The Ties That Bind by Walter M. Miller

Author:Walter M. Miller [Miller, Walter M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Science Fiction, Short Stories
Publisher: Feedbooks
Published: 1954-06-28T16:00:00+00:00

Phase-A had been accomplished, after six months of toil. Baltun Meikl, Analyst Culturetic of Intelligence Section stood on the sunswept hill, once forested, but now barren except for the stumps of trees, and watched the slow file of humanity that coursed along the valley, bearing the hand-hewn ties that were being laid from the opening of the mine shaft to the ore dump. Glittering ribbons of steel snaked along the valley, and ended just below him, where a crew of workmen hammered spikes under the watchful eye of a uniformed foreman. In the distance, the central ring of grounded ships dominated the land. Spacers and natives labored together, to lend an impression of egalitarian cooperation under the autocracy of the officer class.

"How good it is for brethren to be reunited," Meikl's native interpreter murmured, in the facile tongue devised by Semantics Section for use by staff officers and Intelligence men in communicating with the natives.

He stared at her profile for a moment, as she watched the men in the valley. Was she really that blind? Were all of them? Had they no resistance at all to exploitation, or any concept for it?

Meikl had learned as much as he could of the socio-economic matrix of the static civilization of the present Earthlings. He had gone into their glades and gardens and seen the patterns of their life, and he wondered. Life was easy, life was gay, life was full of idle play. Somehow, they seemed completely unaware of what they had done to the planet in twenty thousand years. One of the elders had summed up, without meaning to, the entire meaning of twenty millenia, with the casual statement: "In our gardens, there are no weeds," and it applied to the garden of human culture almost as well as it applied to the fauna and flora of the planet.

This "weedlessness" had not been the goal of any planned project, but rather, the inevitable result of age-old struggles between Man and Nature on a small plot of land. When Man despoiled Nature, and slaughtered her children, Nature could respond in two ways: she could raise up organisms to survive in spite of Man, and she could raise up organisms to survive in the service and custody of Man. She had done both, but the gardener with his weed-hoe and his insect spray and his vermin exterminators had proved that he could invent new weapons faster than Nature could evolve tenacious pests, and eventually the life forms of Earth had been emasculated of the tendency to mutate into disobedient species. Nature had won many bloody battles; but Man had won the war. Now he lived in a green world that seemed to offer up its fruits to him with only a minimum of attention from Man. Nature had learned to survive in the presence of Man. Yet the natives seemed unaware of the wonder of their Eden. There was peace, there was plenty.

This, he thought, could be the answer to their lack of

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