It’s a fair question. You’ve got a species that was all over the spiral arm for fifty million years or more, scattering their constructs over a couple of thousand locations and a few thousand light-years, all of them huge and indestructible and three-quarters of them still working fine — I’ve seen scores, close up, ranging from the practical and useful, like the Dobelle Umbilical, to the half-understandable, like Elephant and Lens, and on to the absolutely incomprehensible, like Succubus and Paradox and Flambeau and Juggernaut.
Builders, and artifacts. And then, bingo, about five million years ago, the Builders vanish. No sign of them after that. No final messages. In fact, no messages of any kind. Either the Builders never discovered writing, or they were even worse than programmers at documentation.
Maybe they did leave records, but we’ve not yet found out how to decipher them — some say that the black pyramid in the middle of Sentinel is a Builder library. But who can tell?
Anyway, I claim that the Downsiders don’t really care what happened to the Builders, because nothing that the Builders left behind makes much difference to planet-grubbers. I’ve watched a man on Terminus cut a Builder flat fabricator — something priceless, something we still don’t come close to understanding — in two, to patch a window. I’ve seen a woman on Darien use a section of a Builder control device, packed with sentient circuits, as a hammer. A lot of Downsiders think of Builder artifacts just the same way they think of a brick or a stone or any other ancient materiaclass="underline" in terms of what they can be used for today.
So I don’t answer the Downsiders, not directly. Usually I ask them a question or two of my own. What happened to the Zardalu, I say?
Oh, the Great Rising wiped them out, they say, when the slave races rebelled.
Then what happened to the dinosaurs, back on Earth?
Oh, that was the March of the Mitochondria. It killed them all off — everyone knows that.
The answers come pat and fast. You see, what the Downsiders want isn’t an explanation; it’s a catchphrase they can use instead of an explanation.
And suppose you tell them, as I used to tell them until I got fed up, that there were once other theories? Before the paleomicrobiologists discovered the Cretaceous mitochondrial mutation that slowed and weakened every land animal over seventy pounds to the point where it didn’t have the strength to carry its own weight, there were explanations of dinosaur extinction ranging from drought to long-period solar companion stars to big meteors to nearby supernovas. Suppose you tell them all that? Why, then they look at you as though you’re crazy.
Now the odd thing is, I do have the explanation for what happened to the Builders. It’s based on my own observations of species all around the arm. It’s logical, its simple, and no one but me seems to believe it.
It’s this:
There’s a simple biological fact, true of every life-form ever discovered: although a single-celled organism, like an amoeba or one of the other Protista, can live forever, any complex multicelled organism will die of old age if nothing else gets it.
Any species, humans or Cecropians or Varnians or Polyphemes (or Builders!), is just a large number of individuals, and you can think of that assembly as a single multicelled organism. In some cases, like the Hymenopts and the Decantil Myrmecons, the single nature is a lot more obvious than it is for humans or Cecropians — though humans seem like a swarm when you’ve seen as many worlds as I have from space, with cities and road nets and superstructures spreading over the surface like mold on a ripe fruit.
Anyway, species are organisms, and here’s my simple syllogism:
Any species is a single, multicelled organism. Every multicelled organism will over the course of time grow old and die. Therefore, any species will at last grow old and die.
That’s what happened to the superorganism known as the Builders. It lived a long time. Then it got old. And it died.
Convincing? If so, you shouldn’t expect anything better for humans. I certainly don’t.
Chapter Ten
Hans Rebka’s job as a Phemus Circle troubleshooter had taken him to a hundred planets. He had made thousands of planetary landings; and because by the nature of things his job took him only to places where there were already problems, scores of those landings had been made in desperate circumstances.
The first thought after a hard impact was always the same: Alive! I’m Alive. The questions came crowding in after that: Am I in good enough shape to function? Are my companions alive and well? Is the ship in one piece? Is it airtight? Is it intact enough to allow us to take off again?
And finally, the questions that made the condition of the ship and the crew so important: Where are we? What is it like outside?
By Rebka’s standards, the seedship had made a soft landing — which is to say, it had been brought down at a speed that did not burn it up as it entered the atmosphere and the impact had not killed outright every being on board. But it had not made a comfortable landing. The ship had driven obliquely into the surface with force enough to make the tough hull shiver and scream in protest. Hans Rebka had felt his teeth rattle in his head while a sudden force of many gravities rammed him down into the padded seat.
He had blacked out for a few seconds. When he swam back to consciousness his eyes were not working properly. There was a shifting flicker of bright lights, interspersed with moments of total darkness.
He shook his head and squeezed his eyes shut. If sight failed, he would have to make do with other senses. The key questions still had to be asked and answered.
Concentrate. Make your brain work, even though it doesn’t want to.
Hearing. He listened to the noises around him. First answer: some of the others on board had survived the crash. He could hear cursing and groaning, and the clicks and whistles of conversation between Kallik and J’merlia. The groans had to be Louis Nenda. And anything that had left humans alive was unlikely to have harmed a Lo’tfian, still less a Hymenopt. Atvar H’sial, most massive of the ship’s occupants, might be in the worst shape. But that fear was eased when Rebka felt a soft proboscis touching his face, and heard Nenda’s voice: “Is he alive? Lift him up, At, let me get a look at him.”
Smell. The ship had fared less well. Rebka could smell an unfamiliar and unpleasant odor, like cloying damp mold. The integrity of the hull had been breached, and they were breathing the planet’s air. That disposed of any idea of testing the atmosphere before exposing themselves to it. Either it would kill them, or it wouldn’t.
Touch. Someone was poking his chest and belly, hard enough to hurt. Rebka grunted and opened his eyes again, experimentally. The flicker was fading, reduced to a background shimmer. His head ached horribly. Louis Nenda had finished his abdominal poking and was moving Rebka’s arms and legs, feeling the bones and working the joints.
“Don’t need to do that.” Rebka took a deep, shuddering breath and sat up. “I’m good as new. The ship…”
“Should probably fly atmospheric with no problem. But we can’t leave for space till that’s fixed.” Nenda was pointing forward. Hans Rebka saw a spray of black mud right in front of his seat, squirted in through a caved section of the seedship’s hull. “Atvar H’sial and J’merlia are checking it out, seein’ how big a job we got before we’d be ready for a space run.”