"There is no possible doubt of that," Speaker interjected. "Trust your senses, Louis. We may find that their race differs from yours or Teela's. But they are human."
"What makes you so sure?"
"I smell them, Louis. The scent reached me when we turned off the sonic folds. Far away, thinly spread, a vast multitude of human beings. Trust my nose, Louis."
Louis accepted it. The kzinti nose was worn by a hunting carnivore. He suggested, "Parallel evolution?"
"Nonsense," said Nessus.
"Right." The human shape was convenient for a toolmaker, but no more so than other configurations. Minds came in all kinds of bodies.
"We are wasting time," said Speaker-To-Animals. "The problem is not how men arrived here. The problem is one of first contact. For us, every contact will be a first contact."
He was right, Louis realized. The 'cycles moved faster than any information-sending service the natives were likely to have. Unless they had semaphores …
Speaker continued, "We need to know something of the behavior of humans in the savage state. Louis? Teela?"
"I know a little anthropology," said Louis.
"Then when we make contact, you will speak for us. Let us hope that our autopilot makes an adequate translator. We will contact the first humans we find."
They were barely in the air, it seemed, when the forest gave way to a checkerboard of cultivated fields. Seconds later, Teela spotted the city.
It resembled some earthly cities of previous centuries. There were a great many buildings a few stories tall, packed shoulder to shoulder in a continuous mass. A few tall, slender towers rose above the mass, and these were joined together by winding groundcar ramps: definitely not a feature of earthly cities. Earth's cities of that era had tended to heliports instead.
"Perhaps our search ends here," Speaker suggested hopefully.
"Bet you it's empty," said Louis.
He was only guessing, but he was right. It became obvious as they flew over.
In its day the city must have been terrible in its beauty. One feature it had which would have been the envy of any city in known space. Many of the buildings had not rested on the ground at all, but had floated in the air, joined to the ground and to other buildings by ramps and elevator towers. Freed of gravity, freed of vertical and horizontal restrictions, these floating dream-castles had come in all shapes and a wide choice of sizes.
Now four flycycles flew over the wreckage. Every floating building had smashed lower buildings when it fell, so that all was shattered brick and glass and concrete, torn steel, twisted ramps and elevator towers still reaching into the air.
It made Louis wonder again about the natives. Human engineers didn't build air-castles; they were too safety-conscious.
"They must have fallen all at once," said Nessus. "I see no sign of attempted repairs. A power failure, no doubt. Speaker, would kzinti build so foolishly?"
"We do not love heights so well. Humans might, if they did not so love their lives."
"Boosterspice," Louis exclaimed. "That's the answer. They didn't have boosterspice."
"Yes, that might make them less safety-conscious. They would have less of life to protect," the puppeteer spewlated. "That seems ominous, does it not? If they think less of their own lives, they will think less of ours."
"You're borrowing trouble."
"We will know soon enough. Speaker, do you see that last building, the tall, cream-colored one with the broken windows -"
They had passed over it while the puppeteer spoke. Louis, who was taking his turn at flying the 'cycles, circled for another look.
"I was right. You see, Speaker? Smoke."
The building was an artistically twisted and sculpted pillar some twenty stories tall. Its windows were rows of black ovals. Most of the windows of the ground floor were covered. The few that ware open poured thin gray smoke into the wind.
The tower stood ankle-deep among one- and two-story homes. A row of those houses had been smashed flat by a rolling cylinder which must have fallen from the sky. But the rolling wreckage had disintegrated into concrete rubble before it reached that single tower.
The back of the tower was the edge of the city. Beyond were only rectangles of cultivation. Humanoid figures were running in from the fields even as the flycycles settled.
Buildings which had looked whole from high up were obvious wrecks at rooftop level. Nothing was untouched. The power failure and its accompanying disasters must have occurred generations ago. Then had come vandalism, rain, all the various corrosions caused by small life-forms, oxidation of metals, and something more. Something that in Earth's prehistoric past had left village mounds for later archeologists to browse thrmgh.
The city-dwellers had not restored their city after the power failure. Neither had they moved away. They had lived on in the ruins.
And the garbage of their living had accumulated about them.
Garbage. Empty boxes. Wind-borne dust. Inedible parts of food, bones, and things comparable to carrot leaves and corn cobs. Broken tools. It built up, when people were too lazy or too hard-worked to haul the rubbish away. It built up, and the parts softened and merged, and the pile settled under its own weight, and was compressed further by heavy feet, year by year, generation by genetation.
The original entrance to the tower was already buried. Ground level had risen that far. As the flycycles settled on hard-packed dirt, ten feet above what had once been a parking area for large ground-bound vehicles, five humanoid natives strode in solemn dignity through a second-story window.
The window was a double bay window, easily large enough to accommodate such a procession. Its sill and lintel were decorated with thirty or forty human-looking skulls. Louis could see no obvious pattern to their arrangement.
The five walked toward the 'cycles. As they came near they hesitated, in visible doubt as to who was in charge. They, too, looked human, but not very. Clearly they belonged to no known race of man.
The five were all shorter than Louis Wu by six inches or more. Where it showed, their skin was very light, almost ghost-white in contrast to Teela's merely Nordic pink or Louis's darker yellow-brown. They tended to short torsos and long legs. They walked with their arms identically folded; and their fingers were extraordinarily long and tapering, so that any of the five would have been a born surgeon in the days when men still performed surgery.
Their hair was more extraordinary than their hands. On all five dignitaries, it was the same shade of ash blond. They wore their hair and beards combed but uncut; and their beards covered their faces entirely, except for the eyes.
Needless to say, they all looked alike.
"They're so hairy!" Teela whispered.
"Stay on your vehicles," Speaker ordered in a low voice. "Wait until they reach us. Then dismount. I assume we are an wearing our communicator discs?"
Louis wore his inside his left wrist. The discs were linked to the autopilot aboard the Liar. They should work over such a distance, and the Liar's autopilot should be able to translate any new language.
But there was no way to test the tanj things except in action. And there were all those skulls …
Other natives were pouring into the former parking lot. Most of them halted at the sight of the confrontation-in-progress, so that the crowd formed a wide rough circle well outside the region of action. A normal crowd would have grumbled to itself in speculation and wagers and arguments. This crowd was unnaturaily silent.
Perhaps the presence of an audience forced the dignitaries to decide. They chose to approach Louis Wu.