There had been a time, long before, when innovation came easier, when a broken sharp-edged stone gave someone the idea to break a stone on purpose to make a sharp edge, when the warm end of a twirled stick made someone twirl it harder and longer just to see how warm it could get. But as more memories built up, crowding and enlarging the storage capacity of their brain, changes came harder. There was no more room for new ideas that would be added to their memory bank, their heads were already too large.

Women had difficulty giving birth; they couldn’t afford new knowledge that would enlarge their heads even more.

The Clan lived by unchanging tradition. Every facet of their lives from the time they were born until they were called to the world of the spirits was circumscribed by the past. It was an attempt at survival, unconscious and unplanned except by nature in a lastditch effort to save the race from extinction, and doomed to failure. They could not stop change, and resistance to it was self-defeating, antisurvival.

They were slow to adapt. Inventions were accidental and often not utilized. If something new happened to them, it could be added to their backlog of information; but change was accomplished only with great effort, and once it was forced on them, they were adamant in following the new course. It came too hard to alter it again. But a race with no room for learning, no room for growth, was no longer equipped for an inherently changing environment, and they had passed beyond the point of developing in a different way. That would be left for a newer form, a different experiment of nature.

As Mog-ur sat alone on the open plain watching the last of the torches sputter and die, he thought of the strange girl Iza had found, and his uneasiness grew until it became a physical discomfort. Her kind had been met before, but only recently in his concept of reckoning, and not many of the chance meetings had been pleasant. Where they had come from was a mystery-her people were newcomers to their land-but since they arrived things had been changing. They seemed to bring change with them.