The three rode in a small car that moved through tunnels laterally as well as up and down. Two of Fagin’s root-pods gripped a low rail that ran a few centimeters off the floor. The two humans held onto another that circuited the car higher up.
Jacob listened with half an ear as the car glided on. LaRoque still bearded a topic he started back aboard the Bradbury: that the missing Patrons of Earth… those mythical beings who supposedly began the Uplift of man thousands of years ago, and then gave it up halfway finished… were somehow associated with the Sun. LaRoque thought the Sun Ghosts themselves might be that race.
“Then you have all of the references in the religions of Earth. Almost in every one the Sun is something holy! It is one of the common threads that runs through all cultures!”
LaRoque made an expansive gesture with his arms, as if to encompass the scope of his idea.
“It makes so much sense,” he said. “It would also explain why it is so difficult for the Library to trace our ancestry. Surely solar-type races have been known before… That is why this ‘research’ is so stupid. But they are undoubtedly rare and no one has yet thought to feed the Library this correlation which could solve two problems at once!”
The trouble was that the idea was so damned hard to refute. Jacob sighed inwardly. Of course many primitive Earth civilizations once had Sun cults. The Sun was so obviously the source of heat and light and life, a thing of miraculous power! It must be a common stage for a primitive people to pass through, to see animate properties in their star.
And there was the problem. The galaxy had few “primitive peoples” to compare to the human experience; mostly animals, pre-sentient hunter-gatherers (or analogous types), and fully uplifted sophont races. Hardly ever did an “in-between” case like man show up — apparently abandoned by its patron without the training to make its new sapiency work.
In such rare cases the newly potent minds were known to burst free of their ecological niche. They invented strange mockeries of science — bizarre rules of cause and effect, superstition and myth. Without the guiding hand of a patron, such “wolfling” races seldom lasted long. Humanity’s current notoriety was partly due to its survival.
The very lack of any other species with similar experience to compare with made generalizations easy to form and hard to refute. Since there were no other examples of species-wide indulgence in Sun-worship known to the small Branch in La Paz. LaRoque could maintain that those traditions of humanity recalled the Uplift that was never finished.
Jacob half listened for a moment longer just in case LaRoque said anything new. But mostly he let his mind drift.
It had been a long two days since the landing. He had had to get used to traversing from parts of the base that were gravity tuned to others in which the feathery pull of Mercury prevailed. There were many introductions to Base personnel, most of whose names he immediately forgot. Then Kepler had assigned someone to take him to his quarters.
The chief physician at Hermes Base turned out to be a Dolphin-Uplift bug. He was only too happy to examine Kepler’s prescriptions, expressing mystification that there were so many. Afterwards he insisted on throwing a party at which everyone in the medical department, it seemed, wanted to ask questions about Makakai. Between toasts, that is. For that matter there weren’t all that many questions after all.
Jacob’s mind moved a little slowly as the car came to rest and the doors slid open to the huge underground cavern where the Sunships were serviced and stored. Then, for a fleeting moment, it seemed that space itself was bending out of shape, and, worse yet, there was two of everybody!
The opposite wall of the Cavern seemed to bulge forward, up to a rounded bulb only a few meters away, directly across from him. There, where it was closest, stood a Kanten two and a half meters high, a small red-faced human, and a tall, stocky, dark complexioned man who stared back at him with one of the stupidest expressions he’d ever seen.
Jacob suddenly realized that he was looking at the hull of a Sunship, the most perfect mirror in the solar system. The amazed man opposite him, with the obvious hangover, was his own reflection.
The twenty-meter spherical ship was so good a mirror that it was difficult to define its shape. Only by noting the sharp discontinuity of the edge and the way reflected images swept away in an arc could he focus his eyes on something to be interpreted as a real object at all.
“Very pretty,” LaRoque admitted grudgingly. “Lovely, brave, misguided crystal.” He lifted his tiny camera-recorder and scanned it left to right.
“Most impressive,” Fagin added.
Yeah, Jacob thought. And big as houses, also.
Large as the ship was, the Cavern made it seem insignificant. The rough, rocky ceiling arched high overhead, disappearing in a misty fog of condensation.
Where they stood it was rather narrow, but it stretched to the right for a kilometer, at least, before curving out of sight.
.They stood on a platform which brought them even with the equator of the ship, above the working floor of the hangar. A small crowd stood down below, dwarfed by the silvery sphere.
Two hundred meters to the left stood a pair of massive vacuum doors, easily a hundred and fifty meters broad. Those, Jacob supposed, were part of the airlock that led, by tunnel, to the unfriendly surface of Mercury, where the giant interplanetary ships, such as the Bradbury, rested in huge natural caves.
A ramp led down from the platform to the cavern floor below. At the bottom Kepler spoke with three men in overalls. Culla stood not far away. His companion was a well-dressed chimpanzee who sported a monocle and stood on a chair to get even with Culla’s eyes.
The chimp jumped up and down with flexed knees and set the chair shivering. He tapped furiously at an instrument on his chest. The Pring diplomat watched with an expression that Jacob had learned to interpret as one of friendly respect. But there was something else in Culla’s stance that surprised him… an indolence, a looseness of posture, before the chimpanzee, that he had never seen the E.T. display in talking to a human or Kanten or Cynthian or, especially, a Pil.
Kepler greeted Fagin first then turned to Jacob.
“Glad you could make the tour, Mr. Demwa.” Kepler shook his hand with a firmness that surprised Jacob, then called the chimpanzee over to his side.
“This is Dr. Jeffrey, the first of his species to become a full member of a space research team, and one helluva fine worker. It’s his ship that we’ll be touring.”
Jeffrey smiled with the wry, unhinged grin characteristic of the superchimp species. Two centuries of genetic engineering had wrought changes in the skull and pelvic arch, changes modeled on the human form, as it was the easiest to duplicate. He looked like a very fuzzy, short brown man with long arms and huge buck teeth.
Another bit of engineering became evident when Jacob shook his hand. The chimpanzee’s fully opposable thumb pressed hard, as if to remind Jacob that it was there, the Mark of a man.
Where Bubbacub carried his Vodor, Jeffrey wore a device with black horizontal keys left and right. In the middle was a blank screen about twenty centimeters by ten.
The superchimp bowed and his fingers flew over the keys. Bright letters appeared on the screen.
I AM HAPPY TO MEET YOU. DOCTOR KEPLER TELLS ME YOU’RE ONE OF THE GOOD GUYS.
Jacob laughed. “Well thanks a lot, Jeff. I try to be, though I still don’t know what it is I’m going to be asked to do!”
Jeffrey gave the familiar shrieking chimpanzee laugh; then, for the first time, he spoke. “You will find out ssooonl”
It was almost a croak, but Jacob was amazed. Speech was still almost impossibly painful for this generation of superchimp, but Jeff’s words came out very clear.