Marion Bradley - Darkover Landfall

"Hello, can we join you for dinner? It'll save building another fire," Judy Lovat greeted them.

"Glad to have you," MacAran agreed, "but what are you doing in the woods, Judy? I thought you were exempt from manual work now."

The woman gestured. "As a matter of fact, I'm being treated like surplus luggage;" she said. "I'm not allowed to lift a finger, or do any real climbing, but it minimizes bringing samples back to camp if I can do preliminary field-testing on various plants. That's how we discovered the ropeweed. Ewen says the exercise will do me good, if I'm careful not to get overtired or chilled." She brought her tea and sat down beside him. "Any luck today?"

He nodded. "About time. For the last three weeks, every day, everything I brought in was just one more version of quartzite or calcite," he said. "Our last strike was graphite."

"Graphite? What good is that?"

"Well, among other things, it's the lead in a pencil," MacAran said, "and we have plenty of wood for pencils, which will help when supplies run low of other writing instruments. It can also be used to lubricate machinery, which will conserve supplies of animal and vegetable fats for food purposes."

"It's funny, you never think of things like that," Judy said. "The millions of little things you need that you always took for granted."

"Yes," said one of MacAran's crew. "I always thought of cosmetics as something extra--something people could do without in an emergency. Marcia Cameron told me the other day that she was working on a high-priority program for face cream, and when I asked why, she reminded me that in a planet with all this much snow and ice, it was an urgent necessity to keep the skin soft and prevent chapping and infections."

Judy laughed. "Yes, and right now we're going mad trying to find a substitute for cornstarch to make baby powder with. Adults can use talc, and there's plenty of that around, but if babies breathe the stuff they can get lung troubles. All the local grains and nuts won't grind fine enough; the flour is fine to eat but not absorbent enough for delicate little baby bottoms. "

MacAran asked, "Just how urgent is that now, Judy?"

Judy shrugged. "On Earth, I'd have about two-and-a half months to go. Camilla and I, and Alastair's girl Alanna, are running about neck-and-neck; the next batch is due about a month after that. Here--well, it's anybody's guess." She added, quietly, "We expect the winter will set

in before that. But you were going to tell me about what you found today."

"Fuller's earth," MacAran said, "or something so like it I can't tell the difference." At her blank look he elucidated, "It's used in making cloth. We get small supplies of animal fiber, something like wool, from the rabbit-horns, and they're plentiful and can be raised in quantity on the farm, but fuller's earth will make the cloth easier to handle and shrink."

Janice said, "You never think of asking a geologist for something to make cloth, for goodness' sake."

Judy said, "When you come down to it, every science is interrelated, although on Earth everything was so specialized we lost sight of it." She drank the last of her tea. "Are you heading back to Base Camp, Rafe?"

He shook his head. "No, it's into the woods for us, probably back in the hills where we went that first time. There may be streams which rise in the far hills and we're going to check them out. That's why Dr. Frazer is with us--he wants to find further traces of the people we sighted last trip, get some more accurate idea of their cultural level. We know they build bridges from tree to tree--we haven't tried to climb in them, they're evidently a lot lighter than we are and we don't want to break their artifacts or frighten them."

Judy nodded. "I wish I were going," she said, rather wistfully, "but I'm under orders never to be more than a few hours from Base Camp until after the baby is born." MacAran caught a look of deep longing in her eyes and, with that new ability to pick up emotions, reached out for her and said gently, "Don't worry, Judy. We won't trouble anyone we find, whether the little people who build the bridges, or--anyone else. If any of the beings here were hostile to us, we'd have found it out by now. We've no intention of bothering them. One of our reasons for going is to make sure we won't inadvertently infringe on their living space, or disturb anything they need for their survival. Once we know where they're settled, we'll know where we ought not to settle."

She smiled. "Thank you, Rafe," she said, softly. "That's good to know. If we're thinking along those lines, I guess I needn't worry."

Shortly after the two groups separated, the food-testing crew working back toward Base Camp, while MacAran's crew moved further into the deep hills.

Twice in the neat ten-day period they saw minor traces of the small furred aliens with the big eyes; once, over a mountain watercourse, a bridge constructed of long linked and woven loops of reed, carefully twined together and fastened with rope ladders leading up toward it from the lower levels of the trees. Without touching it, Dr. Frazer examined the vines of which it was constructed, saying that the need for fiber, rope and heavy twines were likely to be greater than the small supplies of what they called ropeweed could provide. Almost a hundred miles further into the hills, they found what looked like a ring of trees planted in a perfect circle, with more of the rope ladders leading up into the trees; but the place looked deserted and the platform which seemed to have been built across between the trees, of something like wickerwork, was dilapidated and the sky could be seen through wormholes in the bottom.

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.