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.The fact that the city-dwellers abandoned the site doesn’t mean that their cousins aren’t still around.”“We’ve done what we can to find them,” the young man assured him.“Agricultural activity should be easy enough to detect, even at a far more restricted level, and even hunter-gatherers need fires.If anyone had lit a single cooking fire in the last three years, anywhere on the world’s surface, we’d have been able to home in on it.If they were alive somewhere out in the long grass, invisible from the air, they’d have to have gone back to the very beginning, eating what they hunt and gather in its raw state.That seems unlikely.Incredible, even.The people on the ground who believe that the aliens are still around have their own reasons for wanting to believe it.”“The human race had some pretty narrow squeaks,” Matthew said, pensively.“There used to be more genetic variation in a single chimpanzee troop than in the entire human race, before chimps became extinct.Mitochondrial Eve had lived not much more than a hundred and forty thousand years before Hope’s odyssey began.Animals as big as humans are more vulnerable to catastrophes of all kinds than their smaller and humbler cousins.If these guys had never domesticated fire, they’d be even more vulnerable than our ancestors.Still …”“Which side was Delgado on?” Solari asked Frans Leitz.“On the extinction question, I mean.”“I don’t know—but he was enthusiastic about building the boat.”“What boat?” Solari asked.“I think it was Dr.Gherardesca’s idea.She’s the anthropologist.She figured that if it wasn’t possible to recover data about ground-level activity in the grasslands from flying eyes, the best way to do it would be to take a boat downriver.It was just about ready when Professor Delgado was killed, although they’d asked for one last consignment of equipment—we’re holding that so that we can send you down with it.”“How many other people were working at Base Three along with Delgado?” Solari persisted.“Seven.”“Seven!” Matthew could hardly believe it.“You found a ruined city made by intelligent humanoids, and you sent seven people to investigate it! The biggest news story in history, and seven people is all you can spare to follow it up.”“There were eight,” Leitz pointed out, blushing grayly yet again as his discomfort increased by an order of magnitude.“And will be again, once you’re there.” He was already turning away to resume his interrupted retreat.“I really must go now.You’ll soon get the hang of the keypads if you keep playing with them.There’s plenty more library material.Someone will pick you up when it’s time for you to see Captain Milyukov.”SIXVince Solari waited until the young man had left the room before saying: “Milyukov? Wasn’t the original captain called Ying?”“That was seven hundred years ago,” Matthew pointed out.“Captain isn’t a hereditary title.A ship’s crew has to be run on strictly meritocratic principles—supposedly.”“Why supposedly?” Solari had relaxed, allowing the keyboard to hang loosely from his tired hand.The image on the screen had frozen while displaying the internally lit bubble-domes of Base Three, strangely forlorn in a gathering evening that was turning everything purple to matt black.“Seven hundred years is a long time,” Matthew said, “and the ship was always capable of running itself between big decisions.Five or six lifetimes, maybe as many as twenty generations, can produce considerable social and political changes, and meritocracies always have a habit of backsliding.”Solari nodded, slowly.“I see,” he said.“There’s another factor that needs consideration too.Most of the Chosen—including you, I guess—were frozen down before the new generation of plagues had begun to do their worst.Interplanetary distances weren’t quarantine enough to keep the chiasmalytic transformers and their vicious kin on Earth.At least some of the crew must have been sterilized before Hope left the system.They must have been forced to adopt whatever countermeasures allowed the reconstruction of Earthly society.”“How bad did things get before you left?” Matthew asked, quietly.“I was frozen down twenty-four years after you,” Solari reminded him.“The chiasmalytic transformers were running riot.Nobody had given up hope of finding a cure, but they were stripping the eggs out of the ovaries of aborted fetuses and little girls, and splitting viable embryos so that they could keep the clones as spares … all kinds of weird stuff [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]