“Instead of seasons,” Matthew murmured.
“What?” Lynn queried.
“Just a stray thought,” Matthew said, slowly. He had to take a deep breath before carrying on, but talking was a lot less energy-expensive than climbing and he certainly didn’t want to move on too quickly. “On Earth,” he said, pensively, “the versatility of organisms is mostly a series of responses to seasonal variations. In winter, deciduous trees shed their leaves and some vertebrates hibernate. Most flowering plants and most invertebrate imagos die, leaving their seeds and eggs to withstand the cold spell. Large numbers of species opt for an annual life cycle, because the year-on-year advantages gained thereby far outweigh the problems raised by occasional disruptive ecocatastrophes. There are seasons even in the tropics—dry and rainy—generated by ocean currents.”
“Not here,” Lynn told him, although he’d already noted the fact. “Tyre’s axial tilt is less pronounced, and the ocean is as stable as the atmosphere. That constancy seems to be reflected in the relative lack of biodiversity—and, of course, in the dearth of species with dramatic life cycles, like metamorphic insects. Bernal said it wasn’t quite that simple, though, because of the complicity of ecosystems and their inorganic environment.”
“That’s right,” Matthew agreed. “Ecosystems aren’t helpless prisoners of their inorganic frames. Life manages its own atmosphere; to some extent, it manages its own weather too. The rain that falls on rain forests evaporates from the rain forests in a disciplined fashion—take away the forest and the rain goes too. Here, where the world’s axial tilt is less, seasonal variations would be less extreme anyway, but the ecosphere may well play an active role massaging them into near-uniformity, thus nullifying the kinds of advantages insects and other ephemerae derive from their chimerical life cycles. It’s easy enough to grasp the fact that there’s a whole new ballgame here, with a very different set of constraints and strategic opportunities—but it’s not easy to imagine what they might be. Take winter and summer out of the equation, and what might substitute for them as forces of variation? Is there another kind of cycle, or something much more arbitrary? If there is a cycle, it might take a lot longer than three years to work through—and if there isn’t … how often, and how swiftly, do major changes happen? Confusing as it is, this can’t be the whole picture.”
As he voiced the last sentence Matthew drew a wide arc with his right arm, taking in the limited panorama spread out before them and a much greater one whose horizons they were not yet in a position to see.
“Yeah,” said Lynn, quietly. “That’s exactly what Bernal sounded like, when he got going. Did you really know him that well, or is it a case of great minds thinking alike?”
“We were two peas in a pod,” Matthew told her, his gaze lingering for a moment longer on the visible fragment of the distant boat. Then he turned away, saying: “Okay, I’m rested. Onward and upward.”
Having visited several of the ancient walled cities of Earth, Matthew had a reasonably good idea of the way in which the scale of cities had shifted with the centuries. His memory retained a particularly graphic image of the Old City of Jerusalem surrounded by its vast sprawl of twentieth-century concrete suburbs. He was not unduly surprised, therefore, to find that what had apparently been the living space of the aliens’ city was mostly compressed into an area not much more than a couple of kilometers square—although the shape of the hills meant that it was anything but square, and only vaguely round.
Like ancient Rome, the city seemed to have been built on seven hills, although the hills were very various in size and reach. Lynn was guiding him toward the summit of the highest of them all. His limbs felt like lead, and he was glad that Rand Blackstone was not present to witness his weakness.
Had they not been walking through the relics of ancient streets the surrounding territory would have yielded much more to Matthew’s enquiring eyes, but they always seemed to be closely surrounded by huge hedgerows that stopped him seeing anything at all except multitudes of purple flaps, fans, spikes, and florets. Eventually, though, they began to climb something that looked like—and presumably was—a flight of ancient steps. It took them to the top of a lumpen mount that must once have been a building of some kind.
Matthew was exceedingly glad to reach the top. He mopped his brow with the back of his right hand, awkwardly conscious of the fact that both the hand and the moist forehead were intangibly encased in false skin.
The sun was high in the sky now, and its glare was uninterrupted by clouds. Although he knew that the faint purpling of the blue sky had nothing to do with ultraviolet light, Matthew could not help feeling that the alien light might somehow be dangerous, and Blackstone’s wide-brimmed hat suddenly seemed far less ridiculous than it had the previous day. But Lynn had no hat, and no hair either, so he was probably being oversensitive.
From the summit of the mound, the extensive vistas surrounding him seemed quite different from the limited ones accessible from the lower vantage point.
Unpracticed as they were, Matthew’s eyes were suddenly able to pick out the lines inscribed upon the landscape long ago by artificers’ hands, and not yet completely obscured by the patient work of nature. From here, he could see enough of the undulations imposed on the vegetation by ancient walls to comprehend the unobliterated pattern.
The most astonishing thing of all, now that he could judge it properly, was the sheer extent of the walls appended to the city. They covered an area at least twelve times as vast. The residential part of the city—“downtown,” as Matthew could not help calling it in the privacy of his thoughts—was by no means at the center of the complex, most of which was downslope of it. If the whole resembled a falling teardrop, gradually spreading over a landscape of tiny freckles and follicles, “downtown” would have been fairly near to the trailing edge.
“It’s not obvious from anywhere else,” Lynn told him, “but from up here you can see how the pattern must have developed. They moved gradually outward from the primary rampart, preferring downhill to uphill, gradually clearing more ground and surrounding the fields they’d created with new walls. The city itself continued to grow, mostly in upslope directions, so that some of the fields were built over, and there were subsidiary islands of residential building way out there to the east and south, but most of the development as the population swelled seems to have been a matter of building higher and filling in. As they cleared more land for crops, though, they built more walls: rank after rank after rank. The innermost walls are the lowest, perhaps because they routinely cannibalized them to help in the building of the outer ones, even though their quarrying techniques had come on by leaps and bounds. You can see a couple of their biggest quarries way over there in the northwest.”
“How did they move the blocks?” Matthew asked, still feeling distinctly breathless.
“The hard way, according to Dulcie. There’s little enough advantage in wheels, or even in using logs as rollers, on terrain as uneven as this, and you’ve probably noticed that the local tree-substitutes aren’t much given to the production of nice straight logs with a circular cross-section. They had no beasts of burden, so they had to carry the stones themselves, one by one, or maybe a few at a time slung in hammocks from poles and frames carried by small parties of humanoids. But the real question—the big question—is why they felt they had to move the blocks.”
“They had enemies,” Matthew said, making the obvious deduction. “Their fields were precious, and had to be defended.”
“Maybe it’s not so surprising,” Lynn went on, “whichever hypothesis you favor as to the reason for the great leap forward from hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural ones. If it really was a fabulous stroke of inspiration, the tribes that hadn’t made it were probably keen to get in on the act. If it was a desperation move forced by ecological crisis, the tribes that hadn’t made it would have been even keener. On Earth, the major ongoing conflict was always between settled agriculturalists and nomadic herdsm
an, but the relative dearth of mammal-equivalents in this ecosphere seems to have ensured that the humanoids never took to animal husbandry—not in a big way, at any rate—so the Cain and Abel allegory doesn’t apply.”
Matthew noticed the tacit assumption that the “enemies” the city-builders wanted to keep out were others of their own kind, but he didn’t call attention to it. Instead, he asked: “Which hypothesis do you like? The inspirational leap or the existential crisis?”
“The crisis scenario always made more sense to me as an explanation of our own prehistory,” Lynn admitted, “but if we don’t know for sure why our own hunter-gatherer ancestors settled down, we’re hardly likely to be able to come to a firm conclusion about these guys. That’s the way I tell the story to myself, though. If the people who migrated up the river and built the city did so because life down on the plain was becoming too difficult, successive waves of their increasingly distant cousins would have followed in their train. Maybe, at first, some or all of them were taken in, coopted to the grand plan—but as living space became more cramped, the people in the city might have become increasingly desperate to keep others out while the people trying to get in became more desperate in proportion. Positive feedback, ultimately bringing the conflict to a mutually ruinous climax.”
“It sounds plausible,” Matthew agreed.
“Not to Dulcie,” Lynn observed. “Not enough evidence of elaborate weaponry in the hidey-holes we’ve so far excavated. Ideally, of course, we’d like some skeletons so that we could look for evidence of violent death, but even hard human bone wouldn’t have survived for long in this kind of environment. The city-dwellers who died here have all been reabsorbed—every last knucklebone and tooth. All we have to go on are the stones and the glass fragments. No earthenware pots, no metal. Dulcie reckons that if you leave out the walls themselves, the evidence so far unearthed favors the notion that the city-dwellers were a relatively peaceful lot.”
“What about the spearhead that killed Bernal?”
“What about it? Dulcie says it’s a fake. Even if it isn’t, it’s recent, and even if it weren’t recent, it would only be evidence of hunting, not warfare.”
Matthew shrugged his shoulders. Although his smartsuit only presented the illusion of clothing, he couldn’t quite escape the false sensation that something clammy was clinging to his back like a sweat-soaked shirt.
“Given that the local plants don’t make storage-proteins to supply seeds,” he said, seeking further distraction from his discomfort, “the staple crop couldn’t have been a grain-analogue, even though the plants in the drawings I saw on Hope look a bit like corncobs.”
“That’s right,” Lynn confirmed. “We’re not sure how they persuaded their food-plants to put on so much bulk—that’s why we’re doing the test plantings of candidate types. The fields have been reclaimed by local varieties, though—the city-builders probably brought their crop-plants with them from the plain. We don’t really know why they didn’t cultivate the land on the banks of the river, but we figure it must have had something to do with the difficulty of clearing ground and keeping it free from weeds. Those giant grasses are probably more resilient than the hill-dwelling dendrites—too difficult to dislodge.
“I’ll show you the murals when we go down again. We think they might have been colored in at one time, but organic paints would have been stripped off by slugs and snails almost immediately, except where heavy metals in inorganic pigments made them too poisonous. We have a few flakes of what might have been paint, but the only decipherable images are the engravings in the photos.”
Matthew examined the exposed remains of a stone wall on the edge of the platform from which they were looking down. It had been scraped clean of its various encrustations. The blocks of stone from which it had been constructed were relatively small and easily portable, in stark contrast to the bigger foundation blocks that had been similarly cleared.
The mortar sealing the wall gave the impression of being resinous, albeit set as hard as the stone itself, although it could not have survived if it had been organic. Although he could see half-a-dozen places in the immediate neighborhood where similar walls must have been cracked, broken and eventually pulled down by the combined efforts of severe weather and the overgrowing vegetation, this particular fragment looked as if it might stand for thousands of years yet to come, and perhaps hundreds of thousands.
It had been built to last, and it had lasted.
Alas, the civilization it had been built to contain had not. Matthew could hardly help wondering whether any civilization that Hope’s passengers put in place might be bound to meet a similar fate.
TWENTY-ONE
Why didn’t more people come here from Base One when Milyukov refused to supply a proper staff?” Matthew asked Lynn Gwyer. “They’re all Earth-born. They all saw the same VE-dramas you and I grew up on. They must have a proper appreciation of the mythic significance of first contact. The mere possibility that there might be aliens should have had them flocking here in droves.”
“It’s a long way,” she pointed out. “All our aircraft are tiny, and we haven’t finished building and securing a chain of refueling stops. At first, they expected the crew to send down more people. The realization that it wasn’t going to happen was slow to grow, and it grew alongside other arguments. Bernal thought he could change that, if only he could broadcast to Base One, but Milyukov procrastinated over sending the TV cameras he asked for. In the end, we got you instead.”
“He must have chuckled over that one,” Matthew said, meaning Milyukov. “He took an unreasonable relish in informing me that he couldn’t give me the cameras I asked for. He can’t keep me incommunicado, but he knows as well as I do that it’s not easy to persuade large numbers of people to tune in when all you’ve got is a beltphone.”
While he was speaking they completed their descent from the top of the mound—“the tower,” as Lynn insisted on calling it. It had undoubtedly been a tower at one time, but Matthew found his own mind shying away from the designation. Although a way had been cleared to allow observers to climb to the top, and tunnels had been excavated to allow ingress to what had once been the interior, much of the surrounding vegetation had been left in place to provide supportive scaffolding. As he looked back up at it, the only Earthly tower to which Matthew could readily link it, imaginatively, was the fictitious one in which the Sleeping Beauty and her court had been committed to suspended animation until the day that her handsome prince would come. Even having made that link, though, he could not extend the analogy far enough to imagine himself as the Sleeping Beauty, and Nita Brownell or Konstantin Milyukov as the liberator prince.
“There should be more people here,” Lynn said, as they moved toward another, much shallower downslope. “More would be on their way from Base One as we speak if it weren’t for the fact that the groups in favor of a temporary or permanent withdrawal are becoming more paranoid by the day. With Milyukov on one side, insisting that they can’t be taken off the world again, and the frontiersmen on the other, insisting that we have to make a go of the colony and that everybody ought to stop whining and pull their weight, the situation at Base One is gradually turning into total farce. You know they’re planning some kind of election, I suppose? With everything that needs to be done down here, at least half of the people at Base One are devoting the bulk of their time and effort to organizing a bloody conference to determine their official position. Unbelievable! Almost as unbelievable as the idea that if they take a vote on it, the minority will immediately fall into line with the majority!”
“I’ve only heard rumors,” Matthew said, putting a hand on the wall beside the path to balance himself more securely. “No one was delegated to brief us on that sort of stuff, even though Milyukov seems to think that Bernal might have been murdered to deny him a voice in the big debate. Was he even planning to attend?”
“I doubt it. The only plan he seemed to be interested in during the days leading up to his
death was the river journey. The engraved wall’s just over there.”
Matthew picked out the relevant patch of wall easily enough. He’d been hoping that the photograph he’d looked at on Hope hadn’t done it justice, but the original was no clearer. The reality seemed, in a way, even more primitive than the image—but someone had obviously gone to considerable trouble to carve out the line drawing, given that any chisels they had available must have had brittle blades.
“Where’s the pyramid?” Matthew asked, suddenly.
“Good question,” Lynn replied. “We decided that it probably isn’t a structure at all. We think it’s a symbol. Maybe a kind of frame, maybe an arrow pointing up to the sky. It’s just a couple of lines—we only see it as a pyramid because we’re culturally preconditioned.”
“Maybe,” said Matthew, grudgingly. “It’s a pity Bernal didn’t get his cameras. If he’d been able to take them downriver with him, he’d have been able to put his two cents’ worth into the debate at Base One from a unique platform. Unless, of course, Milyukov decided to do likewise, in which case there’d have been a big on-screen argument. Bernal always loved a big showdown.”
“It’s not just some cheap TV event, Matthew,” she told him, with a measure of asperity, as she led him away from the mural, this time heading back the way they had come. “It’s real, and it might determine the fate of the colony.”
“Not unless it’s properly stage-managed, it won’t,” Matthew said. “There’ll be a lot of nonsense talked, and maybe a show of hands, and it will accomplish exactly nothing. The fact that there’s a power struggle going on aboard Hope might have convinced too many of us that there’s more than one possible outcome to this sorry mess, but there isn’t. Whatever happens up there, those of us who are down here are stuck here for the foreseeable future, and probably forever. If this is a death trap, we’ll die in it.”
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