Futurity said, ‘Captain, why do you allow these creatures to run around your ship?’
Poole laughed. ‘Captain, I’m afraid he doesn’t understand.’
Tahget growled, ‘Acolyte, we call these creatures “shipbuilders”. And I do not allow them to do anything – it’s rather the other way around.’
Poole said cheerfully, ‘Hence the ship’s name – Ask Politely!’
‘But you’re the Captain,’ Futurity said, bewildered.
Poole said, ‘Tahget is Captain of the small pod which sustains you, acolyte, which I can see very clearly stuck in the tangle of the hull superstructure. But he’s not in command of the ship. All he does is a bit of negotiating. You are all less than passengers, really. You are like lice in a child’s hair.’
Tahget shrugged. ‘You insult me, Poole, but I don’t mind the truth.’
Futurity still didn’t get it. ‘The ships belong to these Builders? And they let you hitch a ride?’
‘For a fee. They still need material from the ground – food, air, water – no recycling system is a hundred per cent efficient. And that’s what we use to buy passage.’
Poole grinned. ‘I pay you in credits. You pay them in bananas!’
The Captain ignored him. ‘We have ways of letting the Builders know where we want them to take us.’
‘How?’ Poole asked, interested.
Tahget shuddered. ‘The Shipbuilders are nearly mindless. I leave that to specialists.’
Futurity stared at Poole’s images of swarming apes, his dread growing. ‘Nearly mindless. But who maintains the Ask Politely? Who runs the engines? Captain, who’s steering this ship?’
‘The Hairy Folk,’ Poole said.
It was all a question of time, said Michael Poole.
‘In this strange future of yours, it’s more than twenty thousand years since humans first left Sol system. Twenty thousand years! Maybe you’re used to thinking about periods like that, but I’m a sort of involuntary time traveller, and it appals me – because that monstrous interval is a good fraction of the age of the human species itself.
‘And it’s more than enough time for natural selection to have shaped us, if we had given it the chance. The frozen imagination of the Coalition kept most of humanity in a bubble of stasis. But out in the dark, sliding between those islands of rock, it was a different matter: nobody could have controlled what was happening out there. And with time, we diverged.
‘After the first humans had left Earth, most of them plunged straight into another gravity well, like amphibious creatures hopping between ponds. But there were some, just a fraction, who found it preferable to stay out in the smoother spaces between the worlds. They lived in bubble-colonies dug out of ice moons or comets, or blown from asteroid rock. Others travelled on generation starships, unsurprisingly finding that their ship-home became much more congenial than any destination planned for them by well-meaning but long-dead ancestors. Some of them just stayed on their ships, making their living from trading.’
‘My own people did that,’ Futurity said. ‘So it’s believed. The first Engineers were stranded on a clutch of ships, out in space, when Earth was occupied. They couldn’t go home. They survived on trade for centuries, until Earth was freed.’
‘A fascinating snippet of family history,’ Tahget said contemptuously.
Poole said, ‘Just think about it, acolyte. These Hairy Folk have been suspended between worlds for millennia. And that has shaped them. They have lost much of what they don’t need – your built-for-a-gravity-well body, your excessively large brain.’
Futurity said, ‘Given the situation, I don’t see how becoming less intelligent would be an advantage.’
‘Think, boy! You’re running a starship, not a home workshop. You’re out there for ever. Everything is fixed, and the smallest mistake could kill you. You can only maintain, not innovate. Tinkering is one of your strongest taboos! You need absolute cultural stasis, even over evolutionary time. And to get that you have to tap into even more basic drivers. There’s only one force that could fix hominids’ behaviour in such a way and for so long – and that’s sex.’
‘Sex?’
‘Sex! Let me tell you a story. Once there was a kind of hominid – a pre-human – called Homo erectus. They lived on old Earth, of course. They had bodies like humans’, brains like apes’. I’ve always imagined they were beautiful creatures. And they had a simple technology. The cornerstone of it was a hand-axe: a teardrop-shape with a fine edge, hacked out of stone or flint. You could use it to shave your hair, butcher an animal, kill your rival; it was a good tool.
‘And the same design was used, with no significant modification, for a million years. Think about it, acolyte! What an astonishing stasis that is – why, the tool survived even across species boundaries, even when one type of erectus replaced another. But do you know what it was that imposed that stasis, over such an astounding span of time?’
‘Sex?’
‘Exactly! Erectus used the technology, not just as a tool, but as a way of impressing potential mates. Think about it: to find the raw materials you have to show a knowledge of the environment; to make a hand-axe you need to show hand-eye coordination and an ability for abstract thought; to use it you need motor skills. If you can make a hand-axe you’re showing you are a walking, talking expression of a healthy set of genes.
‘But there’s a downside. Once you have picked on the axe as your way of impressing the opposite sex, the design has to freeze. This isn’t a path to innovation! You can make your axes better than the next guy – or bigger, or smaller even – but never different, because you would run the risk of confusing the target of your charms. And that is why the hand-axes didn’t change for a megayear – and that’s why, I’ll wager, the technology of these spiky starships hasn’t changed either for millennia.’
Futurity started to see his point. ‘You’re saying that the Shipbuilders maintain their starships, as – as—’
‘As erectus once made his hand-axes. They do it, not for the utility of the thing itself, but as a display of sexual status. It’s no wonder I couldn’t figure out the function of that superstructure of spines and scoops and nozzles. It has no utility! It has no purpose but showing off for potential mates – but that sexual role has served its purpose and frozen its design.’
Futurity recalled hearing of another case like this – a generation starship called the Mayflower, lost beyond the Galaxy, where the selection pressures of a closed environment had overwhelmed the crew. Evidently it hadn’t been an isolated instance.
As usual Poole seemed delighted to have figured out something new. ‘The Ask Politely is a starship, but it is also a peacock’s tail. How strange it all is.’ He laughed. ‘And it would appal a lot of my old buddies that their dreams of interstellar domination would result in this.’
‘You’re very perceptive, Michael Poole,’ the Captain said with a faint sneer.
‘I always was,’ said Poole. ‘And a fat lot of good it’s done me.’