Evolution

by Stephen Baxter

  But more of the hunters came boiling out of the cover of the rock bluffs and trees. Men and women together, all armed with spears and axes; they were dirt-crusted, lean, hard-eyed. They had come hunting Pebble and his group, as if they were a herd of unwary antelope.

  Pebble could see desperation in the eyes of the others. These newcomers were not nomads, not invaders by instinct, any more than Pebble’s people would have been. Only a dire catastrophe of their own could have forced them to this plight, to make them come into a new and strange land, to wage this sudden war. But now that they were here, they would fight to the death, for they had no choice.

  There was a howl. The hunter who had taken on his uncle was standing now. One arm dangled, bloody and broken. But he was grinning, his mouth a mass of blood and broken teeth. Pebble’s uncle lay at his feet, his chest split open.

  Already Pebble’s folk had lost two of their three adult men, Flatnose and his brother. They had no chance of resisting.

  The survivors ran. There was no time to grab anything, no tools or food — not even the children. And the hunters fell on them as they fled, using the butts of their spears to fell and disable. The third man was cut down. The hunters caught two of the women, and the girl younger than Pebble. The women were thrown to the ground, face first, and the young men pulled their legs apart, jostling for the right to be first.

  The others ran, on and on, until the pursuers gave up.

  Pebble looked back the way they had come. The hunters were pawing through the settlement, the ground that had been Pebble’s ancestors’ for time out of memory.

  There were five of them left from the village, Pebble realized. Two women, including his mother, Pebble himself and a smaller girl, and one of the infants — not Pebble’s sister. Just five.

  Her face hard, Dust turned to Pebble. She laid a hand on his shoulder. “Man,” she said gravely. “You.”

  It was true, he saw with horror. He was the oldest male left: of the five, only the squalling infant in the dirt at his feet was male.

  Dust scooped up the motherless infant and held him close. Then she turned resolutely away from her settlement and began to stomp away to the north, her lame gait leaving uneven tracks in the dirt. She didn’t look back, not once.

  Bewildered, terrified, Pebble followed.

  II

  The Pleistocene, this era of ice, was an age of brutal climatic turbulence. Droughts and floods and storms were commonplace: in this age a “once-in-a-century” climatic disaster came around every decade. It was a time of intense variations, a noisy time.

  This created an environment that was intensely challenging for all the animals who inhabited it. To cope with the changes many creatures got smarter — not just hominids, but carnivores, ungulates, and others. The average mammalian brain size would double across the two million years of the Pleistocene.

  The great family of hominid species to which Pebble belonged had been born in Africa, as had so many others, far to the south of here. Smarter, stronger than Far’s folk, they had pushed in a great arc out of Africa into Europe, south of the ice, and into Asia, as far as India. They had adapted their technology, their ways, and, over enough time, even their bodies to the disparate conditions they encountered.

  And they had displaced the older forms of people. Elegant, skinny walkers like Far still survived in eastern Asia, but they clung on in Africa only in pockets. In Europe they were extinct altogether. As for the pithecine types, the last of them had succumbed long ago, squeezed out between the chimps and the new savannah folk. Still, the hominid range was narrow. There were still no people in the cold northern lands, none in Australia, and none in the Americas, none at all. But the Old World felt ever more full of them.

  Meanwhile the land was growing poorer.

  Once more there had been extinctions. And this time the people had had a lot to do with it. Under climate pressure, many of the larger, slow-breeding species of animals had found themselves increasingly tied to the water sources. They therefore became an easier target for increasingly clever hominid hunters, who, looking for the lowest-risk kills, selectively picked off the old, the weak — and, crucially, the very young.

  The largest and least versatile species had been taken out first. In Africa, of the wide and ancient elephantid family, only the true elephants remained. Many varieties of giraffe, pig, and hippo had followed.

  And then there was fire.

  The harnessing of fire, not so many generations before Pebble’s time, had been one of the most significant events in hominid evolution. Fire offered many advantages: warmth, light, protection from carnivores. It could be used to harden wood, and its heat could be used to make many plant and animal foods digestible. There was still no organized large-scale firing and ground clearing; that would come later. But already the daily use of fire had had, little by little, a profound impact on the vegetation, as those plants able to withstand fire were favored at the expense of less hardy cousins. And meanwhile, though true agriculture lay far in the future, hominids had begun to select those plant species they favored for their own purposes — just as Pebble had cleared grass from the yam stand.

  Such small actions, repeated every day across hundreds of thousands of years, had an immense impact. Once the landscape had been shaped by the trampling of elephants: Far and her kind had been marginal. Not so now. This landscape had been made by people.

  By now it was as if this bare landscape of fire-resistant trees and sparse grass-eaters were somehow natural, and had been here forever, for all time. It had been this way so long that no mind on Earth could remember how things might have been different.

  Seal had caught a spider on the beach. He scampered over the sand and brought it to Pebble, grinning. “Spider web spider fish.” Pebble tapped Seal on the head, warming to his infectious energy, and wishing he shared some of it.

  Seal ran back to the clump of dune grass where he had found the spider. The web was built on a fan of strong radial lines, over which the spider had laid a spiral of continuous sticky web. Now — delicately, delicately, holding a small stick in his wide fingers — the boy lifted the spiral off its nonsticky guide ropes. He moved the rod spoke by spoke, twirling it so that the sticky stuff formed a dangling mass at the end of the rod. Then he hurried to a tidal pool, sheltered by lumpy, eroded rocks. He put his stick in the water, letting the sticky mass dance on the water’s surface.

  A tiny fish came to nibble the enticing lure. But with every bite its jaws got stuck more firmly in the web. At last it was glued to the stick and was easily scooped out of the water. Seal popped it straight into his mouth with a grin of triumph. Then he dipped his makeshift rod into the dead spider’s glue sac and settled it back into the water.

  Seal, brought out of the abandoned settlement in the arms of Dust eleven years back, was twelve years old now — seven years younger than Pebble himself. His early years had been quite different from Pebble’s: They had been years on the move. But Seal didn’t seem disturbed by his experiences. Perhaps he had got used to migrating, like one of the big grass-chewers that followed the seasons. And he had taken to the ocean. He was too heavy to swim — they all were — but whenever Pebble saw him in the shallow water close to the shore, he was reminded of a playful mammal of the sea.

  But, eleven years after the trauma of the attack that had killed his father, Pebble had nothing in common with Seal’s inventive playfulness.

  At nineteen Pebble was fully mature, his frame as squat and powerful as his father’s had been. But he was battered. His body bore old scars from ferocious, desperate hunting incidents. In a collision with a wild horse he had suffered a cracked rib that had never healed properly, and for the rest of his life he would suffer a diffuse pain every time he took a breath. And he bore the marks of wounds inflicted by people; too often he had had to fight.

  Forced to grow up too quickly, he had become introspective. He hid his thoughts behind a mass of beard that, year after year, became more dense and knotted,
and his eyes seemed to recede beneath their great browridge of bone.

  And, like his father, on each of his arms he bore long, ragged scars.

  With a sigh Pebble returned to his own gloomy inspection of the nets and lures he had strung out in the deeper water. This pebbly beach was protected from the sea by an outstretched arm of land, and a freshwater stream trickled down over the beach from the base of the bluffs. The sea was the Mediterranean: This was Africa’s northern coast. Behind him, to the south, the land rose up in a series of bluffs. It was here that Pebble’s refugee people had at last made their home, on the dry grassy dunes above the high-water mark, in a hut constructed from driftwood and saplings.

  As far as he knew Seal, playing with spiders and their webs, had come up with his own miniature way of fishing. But then, on this dismal shore, they had all been forced to learn fast about the use of the sea. In the early days there had been much splashing around as hunters used to chasing down antelope had hurled themselves through the shallows after darting fish and dolphins that evaded them easily. They had gone hungry, and despaired.

  They had got the right idea, in the end, from watching the spiders, and the birds and small animals that occasionally got tangled up in bushes or canes with sticky foliage, or in thickets with trailing vines.

  Gradually they had figured out the use of nets and traps and snares, woven from bark and bits of leather. Their first attempts had failed more often than not. But they had slowly developed skills in exploiting natural cords and vines, and learned how to weave, repair, and tie fibers. And it worked. If you were lucky you could trap fish, octopus, and turtles. The deeper into the water you went, the better the catch would be.

  Well, it had had to work. Otherwise they would surely have starved.

  Ironically the land to the south, beyond these coastal bluffs, was rich, a mosaic of woodland and grass and fresh- and saltwater pools. And there were plenty of animals, beyond the marshes and on the higher ground: red deer, horse, and rhinoceros, and many smaller herbivores. Sometimes the animals would even come down to the beaches in search of salt.

  If the land had been empty of people it might have been a paradise for Pebble’s group. But the land was not empty, and that was the entire trouble.

  On the horizon there was an island. His gaze was drawn there now. Though it was made misty blue by distance, even from here he could see how rich the island was, with lush vegetation running down every cleft of rock, almost to the ocean. And there were people there. He had seen them on clear days: skinny, tall people, who would run across their beaches and hilltops, pale flitting figures.

  There he and his people would be safe, he thought. On an island like that, a scrap of land of their own, they could live forever, untroubled by strangers. If he could get there, perhaps he could fight those skinny folk for possession of their land.

  If he could get there. But people could not swim like dolphins, and they could not walk over the water like insects. It was forever impossible.

  So here they were, stuck.

  They had never planned to come so far as this. None of them had planned any of this at all. They had just been forced to keep going, and going, while the years had worn away.

  Pebble’s kind were by nature sedentary; these robust folk had long lost the wanderlust of Far’s day. It had stressed them hugely to be thrust into unfamiliar landscapes: For Pebble it was as if the great trek had been a long, slow breakdown, a time of madness and bewilderment.

  During the journey the children had grown — Pebble himself had become a man — and their numbers had slowly risen, as more refugees from one disaster or another tagged along with them. And their numbers had grown in another way. Pebble had become a father; he had coupled with Green, the wistful woman who had come with them from the old settlement. But as they crossed a particularly harsh and dry land, the child had died.

  And still they had found nowhere they could live. For the world was full of people.

  Before the attack there had been twelve people in Pebble’s close extended family. They were self-sufficient, and very sedentary. They did not trade, never traveled much further than could be reached in a day’s walk.

  But they had been aware of similar groups nearby, studded around the landscape, as immobile as trees.

  In all there were over forty tribes in the larger clan of which Pebble’s people were part, around a thousand people. Sometimes there would be exchanges as youngsters from one “village” sought mates in another. And there was occasional conflict as two parties found themselves competing over a rich foraging ground or the target of a hunt. But such incidents were usually settled with nothing much more than a slanging match, some inconclusive wrestling, and in extreme cases a spear in the leg, a maiming which had evolved as a ritual punishment.

  And every one of this thousand-strong band, from the smallest baby to the most wizened thirty-five-year-old crone, was marked with the characteristic red or black vertical stripes that Pebble still wore on his face.

  Far would have been astonished to see what had become of her innocent innovation with the bits of ocher. What had started out as a half-unconscious sexual deception had become, over immense stretches of time, a kind of looser celebration of fecundity. Women and even some men would mark their legs with the characteristic color of fertility. Slowly, dim minds and fumbling fingers had experimented with other forms of markings, new symbols.

  By now, though, this crude scribbling had a purpose. Pebble’s vertical markings were a kind of uniform, setting a boundary between his folk and others. You didn’t need to remember everybody in your group personally — as Capo had had to when he had tried to lead his followers. You didn’t need to know faces. All you needed was the symbol.

  The symbols united the bands. In a way the symbols had become what they fought for. These crude stripes and body markings were the birth of art, but they were also the birth of nations, the birth of war. They would make possible conflicts that would transcend even the deaths of those who had started them. That was why hominid minds were becoming smarter at creating the symbols, with each new generation.

  All across this landscape there were clans like this, clans of more or less the same size. They were all sedentary, all staying where they had been born, where their parents and grandparents had lived and died. Their languages were mutually incomprehensible. Indeed many of these communities were no longer even able to interbreed, so long had they been isolated. And there they stayed, until they were displaced by some natural catastrophe like a climate shift or a flood — or by other people.

  Which was why the clans had formed in the first place, of course: to keep out the refugees.

  It had been terribly hard for them. At last, after eleven years, they had come to this place, this beach, and they had been forced to stop, for here the land had run out.

  Now Pebble heard a mournful cry from up the beach. “Hey, hey! Help, help!”

  Pebble stood and peered that way. He saw two stocky figures staggering toward the hut. They were Hands and Hyena, the one characterized by his huge, powerful hands, the other by his habit, when hunting, of laughing like a scavenger. These two men had joined Pebble’s group during their long odyssey. But now they were struggling. Hyena was leaning heavily on the powerful shoulders of his companion, and even from here Pebble could hear Hyena’s wheezing gasps.

  Dust came out of the hut. Pebble’s mother, in her late thirties now, had grown gaunt and bent with the stresses her body had endured during the long walk, and her hair was white and wispy. But she was still doggedly alive. Now she began to hobble up the beach toward Hyena and Hands, and called out. “Stab, stab!”

  Hyena collapsed to the beach, and Pebble could see a stone blade sticking out of his back. Hands struggled to get him to his feet again.

  Muttering darkly Pebble stalked across the beach after his mother.

  By the time they had brought Hyena back to the hut, the light was beginning to leave the sky.

  Preparing t
hemselves for the tasks of the night, the people moved around the hut. The men and women alike had immense bulging shoulder muscles that showed humplike through their leather wraps. Even their hands were huge, with broad spadelike fingertips. Their bones were thick-walled, capable of enduring great stress, and their joints were heavy and bony. These were massive people, solid, as if carved out of the Earth themselves.

  They had to be strong. In a tough environment, they had to work very hard all their lives, making up in brute force and endless labor what they lacked in smarts. Few reached the end of their lives without the pain of old wounds and such problems as degenerative bone diseases. And hardly anybody lived beyond forty.

  Hyena’s wound was unremarkable. Even the fact that he had clearly been stabbed in the back by a hominid from a rival band beyond the bluffs did not arouse much interest. Life was hard. Injuries were commonplace.

  Inside the low, irregular, poky hut there was no light save from the fire and whatever daylight leaked through the gaps in the plaited walls. There was little organization. At the back of the hut were piled up bones and shells, discarded after meals. Tools, some broken or just half-finished, lay where they had been dropped, as did bits of food, leather, wood, stone, unworked skin. On the floor could be spotted traces of the staples that the group relied on: bananas, dates, roots and tubers, a great deal of yam. The adults did dump their feces and urine outside, to keep out the flies, but the younger children had yet to learn that trick, and so the floor was littered with half-buried infant shit.