Evolution

by Stephen Baxter

  Yet how strange it was, Rood thought, that if he were to dig just a few arms’ lengths anywhere under this carpet of crowded color and motion, he would find the ice, the frozen ground where nothing could live.

  “It has been too long since I walked this way,” said Rood. “I had forgotten what it is like.”

  Olith squeezed his arm and moved closer to him. “I know how you must feel—”

  “That every blade of grass, every dancing saxifrage, is a torture, a beauty I do not deserve.” Distantly he was aware of the scent of the vegetable oil she rubbed into her cropped hair. She was not like Mesni, her sister; Olith was taller, more stringy, but her breasts were heavy.

  “The children are not gone,” Olith reminded him. “Their souls will be reborn when you next have children. They were not old enough to have gathered wisdom of their own. But they carried the souls of their grandparents, and they will bring joy and exuberance to—”

  “I have not lain with Mesni,” he said stiffly, “since we last saw Jahna and Millo. Mesni is — changed.”

  “It has been a long time,” Olith murmured, evidently surprised.

  Rood shrugged. “Not long enough for Mesni. Perhaps it will never be long enough.” He looked Olith in the eyes. “I will not have more children with Mesni. I do not think she will ever want that.”

  Olith looked away, but dipped her head. It was, he realized, startled, a gesture of both sympathy and seduction.

  That night, in the crisp cold of the open tundra, under a lean-to hastily constructed of pine branches, they lay together for the first time. As when he took the young bonehead cow, Rood felt relief from the guilt, the constant nagging doubts. Olith meant much more to him than any bonehead animal, of course. But afterward, when Olith lay in his arms, he felt the ice close around his heart once again, as if in the midst of spring he was still stranded in the depths of winter.

  After four days’ steady hiking, Rood and Olith reached the riverbank.

  Already hundreds of people had gathered. There were shelters set up on the bank, stacks of spears and bows, even the carcass of a great buck megaloceros. The people had marked themselves with exuberant flashes of ocher and vegetable dye. Their designs had common elements, proclaiming the unity of the greater clan, and yet were elaborate and diverse, celebrating the identity and strength of their individual bands.

  Probably around five hundred people would come to this gathering — not that anybody was counting. That would comprise about half of all the people on the planet who spoke a language even remotely resembling Rood’s.

  The group from home who had walked with Rood and Olith fanned out. Many of them were looking for partners: perhaps for a quick spring tumble, or perhaps with a view toward a longer-term relationship. This few days’ gathering was the only chance you got to meet somebody new — or to check out if the skinny kid you remembered from last year showed signs of blossoming in the way you hoped he would.

  Rood spotted a woman called Dela. Round, fat, with a booming laugh, she was a capable hunter of large game. In her younger days she had been a beauty with whom Rood had lain a couple of times. He saw that she had, typically, set up a large, flamboyant shelter of stretched hide painted gaily with designs of running animals.

  Rood and Olith marched down the bank. Dela welcomed him with an embrace and a hearty back slap, and she served them bark tea and fruit. Though Dela eyed Olith, evidently wondering what had become of Mesni, she kept her counsel.

  A huge fire already blazed on open ground before the shelter, and somebody was throwing handfuls of fish grease onto it, making explosions and crackles. It was Dela’s folk who had brought in the megaloceros. Brawny young women were carving open the deer carcass, and the smell of blood and stomach contents filled the air.

  Rood and Olith sat with Dela around a low fire. Dela began to ask Rood how this year’s hunting had gone so far, and he responded in kind. They talked of how the season had unfolded this year, how the animals were behaving, what damage the winter storms had done, how high the fish were jumping, on a new way somebody had found to treat a bowstring so it lasted longer before it snapped, a way somebody else had found of soaking mammoth ivory in urine so you could straighten it out.

  The purpose of this gathering was to exchange information, as much as food or goods or mates. Speakers did not exaggerate success or minimize failure. To the best of their ability they spoke with detail and precision, and allowed other participants in the discussion to ask questions. Accuracy was much more important than boasting. To people who relied on culture and knowledge to keep themselves alive, information was the most important thing in the world.

  At last, though, Dela was able to move on to the subject that clearly fascinated her.

  “And Mesni,” she said carefully. “Has she stayed home with the children? Why, Jahna must be tall now — I remember how she caught the boys’ eyes even last year — and—”

  “No,” Rood said gently, aware of Olith’s hand covering his. Dela listened in silence as he described, in painful detail, how he had lost his children to the ice storm.

  When he had finished Dela sipped her tea, her eyes averted. Rood had the odd sense that she knew something, but held it back.

  To fill the silence, Dela recited the story of her land.

  “…And the two brothers, lost in the snow, fell at last. One died. The other rose up. He grieved for his brother. But then he saw a fox, digging under a log, its coat white on white. The fox went away. But the brother knew that a fox will return to the same spot to retrieve what it has buried. So he set a snare, and waited. When the fox returned the brother caught it. But before he could kill it the fox sang for him. It was a lament for the lost brother, like this…”

  Like Jo’on’s Dreamtime tales, though they were a blend of myth and reality, such stories and songs were long, specific, fact-heavy. This was an oral culture. Without writing to record factual data, memory was everything. If dreams and the shaman’s trances were a means of integrating copious information to aid intuitive decision making, the songs and stories were an aid to storing that information in the first place.

  Remarkably, the story Dela told was itself evolving. As the story passed from one listener to another, through error and embellishment its elements changed constantly. Most of the changes were incidental details that didn’t matter, churning without effect, like the coding of junk DNA. The essentials of the story — its mood, the key nodes, its point — tended to remain stable. But not always: Sometimes a major adaptation would take place, by a speaker’s intention or accident, and if the new element improved the story, it would be retained. The stories, like other aspects of the people’s culture, had begun an evolutionary destiny of their own, played out in the arenas of the new humans’ roomy minds.

  But Dela’s story was more than a mere tale, or aid to memory. With her story, by her setting out the narrative of her land and by her listeners’ accepting it by hearing it, she was proclaiming a kind of title. Only by knowing the land well enough to tell its story truly could you affirm your right to that land. There were no written contracts here, no deeds, no courts; the only validity for Dela’s claim came from the relationship of narrator to listener, reaffirmed at gatherings like this.

  There was a ferocious sizzling noise, a great celebratory roar from outside the shelter. The first great slabs of the butchered megaloceros had been hurled on to the fire. Soon the mouth-watering smell of its meat filled the air. The festivities of the night began.

  There was much eating, dancing, hollering. And at the end of the night, Rood was surprised when Dela approached him.

  “Listen to me now, Rood. I am your friend. Once we lay together.”

  “Actually twice,” he said with a rueful smile.

  “Twice, then. What I say to you now I say out of friendship, and not to cause you suffering.”

  He frowned. “What are you trying to tell me?”

  She sighed. “There is a tale. I heard it here, not two days ago; a
group from the south told it. They say that in a stretch of worthless ground near the coast, a bonehead infests a cliff-top cave. Yes? And in that cave — so it is said, so a hunter claims to have seen — two children are living.”

  He didn’t understand. “Bonehead cubs?”

  “No. Not boneheads. People. The hunter, engrossed in his prey, saw all this from a distance. One of the children — so the hunter said — is a girl, maybe so high.” She held up her hand. “And the other—”

  “A boy,” breathed Rood. “A little boy.”

  “I apologize for telling you this,” said Dela.

  Rood understood. Dela perceived that Rood had accepted his loss. Now she had ignited the cold pain of hope in his deadened heart once more. “Tomorrow,” he said thickly. “Tomorrow you will show this hunter to me. And then—”

  “Yes. But not tonight.”

  Later, in the deepest night, Olith lay with Rood, but he was restless.

  “Morning will soon come,” she whispered. “And then you will leave.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Olith — come with me.”

  She thought briefly, then nodded. It was not wise for him to travel alone. She heard his teeth grind. She touched his jaw, felt the tense muscles there. “What is it?”

  “If there is a bonehead buck, if he has harmed them—”

  She crooned, “Your mind flies too far ahead; give your body a chance to catch up. Sleep now.”

  But for Rood, sleep proved impossible.

  III

  The bonehead returned to the cave. Jahna saw that he had a seal — the whole animal, a fat, heavy male — slung over one shoulder. Even now, after weeks in this cliff-top cave, his strength could surprise her.

  Millo came running forward, his bonehead-style skin wrap flying. “A seal! A seal! We’ll eat well tonight!” He hugged the bonehead’s tree-trunk legs.

  Just as he used to hug his father’s. Jahna pushed the unwelcome thought out of her mind; it had no place here, and she must be strong.

  The bonehead, perspiring from the effort of hauling such a weight up the cliff path from the beach, peered down at the boy. He made a string of guttural, grunting noises, a jabber that meant nothing… or at least Jahna didn’t think it meant anything. Sometimes she wondered if he spoke words — bonehead words, what a strange idea — that she just couldn’t recognize.

  She walked forward and pointed to the rear of the cave. “Put the seal down there,” she commanded. “We’ll soon get it butchered. Look, I’ve built a fire already.”

  And so she had. Days ago she had dug out a pit to serve as a proper hearth, and had swept over the ugly ash stains that had randomly scarred the floor. Likewise she had sorted out the clutter of this cave. It had been a jumble, with food scraps and bits of skin and tools all mixed up with all sorts of waste. Now it almost seemed, well, habitable.

  For a person, that is. It didn’t occur to her to wonder what “habitable” might mean for the huge creature she thought of as the bonehead.

  Right now the bonehead didn’t seem happy. He was unpredictable like that. Growling, he dumped the seal on the floor. Then, sweating, filthy, his skin crusted with salt from the sea, he stamped off to the back of the cave for one of his naps.

  Jahna and Millo fell to slicing open the seal carcass. It had been killed by a spear thrust to the heart, leaving a wide and ugly puncture, and Jahna quailed as she imagined the battle that must have preceded this killing strike. But with their sharp stone blades the children’s small hands made efficient work of flensing and dismembering the big mammal. Soon the first slices of seal belly were on the fire.

  The bonehead, as was his wont, woke up when the meat was ready. The children ate their meat well-cooked. The bonehead preferred his raw, or almost. He grabbed a big steak out of the fire, took it to his favorite spot by the entrance, and pulled at the meat with his teeth, facing the setting sun. He ate a lot of meat, about twice as much as Rood, say. But then he worked very hard, all the time.

  It was an oddly domestic scene. But it had been like this for the weeks since Jahna and Millo had stumbled in here. Somehow it worked.

  It had always hurt the Old Man to live alone; his kind were intensely social. But he had suffered more than just loneliness. His mind was of the old compartmented design. Much of what went on inside his cavernous skull was all but unconscious; it was as if his hands made his flint tools, not him. It was only when he was with people that he became truly alive, fully, intensely aware; it was as if without others he was in a dream, only half-conscious. To the Old Man’s kind, other people were the brightest, most active things in the landscape. With no other people around, the world was dull, lifeless, static.

  That was why he had tolerated the skinny children, with their jabber and their meddling, why he had fed and even clothed them. And why he would soon face death.

  Jahna whispered, “Millo. Look.” Watching to be sure the bonehead couldn’t see, she brushed aside some dirt, and revealed a collection of blackened bones.

  Millo gasped. He picked up a skull. It had a protruding face and a thick ridge over its gaping eyes. But it was small, smaller than Millo’s own head; it must have been a child. “Where did you find them?”

  “In the ground,” she whispered. “At the front of the cave, when I was clearing up.”

  Millo dropped the skull; it clattered onto the other bones. The bonehead looked around dully. “It’s scary,” whispered Millo. “Maybe he killed it. The bonehead. Maybe he eats children.”

  “No, silly,” Jahna said. Seeing her brother’s fear was real, she put her arms around him. “He probably just put it in the ground when it was dead.”

  But Millo was shivering. She hadn’t meant to scare him. She pushed the skull out of his sight and, to calm him, began to tell him a story.

  “Listen to me now. Long, long ago, the people were like the dead. The world was dark and their eyes were dull. They lived in a camp as they do now, and they did the things they do now. But everything was dark, not real, like shadows. One day a young man came to the camp. He was like the dead too, but he was curious — different. He liked to go fishing and hunting. But he would always go deeper into the sea than anybody else. The people wondered why…”

  As she crooned the story, Millo relaxed against her, sinking into sleep just as the sun sank into the ocean. Even the big bonehead was dozing, she saw, slumped against a wall, belching softly. Perhaps he was listening too.

  Her story was a creation myth, a legend already more than twenty thousand years old. Such tales — which said that Jahna’s group were the pinnacle of creation, that theirs was the only right way, and that all others were less than human — taught the people to care passionately about themselves, their kin, and a few treasured ideals.

  But to the exclusion of all other humans, let alone such nonpeople as the Old Man’s kind.

  “…One day they saw that the young man was with a sea lion. He was swimming in the waves with it. And he was making love to it. Enraged, the people drove out the young man, and they caught the sea lion. But when they butchered it they found a fish inside, in its womb. It was a fat fish.” She meant a eulachon. “The fish had been fathered by the young man. He was neither person nor fish, but something different. So the people threw the fish-boy on their fire. His head burst into flames and made a bright light that dazzled them. So the fish-boy flew into the sky. The sky was dark, of course. There he sought the place where the light was hiding, because the fish-boy thought he could trick the light to come down to the dark world. And then…”

  And then her father walked in.

  The Old Man was a Neandertal.

  His kind had endured in Europe, through the savage swings of the Ice Age, for a quarter of a million years. In their way the robust folk had been supremely successful. They had found ways to live here in the most marginal of environments, on the edge of the world, where the climate was not only harsh but could vary treacherously fast, where animal and plant resources were sparse and pron
e to fluctuate unpredictably.

  For a long time they had even been able to resist the children of Mother. During warming pulses the new humans pushed into Europe from the south. But with their stocky bodies and big air-warming sinuses and heavily meat-tolerant digestion systems, the robusts were better able to withstand the cold than the moderns. And their bearlike builds made them formidable infighters: tough opponents for the humans, better technology or not. Then, when the cold intensified again, the moderns would retreat back to the south, and the robust folk could repopulate their old lands.

  This had happened over and over. In southern Europe and the Middle East there were caves and other sites where layers of human detritus were overlaid by Neandertal waste, only to be reoccupied by humans again.

  But during the last thaw the moderns had looked again to Europe and Asia. They had advanced, culturally and technologically. And this time the robusts hadn’t been able to resist. Gradually the robusts were eliminated across much of Asia, and pushed back into their chill fortress, Europe.

  The Old Man had been ten years old when skinny hunters had first stumbled on his people’s encampment.

  The camp had been constructed on a south-facing riverbank a few kilometers back from the cliff top, placed close to the trails of the great herds of migrant herbivores that washed over the landscape. They lived here as they had always lived, waiting for the seasons to bring the herds to their porch. The riverbank had been a good place.