Orson Card - Earthfall

"There are a lot of strange things in nature," said Oykib.

"Of course," said Shedemei. "I shouldn't have said there's no chance it evolved naturally. It's just that for me, at least, the coincidence is too great to believe in natural causation. This was done to the diggers and angels."

"But that's not what matters right now," said Zdorab. "Shedya has an answer to that, but what matters is that we have to tell the diggers the truth. They need to go bade to using the statues. And getting new chics."

"Maybe we can get the angels just to give their statues to the diggers," said Padarok. "It's not as if the angels use diem after the women judge the men."

"Maybe," »aid Shedemei. "But it's not just the diggers who are suffering from our interference in their previous social patterns. This relationship, this connection between diggers and angels has been going on for millions of years. Forty million years, to be more precise. And in those countless generations, certain patterns have evolved. The twinning of the angels, for instance. Every pregnancy is double. This isn't accidental. It's only happened twice in all our observations, and never in our own angel village, but when a single birth takes place, the baby is destroyed and the mother is never allowed to mate again. In other words, single births are ruthlessly exduded from angel society. It looks to me as if this is a response to the feet that diggers follow angels wherever they go. The diggers have to follow the angels in order to get the statues. But then the diggers can't help but see the angels as an easy source of meat, especially when the angel infants are at that awkward age when they can't fty well at all, and yet they're too heavy for one adult to carry them alone and still fly. In effect, the twinning allows each generation of angels to have one death and one survivor. Over the years, community cooperation has enabled between two-thirds and three-fourths of the twin-pairs to survive intact. Now, though, in our village all the twins are living to adulthood. And all the damaged, weak, sick, and crippled angels are surviving, where in other villages the diggers cull them out. In short, the angels have evolved a strategy of reproducing far beyond their sustainaWe population in order to survive the depredations of the diggers. When the diggers no longer prey on them, their population balloons out of control"

"It's a delicate balance," Zdorab saki "I found one place where it reached a crisis. The diggers had lost discipline and were eating more than the infants and the strays. They were systematically wiping out the angels in their area. When I got there, only a few beleaguered families of angels survived. But the diggers were already paying the price. They had plenty of old statues, of course.

But no new ones. And so after about five years, their birthrate fell off. Just as it has here. Not so suddenly, of course, since they were still worshipping the statues they had, only the statues contained progressively less and less of the enzyme. Births became more and more rare. With fewer diggers to prey on them, the angel population was going to start recovering soon. When it did, eventually the few surviving diggers would also recover."

Shedemei took over again. "So there's a social balance, you see. The diggers can't harvest too many of the angels for food, because then they lose their own ability to reproduce. It's self-correcting."

"What's to stop the angels from taking off and starting a colony where there aren't any diggers?" asked Protchnu. "Nothing," said Shedemei, "and I'm sure it's happened many times. But they can only live where they can find clay that supports the flatworms. That means that they can only live where there's a pattern of rainy season flooding, and they can only live at elevations where the flat-worm can survive. It's a pretty narrow range, common enough on this massif but not elsewhere. And the diggers range far and wide. I don't think there's anywhere that angels can go without a digger finding them sooner or later. When the digger finds them, he goes home and reports that he's found a new spot that's favored by the gods, and so they send out a colony. It's actually to the benefit of the angels. Without diggers devouring their young, their populations reach climax very quickly."

"Are you suggesting," said Nafai, "that we should let the diggers go back to kidnapping and eating angel infants?"

"That's the question," said Shedemei. "That's really the question, isn't it?"

"Does any of this," asked Chveya, "have to do with the evolution of intelligence among the angels and diggers?"

"Some, I think," said Shedemei. "The way the angel females select their mates is by the intricacy, beauty, originality, and accuracy of their sculptures. Obviously, the more intelligent and creative the angel male, the better his chances of reproducing early and often. For the diggers, it's a little different. In order to kill angels, they have to be devious and smart. We don't see it that much now, of course, because the diggers are so smart that the angels had almost given up trying to stop them. But we've all seen the traps that the angels set at the perimeter of their villages. It may be that the stupid diggers used to get caught in such traps. NoW they recognize and evade them easily. But perhaps their very intelligence evolved because only the smart ones got through the angel traps ki order to steal statues and baby angels."

"In other words, intelligence evolved naturally," said Chveya. "It's this symbiotic relationship that's unnatural."

"Not just unnatural," said Shedemei. "Human-made."

"How can you know that?" asked Protchnu.

"Because we believed that it couldn't be natural. And we knew that humans ceased to live on Earth at the time of the emigration that settled Harmony and, no doubt, other worlds as well. As we searched with the Index, we found that the one part of history where the ship's library had no useful information was human life at the time of the emigration."

Zdorab, the librarian, took over here. "Now, we have always imagined that this was because it was such a terrible time that they tried to forget it. There were implications of wars using weapons so dreadful that they turned the Earth for a while into a ball of ice. That's what the Oversoul himself believed. But then something Nafai said to me one time made me realize that this paucity of information really wasn't believable. He said, ‘How could the people who saved humanity by leaving Earth have allowed themselves to be so completely forgotten?' And I thought. Of course they couldn't. So I started searching the computers on the ship, the ones that tren't tied to the Oversoul. And I found what I was looking for. A database that the Over-soul has no conscious access to. It's called, as nearly as I can translate it, The Book of the Sins of the Human Race"

"Sins?" asked Mebbekew.

"Well, it's the most economical translation. It's a term that means ‘willful mistakes.' ‘Crimes of avoidable negligence,' perhaps. I thought sin was a pretty good way of summing it up."

"What does the book contain?" asked Nafai.

"I only just found it. I haven't read it all, and I'd be glad to have any of you who have the time and interest help me in the translation. The language is close to several known languages but it's very very old and the Oversoul hasn't been updating it because he wasn't conscious that it was there. The thing is, one of the first things I found was the explanation for how the angels and diggers began. It was one of the ‘sins,' you see."

Zdorab brought up a document on the computer screen nearest to him and began to read aloud.

"We have sinned by fiddling with the genes of animals, giving them intelligence without freedom, talent without power, desires without hope. We used them for our amusement, displaying their paintings and sculptures and music and dance while keeping the painters and sculptors, the musicians and dancers in prisons. If they escaped their freedom was worthless because they could have children only in captivity. This was an abomination, and the Keeper of Earth revolted against it, driving away the slavemakers and slavekeepers, and setting the little ones free."