The quality of Oar’s voice as she replied to me—the way the surrounding trees absorbed the sound and muted it.
The slash, slash, slash of our feet through fallen leaves.
A covey of quail which suddenly flushed from cover as we approached.
A flock of geese flying south in a lopsided V, their honking distant and piercingly autumnal.
Topping a rise and seeing a great open marsh in front of us, sparkling in the clear sunlight.
The small nose of a muskrat weaving along the edge of the creek in the marsh’s center.
Oar fastidiously cleaning her feet after picking her way across mud. (“It is brown and ugly, Festina; people will think I am stupid if my feet are brown and ugly.”)
Watching a great blue heron balance on one leg as it scanned the water for prey.
Borrowing Oar’s axe so I could cut down a cattail, then pulling the plant’s fuzzy head apart as we continued through the swamp.
The maddening suspicion that there were eggs all around me: heron eggs hidden by bulrushes, turtle eggs buried in the mud, frog eggs globbed just beneath the creek’s surface. I knew better—on Earth, few species laid eggs so soon before winter—but still I was seized by impulses to look behind patches of reeds or kick the dirt with my toe…as if I had acquired some mystic intuition of eggs calling to me.
I hadn’t. I found nothing. And in time, twilight closed around us as we reached the far edge of the marsh.
My Sleeping Bag
Beyond the marsh was forest; we built camp just inside the trees. More precisely, Oar went to gather firewood, while I pulled handfuls of marsh greenery as input for the food synthesizer. Once the machine had begun digesting the plants, I went to my backpack and debated opening my sleeping bag.
Like most Explorer equipment, standard-issue sleeping bags were compact. They had no bulky padding; an open bag looked like a sheath of tin foil, shiny side in. The foil didn’t have the weight of a nice down comforter, but it was a good insulator for all its thinness—the glossy interior reflected back most escaping body heat. Surprisingly, the entire bag could be folded into a package no bigger than the flat of your hand.
It could be folded that way exactly once: at the factory where the bag was manufactured. Once you broke the shrink-wrap containing the bag, you would never fold the damned thing neatly again. It turned into a crinkly cranky mess of foil, billowing unmanageably in the slightest breeze and smooth enough to slip from your hands unless you held it in a death grip. The best refolding job I ever managed produced a lumpy wad as big as a pillow. Try jamming that into your rucksack when the original package was the size of an envelope.
So: to open or not to open the bag, that was the question—whether it was worse to spend the night unprotected, huddled against Oar for warmth, or to open the bag now and spend the rest of my life on this planet, fighting with a misshapen clump of surly tin.
To hell with it. I’d sooner shiver.
Around the Campfire
We ate around the campfire, Oar picking out the clear jelly blobs and me eating the rest. It took several courses to fill our stomachs. We would stuff the synthesizer with biomass, wait eighteen minutes, then eat the results while the machine whirred away on another batch.
While we ate, we talked…which is to say, Oar talked and I asked enough questions to keep her going. I wanted to learn all I could about her background, especially what she knew about the history of her planet.
She knew almost nothing. The far past was a blank; even the recent past was vague. Oar couldn’t remember her father—her mother had pointed him out in the Tower of Ancestors, but he had been dormant Oar’s whole life. Sometime during the pregnancy, he had simply decided enough was enough.
That was forty-five years ago.
It unsettled me that Oar was forty-five: she was almost twice as old as me. On the other hand, I had seen that her people didn’t show their age…and why should I think of her as childlike, just because her English was simplistic? How’s your grasp of her language? I asked myself.
It brought up an interesting question.
“Oar,” I said, “how did you learn to talk like Explorers? Did Jelca and Ullis teach you?”
“Yes.”
“They taught you to speak this well…and how long were they here?”
“A spring and a summer, three years ago.”
“You learned this much English in six months? That’s fast, Oar.”
“I am very smart, Festina,” she answered. “Not stupid, like Explorers.”
It struck me she might be right. Bioengineering made her stronger and tougher than me; why not smarter too? Admittedly, Earth’s attempts at building smarter people had seldom met with success: tinkering with the brain was so complex, most intelligence enhancement experiments ended in tragic failure. Even “successful” research projects had a ratio of ten thousand dead or near-vegetable infants for every child who turned out a cut above normal. Still, Melaquin had succeeded in so many other DNA modifications, why not heightened learning ability? It could work with the right approach—nothing crude like a mere increase in skull capacity, but exploring how humans truly differed from other animals….
Neotony. Maybe that was it.
“Neotony” was a biological term related to a prolonged period of childhood. Humans were the winners in that category, at least on Earth; some species took longer to reach sexual maturity, but nothing required parental care as long as Homo sapiens. From time to time, zoologists hypothesized that neotony was a prime factor in human intelligence. After all, children learn enormous quantities of knowledge in a short span of time—much more than the greatest genius manages later in life. Some experts thought that the length of human childhood kept our brains in a state of accelerated learning for years longer than anything else in the animal kingdom…precisely what put us ahead of other species in terms of thinking capacity. If you keep acquiring knowledge at high speed for ten to fifteen years, you’re just naturally going to beat animals who hit then-plateau at two months.
Suppose the Melaquin engineers extended the childlike learning phase even longer—decades past us normal-flesh humans. Suppose a forty-year-old could learn languages with the wide-open ease of a toddler. And keeping these glass people childlike wasn’t a safety hazard: they were practically invulnerable and had all their needs supplied by machines like the food synthesizer.
On the other hand, childlike brains might have their drawbacks in the end; after decades of operating at top speed, burnout might easily set in. Was there a neural chemical responsible for feelings of interest, curiosity, wonder? To construct childlike minds, the engineers may have pumped that chemical up to intense levels—levels that just couldn’t be sustained forever. After years of high-capacity effort, the gland that produced the chemical might simply succumb to overwork. Result? Motivational shutdown. A deep metabolic lethargy.
It was all guesswork, but the logic held together. I gazed at Oar, seated across from me with the campflre’s reflection flickering on her face. A sting of tears burned in my eyes. Pity is stupid, I told myself. Every organism breaks down eventually. My father’s heart broke down…my mother’s liver. Why feel unbearably poignant that Oar’s weak spot is her brain?
But the tears did not stop stinging.
Walking (Part 2)
We slept the night in spoon position, with the Bumbler keeping watch for prowling bears. Only my legs got cold— the rest of my body was protected by the insulated remains of my tightsuit. An hour before dawn, I heaped fallen leaves over me from thigh to ankle, so I wasn’t directly exposed to the breeze. The improvement was immediate; I kicked myself mentally for not doing it when I first lay down. Something had frazzled my survival instincts, and I couldn’t allow that to continue.
The day dawned cloudy, and by noon it was raining. The good news was that we were walking through forest; the bad news was that the trees had shed enough leaves for rain to get through anyway. Little dribbles trickling down Oar’s body l
ooked like drops on a windowpane.
The drizzle continued intermittently for a day and a half. It started warm but turned colder on the second morning: a drop of five degrees according to the Bumbler. I hoped this wasn’t the tip of the icestorm…but the temperature stabilized during the afternoon of our third day of travel, and the clouds thinned enough to let the sun glimmer through whitely. By then, we had reached the end of full forest and were picking our way through patchier groves down into the great prairie basin.
The next day we had to detour around an enormous herd of buffalo grazing directly in our path. Oar was surprised we didn’t walk straight through them; but large bull ruminants are notorious for nasty tempers, and I had no intention of getting trampled. It took four hours to circle to a point where we could turn south again, which tells you how big the herd was…several thousand animals in total, all of them shaggy with winter fur.
In midafternoon, with the herd still visible behind us, we came upon a dozen wolves. No doubt, the pack was shadowing the buffalo; I couldn’t remember whether wolves were day or night predators, but they would attack when they were ready, running in to pull down a calf or an elderly animal too weak to defend itself. In the meantime, they eyed us from a judicious distance of a hundred meters, sizing up our food potential.
“Clap your hands,” I murmured to Oar.
“Are we expressing admiration for those dogs?”
“Just do it!”
Oar slapped her hands together several times: glass on glass, each impact as loud as a hammer blow. The noise hurt my ears; and the wolf pack vanished like mist at dawn, slipping silently away through the tall grass.
We had no more trouble with animals that day. Most wildlife stayed away from us through the entire journey. As the terrain flattened out, it became easy to spot ground mammals a long way off—prairie dogs, rabbits, coyotes— but they always disappeared before we came near. Birds let us get closer; they stared at us suspiciously from trees or bushes, or flew overhead in vast migratory flocks. It was late the same day we passed the buffalo that I looked up at one flock and said, “Holy shit!”
“Do Explorers revere shit?” Oar asked with interest.
“It’s an expression,” I said, still staring at the sky. “Do you know what those birds are?”
“No, Festina.”
“I can’t be sure…but I think they’re passenger pigeons.”
The Pigeons
“Do those pigeons carry passengers?” Oar asked. “I should enjoy flying on a bird.”
“I don’t know why they’re called passenger pigeons,” I told her. “They’ve been extinct for five hundred years.”
“Extinct means dead?”
“Yes.”
Oar burst into giggles. “Dead things do not move, Festina. You are very, very stu—confused.”
I didn’t answer. Over the past few days, I had grudgingly accepted Melaquin as Earth’s near-twin; but the sight of an extinct species jolted me. There weren’t even passenger pigeons on New Earth—when the League of Peoples built humanity its new home, they could only duplicate what was still alive on….
“Damn, I’m stupid!” I said, hitting my head with my palm.
“No, just confused,” Oar insisted generously.
Duplication
In all my time on Melaquin, my mind had been too lost in dismay and distraction to put the pieces together. The League of Peoples had already proved it could duplicate Earth—after the schism that divided humanity, the League had built New Earth as a refuge for those who agreed to respect the galactic peace. Humans who refused to give up armed violence were quarantined on their old planet, stuck with the legacy of pollution and war accumulated over the centuries; but those who abandoned their weapons were given a clean new planet: Earth without the garbage. New Earth was a “Welcome to the Universe” gift from the League of Peoples…along with star drives, YouthBoost, and other goodies no sentient race should do without.
Why had it taken me so long to remember New Earth was artificially constructed? Stupid, Festina: very stupid. But now that my eyes were open, everything made sense.
Some time far in the past—long enough ago that history didn’t record it—members of the League must have visited Old Earth. They made the same proposal then that they made to humanity in the twenty-first century: prove your sentience by renouncing violence, and we will give you the stars. As in the more recent contact, some prehistoric people must have said yes while others said no…and those who agreed not to kill were given a new home elsewhere in the galaxy.
Here on Melaquin.
This planet must have been built by the League to duplicate Earth at that long-ago time…including the presence of passenger pigeons. Somewhere Melaquin must also have dodos, moas, and other species that hadn’t survived recent times on our Earth; unless the humans who came to Melaquin had killed those animals all over again.
No, I thought to myself. They didn’t kill the animals, they killed themselves. Either they developed bioengineering on their own, or they received it as a gift from the League; and they had turned themselves into glass creatures like Oar—tougher, stronger, smarter, and a complete evolutionary dead-end.
“Festina,” Oar said, “are you becoming crazed again?”
I must have been standing frozen, thinking it all through. “No,” I answered, “I’m not crazed…although you may think I am when I tell what I want to do.”
“What?”
“We’re going to find rocks and look for creatures that probably aren’t there.”
Paleontology
There is one simple difference between Old and New Earth: the original planet has fossils; the duplicate does not. When the League gave New Earth artificial deposits of sandstone, limestone or shale, they didn’t enliven the rock with simulated remnants of ancient life. For the sake of raw materials, they did create fields of petroleum, coal, and other fossil resources…but not the fossils themselves.
I bet Melaquin didn’t have fossils either.
The most promising excavation site within view was the shore of a creek half an hour ahead of us. Water cuts down into soil, exposing stones that would otherwise require digging to bring to the surface. The creek bank should have a good sample of easy-to-pry-out rocks; if I checked a few dozen without finding fossils, I could be fairly confident my hunch was right.
“We’re going to that creek,” I told Oar.
“Yes, Festina,” she answered patiently. “Going around it would take a long time.”
Creeks were plentiful in that part of the prairies. Most were a few paces wide and barely thigh-deep, so crossing them was no challenge—just cold and wet. The one we approached now was larger than average, but still too small to deserve the name “river”: thirty meters across, sluggish and barely over our heads in depth. In spring, it might be deeper; but now the water level was low enough to leave a healthy sweep of gravel uncovered on the near shore.
“Perfect,” I said. “As good as we’re going to find on short notice.”
“Do you want me to clap in admiration of the creek?” Oar asked.
“No need.” I climbed down the dirt bank to the gravel and stared around appraisingly. The top layer of stones were worn smooth by water action—whatever fossils they once contained could have eroded to invisibility. Still, I might find better samples underneath; and there were other places to look for exposed deposits.
“Oar,” I said, “can you please walk along the bank and see if there are any rocks sticking out of the dirt? I’m looking for rocks with edges…not smooth like these pebbles.”
“What shall I do if I find one?”
“Bring it to me.”
She looked at me dubiously. “You want me to touch dirty rocks, Festina? That is not very nice.”
“You can wash your hands after—the creek’s right there.”
“Is the creek water clean?”
“Clean enough,” I said, stretching a point. It was actually a bit muddy, thanks to silt washed
down by the previous day’s rain. No doubt, it also contained the usual disease-causing microbes one finds in untreated water: typhoid perhaps, and a cornucopia of viruses for intestinal flu. However, Oar had little to worry about—along with the other improvements in her body, she probably had a nigh-impregnable immune system. Why not? Her designers had built in everything else.
I envied her for that. Since the start of our trip, I’d carefully purified the water we drank, boiling it on the campfire and filling enough canteens to last us through the next day. I also had water purification tablets if the canteens ran dry, but I preferred to use those sparingly, since I could never replenish my supply. Still, I worried about infection. If this planet really was a duplicate of Earth from millennia ago, it might have smallpox, diphtheria, pneumonic plague: famous diseases, extinct in the rest of the galaxy, but possibly still thriving here on Melaquin.
Maybe Oar was right to worry about getting dirty.
With the air of a woman who hopes she doesn’t find anything, Oar started walking slowly along the water’s edge. I turned my attention to the gravel flat and began to dig down. Sure enough, the stones were not so eroded a few centimeters below the top surface. I was just beginning to examine them for fossil evidence when the Bumbler’s alarm went off.
EM Anomaly
I did my programmed roll-and-tuck, having the good fortune to dive in the direction of the Bumbler rather than throwing myself into the nearby creek. With fists ready for trouble, I kicked the Bumbler’s shut-up switch and scanned the area.
I saw no threat, but standing on the creek-bed, I was three meters lower than the main level of the prairie. Anything could be up there, lurking just out of sight.
Not far away, Oar opened her mouth to say something. I held up a hand and held my finger to my lips. She closed her mouth and looked around warily.
Think, I told myself. What could the Bumbler detect from here? It might be a false alarm—Bumblers did make mistakes—but Explorers who dismissed such warnings soon had their names entered on the Academy’s Memory Wall.
The League of Peoples Page 17