The Margarets Read Free

water, back again,” they cried. “Right, left, right, left, right, left!”
    “The fruit is ripe,” the women called. “We should all pick it now, it’s so juicy and good. We can dry what’s left over.” Lots of women were having babies.
    Seasons were long in this new world, but eventually the winter came, not a cruel winter, just chilly and unpleasant. The people took mud from the riverbank and piled it into walls. They learned to make thick walls, let them dry, then tunnel through them to get from one room to another. When the rooms were nice and dry, they could build new rooms on top. They made baskets from tree roots and limber branches. “We’re going out to get fruit,” they cried. “We’ll bring a basketful.”
    They cleared everything from around the mud houses, making a smooth, packed-down place where the women could sit making baskets and the children could play. If the children were too noisy, the men would cry, “Cross the ground! Go into the woods!” The woods were safe; there were no beasts. The words for beasts were forgotten.
    Rooms piled on rooms until their dwelling was as high as they could build it. “We have to make room for more,” they said. Some of them went a day’s journey away and started another tower to house some of the children the women were having. Soon each tower had daughter towers out in the woods, many cleaned places for the women to work and the children to play. They had to go farther now to get fruit and roots, but it was still a very good place.
    Time went by. Daughter towers had granddaughter towers and great-granddaughter towers. The people fought over picking grounds. “This is my picking ground, our people’s ground! We’ve always picked here,” the men cried, waving clubs. “Go away.”
    They went away. They had more and more babies. “We need a new place. We have to make room for more,” they said. They followed rivers, they went along shores, all over the world. They had babies, and the babies had babies. The food was far less abundant. Each generation the babies were smaller.
    Time went by. A plague spread among the people. Most of them died. The forest recovered. The plague stopped, the survivors went on living. Another plague; again the forest recovered. An asteroid struck. The people lived on.
    “Wake up,” the mothers said. “Wake up, drink.”
    “Follow,” the children cried. “Right, left, right, left.”
    “Fruit now,” the women said. “Now, hurry.”
    “Commin,” cried the children. “We commin.”
    “My pick ground,” the men said, clubbing one another.
    Millennia went by. One night, when all the people were asleep, a Gentheran ship landed on a rocky outcropping where there were no towers. Gentherans in their silver suits came out of it and moved around looking at the towers and the cleared ground. They set tiny mobile recorders tunneling into the towers and tiny fliers hovering over the remaining forest. They talked among themselves and to the large ship in orbit.
    “It looks like a total extinction coming!” said a Gentheran. “Can we get genetic samples?”
    “Not without the permission of the people if they’re intelligent.”
    “It’s hard to tell whether they are or not.”
    “Leave it for now. We can always come back. You want to leave the monitor ship in place for a while?”
    “We’ve never encountered an extinction in process before. It’s certainly worth recording.”
    Accordingly, the large ship burned a deep, round hole in the rocky area, the monitor ship lowered itself into the hole and buried itself, with only a few well-camouflaged antennae and optical lenses exposed. A shuttle picked up the explorers.
    On the planet, the people were so hungry they were eating the fungus that grew on the latrine grounds, down at the bottom of the towers. It was tasteless, but it kept them alive. When they couldn’t find food, they would bring dead leaves or bark or bodies to put in the latrine grounds for the fungus to