In a quarter of a million years, has not our species evolved beyond us, might they not, may they not, find some faster transport and find us, their aeons-lost precursors; and we will not know each other, Dr. Gothon—how could we know each other—if they had, but they have not; we have become the wavefront of a quest that never overtakes, never surpasses us.
In a quarter of a million years, might some calamity have befallen us and our world be like this world, ocher and deadly rust?
While we are clones and children of clones, genetic fossils, anomalies of our kind?
What are they to us and we to them? We seek the Ancients, the makers of the probe.
Desan’s mind reeled; adept as he was at time-relativity calculations, accustomed as he was to stellar immensities, his mind tottered and he fought to regain the corridor in which they walked, he and the doctor. He widened his stride yet again, overtaking Gothon at the next door.
“Doctor.” He put out his hand, preventing her, and then feared his own question, his own skirting of heresy and tempting of hers. “Are you beyond doubt? You can’t be beyond doubt. They could have simply abandoned this world in its calamity.”
Again the impact of those gentle eyes, devastating. “Tell me, tell me, Lord Desan. In all your travels, in all the several near stars you’ve visited in a century of effort, have you found traces?”
“No. But they could have gone—”
“—leaving no traces, except on their moon?”
“There may be others. The team in search on the fourth planet—”
“Finds nothing.”
“You yourself say that you have to stand in that landscape, you have to think with their mind—Maybe Dr. Ashodt hasn’t come to the right hill, the right plain—”
“If there are artifacts there they only are a few. I’ll tell you why I know so. Come, come with me.” Gothon waved a hand and the door gaped on yet another laboratory.
Desan walked. He would rather have walked out to the deadly surface than through this simple door, to the answer Gothon promised him . . . but habit impelled him; habit, duty—necessity. He had no other purpose for his life but this. He had been left none, lord-navigator, fifth incarnation of Desan Das. They had launched his original with none, his second incarnation had had less, and time and successive incarnations had stripped everything else away. So he went, into a place at once too mundane and too strange to be quite sane—mundane because it was sterile as any lab, a well-lit place of littered tables and a few researchers; and strange because hundreds and hundreds of skulls and bones were piled on shelves in heaps on one wall, silent witnesses. An articulated skeleton hung in its frame; the skeleton of a small animal scampered in macabre rigidity on a tabletop.
He stopped. He stared about him, lost for the moment in the stare of all those eyeless sockets of weathered bone.
“Let me present my colleagues,” Gothon was saying; Desan focused on the words late, and blinked helplessly as Gothon rattled off names. Bothogi the zoologist was one, younger than most, seventeenth incarnation, burning himself out in profligate use of his years: so with all the incarnations of Bothogi Nan. The rest of the names slid past his ears ungathered—true strangers, the truly-born, sons and daughters of the voyage. He was lost in their stares like the stares of the skulls, eyes behind which shadows and dust were truth, gazes full of secrets and heresies.
They knew him and he did not know them, not even Lord Bothogi. He felt his solitude, the helplessness of his convictions all lost in the dust and the silences.
“Kagodte,” said Gothon, to a white-eared, hunched individual. “Kagodte—the Lord Desan has come to see your model.”
“Ah.” The aged eyes flicked, nervously.
“Show him, pray, Dr. Kagodte.”
The hunched man walked over to the table, spread his hands. A hole flared and Desan blinked, having expected some dreadful image, some confrontation with a reconstruction. Instead, columns of words rippled in the air, green and blue. Numbers ticked and multiplied. In his startlement he lost the beginning and failed to follow them. “I don’t see—”
“We speak statistics here,” Gothon said. “We speak data; we couch our heresies in mathematical formulae.”
Desan turned and stared at Gothon in fright. “Heresies I have nothing to do with, doctor. I deal with facts. I come here to find facts.”
“Sit down,” the gentle doctor said. “Sit down, Lord Desan. There, move the bones over, do; the owners won’t mind, there, that’s right.”
Desan collapsed onto a stool facing a white worktable. Looked up reflexively, eye drawn by a wall-mounted stone that bore the blurred image of a face, eroded, time-dulled—
The juxtaposition of image and bones overwhelmed him. The two whole bodies portrayed on the plaque. The sculpture. The rows of fleshless skulls.
Dead. World hammered by meteors, life struggling in its most rudimentary forms. Dead.
“Ah,” Gothon said. Desan looked around and saw Gothon looking up at the wall in his turn. “Yes. That. We find very few sculptures. A few—a precious few. Occasionally the fall of stone will protect a surface. Confirmation. Indeed. But the skulls tell us as much. With our measurements and our holos we can flesh them. We can make them—even more vivid. Do you want to see?”
Desan’s mouth worked. “No.” A small word. A coward word. “Later. So this was one place—You still don’t convince me of your thesis, doctor, I’m sorry.”
“The place. The world of origin. A many-layered world. The last layers are rich with artifacts of one period, one global culture. Then silence. Species extinguished. Stratum upon stratum of desolation. Millions of years of geological record—”
Gothon came round the end of the table and sat down in the opposing chair, elbows on the table, a scatter of bone between them. Gothon’s green eyes shone watery in the brilliant light, her mouth was wrinkled about the jowls and trembled in minute cracks, like aged clay. “The statistics, Lord Desan, the dry statistics tell us. They tell us centers of production of artifacts, such as we have; they tell us compositions, processes the Ancients knew—and there was no progress into advanced materials. None of the materials we take for granted, metals that would have lasted—”
“And perhaps they went to some new process, materials that degraded completely. Perhaps their information storage was on increasingly perishable materials. Perhaps they developed these materials in space.”
“Technology has steps. The dry numbers, the dusty dry numbers, the incidences and concentration of items, the numbers and the pots—always the pots, Lord Desan; and the imperishable stones; and the very fact of the meteors—the undeniable fact of the meteor strikes. Could we not avert such a calamity for our own world? Could we not have done it—oh, a half a century before we left?”
“I’m sure you remember, Dr. Gothon. I’m sure you have the advantage of me. But—”
“You see the evidence. You want to cling to your hopes. But there is only one question—no, two. Is this the species that launched the probe?—Yes. Or evolution and coincidence have cooperated mightily. Is this the only world they inhabited? Beyond all doubt. If there are artifacts on the fourth planet they are scoured by its storms, busied, lost.”
“But they may be there.”