But he had been watching and listening and learning to think like a Terran, not a Kronian. True, with the Trojan and its complement at Jupiter, life at this politically charged moment would be easier for those involved with calming the waters back at Kronia. But if, on the other hand, the Trojan wasn’t going to Jupiter at all, then that could make it a very different matter indeed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
They called the band of survivors simply the “Tribe,” for want of anything better. Nobody had lined them up for an exact count, but there seemed to be between forty and fifty souls, including numerous children. From the progress that Naarmegen was making in establishing a kind of pidgin that mixed their speech with parts of a South African dialect that he’d had some familiarity with and a smattering of English as seemed to suit the occasion, they called their settlement Joburg—obviously after the city that had once existed in the now-snowy region to the south.
The leader, Rakki, had led a small band who arrived from elsewhere and asserted their supremacy over an initial group who seemed to have numbered around a dozen. The rest had appeared in ones, twos, and odd groups since. Far from being among the elders of the assortment of still largely dazed and disoriented individuals who made up the Tribe, Rakki maintained his primacy through ruthlessness and sheer battling prowess despite his physical handicap—evidently the ruling currency of the times. Guesses put him in his mid or even lower teens. He himself was unable to give any account of his years, since for a time that the hapless inhabitants wandered among erupting landscapes and falling storms of fire, the notion of “year” had lost all meaning. Most astounding of all was his virtually total loss of all memories prior to the catastrophe, which seemed to be the case with all the younger people. Only a few of the oldest survivors seemed to possess any coherent recollections at all of the world that had once been.
* * *
“The best I can make of it is that it’s some kind of mental defense mechanism,” Beth said to Keene and Sariena as they stood by the landing-area-side windows in the OpComs Dome at Serengeti, watching the shuttle from the Varuna that had landed a short time previously being lowered to a horizontal position. The intermittently high winds and persistent ground tremors posed too much of a hazard to leave them standing vertically. The permanent pads to be built on the far side of what was currently the landing area would have silos.
The base was continuing to take shape, and Gallian and Charlie Hu had found time to come down to the surface at last. Keene and Sariena had come over from the now-finished mess facility to greet them. Beth was doing a valiant job as the mission’s de facto psychologist and effective psychiatrist. “A collective amnesia is blocking out experiences that were too horrific to be retained consciously. They could have caused mental paralysis to the point of dysfunctionality. Survival needs had to come first.”
“There were a lot of theories like that relating to the state of mind of humanity after the Venus catastrophes,” Sariena said. “Repressed racial memories that found their expression in myths and religion.”
Keene nodded. He’d heard suggestions himself that such buried traumas lay at the root of their reenactment in the senseless aerial bombardment holocausts of modern warfare, and twentieth-century terrors of nuclear annihilation, but had never known how far to believe it. It just seemed to him that the bulk of the human race never passed over any new way of wiping each other out at any opportunity. Or was that in itself another manifestation of what Sariena was talking about? If so, did the Kronians really stand a chance of ultimately producing anything different?
“This looks like them now,” he said, staring out. A Scout carrier was emerging from the huddle of freight movers and forklifts around the shuttle. It turned and headed toward the Operations and Communications Dome.
Surprisingly, in view of the role that physical violence played in determining who would dominate, it was those of smaller stature among the survivors who seemed to have fared better. Presumably their lower minimum nutritional needs had given them the edge through the times when food had been all but nonexistent. From Maria Sanchez’s observations, the newborns and infants were small by the standards that had applied previously, too. And similar things seemed to be happening among the strains of animals that were making a reappearance. Naarmegen’s surveys had identified pygmy breeds of okapi, hog, eland, hyena, and another doglike species that he hadn’t been able to identify, a number of them already showing adaptations to the cooling climate. Again, the animals that Rakki and a few other privileged individuals of the Tribe rode were “mule-like,” but with signs of other odd traits being expressed that didn’t belong.