Алан Дин Фостер - Relic

By nightfall he found, to his considerable shock, that he missed Myssar.

This Earth, this third planet from its warm yellow sun, was the human homeworld for true—but it was not his home. It fulfilled that purpose only in memory. Seraboth was his homeworld and Myssar his home. The realization shocked him; his acceptance of it stunned him. Much as he felt privileged to stand where he stood, he longed for his comfortable, familiar abode in Pe’leoek, with its on-demand entertainment and food and instant access to beaches and the entire breadth of knowledge of the Myssari. If the ruined city spread out before the landing party had been intact and swarming with members of his species, he might have felt differently. But neither was so. It was a beautiful place but an empty one: void of company, conversation, and convenience. They would study it and make recordings and then he and Cherpa and the Myssari who had brought them all this way would go… home. He would finish out his existence on Myssar among the aliens with whom, socially at least, he had become one.

But what of Cherpa? What did she want? And what would be best for their meticulously nurtured offspring? If the restoration program continued to prove successful, there would be more of them, with adequate genetic variation assured through expert Myssari scientific tinkering. At what point would the resurrection of humanity need to be relocated to a human world in order to fully validate the effort? Given his own feelings, would it not be better to transplant the program now to a world once populated by humans? Before the children, like himself, so habituated to Myssar that moving them offworld might prove culturally counterproductive? If so, why move them and the program to someplace like Seraboth when Earth itself awaited? Would it not make the most sense to first reestablish his species on the world that gave it birth?

Cherpa and the children were not yet wedded to Myssar. For him it was too late. Much as he might wish for it philosophically, he knew he could become an Earthman only under duress. He had been away from human company long enough for a crucial part of him to have faded away, to have become lost. Wishing that it were otherwise would not make it so.

The madness that had once afflicted and protected Cherpa on Daribb had given way to an unbridled joy in life. She would be a fine Earth mother for the children, someone they could look up to and admire. For whatever good the Myssari sociologists thought it would do, he would be content to make fatherly visits and declaim what pearls of wisdom he could conjure. But he would not, he could not, live here permanently.

Rising from where he had been sitting, he ascended the remainder of the low hill and turned to look back toward the main part of the enormous, empty city. The jagged spires of abandoned towers loomed over a sprawl of smaller buildings that reached to the horizon. It must have been a grand place once, he told himself, spilling over with energy and life. All gone now. Like the rest of humanity, as dead as the Aura Malignance that had wiped out the species. Or nearly wiped it out. It was too late for him to reclaim humankind’s birthplace. That was a task that would be left to the children and to the irrepressible Cherpa.

Closer, seemingly at his feet and reinforced by a steady stream of personnel and equipment arriving from the ship in orbit, the diligent Myssari were erecting the framework of what would become their preliminary outpost on Earth. Xenoarcheologists were hard at work gathering the first of thousands of artifacts that had been abandoned in the course of the great dying. Once these had been properly catalogued and classified, they would find their way into repositories scattered across the Combine. So it would be done, he told himself as he started back down the hill.

Overhead a flock of noisy unnamed birds was winging its way toward the high mountains. The surrounding underbrush was full of similarly vocal feathered songsters. It struck him that in none of the other places where he had spent time, from Seraboth to Myssar to Daribb, had he encountered so much airborne song. If humans had been the chorus of Earth, then its birds had been its trumpets.

Have to acquire some recordings from the Myssari xenologists, he told himself as he continued to pick his way down the slight slope. He might not be able to live full-time on Earth, but he could take its music with him.

The Myssari expedition had been on Earth for several sublime terrestrial weeks before the first discordant note declared itself.

While no restrictions were placed on Ruslan’s or Cherpa’s movements, the leader of the expedition insisted that they carry sidearms with them on the walks the two humans took frequently. Ruslan scheduled his forays for times when he was not aiding the archeologists in identifying the purpose or providing the names of recovered relics. Sometimes Cherpa went with him. On other occasions they hiked separately, since he preferred the morning hours, while she favored the evening.

Sidearms were necessary because in the absence of humans Earth’s fauna had recovered in numbers not seen on the planet since before the rise of humankind. Not all of these revived species were benign. In particular the expedition’s xenologists singled out in the vicinity of the landing area three examples of large carnivorous felines, any one of which could easily make a meal of an unarmed human or Myssari. Neither was the big cats’ normal prey. They knew nothing of Myssari, while humans had not been available for the taking for hundreds of years. Still, the way any large carnivore determines if something strange and new is good to eat is to taste it, and both the Myssari and the two humans preferred to avoid that possibility.

Between the weapon slung at his hip and the always-on locator/communicator that floated near his lips, Ruslan felt no compunction about wandering through the ruins and the forest that had taken over streets and buildings. Doing so made him feel as if he were a youth again back home on Seraboth, wandering aimlessly in search of sustenance and company, finding ample supplies of the former and none of the latter. Sometimes he went into the ruins with Cherpa, sometimes with a Myssari scientific team.

This morning he was alone. Packs of lesser primates scattered before him, chattering but not complaining at the way history had turned out. This world was theirs once again. Clearly they were happy it was so, despite the disappearance centuries ago of the last handouts. Enormous trees sent powerful aboveground roots searching and curling through the collapsing structures, co-conspirators with the wind and rain in the eternal process of decomposition. Ruslan clambered over and around them, through empty buildings with collapsed roofs, seeking revelation and finding only destruction.

Movement in front of him caused him to pause and put one hand on his weapon. Mindful of the warning about the surviving large native carnivores, he let his forefinger slip down to activate the gun. He did not want to kill anything on a world from which so much life had been taken, but if attacked he would have no hesitation in defending himself.

The predatory nature of the creature that rose before him might have been debatable. Its origin was not.

Gripping a sidearm of its own, the Vrizan approached deliberately. Several more appeared off to Ruslan’s right and left. Drawing his own weapon with his right hand, he murmured to his aural pickup.

“Ruslan speaking. There are Vrizan here. They are armed and closing in on me. I doubt I could outrun them, so I’m not going to try. I’ll attempt to stall them while waiting for pickup.”

“You are wasting your words, human.” The lead Vrizan lowered her (recent study allowed Ruslan to distinguish gender among the Myssari’s rivals) weapon. “Your communications device has been smothered since first we detected you.”