Mr. Ichino watched the snow stream through the box of light cast out from the window. The minute dabs of white were like leaves in a churning river of air, swept through the yellow beam and away into vastness. It was a light snowfall, adding perhaps only a few centimeters to the drifts. But it was more than enough to seal him and Graves into this stale space for a few more days.
“You… you takin’ care of my… stuff …”
“Of course,” Mr. Ichino said mildly, turning back to study Graves’s lined face. “You need not trouble yourself about it. Rest.”
Graves rolled his eyes weakly, searching the cabin. “Don’t wan’… them…”
“Sleep.”
Graves turned on his side heavily and closed his eyes. Mr. Ichino studied the tubular weapon, now lying on an upper shelf of the kitchen where it could not be disturbed. It was clearly alien, he now realized. Perhaps a talisman given the Bigfoot long ago, a parting gesture, something to help their survival. Perhaps.
“Rest,” he said softly. “Rest.”
Nikka was resting, wide-hipped and heavy-lidded beside him, and somehow the cannabis went down with slick ease, mixed well into a fruit drink, and Nigel found himself sitting up late into the night, ragged and rusty-eyed, planning. They really had to do something. Events were crowding them now and if Valiera—he was sure it was Valiera, there was a certain sliding look to the man’s eyes—if Valiera chose, he could press them even further. But Jesus, it was so fucking classically dumb, all this New Sons rubbish that seeped somehow out of the midlands of America, and Nigel had never understood it. These unfathomable mysterious Americans with their four score and seven and tramping out the wineyards or vineyards or whatever, things every schoolboy was supposed to know but if even a fraction of them did they’d be the most bloody insufferable bores in creation, miniature fonts of redneck wisdom. Thinking that he’d understood these creatures was a laugh, they’d slipped away from him time and again with their filmed eyes and folk sayings (What’s the state animal of Mississippi? A squashed cat in the middle of the road. He’d never known if it was a joke or not.) and their obscure obsession with traditions when they plainly had none, all the same running round the other end and constantly pushing what was new, the latest, rave of the week, new new new. Neutrinos, little massless particles streaming through the earth as though it wasn’t there. New trinos. And never for a moment thinking what has happened to all the old trinos, perhaps washed up on some star as War Surplus. Nigel laughed to himself and it came out as a giggle. A small thin one. And at once the slick veneer he had kept up fried away and he saw that he was on the edge again, stretched thin in an awful hollow place, wanting something and not truly knowing what it was any more. Back at Icarus, yes, he’d seen it clearly then, and somehow the need had washed away from him in those years with Alexandria and, God help her, Shirley. But now he had been drifting for vacant years. Nikka was a help but there was beneath the skin of things a resolving element he could not touch. Or was he simply and purely an aging man who had seen better days and knew it, and the truth of that plucked at him and stung, stung?
FIFTEEN
Nigel leaned against the wall at the back of the 3D gallery. Figures jostled on the screen, kicking a ball, falling, forming pincer moves and making blocks. He had never much liked soccer but now he could see the logic of it, the need men had for it. Hunting game in small groups, running and shouting and knowing who was your enemy, who was your friend. In-group and out-group, simple and satisfying. And not a vegetarian in the lot.
A few men sat watching the 3D. A goalsman missed a shot and one of them laughed. The screen flickered and a woman appeared. She gave the camera a sultry smile, held up a small green bottle and said, “Squeeze it for a lift! It’s got upgo! Try—”
Nigel turned to leave and bumped into Nikka. “You’ve got it all?” she said.
Nigel showed her the packet of papers and photographs he carried under his arm. “Everything we’ve found, including the bits we don’t understand.”
“Shouldn’t we tell Team One we’re going off shift early? They might want to—”
“No, we don’t want anyone fooling around with the computer memory now. As long as we don’t know what erased the sequences today, no one should touch the console.”
Nikka gestured down the corridor and they began walking. “You called Valiera?” she said.
“Yes, he said come by any time. I think we shouldn’t delay any longer. And I’d just as soon not have Sanges put his oar in until we’ve seen Valiera.”
Nikka shrugged. “You may be a little harsh on him. His heart must be in the right place, otherwise he wouldn’t be in this expedition. We needn’t think the worst of him just because he’s a New Son. There are bastards who are New Sons and there are bastards who aren’t, and I don’t see much difference.”
“Maybe,” Nigel said noncommittally. They were at Valiera’s office door. He knocked, held the door for Nikka and followed her in. Sanges and Valiera sat looking at them, silent, waiting.
Nikka stopped for a moment, surprised, but Nigel showed no sign and fetched a chair for her from the back of the room. They exchanged pleasantries and Valiera said, “I understand from Mr. Sanges that some of the sequences you found are now inaccessible.”
“Yes,” Nikka said. “We think something has erased them. There must be some method for retrieval and disposal of information, and it’s logical that some command through the console will achieve this. As long as any of the three teams tries new sequences we run the risk of losing information.”
“But if we cease exploring, we will find nothing,” Sanges said reasonably.
“We came here to ask for a halt to all work at the console until the material we have has been assimilated,” Nigel said. “We simply don’t have enough information or people to handle the material here. What we need is cross-correlations, diversity—anthropology, history, radiology, some physics and information theory and lots more. The NSF should release what we’ve found and ask for a consensus—”
“I really think it’s far too early for that,” Valiera said smoothly. “We have hardly begun to—”
“I feel we have enough to think about,” Nikka said. “We have two photos now of those tall hairy creatures—”
“Yes, I’ve seen one of those in your shift report. Interesting. Might be an early form of man,” Valiera said.
“I’m pretty well sure that it is,” Nigel said. He leaned forward in his chair. “I’ve made a few tentative conclusions about what we found and I think they point in an extremely significant direction. I’ll submit a summary later, with full documentation. But I think I should send a preliminary conclusion to the NSF immediately, to get others to working on it, to get some spectrum of opinion. I think there’s a fair chance the aliens who crashed here may have had a significant effect on human evolution.”
There was a tense silence. Sanges shook his head.
“I don’t see why …” Valiera said.
“It’s just an early idea, I’ll agree. But it seems a bit odd, doesn’t it, that we should so quickly stumble on things like the physostigminian derivative, viewed along each of the major symmetry axes? There are DNA traces, some other long chain organic molecules we can’t identify, and Kardensky just got back to me on those furry creatures. The people in Cambridge can’t fit it into the usual scheme of primate evolution. They’re large, probably fairly advanced, and may be a variant form no one has dug up yet. Those fellows are used to looking at bones, you know, and it’s hard to tell very much detail under all that fur.”
“That is surely why we need to find out more,” Sanges said.
“But we can’t risk missing any more entries in the computer memory. Not after losing some today,” Nikka said earnestly.
“Right.” Nigel carried on briskly. “And the matter might be of supreme importance—information from the past can’t be replaced. What’s been bothering me for days now is that it seems a great coincidence that this ship was here between five hundred thousand and a million years ago. Current theories of our own evolution place a number of developments in that same time bracket,” Nigel said.
“But we began evolving long before that time,” Valiera said.
“True enough. But a lot of our progress has been made over the last million years. We learned many things then—forming large groups, big game hunting, all the nuances of family relationships, taboos. Art. Religion. I think there’s a chance these aliens had something to do with that. Man has always been an anomaly, a species that evolved in a wink of an eye.”
Sanges said deliberately, “And you think this was due to the aliens using physostigmine, altering our ancient genetic material?”
“We can almost do that now,” Nikka said. “We’re learning to take traces of the RNA complex. There is legislation about it.”
Valiera looked at her with distant assessment and then turned to Nigel. “I’m no professional anthropologist of course, but I think I see a hole even in what you said just now. If these aliens simply taught these things to our ancestors, how do you explain the parallel evolution of hands, larger brains, two-footed stance and all that? It’s the side-by-side mental and physical evolution that is so interesting about early man. But teaching an animal to do something when he hasn’t got the physical ability is useless.”
Nigel looked concerned and sat and thought for a moment. “Right, I see your point. That removes the driving link between physical and mental evolution. But look, do you see, it could be selective help. That is, you could wait until some small band of primates developed a special trick—say, throwing sharpened stone knives instead of closing in and using them by hand. You could then teach them to better use that new ability. Show them how to use spears—they’re more useful than knives for big game. With a direct hand on the RNA features you could speed up evolution, give it a nudge when it strays from the path you’ve designed. Man was still being shaped by his environment a million years ago. I should think a push in the right direction—depending on your definition of right— would have large long-term effects.”
In a sudden burst of nervous energy Sanges stood and leaned back against the edge of Valiera’s desk. He folded his arms and said, “Why would anyone do this? It would take so long—what would be the point?”
