It would be the first time, Agat thought sardonically, that they ever learned an idea from us. Next we’ll be catching their colds. And that’ll kill us off; and our ideas might well kill them off.…
It wasn’t like the hilfs, this planning ahead. Hilfs did not consider either time or space in the linear, imperialistic fashion of his own species. Time to them was a lantern lighting a step before, a step behind—the rest was indistinguishable dark. Time was this day, this one day of the immense Year. They had no historical vocabulary; there was merely today and “time-past.” They looked ahead only to the next season at most. They did not look down over time but were in it as the lamp in the night, as the heart in the body. And so also with space: space to them was not a surface on which to draw boundaries but a Range, a heartland, centered on the self and clan and tribe. Around the Range were areas that brightened as one approached them and dimmed as one departed; the farther, the fainter. But there were no lines, no limits. This planning ahead, this trying to keep hold of a conquered place across both space and time, was untypical; it showed—what? An autonomous change in a hilf culture-pattern, or an infection from the old northern colonies and forays of Man?
It would be the first time, Agat thought sardonically, that they ever learned an idea from us. Next we’ll be catching their colds. And that’ll kill us off; and our ideas might well kill them off.…
