We pushed a cart down the brick sidewalk, consulting our list, and made about a half-dozen stops. Herbs, guitar strings and clarinet reeds, sandpaper and varnish, memory crystals, a paint set, a kilo of marijuana (Dorian liked it but was allergic to Sage’s homegrown variety). Then we had tea at a sidewalk cafe and watched people go by. It was always a novelty to see all those faces you didn’t recognize.
“I wonder what this will be like when we come back.”
“Unimaginable,” I said, “unless it’s ancient rubble. You go back forty millenniums in human history and what do you have? Not even towns, I suppose.”
“I don’t know. Let’s remember to look it up.” On the street in front of us, a car banged into the rear of another one. The Men who were driving the vehicles got out and silently inspected the damage, which was slight, just a mark on a bumper. They nodded at each other and went back to their places.
“Do you think that was an accident?” Marygay said. “What? Oh…possibly not. Probably.” A staged lesson on how well they got along together. How well Man got along with himself. The coincidence of it happening in front of us was unlikely; there was little traffic.
We indulged in the services of a masseuse and masseur for the hour before we caught the bus back to Paxton. When we got back, I punched up the library to find out what we were doing forty thousand years ago. We weren’t even “us” yet; still late Neanderthal. They did have flint and stone tools. No evident language or art, except for simple petroglyphs in Australia.
What if Man, and people, were to develop characteristics as profound and basic as language and art–which they could share with us, perhaps, only to the extent that we can “talk” to dogs, or be amused by the smears a chimp will make with finger-paints?
It seemed to me that it would certainly be one or the other: extinction or virtual speciation. Either way, the 150 of us would be totally alone. To rebuild the race or wither away, a useless anachronistic appendage.
I was going to keep that conclusion to myself. As if no one else would arrive at it. It would be Aldo Verdeur-Sims to first bring it up in public, or at least semi-public.
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Chapter ten
We’re going to seem as alien to them as the Taurans did to us,” Aldo said, “if they do manage to survive forty thousand years, which I doubt.”
It was called a “discussion group” in the first note we’d sent around, but in fact it was most of the people Marygay and I figured would be most active in setting up the project, if not actually running the ship. Sooner or later there would be some democratic process.
Besides us, it was Cat and Aldo, Charlie and Diana, Ami and Teresa, and a floating population that included Max Weston (his xenophobia notwithstanding), our Sara, Lar Po, and the Tens–Mohammed and one or two of his wives.
Po was a contrarian, in his polite way: express an opinion and watch his brain cells start grinding away. “You assume constant change,” he said to Aldo, “but in fact Man claims perfection, and no need to change. They might enforce that among themselves, even for forty thousand years.”
“But the humans?” Aldo said.
Po dismissed our race with a flick of his hand. “I don’t think we’ll survive two thousand generations. Most likely, we’ll challenge Man and the Taurans and be crushed.”
We were meeting, as usual, in our dining room/kitchen. Ami and Teresa had brought two big jugs of blackberry wine, sweet and fortified with brandy, and the discussion was more animated than usual.
“You’re both underestimating humanity,” Cat said. “What’s most likely is that Man and the Taurans will stagnate, while humans evolve beyond them. When we come back, it may be only Man who’s familiar. Our own descendants grown into something beyond understanding.”
“All this optimism,” Marygay said. “Can we get back to the diagram?”
Sara had drawn up a neat timetable, based on my notes and Marygay’s, roughing out the whole thing from now till launch on one big sheet of paper. At least it had started out neat. For the first hour tonight, people had studied it and penciled in suggestions. Then the Larsons came with their jugs, and the meeting became more relaxed and conversational. But we did have to refine the timetable in order to firm up the launch schedule.