“Why assume the satellites are the last bit of whatever civilization the EMs had? Their orbital age is about the same as the last cratering epoch—but coincidence doesn’t mean causality.”
“Look, we’ll know more when we find some cities.”
“One supposes.” Nigel shrugged, and got up to leave. “Maybe the EMs never had any.”
But there were cities.
Or at least, buildings. Site Team #6 found the circular motif, using IR studies of a particular highland plateau. There was evidence of earlier ages with heavy dust dunes, but now a shift in the Eye winds had uncovered a plain that was, from radioisotope dating, 893,000 years old. Gently curving depressions ringed a central high spot, an ancient weathered hill. Lanes radiated from this point, spokes in a wheel. Excavation found buildings a mere fifteen meters below the dry, wind-scraped terrain. The ancient stones were rectangular and carried faint markings. The anthropologists on Lancer deduced little from these scratchings. They could trace the general outline of streets, an irrigation system, and a river valley ecology. There was no trace of fabricated or smelted metals, but then no one had expected any. What the rust did not claim, the winds rubbed away.
FOUR
Nigel watched the blood streaming out of him and yawned. Somehow it always made him sleepy. The first few dozen times it had made him pass out.
“Hey, I didn’t ask you wanted ta lay down. Wanna?”
“I’m inclined to it, yes,” Nigel said, but the medico didn’t smile. She simply lowered his operating chair with a quick, carelessly efficient wrist motion. Nigel watched the tubing carry away pink strands of his plasma into the medmon.
The hulking machine clicked as it moved on to another sampling diagnostic.
“Some skilled job,” the medico muttered. Nigel would have nodded sympathetically, except his upper arms, chest and neck were turned off. The medmon had to keep cardiovascular rhythm going despite the drop in pressure, and it was easier if the patient didn’t interfere. He could operate his mouth, though. “Let something go wrong and you’d be needed, you know that. Same as a pilot—”
“I only trained for this so, y’know, I could make crew. I was an engineer, best there was, but not the right category for shipwork. Only I noticed this jobclass and I figured it was nothing I couldn’t stack in on.”
Nigel contorted his lips in a way he hoped conveyed agreement. He peered at the medico’s thin, bored face and tried to read the woman’s mood accurately. If nothing else, this exercise took his mind off the unpleasant ringing in his ears which always came as the medmon began sucking harder, filtering the plasma out and keeping his red blood cells. The blocky machine mixed in artificial plasma at the same time, but still the ringing came. With the plasma presumably went the damaged blood cells, while new stuff flooded in. Antioxidants to wipe out free radicals. Microenzymes to unlink confused old DNA strands that had gotten tangled. Immunological boosters. Leaching agents to destroy aging cells which had lost the ability to reproduce themselves correctly. The antisenescent cocktail.
“Does seem rather a bore,” Nigel said carefully.
“Damn right,” she said, surly. “You know, hard to believe, but once doctors used to do this. It was a big deal.”
“Really?” Nigel tried to keep some interest in his voice, despite the fact that he could remember when doctors injected one with needles and thought eating meat was bad for you.
“Now a flush job’s just, uh …”
“Maintenance?”
“Yeah, right. I mean, I like to work with my hands, real on-line stuff, but this jacko—no offense, y’know, I mean I ken you need it, but it’s like being a hairdresser or somethin’.”
“You were an engineer.”
“Fact. Now they got me tracing plasmapheresis and slappin’ fixes on hormones and—”
“How’d you like a spate in the drive tubes?”
She came out of her fixed anthology of gripes and looked at him. Until now he had been another anonymous customer, another plug-in for the medmon. “Well, shit, sure I’d tumble to that, only—”
“I believe I might be able to get you on the crew.”
“Who says?”
“I do; I’ll take it up with Ted Landon.”
“You could do that? I mean, it’s tough to get—”
“Of course. I can see this is bloody tedious. Must be dreadful, particularly for folk like me, who’re just the same old thing, piping it through the medmon.”
“You know it.” She brightened and her thin face filled with interest. “You could maybe get me workin’ with that team? I mean, just cleanin’ the tubes would be, you know, interface solid state, lots of fieldwork and some lab stuff, too, I’d—”
“Fine. You seem the sort who should be set free of this.” He would have waved an arm in mute demonstration, but he made the attempt and found motor control gone. “Feel like a zombie.”
“Here, we’re nearly through.” She flipped a switch and he could move his right arm.
“Seems a pity I have to use up someone’s time to do this—the monitoring, the patching, so on.”
“Yeah. You should be able to handle it yourself. How come you’re not on self-serve medmon?”
“Ted’s being careful. Wants to monitor all the old scruffs like me.”
“Jeez. Just makes more work.”
“Precisely.”
“Frap, if you could get me into engine work—”
“Think you could put me over onto self-serve? I mean, it’s a dreadful waste.”
“I guess so.”
“Good. I’m not going to make a mistake where my own health is concerned, after all.”
