Evolution

by Stephen Baxter

  The convergence of the shaman’s visions and fortune-telling and the dreams of Rood and Millo was reassuring, a valid piece of information to guide the hunters. It showed that their deep intuition about the nature of the world was in accord.

  Still, Jahna thought, Rood looked troubled. As he kicked the boneheads to their feet she approached him. “Father? Your face is long.”

  He glanced down at her, frowning. “It was just that dream of Millo’s. The water, the cold, the dark. Yes, it may be that he dreamed of hunting in the sea, of catching fish. But…” He raised his head, sniffing the air. “Millo’s nose is smarter than yours or mine, daughter. Perhaps he smells something we don’t. But we are committed. Let us go and raid the sea.”

  With a smart slap on the buttocks of one of the buck boneheads, he launched the sled off across the frozen ground once more. Millo, perched on a pile of sleeping bags, squealed with joy.

  When they reached the coast, Rood released the two boneheads and let them forage on the cold ground. They wouldn’t have the energy to run off, or even the wit to imagine escape.

  The ocean was frozen.

  At this time of year only the coastal fringe was completely free of pack ice. But the ice was broken by leads, huge open channels of black water that radiated out from the tip of a headland. The hunters knew the leads formed in this place every year because of the shape of the coast — and that was why they had come here.

  Eagerly, the hunters clambered on to the sea ice. Their bone harpoons in their mittened hands, Jahna and Millo hurried ahead of the others, hoping to be the first to get to the seals.

  Jahna found herself surrounded by miniature mountain ranges, hillocks of ice pushing four or five meters into the air. Wisps of ice crystals blew languidly, and gulls wheeled, seeking fish. As the sea swelled impatiently, its skin of ice groaned and cracked; the air was full of sharp noise. But the ice was rough: autumn storms and the tides around the headland had piled up heaps of huge fractured slabs.

  Rood and a number of the others had gathered around the open water, and were calling excitedly. A narwhal had come up to breathe, and perhaps the hunters would make a spectacular kill.

  But Millo, cawing like a gull, hurried ahead through the maze of ice. Jahna scampered after him. They came to a place where the water was crusted over by grayish new ice. But the ice was broken by circular holes, a pace or two across.

  Millo and Jahna came to a hole and peered into it. In the chill waters, life teemed. Jahna could not make out the tiny plankton that crowded the waters, but she could see the tiny fish and shrimplike creatures that fed on them. In these cold, dry, windy times, dust eroded from the land was blown far out to sea, depositing iron salts; and the iron, always in short supply in the ocean, made life bloom.

  But now Millo grabbed her arm and pointed. A little farther out to sea, close to a larger, slush-capped hole, seals lay on the ice. They were brown slabs of limp flesh, totally relaxed, frost sparkling on their fur. Seals were always attracted to such holes, so they could breathe or come up to bask.

  Jahna thrilled at the opportunity here.

  With immense care, making as little noise as possible, Jahna and Millo made their way across the ice. If one of the seals raised its head, they froze in place, crouching down against the ice, until the seal had relaxed again. Meanwhile, a moaning wind rose. Jahna welcomed it. She wasn’t interested in the weather right now; she had eyes, ears for nothing but the seals. But the wind helped mask their crackling footsteps.

  They were almost there, almost close enough to touch the nearest seals. They raised their harpoons.

  Then, without warning, the wind howled like a wounded animal.

  The seals woke up, startled. They looked around, honking, and with liquid grace and speed they slid into the water. Millo howled his frustration and hurled his harpoon anyway; it slid uselessly into the water and out of sight.

  But Jahna had looked up. A wall of wind-driven snow was descending on them, turning the world white.

  Jahna grabbed Millo’s hand and dragged him into the shelter of an obtruding block of ice. They huddled up against the ice, knees tucked against their chests. The wind screamed through hollows and flutings in the ice, too loud for her to hear her own voice, too loud to think.

  Then the snow was on them.

  She could see nothing but white — no sea, no horizon, no sky. It was as if they had been thrust inside an egg, she thought, a perfect, closed-over egg, sealed off from the world.

  Soon the snow was sticking to their furs and piling up against the ice wall. She knew there was a danger that the snow would drift, here in the lee of this boulder, and she tried to clear away the gathering layers of sharp white crystals.

  But the storm went on, and on. And with every heartbeat that passed, the chances were that Rood and the others were getting farther and farther away.

  Millo’s patience ran out. He pushed her away and stood up, but the swirling wind almost knocked him off his feet. She pulled him back down.

  “No!” he screamed through the wind, struggling. “We’ll die if we stay here.”

  “We’ll die if we leave,” she yelled back. “Look at the snow! Listen to the wind! Think — which way is the land?”

  He turned vaguely, his small round face battered by the snow.

  “We already made a bad mistake,” she said. “We didn’t see the storm coming. What does your soul tell you to do? What does Millo, your great-grandfather, tell you?” She could probably have overpowered him, just forced him to stay, but that would have been wrong. She had to convince him to stay put. For if he chose to leave — well, that was his prerogative.

  At last he relented. With tears freezing to his cheeks he dropped back to the ice and huddled up against his sister. She held him until the weeping was done.

  She kept up her routine of clearing off the loose snow. But as darkness fell — as the bubble of white turned gray, then black, with no letup in the storm — she became increasingly weary, hungry, and thirsty.

  At last she couldn’t fight off the sleep any longer. Just for a while, she thought; I will rest just for a while, and wake before the snow gets too thick. She dreamed of rocking, as if she were an infant in her father’s arms.

  When she woke she felt the weight of her brother’s head on her lap. The noise of the storm was gone. She was in darkness; but it was warm here, dark, warm, safe. She closed her eyes and settled back. It would surely do no harm to rest a little longer.

  But now Millo gasped, as if struggling for air. She remembered his dream, of darkness and immersion and drowning. Maybe she was in the same dream now.

  Darkness.

  In sudden panic Jahna pushed Millo away. Reaching up, she felt a thick layer of loose snow above her. She forced herself to her feet, pushing her face through the clinging snow.

  And found herself in dazzling light. She gasped in the sudden richness of the clean, cold air. The sky was a perfect deep blue dome through which the sun sailed. She gazed around at a landscape of jumbled ice blocks embedded in blue-gray pack ice, scattered with frost and snow drifts, all of it unfamiliar. She was waist-deep in snow. She had been lucky to wake when she did, she knew; the drifting snow had kept her warm, but had nearly suffocated her.

  She reached down, pushing away the snow, until she found Millo’s shoulders. She hauled him out into the air. Soon he was blinking in the light and rubbing his eyes. The snow where he had been lying had turned piss-yellow. “Are you all right?” She cleared the snow from his hair and face, took off his mittens and manipulated his fingers. “Can you feel your toes?”

  “I’m thirsty,” he said plaintively.

  “I know.”

  “I want Rood. I want Mesni.”

  “I know.” Jahna was furious with herself. Careless, careless again, to have fallen asleep like that. And it was carelessness that might yet cost Jahna her life and Millo his. “Let’s get back to the headland.”

  “All right.”

  She put on h
er mittens and took his hand. They walked around the ice block that had sheltered them, back the way they had come yesterday. There was no headland. She could make out the land, but it was a low, worn-looking shore, blanketed by a crisp layer of unbroken snow.

  Millo moaned, “Where’s Rood?”

  For a time Jahna struggled to accept what she was seeing. Everything had been made unfamiliar by the spring storm. And her knowledge of the land was not as deep as her father’s. But still she could see that that was not the shore she had left before the storm. Give me strength, Jahna, mother of my father. “I think the pack ice must have broken up during the storm. We drifted over the sea—” she remembered now those dreams of languid rocking ” — and finished up here.”

  “I don’t recognize that place,” Millo said, pointing to the land.

  “We must have been carried a long way.”

  “Well,” Millo said, businesslike, “that’s where we’ve got to go. Back to the land. Isn’t it, Jahna?”

  “Yes. That’s where we’ve got to go.”

  “Come on then.” He took her hand. “This is the way. Watch your step.”

  She let him lead her.

  They trekked along the coast. Blanketed by the snow, the land was silent. Hardly anything moved — just an occasional arctic fox, a bedraggled gull, an owl — and the quiet was eerie, unnerving.

  It was difficult walking through the heaped-up snow, even close to the shore, especially for Millo with his shorter legs. They had no idea where they were, no idea how far the drifting ice might have carried them. They didn’t even know if they were walking back the way they had come, toward the headland. At that they were lucky, Jahna reflected with a shudder, that the ice floe hadn’t simply carried them out to sea, where, helpless, they would quickly have frozen to death.

  They found a stream running fast enough to have stayed clear of this unseasonal snow. They bent to drink, up to their elbows in snow, their breath steaming. Jahna was relieved. If they had not found fresh water they might have been forced to eat snow. That would have quenched their thirst but it would have put out the fire that burned inside their bodies — and, as everybody knew, when that happened, you died.

  Water, then. But they found no food, none at all. They walked on.

  They stuck to the coast, feeling unwilling to penetrate that central inland silence. There were many dangers there — not the least of which were people.

  As primates with bodies built for tropical climes strove to survive the rapidly changing extremes of the Pleistocene, they had built on the ancient traits they had inherited from the wordless creatures of the forests: on bonds of kinship and cooperation.

  The clans scattered over Eurasia and Africa lived in almost complete isolation from one another. And the isolation went very deep. Fifty kilometers from Jahna’s birthplace lived people who spoke a language more different from hers than Finnish would be from Chinese. In the days of Far and even Pebble, there had been a transcontinental uniformity; now there could be significant differences between one river valley and the next. Humans were capable of altruism so generous one would suffer injury, maiming, even death to save another — and yet they indulged in extreme xenophobia, even deliberate and purposeful genocide. But in a harsh land where food was short, it made sense for members of a community to support one another selflessly — and to fend off others, who might steal scarce resources. Even genocide had a certain horrible logic.

  If the children were discovered by strangers, it was possible Jahna’s life would be spared — but only so she could be taken for sex. Her best hope would be to fall pregnant, and win the loyalty of one of the men. But she would always be lowly, never one of the true people. Millo, meanwhile, would simply be killed, perhaps after a little sport. She knew this was so. She had seen it happen among her own kind. So it was best they remain undiscovered.

  As the children plodded on, their hunger gnawed.

  They crossed a low rocky ridge. In its lee a stand of spruce had grown — dwarfed. The trees were no taller than Jahna was, but in the rock’s shelter they were at least able to lift up from the ground.

  Suddenly Jahna grabbed Millo and unceremoniously dumped him to the ground. Their bodies concealed, they poked their heads over the ridge.

  On a frozen pond beyond the ridge walked a small flock of ptarmigan. The birds were pecking at the ice, plunging their beaks into cracks and leads. They were brilliant white against the ice’s steely blue gray. These early-arriving birds were invisible against the snow, but they would stand out brightly against the greens and browns of the later spring.

  “Come on,” she said. They turned and slithered down the ridge, back to the little stand of spruce.

  Jahna selected a fine, supple young tree. With a stone ax from her pocket, she quickly felled it, a hand’s breadth above the snow, and she lopped away its crown, leaving a length of trunk nearly as tall as she was. Now, with Millo’s help, she made a notch in the trunk and drove in a wedge. The trunk split easily, leaving her with a thin, springy strip. She began to scrape it quickly. Meanwhile Millo peeled the bark off the rest of the trunk. He split it up into fibers and quickly wove it together into a length of string. The bow was so unfinished it had bits of string dangling where they had been hastily tied. Not perfect, she thought, but it would serve its purpose.

  She turned hastily to splitting arrows off the remnants of the trunk. There was no fire to harden the arrows, of course — and, more seriously, no feathers to serve as flights. So she improvised; she took bits of peeled-off bark and jammed them in slits in her arrows.

  They worked as fast as they could. But the sun had slid a little further down the sky by the time she was done.

  She poked her head and shoulders above the ridge once more, wielding her bow. The birds were still there. She took aim, pulling back the bowstring.

  The first arrow went so wide it didn’t even disturb the birds. The second served only to startle them, and the birds took off, shrieking in protest, their shining wings rattling. She loosed off her last shot — a much more difficult attempt at a moving target — but one of the birds crumpled and fell out of the sky.

  Whooping, brother and sister clambered over the ridge and ran down to the frozen pond. The bird lay sprawled on the ice, a splash of blood on its ragged feathers. The children knew better than to rush on to the ice. Millo found a length of spruce branch. They lay flat on their bellies on the firm land at the edge of the ice and used the branch to bring the bird to the shore.

  In death the bird looked ugly, ungainly. But Jahna cupped its small head in her hands. She took a bit of snow, let it melt into her palm, and trickled the water into the bird’s unmoving beak: a final drink. “Thank you,” she said. It was important to pay this kind of respect to animals and plants alike. The world was bountiful — but only so long as you did not trouble it too much.

  When the little ceremony was done, Jahna quickly plucked the bird, slit open its belly, and flensed it. She folded up the skin and put it in her pocket: she would make better arrows tomorrow, with the feathers the ptarmigan had given her.

  They ate the meat raw, the blood trickling down their cheeks and making crimson spots in the snow beneath them. It was a moment of triumph. But Jahna’s satisfaction at the kill did not last long. The light was fading, and the air was growing colder.

  They would die without shelter.

  Her bow on her back, the last of the bird’s meat in her mouth, Jahna led Millo a little way inland. Soon they came to an open, snow-covered plain. Toward the center of the meadow, the snow came almost up to her knees.

  Good enough.

  She shaped blocks out of the snow around her. It was hard work; she had nothing to use but her hands and stone blades, and the upper layers of snow were soft and crumbled easily. But deeper down the snow was compressed and satisfyingly hard.

  She began to pile the blocks in a tight ring around herself. Millo joined in with a will. Soon they were building a circular wall of snow blocks arou
nd an increasingly deep pit. With care they turned their spiraling lines of blocks inward, until they had made a neat dome shape. Jahna punched a tunnel into the wall through which they could come and go, and Millo smoothed over the dome’s surface, inside and out.

  The snow house was small, rough and ready, but it would do.

  The light was fading fast now, and the first wolves’ calls were already echoing. Hurriedly they dug themselves into their snow house.

  We are more secure than last night, Jahna thought as they huddled together for warmth. But tomorrow we must find more food.

  And we must build a fire.

  II

  The hunters returned from the sea. They dispersed among their families, bearing the food they had brought. There were no expressions of gratitude. These people had no words for please or thank you; among these hunter-gatherer folk there were no social inequalities that would have required such niceties. The food was simply shared out, according to need.

  Of Jahna and Millo there was much quiet talk.

  Mesni, mother of Millo and Jahna, visibly strove for self-control. She went about the tasks of the day, caring for her infant, gutting the fish and preparing the rest of the ocean harvest Rood had brought home. But sometimes she would put down her knife or her bowls and give way to open despair. She even wept.

  She became insane with grief: that was how it seemed to Rood. The people prized themselves for their equanimity and control. To show visible anger or despair was to behave like a small child who knew no better.

  As for Rood, he withdrew into himself. He stalked around the village, and out into the country, in his shame and sorrow struggling to keep his face expressionless. There was nothing he could do for Mesni. He knew she must adjust to her loss, must regain her own inner sense of calm and control.

  But the loss was indeed terrible for the little community. There weren’t that many of them to begin with. This little village of around twenty people consisted essentially of three large families. They were part of a more extended clan, who every spring would gather at the bank of a great river to the south of here for a great celebratory festival of trade, partner seeking, and storytelling. But, though they came from far away, there were never more than about a thousand at these gatherings: The tundra could support no higher a density of people than that.