And crawl to the crown of one of the Pillars or emergents that were the worldвЂ™s buttresses. To see the sun one had to climb to the top of the world. Not many men could boast of that, he prided himself. Hard work, much climbing, and courage had gifted him with that sight three times in his modest lifetime. Thoughts of the sun cheered him a little. He snuggled deeper into the cranny in the thomabar tree and wrapped his cloak of green fur more tightly about himself. They matured and observed the world around them through different eyes.Д«ORN WATCHED THE MORNING mist rise and dreamed of the sun. Their offspring grew up with no illusions about the supremacy of humankind or anykind. A few, less constrained by pride and more resilient, survived and had children. Those who held to such practice did not beget a second generation on the world with no name. Mankind in those early days was used to controlling the universe, by force if necessary. It filtered out the preponderance of human chaff from the seed grain right quick and neat, and ate them alive. They were tired and desperate and overconfident, but unprepared. The colonists voted a Soviet ballot and set about the matter of bringing civilization to this world. They would have to make do with this calamitous landfall. Now they were in orbit, with no fuel to go anywhere else, without proper equipment to settle on this world, without time or way to call for help. This was not the planet to which their automatic pilot should have brought them. To the commander and officers of the colony ship, who studied and cursed and ranted at their controls and coordinates, it was a clear case of a malign accident. They arrived, these people did, on the way to some place else. Oh, there were the furcots, of course, but they had not even a name that could be called a name until the people came. It must be considered that that which inhabited the world with no name regarded the universe in a fashion other than usual вЂ¦ if anything did so at all. Rather, it was a question of its supporting too much life, too well.Д®ven so, in all the life that grew and flew and fought and died on the most fertile globe in the heavens, there was not a single creature that thought-not in the manner in which thought is usually and comfortably defined. There was no question of the planetвЂ™s ability to support life. Even the air had a pale green cast to it, so that looking through it one would seem to be staring through lenses cut from purest peridot. The mountains were green until they blended into green froth only at the heights did lichens battle with creeping ice as on most worlds waves warred with the land. Save for a few pockets of rancid blue, the oceans themselves were green from a surfeit of drifting plant life that nearly strangled the waters.

Oh, it was a green so bright it had its own special niche in the spectrum of the impossible, a green pervasive, an everywhere-all-at-once, omnipotent green. From a soil base so rich it all but lived itself, a verdant magma spilled forth to inundate the land.ДЄnd it was green. Rather, on its surface life exploded, erupted, multiplied, and thrived beyond imagining. It lay supine in a sea of sibilant jet, a festering emerald in the universe-ocean. вЂњвЂ¦ where highest woods impenetrable to star or sunlight, spread their umbrage broad.вЂќ

Midworld alan dean foster