by John Brunner
Working furiously, but hardly daring to stop even when they neared exhaustion for fear that the machines might uncover some all-important new object when they were asleep, Igor and Cathy and Sue and Olaf and the rest of the archeological team exposed the matching four buildings with painstaking thoroughness. Meantime, Nadine Shah and Lucas Wong studied the statues with the aid of Ruggiero.
There were indeed four of them, one per building, and as nearly as could be defined they were identical, apart from incidental damage during their long period underground. Why, why, why should the first-ever naturalistic sculpture found here be on a monumental scale? These statues were without precedent; not even figurines or dolls had been dug up before.
And then came more unanswerable questions.
As the digging machines reached the original ground level, they revealed a surface very like an earthly pavement, cracked and deformed now but obviously once all of one piece, a poured layer as durable as concrete made of grit bonded in a resin chemically akin to epoxy glue. On it were fragments of roughly cobbled, virtually primitive devices: a wheel and a rod that might have been an axle and a bearing or trunnion that didn’t fit it properly, suggesting some kind of simple cart; another, detectable chiefly because of the metal cramps which had held it together when most of its substance, perhaps wooden, had rotted to leave only smudges of anomalous compounds in the peat, incontestably—so the computer reconstructions claimed—a cross between a barrow and a sled, a container to be dragged along on a plain runner, without even one wheel…
So out of keeping with the master-craftsmanship of the buildings, let alone the artistic brilliance of those statues!
The entrance to the first building proved to conform to the usual doorless Draconian pattern. Ian and Igor had thrashed out a theory to account for that; suppose, they said, that anything solid enough to be what we would call a door was also solid enough to isolate the occupants from the interplay of electrical fields outside—then it would follow that they’d find the situation intolerable, just as a man shut in a sensory-deprivation tank with neither light nor sound will go insane. Something might once have plugged those openings to conserve heat, but it would have been thin and soft and easily destroyed by time.
Just inside, they made a series of even more astonishing discoveries.
First, they came on a vast printed crystal: ten metres long, almost two metres high, emanating—very weakly, but unmistakably—a single clear pattern of resonance. Then, beyond, they came into a wide-open hall, lighted by day from above because, as it turned out, the material from which the statue on the roof was constructed was translucent, and admitted soft coloured luminance, much like a stained-glass window.
There were objects, artefacts, blocks of crystal, blocks of some kind of plastic, countless things distributed randomly around the floor. But what was most important was that here were also a full score of Draconian corpses, excellently preserved by comparison with any that had been studied before, and including for the first time ever a full range of the species: from a sedentary old female, perhaps already into the dusk of senility, clear down to a baby, no longer than a man’s forearm.
Lucas and Nadine shouted unashamedly for joy when they came on this treasure trove, and instantly set about examining them.
Within a day, they were prepared to state categorically that for the first time the human investigators had tapped into the decadent, preterminal phase of the natives’ existence.
“But how can you be so certain so quickly?” Ruggiero demanded when they announced their opinions to the assembled company that night over the evening meal. Here, there was none of the comparative luxury to be found at the base; they sat on stools and ate with their plates on their knees, and all that stood between them and the chill of the night was a two-layer inflatable which Karen had hastily had made from a simple plastic.
Nobody cared.
“Three main reasons,” Nadine said. “First, although the soft internal organs were destroyed very quickly by putrefying bacteria just as they would have been at home, something stopped the process before the outer integument was seriously affected, and the actual skeletal structure is virtually intact. We’ve found what can only have been congenital deformities. Ankylosed joints, for example, particularly in the case of the baby, which exhibits complete fusion of one joint in each forelimb and two other fusions in the walking limbs.
“Second, the associated artefacts. One of them is—was—still clutching what we recognised after a bit of ‘that’s familiar’ as a regular Type H-2 artefact, but carefully ground down to make a knife. Or some sort of cutting tool, anyway.”
“Excuse me,” Karen said. “For the moment I forget what H-2 is.”
“Glass with embedded strands of something apparently organic, about nineteen or twenty centimetres long.”
“Oh, yes. Now I know what you mean. You say ground down?”
“No doubt of it. By rubbing on a smooth piece of rock.” Nadine stretched and suppressed a yawn. “One can still detect traces of the rock in the parallel microscopic grooves that converge towards the sharp end.”
“I find the case convincing already,” Rorschach said. “But what’s your third point?”
Lucas took up the tale. “Even the skin patterns are preserved,” he said. “You must have noticed that when you broke in here, Igor?”—with a glance at the elderly archeologist. “And they’re diffuse. Irregular. You might say deformed. While those on the statues are perfectly regular.”
“That I’m not convinced by,” Igor said. “Why should not they have idealised their monumental statuary? We do.”
“Far more important,” Olaf Mukerji said, “why only monumental statuary?”
“I think I can answer that,” Ruggiero said suddenly, and snapped his fingers. “Yes! Ian, you’d be the person to put this idea to, which just this moment hit me. I’ve been calibrating the properties of the substance those statues are built from, and I can say definitely that it’s extremely sophisticated. It doesn’t behave the way you’d expect in any band of the spectrum bar visible light. I’m not talking about X rays or gamma rays, obviously. But in terms of—oh—ambient electrical fields, above all, it’s doing things I didn’t think were possible.” He set aside his food plate and hunched forward.
“Could it be that they didn’t make statues until they were technologically advanced enough to create a substance that—well, that gave back a signal corresponding to a real Draconian? In other words, until they could make a statue that was lifelike in electrical as well as visual terms?”
“It figures,” Ian said at once. “Thank you, Ruggiero; I like it! I’ll go see if there’s any correspondence between the signal from the giant printed crystal and—”
“Tomorrow!” Rorschach boomed as Ian made to rise and leave. “We still have a year and a half before the ship comes back, you know!”
Ian gave a rueful grin and resumed his seat.
“And there’s something I propose to do tomorrow, too,” Igor said. They all glanced at him. He went on, “We know the Draconians liked areas of high humidity, as one would expect, moist air being a good conductor and dry air a very poor one. Hence, for instance, their neglect of such areas as the high arid plateau where the base is. But I’m wondering whether there are enough data in store for us to recover something about the meteorological patterns of a hundred thousand years ago. It was what Ruggiero just said that reminded me of this point; it occurred to me a few years ago, and there were insufficient data then, and I’d forgotten again until now. Nadine!”
“Yes?”
“You’ve mainly concentrated on animal life, I think, but I presume you’ve studied vegetation, too?”
She hesitated long enough for Lucas to say, “Of course. We had to from the beginning, to make sure what species were best suited for conversion into food and plastics.”
“Now, I’m ignorant in this area,” Igor said, leaning forward. “But I seem to recall reading that—oh—a forest can chang
e the local climate. Is there any way we can determine whether the Draconians deliberately altered the climate to facilitate their expansion?”
Ian whistled and slapped his knee, and someone behind him clapped hands.
“We should be able to establish that, yes,” Lucas said with a pleased smile. “You mean see if the plants associated with city-sites form a continuum?”
“More or less,” Igor agreed.
“But in some cases we know they did,” Nadine said. “We’ve been assuming that when a species of plant was taken from one continent to another it was for food. We’ve found, for example, seeds right at this site here which belong to species widespread only on another continent. And even some fairly well preserved fronds.”
“But we haven’t specifically checked to see whether any are plants that encourage moisture in the air,” Lucas countered. “It’s a useful new line of approach, isn’t it?”
“Oh yes!” Nadine said, nodding. “We’ll certainly programme a computer to follow it up.”
After that there was a short pause, broken at last by Rorschach, who gave a chuckle.
“Know something? I like you a lot! I love working with you. Every time we reach a new plateau of discovery, you can be relied on to mull things over for a while and generate a thousand new ideas in quick-fire succession. Lucas, I predict a lot of insomnia tonight. Suppose you ask around and see if anybody wants tranquilizing. Me, I’m tired. I’m going to say good night—and I’ll be the first on the list for a tranquilizer, please, because my brain is whirring like a turbine.”
Half an hour later, in the companionable darkness of the tent they were sharing now, Ian said sleepily to Cathy, “You know, you’re a better tranquilizer than any that comes in a pill.”
She gave him a playful jab in the ribs. “So that’s what you make love to me for!”
He chuckled and drew her down close to him. Resting his cheek against the softness of her hair, he said, “In a way, yes. That is why.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“Oh…” With the arm he didn’t have around her shoulders, he made a gesture in the air. “I guess what I mean is that you’ve worked a marvelous transformation in me. When I came here, I was scared and worried and—and outright terrified, on a very deep level of my mind. Now I’m not. I get dreadfully frustrated now and then, but because you’re you and because you decided you liked me, I’m able to digest it and recover and carry on.” He hesitated. “What I really mean, I suspect, is that I love you very much.”
There was a moment of silence. Then, in a changed voice, Cathy said, “I’m beginning to love you, too, Ian. In a way I never felt for anyone before except Dugal. A closeness. A sense of intimacy. ‘Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh…’ Except that it’s more ‘mind of my mind,’ if you follow me.”
“That’s right,” Ian said, and hugged her tightly.
Nothing else, for the time being, seemed worth saying, and Ian was almost sure Cathy had dozed off when suddenly she said, “Do you suppose the Draconians fell in love?”
“I don’t know,” Ian said in surprise. “Maybe… No! No, I doubt it, on reflection. If it’s true they constantly communicated one with another just by existing, then very probably they’d have been in much the same relationship as a brother and sister, as it were—except, since all females were elderly, it might have been more parental. You loved Dugal, but you never fell in love with him.”
“I see what you mean,” she murmured. “The same thing used to happen in a kibbutz, didn’t it? At least according to some authorities.”
“Right; I ran across that, too. Kids raised in close association, much like members of one large family, tended to be reflexively exogamous. They married out of the community more often than they married within it. And if it’s really true that the Draconians expanded smoothly from one focal point, then they would all have belonged to one community, as it were, and the situation would scarcely have been conducive to what we call falling in love.”
“Poor things,” Cathy said drowsily. “What they missed…!”
And, a minute later, she was fast asleep.
XIV
Little by little, the same process as usual overtook all the new discoveries: they erupted like lava from the crater of a volcano, and glowed and flowed for a while—longer than at any other stage since humans arrived here, granted, but doomed to the same fate in the end—and finally they cooled into the dull, grey, obdurate mass of another insoluble problem.
It took almost half a year for that stage to be reached, however. Nearly to the midpoint of his first tour here, Ian was kept abuzz with the continual stimulus of fresh suggestions.
In the other three identical buildings, there were no well-preserved corpses, but there were skeletal remains, and in nearby buildings others were found, many of them being somewhat deformed, too. Moreover they kept unearthing more primitive constructs and tools, right on the topmost layer above the pavement, as they moved outward from the centre. It was generally agreed within a couple of months that this could well have been the spot where the last of the race came to huddle and wait for death. Another indication that this was a safe assumption was presented when a skeleton of an old female was found with a hideously deformed embryo’s skeleton enclosed in the womb area; no trace of the hide or internal organs had survived, and a predator or carrion-eater had gnawed the bones, but enough remained in association with each other for the situation to be reconstructed by the computers.
“Is it possible,” Rorschach asked Igor and Ian, “that they regarded those statues as some sort of magic charm? Were they dying out because of some dominant harmful mutation, and did they erect the statues as a last desperate appeal to the powers that be? Something idealised, beautiful, glamorous in the strict sense…?”
Ian clawed his beard. “It’s a sound speculation,” he admitted. “But somehow it doesn’t jibe with the impression of the natives’ psychology that I’m evolving in my mind.”
Igor glanced at him sharply. “Why not? Look, we’ve established that those huge printed crystals, one at the entrance of each of the four buildings—go ahead and call them temples, I’d say!—each of the four resonates a single loud pattern. To the Draconians they must have been as deafening as a siren!”
“True enough, and the pattern is very simple and very clear,” Ian conceded. “But the whole sequence of their development runs counter to the idea. They seem to have hit on a grand plan, and stuck to it for about three millennia, and collapsed so abruptly that they were back to the simplest and most primitive devices in the blink of an eye. Now, I simply can’t make myself believe that if they’d been handicapped by belief in capricious supernatural beings they’d have achieved what they did. And for the notion of gods or fate or what-have-you to appear at the very last moment… No, it rings false.”
“Unless they did have religious convictions right back at the beginning, discarded them and retained only the memory of their existence as a historical curiosity,” Rorschach offered. “That might explain why they reappeared at the eleventh hour.”
“Ye-es…” But Ian still sounded doubtful. “I’ll add it to my computerised hypotheses, see if the machines can come up with any pointers to it. But I can’t in good faith assign it a high priority.”
“I’m not asking you to,” Rorschach murmured. “It’s just that for the first time since we discovered Ash I have time on my hands. Everyone is so busy, they aren’t creating administrative problems.”
“Just as well,” Igor grunted. “Problems of our own would be superfluous, given the quantity we’ve had wished on us by the natives.”
Occasional breakthroughs continued. It was with high delight that Nadine came to report spin-off from Igor’s remark about plants that would tend to keep the local humidity high.
“We ran a complete review of all our data about the vegetation,” she announced. “Not only does your idea check out, Igor, because we’ve discovered something that’s been right under our noses an
d should have been spotted long ago, but we got a bonus with it.”
She had come upon them while they were impatiently waiting for the digging machines to remove another metre-thick layer of the cover; at this depth, the decayed vegetable matter was so compressed that it was lignitic, on the way to becoming coal, and the task was proceeding slowly.
“Well, tell us all about it,” Igor invited, leaning back against the rail of the catwalk spanning the now enormous pit.
“First off, we discovered that there was a genetic explosion among the plant life here just about a hundred thousand years ago.” Nadine paused impressively.
“Do you mean,” Cathy ventured, “that some common cause led to the plants and the animal life mutating?”
“No, that’s too wild a guess. What it does look like is proof that the Draconians practised selective breeding of crops. It was to be expected, given their use of bioelectronics, but for some idiotic reason we never actually sought out the evidence before. Igor, we’re obliged to you.”
Igor waved the compliment aside. Ian said, “You’re talking about—oh—the kind of process which evolved wheat from wild grass?”
“Exactly. But not just that. Let me get on to the bonus. It’s far more than just proof of something we should have thought of before. Enough unaltered substance remained in the corpses we found over there”—Nadine gestured towards the first of the four identical buildings, now referred to as “temples” despite Ian’s misgivings on the matter—“for us to conduct some comparative studies on the germ plasm of the Draconians, and that of the contemporary fauna. Care to guess what we came up with?”
The others exchanged blank looks. Ian suggested, “Proof of selective breeding among animals, too? But surely you’d expect that. We know the Draconians were primarily herbivorous, don’t we? But that needn’t have prevented them from breeding pets or the counterpart of milch cows!”