David Zindell - Neverness

I coughed and I rubbed the side of my nose. I did not want to point out that as of yet, we had no idea where to look for the wreckage of the museum ship. I said, ‘The Alaloi DNA is probably fifty thousand years old.’

‘Is that true? We don’t know anything about the Alaloi except that they’re so stupid they don’t even have a language!’

I smiled because he was being deliberately fatuous. I told him everything known about the Alaloi, those dreamers who had carked their humanness into neanderthal flesh. According to the historians, the Alaloi’s ancestors had hated the rot and vice of civilization, any civilization. Therefore, they had fled Old Earth in long ships. Because they wanted to live what they thought of as a natural life, they back-mutated some of their chromosomes, the better to grow strong, primitive children to live on the pristine worlds they hoped to discover. In one of their long ships, they carried the frozen body of a neanderthal boy recovered from the ice of Tsibera, which was the northernmost continent of Old Earth. They had spliced strands of frozen DNA; with the boy’s replicated DNA they performed their rituals and carked their germ cells with ancient chromosomes. Generations later, generations of experiment and breeding, the cavemen – to use the ancient, vulgar term – landed on Icefall. They destroyed their ships, fastened their hooded furs, and they went to live in the frozen forests of the Ten Thousand Islands.

‘That’s interesting,’ Bardo said. ‘But I’m bothered by one thing. Well, I’m bothered by everything you’ve said, of course, but there is one thing that bothers me stupendously about this whole scheme of searching for man’s oldest DNA.’

He ordered some coffee and drank it. He looked across the cafe at a pretty journeyman historian, and he began flirting with his eyes.

‘Tell me, then,’ I said.

He reluctantly looked away, looked at me, and said, ‘What did the goddess mean that the secret of life is written in the oldest DNA of the human species? We must think very carefully about this. What did She mean by “old”?’

‘What do you mean, “what did She mean by old?”’

He puffed his cheeks out and swore, ‘Damn you, why do you still answer my questions with questions? Old – what’s old? Does one race of man have older DNA than another? How can one living human have older DNA than another?’

‘You’re splitting words like a semanticist,’ I said.

‘No, I don’t think I am.’ He removed his glove, fingered his greasy nose and said, ‘The DNA in my skin is very old stuff, by God! Parts of the genome have been evolving for four billion years. Now that’s old , I think, and if you want me to split words, I shall. What of the atoms that make up my DNA? Older still, I think, because they were made in the heart of stars ten billion years ago.’

He scraped along the side of his nose and held out his finger. Beneath the long nail was a smear of grease and dead, yellow skin cells. ‘Here’s your secret of life,’ he said. He seemed very pleased with himself, and he went back to flirting with the historian.

I knocked his hand aside and said, ‘I admit the Entity’s words are something of a riddle. We’ll have to solve the riddle, then.’

‘Ah, but I was never fond of riddles.’

I caught his eyes and told him, ‘As you say, the genome has been evolving for billions of years. And therefore any of our ancestors’ DNA is older than ours. This is how I’ll define old, then. We’ll have to start somewhere. The Alaloi have spliced DNA from a body fifty thousand years old into their own bodies. We can hope this DNA – and the message in the DNA – hasn’t mutated or degraded.’

‘But the Alaloi are not our ancestors,’ he said.

‘Yes, but the neanderthals of Old Earth were. ’

‘No, by God, they weren’t even members of the human species! They were slack-jawed, stoop-shouldered brutes as dumb as dodos.’

‘You’re wrong,’ I said. ‘Their brains were larger than those of modern man.’

‘Larger than your brain, perhaps,’ he said. He tapped his bulging forehead. ‘Not larger than Bardo’s, no, I can’t believe that.’

‘We evolved from them.’

‘Now there’s a revolting thought. But I don’t believe you. Does Bardo know his history? Yes, I think I do. But why should pilots argue history?’ He held his head up, stroked his beard and looked at the historian. ‘Why not let an historian settle an historical argument?’

So saying, he excused himself, belched, stood up, brushed cookie crumbs from his beard and squeezed by the crowded tables. He approached the historian and said something to her. She laughed; she took his hand as he guided her back towards our table.

‘May I present Estrella Domingo of Darkmoon.’ Estrella was a bright-looking journeyman and nicely fat, the way Bardo liked his women to be. He introduced me, then said, ‘Estrella has consented to resolve our argument.’ He pulled up a chair so she could sit down. He poured her a cup of coffee. ‘Now tell us, my young Estrella,’ he said. ‘Were neanderthals really our ancestors?’

In truth, I do not think Bardo had any hope of winning his argument. After a while, it became obvious that he had invited this pretty, impressionable girl from Darkmoon to our table not to listen to a history lesson, but to seduce her. After she had patiently explained that there were different theories as to man’s recent evolution and told him, yes, it was most likely that the neanderthals were our direct ancestors, he exclaimed, ‘Ah, so my friend is right once again! But you must admit, it’s too bad that man once looked like cavemen. They’re so ugly, don’t you agree?’

Estrella did not agree. She coyly observed that many women liked thick, muscular, hairy men. Which was one of the reasons it had become fashionable years ago for certain professionals to sculpt their bodies into the shape of Alaloi.

‘Hmmm,’ Bardo said as he twisted his moustache, ‘that is interesting.’

Estrella further observed that the difference between neanderthals and modern man was not so great as most people thought. ‘If you look carefully,’ she said, ‘you can see neanderthal genes in the faces of certain people on any street in any city on any planet of the Civilized Worlds.’ (As I have said, she was a nice, intelligent young woman, even if she had the irritating habit of stringing together too many prepositional phrases when she spoke.) ‘Even you, Master Bardo, with your thick browridges above your deepset eyes surrounded by such a fine beard – have you ever thought about this?’

‘Ah, no, actually I never have. But it would be interesting to discuss the matter in greater detail, wouldn’t it? We could scrutinize various parts of my anatomy and determine those parts which are the most primitive.’

After Bardo and she had made plans ‘to discuss the matter in greater detail,’ she returned to her table and whispered something in her friend’s ear.

‘What a lovely girl!’ he said. ‘Isn’t it wonderful how these journeymen acquiesce to established pilots?’ And then, ‘Ah, perhaps the neanderthals were our ancestors … or perhaps not. That’s still no reason to sculpt our bodies and live among cavemen. I have a better plan. We could bribe a wormrunner to capture an Alaloi. They poach shagshay, don’t they? Well, let them poach a caveman and bring him back to the City.’

I took a sip of coffee and tapped the bridge of my nose. ‘You know we can’t do that,’ I said.

‘Of course, all the wormrunner would really need is a little blood. He could render a caveman unconscious, bleed him a little, and return with a sample of his blood.’