The corner of Raines' mouth turned down. "My `thoughts about the crime,' Mr. Brierson, are that I had nothing to do with it. To put it in your detective jargon: I have no motive, as I have no interest in the Korolevs' pitiful attempt to resurrect mankind. I had no opportunity, as my protection equipment is much more limited than theirs."
"You are a high-tech, though."
"Only by the era of my origin. When I left civilization, I took the bare necessities for survival. I didn't bring software to build autofactories. I have air/space capability and some explosives, but they're the minimum needed to exit stasis safely." She gestured at Lu. "Your high-tech partner can verify all this."
Della dropped bonelessly to a cross-legged position and propped her chin on her hands. For an instant she looked like a young girl. "You'll give me access to your databases?"
"Yes."
The spacer nodded, and then her attention drifted away again. She was watching the picture off the telescope. The dragon birds had stopped their strutting. Now they were taking turns throwing small rocks into the nestlike structure between them. Wil had never seen anything like it. The birds would hunt about at the edge of the pile of stones and brush. They seemed very selective. What they grasped in their beaks glittered. Then, with a quick flip of the head, the pebble was cast into the pile. At the same time, the thrower flapped briefly into the air.
Raines followed Della's glance. The artist's face split with a smile less cynical than usual. "Notice how they face downwind when they do that."
"They're fire makers?" asked Lu.
Raines' head snapped up. "You're the spacer. You've seen things like this before?"
"Once. In the LMC. But they weren't... birds, exactly."
Raines was silent for a moment. Curiosity and wonder seemed to battle against her natural desire to remain one up on her visitors. The latter won, but she sounded friendlier as she continued. "Things have to be just right before they'll try. It's been a dry summer, and they've built their starter-pyre at the edge of an area that hasn't burned in decades. Notice that there's a good breeze blowing along the hillsides."
Lu was smiling now, too. "Yes. So that flapping reflex when they throw-that's to give the sparks a little help?"
"Right. It can be-oh, look, look!" There wasn't much to see. Wil had noticed a faint spark when the last pebble struck the rocks in the nest-the starter-pyre, Monica called it. Now a wisp of smoke rose from the straw that covered the leeward side of the pile. The vulture stayed close to the smoke, moved its wings in long sweeps. Its rattling call echoed up the ravine. "Nope. It didn't quite catch.... Sometimes the dragon's too successful, by the way. They burn like torches if their feathers catch fire. I think that's why the males work in pairs: one's a spare."
"But when the game works..." said Lu.
"When the game works, you get a nice brush fire sweeping away from the dragon birds."
"How do they benefit by starting fires?" asked Wil-, he already had a bad feeling he knew the answer.
"It makes for good eating, Mr. Brierson. These scavengers don't wait for lunch to drop dead on its own. A fire like this can spread faster than some animals can run. After it's over, there's plenty of cooked meat. Those beak ridges are for scraping the char off their prey. The dragons get so fat afterwards, they can barely waddle. A good burn marks the start of a really successful breeding season."
Wil felt a little sick. He'd watched nature films all the way back to the flat-screen Disneys, but he never could accept the talk about the beauty and balance of nature-when illustrated by grotesque forms of sudden death.
Things got worse. Della asked, "So they get mainly small animals?"
Raines nodded. "But there are a few interesting exceptions." She brought another display to life. "These pictures are from a camera about four thousand meters east of here." The picture jogged and bounced. Wil glimpsed shaggy creatures rooting through dense brush. They were built low to the ground, yet seemed vaguely apelike.
"Marvelous what the primates can become, isn't it? The design is so multipurpose, so centered. Except for one disastrous dead end, they are by far the most interesting of the mammals. At one time or another, I've seen them adapt to almost every slot available for large land animals, and more: the fishermonkeys are almost in the penguin slot. I'm watching them very closely; someday they may become exclusively water animals." Enthusiasm was bright on her normally saturnine features.
"You think mankind devolved into the fishermonkeys and these... things?" Wil pointed at the display. He couldn't keep the revulsion from his voice.
Raines sniffed. "That's absurd. And presumptuous, really. Homo sapiens was about the most self-deadly variation in the theme of life. The species insulated itself from physical stress for so long that what few individuals survived the destruction of technology would have been totally unable to live on their own. No, the present-day primates are descended from those in wilderness estates at the time mankind did itself in."
She laughed softly at the look on Wil's face. "You have no business making value judgments on the dragons, Mr. Brierson. Theirs is a beautiful variation. It's survived half a million years -almost as long as Man's experiment with fire. The starterpyres began as small piles of glitter, a kind of sexual display for the males. The first fires were accidental, but the adaptation has been refined over hundreds of thousands of years. It doesn't provide them with all their food, or even most of it. But it's an extra advantage. As a mating ritual, it even survives climatic wet spells. When summers are dry again, it is still ready to use.
"This is how fire was meant to be used, Mr. Brierson. The dragons have little impact on the average tonnage burned; they just redistribute the fires to their advantage. Their way is selflimiting, fitting the balance of nature. Man perverted fire, used it for unlimited destruction."
Every one crazier than the last, thought Wil. Monica Raines sat surrounded and served by the fruits of that "perversion," and all she could do was bitch. She sounded like something out of the twentieth century. "So you don't believe Juan Chanson's theory that man was exterminated by aliens?"
"There's no need for such an invention. Can't you see, Mr. Brierson? The trends were all there, undeniable. Mankind's systems grew more and more complicated, their demands more and more rapacious. I-lave you seen the mines the Korolevs built west of the Inland Sea? They stretch for dozens of kilometers-open pits, autons everywhere. By the late twenty-second century, that's the scale of resources demanded by a single individual. Science gave each human animal the presumption to act like a little god. The Earth just couldn't take it. Hell, I'll bet there wasn't even a war. I'll bet the whole structure collapsed under its own weight, leaving the rapists at the mercy of their victim-nature."
"There's the asteroid belt. Industry could be moved offplanet." In fact, Wil had seen the beginnings of that in his time.
"No. This was an exponential process. Moving into space just postponed the debacle a few decades." She rose to her knees and looked at the telescope display. The vultures had resumed their slow strutting about the rock pile. "Too bad. I don't think we'll get a fire today. They try hardest in the early afternoon."
"If you feel this way about humans, why are you out of stasis just now?" said Lu.
Wil added, "Did you think you could persuade the new settlement to behave more... respectfully toward nature?"