IGMS Issue 22 by IGMS Page A

impervious to local temperature, but I wore what I thought would be appropriate attire should any of the locals discover me -- and did a Link update on the dialects that Kaman and Jorge were learning. Might help -- or it might not. I didn't really care. My ship in orbit didn't show any large animal life for at least fifty kilometers. Only the insects of the tundra kept me company as I spent a few days carefully pawing through the rock mounds, and the bloodsuckers must have bent their beaks trying to penetrate my artificial skin.
    Eventually I wandered up into the foothills themselves. I'd found some burial cairns, but nothing which might tell me where the original inhabitants had gone to. The glaciers were gorgeous and reminded me of photos I'd seen of Earth's glaciers, before things had gotten warmer and all the glaciers melted. At night, the air was full of distant groaning and popping as the ice made its eternal, ponderous flow off the mountains and down through the valleys toward an eventual meeting with the far away sea.
    My luck turned when I stumbled into the cave.
    The skeletons of what appeared to have been families were huddled around its interior, half-buried by the detritus of time. The absence of large scavengers meant that the skeletons had remained relatively intact, and the cave's ceiling had a spectacular array of glyphs painted on it. I imaged everything extensively and Linked the information to a grateful Kaman and Jorge, who incorporated these files into their growing picture of the migrating evolution of human life on Eden.
    One image in particular snared my attention as I paced the cave walls, using a hand lamp to keep the ceiling illuminated. Like the ancient glyphwork of Earth, these pictograms were child-like in their rendering: stick people and stick animals, representations of rituals and hunts, killing, feasting, dying, and living again. But one image seemed remarkably unlike the others. It was a particularly precise diamond, inset with what appeared to be three eyes. The middle eye was larger than the other two, and each of them was split through with what appeared to be triskele-shaped irises.
    If I'd had any blood in me, it would have run stone cold.
    I Linked to the first person who came to my mind.
    "Yes?" Wanda said.
    "Take a look at this," I told her, Linking the image of the diamond with the three eyes.
    "My God," Wanda said.
    "Show this to the others. We need to talk."

    "The Swarmers were here," I said.
    Wanda, Ormond, Jorge, Bana, and anyone else who could be spared all sat around the fire that crackled in the pit I'd built. We could have Linked the entire discussion, but nobody argued when they saw the image of the diamond-with-eyes and received my subsequent request for a face-to-face quorum.
    "Coincidence," Ormond said, waving his huge, copper-colored hand at me. "If the Swarmers had found Eden they'd have destroyed it, just as they've destroyed
any
planet where they've found humans. Swarmer behavior is 100% predictable in this regard. Why would the Swarmers make an exception for Eden?"
    "Maybe they found the Edenites in their primitive state," said Bana, "and, considering them to be harmless, left the Edenites in peace."
    "It's possible," Jorge said, still clad in his Edenite form. "We've never known the Swarmers to destroy any species which has not first reached a sufficient technological level to appear threatening. The Edenites have fire and they have stone, but they've not so much as smelted tin from what I can discern. Dozens of cultures and languages, and each of them is thoroughly steeped in religious imagery and explanation for the world. The scientific mindset has never found purchase."
    "Who needs technology when they're happy the way things are?" Bana said, her four arms crossed. "Long life, neither disease nor parasites; they've got relatively little to complain about."
    "And relatively little tribal competition," Jorge added.
    I stared at my friends.
    "You admire the