“Mim watch out!” Bram shouted.
A little ball of fluff streaked between her ankles and almost tripped her. She recovered her balance and managed to keep the tray level without spilling anything.
“Loki!” she scolded.
The Cuddly scampered up Trist’s leg, paused at his knee to be patted, then climbed to his shoulder and pulled at his yellow hair.
“Loki, get down and behave yourself,” Bram said. He apologized to Trist. “He gets into everything.”
“Oh, that’s all right, we have one of our own,” Trist said. He scratched the little creatures’s neck. “Where’d you get the name?”
“Loki? It was an old human god who was always getting into mischief. It seemed to fit.”
“Nen named ours Fluff. If she doesn’t stop overfeeding it, we’ll have to rename it Sphere.”
“It’s hard to resist one,” Mim said. “They’re the best thing we’re taking with us from the diskworld.”
Loki sat up and chittered at her as if he knew what she was saying. Trist broke off a corner of one of his cornsnacks and gave it to the little beast, which held the morsel in both paws and began nibbling at it.
“Yes,” Bram said. “I think they mean more to us than we realize. They’re the first terrestrial life form that humans have ever seen, after all.”
“Other than vegetables,” Trist said, popping a potato crisp into his mouth.
“Vegetables that we engineered ourselves or the Nar engineered for us. But Trist, just think of it, these little creatures carry an unbroken line of DNA that goes all the way back to the world that gave us birth.”
“DNA calls out to DNA, is that it?”
“Something like that. We know without having to think about it that these little animals are a precious link with an earthly heritage.”
Idly, Trist scratched the Cuddly behind one ear. It made a contented sound and snuggled against him. “There’s something wrong there,” he said lazily. “The first human being, as far as we’re concerned, was mixed up in a test tube by a Nar bioengineer. From native materials.”
“Ravel is Ravel,” Mim said. “No matter what instruments play it.”
“Hah! Good for you, Mim!” Trist conceded. “I’ll desist.” He took a sip of his drink. Loki tried to poke his muzzle into the cup, and Trist let him have a taste. The Cuddly sputtered and spat it out. Everybody laughed.
“Abstemious,” Bram said. “Maybe we can learn something from them.”
Trist fed the little pet another fragment of cornsnack to appease it. “It would be nice,” he said, “to go home to an Earth that was inhabited by Cuddlies instead of those tailed people with the long skinny feet.”
“Not likely,” Bram said. “Ame says the Cuddlies evolved on the diskworld from more primitive forms. That isn’t to say that some collateral branch with similar traits couldn’t have evolved on Earth in the meantime.” He frowned. “But we know what life form achieved dominance on Earth, don’t we?”
“They were rats,” Ame said.
She stepped back to let Bram have a better look at the exhibit that she and her section had prepared. Two of her colleagues—Jorv, the bouncy baby-faced zoologist whom Bram had met before, and a tall bony young woman named Shira, who was something called a “paleobiologist”—stood by with eager expressions on their faces.
Bram raised an eyebrow. “Rats? The pests of the ‘Dappled Piper’ legend?”
He scuffed cautiously closer. He hadn’t had time to readjust to diskworld gravity yet, and he was still stiff and tired from the ferry trip to the surface, though it was down to five days now.
“Rattus norvegicus to be exact,” Ame said. “The most successful member of the family and the one that would have been in the best position to succeed Original Man after man’s activities had changed the environment. They were highly adaptable, they were omnivores as humankind’s ancestors were, and in fact they resembled some of the primitive specimens on our own family tree.”
The computer-generated hologram showed three skeletons in the same scale. The center one was a life-size projection of Ame’s most complete longfoot skeleton—the one Bram had noticed when he first entered the work-bay. He recognized the skeleton on the right, too. It was Doc Pol’s familiar ultrasound figurine, the textbook example that Doc had learned his own trade from and that he now required his apprentices to memorize.
The third skeleton was something else entirely. Though the computer had made the bones stand in an upright position, the proportions were grotesque. The torso was absurdly long, with tiny little hands and feet and a head that was much too large for it. The bones would have been too spindly to support the creature in normal gravity. Bram saw immediately that the creature must have been a very small animal that the computer had brought up to the size of the other two skeletons for purposes of comparison.
Ame touched a button, and lines flashed from the center skeleton to the other two, showing correspondences. Though the longfoot skeleton and the human skeleton were superficially similar, it was immediately apparent that the disproportioned skeleton on the left had more in common with the longfoot specimen.
“You can see that what appears to be a backward-bending knee is actually what became a heel,” Ame said. “The creature would have walked on its toes. The shaft of the leg bone became a long, narrow foot. And of course, the tail is there, bone for bone.”
“Ame, this is marvelous,” Bram said. “I’m enormously impressed. How did you do all this?”
She looked pleased. “We had a breakthrough. Literally. One of the digging machines broke through to a layer where the stratigraphy had been disturbed. The longfoots had been busy there. They had a—a sort of museum of their own there. And a library. And biosample vaults. They had brought up and catalogued a whole biological cornucopia preserved by Original Man. It must have come as a wonderful revelation to the longfoots. They were interested in their own ancestry, you see. Original Man’s records predated their own fossil records.”
Jorv’s plump face beamed complacency. “Original Man did all the work for them,” he said, “and they did all the work for us.”
“We don’t have enough archaeologists to go around,” Ame said, “but all the amateurs are well trained by now. As soon as the digging machine operator saw what he was bringing up, he stopped, roped off the place, and notified the proper people.”
“As soon as they saw they were bringing up biological specimens, they got us,” Jorv bubbled. “You wouldn’t believe it! There were mounted skeletons. Arranged in classifications. And metal plaques to explain them. And supplementary materials—actual books preserved in nitrogen. And tapes and holochips. In Inglex and Chin-pin-yin. The longfoots probably couldn’t read them, but we could—right away!”
The attenuated paleobiologist, Shira, ran nervous fingers through stringy brown hair. “And there were actual tissue samples, too, still in a remarkable state of preservation. The rat-people—longfoots—had broken some of the seals, but others were intact. We were able to extract enough DNA and protein for sequential analysis.”
“There’ll be more,” Jorv interrupted. “We’ve only scratched the surface with this find. We’re trenching now, looking for the rest of it. And they thought zoology was a theoretical science! Bram-companion, when we get to our world, we’ll be able to recreate species! Stock our streams with trout, our forests with trees other than poplar! Did you know that Original Man had his own bio-vehicles—a sort of walker called a horse!”