Free The Ship Who Won by Anne McCaffrey, Jody Lynn Nye Page A

Earth. Maybe
    they've been conquered by another tribe who primarily
    use sign language for communication. Or it might be the
    signs come from their religious life, and mama was telling
    baby that God would be unhappy if he didn't snap to it."
    "Ugh. Invisible blackmail."
    Keff patted the remote IT unit propped almost underneath his chin. "I want to talk to some of these people and
    see how long it takes my unit to translate. I'm dying to see
    what similarities there are between their language structure and Standards." He started to gather himself up to
    stand.
    "Not so fast," Carialle said, her voice ringing in his
    mastoid-bone implant. He winced. "When something
    seems too good to be true, it probably is. I think we need
    to do more observation."
    "Cari, we've watched half a dozen of these groups
    already. They're all alike, even to the size of the flower gardens. When am I going to get to talk to one of them?"
    The brains voice hinted of uneasiness. 'There's something, well, odd and seedy about this place. Have you
    noticed how old all these artifacts are?"
    Keff shrugged. "Usable tools passed down from generation to generation. Not uncommon in a developing
    civilization."
    "I think its just the opposite. Look at that!"
    Coming toward the work party in the field were two
    furry humanoid males. Between them on a makeshift
    woven net of rough cords, they carefully bore a hemispherical, shieldlike object full of sloshing liquid. They
    were led by the excited child who had been sent off by his
    mother. He shouted triumphantly to the teams of workers
    who set down their tools and rubbed the dust out of their
    fur as they came over for a drink. Patiently, each waited his
    or her turn to use the crude wooden dippers, then went
    immediately back to the fields.
    "Water break," Keff observed, propping his chin on his
    palm. "Interesting bucket."
    "It looks more like a microwave raydome to me, Keff,"
    Carialle said. "Whaddayou know! They're using the
    remains of a piece of advanced technical equipment to
    haul water."
    "By Saint George and Saint Vidicon, you're right! It
    does look like a raydome. So the civilizations not evolving,
    but in the last stages of decline," Keff said, thoughtfully,
    tapping his cheek with his fingertips. "I wonder if they had
    a war, eons ago, and the opposing forces blew themselves
    out of civilization. Its so horribly cold and dry here that we
    could very well be seeing the survivors of a comet strike."
    Carialle ran through her photo maps of the planet taken
    from space. "No ruins of cities above ground. No signatures of decaying radiation that I saw, except for those
    sourceless power surges-and by the way, I just felt
    another one. Could they be from the planet's magnetic disturbance? There are heavy electromagnetic bursts
    throughout the fabric of the planet, and they don't seem to
    be coming from anywhere. I suppose they could be natural
    but - it's certainly puzzling. Possibly there was a Pyrrhic
    victory and both sides declined past survival point so that
    they ended up back in the Stone Age. Dawn of Furry
    Mankind, second day."
    "Now that you've mention it, I do recognize some of the
    pieces they made their tools out of," Keff said. He watched
    an adolescent female guiding two six-packs in a tandem
    yoke pulling a plow over part of the field that had been
    harvested. 'Tours is probably the best explanation, unless
    they're a hard-line back-to-nature sect doing this on purpose, and I doubt that very much. But that plowshare looks
    more to me like part ofashutdecraft fin. Especially if their
    bucket has a ninety-seven-point resemblance to a raydome. Sad. A viable culture reduced to noble primitives
    with only vestiges of their civilization."
    'That's what we'll call them, then," Carialle said,
    promptly. "Noble Primitives."
    "Seconded. The motion is carried."
    Another young female and her docile six-pack dragged a
    full load of roots toward the stone square. Keff shifted to
    watch her.
    "Hey, the