Genetic Soldier

by George Turner

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Genetic Engineering

Synopsis

In a distant future, on an Earth populated by a scant few hundred thousand humans, the Atkins's Thomas performs without question the duties for which he was genetically bred. Called "Soldier" by one and all, he is a man of honor and ability, responsible for keeping the peace, for maintaining the status quo . . . and, most important, for guarding the great Book House on the hill - a vast repository of Last Culture knowledge presided over by Libary, Soldier's mentor, the most senior of the mystic Celibate scholars. Such is Thomas's life in the serene, semi-primitive world without nations and cities and governments - until the night the starship comes home. Having fled a dangerously overcrowded Earth years before the Collapse and the Twilight that followed, for seven centuries the men and women of the space-going vessel Search have been combing the galaxy for inhabitable planets - their aging processes dramatically slowed by the relative magic of light speed travel and cryogenic sleep. And now, lonely and frustrated, the weary voyagers have returned to a homeworld unrecognizably altered by the relentless tides of time - a world that does not want them back. A bitter welcome awaits the Searchers, as old Libary gathers Earth's Ordinands and Elders together to tap the terrifying power of the collective unconscious - in preparation of the Carnival night when they will sweep the helpless intruders back to their lonely sky in the name of Holy Science. And it is Soldier who stands in the middle, silent and alone - bound by duty to evict the homesick star-travelers . . . yet cursed by a preordained genetic destiny that has decreed their eviction will mean Soldier's death.

Release date: January 1, 2019

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 357

Sample

THIS IS THE STORY OF SOLDIER, FATED to stand at the crossroads of history and there question everything he had been raised to believe and cherish. And, with only self-respect for a weapon, save his life. If he could.

The villagers called him “Soldier” but he was in fact registered as the Atkins’s Thomas (he knew the sour joke implied); parents unknown; CB. CB stood for Carnival Birth.

At twenty-eight Soldier was, in the estimation of those qualified to speak, as hard and unyielding as he needed to be (which meant curiously different things in different circumstances) in a hard and unyielding profession. Some—though not the Jones’s Johnno, a lifelong friend—would have been surprised to learn that Soldier thought himself quite otherwise.

He had been reared by Libary, the Celibate, without thereby embracing chastity for himself, and was in consequence a highly educated man within the limits of his time and culture, which accounted for his knowledge of the verses of the poet Kipling, dead some nine centuries. He considered himself a basically gentle man whose work could be endured only by those with a pragmatic understanding of necessity and choice; the work itself had been finally dictated by his Genetic grouping. Libary, guardian and mentor of the teenager, could have interfered but did not; as an intellectual Libary held warfare in contempt but conceded that if there must be conflict, it should at least be conducted by competent minds, such as his Thomas’s.

Soldier, who thought himself not much given to sentiment—at any rate, where it might be observed—never strayed far from Libary when his duties permitted. He had a great capacity for affection and gratitude.

So much for Soldier, marking time until time itself should question him.

The ambiguous attitude of the Forest Genetic, who made up the great mass of the civil population, no longer troubled him as it had once done. Soldiers grew accustomed to it and were able to joke about it without rancour.

Even the few Foresters who were fairly familiar with Thomas Atkins addressed him as “Soldier,” partly from habit, partly because of their uneasy feeling that his profession was not wholly justifiable although practised in their defence. The paradox of preaching peace while being eternally ready for war was older than written history and defeated them as it had defeated their ancestors. It was too difficult for simple folk, and they called themselves “simple folk” when faced with hard questions.

They kept Soldier at symbolic arm’s length by refusing his given name while affirming that he was really a good chap, not just any coarse fighting man. He’s different, they would say, justifying both him and themselves; he’s not just a trained killer, he’s a nice bloke.

Behind his back they speculated on his procreative future. Twenty-eight was a late age for beginning a family, yet Soldier showed no sign of being caught in the sexual trap of Genetic Match, whereas most men had made their couple of false starts by twenty and begun fathering soon after.

No one doubted his sexual capacity; he joined actively, very actively, in the annual indecencies of Carnival and was known to have broken intercourse protocol in the privacy of forest assignations. There remained the possibility that his Genetic makeup was “unconforming”, containing some rare “character” (the villagers knew nothing of genes and chromosomes) matchable only with a woman whose exotic “character” could accommodate his.

She would be a remarkable woman, they thought, who made Match with their Soldier and snatched him forever out of the license of Carnival.

(She existed and their meeting was imminent. And strange and disruptive and deadly. Yet there was little remarkable about her.)

And now something about Libary, the most senior of the Celibates who administered the great Book House on the hill. The villagers, respecting and a little fearing him, had christened him “Libary,” which was a suitable name, given that the first “r” in “library”—a Late English word from the Last Culture—had been elided by time and carelessness.

Black Libary was over half a century old, a good age in an era when most of the clinical wisdom of the Last Culture had been lost. The Book House scholars found diseases and their cures described in the ancient, preserved books but they no longer possessed the means or the understanding to cope with them; Last Culture prescriptions might as well have been spells of the caditcha men or the lost memories of Dreamtime. They had developed an efficient plant-based pharmacopoeia of their own but the life span of a sturdy race had regressed to about fifty; infant mortality was high.

Why Libary had adopted and taught Soldier was his own affair, his secret, though the Ordinate scholars exchanged muttered opinions on the matter.

Soldier, clinging to Libary like an imprinted duckling, decided in early childhood that the old Koori was indeed his father. Discovering the meaning of celibacy was only a temporary setback because he soon found out, like any other sniggering twelve-year-old with the sap beginning to rise, the meaning of Carnival. Carnival was that one time of year when even the best-bred girls were liable to allow themselves a swallow or two more of strong country ale than propriety would sanction and so commit friendly errors against the Top-Ma’s breeding programme.

When such errors were permitted to come to term the males were expected to accept parental responsibility and usually did so (though the occasional renegade faded from sight, for “administrative reasons”) before the registration was made. The mothers were, on the whole, content to hand their deserted errors over to Public Patronage (not always; some screamed and clung while family reasoned, cursed, and struggled) because a girl had eventually to enslave with her sexual rom the right man in the right Genetic and he would not often care to be burdened with a Carnival by-blow who might not fit his occupational group.

Soldier, trained in Cadet School on the one hand and by Libary in Late English and History and Science on the other, began to research his own biological history in bathroom mirrors. Libary, shown in the record to have accepted Dedication at twenty-three, could have kicked up sexual heels in a few farewell years of Carnival before entry into professional purity. But it was a question which in “common decency”—that pestilent cover over truth and feeling—could not be asked; Libary, questioned, would have pretended not to hear and talked of something else.

The mirrors twinkled slyly at the boy’s investigation. Libary was a full-blooded Koori; Soldier, lighter-coloured, was not so light that he could not be nyoongan, half-bred. There were resemblances which thirst for a parent exaggerated but they existed in, for example, the flared nostrils and wide mouth and slender bones. Blue eyes were a problem but could be blamed on the unknown mother; Libary’s eyes were soft, Koori brown. To the boy, the general shaping of limbs and hands told their tale; Libary, had he not opted for Ordination, would certainly have been seen as Desert Genetic (from which the fighting soldiers were drawn).

Area General Atkins, Commander of the Yarra Valley Protective Force, was on an extended leave during a period of quiet in the regional animosities when The Comet made the first of its many orbits over southeastern Australia.

News travelled rapidly in the Twenty-eighth Century world, transmitted by the semaphore systems that ringed the planet. Islands like Australia suffered delay while the mail catamarans closed the sea gaps but Libary was not taken by surprise when the bright light rose overhead. Only the day before, word had been signalled down the coast from Nugini that a strange star had risen and sped through the night sky in many passages over many lands.

Over all lands, Libary thought, since its orbit was south to north, precessing as the Earth turned beneath it. He puzzled, though, over the rapidity with which it traversed the night; reports of dawn sightings indicated two complete circlings each day. He puzzled more when precession ceased on its east Australian orbit and it traced the same path, night after night, over the same area of the planet. Then he recalled the stories of Search and Kiev and instituted a headlong hunt for references by the crypt Ordinands; in hours he was able to surmise that a starship had come home.

As a wise man he kept that conviction to himself; he believed in proof before speech.

On the third night of orbital stability it rose again at the same time and place and careered through its six-hour path to zenith and vanishment below the midnight horizon.

Therefore it was no comet, despite the villagers’ naming it so because of its wan, misty tail.

Libary sent for Thomas, went over with him what had been observed, but not what he had concluded, and asked what he thought of it all. Soldier, having no profound thought about a light in the sky, told him the village gossip.

Libary asked brutally, “What more did you expect from them?”

“Nothing, having no facts to argue over.”

Whereupon Libary told this single most powerful authority for a hundred kils around that all his education had been wasted time, that his mind slept, that there were facts in plenty for any but the blind to wonder at and that he, General Atkins, should station himself at dusk on the crest of the neighbouring hill to the north and observe—with his eyes and then with his brain.

The Ordinands tut-tutted amongst themselves when Libary treated the General like a small boy, but they noted that the old man commonly marked his affection with challenges and that the General never failed to take them up.

Soldier climbed the hill, observed the rise of The Comet, its place and time, and made nothing of it. He knew little astronomy beyond the basics needed for march orientation—but enough, had he guessed what he was looking for.

Libary grunted, “Try again—if it will perform long enough for you to recognise it.”

On the second night he was distracted by visitors to his hilltop and it was then, with only a part of his attention on the sky and the rest entertained by Johnno and his new beloved, that Soldier’s brain delivered up common sense where cudgelling had only pawed over the rubble.

It was near the end of spring; day temperatures had risen to an average twenty-eight Centigrade. He took advantage of solitude and the little sundown breeze to strip and enjoy coolness with the UV radiation at minimum. He was dark enough to bear exposure with little risk of the skin evil but it was his professional business to be healthy and an example to his troopers, so he wore full dress by day, which the villagers thought eccentric.

From his grassy summit he looked across a saddle to the Library on its long ridge with, three hundred metres below, the village hidden under trees on the further side of the river bank. He would yet have to wait until near dark before The Comet rose, as before, over the left-hand corner of the building. Some flicker in his mind registered a clue there but he was immersed in the animal pleasure of cooling as sweat dried from the creases and hollows of his body.

Two figures emerged from the plantation of eucalypts on the lower slope. The stocky, overmuscled Johnno with his slightly bowlegged stride Soldier would have known at twice the distance; the companion, shorter but also broadly built, must be the matchwoman, brought for display and congratulation. She came from a village downriver and he had never seen her, but he had heard from those who had and his curiosity was whetted. He had shepherded Johnno through previous loves blighted by the veto of the Top-Ma and knew his friend’s Genetically approved Match would be worth meeting.

(And what of his own Matching? He was in no hurry; there was pleasure in women, denied by the Match which would restrict him to one woman only. The Matched told him that the rom recognition was a sudden thing, a heaven-bolt that changed the world, but he was a thoughtful man who did not fancy restriction by lightning strike.)

As they climbed nearer he saw that she wore her hair at shoulder length, like the men, and that what he had taken for a very short skirt was a pair of men’s thigh-length trousers. He sought a Late English word less damning than the local demotic speech and settled for “hoyden.” It occurred to him to pull his own ankle-length trousers on as a gesture of respect, then decided against it. Johnno wouldn’t give a damn and the sight of a lusty village siren, surely old enough to have survived a Carnival or two, going through the motions of coy avoidance of the obvious (without missing a detail) could be treasurable.

At closer sight it seemed that Johnno had excelled himself; he had always preferred wrestling partners and this one might well give him a fall or two. She was not at all bad looking for a workhorse of Forest Genetic and as sturdily built for her sex as Johnno for his. He fancied them bedding down like grappling grampuses, but what of that while they kept each other happy?

They stumped to a halt, not breathing very heavily from the climb, and Johnno introduced his woman as, “the Ridley’s Bella,” which seemed to match her no-nonsense solidity, and told her, “This is the Atkins’s Tommy, but everybody calls him Soldier because that’s what he is.”

She looked him over with no pretence of modesty and said, “You’ve got a lot of Koori in you, haven’t you?”

From some that would have been insolence, short of good manners though less than insult, but Soldier heard only the interest of a child with a novelty. (If the Genetics ever stopped to think about it, they all had “a lot of Koori” in them, the strong melanin that had made their racial persistence practicable in the Greenhouse light.) He caught Johnno’s wink telling him that this was a blunt one and no mistake, so he gave back blunt for blunt: “Plenty but I don’t know who from. I’m a Carnival get.”

That would have set most strangers back into polite nothings but Bella said, “I know; Johnno told me. You’re not what I expected.”

“No?” Had she expected another ploughman’s ox like Johnno?

“I’ve never seen a soldier close-to before.”

So he was a showpiece, a curio. He answered with specious gravity, “Why should you? We don’t advertise.”

A gameplaying slyness in her eyes should have warned him not to be too easily amused. “You haven’t got all that much to advertise.”

That was close to breathtaking, even from the village hoyden, but he saw that matchstruck Johnno thought it a huge joke. Wounded pride assured him that it was not true, save that she would be comparing him with Johnno, whose endowment was a Carnival byword.

“Besides,” said Bella, playing brashness to the hilt, “you’re thin! Soldiers ought to be big men.”

“They don’t have to be.”

“That’s silly.” She flexed a very respectable working muscle. “Why, I bet I’m stronger than you.”

Soldier fell back on cool politeness, wondering was the girl possessed by some demented bush demon. “In some ways you may be.”

Politeness was no defence against the total tomboy who rounded on her grinning lover to demand, “I can tough it with the men, can’t I?”

Soldier smothered an ungenerous smile. Oh, Johnno, Johnno, do you deserve this hooligan lump of trouble?

He was unprepared for Bella’s laughing attack, the launch of her seventy or so kilos on to his half-recumbent body. He was slammed smartly flat on his back while her knees ground into the biceps of both arms and a solid rump drove his stomach back to his spine.

He was instantly furious and as instantly controlled as he heard Johnno’s shocked, “Bella!” No responsible person would goad a reflexive fighting machine into action. He lay still for a long moment, forcing a smile, and when he was ready lifted his legs from the hips with the coordinated smoothness built into the Desert Genetic and brought his bended knees round either side of her until he could plant his toes under her armpits and lift her away.

She went down solidly, sitting hard, surprised but still laughing and complaining delightedly to Johnno, “You never told me he could do that.”

Johnno, between relief and embarrassment, said, “I told you not to try anything on him” and to Soldier, “Tommy, she arm-wrestles with the boys in the beerhouse.”

The Match, Soldier decided, was more than merely mysterious; it addled the brain.

Bella became marginally respectful. “The other boys couldn’t have done that lift.”

“They could if they were practised in it.” And if they were limber enough and fast enough, which most of her Genetic toughs were not.

“But you lifted me easy.”

“Why not?”

“When you’re so thin!”

By comparison, yes. “I’m just not thick.”

She leaned over to slap at his calf muscle. “There’s not enough there.”

“There is, lass.”

Johnno said, “The breeding’s different, love. It’s another sort of muscle.”

That was a strange idea to her; like so many villagers she accepted Genetic variation without thought of the mechanisms within it. Her puzzlement brought out the eternal instructor in Soldier.

“There are two kinds of muscle fibre, Bella, for different jobs. Yours and Johnno’s have a mostly crosswise grain, good for lifting weights and heavy work, but you get tired and have to take a break every so often. Mine have mostly a longwise grain for stamina, for fast moving over long distances, for doing lighter work without stopping or slowing down. A soldier has to go till the job is done, so he needs a body built to do that.”

It was only a half explanation but enough for the purpose. Bella was doubtful. “Bend your leg,” she ordered and pinched his calf and slid her hand down to the ankle, then felt her own bunchy leg muscle. “It’s a different shape; yours goes right down along the bone.”

“Extensors; tendons with lots of stretch.”

“Um.” She examined his arms, thin beside those of the village men, something less than she would expect of a husband doing farm and forestry work between stints of factory loading and handling. “What if you have to lift something heavy?”

“Use two men.”

Her approved man would grunt and strain to prove he could do the job alone. “Are all the soldiers like you?”

“More or less. We use some mixed-Genetics for special heavy duties.”

“Mixed?” She was puzzled again at an idea outside her experience. “Do you mean they breed you like—like …”

Outspokenness had found its limit; one did not compare people with …

Soldier grinned at her. “Like farm animals? For fat or meat or hauling loads? Why not? It just happens that I’m a stray born of the right parents for soldiering but most come of parents deliberately Matched—like you to Johnno.”

The Mas and Top-Mas were skilled in guiding like cautiously to like and in maintaining records to guard against inbreeding. And there was always Test Year to weed out social incompatibles. It was a fallible system but one that preserved a reasonable balance of types to fill essential niches. Bella seemed unaware of herself as a roughly designed end product; Johnno knew more because of his long association with Soldier but he knew also that in a basic-education community you keep special knowledge to yourself; nothing brings ostracism so fast as a hint of clever-clever.

Soldier said, “Anyway, I’m happy to meet you. Johnno has told me all about you.” The lovelorn half-wit!

She simpered, an unnerving sight, and murmured, “We’re starting Test Year.”

“Best of luck to you.”

In the macabre fascination of Bella he had missed the waning of the light. Now the corner of his eye caught the Moon clearing a cloud and a vagrant thought came to mind—of how it rose at a slightly more northerly point each night as the seasons changed. …

The evening breeze blew harder as the temperature dropped. It was nearing full dark and he began to pull on his clothes. Bending to lace his shoes, he almost missed the rise of brilliance.

The splendid silver-white spark lifted abruptly over the left-hand end of the Library, drawing its dim shaft of comet-tail after it like—

Like the comet-tail, he knew suddenly, that it was not.

The vagrant thought returned as revelation: If it rose in the same place each night, not shifting its orbit westward, then it was not “precessing.” That was a word he had picked up from Libary, one that even the Ordinand translators of Late English encountered only rarely.

His mind, once stirred, made a web of connections and he knew, with an excited wonder, what it was. Old men in the beerhouses nattered of the folkloric Star People who might or might not have had an existence long ago, before the Twilight, but Soldier, reared in the very smell of history, knew the ancient reality.

Bella, with her back to it, had missed the not-comet’s rising and was still earthbound. “Do soldiers always wear long trousers?” Her men might wear them for special tasks but not for sitting on hilltops.

A small part of Soldier’s mind answered politely while the greater part cogitated and examined. “Mostly. We work in all sorts of conditions—mud, water, thorns, insects, snake country. We can’t be changing into suitable gear all the time.”

“Oh.”

She probably thought the real reason was to hide his thin legs and he was suddenly tired of her. “I have to leave you; I must report back. I’ll come down and see you both in your Test cottage.”

He started downhill at speed, faster than they would try to follow, and heard Bella confide in her brass voice, “He’s nice in his skinny way.”

Well, he was not for the Bellas of this world, whatever virtues hid beneath her layers of muscle; Johnno was welcome to the hack work.

Above him the not-comet rose steadily, chasing and outstripping the lagging Moon. He stumbled more than once because he could not bear to take his eyes from the entrancing thing.

The barely literate villagers took pride in their Book House, visiting it on holidays, delighting in the ancient art works and the historical tales told by the Ordinands. Only a single storey high, but long and broad and deep in its underground rooms, it crouched on its high ridge as a dominant presence.

Soldier had ceased to be impressed by it while still a toddler; it was his place that he was used to. He nodded to the sentries at the outer end of the drawbridge and those under the war-door at the inner end; as he stopped for a moment to slow his breathing, he listened automatically for the creak of windlasses as the bridge rose and the war-door dropped, the quick bark of the sergeant’s voice dismissing the outer guard now that the General was inside. Moat, drawbridge, and suspended war-door were not ornaments and the Library drew on his troops for its defence.

Libary, he knew, would be on the roof with his pride and darling, the small telescope he had designed and whose lenses had been ground and polished by workmen brought in from the villages of the Glassmaker Talent and driven to the edge of revolt by what they saw as finicking insistence on an unnatural precision. A high bargain would be exacted for any more such instruments!

Soldier had looked through the eyepiece and declared himself delighted by the craters on the Moon and the rather fuzzy rings of Saturn; in fact the life-pictures (in Late English, “photographs” and “illustrations”) of these to be found in a number of the preserved books were clearer and more impressive. However, with Libary deep in designs for larger reflectors, enthusiasm was required of him and Soldier was willing, for affection’s sake, and because the old brute’s excitements tended to produce useful results. The Glassmakers had been more surly: We know, Sir, that two- and three-metre reflectors once existed; only find the means of their construction and they will exist again.

They had muttered among themselves, arguing impossibilities but already making tentative suggestions. Libary was confident that a step forward would be made but his present progress was limited to an eye glued to the small tube, rediscovering for himself the matters depicted in the illustrations.

At the top of the stairs Soldier changed into the fur-soled slippers worn on the roof to protect the thousands of glass panes through which the Sun lit the space below.

He saw Libary clearly in the moonlight, eye to the tube, following the splendour in orbit. Libary heard the loose shoes flap on glass and asked, “Thomas?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well?”

“The Jones’s Johnno is Matched. Risking his life with this one, I’d say.”

“I know that.” Testy. The Top-Ma had probably consulted with him on Genetic probity. “What else?”

“As with Johnno, nothing you do not already know.”

“I’m not a fish; don’t play me.”

“Very well; your bright light is not a natural object but an artefact, guided and driven, or else it could not rise in the same place at the same time each night.”

“That was obvious from the second sighting.”

“To you. I am a soldier with a different expertise.”

“Stop it, Thomas! This thing is not trivial. What is your conclusion?”

Soldier had to hope he was not about to make a thundering fool of himself. “A sky ship. A traveller between worlds.”

Libary grunted, “‘Spaceship’ was the term,” and stepped back from the eyepiece. “This is donkey work. We need the secret of camera picturing. It will be somewhere amongst a million unread texts—and when found may be unintelligible.” He rubbed his eyes. “So it’s a spaceship, is it?”

“It fits the descriptions—a metal cabin reflecting sunlight, and a tail of fire.”

“This tail of fire is pale stuff. Pictures of rockets show very bright tails of white fire, so perhaps this is not driven by a rocket. What then?”

“I don’t know.”

“There are mentions of a starship driven by ramjet. What might a ramjet be?”

“Again, I don’t know.”

“Nor does anybody.” Bright teeth in the dark face showed him smiling in the night. “We ransack the past for useful knowledge and every discovery leads to a blank wall for lack of some simple information that a schoolboy of the time could have supplied.”

Soldier guessed that something better than a schoolboy might have been needed to explain a spaceship but he said only, “Can you see it clearly?”

“No. I need a wider lens and a means of filtering sunlight and a method of stilling the twinkling and dimming of the air, but I can see well enough to tell you with certainty that this visitor is one of the ships that went into the sky before the Twilight. Tabulator Gerald found an illustration in a book in the crypts.”

He gestured at the small table standing on padded legs by the telescope. On it stood a lamp, wick turned down to conserve precious oil—one of those called by its Late English name of “hurricane lamp,” fashioned of thin, valuable copper after a dozen attempts and frustrations from illustrations in very old books indeed, dated two centuries or more before the Twilight. Soldier turned up the wick and a polished reflector at the back beat light onto the book. Libary had laid clear glass across the pages; only trained handlers were allowed to touch the easily damaged paper.

The ship was an extraordinary object, not the bullet shape to be expected for launching into the vast night but formed like two long trumpets joined end to end at the narrow point of their mouthpieces. The trumpet sides were not solid but a tracery, lattices of struts opening onto a huge bellmouth at each end, dwarfing the cabin set like a thick collar at the narrow point of join. The Last Culture had possessed extremely strong metals which were still found—resistant and unworkable—in ancient ruins and caches, so the lattice was too fine for the little telescope to break down into detail, but the outline was clear enough when he put his eye to the lens for comparison. The cabin, he remarked, seemed absurdly small.

“I think not, Thomas. How do we judge? How high in the sky is it? What can we compare it with? I have fifty Tabulators scouring the crypt shelves for detail and a few facts have appeared. For instance, that the crew and complement ran into hundreds. It must be larger than you guess.”

The largest transocean catamarans carried crews of thirty or so and a few passengers; on the same scale this ship would be far larger than the Library itself. The Last Age had seen miracles before it crashed into history.

Soldier raised an objection. “Yet how can it be the same after seven hundred years? Those people worked their wonders but they did not live forever.”

“Children and grandchildren, descendants growing and taking over. Leave that and ask rather what they do out there, circling the same course, doing what, and why?”

“That’s in a soldier’s bag of answers. They inspect, reconnoitre. They had vast telescopes; perhaps they see clear to the ground from up there.”

“They had other instruments than telescopes. They could see a man from a height of hundreds of kils.”

That was an eerie thought, a negation of all possible privacy, almost a confirmation of the concept of magic that still lingered in men’s minds.

Libary’s thought was nearer home. “What they see must puzzle them. They left a world of cities that towered to the clouds and people who crowded the Earth like ants; now they return to find a civilisa