Mercury in The Fiction of Leigh Brackett - Mercurian Aborigines

Mercurian Aborigines

Mercury is known to have evolved three forms of sentient life. Among these were a group of glacially-slow silicon-based life-forms that were almost extinct by the time the first settlers arrived; the crystalline life-forms of the Darkside (see below), that remained largely unknown to the settlers save as rumor; and the furry aborigines of the closed valleys of the Twilight Belt.

The furry aborigines were non-human, but humanoid, and had achieved a barely Stone Age existence before the arrival of the settlers. They were patriarchal and clannish, living by hunting rock-lizards. Male children hunted with wooden spears, and were forbidden certain quarries; when they came of age, if they were successful in the ritual of the Man's Hunt, they were awarded flint spears and became members of the community (Enchantress of Venus).

Although the aborigines had little physical power compared to the human settlers of Mercury, and many were ruthlessly massacred by the least scrupulous of the mineral exploiters, they were not to be underestimated. The aborigines inhabiting the cliff-caves of Arianrhod, near the Darkside, had developed a powerful form of telepathy, capable of discerning events across a planet; this skill was learned by the Terro-Mercurian Jaffa Storm (Shadow over Mars). They could be very friendly to humans on occasion, for instance adopting the orphaned Eric John Stark and raising him to adulthood.