Bram looked across at the row of skeletons wired upright to metal stands. “It looks as if you’ve put together some fairly complete specimens since I was here last.”
“Yes,” Ame said, looking pleased. “We were lucky enough to stumble across a burial ground. They seem to have interred their dead with much ceremony. That was a bonus. We’re learning quite a lot about their technology from the grave-objects. Don’t be deceived, though. The skeletons aren’t quite as complete as they look. We’ve filled in a few missing parts with plaster and resin by mirror-imaging, inference, trading bones, and so forth.”
Bram stopped the eager flow of words with a raised eyebrow. “Burial ground?” he repeated. “What did they die of?”
“Accidents, some of them. Degenerative diseases. Old age.”
“Old age!” Mim exclaimed. “But human beings are immortal!”
“Not always, Mim,” Bram reminded her. “The immortality virus was an addition to Original Man’s message. It came somewhere between the cycles of the transmission.” He turned expectantly to Ame. “The burial ground must have dated from the earlier epoch of the diskworld, then?”
“No,” Ame said. “That’s the problem. We haven’t dug down that far yet. Though the levels are mixed in ways they ought not to be—they’ve been disturbed.”
“How recent, then?”
“From everything we can surmise from the skeleton remains, the grave objects, the kitchen middens, and all the rest—the most recent habitation of this city was only about twenty-eight to thirty million years ago.”
“Original Man’s heyday was more than twice as long ago as that. Could you be mistaken?”
“Radiometric dating confirms that figure pretty much.”
“Original Man’s civilization fell,” Mim offered. “They lost their immortality. Forgot everything. Struggled up from barbarism. Then a new civilization emerged. Went star traveling again. Found humanity’s old beacon and began digging through the ruins—same as we’re doing.”
“That might fit,” Bram said. “The mixed levels. And some of the artifacts. They’re more primitive than the diskworld itself would suggest. That eight-wheeled jointed machine with the armored portholes and those crude metal-spring tires to absorb bounce in low gravity, for instance. Even we’re beyond that, with our Nar technology. Doesn’t it suggest a race with reborn self-confidence in the first flush of star travel?”
“Come over here,” Ame said. “I want to show you something.”
They followed her to the row of skeletons. A young assistant looked up from her work, smiled, and went back to wiring vertebrae together on a half-completed specimen.
“I’ve never seen a human skeleton, of course,” Ame said. “Just Doc Pol’s ultrasonic hologram of one. But you don’t have to be an expert to see that these skeletons aren’t right.”
She switched on the hologram, which appeared in a tinted plastic booth at the end of the row of skeletons, like one more skeleton frozen in a block of ice. Bram glanced at it for comparison, then turned his attention to the others.
The long-footed skeletons were approximately human size and shape and looked remarkably similar to Doc Pol’s study model if you discounted the long tail. But even without recourse to the hologram, Bram could spot the anomalies.
“They have the same general body plan as we do,” Ame said, “and the same major bones in the same places. But the arms are too short. The upper and lower leg bones are in the wrong proportion. The thumb opposes, but it’s the same length as the fingers. The cranial structures are wrong—the skull has about the same volume as ours, but it’s long rather than domed. And the dentition is very different.”
“And then there’s the tail,” Mim put in.
“Yes,” Ame said. “Evolution might have made many changes in man over a forty-million-year period, but surely it would not have given him back his tail.”
Bram chewed his lip. “It is possible, you know. There’s such a thing as back mutation or reversion. The mechanism isn’t well understood. But in this case you might envision it as the loss of a ‘switch-off’ gene that was an earlier mutation causing taillessness in some hominoid ancestor of man. The loss would leave the redundant tail genes that were still part of the DNA free to express themselves again.”
“You mean we could all grow tails again?” Mim said, wide-eyed. “I don’t think I’d like that!”
She cast a distinctly worried look at the short-armed, long-footed skeletons with their long whiplashes of added vertebrae.
Bram laughed. “It must have complicated their space-suit design, I’ll say that.”
“Oh, we’ve found an almost intact space suit,” Ame said. “The tail sheath was quite ingenious, with a whole series of little bleeder valves that allowed the tail to curl all the way around in a prehensile grip. Even in moderate gravity, they could have hung from their tails, leaving both hands free. We turned the suit over to one of the technology evaluation committees. You can see it on the upper balcony if you like.”
“Ame, how large a population of them was there?”
“It’s too early to answer that, but it must have been in the tens of thousands.”
“Too few to have filled this city, too many to have been just a scientific expedition. Ame, what were they doing here?”
“I can’t tell you that, either. We know that one of the things they were doing was exploring these ruins—just as we are. In fact, they’ve made our work a little easier. We’ve found at least one of their digs and its repository. They seem to have brought things up from a lower level one where the artifacts definitely were made for hands like ours—and they’ve arranged and cataloged their finds most conveniently.”
“Longfoot archaeologists.”
“Yes. They seem to have been just as interested in Original Man as we are. But the level of archaeological activity wasn’t high enough to explain their numbers. Otherwise, the whole place would have been dug up.”
“And yet they lived and died here.”
“For several generations, at least. We’ve found parts of children’s skeletons, too, and fetal bones along with the skeleton of one pregnant female. Bram-tsu, they gave birth to a dozen young at a time.”
“That doesn’t sound like human beings,” Mim said.
“No, not even after thirty million more years of evolution. But on the other hand, thirty million years before our line diverged from the hominids, our most probable direct ancestor was a small tree-dwelling animal called Aegyptopithecus. It was about the size of a Cuddly and looked something like a cat.” She halted. “Do you know what a cat was?”
“Yes. The little furry animals in the Goya painting.”
Ame nodded. “So you see, a lot can happen in thirty million years, even in the human line. Tail aside, the longfoots don’t seem that different from us.”
Bram said, “Ame, what were they?”
“We’re going to do some DNA studies and protein sequencing as soon as we can scrape together enough material. I’ll let you know.”
He got the answer to one of his questions a couple of Tendays later.
He was sitting in the cubbyhole he used as an office, going over Yggdrasil’s accounts—one of the more onerous chores he had to do as year-captain. Enyd had sent him an enormous stack of tally sheets—glucose balance; starch reserves; projected production of fats, oils, alcohol, and glycine over the next kiloday; currently available hydrogen and oxygen—and he was expected to okay the allocations today, if not yesterday.