Evolution

by Stephen Baxter

  Compared to most animals the jellyfish was a crude creature. It had a simple radial symmetry, and lacked substance and tissue organization. It didn’t even have blood. But its form was very ancient. Once the ocean had been full of creatures more or less like the jellyfish. They had anchored themselves to the seafloor, turning the ocean into a forest of stinging tentacles. They did not need to be more active; they were untroubled by predators or grazers, as there had not been enough oxygen in the environment to fuel such dangerous monsters.

  Roamer was baffled by the sea. To her water was something that came in ponds and rivers and cupped leaves, a fresh, salt-free stuff that you drank whenever you were safe enough to do so. Nothing in her experience or her innate neural programming had prepared her for suspension over a great inverted sky through which drifted such bizarre creatures as the jellyfish.

  And she was thirsty, terribly thirsty. Her hand reached down, dipped into that murky soup, and lifted a palmful of water to her mouth. She had forgotten that she had done this not an hour ago, forgotten the bitterness of the brine.

  The males had done feeding, she saw. They had fallen into a kind of stupor in the day’s continuing heat. Of Patch, all that could be seen was a single foot, toes curled, that protruded from her lonely nest.

  Cautiously, Roamer made her way to the place where the infant had been slaughtered. Blood stained the branches, smeared by the licking of anthro tongues. Roamer picked through the leaves carefully. She found nothing of the infant save a scattering of thin fur — and one perfect little hand, severed at the wrist. She grabbed the hand and retreated to a corner of the raft, as far from the others as she could get.

  The hand was limp, relaxed, as if it belonged to a sleeping infant. Briefly Roamer ran it over her chest and remembered how Scrap would pull at her fur.

  But Scrap was gone.

  Roamer bit into the flesh of the forefinger, close to the knuckle. The meat was soft, irritating her dry palate. With a fast, jerking pull she stripped the flesh off the bone. She repeated that with the other fingers, then munched on the bare flesh of the palm. When the hand had been reduced to little more than skeletal, with a few scraps of cartilage and flesh still hanging off it, she bit through the tiny clattering bones, but there was only a dribble of marrow.

  She dumped the bone fragments into the endless ocean. She glimpsed tiny silvery fish quickly clustering, before the bones sank out of sight into the greater deep.

  Patch stayed in her nest of leaves for two days, barely moving. The males lay immobile in an untidy heap, occasionally picking at each other’s increasingly sparse fur.

  Roamer moved listlessly around the tree, seeking relief. Her mouth no longer generated saliva. Her tongue had hardened into a lump without sensation or mobility, like a stone in her mouth. She couldn’t cry out or call; all she could make was a formless groaning. She even found herself picking at the dried shit left behind by the potbelly, seeking moisture, maybe a few nut kernels embedded in the waste. But the leaf eater’s dung was thin and dry. She sank into misery, exhausted, drifting between sleep and wakefulness.

  On the third day after Scrap’s death, Patch stirred. Roamer watched listlessly.

  Patch scrambled up to all fours. Dizzy, her fluid balance ruined by her long inactivity, she stumbled — and Roamer saw her grab at her belly. She was pregnant by Whiteblood, a pregnancy that was draining still more reserves from her depleted body. But she raised herself up and, doggedly, approached the males.

  Crest sat upright as Patch approached, nervous, as if expecting an attack. Roamer could see his blackened tongue protruding from his mouth. His facial fur was still stained brown by Scrap’s blood.

  But Patch settled beside him and began running her fingers through his fur. The grooming was only a partial success. All their bodies had lost fur, and their skin was broken by ulcers and lesions that would not heal; as she worked she broke open scabs and probed at bruises. But he submitted, welcoming the attention despite the pain.

  And then she moved away a little, turned her back, and presented her rump to him. She was hardly looking her best. Her fur was ragged, her skin broken, and her swelling had all but vanished, days earlier than it should have. But still, as she pressed her rump into his chest, Crest responded; a spindly erection soon poked out from his matted belly fur.

  Now, at last, Whiteblood took notice of this violation of the hierarchy. This was not like his own deception; this was not acceptable. He lurched upright, uttering an incoherent roar around his ruined tongue. Crest backed away.

  But Patch immediately attacked Whiteblood, ramming her head into his chest and beating him about the temples with her fists. He fell back, startled. Patch hurried back to the other males and made perfunctory presentations of her rump to them, uttering rasping hoots. And then she threw herself back on Whiteblood.

  Subtly, alliances shifted, dominance dissolved. Without even looking at each other the brothers came to a quick decision. They joined in Patch’s attack on Whiteblood. Whiteblood began to fight back, snapping and warding off the blows that rained down on him.

  It was a grotesque battle, waged by four badly depleted creatures. The blows and kicks were soft and delivered in an eerie slow motion. And it was waged in a silence broken only by gasps of weariness or pain: There was none of the screeching and hooting that would normally have accompanied an attack by two juniors on a dominant male.

  And yet it was deadly. For, under Patch’s leadership, the brothers herded Whiteblood step by step toward the lip of the raft.

  It was Patch who delivered the final blow: another ram to Whiteblood’s belly, made with a hoarse, wrenching roar. Whiteblood toppled backward and fell through the raft’s loose fringe of branches and into the water. He bobbed, splashed, and spluttered, his fur immediately becoming soaked and impeding his movements. He looked back at the raft, mewling like an infant around his blackened tongue.

  Crest and Left were confused. They had not meant to kill Whiteblood; few dominance battles among the anthros ended lethally.

  Roamer felt an odd pang of regret. There had been few enough of them already. Her instincts warned her that too small a pool of potential mates was a bad thing. But it was too late for that.

  Whiteblood weakened rapidly. Soon the effort of keeping his mouth and nostrils above the water proved too much for him, and his struggling stopped. The shark, attracted by the blood that leaked from Whiteblood’s stale wounds, took his body in a single bite.

  After that, the suffering got worse. As the softly creaking raft drifted over the great unforgiving shield of the ocean, as these small creatures rapidly depleted their reserves, it could only get worse.

  Roamer’s limbs had swollen. The stretched skin ached continually and cracked easily. Her tongue squeezed past her jaws, as if her mouth were crammed with a great lump of dry dung. Her eyelids had cracked, and it felt as if she were weeping, but when she touched her fur she found blood leaking from her eyeballs.

  She was undergoing a living mummification.

  At last, one morning, she heard a cry, high and feeble, like a bird’s.

  She pushed away her covering of leaves and sat upright. The world turned yellow, and there was an odd ringing in her ears. It was hard to see anything; her vision was a blur, and when she tried to blink her eyes she got no relief, for her body could spare no moisture.

  Still, she made out two anthros — Patch, Crest — sitting side by side over a dark, huddled form. Perhaps it was food. Painfully she pushed her way forward to join them.

  It was Left, lying flat, his limbs splayed.

  The sucking heat of the sun had done its work well. There was barely any of his white fur left on his head or neck. His flesh had shrunk on his bones. Roamer could see the shape of his skull, of the fine bones of his hands and feet and pelvis. His naked skin had turned purple and gray, and it was covered with huge blotches and streaks. His lips had shriveled to thin strips of blackened tissue, exposing teeth and cracked gums. The rest of his face w
as black and dry, as if burned. The flesh around his nose had withered, so his two small sideways-pointing nostrils were stretched, exposing the black lining of his nostrils. His eyelids had shriveled too, exposing his eyes in an unblinking, sightless stare at the sun. The conjunctiva that surrounded his eyes, exposed, had turned black as charcoal. He had been scrabbling at the bark, helplessly seeking food, and had cut his hands and feet. But there was no trace of blood; the cuts were like scratches in cured leather.

  But he was still conscious, emitting dry, wistful cries. He moved his head gently and spread the fingers of his stronger left hand.

  In the end, starved of input, striving to keep its vital systems running as long as possible, Left’s body had consumed itself. Once its fat was gone, muscle had begun to be absorbed, a process that soon resulted in damage to the internal organs — which, badly deteriorated, were beginning to close down.

  But in these last moments, Left was in no pain. Even the sensations of hunger and thirst had ceased.

  Roamer watched, dizzy, bemused. It was like watching an animated skeleton.

  Left’s last eerie calls faded to silence. His fingers remained outstretched, frozen forever in his final gesture. His shrunken stomach growled, and a final noxious belch passed through his lifeless lips.

  Roamer looked dully at the others. They were heaps of bone and damaged flesh, not much better off than Left, barely recognizable as anthros at all. They made no effort to groom, to make any kind of contact. It was as if the sun had baked away everything that made them anthros, had stripped them of the gains made painfully in thirty million years of evolution.

  Roamer turned away and limped painfully back to her patch of soiled leaves, seeking cover.

  She lay passively, shifting only to relieve the pain of suppurating sores. Her mind seemed empty, free of curiosity. She existed in a dull reptilian blankness. She would cram her mouth full of bark and dry leaves, but the dead stuff only scratched her broken flesh.

  And she kept thinking about Left’s corpse.

  She got up slowly and crossed to Left’s body. His chest had split open, a postmortem wound opened up by the drying of his skin. The stench, oddly, wasn’t too bad. On this brine desert, the processes of decay that would, in the forests, have quickly absorbed Left’s body were largely absent, and the slow mummification that had begun while he was still alive had continued.

  Cautiously she pushed her hand into the wound. She touched ribs, already dried. She tugged at the flesh over his chest. It peeled back easily, exposing his rib cage.

  There was barely any muscle tissue left on the body. There was no fat either, only traces of a translucent, sticky substance. Within Left’s body cavity she could see his organs, his heart, liver, kidneys. They had been shrunken; they were like hard, blackened fruit.

  Fruit, yes.

  Roamer pushed her hand into the chest cavity. The rib cage split open with a crack, exposing the meaty fruit within. She closed her hand around his blackened heart. It came away easily, with a soft ripping noise.

  She sat with the heart, and, as if it were no more exotic than a peculiar variety of mango, bit into it. The meat was lean, fibrous, and it resisted teeth that wobbled loose in her jaw. But soon she was tearing into the organ, and was rewarded with a little fluid, blood from its core that had not yet dried.

  Instead of easing her hunger pangs, the meat only served to inflame Roamer’s atavistic drive to eat. Saliva flowed in her mouth again, and digestive juices pumped painfully through her stomach. She vomited out her first mouthfuls, losing them to the sea, but she persisted until the hard, fibrous meat stayed down.

  Left’s eyes, milky white and opaque, still stared sightlessly at the sun that had killed him; and his left hand was curled in its final gesture.

  Patch had stirred now. She came loping cautiously toward Roamer. Her skin was a tight sack to which only a few clumps of her once-beautiful black fur still clung. Curious, she rummaged through Left’s open chest. She came away with the liver, which she rapidly devoured.

  Meanwhile Crest had not moved. Showing no signs of interest in the fate of his brother, he lay on his side, limbs splayed. He might have been dead, but Roamer made out a subtle movement, a slow rise and fall of his chest, slow as the ocean’s swell, the last of his strength invested in keeping him breathing.

  Instinct worked in Roamer now. Patch had been made pregnant by Whiteblood — but perhaps her body had destroyed the fetus by now, absorbing it like its own muscle and fat to keep itself functioning. Two females, alone, had nothing but their own deaths to look forward to. So Crest, the last male, must be preserved.

  Roamer returned to the body and plucked out a kidney, another hard knot of blackened, shriveled meat. She carried it to Crest and pushed the meat into his shriveled mouth. At last he stirred. With a gesture as feeble as an infant’s he reached up and took the lump of meat, and began to gnaw it slowly.

  The food, such as it was, only made them more hungry, for it lacked the fat they needed to enable them to digest it properly. Still, all three of the survivors returned to the body over and over again, emptying the body cavity, gnawing flesh from limbs, ribs, pelvis, back. When they were done, only scattered bones remained — bones and a skull, from which eyeballs still stared at the sun.

  After that the three anthros returned to their solitary corners. If they had been human, now that the taboo of devouring the flesh of their own kind had been broken, a kind of cruel mathematics would have begun to work in their minds. Another death, after all, would have provided the survivors with more food — and reduced the number who would share it.

  It was, perhaps, a mercy that none of the anthros were able to plan that far ahead.

  IV

  The raft jolted under her. It was a sharper motion than the broad, slow swell of the sea. But she was beyond curiosity, and she lay passively in the raft’s rough cradling, knotted branches poking into her thin flesh.

  She was in pain constantly now. Her bones felt as if they were working their way out through her skin, which was like one giant ulcer. She could barely close her dried eyelids. Her memory was a disorganized hall of images: the feel of her sister’s strong, grooming fingers, the warm, safe scent of her mother’s milk, the brazen cries of the males who believed they owned them all. But then her soft dreams would be shattered by the irruption of great slavering jaws from the floor of the world…

  Now came another jolt, a rustle of the dry timber around her. She heard the noise of waves breaking, quite different from the languorous lapping of the deep ocean.

  Birds clattered overhead.

  She peered up. They were the first birds she had seen since she had been washed from the land. They were brilliant white, and they wheeled high above her.

  Something moved on her chest. It felt like fingers, tentatively scratching: perhaps someone was trying to groom her. With an immense effort she lifted her head. It lolled, her skin tight like a mask, her tongue a block of wood in her mouth. She had difficulty focusing her bleeding eyes.

  Something was crawling over her: a flat orange shape with many segmented legs and big raised claws. She yelped, a thin, dry sound, and brushed her arm over her chest. The crab scuttled away, indignant.

  With nostrils baked black as tar, she could smell something new. Water. And not the stinking brine of the sea, but fresh water.

  She lifted an arm and grabbed at the foliage. Every scrap of her raw flesh, as scabs and blisters pulled and broke, was a source of lancing pain. With an immense heave she managed to get herself upright, her feet under her, her legs folded. Her head lolled, too heavy for her neck. It took her more energy yet to raise it, to squint through her broken eyes.

  Green.

  She saw green, a great horizontal slab of it, running from horizon to horizon. It was the first green she had seen since the last of the mango’s leaves had curled and browned. After so many days of blue and gray, of nothing but sky and sea, the green seemed vibrantly bright, so bright it almost hurt he
r eyes, beautiful beyond imagining, and just looking at it seemed to strengthen her.

  She levered herself forward, half crawling. The mango’s dead foliage pricked and cut her, but there was no blood to flow, nothing but dozens of tiny sources of pain.

  She reached the edge of the raft. No ocean, no water. She saw a shallow beach of coarse, young sand, stretching up a short rise to the foot of a sparse forest. Birds, bright blue and orange, flittered through the tops of the trees, piping brightly.

  Her first impression could have been summarized as I am home. But she was wrong.

  She pulled herself over the branches and half fell onto the sand. It was hot, very hot, and it burned her exposed skin. She mewled, pulled herself up, and limped forward, as if she had grown very old, up the beach toward the forest.

  At the forest edge was an undergrowth of low ferns and blessed shade. Taller trees towered above her. On their branches were clusters of a red fruit she didn’t recognize. Her mouth was too dry to salivate, but her tongue clicked against her teeth.

  She glanced back the way she had come. The mango tree and its raft of vegetation was just a scrap of driftwood, broken, rotten, seaweed clinging to it, now washed up on this shore. She could see the unmoving form of an anthro — Patch or Crest — lying inert on the broken, salt-crusted foliage. And beyond the raft the sea rolled, huge, eternal, blue gray, reaching as far as she could see to a horizon of chilling geometric perfection.

  Now there was a crashing tread, a great snapping of foliage. Roamer shrank back.

  A giant form emerged from the forest, like a tank rolling through the undergrowth. Huge, squat, under a great bony dome of a shell, it looked like a giant tortoise — or perhaps an armored elephant — a great plated body supported by four stumpy legs. Behind it a tail swung carelessly, tipped by a spiky club. And as its small reinforced head pushed out into the light, armored eyelids blinked. This tremendous ankylosaur-like creature was a glyptodont. Roamer had never seen anything like it in Africa.