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FIFTEEN The Empty Millennia

To sleep, perchance not to dream—if she was lucky.

Now, in Vivian Richardson's continuing absence, the expedition's second-highest-ranking officer, Reille y Sanchez remembered that she rated a better place to toss and turn: a folding cot and sleeping bag—one of three available—in the relative privacy and luxury of the crew deck, either aboard the Dole or the McCain.

After being outdoors so much the last couple of days, her skin crawled at thought of the alternative. For most of the past year, eight hours a "day," she'd occupied thirty vertical centimeters between folding bunks arranged in a stack of six in the cargo bay insert, inboard the former vessel. Even as she strode alone through the trees on her way back to the camp, the idea of wedging herself once again into such confinement, of breathing air exhaled by others, of smelling their smells, gave her a feeling of suffocation.

Entering the lighted area around the shuttles, she brightened in more than a literal sense at a third possibility. She could follow the example of many of the crew who'd scrounged blankets and bags and were sleeping under the wings and hulls of the spacecraft. The idea appealed to her. She'd gotten almost nothing in the way of rest during the previous period of darkness, with Semlohcolresh's unexpected visit to the camp and the subsequent flap over the disappearance of the expedition's second-in-command. A few minutes, here and there, was all she'd had, sitting propped against the tandem-tired nose-gear of the Hatch, Witness in hand.

Glancing down now at the same kilo of Czech steel and plastic hanging in her numb, aching fingers, she smiled sheepishly to herself. She was exhausted and becoming careless, forgetful. She slid the weapon into its holster, fastening the flap. At that, she thought, it hadn't been bad last night, all things considered, particularly after the three-hundred-odd worse nights which had preceded it. It was warm enough outside that she shouldn't need much in the way of bedding. Maybe she could still find something fresh in the Dole's emergency stores.

After a brief search, equipped with a lightweight silver-and-red plastic "space blanket" and a cup of tea courtesy of Corporal Owen's welding torch, Reille y Sanchez settled in under what was being called the "girl's wing" of the flagship, between Marna and Pulaski. She was too worn out for any conversation and grateful that both young women were already sound asleep (the latter, she observed, with her thumb in her mouth again, as had been her unconscious habit throughout most of the journey to the asteroid). As tired as Reille y Sanchez was, disturbing thoughts and vivid images kept circling inside her head. Her mind wouldn't shut itself off.

Among other things, until now, she hadn't really had time to feel the full loss of Piotr Kamanov. For most of her life, all of the people around her had been just like she was: sober, literal-minded, duty-oriented. She'd never met a man quite like the geologist, who seemed to live life simply for the fun of it. She knew now that she'd miss him very badly; his silly joking, his habit of collecting and redistributing strange stories and ideas, his astonishing lack of respect for authority and established wisdom.

Most of all, she couldn't get the Russian's stupid, senseless death out of her troubled mind, the horrifying sight of him, silent and slack-faced for the first time since she'd met him. She could think of a hundred individuals for whom the world would have been better off, had they died in his place. Now more than ever she understood that the general was right. The solution to their bizarre situation—to her own in particular—lay in somehow learning to think the way Kamanov had.

But Reille y Sanchez was a soldier. This sort of morbid preoccupation was unusual for the no-nonsense, action-oriented Marine officer, and she knew it. Finishing her tea, Reille y Sanchez set the cup aside, along with what she realized (with a small start of surprise) was her grieving. Likewise, she abandoned the speculation over the reliability of Sam and Eichra Oren which had filled her mind before these thoughts of Kamanov had intruded, and simply promised herself that she'd try her best to evaluate the amazing information they'd given her as objectively she could—tomorrow.

* * *

"Colonel?"

In a shorter time than seemed possible, the butterscotch-colored light of day had returned to the human encampment and sought out Reille y Sanchez where she lay, sweating under her plastic blanket, twitching occasionally in her sleep and mumbling to herself.

"Pulaski?" Blinking, Reille y Sanchez sat up, stiff and sore in every muscle, her mouth tasting like her idea of some nameless, ancient evil. Her right hip seemed particularly painful, as if she'd slept on a big rock. Pushing the blanket aside, she discovered that she'd fallen asleep still wearing her knife-and-pistol belt.

"Yes, ma'am. It's 0600, as near as anybody can figure, and I wondered if you'd like some coffee." The sergeant held a steaming cup under her nose, constructed neither of paper nor plastic, but of something somewhere between metal and ceramic, probably another gift from the strangely generous creatures Washington wanted them to kill. The colonel's initial nausea at the aroma was immediately smothered in a wave of irresistible craving. She took a sip and swallowed.

"Thanks—stick around. You're just the person I want to see."

"Me, Colonel?"

Reille y Sanchez struggled to her feet, brushing at her uniform with one hand while she held onto her cup with the other. "No, Pulaski, me colonel, you sergeant." She grinned self-consciously. It wasn't as bad as one of Kamanov's, but at least she was trying. "Get yourself some coffee, if you want, while I go inside for PTA drill." She watched the girl blush, as she always did, at the figure of speech, peculiar to the female Marine Corps, which stood for those parts of her anatomy she intended giving a cursory rinse. The A stood for armpits. "We're going to talk over all these ancient matters you're supposed to know so much about."

Pulaski actually threw her a salute. "Yes, ma'am."

Minutes later, they were sitting back outdoors in sunshine which came, surprisingly strong, through the asteroid canopy. For a bench, Pulaski had commandeered a fair-sized log, fated for this evening's fire. They were somewhat startled to be watching their commander, stripped to the waist and sweating, laboriously cutting kindling with the almost useless saw-toothed back of a big hollow-handled knife exactly like her own.

Adversity must be good for some people, Reille y Sanchez thought. The man seemed a lot less flabby than she recalled from their pre-voyage physical training. Brigadier General Gutierrez was being assisted by Second Lieutenant Gutierrez (if the younger man had been a Marine, he'd still be in the brig for losing his pistol to Richardson, but the Aerospace Force was infamous for gentle discipline), the first she'd ever seen them like this, father and son. It was a pleasant picture. For some reason, it made her want to cry.

"Let me see," declared the expedition's amateur paleontologist, answering the first question Reille y Sanchez had asked her. "I think the oldest known fully human remains are about a quarter of a million years old. They were discovered a long time ago, somewhere in the British Isles. I don't remember exactly where or when."

"How about," the colonel asked, "the oldest known civilization?"

Pulaski frowned. "In what sense do you mean `civilization'?"

"I don't know, Toya, what do I mean?" No "ma'am" when answering questions in her field, observed Reille y Sanchez, who hated the word, let alone being called by it. I'll have to remember that. "Houses, buildings, cities? Doesn't `civilization' mean cities?"

Pulaski blinked. "The most ancient known cluster of habitations which might—generously—be called a city, are about eight thousand years old. They were located somewhere in the Middle East, the so-called `cradle of civilization,' before that whole area got slagged in '23."

Reille y Sanchez reflected without self-pity that these were items she might have learned about if she'd had anything resembling a normal growing up. Instead, on the basis of aptitudes she'd unknowingly demonstrated in written and athletic tests at the age of eight or nine, she'd been selected for special attention, taken from her family—tearfully proud to let their daughter go—and enrolled in a strictly supervised Soviet-American training academy.

She and her school had been interested in preparing her for a career as an officer. At the time, she'd have regarded any other kind of knowledge as useless mental clutter, possibly of mild interest but essentially irrelevant. This had certainly included subjects like paleontology, archaeology, and all but military history. If she'd ever heard anything about it, she'd have promptly forgotten it, having no way of knowing that such information might someday prove critical to her survival, not to mention her career.

Later, of course, she'd done some casual reading, a paperback purchased at a terminal or base exchange, shoved as an afterthought into a duffel bag. The hurry-up-and-wait life led by any professional soldier affords plenty of time for casual reading. A surprising number of thick-necked, dog-faced grunts of her own acquaintance might easily have qualified for doctorates, based on this sort of casually acquired information, if they'd given a damn, which they didn't. Now, thanks to Pulaski, who more or less fit into the same category, Reille y Sanchez had been supplied with new data and some refreshed memories.

"Thanks, Toya, that's about what I thought. And now I wonder why it's never occurred to anyone to ask one simple, highly disturbing question."

"Colonel?"

Better than "ma'am." Come to think of it, a lot better. "Well, if the oldest known human remains are two hundred fifty thousand years old, and the oldest known civilization only about eight thousand, what, in the sacred name of the martyred Geraldo Rivera was Homo sapiens doing with himself during the intervening two hundred forty-two thousand years?"

Pulaski had an odd, frightened expression on her face. "I don't believe I follow you, ma'am."

The colonel was too deep in concentration to be annoyed at this relapse. "Sure you do, Toya, look: it required only eighty centuries for mankind to step from your sun-baked adobe villages, somewhere in the Middle East, to the crater-marked surface of the Moon, right?"

"Right—" A dismayed look on the girl's face indicated a suspicion that, by some tricky, characteristically military twisting of logic, her answer might somehow get her into trouble. Reille y Sanchez knew from her own experience that such a suspicion, although groundless on this occasion, was as soundly rooted in reality as the great trees surrounding the encampment. "I mean, yes, Colonel."

"Relax, Toya, and answer this: could it actually have taken poor old Homo sap each of the preceding two hundred forty-two millennia to claw his way up from animal subsistence on the blood-soaked veldt of Africa to those damned adobe villages?"

"That's colorful, Colonel." The sergeant swallowed, still uncomfortable. "But not very, um, scientific—I mean I don't believe I ever thought much about it before."

Reille y Sanchez laughed. "That's what I was warned you'd say, as a representative of established science. Well, it occurred to me to ask that question, rather it was asked for me last night. And now, either I can't leave it alone, or it won't leave me alone. Could our species, the supposedly human race, possibly be as slow-witted as that empty, accusing quarter of a million years seems to imply?"

"I, er—" Pulaski closed her mouth, thinking.

"If that were truly so, how could they have survived all of those long, danger-filled tens of thousands of years in tooth-and-nail competition with what would, by logical comparison, have been vastly more intelligent species, like turtles, parakeets, garden snails—"

Pulaski giggled. "And giant ground sloths?"

"I think, Toya," Reille y Sanchez laughed again, "that you've got the idea. No matter how hard I try—no matter how the contrary proposition flies in the face of accepted scientific evidence—I can't bring myself to believe we're that dumb. I never thought of myself as an optimist regarding human nature, but there it is."

"There what is, Estrellita?" A shadow fell across the women. Gutierrez stood before them bare-chested, toweling himself off, his shirt still tucked in and hanging from the waist. Across the campsite, Danny was stacking kindling under a shuttle wingtip.

The colonel eyed the general's hands, covered with painful-looking blisters, broken and weeping. "I suppose I could be wrong," she mused. "Still, two hundred forty-two thousand years. What if people were doing something more ambitious, something nobler, with all that spare time?"

"Like what?" Pulaski asked.

"What are you two talking about?" demanded the general.

Pulaski looked up, visibly embarrassed by his naked, hairy torso, and even more, the colonel thought, by his not-unpleasant male-animal odor. "Anthropology, sir, and prehistory." Together, the women explained what they'd been discussing.

He nodded, folding his legs beneath him and sitting on the ground. "So the question is: what if people were accomplishing something all that time—besides bashing cave bears, saber-toothed tigers, and each other over the heads and subsisting as the fur-clad stone-tooled Alley Oops you see in museum dioramas? Well, what about it?"

Reille y Sanchez took up where she'd left off. "Okay, why is it archaeologists and paleontologists, even when they're violating all accepted academic precedent looking for it—"

"Which, for the most part," Pulaski interrupted, surprising even herself, "they're decidedly not—"

"Why can't they find any physical trace of it?" the colonel finished.

"For the excellent reason . . ." The general thrust his arms into the sleeves of his shirt, pulled it around his shoulders, and closed the zipper halfway. From the way his uniform hung, Reille y Sanchez guessed that he was still carrying the weapons left behind by Kamanov and Richardson. " . . . that the poor, ignorant, tenured schmucks've been looking in all the wrong places!"

Reille y Sanchez opened her mouth. She closed it.

"Don't look surprised," he said. "I've been doing some snooping on my own, as I said I would, among the asteroid's better-informed inhabitants. For instance, I had a long, interesting talk with Eichra Oren yesterday, while some of you were out looking for Vivian. Funny kind of investigator. He answers more questions than he asks. He suggested they'd be better off—archaeologists and paleontologists—if they'd drill for evidence of archaic civilization beneath the South Polar icecap. They might even find something rewarding by randomly dragging the bottom of the Indian Ocean."

"For what?" both women demanded of the man.

"For what, sir?" Pulaski added, after a moment, in a small voice.

Gutierrez grinned. "For physical evidence of a prehistoric civilization which it appears Mother Nature—or maybe it was Auntie Evolution—once shoved off the edge of a continental shelf."

Pulaski began nodding, understanding something Reille y Sanchez hadn't caught yet. "Tens of thousands of years ago," the girl declared, staring off at the treetops as if she were talking to herself, "what we regard as our hospitable home-continent of North America was every bit as uninhabitable as the surface of the Moon."

"The whole thing was covered," agreed Gutierrez, "from the Arctic Sea, almost to the Gulf of Mexico, by an ice sheet—as hard as it may be to imagine it—three kilometers thick in places."

They're both right, the colonel realized, remembering colored maps and artists' renderings from science and geographic magazines which, long after she'd left the academy and its narrow concerns, never failed to fascinate her. "The North and South Poles," she volunteered, "were in different places only a few thousand years ago."

He clapped his palms together. "As usual—sonofabitch, look at those blisters, will you? I didn't realize I'd done that! So much for healthy physical labor! I was about to say, you've hit the nail on the head, Estrellita. And at the same time—well, you tell it, Sergeant. About Antarctica during the same period. It's your hobby, after all." He stared down at his hands and shook his head.

Pulaski smiled a shy smile. The general, too, had made a friend. "Well, sir—ma'am—the fossil record demonstrates that today's ice-bound Antarctica was, by contrast, a dry, warm, heavily forested environment, even though, on all the Earth, it's now the bleakest and most barren."

"Right." In his enthusiasm, the general couldn't resist interrupting. "At least according to Eichra Oren, it wasn't in the so-called `Fertile Crescent' of the Middle East that the human race built its first real civilizations. In a sense, if you believe him, that's where they were forced, later on, to begin climbing to the stars all over again."

"I don't know, sir, if it's smart to believe everything we're told." Again Reille y Sanchez faced the dilemma of open-mindedness and gullibility. "What you're saying, what Eichra Oren maintains, is that civilization began in Antarctica, the least hospitable—"

He nodded. "Back, to paraphrase George Harrison, when it was fab. I don't know whether we can believe Eichra Oren either, Estrellita, but it's fascinating to think about. Everything about Mister Thoggosh's new deputy seems mysterious and unbelievable. But Eichra Oren says his immediate ancestors once lived there."

"On that little frozen-over continent?"

"Not that little, really. And only recently frozen over. Soviet science states—correctly, according to Eichra Oren—that human beings first arose as a sapient species in nearby southern Africa. Somehow, some of them managed to cross the water and made history for thousands of years—history which would have been lost to us forever if we hadn't met Eichra Oren—and learned and grew as a people. Which accounts for at least a part of your missing two hundred forty-two thousand years, Estrellita. I gather these people spent a chunk of it building themselves a fairly impressive civilization, in every way comparable to the civilization achieved, oh, say by our European ancestors during the early Industrial Revolution."

Pulaski looked concerned. "But what became of them, sir?"

"Well, Toya, in a sense, nothing. Here we are, aren't we?"

Reille y Sanchez shook her head. "You mean to say, sir, that these ancient people we're just hearing about for the first time happen to be our ancestors, too?"

He stood up, grunting just a little. "By a more indirect route than they're Eichra Oren's, but yes. Our remote ancestors. Now, if you ladies will excuse me, I'm going to go find a Band-aid or nine."

"Our remote ancestors." Toya sighed.

"From the Lost Continent," the colonel answered, "of Antarctica."

 

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