The forest had swallowed the city, and plants had replaced the buildings. The "spirits of all things" had built a brilliant civilization with fire and steel, but nature needed only a little time to grind those traces into nothing—even swallowing and assimilating everything into itself as part of nature.
Civilization on this planet had been in decline for many years, as the ancient, desolate ruins made clear. Many ruins had not only collapsed but had also become the nests and territories of wild animals. Their builders had carefully designed these structures to display human wisdom and strength, but now those achievements merely benefited the birds and beasts of the forest, while these later "tenants" clearly had no interest in what their nests had originally been used for.
Several alien beasts with stiff, short fur that looked like wild boars fled toward the distance in panic, vanishing into the dense forest in the blink of an eye. Lily had released only a trace of her pressure, yet it had scared these dim-witted animals witless. It seemed Nolan's earlier judgment had been correct: there was nothing particularly threatening on this planet. The beasts in the forest were no more formidable than the tigers and wolves on Earth.
"This civilization's level of development was clearly quite high. These ruins are several thousand years old, yet they still haven't completely weathered away. Their material technology was on par with Tanagrus, or perhaps even more advanced." After driving away the beasts, Hao Ren and the Data Terminal stepped forward to examine an ancient relic that the animals had occupied as a nest. It was a hemispherical metal shell that had apparently once been a large pressure vessel for storing dangerous liquids. It had been twisted out of shape and only half remained, but its strength