Felph turned around, pocketed the devices that let him play the recording.
Gallen stood in the solemn chamber, with his friends around him. Beside him he could feel Maggie standing close, shivering from fear. Gallen remained utterly silent, the alien music ringing through his head. No one spoke. No one wanted to be the first to break the spell the Qualeewooh music had woven. The whole battle, the symbolism, was utterly alien. But Gallen felt that, somehow, he understood.
He wondered how this cave had appeared to the Qualeewoohs, thirty thousand years ago: many nesting sites had probably been here in the cliffs. The chicks would have come into this cave, in the darkness, Gallen imagined. Perhaps the chicks would have been small, so young they hadn’t grown their adult plumage. So they would have been ugly, gangling things with small wings and large heads.
A priestess would have stood before the platinum panel and waved her wings, as if taking flight. Immediately the dark god would rise behind her, its malevolent intent glowing in its eyes. Each chick would have had its head turned to the side, gazing at the dark god with one eye only. Perhaps the victim of the murder symbolized the priestess in her flight. That sounded somehow right.
Gallen realized that the defender in the battle had been lighter of color. Female, perhaps? The death of virtue, the end of civilization. That’s what the dark god brought.
He stared at the scene in his imagination, lost in thought, until Felph said quietly, “I first came to Ruin nearly seven hundred years ago, as an archaeologist. I was part of a team that discovered this site. All the others, they’ve moved on to other worlds, other ruins. But I’ve stayed to study the Qualeewoohs and their civilization.
“You see, they are not unlike us. Their ancestors were violent hunters, lords of the skies. They traveled in great flocks that darkened the heavens. When they descended on the twisted jungles, they carried off what they desired.
“And like our ancestors, they grew to be too numerous, and began to war.
“But they were not really like us,” Felph mused, and his tone was somber. He stared at the floor, his dark eyes unfocused, his gaze directed inward.
“Man was content to live with war, and even gloried in it. But the Qualeewoohs never romanticized it, never saw it as a necessity, nor even really tolerated it. “
“What happened to them, then?” Orick asked, his deep voice full of awe. “Why did they die out?”
“They haven’t, as I said,” Felph answered. “But if our astrophysical models are correct, things here changed about thirty thousand years ago, during the fourth expansion. Ruin circles a small sun, as you can see-one too small to regularly burn away the planet’s polar ice caps. Darksun drew close to its larger sister every six years in a very elliptical orbit, and when the suns reached perigee, the combined light provided enough heat to melt the polar caps here on Ruin. With this melting, water would fill the shallow seas, and as the tangles enlarged, the local flora and fauna populations would explode for a few years.
“But about twenty-eight thousand years ago, something changed the orbits. It may have been that a large planetary body passed through the system, or even hit Darksun, skewing its orbit, making it more and more elliptical. On a cosmic scale, the variations in orbit appear minor, but the changes here on Ruin have been dramatic.
“The result has been that the six-year cycle now takes three hundred years to complete. The free water here on Ruin is becoming more and more concentrated at the poles, and now, even when the ice caps do melt, they can’t melt completely.”
“So the Qualeewoohs died out?” Maggie asked.
“No, not exactly,” Felph said. “Their numbers were on the decline even before this tragedy. That is what intrigued me about them you see, Qualeewoohs are intelligent creatures-smarter than the average human who isn’t genetically enhanced.
“No, they weren’t dying out. What happened is this: in the early days of human technology, our ancestors’ innovations concentrated in several areas-the production of shelter, transportation, food, and weapons of war.
“But the Qualeewoohs never needed these. They needed no transportation. Because they were winged creatures, they were free to hunt and move at will. Indeed, I can find no evidence that, outside of litters for carrying their sick, the Qualeewooh ever created any kind of vehicle.
“As far as shelter goes, their needs seemed minimal. The Qualeewoohs, unlike humans, cannot live in extreme cold. Their wings and necks dissipate too much heat, so they were never free to expand beyond their lower temperate regions. Nor can they nest near the tangles, where predators steal their eggs. So they nest in mountainous areas above the tangles-and there were plenty of nesting sites.
“Also, the Qualeewoohs, unlike humans, are pure carnivores. The ancients did develop methods of ranching-controlling predators and unwanted herbivores. The tangles provided them with hundreds of different natural pesticides and whatnot. But because the Qualeewooh are carnivores, their numbers naturally stabilized at smaller populations than human populations would. Indeed, food became the predominant limiting factor in their expansion.
“But war, of course, was their big problem. When driven by hunger, Qualeewoohs engaged in the worst sort of cannibalism. A well-fed Qualeewooh is a magnificently moral creature, but when a Qualeewooh starves, when its brain suffers from a lack of sugars, it enters a dark state that the Qualeewoohs call ‘The Voracion.’ A Qualeewooh, so afflicted becomes a terrible, mindless predator-slaying anything but its own mate in an effort to survive. Thus, starving adults would forage into the nesting territories of enemy flocks, slaying the females, eating eggs and chicks. In lean years, terrible things happened.”
“In an effort to abolish the slaughter, the Qualeewoohs focused their research efforts. The Qualeewoohs did not seek to protect themselves from their neighbors, as humans did. Mankind developed all sorts of fascinating myths about how other tribes of humans were ‘evil’ and inferior so we could continue to justify our war efforts.
“But among Qualeewoohs, who could fly, there was no boundary between peoples. A global language developed early in their civilization, along with two or three very similar global cosmologies, and everyone understood one another. One Qualeewooh could join with any flock he or she chose, and, it appears to me, the Qualeewoohs’ territorial instinct never developed as strongly as did mankind’s.
“And there is one more thing you must understand: the Qualeewoohs were brilliant mathematicians. They could estimate populations of animals, count their citizens, study the prevailing weather, then calculate accurately how many of their own people they could supply with food and water.
“So when the Qualeewoohs turned to the problem of war, they took a pragmatic approach. Instead of trying to search endlessly for new sources of food and water, instead of trying to defend themselves from the inevitable depredations of others-their technology focused on self-control.”
“You mean to limiting their numbers?” Gallen asked.
“No,” Felph said. “That was but a small part of their program. I mean that they turned toward social and genetic manipulation. That they practiced genetic manipulation is obvious. We’ve found fossilized plants from the tangle and compared their DNA to that in current samples. The dew trees, which serve as the platform for all other life here on Ruin, show a common pattern of genetic manipulation across twenty-three separate species. The Qualeewoohs inserted the instructions for a common root and hibernation system through all those species. It is only because of these genetic manipulations that any life at all still thrives on this planet.
“But even more importantly than their manipulations of the flora and fauna, they developed a genetic upgrade which they spread among their own kind. They inserted a gene into their thirty-second chromosome that makes it terrifying, utterly intolerable, for one Qualeewooh to be near another adult of the same sex. The very sight of an adult Qualeewooh of the same sex sends both individuals into flight. “