She asked him, her voice flat and full of trepidation, “Why am I lucky I didn’t break my other arm, Cole?”

The lips broke from a frozen purse. “Because they would’ve killed you.”

Molly suppressed a laugh. “These guys? They seem perfectly gentle! My gods, look at this place! It’s too fantastic for nonsense like that.”

“Keep your voice down.” He scanned their surroundings. “Let’s walk along the stream and talk. I’ve picked up quite a bit and filled in most of the blanks between. We’ve a little over three hours until we won’t have another chance to talk like this.”

Molly looked over her shoulder at the giant mounds of fur loping effortlessly up the hill. Activity was spreading out among the tents, the smoke from the cooking of various foods rising—solid white pillars holding up a windless sky. She was having a hard time feeling afraid.

“Walter may already be dead.” Cole said.

“What?!”

“Keep walking. I’m sorry to be abrupt, but I understand your euphoria; I felt it yesterday. Gods, I felt it as soon as I found you alive in the airlock. So I’m sorry to shatter your expectations, but I need to do it fast.”

“How’d he die?”

“I said he’s probably dead. It’s been determined by the council that he’s ‘without proper function.’ Also, the ship’s being dismantled as we speak. You already wouldn’t recognize it. These guys are big, but their claws are prehensile, it’s like each of them has a complete tool rig in both paws.”

“Without proper function?”

“Listen, this beautiful land is at war. Constant war. They have formulas for how to preserve the natural state of this planet, but tribes keep breaking off and establishing new ones as they argue over which formula is right and which is wrong. I can barely understand most of it, but they have genetics reduced to mathematics. They can tell what the average age in each population should be, and they maintain it.”

“Maintain it how?”

Cole steered her away from the edge of the woods, more in the open. “How do you think?” he whispered. “If the average gets too high, they kill a few of the elders. If it jumps up too fast, they kill their own young. There’s no hesitation, either. What they consider to be the ‘natural’ order must be maintained. That pursuit is so much higher than all else—it makes lesser ethical problems vanish in their eyes.”

“I don’t understand. I think I’m missing something or you skipped a step.” She reached down to pick up a stone, then tossed it into the stream in frustration.

“Okay. Quick history lesson. And keep in mind, some of this is from them and some is from the Navy reports we read, no telling how much I’m missing or getting wrong.” He cleared his throat and glanced around before beginning. “The Glemots were a race of warring tribes for thousands and thousands of years. Evolution, of course, rewarded some of the same nasty traits in their genome that we find everywhere else. But, instead of civilizing and overcoming these traits, they created a culture around them.

“Despite intellects that—well I’ll just say that what they did to control Parsona doesn’t amaze me in the least anymore. Despite this, they never got into technology. Not because their brains weren’t capable of seizing it, but because their lives were too brutal to invest in it. There was no foundation there. It was like us prior to organized agriculture, before some of us got bored and started tinkering.”

“And then the satellite,” Molly offered.

“Exactly. The satellite. The problem was, the Glemots thought they found another natural discovery. They saw this tech as something handed down from the gods. Or maybe something bubbling up from within the planet, who knows? So the tribe that found it, the Leefs, they went from smelting ore to seven-dimensional calculus in less than a year.”

“No way.”

“Way. I’m serious, the intellect here is off the freakin’ charts. And they age more slowly than we do, so the amount they retain over an average lifetime is just crazy.”

She opened her mouth to ask a question, but Cole headed her off. “Don’t interrupt, I’m getting to the important part. So, they had incredibly advanced tech within three years. The Leefs gained an advantage—and they guarded it closely. Nearby tribes were nearly hunted to extinction with their new weapons. I imagine the tribes on the other side of Glemot still have legends about what happened over here.

“Of course, they didn’t just build weapons. They also built the first complex devices common to all tech-savvy races. Radios, micro/telescopes, the sensors that augment our senses. That’s when they spot the ‘gods’ in the sky.”

“The Navy.”

“Right, the Navy. So they try and communicate with them using means that were actually beyond our ability, or maybe we weren’t listening. Either way, the legend is that they tried everything to hail our boys in black, but no response. So guess what they did—they built their first ship and flew up to say hello! Needless to say, they were pretty disappointed. They learned about the GU and the GN, and they came back and had a Council meeting, a famous one. They still talk about it all the time.”

“What was it about?”

“What to do next. There were two main lines of thought. The leaders of the original Leef Tribe, a tribe that now lives in the forests beyond here, they wanted to expand out and exterminate what they saw as a danger to the natural order. Namely, our entire race.”

Molly’s eyes widened at this.

“Yeah, I had the same reaction. Luckily for us, one of the Glemots, another male named Campton, saw the Leef response as the ultimate disruption of the natural order. His thinking was that whatever aliens did with their creations was also part of the natural way of things.”

“What, like beehives and anthills?”

“Exactly. Which was heresy to those that hated the new technology, especially once they learned about its ‘impure source.’ These guys wanted to use some technology to destroy all technology. The Glemots following Campton wanted to use as little technology as possible to restore the balance they had before.”

“So the tribe that just ‘accepted’ me, they’re the good guys?”

“There aren’t any good guys here. Not in my view. Granted, I’m glad the Campton Tribe formed and kicked some Leef butt or the war with the Drenards would look like a cake-walk in comparison. Look at what they did with our ship, what they must have done with the UN ships. The fact the Navy was ousted from the OS and never won it back must be a mere hint of what they can do. Now imagine ground warfare with those things.”

Cole’s voice trailed off as a Glemot thundered by, rushing from the woods and back up the hill. Molly’s gaze followed the lumbering beast. She tried her hardest to imagine a brutal side to these creatures. She couldn’t. But mainly because she was still resisting the idea that they could do harm. “But this place is paradise,” she complained.

“Paradise at a cost. I was talking to one of the younger Glemots last night, a kid named Edison—”

“What’s up with the names?” she interrupted.

“Hah. I picked up on it, too, and one of the adults confirmed it. The Camptons name themselves after famous human engineers. The ones they think did more good than harm. They know all about our history, more than you and I combined. They got all kinds of data files from the Orbital Station, but getting back to the point—I was talking to Edison last night and he’s a cool kid. Well, I say kid, but the guy is smarter than any human I’ve ever met, even though he’s still considered a pup. I have no idea how old he is in Earth years, but he comes across as a complete prodigy when he talks.

“Anyway, Edison was talking about today’s Council and comparing it to one several years ago. The Camptons—the tribe you and I belong to—found out the tribes on the other side of the planet were reproducing too quickly. They were warring less and finding new resources for food. This was deemed so serious that a truce was called between the Leefs and the Camptons. They came together and devised a solution.”

“Which was?”

“A new disease. Genetically targeting a specific strain common to two of the largest tribes on the other side of the planet. Like I said, the Camptons won the civil war and they have the tech they need to keep things in balance. So they released this disease and killed the tribes.”

“All of them?” Molly looked horrified.

“Millions of them.” Cole stopped walking and looked out over the lake.

Molly felt her stomach churn. They stood in silence for awhile. Finally, Molly said, “But it’s so beautiful here.”

“Depends on where you look.”

They had wandered close to the forest again and turned to follow the stream back toward the tents. Molly wasn’t sure what to say, or even what she believed at the moment.

“We have a name for what the Glemots live by, you know.”

“Crazy?” Molly suggested, even though she grudgingly admired the results of their actions.

“No, Molly, these guys aren’t crazy, they’re just driven by an extreme form of something you and I fall for all the time.”

“What?”

“The naturalistic fallacy. It’s when our aesthetic sense of beauty in nature confuses us into thinking that if it exists there, it must be good. Or maybe ‘right’ is a better word than good.”

“I’m not following you. It’s obvious to me that if I think that lake is beautiful then it is beautiful; that’s all our emotions are.” She really didn’t want to get into a philosophical discussion. She barely passed that class and hated every subjective minute of it.

“No, deeper than that. It’s when we think that whatever state we happen to find our world in when we become philosophically aware must be the state we keep it in. Even though the world changed naturally leading up to this understanding, we think we shouldn’t allow it to progress any further.”

“I really don’t want to talk about this, Cole.”

“It’s important if we’re going to get out of here.”

“Why leave?” She threw her one good arm up. “Where could we go that’s better than this? Let’s say I clear things up with the Navy, run a shuttle or courier service for the next forty years. You know what I’d want to do with the money I saved? I’d want to come build a house right over there and live the rest of my days strolling through these forests and swimming in that lake and collecting bugs.”

Cole frowned at her; she’d never seen him look so sad. “That sounds great. Really, it does. But they wouldn’t let you build that house ’cause it’d destroy the look of the shore. They wouldn’t let you walk the same path every day because you’d trample the soil. And if you deviated from whatever they calculated the ‘norm’ was, they’d kill you with a vote. I’m sorry, and trust me, I’ve gone through the same emotions over the last day, and I hate that you have to do it with less time, but we need to finish this conversation.”

Molly shook her head. “This talk is worse and more confusing than being in prison on Palan was.”

“That’s an exaggeration.”

“Yeah, a little,” she admitted, but not smiling. “Okay, forget the philosophy stuff. Even if we assume that our survival depends on getting away from this paradise, how do we fly away from them if my ship is being dismantled and they can control it from orbit anyway?”

“Simple,” said Cole. “We start a war.”

“We do what?!”

“Hear me out: not every Glemot agrees on what balance to fight for. Hell, not every Campton agrees with one another. Just like with humans, it takes a strong leader to keep order here. Franklin is getting old, even by their standards, I think, and the Leefs have been making some progress with getting their technology going again.”

“How did they ever lose their technology in the first place?”

“Campton’s rebels. They created all kinds of anti-tech technology. EMPs that fry electronics. Little micro-bots that eat away specific metals. But their guiding principles meant every victory against the Leef technology required them to ratchet down their own. They try to control the spread of tech using the simplest tools required. As long as they stay one step ahead, they can remain there. They’ve almost progressed back to the stone age from a starting point that was beyond our own technology. That’s why you woke up in a tent with a balm on your arm instead of a high-rise hospital full of beeping things.”

“It’s hard to argue with the result,” Molly said, sweeping her arm at the vista around them.

“Now you’re the one bringing up the ‘philosophy crap’ you hate so much. Yes, this is beautiful. We have parks on Earth that look like this. But we also have Mozart and Dali and Spengle and T’chuyn and even the Drenard sculptor Tadi Rooo. We can admire the cosmos and the atom. We have a diversity of beauty that’s just as natural as this.” He also waved his hand at the scenery.” He paused. “I’m sorry to be so strident here. I honestly hope we can discuss this in detail one day, and we can both see neither extreme is tenable. Right now, though, I want to devise a plan that wins us that day.”

Molly nodded. She turned her head away from the beauty of the lake and looked up the hill. But there was no escaping the sensual pleasure of being here.

She listened as Cole got into the meat of his plan. Molly felt detached from it all but was able to point out some tactical flaws. She agreed it would work as long as the dozen or so various “ifs” they foresaw were the only ones that existed. And of course, a lot depended on the Glemots.