“Maintain it how?”
Cole steered her away from the edge of the woods, more in the open. “How do you think?” he whispered. “If the average gets too high, they kill a few of the elders. If it jumps up too fast, they kill their own young. There’s no hesitation, either. What they consider to be the ‘natural’ order must be maintained. That pursuit is so much higher than all else—it makes lesser ethical problems vanish in their eyes.”
“I don’t understand. I think I’m missing something or you skipped a step.” She reached down to pick up a stone, then tossed it into the stream in frustration.
“Okay. Quick history lesson. And keep in mind, some of this is from them and some is from the Navy reports we read, no telling how much I’m missing or getting wrong.” He cleared his throat and glanced around before beginning. “The Glemots were a race of warring tribes for thousands and thousands of years. Evolution, of course, rewarded some of the same nasty traits in their genome that we find everywhere else. But, instead of civilizing and overcoming these traits, they created a culture around them.
“Despite intellects that—well I’ll just say that what they did to control Parsona doesn’t amaze me in the least anymore. Despite this, they never got into technology. Not because their brains weren’t capable of seizing it, but because their lives were too brutal to invest in it. There was no foundation there. It was like us prior to organized agriculture, before some of us got bored and started tinkering.”
“And then the satellite,” Molly offered.
“Exactly. The satellite. The problem was, the Glemots thought they found another natural discovery. They saw this tech as something handed down from the gods. Or maybe something bubbling up from within the planet, who knows? So the tribe that found it, the Leefs, they went from smelting ore to seven-dimensional calculus in less than a year.”
“No way.”
“Way. I’m serious, the intellect here is off the freakin’ charts. And they age more slowly than we do, so the amount they retain over an average lifetime is just crazy.”
She opened her mouth to ask a question, but Cole headed her off. “Don’t interrupt, I’m getting to the important part. So, they had incredibly advanced tech within three years. The Leefs gained an advantage—and they guarded it closely. Nearby tribes were nearly hunted to extinction with their new weapons. I imagine the tribes on the other side of Glemot still have legends about what happened over here.
“Of course, they didn’t just build weapons. They also built the first complex devices common to all tech-savvy races. Radios, micro/telescopes, the sensors that augment our senses. That’s when they spot the ‘gods’ in the sky.”
“The Navy.”
“Right, the Navy. So they try and communicate with them using means that were actually beyond our ability, or maybe we weren’t listening. Either way, the legend is that they tried everything to hail our boys in black, but no response. So guess what they did—they built their first ship and flew up to say hello! Needless to say, they were pretty disappointed. They learned about the GU and the GN, and they came back and had a Council meeting, a famous one. They still talk about it all the time.”
“What was it about?”
“What to do next. There were two main lines of thought. The leaders of the original Leef Tribe, a tribe that now lives in the forests beyond here, they wanted to expand out and exterminate what they saw as a danger to the natural order. Namely, our entire race.”
Molly’s eyes widened at this.
“Yeah, I had the same reaction. Luckily for us, one of the Glemots, another male named Campton, saw the Leef response as the ultimate disruption of the natural order. His thinking was that whatever aliens did with their creations was also part of the natural way of things.”
“What, like beehives and anthills?”
“Exactly. Which was heresy to those that hated the new technology, especially once they learned about its ‘impure source.’ These guys wanted to use some technology to destroy all technology. The Glemots following Campton wanted to use as little technology as possible to restore the balance they had before.”
“So the tribe that just ‘accepted’ me, they’re the good guys?”
“There aren’t any good guys here. Not in my view. Granted, I’m glad the Campton Tribe formed and kicked some Leef butt or the war with the Drenards would look like a cake-walk in comparison. Look at what they did with our ship, what they must have done with the UN ships. The fact the Navy was ousted from the OS and never won it back must be a mere hint of what they can do. Now imagine ground warfare with those things.”
Cole’s voice trailed off as a Glemot thundered by, rushing from the woods and back up the hill. Molly’s gaze followed the lumbering beast. She tried her hardest to imagine a brutal side to these creatures. She couldn’t. But mainly because she was still resisting the idea that they could do harm. “But this place is paradise,” she complained.
“Paradise at a cost. I was talking to one of the younger Glemots last night, a kid named Edison—”
“What’s up with the names?” she interrupted.
“Hah. I picked up on it, too, and one of the adults confirmed it. The Camptons name themselves after famous human engineers. The ones they think did more good than harm. They know all about our history, more than you and I combined. They got all kinds of data files from the Orbital Station, but getting back to the point—I was talking to Edison last night and he’s a cool kid. Well, I say kid, but the guy is smarter than any human I’ve ever met, even though he’s still considered a pup. I have no idea how old he is in Earth years, but he comes across as a complete prodigy when he talks.
“Anyway, Edison was talking about today’s Council and comparing it to one several years ago. The Camptons—the tribe you and I belong to—found out the tribes on the other side of the planet were reproducing too quickly. They were warring less and finding new resources for food. This was deemed so serious that a truce was called between the Leefs and the Camptons. They came together and devised a solution.”
“Which was?”
“A new disease. Genetically targeting a specific strain common to two of the largest tribes on the other side of the planet. Like I said, the Camptons won the civil war and they have the tech they need to keep things in balance. So they released this disease and killed the tribes.”
“All of them?” Molly looked horrified.
“Millions of them.” Cole stopped walking and looked out over the lake.
Molly felt her stomach churn. They stood in silence for awhile. Finally, Molly said, “But it’s so beautiful here.”
“Depends on where you look.”
They had wandered close to the forest again and turned to follow the stream back toward the tents. Molly wasn’t sure what to say, or even what she believed at the moment.
“We have a name for what the Glemots live by, you know.”
“Crazy?” Molly suggested, even though she grudgingly admired the results of their actions.
“No, Molly, these guys aren’t crazy, they’re just driven by an extreme form of something you and I fall for all the time.”
“What?”
“The naturalistic fallacy. It’s when our aesthetic sense of beauty in nature confuses us into thinking that if it exists there, it must be good. Or maybe ‘right’ is a better word than good.”