“We’d best go down,” Lors said, trying to give his words the sound of judicious reflection. “We can get deer quicker and not delay our guests.”
Duro at once countered, seemingly innocently, “And then you can get back and away quicker, and on top of Mia.”
The younger boys laughed; the newcomer smiled. Lors wondered if he should hit his brother, decided against it for the moment. “I was thinking only of our guests,” he said with dignity. And added, “How do they call you, guest?”
“Tom-small,” said the guest, putting the boys to giggling again. He was about Lors’ own age, and a rather large young man.
“I shouldn’t like to have to share a sleeping-hammock with Tom-big, whoever he is,” said Duro. This was an acceptable excuse: Lors hit him.
“No way to talk to guests,” he said, righteously.
“He’s my uncle,” the guest said, unannoyed. “I used to be smaller than him, but the name sticks…” He looked up the fork to the right, raising his head toward Mount Tihuaca, only partly obscured by drifting clouds. “I’ve never been up there. I’ve heard… it’s said that on a clear day you can see the ocean on all sides, the whole coastline, from there…” His voice ended on a vaguely questioning note. He was a diffident, amiable one.
Duro said, “Yes, maybe, but I’ve never seen the day that was that clear. There always seems to be at least some part of the coast you can’t see.”
Lors understood what Tom-small had in mind. “We really do not have time to go that far today,” he pointed out, kindly enough. His eyes were blue-gray, his hair was long and black, his skin a light brown. “Maybe, if you stay over, we could make a special trip—” A half-smile of pleasurable, anticipating assent lit up Tom-small’s broad and open face. Lors went on, “But right now we have to get meat. So: it’s downward ho for us. Let me tell you the plan.
“There’s a spring which the deer favor. And we usually set salt there for them, as a further attraction. The boys will go ahead and around to beat them back this way — if there are any there now. I’ll show you, by and by, where we crouch for them along their trail. With three bows, we ought to have luck. Oh! Say — you’re all right for hunting, aren’t you? I mean, you haven’t touched a corpse or a cat or a fluxy female today, have you?” Tom-small shook his head. “That’s all right, then.”
But Duro wasn’t sure it was all right. “How about Mia?” he asked. “You were touching her!”
Lors had forgotten. His heart gave a thump, and the blood ran into, then away from his face. How could he have forgotten? But after a second he said, “No, I’m sure it’s all right. She knows better; she wouldn’t have let me, if — Besides, Popa saw me. He must think it’s all right, too, or he wouldn’t have sent me.”
Satisfied, they started off down the down-slope branch of the fork. Far off below, through a break in the hills, they saw the blue sea. Lors pointed. “That’s where the first Rowan landed,” he said.
Tom-small looked impressed. “Before the Devils came,” he said.
Duro, looked at him. “How could that be?” he asked. “If the Devils hadn’t come, Rowan would have stayed where he was and not come here.”
The young guest looked confused. Then, dismissing the need to figure the matter out, he said, “Well, anyway, it was a long time ago.”
It had been, indeed.
And it had all begun much further ago than that.
Earth had become like a woman who has, after a long and painful labor, given multiple birth… flat, empty, weary and bare. For the Earth was long enough over the final wave of outward, star-bound emigrants for the last trace of concern and excitement in it to have ebbed utterly away. And there was, it seemed, nothing else.
It had begun calmly enough, this move to the known hospitable worlds swimming around the distant stars. Mankind had waited long enough to be patient at first. No one could say at just exactly what point it all became a frenzy. The Earth went mad; contentedly, controlledly mad… and stayed so for centuries. For on the one hand there was instant and continual concern to solve once and for all the old problem of overpopulation. Those nations which were actually overpeopled — which was most of them — wanted to make an end at last, forever, to crush and hunger. The few that weren’t did not and could not remain aloof, for they wanted just as much an end to the fear that the overcrowded countries would spill out of their borders in war. So all worked intently. The first wave of migrants wanted just to get away. Their zeal was negative. But it was nonetheless zeal. Then came those who wanted to claim a share of what they heard was out there — land, room, opportunity, adventure. Then came those who wanted just to see for themselves what it was like… they said. The next wave went to join family and friends. Finally it became indiscriminately contagious, a roaring wind, sucking up that which lay behind as well as driving on that which lay before it. Those who toiled in sending people out were themselves caught up in it and strove to be themselves sent out. And so, finally, there were comparatively few left behind.
The long morning had been filled with noise. The long afternoon was strangely silent. The silence at first was filled with remembered echo.
Earth’s remaining people had worked themselves into an unprecedented fatigue. They had also, it seemed, finally and forever plundered their planet dry. Scarcely a trace of crude metals remained, and not even a trace of mineral fuels. The very wastes of the ancient mines had been reclaimed, reprocessed, redigested and reconsumed. In the last stages, the technicians had cannibalized their own technology, gobbling up factories and smelting down fabric and machinery to consolidate and produce the ultimate ships. The near-empty cities were at last dismantled for their bones and scrap, ruins ravaged like pigs nosing for truffles.
Finally, no more ships were built on earth and no more migrant parties sent off. For a while yet, though, the old world Earth stayed in touch with her children via out-world-built ships touching down with visitors. But there were never many of them; and as the Earth-born in the outer worlds grew old and died off, there were ever fewer. So, finally, even they ceased. There was no announcement, only that the perhaps penultimate one bore notice, in the form of so few passengers, that the children-planets had become too caught up in their own concerns to care much about the withered mother-world.
Yet no doubt habit alone might have served to keep up a communication with some semblance of regularity. The migrants had been as careful as they might to purge and to protect themselves against bringing communicable disease with them as they swarmed out to the series of worlds which later became known as The Inner Circle. But when they learned of the presence among them of the deadliest such disease of all it was too late: it had blazed up, and it was not to die down for centuries. Its name was War.
And it was then, when all the other worlds of human tenancy were so pre-empted and preoccupied that the very awareness of the Earth-Mother-world became only faint memory — less, perhaps, than the memory of Juteland was to England during her Colonial wars — it was then that the Kar-chee came. Earth-planet may have seemed sucked dry, worthless, to those who now lived or whose fathers had once lived on it… just as the rind and the pulp of a squeezed orange might. But that same would not seem worthless at all to a pig or a swarm of flies. Nor did it seem so to the Kar-chee. They left their lairs around the Ring Stars and swarmed down onto weary, exhausted, riven old Earth, to pick the bones and crack the plundered planet for its marrow.