The Two Worlds (23 page)

After that came the discovery of tools and fire, tribalization, and the sequence of evolving social order that led from primitive hunter-gatherer economies through agriculture and city-building to the discovery of the sciences and the beginnings of industrialization. And there was something about this part of their history too that set them apart from terrestrial humans in Hunt's eyes: the practical and realistic approach that the Lunarians had adopted to everything they did. They had exploited their resources and talents efficiently, without drifting off into fruitless reliance on superstitions and magic to solve their problems as had so many millennia of Earth people. For the early hunters, better weapons and greater skill decided success, not the whims of imaginary gods who needed to be placated. For the crop growers, better knowledge of plants, the land, and the elements improved yields; rituals and incantations did not, and were soon abandoned. And not very long afterward it was measurement, observation, and the powers of reason that uncovered the laws governing the universe and opened up new horizons for the harnessing of energy and the creation of wealth. As a result the Lunarian sciences and industries had mushroomed almost overnight in comparison with the halting, faltering groping toward enlightenment that had come later when the same general pattern repeated itself on Earth.

The scientists on Earth who had recovered the information on the Lunarians had pictured them as an incurably aggressive and warlike breed whose discoveries of advanced technology had inevitably spelled their eventual self-destruction. Hunt and the others now learned that this picture was not really accurate. There had been some feuding and fighting in the earlier periods of Lunarian history, it was true, but by the time of the early industrial period such things had become rare. A greater common cause had united the Minervan nations. Their scientists recognized the deteriorating conditions that were descending with the coming Ice Age, and the whole race embarked on a feverish development of the sciences that would enable them to move to a warmer planet in the centuries ahead. The astronomers of the time singled out Mars and Earth as the most promising candidates. The stakes were survival, and there were no resources to be squandered on internal conflicts, until . . .

About two hundred years before the final, catastrophic war, something happened to change all that. Calazar explained, "It could have been a result of extreme genetic instabilities still inherent in the race. At about the time they had learned to harness steam and were just beginning to explore electricity, a superbreed of Lunarians appeared quite suddenly and advanced a quantum leap ahead of anything else in existence anywhere on the planet. Exactly where or when they appeared we don't know. Numerically they were few to begin with, but they spread and consolidated rapidly."

"Was that when the planet started to polarize?" Heller asked.

"Yes," Calazar replied. "The superbreed became the Lambians. They were totally ruthless. They militarized and formed a totalitarian regime that imposed itself by force on a large portion of the planet before the other nations could muster the strength to resist. Their aim was to gain control of Minerva's industrial and technical capabilities totally and exclusively to guarantee their own move to Earth, which meant taking over the nations that had been pursuing that goal collectively. Submission would have meant extinction. The other nations had no choice but to unite, arm, and defend their security. They became the Cerians. The course was set irrevocably toward a struggle to the death between the two factions."

Hunt watched more scenes showing the gradual transformation of Minerva into one enormous military and manufacturing machine dedicated to preparations for war. The tragedy of what had happened appalled him. There had been no need for it. More effort had gone into armaments than would have been needed to move the whole Lunarian race to Earth twice over. If the Lambians hadn't appeared on the scene when they did, the people on Minerva would have done it. After millennia they had gotten to within two hundred years of achieving the goal that would have saved them from extinction and preserved their civilization, and then they had thrown it all away.

visar began showing scenes from the war itself. A world quaked under the shocks of miles-high fireballs that vaporized cities; oceans boiled, and forests flared into carpets of sterile ash writhing and twisting in an atmosphere in turmoil. Then blankets of smoke and dust blotted out the surface and turned the planet into a murky ball of black and brown. Spots of red and slowly pulsating yellow appeared, isolated and glowing dimly at first, but becoming brighter and spreading, then merging as continents ruptured and the planet's interior exploded through and hurled fragments of crust into the void. The asteroids were being born, and what would eventually become Pluto was being carved into a tombstone for a whole race, destined to drift forever far from the Sun. Although Garuth and Shilohin had watched these scenes before, they became very quiet; they alone among all those present had known Minerva as home.

Calazar waited a while for the mood to lighten, then resumed, "The Ganymeans had long been troubled by their consciences over their genetic interference with the early Lunarian ancestors. Therefore their policy toward Minerva had been one of nonintervention in its affairs. You've just seen the result of that. After the calamity a few survivors were left stranded on the Moon with no hope of survival. By that time Thurien had perfected the black-hole technology that made instant communications and transfers of objects possible, so the Ganymeans were aware of events in real time, and they were in a position to intervene. After witnessing the results of their policy, they could not simply stand aside and allow the survivors to perish. Accordingly, they organized a rescue mission and sent several large vessels to the close vicinity of Luna and Minerva."

It took Hunt a few seconds to see the implications of what Calazar had just said. He stared at the Ganymeans in sudden surprise. "Not outside the Solar System?" he queried. "I thought you said you didn't establish large toroids inside planetary systems."

"It was an emergency," Calazar replied. "The Ganymeans decided to forget their rules for once. They didn't have any time to spare."

Hunt's eyes opened wider as the implication hit him:
that
was how Pluto had gotten to where it was! And
that
was what had broken the gravitational coupling between Minerva and its moon. One simple statement had put half his people at Navcomms out of business.

"So the Lunarian ancestors of the human race never came to Earth with the Moon at all," Karen Heller said. "They were
taken
here—by the Ganymeans. The Moon only showed up later."

"Yes," Calazar replied simply.

That answered another mystery. All the math models of the process had required a long transit time for the Moon to get from Minerva to the orbit of Earth. A lot of doubt had been expressed that a handful of Lunarian survivors could have lasted for any length of time at all, let alone with the resources necessary to reach Earth. But with Ganymean intervention added into the equation, all that changed. With some Ganymean help that handful would have established a secure settlement for themselves and been able to make a viable start at rebuilding their culture. So why had they plunged back into a barbarism that had taken tens of thousands of years to recover from? The only answer could be the upheavals caused by Luna being captured later. The truth was so ironic, Hunt thought: if they hadn't been stabbed in the back by their own Moon, they could have been back into space by 45,000 B.C., if not sooner.

"But not all were taken to Earth," Danchekker concluded. "Another group was taken back to Thurien, and have since become the Jevlenese."

"It was so," Calazar confirmed.

"Even after all that had happened," Showm explained, "the Cerians and the Lambians were unmixable. Since the Lambians had been the cause of the trouble, the Ganymeans of that time considered that more good would come out of the Lambians being taken to Thurien and—it was hoped—being integrated into Ganymean ways and society. The Cerians were taken to Earth at their own request. They were offered ongoing aid to rebuild, but they declined. So a surveillance system was set up instead to keep an eye on them—as much for their own protection as anything." Hunt was surprised. If the surveillance system had been in place that long, the Ganymeans would have known about the collapse of the colony which they themselves had helped found. Why had they let it happen?

"So how did the others make out—the Lambians?" Heller asked. "They couldn't have been running the surveillance that far back. How did they get their hands on it?"

Calazar emitted a heavy sigh. "They caused a lot of problems for the Thuriens of that time, so much so that when Luna came to be captured by Earth and caused widespread catastrophes that demolished the fragile beginnings of the new Cerian society that had started to take root there, it was decided to leave things be. With troubles of their own at home, the Thuriens were not eager to see another human civilization rushing headlong toward advancement, perhaps to repeat the Minervan disaster." He shrugged as if to say that right or wrong, that was the way it had been, then resumed, "But as time went by and further generations of Lambians came and went, the situation seemed to improve. Signs appeared that they could be integrated fully into Ganymean society, so the Ganymean leaders adopted a policy of appeasement in an attempt to accelerate the process. As a result the Jevlenese, as the descendants of the Lambians were called by then, acquired control of the surveillance program."

"A mistake," Showm commented. "They should have been exiled."

"With hindsight, I think I agree," Calazar said. "But that was long before either my time or yours."

"How about telling us something about this system," Hunt suggested. "How does it work?"

Eesyan answered. "Mostly from space. Until about a century ago, it was comparatively simple. Since Earth entered its electronics and space era, the Jevlenese have had to be more careful. Their devices are very small and virtually undetectable. Most of their information comes from intercepting and retransmitting your communications, such as the laser links between Jupiter and Earth. At one time in the early years of your space program they manufactured instrument packages to resemble pieces of your own space debris, but they had to stop when you started clearing things up. That experiment had its uses though; that was where we got the idea of building a perceptron that looked like a Boeing."

"But how could they fake the reports as well as they did?" Hunt asked. "They must have something of their own like visar. No Mickey Mouse computer did that."

"They have," Eesyan told him. "Long ago, when there seemed reason to feel optimistic about the Jevlenese, the Thuriens helped them establish their own autonomous world. It's called Jevlen, on the fringe of our developed region of space, and it's equipped with a system known as jevex, which is visar-like but independent of visar. Like visar, jevex operates across its own system of many stars. The surveillance system from Earth is coupled into jevex, and the reports that we receive are transmitted indirectly from jevex through visar."

"So it isn't difficult to understand how the fabrications and distortions were engineered," Showm said. "So much for philanthropy. They should never have been allowed to operate such a system."

"But why did they do it?" Karen Heller asked. "We still don't have an answer. Their reports were pretty accurate up until about the time of World War II. The problems of the late twentieth century were somewhat exaggerated, but for the last thirty years it's turned into pure fiction. Why would they want you to think we were still heading for World War III?"

"Who can understand the contortions of human minds?" Showm asked, using the general term unconsciously.

Hunt just caught the look that she flashed involuntarily at Calazar as she spoke. There was something more behind it all, he realized—something that the Thuriens were not divulging even now. Whatever it was, he was just as certain in that same split second that Garuth and Shilohin didn't know about it, either. But he didn't feel this was the time to force a confrontation. Instead he steered the discussion back into technicalities as he remembered something else. "What kind of archives does jevex have?" he asked. "Do they go all the way back to the Ganymean civilization on Minerva, like visar's?"

"No," Eesyan replied. "jevex is of much more recent vintage. There was no need to load it with visar's complete archives, which concerned only Ganymeans." He studied Hunt curiously for a few seconds. "Are you thinking about the anomalies in the displacements of background stars that visar noticed in the shots of the
Shapieron
?"

Hunt nodded. "That explains it, doesn't it. jevex couldn't have known about the displacements. visar had access to the original design data for the ship; jevex didn't."

"Correct," Eesyan said. "There were a few other anomalies too, but all similar—all to do with an old Ganymean technology that jevex couldn't have known very much about. That was when we became suspicious." At which point everything that had ever come from jevex would be suspect, Hunt saw. But there would have been no way of checking any of the rest without bypassing the Jevlenese completely and going straight to the source of the information—Earth. And that was precisely what the Thuriens had done.

Calazar seemed anxious to move them away from the whole topic. When a lull presented itself, he said, "Garuth wanted me to show you another sequence that he thought you would find interesting. visar, show us the Ganymean landing at Gorda."

Hunt jerked his head up in surprise. The name was familiar. Danchekker was looking incredulous as well. Heller was looking from one to the other of the men with a puzzled frown; she was less conversant with Charlie's story than they were.

Don Maddson's linguistics team at Navcomms had eventually succeeded in deciphering a notebook of Charlie's that had remained a mystery for a long time. It gave a day-to-day account of Charlie's experiences as one member of a rapidly diminishing band of Cerian survivors making a desperate trek across the lunar surface to reach a base that offered their last hope of escape from the Moon, if any hope remained at all. The account had covered events up to the point of Charlie's arrival at the place at which he had been found, by which time attrition of various kinds had reduced his band to just two—him, and a companion whose name had been Koriel. Charlie had collapsed there from the effects of a malfunctioning life-support system, and Koriel had left on a lone bid to reach the base. Apparently he had never returned. The base was called Gorda.