In fact, gravity waves were coursing through this space even as she sat here! They weren’t coupling with ordinary surface matter yet — only a few frequencies and impedances did that. But soon a matching would be found. No wonder Kenda and the others had departed!

Jen watched loops and spires flicker three thousand kilometers below, where minerals and metals mixed and separated at the planet’s most violent interface. In the holo tank, great molten-electric prominences took on gauzy textures. Threads of ephemeral superconductivity throbbed and Beta’s brittle gleam waxed and waned in tempo to this arrogant human meddling.

Jen grunted at the irony. That’s where all my work went… Kenda must have taken everything in the computer and just poured it down the resonator all at once, in a vain attempt to stop them.

When that failed, he ordered everyone out.

She chuckled suddenly. Even a near miss by those unknown enemies should collapse these tottering mine shafts. Kenda and the others might escape in time, but it was clearly too late for her now.

I guess in all the panic, no one bothered with that irritating old woman in the corner, the one always making a nuisance of herself. See, Wolling? I told you bad habits can be fatal!

The resonator hummed, apparently still linked to all the furious activity below.

Well, I might as well get the best seat in the house, she thought, and picked up her subvocal again. Let’s see just what kind of a finish Mother has in store for me.

Nelson worried about the termites.

Specifically, for several days the hives inside the ark had been acting strangely. Instead of sending forth twisty files of workers in search of decaying organic matter, the insects scurried near their tapered mounds, frantically reinforcing them with fresh mud from countless tiny mandibles. It was the same on all levels of ark four. Nelson had reported first signs on Thursday, then had to wait for Dr. B’Keli’s scientists to analyze his samples. Finally, as he came on shift today, one of the departing day workers told him. “Termites, like fire ants, are very sensitive to electric fields,” the young woman entomologist told him. “They can feel variations you or I would never notice without instruments.

“Tomorrow we’ll go looking for a short circuit,” she added with a smile. “Want to come early and join us? I’m sure you’ll find it interesting.”

Interesting might be one word for it. She was young, pretty, and Nelson felt suddenly awkward. “Uh, maybe,” he answered, imaginatively.

During his nightly rounds with Shig and Nell, he kept wondering about that look in her eyes. Looks can deceive, of course, even when interpreted truly. Still, he decided he would come in early tomorrow.

One thing he knew the lady entomologist was wrong about though — humans could detect whatever was affecting the insects. He felt it in his soles and in prickled hairs at the back of his neck. And Shig walked across the savannah enclosure as if each crackling grass stem gave off sparks. Finally, Nelson had to carry the youngster so Nell could get some rest.

There was a dusty odor in the air, even after they entered the rain forest biosphere. A glance through the windows showed desert hazes carried by the dry north wind. “Close all external air ducts,” he commanded the ever-listening computers, and his ears popped as the system went over to full recirculation. That was what an enclosed ecosystem was all about anyway. Nelson thought it almost cheating to let ark four purge some of its wastes outside and take in occasional doses of water and air.

“Increase hourly mist ten percent, upper canopy level,” he added, rubbing some leaves. He felt more comfortable using his “knack,” now that book learning was taking some of the edge off his ignorance. From a catwalk he looked across the branches of the miniforest, smelling rank aromas of fecundity and death. Heavy, interlaced branches bore rich humus layers on top, where whole communities of epiphytes lived out cycle after cycle, never touching the ground. Tangled vines sheltered crawling, slithering things whose nocturnal habits made Nelson their only regular human contact.

Most probably preferred it that way. This habitat recreated a bit of the long-lost jungles of Madagascar, where whole orders of primates had once dwelled in splendid isolation, until canoes from the distant east only a few scant centuries ago brought the first human invasion. In that brief time those forests vanished, along with so many of man’s strange cousins — the lemurs and other prosimians. Some “lost” species still lived, barely, in enclaves like this one, sheltered in care by the descendants of ax wielders, forest slashers, and road builders.

The contrast seemed so great, one might think two distinct species had invented the chain saw and the survival ark. But then. Nelson thought, even in ancient times, there was Noah.

A pair of eyes much too large for daylight blinked at Nelson as he wandered by. History is so strange. Once you start really feeling for people long ago, it’s like a drug. You can’t stop thinking about it.

He remembered his epiphany on that fateful day in the baboon enclosure — eons ago — when he first realized that a life without others to care for wasn’t worth living. That same afternoon he had also glimpsed something else… what the struggle for survival must have been like for men and women during most of the ages of humankind.

Nelson stopped where the catwalk neared a bank of sloping glass-crystal. Beyond the ark’s perimeter, the haze-shrouded Kuwenezi foothills shone under an opal moon. It was a beautiful night, in a sere, parched sort of way. His modern mind could look across the expanse with little emotion but aesthetic appreciation… or maybe sadness over the land’s unstoppable deterioration.

But for most of the lifespan of his race, the night must have been more intense — a time of lurking shadows and unseen, mortal dangers — even with the companionship of fire and long after Neolithic hunters had become the most fearsome creatures around. Nelson thought he understood why.

Poor Homo sapiens, doomed to die.

That much people shared with other beasts. But with mortality early humans acquired the added burden of a wild, untamed, magnificent new brain, an organ offering skill and planning by day, but also capable of crafting demons just beyond the flickering firelight, enabling you to imagine in detail tomorrow’s hunt or the next day’s injury or your neighbor’s secret deceit. A mind capable of knowing death… of helplessly watching its conquest over a comrade’s courage, over a wife’s withered youth, over a babe’s never-to-be-known passion… and seeing in those moments the spoor of a foe worse than any lion. The last implacable, undefeated enemy.

What do you get when you mix utter ignorance and a mind able to ask, “Why”? Early human societies grasped at so many superstitions, pagan hierarchies, and countless bizarre notions about the world. Some folkways were harmless, even pragmatic and wise. Others were passed on as fierce “truth”… because not to believe fiercely opened the way to something far worse than error… uncertainty.