The Kar-Chee Reign Read Online Free Page A

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 byproducts. Then they scored great trenches on land and sea and turned their contents over and over again like earthworms, digesting and re-digesting. 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