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wet bare skin and hair. He knew, though, that this was not what the old ones
would have considered cold. His mother had told him once of it being so cold
that water turned to something soft but solid that came out of the sky and
covered the ground.
He had seen this from the plains as he'd looked to the tall mountains to the
west, which often were so high they rose into the clouds and were hidden from
view. When you could see their tops, they were often white in color, white
with what his mother had told him about. But in those days it had happened
here for part of the year. That was hard to imagine. White powder that was
solid water falling all over and covering the plains ... It was a pretty
vision, but only that.
The sentries were already moving back out to protect the family, while the
Mothers were coming back together, forming their kraal and settling
back in for the night, while the men not on duty established their
own place and tried to find somewhere in the grass where they
would not be sleeping in the mud. It would not take long for things to go
back to normal, they all knew. Even now they could sense water coming back
into the air, and the ground was ab-sorbing even that huge amount of
rain, leaving things moist but much more comfortable. Even the
clouds were parting, breaking up, and through one massive hole they could
see the vast number of stars out there, not all of which were yet under the
Titans, and the faded reddish larger moon, Achilles, and the smaller, almost
faded out yellow-brown of Hector.
The two moons were quite comforting to them all, since they had been there
before and would probably be there after, long after their names were
forgotten. Having seen no other sky, they had no idea what it was to live
under the light of a full globular cluster, nor did they think it was un-usual
that their moons were dull, of differing colors, and orbited in opposite
directions from one another. They did not and could not know that the two
moons were only ap-parently close, and that great Achilles was actually not
just twice the size of tiny and irregular Hector but much farther away and
thus far larger, and that one day poor Hector would slip just enough out of
its delicate balancing act that its bigger brother and its planet would
eventually tear it to bits.
Father Alex did not shake his depression even as the relief and joy swept
through the Family like something liquid and sweet. Instead, it added to it,
for surviving a near nightly event one more time wasn't exactly what he would
consider a highlight of life.
But it was a highlight of their lives.
Each generation was distanced still more than its prede-cessor from the old
life and what it had meant to be hu-man. At least he was old enough to
remember when people still wore clothing, and had things like food in sealed
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ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
containers that did not spoil. The reterraforming of Helena had been global
but not deep. Beyond a two-meter depth, much of what had been
buried down there or stored down there remained, until the first-generation
and second-generation survivors finally went through it. But now what did
these young ones know? How quickly within Father Alex's own lifetime
they had descended into a level of primitiveness even he would have thought
inconceivable.
"Daddy, how can so many of us have died so quickly and so terribly? "
"Because we were so removed from the land ourselves that we had forgotten how
to do things, son. We played at being farmers and ranchers when
actually it was done by machines and computers and automated systems.
We forgot just how many skills, how many pieces of knowl-edge it
takes to make a simple pair of pants or build a grass hut or to cultivate the
land with or without draft ani-mals. We'd forgotten how to be blacksmiths, how
to be potters when you
had to create everything, literally everything, from scratch, how to fashion
and make a yoke or properly plow and plant. We equated primitive with simple;
in fact, it was our lives that had been made simple by our machines. The
primitive was impossibly complex. We simply never realized how little we
really knew."
His parents had even come to suspect that the survivors, few as they were
compared to those who had lived here, were almost being shaped into this
existence, turned back into nearly hairless animals deliberately, perhaps
for the same reason naturalists preserved some representatives of [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]