"Space" - читать интересную книгу автора (Baxter Stephen)

Chapter 25 Wanpamba’s Tomb

Pierre de Bonneville, with his crew of humans and golden-haired hominids, spent a night on the beach where Malenfant had fallen from orbit. By firelight, the human crew ate dried fish and sweet potatoes. The Uprights served the humans, who didn’t acknowledge or thank them in any way.

De Bonneville started drinking a frothy beer he called pombe, of fermented grain. Within an hour he was bleary eyed, thick tongued, husky voiced.

When they were done with their chores the Uprights settled down away from the others. They built their own crude fire and cooked something that sizzled and popped with fat; to Malenfant it smelled like pork.

The boy Malenfant had dubbed “Friday” turned out to be called Magassa.

De Bonneville told Malenfant how he had traveled here along the course of the Nile, from where Cairo used to be. Like Malenfant, he’d been drawn, on his return from the stars, to the nearest thing to a metropolis the old planet had to offer. The Nile journey sounded like quite a trip: In A.D. 3265, Africa was a savage place once more.

“Listen to me. The ruler here is called Mtesa. Mtesa is the Kabaka of Uganda, Usogo, Unyoro, and Karagwe — an empire three hundred kilometers in length and fifty in breadth, the biggest political unit in all this pagan world. Things have… reverted… here on Earth, Malenfant, while we weren’t looking. The people here have gone back to ways of life they enjoyed, or endured, centuries before your time or mine, before the Europeans expanded across the planet. You and I are true anachronisms. Do you understand? These people aren’t like us. They have no real sense of history. No sense of change, of the possibility of a different future or past. The date, by your and my calendars, may be A.D. 3265. But Earth is now timeless.” He coughed, and hawked up a gob of blood-soaked phlegm.

“What happened to you, de Bonneville?”

The Frenchman grinned and deflected the question. “Let me tell you how this country is. We’re like the first European explorers, coming here to darkest Africa, in the nineteenth century. And the Kabaka is a tough gentleman. When the traveler first enters this country, his path seems to be strewn with flowers. Gifts follow one another rapidly, pages and courtiers kneel before him, and the least wish is immediately gratified. So long as the stranger is a novelty, and his capacities or worth have not yet been sounded, it is like a holiday here. But there comes a time when he must make return. Do you follow me?”

Malenfant thought about it. De Bonneville’s speech was more florid than Malenfant was used to. But then, he’d been born maybe two hundred years later than Malenfant; a lot could change in that time. Mostly, though, he thought de Bonneville had gotten a little too immersed in the local politics — who cared about this Kabaka? — not to mention becoming as bitter as hell.

“No,” he said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

De Bonneville seemed frustrated. “Ultimately you must pay back the Kabaka for his hospitality. If you have weapons with you, you must give; if you have rings, or good clothes, you must give. And if you do not give liberally, there will be found other means to rid you of your superfluities. Your companions will desert, attracted by the rewards of Mtesa. And one day, you will find yourself utterly bereft of your entire stock — and you will be stranded here, a thousand kilometers from the nearest independent community.”

“And that’s what happened to you.”

“When I stopped amusing him, the Kabaka dragged me before his court. And I… displeased him further. And, with a kiss from the katekiro — Mtesa’s lieutenant — I was sentenced to a month in the Engine of Kimera.”

“An engine?”

“It is a yellow-cake mine. I was put in with the lowest of the low, Malenfant. The sentence left me reduced, as you see. When I was released, Mtesa — in the manner of the half-civilized ruler he is — found me work in the court. I am a bookkeeper.

“Here’s something to amuse you. From my memories of Inca culture I recognized the number recording system here, which is like the quipu — that is to say, numerical records made up of knotted strings. The Kabaka has embraced this technology. Every citizen in this kingdom is stored in numbers: the date of her birth, her kinship through birth and marriage, the contents of her granaries and warehouses. I was able to devise an accounting system to assist Mtesa with tax levies, for which he showed inordinate gratitude, and I became something of a favorite at the court again, though in a different capacity.

“But you see the irony, Malenfant. We travelers return from the stars to this dismal posttechnological future — a world of illiterates — and yet I find myself a prisoner of an empire that lists the acts of every citizen as pure unadorned numbers. This may look like Eden to you; in fact it is a dread, soulless metropolis!”

The Uprights were laughing together. Malenfant could hear their voices, oddly monotonous, their jabbered speech.

“Their talk is simple,” Malenfant said.

“Yes. Direct and nonabstract. Sweet, isn’t it? About the level of a six-year-old human child.”

“What are they, de Bonneville?”

“Can’t you tell? They make me shudder. They are physically beautiful, of course. The women are sometimes compliant… Here. More pombe.”

“No.”

They sat in the cooling night, an old man and an invalid, stranded out of time, as in the distance the Uprights clustered around their fire, tall and elegant.

Malenfant agreed to travel with Pierre de Bonneville to Usavara, the hunting village of the Kabaka, and from there to the capital, Rubaga. Rubaga was the source of those radiation anomalies Malenfant had observed from orbit.

The next day they rowed out of the bay. De Bonneville’s canoe was superb, and Magassa, the Upright, drummed an accompaniment to the droning chant of the oarsmen.

Malenfant, sitting astern, felt as if he had wandered into a theme park.

About two kilometers along the shore from Usavara, the hunting village, Malenfant saw what had to be thousands of Waganda — which was, de Bonneville said, this new race’s name for members of their tribe. They were standing to order on the shore in two dense lines, at the ends of which stood several finely dressed men in crimson and black and snowy white. As the canoes neared the beach, arrows flew in the air. Kettle and bass drums sounded a noisy welcome, and flags and banners waved.

When they landed, de Bonneville led Malenfant up the beach. They were met by an old woman, short and bent. She was dressed in a crimson robe that covered a white dress of bleached cotton. De Bonneville kneeled before this figure and told Malenfant she was the katekiro: a kind of prime minister to the Kabaka.

The katekiro’s face was a wizened mask.

“Holy shit. Nemoto. ” It was her; Malenfant had no doubt about it.

When she looked closely at Malenfant, her eyes widened, and she turned away. She would not meet his eyes again.

De Bonneville watched them curiously.

The katekiro motioned with her head and, amid a clamor of beaten drums, Malenfant and de Bonneville walked into the village.

They reached a circle of grass-thatched huts surrounding a large house, which Malenfant was told would be his quarters. They were going to stay here a night, before moving inland. Nemoto left as soon as she could, and Malenfant didn’t get to speak to her.

When Malenfant emerged from his hut he found gifts from the Kabaka: bunches of bananas, milk, sweet potatoes, green Indian corn, rice, fresh eggs, and ten pots of maramba wine.

Reid Malenfant, cradling his NASA pressure suit under his arm, felt utterly disoriented. And the presence of Nemoto, a human being he’d known a thousand years before, somehow only enhanced his sense of the bizarre.

He laughed, picked up a pot of wine, and went to bed.

The next day they walked inland, toward the capital.

Malenfant found himself trekking across a vast bowl of grass. The road was a level strip two meters wide, cutting through jungle and savannah. It had, it seemed, been built for the Kabaka’s hunting excursions. Some distance away there was a lake, small and brackish, and beyond that a range of hills, climbing into mountains. The lower flanks of the mountains were cloaked in forest; their summits were wreathed in clouds. The domelike huts of the Waganda were buried deep in dense bowers of plantains — flat leaves and green flowers — that filled the air with the cloying stink of overripe fruit.

Malenfant heard a remote bellowing.

He saw animals stalking across the plain, two or three kilometers away. They might have been elephants; they were huge and gray, and tusks gleamed white in the gray light of the predawn sky. The tusks turned downward, unlike the zoo animals Malenfant remembered.

He asked de Bonneville about the animals.

De Bonneville grunted. “Those are deinotherium. The elephant things. Genetic archaeology.”

Malenfant tried to observe all this, to memorize the way back to the coast. But he found it hard to concentrate on what he was seeing.

Nemoto: God damn. She’d surely recognized him. But she’d barely acknowledged his existence, and during this long walk across Africa, he couldn’t find a way to get close to her.

After three hours’ march, they came into view of a flat-topped hill that cast a long shadow across the countryside. The hill was crowned by a cluster of tall, conical grass huts, walled by a cane fence. This hilltop village, de Bonneville said, was the capital, Rubaga; the hill itself was known as Wanpamba’s Tomb. Rubaga struck Malenfant as a sinister, brooding place, out of sympathy with the lush green countryside it ruled.

In the center of the hilltop cluster of huts stood a bigger building. Evidently this was the imperial palace. To Malenfant it looked like a Kansas barn. Fountains thrust up into the air around the central building, like handfuls of diamonds catching the light. That struck Malenfant as odd. Fountains? Where did the power for fountains come from?

Broad avenues radiated down the hill’s flanks. The big avenues blended into lower-grade roads, which cut across the countryside. Malenfant saw that much of the traffic — pedestrians and ox carts — was directed along these radiating roads, toward and away from the capital.

Two of the bigger roads, to east and west, seemed more rutted and damaged than the rest, as if they bore heavy traffic. The eastern road didn’t ascend the hill itself but rather entered a tunnel cut into the hillside. It looked like it was designed for delivering supplies of some sort to a mine or quarry inside the bulk of the hill, or maybe for hauling ore out of there. In fact he saw a caravan of several heavy covered carts, drawn by laboring bullocks, dragging its way along the eastern road. It reminded Malenfant of a twenty-mule team hauling bauxite out of Death Valley.

They proceeded up the hill, along one of the big avenues. The ground was a reddish clay. The avenue was fenced with tall water-cane set together in uniform rows.

People crowded the avenues. The Waganda wore brown robes or white dresses, some with white goatskins over their brown robes, and others with cords folded like a turban around their heads. They didn’t show much curiosity about de Bonneville’s party. Evidently a traveler was a big deal out in Usavara, out in the sticks, but here in the capital everyone was much too cool to pay attention.

There wasn’t so much as a TV aerial or a Coke machine in sight. But de Bonneville surprised Malenfant by telling him that people here could live to be as old as 150 years.

“We have been to the stars, and have returned. Rubaga might look primitive, but it is deceptive. We are living on the back of a thousand years’ progress in science and technology. Plus what we bought from the Gaijin, and others. It is invisible — embedded in the fabric of the world — but it’s here. For instance, many diseases have been eradicated. And, thanks to genetic engineering, aging has been slowed down greatly.”

“What about the Uprights?”

“What?”

“What life span can they expect?”

De Bonneville looked irritated. “Thirty or forty years, I suppose. What does it matter? I’m talking about Homo Sapiens, Malenfant.”

Despite de Bonneville’s claims about progress, Malenfant soon noticed that mixed in with the clean and healthy and long-lived citizens there were a handful who looked a lot worse off. These unclean were dressed reasonably well. But each of them — man, woman, or child — was afflicted by diseases and deformities. Malenfant counted symptoms: swollen lips, open sores, heads of men and women like billiard balls to which mere clumps of hair still clung. Many were mottled with blackness about the face and hands. Some of them had skin that appeared to be flaking away in handfuls, and there were others with swollen arms, legs and necks, so that their skin was stretched to a smooth glassiness.

All in all, the same symptoms as Pierre de Bonneville.

De Bonneville grimaced at his fellow sufferers. “The Breath of Kimera,” he hissed. “A terrible thing, Malenfant.” But he would say no more than that.

When these unfortunates moved through the crowds the other Waganda melted away from them, as if determined not even to glance at the unclean ones.

They reached the cane fence that surrounded the village at the top of the hill. They passed through a gate and into the central compound.

Malenfant was led to the house that had been allotted to him. It stood in the center of a plantain garden and was shaped like a marquee, with a portico projecting over the doorway. It had two apartments. Close by there were three domelike huts for servants, and railed spaces for — he was told — his bullocks and goats.

Useful, he thought.

The prospect from up here was imperial. A landscape of early summer green, drenched in sunshine, fell away in waves. There was a fresh breeze coming off the huge inland sea. Here and there isolated cone-shaped hills thrust up from the flat landscape, like giant tables above a green carpet. Dark sinuous lines traced the winding courses of deep tree-filled ravines separated by undulating pastures. In broader depressions Malenfant could see cultivated gardens and grain fields. Up toward the horizon all these details melted into the blues of the distance.

It was picture-postcard pretty, as if Europeans had never come here. But he wondered what this countryside had seen, how much blood and tears had had to soak into the earth before the scars of colonialism had been healed.

Not that the land wasn’t developed pretty intensely: notably, with a network of irrigation channels and canals, clearly visible from up here. The engineering was impressive, in its way. Malenfant wondered how the Kabaka and his predecessors had managed it. The population wasn’t so great, it seemed to him, that it could spare huge numbers of laborers from the fields for all these earthworks.

Maybe they used Uprights, whatever they were.

Anyhow, he thought sourly, so much for the pastoral idyll. It looked as if Homo Sap was on the move again — building, breeding, lording it over his fellows and the creatures around him, just like always.

In this unmanaged biosphere, immersed in air that was too dense and too hot and too humid, Malenfant had trouble sleeping; and when he did sleep, he woke to fuzzy senses and a sore head.

There was no way to get coffee, decaffeinated or otherwise.

The next afternoon Malenfant was invited to the palace.

The katekiro — Nemoto — came to escort him, evidently under orders. “Come with me,” she said bluntly. It was the first time she’d spoken directly to Malenfant.

“Nemoto, I know it’s you. And you know me, don’t you?”

“The Kabaka is waiting.”

“How did you get here? How long have you been here? Are there any other travelers here?”

Nemoto wouldn’t reply.

They approached the tall inner fence around the palace itself. He wasn’t the only visitor today, and a procession drew up. The ordinary Waganda weren’t permitted beyond this point, but they crowded around the gates anyhow, gossiping and preening.

There was a rumbling roll of a kettle drum, and the gate was drawn aside; they proceeded — chiefs, soldiers, peasants, and interstellar travelers — into a complex of courtyards.

There was a wide avenue inside the fence, and at the fence’s four corners those spectacular fountains thrust up into the air, rising fifteen meters or more. The water emerged from crude clay piping that snaked into the ground beneath the palace. Maybe there were pumps buried in the hillside.

Malenfant approached the nearest fountain. He reached out to touch the water. Christ, it was hot, so hot it almost scalded his fingers. Nemoto pulled his arm back. Her hand on his was leathery and warm.

The drums sounded again. They passed through courtyard after courtyard, until finally they stood in front of the palace itself.

It was only a grass hut. But it was tall and spacious, full of light and air. Malenfant, who had once visited the White House, had been in worse government buildings.

The heart of the palace was a reception room. This was a narrow hall some twenty meters long, the ceiling of which was supported by two rows of pillars. The aisles were filled with dignitaries and officers. At each pillar stood one of the Kabaka’s guards, wearing a long red mantle, white trousers, black blouse, and a white turban ornamented with monkey skin. All were armed with spears. But there was no throne there, nor Mtesa himself. Instead there was only what Malenfant took to be a well, a rectangular pit in the floor.

Malenfant, Nemoto, and the rest had to sit in rows before the open pit.

Drums clattered, and puffs of steam came venting up from the well mouth, followed by a grinding, mechanical noise. A platform rose up out of the well, smoothly enough. Once again, Malenfant wondered where the energy for these stunts came from. The platform carried a throne — a seat like an office chair — on which sat the lean figure of Mtesa himself. Mtesa’s head was clean-shaven and covered with a fez; his features were smooth, polished and without a wrinkle, and he might have been any age between twenty-five and thirty-five. His big, lustrous eyes gave him a strange beauty, and Malenfant wondered if there was Upright blood in there. Mtesa was sweating, his robes a little rumpled, but was grinning hugely.

Nemoto, as the katekiro, and Mtesa’s vizier and scribes all came forward to kneel at his feet. Some kissed the palms and backs of his hands; others prostrated themselves on the ground. Malenfant found it very strange to watch Nemoto do this.

Through all this, a girl stood at Mtesa’s elbow. She was tall, dressed in white, her hair dark, but she had the broad neck and downy golden fur of an Upright. She couldn’t have been more than fifteen. She moved like a cat, and — thought Reid Malenfant, dried-up hundred-year-old star voyager — she was sexy as all hell. But she looked troubled, like a child with a guilty conscience.

The main business of the afternoon was a bunch of petitioners and embassies, each of which Mtesa handled with efficiency — and, when he was displeased, with brutality. In such cases the “Lords of the Cord” were called forward: big beefy guards whose job was to drag away the source of Mtesa’s anger by ropes about the neck. It was, Malenfant thought, a striking management technique.

Nemoto was heavily involved in all this: the presentation of cases and evidence, the delivery of the verdict. And each sentencing was preceded by Nemoto placing a dry kiss on the cheek of the terrified victim — a kiss of death, Malenfant thought with a shudder, planted by a thousand-year-old woman.

At last Mtesa turned to Malenfant. Through an interpreter, a dried-up little courtier, the Kabaka asked questions. He showed a childlike curiosity about Malenfant’s story: where and when he had been born, the places he had seen in his travels.

After a while, Malenfant started to enjoy the occasion. For the first time in a thousand years, Reid Malenfant had found somebody who actually wanted to hear his anecdotes about the early days of the U.S. space program.

Mtesa, it turned out, knew all about the Gaijin, and Saddle Point gateways, and, roughly speaking, the dispersal of humanity over the last thousand years. He wasn’t uncomfortable with the idea of Malenfant having been born a millennium ago. But these were abstractions to him, since the Gaijin didn’t intervene in affairs on Earth — not overtly anyhow — and Mtesa was more interested in what profit he could make out of this windfall.

Malenfant reminded himself that people were most preoccupied by their own slice of history; Mtesa was a man of his time, which had nothing to do with Malenfant’s. Still, Malenfant wondered how many more generations would pass before only the kings and courtiers knew the true story of mankind, while everyone else subsided to flat-Earth ignorance and started worshiping Gaijin flower-ships as gods in the sky.

Mtesa offered Malenfant various gifts and an invitation to stay as long as he wished, then dismissed him.

Nemoto got away from Malenfant as soon as she could.

That evening, alone in his villa, Malenfant started to feel ill.

He couldn’t keep down his food. He felt as if he was running a temperature. And his hand hurt: there was a burning sensation, deep in the flesh, where the fountain water had splashed him.

In the bubble helmet of his EMU, he studied his reflection. He didn’t look so bad. A little glassy about the eyes, perhaps. Maybe it was the food.

He went to bed early and tried to forget about it.

He pursued Nemoto. He tried everything he could think of to break through to her.

Eventually, with every evidence of reluctance, Nemoto agreed to spend a little time with Malenfant. She came to his hut, and they sat on the broad, wood-floored veranda, by the light of a small oil lamp and of the blue Moon.

She brought with her a Buddha, a squat, ugly carving. It was made, she said, of fused regolith from the Mare Ingenii: Moon rock, worn smooth by time. The wizened little Japanese looked up at the blue-green Moon. “And now the regolith is buried under meters of dirt, with fat lunar-gravity-evolved earthworms crawling through it. We have survived to see strange times, Malenfant.”

“Yeah.”

They talked, but Nemoto was no cicerone. The only way he could get any information out of her was to let her rehearse her obsession with the Gaijin — not to mention her former employers, Nishizaki Heavy Industries, whom she thought had betrayed the human species.

He was astonished to find she’d traveled here, through a thousand years of history, the long way around: not by skipping from era to era as he and the other Saddle Point travelers had done, but simply by not dying. She gave him no indication of what technology she had used to exceed so greatly the usual human life span.

A thousand years of consciousness: no doubt this was dwarfed by Cassiopeia and her mechanical sisters, but such a span seemed unbearable on a human scale. He wondered how well Nemoto could retrieve the memories of her own deep past, of her first meeting with him on the Moon, for instance; perhaps she had been forced to resort to technology to reorder and optimize her immense recollections. And, listening to Nemoto, he wondered how much of her sanity, her personality, had survived this long ordeal of life. She hinted at dark periods, slumps into poverty and powerlessness, even a period — centuries long — when she had lived as a recluse on the Farside of the Moon.

However she had been damaged by time, though, she had retained one thing: her crystal-clear enmity of the Gaijin, and the ETs who were following them.

“When I found the Gaijin I imagined we were destined fora thousand-year war. But now a thousand years have elapsed, and the war continues. Malenfant, when I still had influence, I struggled to restrict the Gaijin. I recruited the people called the Yolgnu. I established Kasyapa Township—”

“On Triton.”

“Yes. It was a beachhead, to keep the Gaijin from expanding their industrial activities in the outer system. I failed in that purpose. Now there are only a handful of human settlements beyond the Earth. There is a colony on Mercury, huddling close to the Sun beyond the reach of the Gaijin… If it survives, perhaps that will be our final home. For the Gaijin are here. ”

A moth was beating against the lamp. She reached up and grabbed the insect in one gnarled hand. She showed the crushed fragments to Malenfant.

Flakes of mica wing. The sparkle of plastic. A smear of what looked like fine engine oil.

“Gaijin,” Nemoto said. “They are here, Malenfant. They are everywhere, meddling, building. And worse are following.” She pointed up to the stars, in a sky made muddy with light by the low Moon. He could pick out Orion, just. “You must have seen the novae.”

“Is that what they are?”

“Yes. There has been a rash of novae, of minor stellar explosions, like an infection spreading along the spiral arm. It has been proceeding for centuries.”

“My God.”

She smiled grimly. “I’ve missed you, Malenfant. You immediately see implications. This is deliberate, of course, a strategy of some intelligence. Somebody is setting off the stars, exploding them like firecrackers. The stars selected are like the Sun — more or less. We have seen the disruption of Castor and Pollux in Gemini. Castor is a binary of two A-class stars some forty-five light-years away, Pollux a K-class thirty-five light-years away. Then came Procyon, an F-class eleven light-years away, and, more recently Sirius—”

“Just nine light-years away.”

“Yes.”

“Why would anybody blow up stars?”

She shrugged. “To mine them of raw materials. Perhaps to launch a fleet of solar-sail starships. Who knows? I call them the Crackers,” she said darkly. “Appropriate, don’t you think? The spread seems to have been patchy, diffuse.”

“But they are coming this way.”

“Yes. They are coming this way.”

“Perhaps the Gaijin will defend us.”

She snorted. “The Gaijin pursue their own interest. We are incidental, just another victim species a few decades or centuries behind the general development, about to be burned up in an interstellar war between rapacious colonists.”

Just as Malenfant had seen among the stars, over and over. And now it was happening here.

But there was still much mystery, he thought. There was still the question of the reboot, the greater cataclysm that seemed poised to sweep over the Galaxy and all its squabbling species.

What were the Gaijin really up to, here in the Solar System? Nemoto’s blunt antagonism seemed simplistic to Malenfant, who had come to know the Gaijin better. They were hardly humanity’s friends, but neither were they mortal enemies. They were just Gaijin, following their own star.

But Nemoto was still talking, resigned, fatalistic. “I am an old woman. I was already an old woman a thousand years ago. All I can do now is survive, here, in this absurd little kingdom…”

Maybe. But, he reflected, if she’d chosen to retire, she could have done that anywhere. She didn’t have to come here, to this dismal feudal empire, and serve its puffed-up ruler. The grassy metropolis — and the radiation signature, that trace of technology — had drawn her here, just like himself.

Testing her, he said, “I have a functioning pressure suit.”

She scarcely moved, as if trying to mask her reaction to that. She was like a statue, some greater Moon-rock Buddha herself.

There is, he realized, something she isn’t telling me — something significant.

He was woken before dawn.

De Bonneville’s ruined face loomed over him like a black moon, the sweet stink of pombe on his breath. “Malenfant. Come. They’re hunting.”

“Who?”

“You’ll see.”

A sticky, moist heat hit Malenfant as soon as he left his hut. He walked down the broad hill, after de Bonneville, working through a hierarchy of smaller and more sinuous paths until there was savannah grass under his feet, long and damp with dew. Wagandans were following them, men and women alike, talking softly, some laughing.

The blue Moon had long set. There were still stars above. Malenfant saw a diffuse light, clearly green, tracking across the southern sky: it was a Tree, a living satellite populated by posthumans, floating above this primeval African landscape.

De Bonneville cast about and pointed. “There’s a track — see, where the grass has been beaten down? It leads toward the lake. Come. We will walk.” And, without waiting for acquiescence, he turned and led the way, limping and wheezing, his pains evidently forgotten in his eagerness for the spectacle.

Malenfant followed, tracking through the long damp grass. They passed a herd of the elephant analogs, the deinotherium. They seemed unaware of the humans. From a stand of trees, Malenfant saw the scowl of a cat — perhaps a lion — with long saber teeth protruding over its lower jaw. De Bonneville said it was a megantereon. And he almost tripped over a lizard hiding in the undergrowth at his feet; it was half a meter long, with three sharp horns protruding from its crest. It scampered away from him and then sat in the grass, its huge eyes fixed on him.

They passed a skull, perhaps of an antelope, bleached of flesh. It had been cracked open by a stone flake — little more than a shaped pebble — embedded in a pit in the bone. Malenfant bent down and prised out the flake with his fingers. Was it made by the Uprights? It seemed too primitive.

De Bonneville grabbed his arm. “There,” he whispered.

Perhaps half a kilometer away, a group of what looked like big apes — muscular, hairy, big-brained — was gathered around a carcass. Malenfant could see curved horns; maybe it was another antelope. In the dawn light the hominids were working together with what looked like handheld stone tools, butchering the carcass. A number of them were keeping watch at the fringe of the group, throwing rocks at circling hyenas.

“Are these the hunters you brought me to see?” Malenfant asked.

De Bonneville snorted with contempt. “These? No. They are not even hunters. They waited for the hyenas or jackals to kill that sivatherium, and now they steal it for themselves… Ah. Look, Malenfant.”

To Malenfant’s left, crouching figures were moving forward through the grass. In the gray light, Malenfant could make out golden skin, flashes of white cloth. It was Magassa, and more of his people, moving toward the apelike scavengers.

“Now,” de Bonneville hissed. “Now the sport begins.”

“What are these creatures, de Bonneville?”

He grinned. “When the ice was rolled back, the Earth was left empty. Various… experiments… were performed to repopulate it. But not as it had been before.”

“With older forms.”

“Of animals and even hominids, us. Yes.”

“So Magassa—”

“ — is a once-extinct hominid, recreated here, in the year A.D. 3265. Magassa is Homo Erectus. And there are tigers once more in India, and mammoths in the north of Europe, and roaming the prairies of North America once more are many of the megafauna species destroyed by the Stone Age settlers there… Quite something, isn’t it, Malenfant? I’m sure you didn’t expect to find this on your return to Earth: the lost species of the past, restored to roam the empty planet, here at the end of time.”

It sounded, to Malenfant, like characteristic Gaijin tinkering. Just as they had poked around with Earth’s climate and biosphere and geophysical cycles, so, it seemed, they were determined to explore the possibilities inherent in DNA, life’s treasury of the past. Endless questing, as they sought answers to their unspoken questions. But still, here was a hunting party of Homo Erectus, by God, stalking easily across the plains of Africa in this year A.D. 3265. “Is anyone studying this?”

De Bonneville looked at him curiously. “Perhaps you don’t understand. Science is dead, Malenfant. These are only Uprights. But…” He looked more thoughtful. “I sometimes wonder if Magassa has a soul. Magassa can speak, you know, to some extent. His speech mechanism is closer to nonhuman primates. Still, he can make himself understood. Look into Magassa’s eyes, Malenfant, and you will see a true consciousness — far more developed than any animal’s — but a consciousness lacking much of the complexity and darkness and confusion of our own. Is there still a Pope or a mullah, somewhere on Earth or the Moon, concerned with such issues, perhaps declaring Magassa an abomination even now? But Magassa himself would not frame such questions; without our full inner awareness, he would lack the ability to impute consciousness in other beings, and so could not envisage consciousness in nonhuman animals and objects. That is to say, he would not be able to imagine God.”

“You envy him,” Malenfant said.

“Yes. Yes, I envy Magassa his calm sanity. Well. They make good laborers. And the women — Wait. Watch this.”

Magassa stood suddenly, whooped, and brandished a torch, which burst into flame. The other Uprights stood with him and hollered. Their high, clear voices carried across the grassy plain to Malenfant, like the cries of gulls.

At the noise, the primitive scavenging hominids jumped up, startled. With bleating cries they ran away from the Uprights and their fire, abandoning the antelope. One of the hominids — a female — was a little more courageous; she reached back and tore a final strip of flesh from the carcass before fleeing with the others, flat breasts flapping.

But now more Uprights burst out of the grass before the fleeing hominids. It was a simple trap, but obviously beyond the more primitive hominids’ mental grasp.

At this new obstacle the scavengers hesitated for a second, like startled sheep. Then they bunched together and kept on running. They forced their way right through the cluster of Uprights, who hailed stones and bone spears at them. Some of the weapons struck home, with a crunching violence that startled Malenfant. But as far as he could see all the hominids got through.

All, that is, except one: the female who had hung back, and who was now a few dozen meters behind the rest.

The Uprights closed around her. She fought — she seemed to have a rock in her clenched fist — but she was overwhelmed. The Uprights fell on her, and she went down in a forest of flailing arms.

Her fleeing companions didn’t look back.

De Bonneville stood up, his blackened face slick with sweat, breathing hard.

The Upright Magassa came stalking out of the pack with a corpse slung over his shoulder. He had blood on his teeth and on the golden fur of his chest.

The body he carried was about the size of a twelve-year-old child’s, Malenfant guessed, coated with fine dark hair. The arms were long, but the hands and feet were like a modern human’s. The brainpan was crushed, a bloody mess, but the face was prominent: a brow ridge, a flat apelike nose, the jaw protruding, big front teeth. That tool was still clutched in the female’s hand; it was a lava rock, crudely shaped.

The head, in life, had been held up. This was a creature that had walked upright.

Magassa dumped the corpse at de Bonneville’s feet and howled his triumph.

“And what is this, de Bonneville?”

“Another reconstruction: Handy Man, some two million years vanished. Even less conscious, less self-aware, than our Upright friends.”

“Homo Habilis.”

“Malenfant, every species of extinct hominid is represented on this big roomy land of ours. I was pleased to see the prey were habilines, this morning — the Australopithecines can run, but are too stupid for good sport—”

“Get me out of here, de Bonneville.”

De Bonneville’s ruined eyes narrowed. “So squeamish. So hypocritical. Listen to me, Malenfant. This is how we lived. Sometimes they rape before the kill. Think of it, Malenfant! You and I have traveled to the stars. And yet, all the time, we carried the Old Men with us, asleep in our bones, waiting to be recalled…”

The Upright took a rock from his belt and started to hammer at the back of the dead habiline’s skull. He dug his fingers into the hole he had made, pulled out gray material, blood-soaked, and crammed it into his mouth.

Reid Malenfant knew, at last, that he had truly come home. He turned away from the habiline corpse.