In the Ocean of Night (40 page)

When asked why they live in small groups, the Bush-men of the Kalahari reply that they fear war.

Tribes, clans, pacts. Africa the cauldron, Africa the crucible. Olduvai Gorge. Serengeti Plain. The Great Rift that circled the planet, a giant baseball seam, splitting, twisting, churning the dry, dusty plains of Africa. Earthquakes and volcanoes that forced migration and pushed the hunter onward in search of game.

Here is where ritual began, some said: the great peace that comes of doing a thing over and over again, every step spelled out in fine detail. The numbing, reassuring chant, the prescribed steps of the dance—creating a system where all is certain, all is regular, a substitute pocket universe for the uncertain and unpredictable world outside.

A dry rattle of turning pages cut the silence of the room as he read. He skimmed through an analysis of ritual as the social cement.
Running living leaping soaring.
Nigel made a small bitter laugh.
Only once and all together. Joyful singing love forever.

He grimaced.

The birthplace: a dry, straw-colored plain with scattered bushes, dark green clumps near swamps and water holes, the long winding ribbon of green that lines the course of a small river. The language of fur, horns, claws, scales, wings. The serene logic of sharp yellow teeth and blunt clubs. A creature who walks upright, leading a ragged troop behind. Jaw and mouth thrust forward, a trace of muzzle. Low forehead and flattish nose. He climbs trees, he seeks water, he learns and remembers.

Reason and murder. The rich, evil smell of meat.

The women, who stayed behind during the hunt to gather roots and berries, now prefer vegetables and fruits and salads. In a man’s restaurant the menu is thick steaks and roast beef, rare.

A skull, three hundred millennia old, showing clear signs of murder. But with such built-in tension, such rivalry, how did men ever come to cooperate? Why did they erupt from the bloody cradle of Africa, products of an entirely new kind of evolution? Ramapithecus to Australopithecus africans to Homo erectus to Neanderthal to Walmsley, the litany which should explain everything and said nothing, really, about the great mystery of why it all happened.

Genes, the brute push of circumstance, Darwin’s remorseless machine. Flexibility. The complexity of uncommitted structures in the brain, they said. Nerve cells with subtle interconnections not fixed at birth, but patterned by the stamp of experience.

Hands, eyes, upright gait. An excited male chimp snaps a branch from a tree, brandishes it, rears up on two feet and drags it away. Other chimps follow, chittering among the trees, tearing away branches and waving them. They jump through the green leaves and land in the clear, scampering out a few meters into the withered grass. It is some form of display, a celebration of the troop.

Inference, deduction, circumstantial evidence. A boy about sixteen years old lies on his right side, knees slightly drawn up and head resting on his forearm in a sleeping position. He seems small at the bottom of the dark trench. A pile of chipped flint forms a stone pillow beneath his head and near his hand is a beautifully worked stone axe. There are roasted chops and antelope legs, wrapped in leaves; the boy will need something to eat in the land of the dead.

Circles and animals drawn on the walls, colored clay smeared on faces and pebbles. Art follows religion, at least a hundred millennia old. Domesticated animals, the client allies of dogs and cats and cattle. And always the restlessness, the outward thrust, aggression, war.

Man would rather kill himself than die of boredom. Thus—novelty, gambling, exploration, art, science…

“Wamm ymm doing?” Nikka said. She peered at him drowsily.

“Studying up. Looking for clues.”

Nikka threw back the covers and lay gazing at the low ceiling. She took a deep, cleansing breath and sat up. Her black hair curled and tumbled slowly in the low gravity. “That was exceptionally fine.”

“Ummmm.”

“It’s never really been this way for me before, you know.”

He looked up. “How?”

“Well, I’m just a lot more easy about it. I guess… there are love affairs and then there are love affairs.”

“Indeed,” Nigel murmured, distracted. “Sex is God’s way of laughing at the rich and powerful, as Shaw or Wilde or somebody said.”

“And we’re neither.”

“Yes.” Nigel went on reading.

“Well, I suppose I don’t really know how to say…” Nigel put his papers aside, and smiled. “You don’t have to. See, it’s simply too early to assess things. And you learn more by plowing through life, sometimes, rather than dissecting it.”

“I… oh.”

“Does that make any sense to you?”

“Some.”

“Ummm. Good.” He picked up his notes.

“Don’t you have an
off
button that’ll stop you working?”

“Yup,” he murmured absently. “Directly on the tip of my cock.”

“I’ve already tried that.”

“Um. Love me, love my fanaticism.”

“Very well.” She sighed elaborately. “I see there’s not going to be very much more done about romance. I’ve never seen anyone drive himself this way. The others don’t—”

Nigel snorted. “They haven’t a clue about what matters.”

“And you do.”

“Perhaps. There’s a lot I’m still trying to cram into my grizzled synapses. Look.” He rocked forward, threading his hands together. “It’s clear whoever flew this ship knew a bloody huge lot about our ancestors. They must’ve had some kind of operation going here, else why learn so much? And why not study the dolphins, too— they’re intelligent. Though in a vastly different way, of course.”

Nikka pulled on one of his shirts and came to sit beside him. “Okay, I’ll play your game. Maybe we were easier to talk to.”

“Why?”

“Well, they must have been somewhat like us. There are many things about this wreck we can understand. Their technology isn’t
totally
mysterious. They must have had some of the same social forms. They even had war, if that’s what their defensive screen and attack system means.”

Nigel nodded slowly. “Someone picked up the survivors of this wreck, too, or we would have found some traces of their bodies.”

“So they had more than a one-ship expedition.” “Perhaps. It’s hard to pin down. A half million years is a long time. We can’t even be sure of very much about
ourselves
a half million years ago. How did we domesticate animals? Evolve the family system and sprout onto the savanna, away from the forests? How did we learn how to swim? Hell, apes won’t cross a stream more than a half-meter deep or ten meters wide. Yet it all happened so
fast.
”

Nikka shrugged. “Forced evolution. The great drought in Africa.”

“That’s the usual story, yes. But all this”—he waved a hand at the walls—“bases on the moon, science and technology and warfare and cities. Is it
all
just spelling out the implication of big game hunting? Hard to believe. Here, listen to this.”

He picked up a small tape player and placed it on his knee. “I’ll keep the volume down so we don’t wake anyone. This is a war chant from New Caledonia. Part of the anthropology packet. I suppose Kardensky thought I would find it amusing, since he thinks my taste in music is rather along the same lines.”

The tape clicked on. A long droning song began, loud and deep and half-shouted to the beating of drums. It was sung with feeling but strangely without pattern. There was no sustained rhythm, only occasional random intervals of cadence that came like interruptions. A dull bass sound filled the room. For a few moments the chanters sang in unison and their voices and the drum beating seemed to gain in power and purpose. Then the rhythm broke again.

“Spooky stuff,” Nikka said. “What people sang
this
?” “The most primitive human society we know. Or
knew
—this recording is sixty years old and that tribe has disintegrated since. They’re the losers—people who didn’t adjust to larger and larger groups and better ways of warfare and toolmaking. They seemed to lack some trait of aggressiveness that ‘successful’ societies such as ours display all too much of.”

“That is why they’re gone now?”

“I suppose. Somewhere in the past we must have all been like those tribes, but something got into us. And what
was
that something? Evolution, the scientists say; God, the New Sons think. I wish I knew.”

Fatigue claimed them. Nigel muttered a good-night and fell asleep within a few moments. But Nikka remained awake. She lay staring into the darkness and the listless, random chant ran through her mind over and over.

They had to stop work in the wreck for two days as all hands pitched in and finished the life support systems. Nigel and Nikka worked in the hydroponics bubbles, huge caverns scooped out of the lunar rock by nuclear vaporizers. They sealed the fractured walls, smearing them with a gritty red dye that dried into an oily hardness. At the end of the second day Nigel was sore from exertion and limped from a pulled muscle in his back. He left the spontaneous celebration in the dining hall and returned to the console room. Nikka noticed his absence and followed; she found him dozing in the console chair, his face shadowed in the green running lights.

“You should sleep at home.”

“Came here to think.”

“So I noticed.”

“Um. Wasn’t being blindingly brilliant back there, was I? That hydroponics lashup did me in.”

“I don’t think you should’ve had to do it. Valiera sat it out and he’s no older than you.”

He wagged a finger at an imaginary opponent in the chilly, layered space of the room. “That’s where you’re wrong. Valiera would like nothing better than evidence of my physical incapacity to—what’s the usual phrase?— ‘contribute fully to the work here.’ No, I’ve got to watch the fine points. They’re fatal.”

“We should have
more
help, not be required to… well, I guess it doesn’t matter. I’d like to have an on-site specialist or two, though, to back us up. Maybe in, well, cultural anthropology,” she said.

“Too pedestrian,” Nigel muttered.

“How so?”

“There’s more at stake here.”

“Things seem pretty innocuous so far.”

Nigel snorted, a kind of brusque laughter. “Maybe.” “But you don’t think so.”

“Just a guess.”

“Do you know something I don’t?”

“What you
know
isn’t the point. It’s the connections.” “Such as?”

“Did you read the research on the Snark?”

“I got through most of it. There wasn’t a lot of data.” “There never is, in research, until you’ve already solved the problem anyway. No, I mean about its initial trajectory.”

“I didn’t think we knew that.”

“Not precisely, no. It was under orders to cover its tracks. But some fellows worked backward from its various planetary flybys and got a pretty fair fix on what direction it was heading.”

“What part of the sky it came out of, you mean?” “Right. Old Snarky came out of the constellation Aquila. That’s a supposedly eagle-shaped bunch of stars—Altair is among them.”

“Fascinating,” she said dryly.

“Wait, there’s one more bit. I rummaged around a few years back, studying Aquila. In Norton’s
Star Atlas
you’ll find that there were twenty fairly bright novas—star explosions—between 1899 and 1936, distributed over the whole sky.”

“Um. Hum.”

“Five of them were in Aquila.”

“So?”

“Aquila is a
small
constellation. It covers less than a
quarter of one percent of the sky.
”

Nikka looked up with renewed interest. “Does anyone else know this?”

“Somebody must. A fellow named Clarke brought it up once—I found the reference.”

“Big novas?”

“Sizable. The 1918 Nova Aquila was one of the brightest ever recorded. Aquila had
two
novas in 1936 alone.”

“So the Snark was at work?”

“Not him. I’m convinced he’s reconnaissance, period.”

“Or a pointer?”

“How’s that?”

“A pointer dog. The kind that sights the quail.” “Damn.” Nigel sat very still. “I hadn’t thought of it quite that way.”

“It’s possible.”

“Hell, yes, it is. Snark wouldn’t need to know what his designers intended.”

“Every now and then he squirts them his findings.” “And they… use the information.”

Nikka said briskly, “It’s just an idea. Those novas— how far away were they?”

“Oh, they varied,” Nigel said absently. “The important point is that they’re all along the same line of sight, seen from here. As though the cause were moving toward us.”

“Nigel, it’s just—”

“I know. Just an idea. But it… fits.”

“Fits what?”

“The wreck out there.” He waved airily. “Some living creatures came here, far back in our past. That ship carried what the Snark called organic forms, not supercomputers.”

“Animals, I think you said.”

“Yes, Snark called us animals, too. No insult intended. He thinks of us as special.”