“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.”
