Evolution

by Stephen Baxter

  At last, a meter or so deep, she glimpsed the white of bone. The first fragment she retrieved was a rib. In the harsh sunlight it gleamed white, utterly cleansed of flesh and blood; she was struck by the awful efficiency of the worms. But it wasn’t ribs she wanted. She dropped the bone and dug her hands into the soil. She knew where to look, remembered every detail of that terrible day when Silent had been flung into this bit of ground, how he had fallen with head lolling back and limbs splayed, the stains of his death shit still showing on his thin legs.

  Soon she closed her hands on his head.

  She lifted the skull into the air, the gaping eyes facing her. A scrap of cartilage held the jaw in place — but then the rotting cartilage gave way, and the jaw creaked open, as if the fleshless child were trying to say something to her. But the gaping smile kept widening, grotesquely, and a fat worm wriggled where the tongue had been, and then the jaw fell off, back into the dirt.

  That didn’t matter. He didn’t need a jaw. What were a few teeth? She spat on the cranium and polished it clean of dirt with the palm of her hand. She cradled the skull, crooning.

  When she returned to the lake, the people were waiting for her. They were all here, all but the youngest children and the mothers with infants. Some of the adults carried weapons — stone knives, wooden spears — as if Mother were a rogue bull elephant who might suddenly turn on them. But as many of the group were dismayed as were overtly hostile. Here was Sapling, for instance, his spear-thrower slung over his back on a length of sinew, his pale eyes clouded as he watched the woman who had taught him so much. Many of them even wore the markings she had inspired on their flesh or clothes.

  Sour’s only surviving child was a girl, thirteen years old. She had always been prone to chubbiness, and that had gotten worse now that she was coming into womanhood; already her breasts were large, pendulous. And her skin was an odd yellow-brown color, like honey, the legacy of a chance meeting with a wandering group from the north a couple of generations back. Now this girl, Honey, Mother’s cousin, stared at Mother with baffled anger, her dirty face streaked with tears.

  Hostile, sad, pitying, or confused, they were all uncertain. When she recognized that uncertainty Mother felt a kind of inner warmth. Without yelling, without using violence, without so much as a gesture, she was in control of the situation.

  She held up the skull and swiveled it so that its sightless eyes turned on the people. They gasped and flinched — but most looked more baffled than frightened. What use was an old skull?

  But one girl turned away, as if the staring skull were looking at her accusingly. She was a skinny, intense fourteen-year-old with wide eyes. This girl, Eyes, had a particularly elaborate spiral design sketched on her upper arms in ocher. Mother made a mental note of her.

  One man stepped forward. He was a huge fellow with a ferocious temper, like a cornered ox. Now Ox pointed back at Sour’s shelter. “Dead,” he said. He pointed his ax at Mother. “You. Head, rock. Why?”

  For all the control she was exerting on the situation, Mother knew that what she said now would determine her entire future. If she was driven out of the camp she could not expect to survive long.

  But she was confident.

  She looked at the skull, and smiled. Then she pointed at Sour’s body. “She kill boy. She kill him.”

  Ox’s black eyes narrowed. If that was true that Sour had killed the boy, then Mother’s actions could be justified. Any mother, even a father, would be expected to avenge a murdered child.

  But now Honey pushed forward. “How, how, how?” Struggling to express herself, her plump belly wobbling, she mimed stabbing, strangling. “Not kill. Not touch. How, how, how? Boy sick. Boy die. How, how?” How is my mother supposed to have done this?

  Mother raised her face to the sun, which sailed through a cloudless dome of white-blue sky. “Hot,” she said, wiping her brow. “Sun hot. Sun not touch. She not touch. She kill.” Action at a distance. It isn’t necessary for the sun to touch your flesh for it to warm you. And it wasn’t necessary for Sour to touch my son to kill him.

  There was fear in their faces now. There were plenty of invisible, incomprehensible killers in their lives. But the notion that a person could control such forces was new, frightening.

  Mother forced herself to smile. “Safe. She dead. Safe now.” I killed her for you. I killed the demon. Trust me. She held up the skull, stroking its cranium. “Tell me.” And so it had been.

  Ox glared at Mother. He growled and stamped, and pointed at her chest with his ax. “Boy dead. Not tell. Boy dead.”

  She smiled. She nestled the skull in the crook of her arm, like the head of a baby. And as they stared at her, half-believing, she could feel her power spread.

  But Honey wouldn’t accept any of this. Crying, jabbering meaninglessly, she lunged at Mother. But the women held her back.

  Mother walked away toward her shelter. The people shrank back as she passed, eyes wide.

  III

  The dryness intensified. One hot, cloudless day gave way to another. The land dried quickly, the streams shriveling to brownish trickles. The plants died back, though there were still roots to be dug out with ingenuity and strength. The hunters had to range far in search of meat, their feet pounding over dusty baked-dry ground.

  These were people who lived in the open, with the land, the sky, the air. They were sensitive to the changes in the world around them. And they all quickly knew that the drought was deepening.

  Paradoxically, though, the drought brought them a short-term benefit.

  When the dry period had lasted thirty days, the group broke up its encampment and trekked to the largest lake in the area, a great pool of standing water that persisted through all but the most ferocious dry seasons. Here they found the herbivores — elephant, oxen, antelope, buffalo, horses. Driven to distraction by thirst and hunger, the animals crowded around the lake, jostling to get at the water, and their great feet and hooves had turned the lake’s perimeter into a trampled, muddy bowl where nothing could grow. But already some of them were failing: the old, the very young, the weak, those with the least reserves to see them through this harsh time.

  The humans settled, watchful, alongside the other scavengers. There were other human bands here — even other kinds of people, the thick-browed sluggish ones you glimpsed in the distance sometimes. But the lake was big; there was no need for contact, conflict.

  For a time the living was easy. It wasn’t even necessary to hunt; the herbivores simply fell where they stood, and you could just walk in and take what you needed. The competition with other carnivores wasn’t too intense, for there was plenty for everybody.

  The people didn’t even have to take the whole animal: The meat of a fallen elephant, say, was more than they could consume before it spoiled. So they took only the choicest cuts: the trunk, the delicious, fat-rich footpads, the liver and heart, the marrow of the bones, abandoning the rest to less choosy scavengers. Sometimes they would close in on an animal that wasn’t yet dead, but was too weak to resist. If you let it live, the ravaged animal was a larder of fresh meat for those who preyed on it, as long as it survived.

  So the animals fell and their meat was consumed, their bones were scattered and trampled by their surviving fellows, until the muddy margin that surrounded the shrinking lake glinted with shards of white.

  But the drought wasn’t a disaster for the people. Not yet.

  Mother had moved to the lake with the people, of course; no matter what remarkable internal trajectory she was now following, she still had to eat, to stay alive, and the only way she could do that was as part of the group.

  But life began to get subtly easier for her.

  Nothing could grow close to this mud hole, and as the drought continued — and the elephants and other browsers demolished the trees over an increasingly wide radius — the people had to range further to gather raw materials for their fires, pallets, and shelters.

  Mother got help with this chore. Eye
s, the staring, intense girl who had been so impressed by Silent’s stare, brought Mother wood, her skinny arms laden with the scratchy, dried-out stuff. Mother accepted this without comment. Later she let Eyes sit and watch as she made her markings in the dirt. After a time, shyly, Eyes joined in.

  One of the younger men had been close to Eyes. He was a long-fingered boy, oddly fond of consuming insects. This boy, Ant-eater, jeered at Mother and tried to pull Eyes away. But Eyes resisted.

  At length Mother took a long straight sapling trunk, thrust it into the ground, and set Silent’s empty skull up on top of it. The next time Ant-eater came sniffing around Eyes, he walked straight into Silent’s eyeless glare. Whimpering, he scuttled away.

  After that, with the skull watching over her day and night, Mother’s power and authority seemed to grow.

  Soon it wasn’t just Eyes who brought her wood and food, but several of the women. And if she walked down to the water’s edge, even the men would grudgingly make way and let her have first cut of the drought’s latest victim.

  It was all because of Silent, of course. Her son was helping her, in his own subtle, characteristically quiet way. In gratitude she set his favorite toys out at the base of the post: the bits of pyrite, the twisted chunk of wood. She even took to leaving out food for him — elephant calf meat, well cooked and chewed by his mother, the way he had liked it as a small child. Every morning, the meat was gone.

  She was no fool. She knew Silent wasn’t alive in any brute physical sense. But he wasn’t dead. He lived on in other, more subtle, dispersed ways. Perhaps he was in the animals who fed on the food she put out for him. Perhaps he was in the pallet that cushioned her when she slept. Perhaps he was working in the hearts of the people who gave her food. It didn’t matter how he was here. It was enough that she knew now that death was just a stage, like birth, the sprouting of body hair, the withering of the aging. It was nothing to fear. The ache she had endured had gone. When she lay on her pallet, alone in the dark, she felt as close to Silent as she had when he was an infant snuggling at her breast.

  She was certainly schizophrenic. Perhaps she was no longer sane. It would have been impossible to tell; in all the world, there were only a handful of people like Mother, only a few heads filled with such a light, and there was no meaningful comparison to make.

  But, sane or not, she was happier than she had been for a long time. And, even in this time of drought, she was growing fat. From the point of view of simple survival, she was succeeding better than her fellows.

  Her insanity — if it was insanity — was adaptive.

  One day Eyes came up with something new.

  Inspired by the carved ivory figurine Mother still kept at her side, Eyes began to make new kinds of marks on a bit of flattened-out elephant skin. At first they were very crude, just scribbles of ocher and soot on dusty hide. But Eyes persisted, struggling to replicate in ocher on skin what she could see in her head. Watching her, Mother recognized something of herself, the painful early times as she strove to get the strange contents of her head out.

  And then she understood what Eyes was trying to do.

  On this scrap of elephant hide, Eyes was drawing a horse. It was a crude picture, even infantile, the line poor, the anatomy distorted. But this was no abstract shape, like Mother’s parallel lines and spirals. This was definitely a horse: There was the graceful head, the flowing neck, the blur of hooves beneath.

  For Mother it was another thunderbolt moment, an instant when the connections closed and her head reconfigured once again. With a cry she fell to the ground, scrabbling for her own bits of ocher and charcoal. Startled, Eyes quailed back, fearful she had done something wrong. But Mother only grabbed a bit of hide and began to scratch and scribble as Eyes had done.

  She felt the first sun-bright premonitory tingling of pain in her head. But she kept on working through the pain.

  Soon Eyes and Mother had covered the surfaces around them, rocks and bone and skin and even the dry dust, with hasty images of leaping gazelles and towering giraffes, with elephants, horses, eland.

  When they saw what Eyes and Mother were doing, others, immediately fascinated, tried to copy them. Gradually the new imagery spread, and throughout the little community ocher animals leapt and sooty spears flew. It was as if a new layer of life had entered the world, a surface of mind that changed everything it touched.

  For Mother it was a new kind of power. When she had recognized that the shapes she saw in her head had matches in the world outside, she had begun to understand that she was at the focus of the global web of causality and control — as if the universe of people and animals, rocks and sky, was just a map of what lay inside her own imagination. And now, with this new technique of Eyes’s, there was a whole new way to express that control, those connections. Taking the horse into her head and then transferring it, frozen, to a rock or a bit of skin was as if she owned it forever — no matter that the animal ran unimpeded across the dry plains.

  Many people feared the new images and those who produced them. Mother herself had grown too strong to be challenged; few would meet the sightless gaze of that skull on the post. But Eyes, her closest acolyte, was an easier target.

  One day she came to Mother, weeping. She was bedraggled and muddy, and the elaborate designs she had painted on her skin were smudged and washed away. Eyes’s language skills remained poor, and Mother had to listen to a lot of her circumlocutory pidgin before she understood what had happened.

  It had been Ant-eater, the boy who had shown interest in Eyes. He had pursued her again. When she had shown no desire for him he had tried to force himself on her. But still she resisted. So he carried her to the lake and threw her into the water, smeared her with mud, tried to destroy her skin markings.

  Eyes looked at Mother as if she expected comfort, a hug, as if she were an upset child. But Mother merely sat before her, her face hard.

  Then she went to her pallet and returned with a fine stone scraper. She made the girl rest her head in her lap — and Mother jabbed the stone into her cheek. Eyes cried out and pulled away, baffled; she touched her cheek and looked in horror at the blood on her fingers. But Mother coaxed her back, made her lie down again, and again punctured her cheek, this time a little below the first wound. Eyes struggled a little, but she submitted. Gradually, as the pain seeped through her, she went limp.

  When Mother was done with the awl she wiped away the blood and took a piece of ocher, rubbing the crumbling rock deep into the wounds she had made. Eyes mewled as the salty stuff stung her damaged flesh.

  Then Mother took her hand. “Come,” she said. “Water.”

  She led the reluctant, baffled girl through the listless herbivores down to the lake. They splashed out into the water, their toes sinking into the clinging lake-bottom mud, until the water came up to their knees. They stood still until the ripples had settled, and the muddy water lay still and smooth before them.

  Mother bade Eyes look down at her reflection.

  Eyes saw that a vivid crimson spiral looped from her eye and over her cheek. Blood still seeped from the rudimentary tattoo. When she splashed water over her face the blood washed away, but the spiral remained. Eyes gaped and grinned — though the flexing of her face made her aching wounds hurt even more. She understood now what Mother had been doing.

  The tattooing was a technique Mother had tried out on herself. It was painful, of course. But it was pain — the pain in her head, the pain of her loss of Silent — that had given birth to the great transformations of her life. Pain was to be welcomed, celebrated. What better way to make this child one of her own?

  Hand in hand, the two of them walked back to the shore.

  For day after relentless day the drought continued.

  The lake became a dank puddle at the center of a bowl of cracked mud. The water was fouled by the droppings and corpses of the animals — but the people drank it nonetheless, for they had no choice, and many of them suffered diarrhea and other ailments.
Among the animals the die back continued. But there was little fresh meat now, and there was ferocious competition from the wolves and hyenas and cats.

  The bands, of skinny folk and bone-brows alike, stared at each other sullenly.

  Among Mother’s people, the first to die was an infant. Her little body had been depleted by diarrhea. Her mother keened over the little corpse, then she gave it up to her sisters, who took it away to put it in the ground. But the dirt was dry, hard packed, and the weakened folk had trouble digging into it. Next day another died, an old man. And two the next, two more children.

  It was after that, after they had started to die, that the people began to come to Mother.

  They approached her pallet, with the gleaming skull on its post. They would sit on the dusty ground, gazing at Mother or Eyes or the animals and geometric designs they had scratched everywhere. More of them began to copy Mother’s practices, pasting spirals and starbursts and wavy lines on their faces and arms. And they would gaze into Silent’s empty eye sockets, as if seeking wisdom there.

  It was a matter of why. Mother had been able to tell them why her son had died, of an invisible illness nobody else had even been able to name; she had been able to pick out and punish Sour, the woman who had caused that death. Surely if anybody knew why this drought was afflicting them, it would be Mother.

  Mother studied this rough congregation, her mind working relentlessly, ideas and interconnections sparking. The drought had a cause; of course it did. Behind every cause there was an intention, a mind, whether you could see it or not. And if there was a mind, you could negotiate with it. After all her people had already been traders, instinctive negotiators, for seventy thousand years.

  But how was she to negotiate with the rain? What did she have to trade?

  And overlaid on such musings was her suspicions about the people. Which of them could be trusted? Which of them talked about her when she wasn’t present? Even now, as they gazed up at her in a kind of desultory hope, were they somehow communicating, sending secret messages to each other with gestures, looks, even scribbled marks in the dust?