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Revision as of 16:56, 13 September 2016

The hibernator, Homo dormitor, (also known as the planter) is a conifer forest-dwelling human from 10,000 years (the 120th Century), descended from the temperate woodland-dweller (descended from Trancer's line), able to hibernate for long periods of time, from Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future.

The trancelike state is not now as deep as it was a few days ago. The warmth of spring is filtering through the cocoon's insulating layers of fiber and wood, registering slowly on the dulled nerves and sensory system of the sleeper, triggering a slow increase in his metabolism and bringing consciousness nearer. His mind emerges from total blankness into a dream state, in which he relives and consolidates the hunting and gathering techniques that he learned last season. In his dream he sees the forest of his home, firstly as it was when he was a child, then as it was more recently. The most recent memory-dream is of his mate of last season, and hopefully of this season also, and the thought of her excites him so much that the final barrier of consciousness is broken, and he is awake.

With a groan of momentary disappointment that the last vision was only a dream, he stretches himself, pulling open his eyelids against the mucus that gums them together, and unfolding his limbs which are so stiff that they almost creak. With a struggle he breaks through the covering of vegetable matter and into the spring smells of the coniferous forest.

The spring flowers - the gentians, orchids and saxifrages - are out and blooming, as they are whenever he awakes from his winter sleep, but the Sun is low in the sky. Spring is early this year, therefore the climate must be becoming warmer.

Then the pain of hunger strikes him and he digs at the remains of his food store. Several times throughout the dark winter he broke his trance to feed and now there is little left. Most of the tubers have rotted and the seeds germinated, but there are still a number of items that are edible. These he devours with no hesitation, to give him the strength to look for more.

There is plenty of food about, since it is the beginning of the time of swarming insects and the damp soil and decaying needles underfoot house a vast array of luscious wriggling things. Beneath the bark of the trees, too, grubs of such insects as beetles burrow and tunnel in their millions, and birds are here as well, having travelled up from the south, as his mate will hopefully do, to feed on the insects. When his stiffness has worn off, and he has built up his strength again he will also be able to catch the birds and the little rodents that have come out to feed on the tender shoots and saplings.

Looking for food, he rips the bark from a fallen tree, one which must have died during the winter. He remembers when it was merely a sapling - over 60 years ago, but numbers mean nothing to him. He only remembers.

After building up his strength for a few days he sets about the task of building his fortress. It will be made of wood, comfortable and soft inside, but harsh, jagged and defensive outside. It needs to be, since there are many marauding rival males about that would fight him to death for a fertile female like his. He builds his fortress on what remains of last season's, and that is quite a lot. As the years go by his building techniques improve and his structures become more durable.

Little remains, however, of the guide walls, and these have to be rebuilt every spring. Reaching out in two directions in a huge V-shape, open end to the south and with the fortress at the apex, the structure stretches for over 2,000 paces in each direction. It is made of sticks pushed into the ground and thinner sticks woven in between. It is not meant to be a barrier, but more of a marker across the landscape. His mate has wintered in the milder climates away to the south, and will be travelling northwards very soon. It is essential that she does not miss the fortress and go blundering on northwards, or end up in some other male's domain.

With construction completed, he starts to build up the food supplies in the fortress itself. After a few days he hears an excited chatter, and he looks expectantly from the mouth of the now comfortable fortress. She is there, walking confidently up the side of the barrier.

Yes, she carries the winter's baby with her.

With joy, one of the few emotions he can feel, he rushes to meet them, and to fondle her and stroke the child he sees for the first time. A female. That is good: there are enough males around. This is the first child that he has had by this female, although he has had many others by other mates.

Females are much shorter-lived than males. They cannot sleep the cold times away, as they have to travel south to give birth in the winter. Many of his females aged and died during his life, while many others became lost in the migration, dying on the trek or ending up in other fortresses.

Each individual has its allotted lifespan. Barring accident or disease it survives for about 2,000 million heartbeats. For the migrating females these heartbeats average about 70 per minute. For the hibernating males this average is kept up during waking times, but during the late autumn, winter and early spring it drops to about 20 per minute. The remainder of his bodily functions slow down accordingly. As a result the male's lifespan is between four and five times the length of the female's.

In the dimness of his weak imagination he sometimes thinks that it would be better if babies were born during the summer so that they could all hibernate together; but this would not be possible unless the growth of a baby inside the female could be speeded up or slowed down, so that the offspring of the spring mating emerged at a more convenient time.

That cannot be... yet.

By 2 million years (the 20020th Century)

The food will be there, and can be taken, as the travellers know. Every year the enclosures ripen, the planters awake, feed, repair the enclosures if necessary, plant the new seed and return to their slumbers once more. The secret is for the travellers to time the journey in the north during warm times so as to arrive before the planters rouse from their long sleep. The planters are supposed to be a very ancient race, and each one lives for many hundreds of years (if "live" is the right word). How can you be living if more than nine-tenths of your time is spent asleep?

How did this come about? It probably goes back to the time when the differences between the cold times and the warm times were much greater than they are now. There have always been animals that have hibernated - slowed down their systems and gone to sleep during the coldest time of the year. These creatures usually gather their food and store it, waking up and eating from time to time; or else they eat so much when they are awake that they build up stores of fat that nourish them while they sleep. The planters were once normal, like the travellers, but probably not so intelligent. Back when the ice had just shriveled up from the continents and the "winters" were still cold, they developed the ability to sleep away the harshest of conditions, and they stored up food as well. Some of the seeds and grains that they stored would have germinated by the time the stores were opened; if the hibernation time were long enough they may even have fruited again. As the centuries and millennia passed, the planters developed the ability to remain suspended until harvest time, when they would come out and eat, plant the next crop and retire again.

The travellers knew that it was possible for such things to happen. Vaguely they remembered the knowledge that their ancestors had possessed, knowledge about changing conditions and changing life.

There must never be any dealings with the planters. The planters build their enclosures, and use the growing vegetation not just for food. They gather their food from where it grows, but also plant it in places that will be more convenient for them to collect it from. They build walls and roofs of stone and wood to protect what they have done, just as their remote ancestors did. It was the beginning of the changes that eventually destroyed everything - the land, the other living things, themselves. Now nothing must be altered, nothing must be built, nothing must be changed from its natural state; that is the credo of the travellers.

It is a sign of their strength that they know how to make their life easier, but ignore the knowledge. Any one of them has enough inherited knowledge to dig the burning stones or the naturally-distilled organic fluid from the ground (if indeed there are any deposits of these left) and use their heat to melt down the metal minerals. They could all break down the substances from the rocks and use them for many varied purposes. They know that it is possible to fly to the Moon and stars, and they know how to do it; but they will not. They will not call down the destruction once more.

It is not just their memories that impress this credo upon them. Wherever they travel, through the lush forests and woodlands or across the open plains and deserts, they see the dismal results. In a forested valley, where they remember once stood a city, the rocks that outcrop in the slopes of the stream gullies are not natural. They are manmade, sometimes with unnatural angles and faces that have miraculously survived 2 million years of burial. The soil here is stained and streaked with red and green where the vast volumes of metal that went into the artifacts have oxidized away to dust. The area is disgustingly unnatural, and avoided.

Elsewhere lie similar remains that are lethal to any creature that passes close by. Even now, 2 million years later, the technological overproduction of their ancestors has the power to kill. Nothing appears at the surface here, but not far down lies the disintegrated ruin of some vast structure. So great have been the natural forces of erosion and decay that nothing recognizable of the original structure remains even underground, but some of the raw materials still lie there, emitting a deadly force. Anyone crossing this area sickens and dies. The travellers remember that it was something to do with the generation of energy.

This is why the travellers despise the dark-minded creatures, their distant relatives, with whom they share the planet but who do not have the remembered knowledge. These beings, such as the planters, constantly use their minds and their hands to devise and construct artifacts. They are intelligent enough to think out anew the ways of doing things, although they do not remember that these things have been done before. It is as if the whole disease were starting all over again.

Dig a shelter today. Build a house tomorrow. Clear a forest for a city the day after. Choke the landscape with the waste materials the next.

Plant a seed today. Cut down a clearing for many seeds tomorrow. Deforest and irrigate a valley the day after. Change the global climate the next.

Make a spade today. Make a spear tomorrow. Make an explosive machine the day after. Engulf a plain with instantaneous fire and leave it a poisonous ruin the next.

Although the travellers make it their work to frustrate any of this activity wherever they find it, they also use its results. In the far north where they go when times are warm they eat the food grown in the enclosures by the planters. In the far south, when they have travelled there along the spines and ridges of high ground between the foul low-lying slimelands, they eat the roots and tubers stored in the cooled chambers of the hivers. It is a paradox that they do not even try to solve - they are, after all, human beings.

By 3 million years (the 30020th Century)

They die out.

Trivia

  • This is one species in the book that was never given an illustration.