Footfall

“Fistarteh-thuktun knows. I talk to him. Wait.” Tashayamp turned away. She stood behind the priest and did nothing, waiting.

Wes looked down.

From below, the cradle had blocked some of the script. From above, it didn’t. The sculptors had left a meter or more of margin around the writing; it had worn away unevenly, leaving bulges the cradle arms could grip.

The script was lost to him. Wes studied the diagrams.

The patterns in the Podo Thuktun: here a spray of dots in which Wes could recognize the Summer Triangle: a star pattern. There a pattern of curves that might be the magnetic fields in a Bussard ramjet… Podo could mean starflight or stars or just sky. Certain words and phrases became clear. He was sure that Thuktun Pushithy meant Thuktun Carrier or Message Bearer. Fistarteh-thuktun was a priest; it might bethat he worshiped the Podo Thuktun. He seemed to function as a Librarian too. Loremaster.

Fistarteh-thuktun had turned from the screen and was talking with Tashayamp, too fast to be understood.

“Not known what happened to end Predecessor children,” Tashayamp said. “Perhaps they do not want children because they have destroyed the world. Perhaps they cannot have children.” She spread her digits in the pattern Dawson had come to call a shrug: a futile clawing at the air. It meant, “I do not know and do not believe it can be known.”

She turned back to Fistarteh-thuktun. Wes studied the star patterns again. The constellations are nearly the same as Earth’s. Nearly, but not identical. They must be from somewhere near — He shuddered. Can more be coming? No, only one ship was in the films they showed us. “Nearby” is meaningless when we’re talking about stars!

Fistarteh-thuktun was speaking again. Wes moved closer to listen to Tashayamp translate into fithp baby-talk.

Their quarters had become tolerable as the fithp learned what they liked. The padding over the six walls was no longer wet. Dawson was almost comfortable.

Dmitri was speaking English. Dawson was ashamed at how glad that made him. I am not a communist. Nobody ever called me that except the goddamn Birchers. But I can’t live alone!

“They were dying. Wes, did it sound as if they destroyed their environment themselves?”

“I thought that’s what Fistarteh-thuktun said.”

“But they must have thought some of them would live. Changed. Could it be true?”

“Do you mean, could the Predecessors be their ancestors? No. There was a thuktun onscreen with a column of biology sketches till Fistarteh-thuktun shifted to something else. Didn’t you notice the sketches? That misshapen fi’ was third from the top. If you were making a hierarchy of life on Earth, would you put humanity third from the top?”

“No,” Dmith said in some irritation, “but I might leave humanity off entirely if I were Christian or some such! Then I might put apes third from the top, if I seriously liked dolphins and whales!”

“That’s too many ifs.”

“Or a Christian or Muslim might put fanciful angels above him—”

“For the moment, we might as well believe as Tashayamp believes,” Arvid said soothingly. “The fithp have studied the subject for much longer than the hour we have been granted. So. A race died of overpollution. The world was changed. In the changed world something new grew up-perhaps a pet or a work animal, an evolved dog or horse. They do seem to worship the Predecessors.”

“Why wouldn’t they?” Wes wondered. “Consider what would happen to tribes who didn’t study the thuktunthp. There were… eight to the fourth power is around four thousand thuktunthp, and a lot of them were duplicates. For every one of those, the first tribe-herd?-to use the information would be the first to rule. It must have happened hundreds of times. Of course they worship the Predecessors!”

Arvid shrugged. “I like to think of them as a tamed elephant. Then the world came apart. Dwarfing is caused by ages of famine. flash floods winnowed those who could not grow claws to grip a passing rock.” He smiled. “There is no proof. Choose the picture you like.”

“Shape wars,” Dmitri said. “Is it your belief that these were religious wars based on interpretation of the thuktunthp?”

“Yes,” He shook his head. “Very strange.”

Dmitri laughed. “Why strange? Human history is full of such. The Byzantine Church was divided, and civil wars resulted, from what icons were permitted to be shown in churches. The Christian god has no shape, yet one of the prophets was permitted to see his hindquarters. Not his front, you understand. Only his hindquarters. I do not know if that resulted in wars among the Jews, but it easily might.”

“You’d think there would be some pictures of the Predecessors,” Dawson said.

“Perhaps there were,” Dmitri mused. “Only-suppose there were descendents of the Predecessors, and the fithp killed them. It would not be an easy thing to face, that you had killed the sons of your gods.