But long before the Kar-chee were done with it, it was no longer so.
The Kar-chee were ten feet tall and a dull, dull black, with heads which seemed tiny in comparison to their height and perhaps particularly in comparison to the huge anterior forelimbs. In this they resembled the mantis, but in nothing else did they resemble anything else with which the scattered handfuls of infinitely wearied peoples on Earth were familiar. Kar-chee they were called, from a real or a fancied similarity to sounds which they were heard to make by those few who had come close to them, close enough to hear them, and departed whole; but what they called themselves, no man knew. There had been no dialogue between the two species. Had there ever been between men and ants?
So, the old dwellers called the incomers Kar-chee in much the manner that a child calls a dog Bow-wow—though the Kar-chee, of course, were nothing at all like dogs. The Kar-chee, in a way, were audible ants. Conquering ants. Ants which brought with them their fulcrum, and, finding a place on which to rest it, did what Archimedes never could do, and moved the Earth.
Piece by piece.
Of old, in the lost land of California, came the Americans and dug and washed the dirt for gold, and left behind great heaps of soil from which all profit was extracted. After them came the Chinese, and washed the once-washed dirt again and, counting labor and toil as nothing, extracted profit from the unprofitable, content with tiny flecks of dust where only nuggets had satisfied their predecessors. Neither of them, of course, in the least understanding the other. But understanding, at least, that there was something to understand.
This much seemed at least clear — the Kar-chee had done this before. Their movements were too practiced, their equipment too suitable, their techniques too efficient, to allow for any of it to be new to them. Scavengers of worlds beyond number they must have been, for ages beyond counting; and in those worlds throughout those ages they had developed systems of working titanic changes in oceans and in continents in order to get at and get out the veins and pockets and the merest morsels of minerals and such as were left behind by human exploiters. First they reprocessed the slag and the tailings and the cinders and the ashes and all the mountainous heaps of (to man) worthless by-products. Then they scored great trenches on land and sea and turned their contents over and over again like earthworms, digesting and redigesting. They peeled the earth like an onion. But all of this was the merest beginning…
When they had done what they wanted with a given section of land, for the present time, at least (and who knew what “time” meant for them? how long they lived? or how they died, or where, or at all?), then with inhuman efficiency and ineffable insouciance they disposed of it. They triggered the long-set charge provided by the pre-existent San Andreas Fault, and California in convulsions and hideous agonies sank shrieking into the sea. And before the waters had in the least begun to settle, they were convulsed again as the floor of the Gulf of California arose trembling and quaking and flinching from the air it had not encountered in countless ages. The Kar-chee barely waited for it to dry before they settled onto it like flies upon a carcass and commenced to suck the hidden treasures of its sands.
There must have been some plan determining which lands should live and which should die, which perish by volcanic fire and which by the overwhelming of water. But no man knew in the least what plan there was. Sometimes, though, it did seem that here a land was sunken and here a land raised up, not because of immediate particular concern for either but instead because of problems concerning the adjustment and readjustment of the weight upon the Earth’s surface. Thus Gondwanaland arose again, and lost Atlantis, and land-masses — subcontinents or great islands — were newly designed and surfaced, while the familiar terrains were often fragmented or destroyed. And all the while the vast equipages of the Kar-chee, like huge and mobile cities, alien beyond the phantasizing ability of the human mind, slowly and relentlessly roamed surfaces and sea-depths, turning and churning and extracting and processing. And the great black hulks of the Kar-chee ships came and went… endlessly… endlessly…
And — meanwhile — what of man?
At first, then, of man: nothing. What of the ants, when man had first come to occupy and to use new territory? One might step on an ant, idly encountered. If they become too intrusive, too troublesome, then one might take means to prevent their incursions. One would not, ordinarily, think too much about them; they were too small, alien, insignificant. Who considered a possible “history” of ants? Or who reflected that ants might have a “prior claim,” as it were, to any place? But if in time ants became more troublesome, then, and only then, would attention take the form of destroying ant-hills — or, ecologically, introducing natural enemies which might do the work of destroying them and allow mankind to go about its own and proper business of plundering and polluting the world man lived in.
Thus, meanwhile, that of man.
Some handfuls of them dwelt, drowsy and fatigued, in what had been called the British Isles, when the Kar-chee came. Some, out of curiosity, had investigated… intruded… had been destroyed. Others had moved away. And continued to move, as the Kar-chee and their gargantuan machinery advanced. There was no thought of fighting, of resisting. Man was too few, Kar-chee too many; the invaders too strong, the autochthones too weak, too weary, too disorganized and inexperienced. One might hypothesize a situation wherein the children-worlds became aware of Earth’s plight, and had sent help. But the children-worlds were not aware, and after the few first generations had died away, the very memory of such worlds had died away with them.
Man, in short, adjusted.
Where there were no Kar-chee, the people slowly increased in number, slowly developed new skills, new forms, new views. Where there were Kar-chee, the people either perished or retreated before them. The remnants of Earth’s wild life, where the Kar-chee did not yet venture or remain, and while man was still so few, increased as well. Once again the trees grew tall, the herbivores replenished their flocks and herds, the wild swine flourished in the marshes and masted on the nuts and acorns, the fish returned to the cleansed-again waters.
It was fortunate, providential, that the last centuries of the movement of man away from Earth had coincided with the last centuries of a cold cycle. It may well have made no difference to the Kar-chee what the climate of the northerly part of the Northern Hemisphere was, tapping as they did the molten heart of the planet for energy. But the return of a warm cycle may have made all the difference to the bands of men living there. And when Britannia proper sank beneath the waves it once had ruled, and most of Ireland with it, when a new great island was created by joining the Outer Hebrides and the Isle of Man with much of Northern Ireland — then, great though the shock was, it was the milder climate which enabled the survivors to… survive. New rivers flowed into the sea through new beds; for a while they ran brackish as the rains washed the salt from the new-formed land. Eventually the whole new land was cleansed, and, richer than the older lands now joined with it by reason of its accumulations of eons of organic matter, it benefited by the milder climate and the longer growing season, and its people benefited even more. For the Kar-chee did not come. Perhaps they had intended the changes wrought in the south. No one ever knew. What they did know was that the Kar-chee did not come, and this was of the most infinite importance.