Ontogeny

Chapter 12a

     They crested the hill, and there was the Radiant city ahead of them.

     It was like nothing Malone had ever seen before. It didn’t seem to have any enclosed spaces. No rooms or buildings. Instead it seemed to consist of a tangled mass of cobwebs within which the Radiants swam like fish in a coral reef. The whole thing had a faintly luminous glow, like the Radiants themselves, although not as bright, and it hung in the air, hundreds of feet above the ground, some of the outermost parts moving slightly in the breeze. It was tethered in place by thick strands of the same material that were anchored to large white blocks half sunk in the ground.

     It was huge. Miles across at least, and parts of it towered high into the sky like thunderheads of stormy clouds. If it had been a human city there would have been smaller communities all about, towns and villages and the like, but Malone and the Brigadier had seen nothing before this. It seemed that all the Radiants in this part of the world lived in this one place.

     Several Radiants hovered above them, seemingly curious about the two humans who had invaded their territory, but neither he nor the Brigadier sensed any hostility from them. Their dangling tentacles would occasionally brush against their clothes and faces, exploring them by feel, and when they did Malone felt a cold dampness like that of a wet strand of seaweed. Occasionally one or two would drift back towards the city, having seen enough, to be replaced by new arrivals come to see what all the fuss was about.

     “They don’t seem to have their own personal spaces,” mused the Brigadier. “Nothing that's theirs alone, that they can personalise according to their own wishes and preferences and where they keep their personal possessions. The entire city seems to be one huge public space.”

     “Do they have factories, farms, things like that?” asked Malone. “The land around the city is just wilderness. Where do they grow their food? What do they eat anyway?”

     “The same kinds of domesticated farm animals we do,” replied the Brigadier. “They have farms, and they grow crops, but their farms aren't like ours. They don’t have fields with fences around them. The livestock just stays where they’re supposed to be of their own accord. The Radiants are able to control their behaviour somehow. They don’t eat crops and vegetables, but they grow them to feed to their livestock. I've seen their crop fields. They don’t need fences to keep pests out. Rabbits and insects just leave the plants alone.”

     “Can they control us?” asked Malone, suddenly worried,

     “No. If they could, no-one would ever try to fight them off when they tried to adopt them. People have tried to trap them, tried to kill them. Without success, but if they could control us no-one would even try. It seems they can only control lower life forms. As for factories, I don’t think they ever make anything. Not that I've ever seen, anyway. That luminous material they make their cities from is extruded from their own bodies, I think. Like spider silk.”

     “So they don’t have machines to do their work for them? Pumps, mills, things like that?”

     “Not that I've ever seen. They work their farms by hand. By tentacle I should say. They float above their fields, harvesting the crops by hand and placing it in large baskets made of the same Radiant silk, or whatever it is. They don’t plough their fields, or drain marshland or irrigate. They just use the land as it is.”

     “Don't they realise they could increase their crop yield by ploughing, irrigating, and so on?”

     “Maybe they’re able to grow all the crops they need without doing those things. You only need to farm intensively if you're trying to feed a large population on limited land. They may deliberately keep their population low so that the land can support them without having to go to all the effort that we have to. Maybe that, more than anything else, is the greatest evidence of their higher intelligence.”