Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [88]
“How did they move the blocks?” Matthew asked, still feeling distinctly breathless.
“The hard way, according to Dulcie. There’s little enough advantage in wheels, or even in using logs as rollers, on terrain as uneven as this, and you’ve probably noticed that the local tree-substitutes aren’t much given to the production of nice straight logs with a circular cross-section. They had no beasts of burden, so they had to carry the stones themselves, one by one, or maybe a few at a time slung in hammocks from poles and frames carried by small parties of humanoids. But the real question—the big question—is why they felt they had to move the blocks.”
“They had enemies,” Matthew said, making the obvious deduction. “Their fields were precious, and had to be defended.”
“Maybe it’s not so surprising,” Lynn went on, “whichever hypothesis you favor as to the reason for the great leap forward from hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural ones. If it really was a fabulous stroke of inspiration, the tribes that hadn’t made it were probably keen to get in on the act. If it was a desperation move forced by ecological crisis, the tribes that hadn’t made it would have been even keener. On Earth, the major ongoing conflict was always between settled agriculturalists and nomadic herdsman, but the relative dearth of mammal-equivalents in this ecosphere seems to have ensured that the humanoids never took to animal husbandry—not in a big way, at any rate—so the Cain and Abel allegory doesn’t apply.”
Matthew noticed the tacit assumption that the “enemies” the city-builders wanted to keep out were others of their own kind, but he didn’t call attention to it. Instead, he asked: “Which hypothesis do you like? The inspirational leap or the existential crisis?”
“The crisis scenario always made more sense to me as an explanation of our own prehistory,” Lynn admitted, “but if we don’t know for sure why our own hunter-gatherer ancestors settled down, we’re hardly likely to be able to come to a firm conclusion about these guys. That’s the way I tell the story to myself, though. If the people who migrated up the river and built the city did so because life down on the plain was becoming too difficult, successive waves of their increasingly distant cousins would have followed in their train. Maybe, at first, some or all of them were taken in, coopted to the grand plan—but as living space became more cramped, the people in the city might have become increasingly desperate to keep others out while the people trying to get in became more desperate in proportion. Positive feedback, ultimately bringing the conflict to a mutually ruinous climax.”
“It sounds plausible,” Matthew agreed.
“Not to Dulcie,” Lynn observed. “Not enough evidence of elaborate weaponry in the hidey-holes we’ve so far excavated. Ideally, of course, we’d like some skeletons so that we could look for evidence of violent death, but even hard human bone wouldn’t have survived for long in this kind of environment. The city-dwellers who died here have all been reabsorbed—every last knucklebone and tooth. All we have to go on are the stones and the glass fragments. No earthenware pots, no metal. Dulcie reckons that if you leave out the walls themselves, the evidence so far unearthed favors the notion