The Kar-Chee Reign Read Online Free Page B

sea-depths, turning and churning and extracting and processing. And the great black hulks of the Kar-chee ships came and went … endlessly … endlessly….
    And — meanwhile — what of man?
    At first, then, of man: nothing. What of the ants, when man had first come to occupy and to use new territory? One might step on an ant, idly encountered. If they become too intrusive, too troublesome, then one might take means to prevent their incursions. One would not, ordinarily, think too much about them; they were too small, alien, insignificant. Who considered a possible “history” of ants? Or who reflected that ants might have a “prior claim,” as it were, to any place? But if in time ants became more troublesome, then, and only then, would attention take the form of destroying ant-hills — or, ecologically, introducing natural enemies which might do the work of destroying them and allow mankind to go about its own and proper business of plundering and polluting the world man lived in.
    Thus, meanwhile,
that
of man.
    Some handfuls of them dwelt, drowsy and fatigued, in what had been called the British Isles, when the Kar-chee came. Some, out of curiosity, had investigated … intruded … had been destroyed. Others had moved away. And continued to move, as the Kar-chee and their gargantuan machinery advanced. There was no thought of fighting, of resisting. Man was too few, Kar-chee too many; the invaders too strong, the autochthones too weak, too disorganized and inexperienced. One might hypothesize a situation wherein the children-worlds became aware of Earth’s plight, and had sent help. But the children-worlds were not aware, and after the few first generations had died away, the very memory of such worlds had died away with them.
    Man, in short, adjusted.
    Where there were no Kar-chee, the people slowly increased in number, slowly developed new skills, new forms, new views. Where there were Kar-chee, the people either perished or retreated before them. The remnants of Earth’s wild life, where the Kar-chee did not yet venture or remain, and while man was still so few, increased as well. Once again the trees grew tall, the herbivores replenished their flocks and herds, the wild swine flourished in the marshes and masted on the nuts and acorns, the fish returned to the cleansed-again waters.
    It was fortunate, providential, that the last centuries of the movement of man away from Earth had coincided with the last centuries of a cold cycle. It may well have made no difference to the Kar-chee what the climate of the northerly part of the Northern Hemisphere was, tapping as they did the molten heart of the planet for energy. But the return of a warm cycle may have made all the difference to the bands of men living there. And when Britannia proper sank beneath the waves it once had ruled, and most of Ireland with it, when a new great island was created by joining the Outer Hebrides and the Isle of Man with much of Northern Ireland — then, great though the shock was, it was the milder climate which enabled the survivors to … survive. New rivers flowed into the sea through new beds; for a while they ran brackish as the rains washed the salt from the new-formed land. Eventually the whole new land was cleansed, and, richer than the older lands now joined with it by reason of its accumulations of eons of organic matter, it benefited by the milder climate and the longer growing season, and its people benefited even more. For the Kar-chee did not come. Perhaps they had intended the changes wrought in the south. No one ever knew. What they did know was that the Kar-chee did not come, and this was of the most infinite importance.
    Indeed, it might have been that what had occurred there had been done to balance what had occurred in California, when Rowan the first had fled, a sea-borne single Noah, an Aeneas fleeing fatherless across the sullen seas. None could say.
    So the centuries continued to pass; there, in the