Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [77]
“But you’re convinced that they came up the river.”
“And then they stopped coming,” she agreed. “Whether the city-dwellers died here or left, their plains-dwelling cousins presumably decided to stay where they were. If they died out too, they died where they’d always lived, presumably as nomadic hunter-gatherers. Like all the hominid species of Earth, except one.”
Matthew thought that was a strange way of putting it—but then he saw what she was getting at. Nobody really knew what had happened to all the Australopithecine species that had coexisted with the remotest ancestors of Homo sapiens, or the other hominid species that had fallen by the evolutionary wayside in later eras. The conventional assumption was that they had been out-competed and driven to extinction by genus Homo, but nobody knew. There wasn’t enough evidence left to settle the question. Maybe they had died out for other reasons. How would anyone ever be sure?
“It took Homo sapiens hundreds of thousands of years to invent agriculture,” Dulcie Gherardesca pointed out, “and not much more than ten thousand to bring Earth’s ecosphere to the brink of rack and ruin. Maybe our ancestors should have figured out that it was a bad idea too, and returned to their hunter-gatherer roots as soon as possible.”
“We wouldn’t be here to worry about these guys if they had,” Matthew observed—but he knew that what she was really getting at was that if humans had returned to their hunter-gatherer roots after living for a while in the first cities of Egypt or Sumeria they would probably have died out in the next ecocatastrophe. Even as things were, humankind’s ancestors had squeezed through a desperately narrow population bottleneck.
Matthew handed back his bowl, having done his best to finish the meal. Dulcie made as if to leave, but he checked her retreat with another question. “When will the boat be finished?” he asked.
“Tomorrow, or the day after,” she told him. “We could have set out days ago if we’d been prepared to go without the last few frills, but we were instructed to wait for Solari to arrive, so that we could help with his inquiries. Some of us wanted to say no, if only on the grounds that the instruction came from people who had no authority to give us orders, but…. well, we’re just about getting used to the notion that we’re no longer united, even among ourselves. I suppose you want to come with us.”
“Yes, I do,” Matthew said.
“I suppose you even think you’re entitled, because you’re Bernal’s substitute.”
“That too.”
“But you’ve only been awake four days. You know next to nothing about this world. You’d be a passenger.”
“Sometimes,” Matthew said, mildly, “a fresh pair of eyes can be useful. Not to mention a fresh mind …”
“Bullshit,” she said. “Tang has the educated eye, the educated mind. If it were my boat, I’d want him.”
“And you need an ecologist,” Matthew continued. “All the people I talked to on Hope are too narrowly focused, on scientific and political issues alike. They’re drowning in biochemical data—there’s so much of it, and it’s so resolutely peculiar, that they’ve almost lost sight of the actual living organisms.”
“That hasn’t happened here,” she snapped back—but then she blinked, and might even have displayed a blush had she not been wearing a surface-suit. “Well,” she conceded, after a pause, “maybe a little. Most of the animals hereabouts are slugs and worms—the mammal-analogues seem to steer clear of the ruins, and the presence of the domes must be even more inhibiting.”