“Could the Cuddlies be that smart?”
“It would be instinctual behavior. A survival characteristic developed through the ages. Mim, we’re finding out so much about terrestrial life from the books and microrecords in the libraries we’ve unearthed and from studying the organisms in the Cuddly burrows. Earth must have been a wonderful place! There were flying things that wove nests, rodents that built dams! Animal societies that cared for their young cooperatively! And we’re a part of that richness and diversity!”
She reached for his gloved hand and gave it a clumsy squeeze. “I know. Life will never be the same again.” She darted a a mischievous glance at him. “The food, for one thing. Marg’s been experimenting with some of those frozen seeds that were found in storage. She says we’ll soon be eating something called an artichoke.”
Bram laughed. “She’ll have us eating King James’s forbidden fruit next.”
“We already are,” Mim said quite seriously. “Wasn’t that the fruit of the tree of knowledge?”
Bram sobered. “More knowledge than we can absorb during our stay here. We’ll have to come back someday, Mim, after we find our world and get settled.” He took her by the arm. “Come on, we’d better find Ame and find out what she has to tell us.”
The archaeologists had chosen the big sports arena as their headquarters. It was the only place large enough to reassemble some of their finds. Most of it was still underground, a tall interior space that the diggers had gained access to after excavating only a couple of layers.
Bram and Mim followed the vehicle ramp downward to a domed receiving area where several of the monstrous Nar digging machines were parked awaiting service and a number of heavy-duty walkers were being carefully unloaded under supervision. A driver going off duty let them in through one of the small prefabricated personnel locks that had been ferried down from the tree and installed here.
The living quarters were a careless jumble of plastic cubicles around the perimeter of the dig. Bram and Mim gratefully accepted an offer of showers and fresh tunics before going on through to the huge cylindrical cavity proper; several hours in a space suit doesn’t do much to make a person presentable.
Banks of powerful lamps had been mounted far overhead as work lights. In their harsh glare, the cavernous interior took on a stark pattern of bright surfaces outlined by black shadow. Small groups of people in smocks or tabards were scattered across the immense broken floor, working at some of the hundreds of long tables where fragments of artifacts were being sorted and cataloged. More treasures were on display along the tiers of former spectator balconies in arrangements that made sense to the various specialists.
The larger reconstructions, some of them fairly complete, rose at intervals from the floor. Bram saw an articulated eight-wheeled surface vehicle taking shape—a series of portholed balls connected by flexible access tubes—and a towering plinth with the legs of a colossal metal statue still attached to it. Elsewhere, a section of wall with an engraved gate was being put together from a pile of stone blocks.
Bram pointed upward. “You can see where we patched the roof to pressurize the place—and we only had to do that because we broke through it ourselves. Otherwise, we only had to put in a few minor seals to make the place airtight again. They built well, these former humans. The supporting walls were fused stone and carbon, yards thick.”
“What kind of games did they play here?”
“We’ve found clues to that in some bas-reliefs we dug up. One game was played with a ball and paddles. You struck the ball with a paddle or kicked it with a foot while flapping the paddles to try to stay aloft as long as possible. There was a variation played only with a stick—the players dropped faster, and the plays were shorter. If you’ll look way up toward the ceiling past the lights, you’ll see the remnants of the drop grid. At the beginning of each play the teams were released simultaneously at a signal, in their starting positions.”
They continued threading their way between the tables across the wide floor. Progress was tricky because the floor was not smooth enough for a low-gravity scuff, and there was a tendency to bounce too high when surmounting some block of rubble—but they couldn’t sail over the obstacles, either, because they had to be careful of the tables.
“They drank out of strange cups,” Mim said, pausing at a table spread with shards of plastic ware.
Bram examined one of the more complete cups, a two-handled affair whose top tapered into a sort of spout that one could put into one’s mouth, almost like a nipple.
“Actually, that’s not such a bad design for a low-gravity environment. Prevents sloshing. Better than our own lidded cups,” Bram observed.
“That’s not what I meant. It’s the handles. They don’t seem to fit the hand very well. I’d find it very awkward to drink from one.”
Instead of being designed for one or two fingers and an opposing thumb, the handles were fat knobs with five vertical grooves. Bram could see what Mim meant. If one were going to hold a cup with two hands as if it were a bowl, the natural tendency would be to cradle it laterally, in the direction the wrists faced. If handles were needed at all, the grooves ought to have been horizontal—and there ought to have been only four of them, with a depression for the thumb on the opposite side.
“Maybe their wrists were more supple than ours,” he said. He smiled at a sudden comic image. “Or maybe they had no elbow room at their tables.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I. About the wrist joints, anyway. Mim, what if Original Man didn’t become extinct seventy-odd million years ago, as we’ve always thought? What if he evolved past us—past the image of himself that he transmitted to the Virgo cluster?”
“Have you talked to Edard about the musical instruments?”
“What? No, Edard leads his own life these days. I haven’t seen him for a ten of Tendays.”
“They put him on one of the evaluation committees. Asked for his thoughts on fragments that seemed to belong to musical instruments. There’s a sort of pottery … flute, I’d guess you’d call it, in the shape of a tapered ovoid. It has finger grooves like the cups. And Edard says that the finger holes are placed in a peculiar way. It would make it almost impossible to play.”
“Well, perhaps Ame has an answer. Here we are. This is her bailiwick over here.”
He steered Mim toward one of the open bays on the perimeter of the floor, under the overhang of the first balcony. The bay was perhaps a quarter acre in extent. The bones didn’t take up as much room as the artifacts.
Ame came over to greet them. Her handful of assistants were working at tables with brushes and scrapers and buckets of plaster. One bushy-headed fellow was glued to a computer screen that showed animated images comparing the ways hip joints rotated.
“Bram-tsu-fu, Mim-tsu-mu!” she said, her face radiant with pleasure. “I’m so glad you could come!”
“How are the twins?” Mim asked, giving her a matriarchal kiss.
“Jabbering. And getting into things. Smeth’s watching them now. We have rooms at the guest house across the moon plaza. But I think I’m going to ask him to take them back to the tree. The low gravity isn’t good for their bones while they’re growing.” She laughed. “Besides, they’re enough trouble in two dimensions without having them flying through the air as well.”