Here Gothon paused, selected one of the small sapient skulls, much reconstructed: Desan had at least the skill to recognize the true bone from the plassbone bonded to it. This skull was far more delicate than the others, jaw smaller. The front two teeth were restructs. So was one of the side.
“It was a child,” Gothon said. “We call her Missy. The first we found at this site, up in the hills, in a streambank. Most of Missy’s feet were gone, but she’s otherwise intact. Missy was all alone except for a little animal all tucked up in her arms. We keep them together—never mind the cataloging.” She lifted an anomalous and much-reconstructed skull from the shelf among the sapients; fanged and delicate. “Even archaeologists have sentiment.”
“I—see—” Helpless, caught in courtesy, Desan extended an unwilling finger and touched the skull.
“Back to sleep.” Gothon set both skulls tenderly back on the shelf, and dusted her hands and walked farther, Desan following, beyond a simple door and into a busy room of workbenches piled high with a clutter of artifacts.
Staff began to rise from their dusty work in a sudden startlement. “No, no, go on,” Gothon said quietly. “We’re only passing through; ignore us. —Here, do you see, Lord Desan?” Gothon reached carefully past a researcher’s shoulder and lifted from the counter an elongate ribbed bottle with the opalescent patina of long burial. “We find a great many of these. Mass production. Industry. Not only on this continent. This same bottle exists in sites all over the world, in the uppermost strata. Same design. Near the time of the calamity. We trace global alliances and trade by such small things.” She set it down and gathered up a virtually complete vase, much patched. “It always comes to pots, Lord Desan. By pots and bottles we track them through the ages. Many layers. They had a long and complex past.”
Desan reached out and touched the corroded brown surface of the vase, discovering a single bright remnant of the blue glaze along with the gray encrustations of long burial. “How long—how long does it take to reduce a thing to this?”
“It depends on the soil—on moisture, on acidity. This came from hereabouts.” Gothon tenderly set it back on a shelf, walked on, frail, hunch-shouldered figure among the aisles of the past. “But very long, very long to obliterate so much—almost all the artifacts are gone. Metals oxidize; plastics rot; cloth goes very quickly; paper and wood last quite long in a desert climate, but they go, finally. Moisture dissolves the details of sculpture. Only the noble metals survive intact. Soil creep warps even stone; crushes metal. We find even the best pots in a matrix of pieces, a puzzle-toss. Fragile as they are, they outlast monuments, they last as long as the earth that holds them, drylands, wetlands, even beneath the sea—where no marine life exists to trouble them. That bottle and that pot are as venerable as that great dam. The makers wouldn’t have thought that, would they?”
“But—” Desan’s mind reeled at the remembrance of the great plain, the silt and the deep buried secrets.
“But?”
“You surely might miss important detail. A world to search. You might walk right over something and misinterpret everything.”
“Oh, yes, it can happen. But finding things where we expect them is an important clue, Lord Desan, a confirmation—One only has to suspect where to look. We locate our best hope first—a sunken, a raised place in those photographs we trouble the orbiters to take; but one gets a feeling about the lay of the land—more than the mechanical probes, Lord Desan.” Gothon’s dark eyes crinkled in the passage of thoughts unguessed, and Desan stood lost in Gothon’s unthinkable mentality. What did a mind do in such age? Wander? Could the great doctor lapse into mysticism? To report such a thing—would solve one difficulty. But to have that regrettable duty—
“It’s a feeling for living creatures, Lord Desan. It’s reaching out to the land and saying—if this were long ago, if I thought to build, if I thought to trade—where would I go? Where would my neighbors live?”
Desan coughed delicately, wishing to draw things back to hard fact. “And the robot probes, of course, do assist.”
“Probes, Lord Desan, are heartless things. A robot can be very skilled, but a researcher directs it only at distance, blind to opportunities and the true sense of the land. But you were born to space. Perhaps it makes no sense.”
“I take your word for it,” Desan said earnestly. He felt the weight of the sky on his back. The leaden, awful sky, leprous and unhealthy cover between them and the star and the single moon. Gothon remembered homeworld. Remembered homeworld. Had been renowned in her field even there. The old scientist claimed to come to such a landscape and locate things by seeing things that robot eyes could not, by thinking thoughts those dusty skulls had held in fleshy matter—
—how long ago?
“We look for mounds,” Gothon said, continuing in her brittle gait down the aisle, past the bowed heads and shy looks of staff and students at their meticulous tasks. The work of tiny electronic needles proceeded about them, the patient ticking away at encrustations to bring ancient surfaces to light. “They built massive structures. Great skyscrapers. Some of them must have lasted, oh, thousands of years intact; but when they went unstable, they fell, and their fall made rubble; and the wind came and the rivers shifted their courses around the ruin, and of course the weight of sediment piled up, wind- and water-driven. From that point, its own weight moved it and warped it and complicated our work.” Gothon paused again beside a farther table, where holo plates stood inactive. She waved her hand and a landscape showed itself, a serpentined row of masonry across a depression. “See the wall there. They didn’t build it that way, all wavering back and forth and up and down. Gravity and soil movement deformed it. It was buried until we unearthed it. Otherwise, wind and rain alone would have destroyed it ages ago. As it will do, now, if time doesn’t rebury it.”
“And this great pile of stone—” Desan waved an arm, indicating the imagined direction of the great dam and realizing himself disoriented. “How old is it?”
“Old as the lake it made.”
“But contemporaneous with the fall?”
“Yes. Do you know, that mass may be standing when the star dies. The few great dams; the pyramids we find here and there around the world—One only guesses at their age. They’ll outlast any other surface feature except the mountains themselves.”
“Without life.”
“Oh, but there is.”
“Declining.”
“No, no. Not declining.” The doctor waved her hand and a puddle appeared over the second holo plate, all green with weed waving feathery tendrils back and forth in the surge. “The moon still keeps this world from entropy. There’s water, not as much as this dam saw—It’s the weed, this little weed that gives one hope for this world. The little life, the things that fly and crawl—the lichens and the life on the flatlands.”
“But nothing they knew.”
“No. Life’s evolved new answers here. Life’s starting over.”
“It certainly hasn’t much to start with, has it?”
“Not very much. It’s a question that interests Dr. Bothogi—whether the life making a start here has the time left, and whether the consumption curve doesn’t add up to defeat—But life doesn’t know that. We’re very concerned about contamination. But we fear it’s inevitable. And who knows, perhaps it will have added something beneficial.” Dr. Gothon lit yet another holo with the wave of her hand. A streamlined six-legged creature scuttled energetically across a surface of dead moss, frantically waving antennae and making no apparent progress.