Remnant Population

Of course, they’d also reported turning off the powerplant. Kira had another cold feeling, along with the certainty that “What else?” was a question that should have been asked long ago. She checked the loworbital scanner. It was behind the planet now, probably still doing its first run of pre-programmed tasks. She no longer cared about atmospheric gases, about tidal reflectance data.

“Aha!” Chesva said. “Come see this.”

Kira moved over. It was a single motionless screen, again visual, but not what they’d seen before. For one thing, the sun was higher, the shadows shorter, and in the other direction. “Midmorning,” Chesva said. “I threw in some search parameters based on those few frames we had, and this is the best I’ve found so far.”

“Why was the weathersat doing an optical scan? It was turned off when you queried, wasn’t it?” “Probably one of those things put its foot on the controls,” Chesva said. Clearly he didn’t care how the weathersat had come by its images, now that he had them. Kira felt the same way. “Two legs,” Kira said instead of commenting on the unlikelihood of some animal stepping in the right place and then stepping there again to turn the same scan off.

“Yeah… you were right about bipedal. The theory’s always said it’s more likely. Two upper limbs, too — the shadows show that clearly. But look here—” He pointed to a shorter figure among the others. Shorter, its proportions familiar. Human.

Kira choked back all the rude expressions she knew, and said instead, “Vasil will not be happy about this.”

“No,” Chesva said. He grinned at her. “But it should get his mind off Bilong, don’t you think?” There was now no question of landing anywhere but the Sims Bancorp shuttle strip. They had been lent a military-grade drop shuttle, supposedly impervious to anything but “extremely advanced technology,” the military pilots said. The pilots had come with the shuttle, along with a small contingent of “advisors” who had not mingled at all with the scientific and diplomatic specialists during the voyage. The shuttle had made several reconnaissance flights after the low-orbital scanner showed no evidence of technology that could blow them from the sky. Evidence of lower-level technology filled the datastrips and cubes. Stone buildings — obvious permanent settlements — clustered on the rocky coast far north and east of the Sims Bancorp colony, and troops of nomads accompanied by herds of quadruped grazers in the grasslands west of the settlements.

“I’m not surprised they missed the nomads,” Vasil said. “They could be other migrating animals, nothing special. They don’t seem to build fires, or structures. Its only that we know to look for them. But how they could have missed those cities — !” He shook his head dramatically.

Kira refused to restart the discussion of critical points and emergence, gradualism versus cultural discontinuity. They didn’t have the historical data they needed to determine when the indigenes had achieved the cognitive and cultural complexity needed for this level of technology, and they couldn’t get it up here. Down there, if Ori and his backup were good enough, might be the data they needed to settle the question. Instead, she concentrated on biota: the four-legged herds the nomads accompanied… hunted? Herded? Herbivores, surely; only abundant plant growth would support that mass of flesh. Prey animals, certainly, with those eyes set on the sides of longish heads, eyes that could see behind and around. Were the indigenes the only predators? She looked for, but did not find, something equivalent to canids. “Boats, with rowers, and sails,” Ori said, gloating over the pictures taken of the coastal settlements. “They can work wood — I wonder if it’s all as hard as the stuff Sims exported from the tropics. We have to have metal for that. If they have metal tools—” Kira looked at the creatures themselves. Indigenes, she reminded herself. She couldn’t tell what they were most like, mammals or reptiles or birds… they had no visible hair or feathers, but their surface looked more like skin than scales. Their gait, with its long-legged, bouncing quality, reminded her of ratites, the large flightless birds of old Earth, but the obvious joint in the leg faced forward, like the human knee. Large eyes, placed slightly more to the side of the head than human eyes; they would have both binocular and monocular vision, she suspected. Four-toed, four-fingered… an opposable digit on the hand, and one of the toes looked as if it were almost opposable.