had been long. His people were growing old.
He clasped his gnarled hands together in the firelight, seeking warmth. The pain was in him again. It throbbed from his fused neck through his powerful shoulders. He was used to pain. That did not make the hurting easier.
Caroth did not think about the pain. He thought about the hunger. It surged in him.
He knew that he had little time left, but there would be an end to waiting. The waiting was almost over.
They were coming.
Caroth was ready for them.
Rick Malina would not have admitted it to just anyone, but he had a sneaking affection for the damned things.
The ship had it on close visual now: a doughnut-shaped O’Neill like a thousand others, still rotating at the standard speed of one revolution per minute, its shielding still bright if a trifle pock-marked, the spidery appendages still swinging in a frozen dance against the stars.
Junk, of course—but valuable junk.
Space garbage—but garbage worth collecting.
Something left behind.
Rick supposed that his own ancestors—biological and professional—had felt the same way about the abandoned cliff houses in the moonlight, the rings of tipi stones that weathered in the brown grass of summer, the bits of charcoal and flakes of flint that marked an ancient campsite. You had to be a bit of a romantic to go into archeology in the first place. You concealed it later, masked it with the routine of job competence. It got covered up, just as the ruins themselves became buried in the earth.
But it was there.
And it was here. He could feel it, even on a conventional mission like this. It was a tiny stubborn flame that refused to go out.
“Hey, Doc.” The commander’s voice held nothing but boredom. She was not getting any younger and she was good enough for the starships. She hated shuttle flights and antediluvian spacecraft. “You going to suit up or go the Superman route?”
“Just checking,” Rick said. He was not overly fond of the ship’s commander, but she was stretching the Sacred Rules to allow him up here with the primary screen. He was basically cargo, after all. “Sometimes the optical configuration gives us a scan on the modular modification.” It didn’t mean a blessed thing, but it sounded impressive.
“Sure,” she said with massive disinterest. “We’ll be matched and ready for the dump within an hour. I assume you’re still going?”
“I’m going,” Rick Malina said. “Science never sleeps while the grants are awake.”
He allowed himself one more look at that little artificial world floating in the cluttered space sea. He knew it up one ring of the torus and down the other. He knew it from the solar mirrors to the processing labs for nickel, iron, and titanium. He knew every dimension and atmospheric component.
He had done his homework.
This wasn’t the first time his crew had worked an O’Neill.
Just the same, he enjoyed eyeballing it. It was a world. You didn’t get to see them every day, even dead ones.
He executed a maneuver with the handholds that was fancier than it really had to be and drifted out of the control room.
“We’ll be ready,” he said.
It would be good to feel gravity again.
Caroth knew what he was. He had the kind of self-knowledge that came from endurance. Caroth was a survivor.
To survive was to continue.
He knew that his family name had once been Carothers. He knew that his people had used first names, long ago. That was before the population decline. That was when there had still been children.
Caroth was the only name he needed now. His people were few. Some of them had retained family names. Others just went by descriptive tags: One Eye, Smoke-Eater, Floater, Dreaming Woman….
Perhaps, if the ape-things that had stayed behind had been a little closer genetically—
But they weren’t.
Caroth was facing more than death. He was looking at extinction.
He refused to accept it.
Among other things, Caroth was a very stubborn old man.
Every O’Neill had an airlock that could be activated from outside. That was the law, a routine safety precaution. The lock could be sealed from the inside simply by dropping a metal bar into sockets, but that was an emergency procedure. An abandoned colony was never barred.
Getting inside was no problem. Transferring the supplies was no problem. Life-support tests were no problem.
It was after the shuttle had been released and the rendezvous time had been double-checked that the problems began.
“Did you see that?” asked Ann Vaughan.
“I saw it,” Rick said.
Something had moved through the wild tangle of vegetation against the slight concavity of the O’Neill rim. The light was not ideal but it was sufficient. The moving form had two arms and two legs. It was about the size of a human being. It was dark and hairy.
It should not have been there.
“What the hell was that?” Pete Hurwitz stood as though he had taken root.
Rick took a deep breath. The air was not stale. Neither was it of the texture he had experienced before: heavy, full, redolent with the smells of untouched plants. This air tasted used. It had a greasy feel to it.
“It looked like a chimpanzee,” he said carefully.
“Oh, sure,” Ann said. She prided herself on her rationality. It took a lot to jolt her.
“You got a better idea?”
She hadn’t.
Rick consid
ered. Archeologists were not inclined to be fussy about such things, but he was nominally in charge. It was his job to maintain some perspective.
“It isn’t the first time we’ve found some livestock left behind in one of these things,” he said. “They can reproduce, you know. Keep going.”
His explanation was on the feeble side and he knew it. Yes, they had encountered feral cattle twice before, and even those mutated chickens in the Kovar site. It made poor economic sense to remove all the animals when an O’Neill was emptied. It wasn’t unprecedented for a few of them to survive.
But a chimpanzee?
Chimpanzees were valuable creatures: intelligent, trained, half-human, sometimes loved.
They were never left behind.
That chimp—if it had indeed been a chimp—raised some chilling possibilities.
Rick looked around in the uncertain light and tried to appear less concerned than he was. He saw nothing that he had not seen many times before. That was not surprising. He might not word it that way in his reports, but the plain fact was that one O’Neill was very much like another.
He was not reassured. He knew from experience that first impressions could not be counted upon. It took some time to ferret out the unusual or the unique. That was what salvage archeology was all about.
In the past, when archeologists had been sent into construction sites or areas destined to be flooded by building dams, it had been the same. You went in and worked your tail off, searching for new information that might otherwise vanish forever. There were times when you found nothing significant. There were times when you struck the mother lode relatively quickly. There were times when you found nothing until the last day, the last hour, the last five minutes.
It was the same with a salvage operation in an O’Neill. There was more to it than just determining what was worth saving and what wasn’t.
There was history in an O’Neill. The trick was to find it.
The O’Neills that were not primarily close-in generators of solar power had been abandoned in a hurry. Few people wanted to go on living in a fossil tube, particularly when the paycredits stopped coming. Population pressure was no longer a problem on Earth, and there were more attractive worlds available than artificial colonies.
There were similarities between the O’Neills and the high mining camps that had once flourished in the Rocky Mountains of North America. Rick had seen some of those camps, restored meticulously by the Preservationists more than a century after the silver crash of 1893. Sagging cabins with the thin cold wind keening through the empty window frames, deserted log hotels inviting the guests who never arrived, cheerless corrals for long-vanished mules, tons of dirt and rock that had been torn from the mountains with rust-ruined picks and shovels. Iron stoves and school-books decaying on snow-stained tables, ancient newspapers stuffed into cracks between warped and water-spotted boards—
And the graves. So many graves.
The people had been tough in those years.
Just the same, when the people moved out fast they went.
Only ghost towns were left.
Nobody kept records, nobody took inventory, and nobody gave much of a damn.
The idea was to leave.
Ghost towns. Waiting, perhaps. Maybe just there, like the scarred rocks and the dark trees and the cold, cold air.
The empty O’Neills were less fortunate. They remained intact and habitable, since nothing was gained by shutting down their self-contained power sources. At one time, there was even the forlorn hope that people might return to them, somehow, sometime.
Technology ruled otherwise. With the development of the stardrive, the near-space colonies of Earth lost their function. There is only one kind of stardrive that is useful, and that is one that is nearly instantaneous. If it is, then you don’t need way stations.
The O’Neills were a slight navigational hazard for the starships, but that was no big deal. The critical problem was that they could not compete economically—and they all contained silent history.
The solution was neat and simple: salvage what was worth the effort and destroy the rest.
It was deeply touching.
But just for the record—
Just in case something of interest turned up—
Maybe even to ease a little collective guilt—
Check them out.
Rick Malina already felt something less than wild enthusiasm for what he had to do. He was not a stupid man. They were a team of five, and they were unarmed. They were on their own until the shuttle returned.
He had no fear of a deserted colony. It might be a bit on the eerie side, but he was used to that. He even enjoyed it, finding pleasure in the familiar details of a situation he knew well. He could run an analysis on an empty O’Neill in his sleep. When you got right down to it, all you had to do was to identify the standard features and then concentrate on what was unusual.
A chimpanzee was unusual.
Oh, yes.
This was one O’Neill that wasn’t deserted.
Chimpanzees by themselves could not be taken lightly. Pound for pound, they were twice as strong as a man. In a strange environment, they could be dangerous.
The real question, though, was disturbingly simple. What the hell else was left alive in here?
Rick managed a smile that would not have fooled a distracted child.
“Okay,” he said. “Maybe we’ve got us a primate colony.”
Nobody laughed.
The five of them moved in.
Caroth knew exactly where they were and exactly what they would do. He understood his world.
He knew himself well but that did not mean that he had his feelings entirely under control. Conflicting emotions stormed in his gut. Pain, hunger, regret, eagerness, fear—
It would not be easy to do what he had to do.
He was sure of his power, but he could not select from a wide field. He had to take what came.
Come on, come on, he thought. Let’s get it over with.
When you are in an O’Neill, orientation can be confusing. Horizons tend to wobble. You can go “in” by moving in a great circle around the outer rim. The sensation of gravity remains a constant determined by centrifugal force. You can go “in” by working along the shafts or spokes toward the hub of the wheel. Then things get tricky and your stomach starts to float away from you.
Rick Malina was a cautious man. He seldom acted on impulse. He knew that he would have to examine the intermediate food-producing areas and the industrial complexes clustered near the center. He didn’t have to do it now, however.
He had seen enough to rivet his attention on the rim. When he moved toward the hub, he wanted to be very sure about what was behind him.
He felt a sense of strangeness that was alien to him. It offended his picture of the way things should be. It wasn’t the curvature of the surface; that was almost undetectable. It wasn’t the slime-covered spherical dwellings that sprouted like bubbles; they were standard. It wasn’t the twisted shrubs and crazy trees and grotesquely overgrown gardens.
He didn’t mind the phony clouds or even the see-through horizons with their shifting colors. He could even take the pale rubbery mold that squished and compressed under his boots.
It was the air—the oily air that neither smelled nor tasted right.
It was the shadows—fugitive shadows where shadows should not be. Chimpanzees, maybe. Still …
It was a power that was reaching out for him, seeking him. He could feel it in the marrow of his bones. The issue was not if he was going to find something outside the range of his experience. The problem was when.
He did not have long to wait.
He caught a whiff of it before he saw it. It took him a long minute to classify that dry pungent smell. It was one of the oldest smells of all, and should have been instantly familiar.
Familiar? Not here.
It was smoke. Plain old woodsmoke.
In an O’Neill?
; He shot a look at Frances Bauerle. Fran had the best nose in the group; it was a standard joke between them. Fran smelled it too. She had come to a halt, sniffing the greasy air.
Rick’s mind tensed and coiled, threatening to run away with him. The impurities could be taken out when the air was recycled, of course. If there were not too many fires. If they were located properly—
But who would build a fire? And why?
He had a wild moment when he thought of forgotten chimpanzees, chimpanzees subtly changed over the generations, chimpanzees building fires and beginning a weird new life in a world where they finally had a chance….
Impossible? Not in this O’Neill.
He put the brakes to his imagination. He had enough problems without conjuring up phantoms.
“I see it,” said Sandy Bayer. His vision had always been sharp. Fran’s nose, Sandy’s eyes: they covered the waterfront. “It’s a fire, Rick. There are—figures—around it. I think—”
It was too late to think. Rick felt a blurring in his brain. He sensed that there were forms behind his group, cutting them off. It was as practical to keep going in the same direction as to turn back.
Why not?
They moved toward the fire.
There was really nothing else to do.
Out of the wavering light there emerged a scene not quite as old as time, but old enough. It sent a haunting chill through Rick. It fingered chords of memory he hadn’t known he possessed. It had a dreamlike quality, a dream that twisted back through ancient sleeps….
A crackling orange flame that hissed and danced. The sharp warm scent of blue woodsmoke. Another smell: sweet, dripping, blood-salty. Meat. Fresh wet meat sizzling in tongues of searing fire.
Yes, and figures. People? Half-naked, crouching around the licking flames. Eyes that gleamed. Sweat that glistened. Bodies that cast monstrous shadows.
Savages? (Good God, where had that word come from?)
