TOTAL ECLIPSE

by John Brunner

  Time had passed. A lot of time. Shadows had lengthened and the breeze was strengthening with the approach of dusk. Cathy stirred and lowered her hands from her red-rimmed eyes; instantly the dry air erased her last tears.

  Poor Dugal. To have lived thirty-two years, with such a sharp mind, such splendid ambitions… and then to have it go for nothing. How like the natives of this world!

  Stiffly she rose and walked over to the group of her colleagues who were chatting with this new arrival, this man Ian Macauley who, at least according to Igor, had done work in his twenties which deserved comparison with that of Michael Ventris and Champollion. He was gaunt and gawky, and he kept nervously plucking at his untidy red hair, but to judge by the smiles on the others’ faces he was making a good impression.

  As she drew near, they fell silent and looked at her. No doubt Igor would already have explained why she was sitting alone crying. Well, for the moment that was over. She felt purged of grief for the time being, able to reason and react.

  “Dr. Macauley?” she said, and offered her hand. “I’m Cathy Polyzotis, as you’ve probably realised.”

  Somewhat awkwardly he shook with her, and said, “I’m—ah—I’m terribly sorry about your brother, Dr. Polyzotis.”

  “Cathy, please… Well, I was expecting it, you know. It had to happen sooner or later, and it can only happen once.” She hesitated and glanced around. “Is that general going to keep us waiting here all night as well as all day?”

  “He went back inside,” Igor grunted. “After examining the artefacts we’d packed for dispatch. Probably wants to make sure the computer records don’t describe them as ultra-guns or hyperbombs or whatever the hell.”

  “It makes me feel,” Cathy said with a shudder, “that everybody on Earth must have gone mad.”

  “Not quite,” Ian said. “But they’re getting close.”

  She blinked at him, and the rest of the little group were jolted, too.

  “You sound as though you mean that!” Olaf said.

  “I think I do. Simply knowing that another civilisation vanished, knowing above all that the explanation may be in the records they left behind which we can’t read… It’s preying on the mind of the human race.”

  “They want to be distracted at all costs,” Igor suggested. “Anything so as to stop thinking about the idea.”

  “Yes, I’m afraid that’s the size of it. The mood we left behind was… Well, I can only call it ugly.”

  Into a depressed pause there broke a booming shout from Ordoñez-Vico’s bullhorn. With Toko and Rorschach following, he had emerged from the nearest building, the one housing the computers and communications gear.

  “Attention, all of you! You may disperse to your quarters now. Bear in mind that my spy-eyes are monitoring literally every word and action! Assemble again in the refectory for a meal in thirty minutes. After you have eaten I propose to question you collectively, employing an advanced lie detector, and over the days to come I shall interrogate you individually, too. That is all!”

  He spun on his heel and marched back indoors.

  “He sounds like a prison-camp commandant!” Cathy said in horror.

  Ian answered in a low tone, “Yes, he comes of the same stock. An atavism. But I’m afraid he’s more typical of mankind than you or I.”

  VI

  It would have been hard to tell, simply by looking, that this base was in fact basic. Never before in human history had so much sheer ingenuity been focussed on so tiny a spot.

  When Ian reached the quarters assigned to him, pushing his belongings on a little trolley, he discovered they were amazingly spacious; he had expected far more primitive conditions—if not quite like those he was used to at archeological digs on Earth, then at any rate something cramped, like his cabin aboard Stellaris.

  On the contrary, the bedroom was large, he had his own bathroom, there was a sonic cleanser ready to accept his soiled clothing, the walls were brightly painted and there were cheerful curtains at the window which matched the coverlet of the bed.

  But, of course, they were locally spun from the same material used for flooring, and packaging delicate alien artefacts, and the table and the two chairs—one upright, one easy—were made of the same stuff, and the floor and the walls and the door and the ceiling and the bathtub and the shelves were all variants of the same simple metal plate with a foamed internal layer which was the best the foundry and machine shop here could offer, anodised with several colours.

  The changes were, nonetheless, very ingeniously rung. He was impressed—as impressed as he had been when, thinking in despair that his mass allotment of twenty kilos would mean leaving behind half the reference books and computer programmes he wanted to bring with him, he had discovered just how many data could be crammed into a single cassette of acceleratape when expense was virtually no object.

  He had wound up scratching his head and trying to decide what else he ought to take along.

  And he was positively shaken when he saw the variety of food offered in the cafeteria-styled refectory, which included every classic dish from every cuisine on Earth, plus a choice of more than fifty drinks to wash it down.

  And to think my briefing covered that in a single sentence—something like, “The machines provide a diet both nutritionally adequate and exceptionally varied.”

  He was frankly goggling at the array of selection knobs when Karen Vlady tapped his arm and murmured, “Ian dear, in the next two years you’ll have a chance to try them all!”

  A valid point, in the light of which it didn’t seem to matter that this first time he wound up, somehow, with bird’s-nest soup, souvlakia, mealie porridge with okra sauce, and peaches Melba. It all tasted most convincing.

  The refectory doubled as a lounge and conference hall. Around its walls were plastic couches, foamed, formed and furred in a single operation, light enough to be carried by one person if it was desired to rearrange the room. In the centre of the floor were stackable chairs and a dozen tables, each capable of seating four people.

  Ordoñez-Vico had arrived early and created for himself a sort of place of honour, with Rorschach, Wong and Weil as his companions. He ate little, but kept sweeping the room with a defiant, challenging glare.

  Ian accepted an invitation to sit with Cathy and Andrevski, with Olaf, Sue, Ruggiero and Irene Bakongu—who seemed to be an old and close friend of Ruggiero’s—at the next table. Even though Andrevski kept urging him to take another and yet another glass of a delicious white wine, based on a tape delivered by the second expedition which had retained extraordinarily fine detail despite countless replayings, Ian found the meal a terrible ordeal. Ordoñez-Vico’s spy-eyes had found their way indoors, inevitably, and one of them clung to the ceiling directly above their table like a patch of mould.

  Moreover the knowledge weighed on him: This is all of us, and very nearly all we have!

  Comparing this base to the planet as a whole was like comparing one human life-span to the period since the disappearance of the natives.

  He was not alone in lacking appetite. Much food was left on many plates… not that it mattered, for it would all be recycled through the processors. When the tension had reached near breaking point, Ordoñez-Vico finally rose, cleared his throat and produced his lie detector.

  “Your attention, please! First I propose to make some calibrations. I shall put some questions, and pick on one of you at random to supply the answer.”

  He left his seat and followed a weaving path through the hall which took him past every table. His glance darted from face to face, then to his lie detector, then back again. It was noticeable that his eyes paused a fraction longer when he looked at the women, as though he resented their presence.

  And it was a woman he called on to answer his first question: Toko Nabura.

  “These aliens—how long ago did they die out?”

  “About a hundred thousand years, plus or minus four thousand.”

  “Why aren’t you more pre
cise about the date? You!” And a woman again: Sue Tennant.

  Wearily she replied, “This is a world with vigorous tectonics and rapid changes of climate. It’s hard to calibrate the strata.”

  “Yet you assert that their earliest traces are only some three thousand years prior to their last. How do you explain that?” He was pointing at a woman again, and this time at Cathy.

  She had spent the meal in a brown study of depression, eating little, speaking only when addressed. Now, though, she contrived to rouse herself and find an answer.

  “Oh… Oh, everything points to it.”

  “I want details!” Ordoñez-Vico strode over to her. “Don’t think you can get away with vague double-talk!”

  “General!”—sharply, from Andrevski. “Cathy was told, only a few hours ago, that her brother died after she left Earth.”

  “I know all about that, and I still want a proper answer!”

  All around the hall chairs scraped as people pushed them back resignedly. This was going to be long and unpleasant, that was plain.

  But by now Cathy had all her wits about her and was looking Ordoñez-Vico straight in the eye. She said, “With respect, General, I’m not sure you’d understand if I said that the phi-diffusion factor in the modified orthorhodoclosites, the pyruvitic gangliar formations, and the Type G-9 artefacts which are the main items in respect of which we’ve so far established a definite temporal progression—because they are found at all the sites we’ve investigated rather than at one or two—when taken in conjunction with contemporary C-14 uptake in surviving near relatives of the natives, and the known decay rate of epidermal pseudo-chitin as established by testing it in various simulable media that correspond to actual conditions at the various city-sites… and sundry other factors, naturally… all these things are what we base our estimates upon, and they happen to coincide within a very narrow band of the past: three thousand years. But equally I am sure”—this with a sunny smile—“that you as an expert in your field will take an expert’s word in a field you’re not conversant with. Won’t you?”

  From the far side of the hall there was a noise as though somebody was trying to stifle a laugh, without much success. Ordoñez-Vico whirled, as though suspecting mockery, but all he saw was Achmed Hossein holding a napkin to his mouth and a great many polite smiles at surrounding tables.

  As for Ian, he wanted to clap his hands. But all he dared do was give Cathy a wink, which she acknowledged with a moue before reaching for the wine bottle.

  Breathing heavily, Ordoñez-Vico rounded on Rorschach.

  “You’ve been here six years—why haven’t you come up with any solid facts?”

  Rorschach, as usual, brushed at his bald forehead as though still expecting to find on it the hair he had lost since his arrival.

  “But we have. A great many. As a result of slow, thorough research, particularly by comparing the scanty remains of the intelligent species themselves—I mean their fragmentary corpses—with their nearest surviving relatives. Of which there are about four hundred and fifty, aren’t there, Lucas? I’m talking about species, obviously.”

  “Nearly five hundred when you take genetic resemblances into account,” Lucas Wong said with a sigh.

  “So what are these solid facts?” Ordoñez-Vico barked. “I didn’t notice them when I was going through your reports on Earth!”

  Rorschach allowed that point to sink into the minds of everybody else present by hesitating just sufficiently long before he answered.

  “This is almost cruel!” Cathy breathed.

  “He deserves it,” Ian muttered.

  “Well, for example,” Rorschach said, looking up at the ceiling, “we know they were very much like us in some respects. We know they were interested in the universe around them. We suspect they traded among each other. We’re almost certain they had the equivalent of writing, and beyond doubt they had transportation, communication, science, mathematics… But we also know that in some ways they were very different from mankind. Above all, their culture must have been as influenced as all human cultures have always been by sex.”

  He paused, having judged—rightly, as was clear—that he had used a word which in the general’s vocabulary was of limited significance, and pejorative into the bargain.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think you’d better ask Lucas, rather than me,” Rorschach suggested.

  “I will decide who is to answer which question. In this case… you!”

  He pointed at Nadine Shah, a handsome woman (a woman again, as though he really believed he could catch one in a lie more easily than he could a man) in her late forties, who was Lucas’s chief assistant and the leading authority present on comparative biology.

  In a clear voice she replied, “Unless they were improbably different from their surviving cousins, they were bisexual as we are, but both sexes coexisted in the same individual. Infancy was a neuter stage; there followed a male stage; and after that there was a comparatively short female stage prior to the infertility of old age.”

  That, for the moment, silenced Ordoñez-Vico, and gave Rudolf Weil the chance to say, “That’s new, isn’t it?”

  Nadine nodded. “Yes, when you last called we were still under the misapprehension that we were dealing with no more than an extreme degree of sexual differentiation. Now we’ve actually tracked several individuals through the transition stage. It lasts about a year, after which what was a functional male is incontestably a functional female. There are terrestrial parallels, of course, such as oysters.”

  “Kindly do not talk among yourselves!” Ordoñez-Vico snapped. “Simply answer my questions!”

  Obediently the company fell silent again.

  “Explain more about the differences between them and us. You!” Pointing now at Ruggiero Bono.

  “They thought differently from the way we do, and that’s the long and short of it,” sighed the little dark man. “They approached problems similar to ours by a different route. Up there on the moon they equipped their telescope with—with something organic, where we’d have used solid-state electronics. We dug that flying machine out from under a pile of snow, and from that and everything else that’s reasonably intact we’ve deduced that they could store enormous amounts of energy in ways we’d regard as fit only for a kid’s toy: like twisting rubber bands! They used springs and filaments, except somehow they managed to pack the energy right away on the molecular level. Oh, they did things we can barely guess at!”

  “So what happened to them?” Ordoñez-Vico rapped, and pointed at Andrevski for the answer.

  Perfectly calm and collected, the chief archeologist wiped a trace of wine from his upper lip and planted both elbows on the table with a thoughtful expression. “Well, a great many possibilities remain open,” he said judiciously. “I’ll list them with their various pros and cons, keeping track as best I can. There’s the possibility that they may have emigrated, to begin with.”

  “What?”

  “Well, as I said, many possibilities remain open! Myself, I don’t think that’s to be seriously considered. More to the point, perhaps, is the idea of epidemic disease. We know they had rapid transportation, so it’s conceivable that they may have spread some fatal virus so swiftly around the planet they had no chance to develop immunity against it. On the other hand, the bioelectronics on the moon, which have just been mentioned, argue that they must have been very skilled in organic chemistry. It’s reasonable to assume that their medicine too would have been very advanced.

  “Did they exterminate themselves in a war? Well, we’ve found no traces to suggest that any of their cities were laid waste by other than the natural forces: weathering, earthquakes and suchlike. But it’s not impossible, even though we’ve ruled out explosives, nuclear or otherwise, and massive doses of any substance we know to be poisonous to the contemporary fauna. And radiation weapons, too. It’s been suggested that some disease may have been deliberately sown broadcast—in other words, they may
have fought a biological war—but there’s an excellent reason for discarding that idea, too.”

  “What?”

  “How could they have crammed such a vast range of achievement into so short a time if they’d wasted any of their ingenuity on quarrelling among themselves? We’ve surveyed this planet from space over and over and over; we’ve probed the surface with sonar, electronic detectors, all our most reliable techniques. We’ve found a coherent cross section of relics. In three thousand years they went from—oh—what we’d call the Neolithic stage, smelting copper and baking pottery vessels, to spaceflight. It took us more than twice as long.”

  “How do you know these conditions didn’t exist simultaneously?” Ordoñez-Vico broke in. “They do on Earth!”

  “A very acute question,” Andrevski acknowledged. “Let me make my point a little clearer. We have found a central focus from which their culture appears to have disseminated—the sole place at which the full range of artefacts has been discovered. As one progresses along a line of expansion, or more exactly a cone of expansion, because it broadens as it grows longer, the lower level disappears. At the far side of the planet from this focus I mentioned, there seem to be no primitive vessels, no copper implements, no artefacts that can be dated to the earlier, rather than the later, stage of their development. It’s as though, to take an earthly analogy, the civilisation which arose in the Fertile Crescent had expanded without interruption westwards, engulfed Europe, crossed to North America, then spread to the far side of the Pacific, expanded over the whole of Asia and India and returned to its still-intact point of origin, where, naturally, things would by then have been very much changed. This is another thing to bear in mind when considering the possibility of them being wiped out in a war: this single continuous expansion, as though they never met any opposition. Without opposition, what cause for war? But—” Andrevski raised an admonitory finger. “This brings in a related subject, one which I presume to have been at the forefront of the minds of those who sent you. Were they wiped out by an attack from space?”