And Mother wasn’t the only catalyst. Scattered throughout the human range were many others like her. Each of these genius-prophets — if she were not quickly killed by her suspicious fellows — was similarly serving as the focus of a new kind of thinking, new ways of life, a new kind of fire. It was the beginning of an explosive change in the way people interacted with the world around them.
It was the instability of the climate that had driven the development of this new type of mind. The savagely fluctuating environment of this Pleistocene age, like nothing seen in later times, was an unforgiving filter: Only exceptional individuals survived the exceptional harshness, to pass on their genetic legacy. And, not only was the average mind improving, exceptional individuals like Mother were becoming more common — like the prescient technologists who had given the river folk their advanced tool kit. From the point of view of the species it was useful for the mind to be able to produce occasional geniuses. They might wither in the dirt — or they might invent something that would transform human fortunes.
And when such an innovation was made, the roomy heads of their fellows were ready for it. It was as if they longed for it. For seventy thousand years the people had had the necessary hardware. Now Mother, and others like her, supplied the software.
This new way of thinking about the world was already bringing Mother’s people unprecedented new rewards. The encampment, save for its adornment, was the usual jumble of lean-tos. But this latest camp was large; there were twice as many people here now compared to the time before Mother’s awakening. And it was a long time since anybody had suffered the sunken cheeks and swollen belly of hunger. Mother’s ways were successful.
Mother saw the girl Finger sitting alone in the shade of a giant baobab. Finger, just fourteen, was working carefully at some new sculpture, whittling gently at a bit of ivory. She had her legs crossed and a scrap of leather over her lap; Mother’s eyes, still sharp, could make out the gleam of waste bits of the ivory on the ground around her. It was she who had made the exquisite elephant-head shell carving Sapling had given to the river folk.
Finger wore the spiral-design cheek tattoo that had become the badge of those privileged to be closest to Mother: the insignia of her priesthood. But Finger was second generation. She was the daughter of Eyes — who was long dead now, killed by the infection of that first crude tattoo. Finger had been marked with the spiral insignia when she was still an infant; you could tell that by how much the tattoo had distorted and faded as she had grown, a mark of special honor.
But the girl was growing fast. Soon, Mother knew, she would have to find her a partner — just as she had selected partners for her mother, Eyes. Mother had several candidates in mind, boys and young men among her priesthood; she would trust her instincts to make the right choice when the time came.
A shadow passed across her. A woman approached Mother, hesitantly, gaze fixed on the dusty ground. She was young, but she walked stooped over. She had brought a haunch of deer meat; she laid this token on the ground before Mother. “Sore,” said the woman feebly, her head downturned. “Back sore. Walk head up, back hurt. Lift baby, back hurt.”
Mother knew she was only in her early twenties, but this girl had been plagued with problems with her back since foolishly engaging in a wrestling match with her brother — much older, much heavier — some years back.
Mother turned down almost all such requests. It would do her no good to be seen to grant miracles on demand, whether they worked or not. But today, having watched the small genius of Finger at work, warmed through by the sun, she was in an expansive mood. She snapped her fingers. She gestured for the girl to take off her skin wrap and kneel with her back turned.
The girl complied eagerly, bowing naked before Mother.
From the hearth behind her Mother took a handful of cold ash. She spat into it, making a thin, dusty paste, and she lifted it up to Silent’s bony gaze for him to see. Then she rubbed the ash into the girl’s back, muttering wordless jabber. The girl flinched as the ash touched her flesh, as if it were still hot.
When she was done Mother slapped the girl’s backside and let her stand up. Mother waggled a finger. “Be strong. Think no bad. Say no bad.” If the treatment worked, Mother would get the credit. If it failed, the girl would blame herself, for not being worthy. Either way Mother would garner a little more credit.
The girl nodded nervously. Mother let the girl go, satisfied. She took the meat and pushed it into her hut. Somebody would cook it and store it for her later.
All in a day’s work.
Mother’s crude treatment had given her patient a real sense of relief from the pain of her bad back. It was no more than what would one day be called the placebo effect: Because she believed in the power of the treatment, the girl felt better. But the fact that the placebo effect worked on the girl’s mind rather than her body did not make it any less real, or less useful. Now she would be better able to care for her children — who would therefore have a better chance of survival than those of a comparable family with an unbelieving mother whose symptoms could not be relieved by a placebo — and so those children were more likely to go on to have children of their own, who would inherit their grandmother’s internal propensity for belief.
It was the same for the hunters. They had begun to draw images of their prey animals on rocks and the hide walls of their shelters. They would stalk these images, spear them in the heart or the head, even reason with the animals about why they should lay down their lives for the benefit of the people. With these rituals the hunters’ fear was anesthetized out of them. They were often wounded or killed for their recklessness — but their success rate was high, higher than those who did not believe they had any way of reasoning with their prey.
The emergent humans were still animals, still bound by natural law. No innovation in the way they lived would have taken root if it had not given them an adaptive advantage in the endless struggle to survive. An ability to believe in things that weren’t true was a powerful tool.
And Mother was, half consciously, doing her very best to help this propensity for faith to take hold and spread. By selecting mating pairs among her believing followers, Mother was creating a new reproductive isolation. Thanks to this, the divergence of one kind of person from another — believers from those unable to believe — would be surprisingly rapid, leading to marked differences in brain chemistry and organization within a dozen generations. It was the beginning of a plague of thought that would quickly burn through the entire population.
And yet in the world beyond the human range, in northern Europe and the Far East, the older people, the robust beetle-brows and the lanky walkers, still made their simpler tools, even their ancient bower bird hand axes, and lived their simpler lives, just as they always had.
Later, Mother saw the girl again. She was walking more easily, her stoop much lessened. She smiled and even waved at Mother, who allowed herself to smile back.
At the end of the day Sapling returned from his expedition along the river, dusty, hot, thirsty. Of all the artifacts he had brought back he selected a single one to show Mother. It was a lamp, made of the miraculously hard-fired clay. He lit its bark wick and set it up inside her hut, illuminating the dark interior as the daylight faded. Mother nodded her head. We must have this. In terse sentences they began to make plans.
But Mother noticed an oddity in Sapling’s behavior. Her closest lieutenant since the death of Eyes, he was as respectful as he had ever been toward her. However there was a certain impatience in his manner. But the sparkling light of the little lamp crowded such thoughts out of her head.
Sapling took his best hunters on scouting trips around the river folk’s encampment.
He had explained how he wanted the attack to proceed. He drew sketchy maps in the dust, and set stones to serve as models of shelters and people. A talent for symbology had many uses. Social hunters had always had to coordinate their attacks. Wolves did it, as did the great cats, as had the ra
ptors of vanished ages. But never before had planning been so meticulous and complete as in these clever hominids.
As the raiding party approached the river folk’s base, they encountered few animals. The prey creatures were already learning to fear these clever new hunters with their far-reaching weapons and overwhelming intelligence.
And already some animals — some pigs, certain forest antelope — had become scarce in this area, exterminated by the humans.
This was, of course, like an advance echo of the future.
But for now, Sapling and his party were hunting people, not animals.
When the attack came, the river folk didn’t stand a chance. It was not their weapons that gave the attackers their advantage, not their numbers, but their attitude.
Mother’s people fought with a kind of liberating madness. They would fight on when their fellows were cut down around them, after suffering an injury that ought to have disabled them, even when it seemed inevitable that they would be killed. They fought as if they had a belief that they could not die — and that, in fact, was close to the truth. Had not Mother’s child survived death, suffusing into the rocks and dirt and water and sky, to live with the invisible people who controlled the weather, the animals, the grass?
And just as they were able to believe that things, weapons or animals or the sky, were in some way people, it wasn’t a hard leap to make to believe that some people were no more than things. The old categories had broken down. In attacking the river folk they weren’t killing humans, people like themselves. They were killing objects, animals, something less than themselves. The river folk, for all their technical cleverness with fire and clay, had no such belief. It was a weapon they could not match. And this small but vicious conflict set a pattern that would be repeated again and again in the long, bloody ages to come.
When it was done, Sapling stalked through the remains of the encampment. He had most of the river folk men slaughtered, young or old, weak or strong. He tried to spare some of the children and the younger women. The children would be marked and trained to respect Mother and her acolytes. The women would be given to his fighting men. If they became pregnant, they would not be allowed to keep their babies unless they themselves had become acolytes. He had also identified some of those with an understanding of the kilns, the lamps, and the other clever things here, and they would be spared, if they were cooperative. He meant his people to learn the techniques of the river folk.
It was another successful operation, part of the long-term growth of Mother’s community.
When she was shown the village of the river folk, Mother was pleased, and accepted Sapling’s bowed obeisance. But again she saw a frown on Sapling’s face. Perhaps he was growing discontented with obeying her instructions, she thought. Perhaps he wanted more for himself. She would have to consider, do something about it.
But it was too late for such plotting. Even as she surveyed this latest conquest, she had begun to die.
Mother never understood the cancer that devoured her from within. But she could feel it, a lump in her belly. Sometimes she imagined it was Silent, returned from the dead, preparing for a new birth. The pain in her head returned, as powerful as ever. Those sparking lights would flash behind her eyes, zigzags and lattices and stars bursting like pus-filled wounds. It got to the point where she could do nothing but lie in her shelter, smoky animal-fat lamps burning, and listen to the voices that echoed through her roomy cranium.
At last Sapling came to her. She could barely see him through the dazzle of patterns, but there was something she needed to tell him. She grabbed his arm with a hand like a claw. “Listen,” she said.
He crooned softly, as if to a child, “You sleep.”
“No, no,” she insisted, her voice a rasp. “No you. No I.” She raised her finger and tapped her head, her chest. “I, I. Mother.” In her language it was a soft word: “Ja-ahn.”
Another connection had closed. Now she had a symbol even for herself: Mother. She was the first person in all of human history to have a name. And, though she was dying without a surviving child, she thought she was the mother of them all.
“Ja-ahn,” Sapling whispered. “Ja-ahn.” He smiled at her, understanding. He bent over her, covering her mouth with his lips. Then he pinched her nose shut.
As the gruesome kiss went on, as her weakened lungs pulled for air, the darkness quickly gathered.
She had suspected everyone in the group, at one time or another, of harboring malice for her. Everyone except Sapling, her first acolyte of all. How strange, she thought.
A growing belief that behind every event lay intention — be it an evil thought in the mind of another, or the benevolent whim of a god in the sky — was perhaps inevitable in creatures with an innate understanding of causality. If you were smart enough to make multicomponent tools, you eventually came to believe in gods, the end of all causal chains. There would be costs, of course. In the future, to serve their new gods and shamans, the people would have to sacrifice much: time, wealth, even their right to have children. Sometimes they would even have to lay down their lives. But the payback was that they no longer had to be afraid of dying.
And so now Mother was not afraid. The lights in her head went out at last, the images faded, even the pain soothed.
CHAPTER 12
Raft Continent
I
Indonesian Peninsula, Southeast Asia. Circa 52,000 years before present.
The two brothers pushed the canoe out from the riverbank. “Careful, careful — to my left. All right, we’re clear. Now if we head to the right I think we can get through that channel.” Ejan was in the prow of the bark canoe, his brother Torr in the stern. Aged twenty and twenty-two respectively, they were both small, slim, wiry men with nut dark skin and crisp black hair.
They maneuvered their boat through water clogged with reeds, tangled flood debris, and stranded trunks. The trees lining the banks were cheesewood, teak, mahogany, karaya, and tall mangrove. A tremendous translucent curtain of spiderwebs hung over the forest, catching the light and dimming the intensity of the green within. But the heat lay over the river like a great lid, and the air was drenched with light. Already Ejan was sweating heavily, and the dense moist air lay thick in his lungs.
It would have been hard to believe that this was the middle of the latest glaciation, that in the northern hemisphere giant deer roamed in the lee of ice caps kilometers’ thick.
At last they reached the open water. But they were dismayed to see how crowded it was.
There was a dense traffic of bark canoes and dugouts. Some families were using two or three canoes lashed together for stability. Between these stately fleets scuttled cruder craft, rafts of mangrove and bamboo and reed. But there were also fisher folk working without boats or rafts at all. One woman waded from the shore with a pair of sticks she clapped around any fish that foolishly swam near. A group of girls were standing waist-deep, holding a series of nets across the river, while companions converged on them, with much splashing, to drive fish into the nets.
It was all a great divergence of technology from the simple log floats once used by Harpoon’s people. Spurred on by the great riches available from the coasts, rivers, and estuaries, inventive, restless human minds had come up with a whole spectrum of ways to work the water.
The brothers maneuvered through this crowd.
“Busy today,” growled Ejan. “We’ll be lucky to eat tonight. If I was a fish I’d be far from here.”
“Then let’s hope the fish are even more stupid than you.”
With a flick of his wooden paddle Ejan casually splashed his brother.
There was a cry from further down the river. The brothers turned and peered, cupping their eyes.
Through the murky cloud of sunlit insects that hovered over the water, they made out a raft of mangrove poles. Three men stood on this platform, slim dark shadows in the humid air. Ejan could see their equipment, weapons and skins, lashed to the raft.
&
nbsp; “Our brothers,” said Ejan, excited. He took a chance and stood up in the canoe, relying on Torr to keep the little craft stable, and waved vigorously. Seeing him, the brothers waved back, jumping up and down on their raft and making it rock. Today the three of them were going out into the open ocean on that raft, attempting a crossing to the great southern land.
Ejan sat down, his concern outweighing his evaporating elation at spotting his brothers. “I still say that raft is too flimsy,” he murmured.
Torr paddled stoically. “Osa and the rest know what they are doing.”
“But the ocean currents, the way the tide surges—”
“We killed a monkey for Ja’an last night,” Torr reminded him. “Her soul is with them.”
But, Ejan thought uneasily, it is me who bears the ancient name of the Wise One, not any of them. “Perhaps I should have gone with them.”
“Too late now,” said Torr reasonably. And so it was; Ejan could see that the three brothers had turned away and were paddling evenly downstream, toward the river’s mouth. “Come, Ejan,” Torr said. “Let’s fish.”
When they had reached an open stretch of deep water the brothers took their net of woven flax and slipped into the water. The brothers swam apart until the net was stretched out, then Ejan hooked his big toe into the net’s lower margin to open it out vertically. They had turned the net into a fence across the current; it was about fifteen meters long. The brothers began to swim forward, sweeping the water.
Languidly flowing, the water was warm on Ejan’s skin, muddy, murky with green life.
After about fifty meters they swam together, closing the net. Their haul was not great — the fish had indeed been scared off today — but there were a few fat specimens that they threw into the canoe. They took care to release the smallest, most immature fish; nobody would eat a morsel when he could wait and take a fat adult in a few months. They pulled the net taut and prepared to swim upstream once more.
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