Frazier looked covetously upward. “I’d give five years off my life to get a look up there. Do they use furniture? Is it a house, a temple, who knows what? But I can’t climb those trees and the rope ladders probably wouldn’t even hold Janice’s weight, let alone mine. As I remember, none of them was much bigger than a ten year-old child.”
“There’s plenty of time,” MacAran said. “The place is deserted, we can come back some day with ladders and explore to your heart’s content. Personally I think it’s a farm.”
“A farm?”
MacAran pointed. On the regularly spaced treetrunks were extraordinarily straight lines; the delicious grey fungus which MacLeod had discovered before the first of the Winds was growing there in rows as neatly spaced as if they had been drawn on with a ruler. “They could hardly grow as neatly as this;” MacAran said, “they must have been planted here. Maybe they come back every few months to harvest their crop, and the platform up there could be anything–a resthouse, a storage granary, an overnight camp. Or of course this could be a farm they abandoned years ago.”
“It’s nice to know the stuff can be cultivated,” Frazer said, and began carefully making notes in his notebook about the exact kind of tree on which it was growing, the spacing and height of the rows. “Look at this! It looks for all the world like a simple irrigation system, to divert water away from where the fungus is growing and directly to the roots of the tree!”
As they went on into the hills, the location of the alien “farm” firmly fixed on Janice’s map, MacAran found himself thinking about the aliens. Primitive, yes, but what other type of society was seriously possible on this world? Their intelligence level must be comparable to that of many men, judging by the sophistication of their devices.
The Captain talks about a return to savagery. But I suspect we couldn’t return if we tried. In the first place we’re a selected group, half of us educated at the upper levels, the rest having been through the screening process for the Colonies. We come with knowledge acquired over millions of years of evolution and a few hundred years of forced technology pressured by an over-populated, polluted world. We may not be able to transplant our culture whole, this planet wouldn’t survive it, and it would probably be suicide to try. But he doesn’t have to worry about dropping back to a primitive level. Whatever we finally do with this world, the end result, I suspect, won’t at least be below what we had on Earth, in terms of the human mind making the best use of what it finds. It will be different… probably in a few generations even I couldn’t relate it to Earth culture. But humans can’t be less than human, and intelligence doesn’t function below its own level.
These small aliens had developed according to the needs of this world; a forest people, wearing fur (MacAran, shivering in the icy rain of a summer night, wished he had it) and living in symbiosis with the forests. But as nearly as he could judge their constructs were indicative of a high level of elegance and adaptiveness.
What had Judy called them? The little brothers who are not wise. And what about the other aliens? This planet had evidently brought forth two wholly sapient races, and they must co-exist to some degree. It was a good sign for humanity and the others. But Judy’s alien–it was the only name he had and even now he found himself doubting the very existence of the others–must be near enough to human to father a child on an Earth-woman, and the thought was strangely disturbing.
On the fourteenth day of their journey they reached the lower slopes of the great glacier which Camilla had christened The Wall Around the World. It soared above them cutting off half the sky, and MacAran knew that even at this oxygen level it was unclimbable. There was nothing beyond these slopes except bare ice and rock, buffeted by the eternal icy winds, and nothing was to be gained by going on. But even as MacAran’s party turned their back on the enormous mountain mass, his mind rejected that unclimbable. He thought, no, nothing is impossible. We can’t climb it now. Perhaps not in my lifetime; certainly not for ten, twenty years. But it’s not in human nature to accept limits like this. Some day either I’ll come back and climb it, or my children will. Or their children.