Evolution

by Stephen Baxter

  Until the skinnies came.

  It wasn’t a war. The engagement had been much more complex, messy, and protracted than that.

  At first there had even been a kind of trade, as the skinnies swapped sea produce for meat from the giant animals the people were able to kill with their thrusting spears and great strength. But the skinnies seemed to want more and more. And, as they came roaming over the land with their strange slender spears and the bits of wood that would hurl them far, the skinny hunters were just too effective. Soon the animals grew wary and changed their habits. No longer did they follow their old trails and gather at the lakes and ponds and rivers, and the robusts had to roam far in search of the prey that had once come to them.

  Meanwhile, for the Old Man’s folk, contact with the skinnies had inevitably increased.

  There had been sex, willing and unwilling. There had been fights. If you got a skinny in close combat you could crush his or her spine, or smash that big bubble skull with a single punch. But the skinnies wouldn’t close with you. They struck from a distance, with their hard-thrown spears and flying arrows. And the people could not strike back: even after tens of millennia of living alongside the skinnies the descendants of Pebble had failed to copy even their simplest innovations. Besides, as the skinnies ran around you hollering to each other in their birdlike voices — with their elaborately painted clothes and bodies, and with a restless blur of speed as if the world was too slow, too static for them — it was hard to even see them. You couldn’t fight what you couldn’t see.

  Eventually there had come a day when the skinnies had decided they wanted the place where the Old Man’s people lived, their riverbank home.

  It had been simple for them. They had killed most of the men, and some of the women. They chased the survivors away, to forage for themselves as best they could. By the time the Old Man returned, from a solo expedition to the river, the skinnies were burning the huts and cleaning out the caves, places where the Old Man’s grandmothers’ bones lay a hundred generations deep.

  After that, the people wandered aimlessly, sedentary creatures forced to be nomads. If they tried to set up a new base, the skinnies would quickly break it up again. Many of them starved.

  At last, inevitably, they had been drawn to the camps of the skinnies. Even now, many of his kind still lived on, but they were like the boneheads who followed Jahna’s encampment, where they lived like rats on garbage, and even then only as long as the skinnies tolerated them. Their eventual fate was already obvious.

  All save the Old Man. The Old Man had stayed away from the dismal skinny places. He was not the last of his kind. But he was the last to live as his ancestors had before the coming of the moderns. He was the last to live free.

  When Mother had died, just sixty thousand years before the birth of Christ, there had still been many different kinds of people in the world. There had been Mother’s humanlike people in parts of Africa. In Europe and western Asia lived robust folk like Pebble, like Neandertals. In eastern Asia there were still bands of the skinny, small-brained walkers, the Homo erectus types. The old hominid complexity had reigned still, with many variants and subspecies and even hybrids of the different types.

  With the revolution started in Mother’s generation, with the great expansion that had followed, all this changed. It was not genocide; it was not planned. It was a matter of ecology. The different forms of humans were competing for the same resources. All over the world there had been a wave of extinctions — human extinctions — a wave of last contacts, of regret-free good-byes, as one hominid species after another succumbed to the dark. For a time the last of the walkers had hung on in isolation on Indonesian islands, still living much as Far had, so long ago. But when the sea levels dropped once more, the bridges to the mainland were reestablished, and the moderns crossed over — and for the walkers, after a long and static history spanning some two million years, the game was up.

  And so on. The outcome was inevitable. And soon the world would be empty of people — empty, save for just one kind.

  After he had lost his family the Old Man had fled from the skinnies, heading ever west. But here, in this coastal cave, the Old Man had reached the western shore of Europe, the fringe of the Atlantic. The ocean was an impassable barrier. He had nowhere left to go.

  Jahna’s encounter with the Old Man was the last contact of all.

  Rood, silhouetted against the sunset, looked dusty, hot. At his side was Olith, Jahna’s aunt. Rood’s eyes were wide, as he took in what he saw in the cave.

  For Jahna, it was like snapping awake from a nightmare. She dropped the bit of hide she had been working, ran forward across a cave floor that suddenly seemed filthy and cluttered, and hurled herself into her father’s arms. There she wept like a very small child, while her father’s hands hesitantly patted the crude bonehead wrap she wore.

  The bonehead roused. The shadows of the two adults, cast by the setting sun, striped over him. He raised a hand to shield his eyes. Then, bleary with sleep, heavy with meat, he struggled to get to his feet, growling.

  Rood pushed the children to Olith, who held them. Then he raised a cobble over the struggling bonehead’s cranium.

  Jahna cried, “No!” She struggled free of Olith and grabbed her father’s hand.

  Rood stared down at her. And she realized she had a choice to make.

  Jahna thought about it for a heartbeat. She remembered the mussels, the seals, the fires she had built. And she looked at the ugly, lumpy brow of the bonehead. She released her father’s arm.

  Rood let his arm fall. It was a heavy blow. The bonehead fell forward. But bonehead skulls were thick. It seemed to Jahna that the Old Man could have got up, fought on even now. But he didn’t. He remained in the dirt of his cave, on his hands and knees.

  It took four, five blows before Rood had gotten through his skull. Long before the last blow Jahna had turned away.

  They stayed in the cave one more night, with the fallen bonehead slumped on the floor, blood pooled beneath his shattered skull. In the morning they wrapped up what was left of the seal meat, and prepared to begin the journey back. But before they left Jahna insisted they dig a hole in the ground, wide but shallow. Into the hole she dropped the bones of the infant she had found, and the big carcass of the bonehead. Then she kicked the dirt back into the hole, and tamped it down with her feet.

  After they had gone the gulls came. They pecked at the bits of seal meat, and the patch of dried blood in the entrance of the cave that faced the sea.

  CHAPTER 14

  The Swarming People

  Anatolia, Turkey. Circa 9,600 years before present.

  I

  The two girls, lying side by side, nibbled at their kernels of wild grain.

  “So you like Tori better than Jaypee,” said Sion.

  Juna, at sixteen a year younger than her sister, flicked her hair out of her eyes. Her hair was a pale blond, strikingly bright. She said carefully, “Maybe. I think he likes me better than Jaypee does.”

  “But you said Tori was a runt. You said you liked the way Jaypee’s hair falls when he runs, and those big thighs he has, and—”

  “I know what I said,” Juna said uncomfortably. “But Tori has a better—”

  “Cock?”

  “A better personality,” Juna forced out.

  Sion’s pealing laughter billowed out over the empty space. A dog, slumbering in the shade of the men’s hut, deigned to move one eye to check out the disturbance, then fell back asleep.

  The girls were surrounded by the bare, trampled dust of the village. The place was dominated by the great slumped form of the men’s hut, a ramshackle construction of timber and reeds. The women’s huts were smaller satellites of this rude giant. Gravelly snoring from within the men’s hut told the girls that the shaman was sleeping off another hard night of beer and visions. Nobody was moving: not the dogs, not the adults. Most of the men were out hunting; the women were dozing in their huts with their infants. There we
ren’t even any children around.

  Sion sprinkled a little more ground fennel on her grain. The fennel’s aromatic oil was actually a defense evolved by the plant before the death of the dinosaurs, intended to make its leaves too slippery for the legs of boring, nibbling insects; now the result of that ancient evolutionary arms race flavored Sion’s snack. “You are joking,” said Sion. “Juna, I love you dearly. But you are the most shallow person I know. Since when has personality mattered a dried fig to you?”

  Juna felt her face burn.

  “Ah. There’s something you aren’t telling me.” Sion studied Juna’s face with a hunter’s expert knowledge of her prey. “Have you two lain together? ”

  “No,” Juna snapped.

  Sion was still suspicious. “I didn’t think Tori was lying with anybody yet. Apart from Acta, of course.” Acta was one of the oldest of the men — not to mention the fattest — but he continued to prove his strength with his wily leadership of the hunts, and so he continued to assert his rights over the boys and young men. “I know Tori’s getting sick of being poked with Acta’s stinking dick; that’s what Jaypee told me! Soon he’s going to want to be with a woman, but not yet—”

  Juna couldn’t meet her sister’s eyes — for the truth was, she had lain with Tori, just as Sion suspected. It had been out in the bush, with Tori boastfully full of beer. She didn’t know why she’d let him do it. She hadn’t even been sure he had done it right. She longed to tell her sister everything — how her bleeding had stopped, how she already felt the new life moving inside her — but how could she? Times were hard — times were always hard — and it wasn’t a good time to be producing a baby by a feckless boy. She hadn’t yet told Tori himself. She hadn’t even told her mother, Pepule, who was herself expecting a child. “Sion, I—”

  There was a hand on her arm, hot and heavy, a breath redolent with unfamiliar spices. “Hello, girls. Something on your mind?” Juna flinched away, pulling her arm free.

  This was Cahl, the beer man. He was a big man, fatter even than Acta, and he wore strangely constraining clothes: a tightly sewn jacket and trousers, heavy leather shoes, a hat stuffed with straw. On his back was a heavy skin full of ale; it sloshed as he squatted down beside them. His skin was cratered, like soil after rain, and his teeth were ugly brown stumps. But his gaze, as he smiled at Juna, had a kind of predator’s intensity.

  Sion glared at him. “Why don’t you go back where you came from? Nobody wants you here.”

  He frowned briefly, striving to translate what she had said. His language was different from theirs. It was a common speculation that Cahl’s folk had come from somewhere far to the east, bringing their peculiar language with them. “Oh,” he said at last, “plenty of people want me here. Some want me an awful lot. You’d be surprised what people will give me, in return for what I can give them.” And he leered again, showing a mouthful of brown, rotten teeth. “Maybe we should talk about it, you and me,” he said to Juna. “Maybe we should find out what we can do for each other.”

  “Keep away from me,” Juna said tremulously.

  But Cahl kept on staring at her, a snake’s stare, hard and intense.

  It was with relief that she heard the footsteps of the returning men, their bare feet grinding in the dirt. Their naked bodies were caked with dust, and they were obviously weary. Juna saw that once again the dozen men had returned home empty-handed save for a few rabbits and rats; bigger game was very rare.

  Old man Acta had his fat arm draped over Tori’s shoulders. Juna didn’t want to meet the slim boy’s gaze, and yet she longed to know what he was thinking. How would he react if she told him what had happened as a result of their foolish fumble?

  Cahl broke away from the girls, stood up, and raised his sack of beer over his head. “Welcome the hunters!”

  Acta strode up to him. His tongue hung out doglike, as if the pendulous sack contained the only drink in the world. “Cahl, my friend. I hoped you would be here. You are a better shaman than that old fool in the hut.”

  Sion gasped at that casual blasphemy.

  Cahl handed over the beer sack. “You look like you need this.”

  Acta grabbed it and held it close. But a trace of his old wiliness showed in his deep, piglike eyes. “And the payment? You can see how we are. We have little enough meat for ourselves. But—”

  “But,” said Cahl evenly, “you will take the beer anyway. Won’t you?” And he kept staring, until he had faced down Acta. Some of the men muttered uncomfortably at this show of weakness. But what Cahl said was obviously true. Cahl slapped Acta’s shoulder amiably. “We can talk about it later. Go rest in the shade. And as for me—”

  “Take her,” Acta mumbled, gazing at the beer. “Do what you like.” He shambled toward the men’s hut. The other failed hunters dumped their meat outside the women’s huts and followed Acta, eager for a share in the beer. Soon Juna heard the growling of the shaman, who was always quickly revived by the stink of ale.

  Cahl came back to the girls. He shook his head. “In my home such a depraved oaf would be cast out.”

  Sion prickled at this new insult. “The boys live with the men, in the men’s hut. It is a place of wisdom, where the boys learn to be men. And each man has a small house for his wife and his daughters and his infant sons. It is our way. It has always been our way.”

  “It might be your way, but it isn’t mine,” Cahl said bluntly.

  Juna found her curiosity pricked by that.

  The only thing anybody knew about the new people, save for their marvelous ability to make beer, was that there were many, many of them. Some of the women whispered that no baby was discarded among the strangers — not one, not ever. And that was why there was so many of them, though nobody had any idea how they fed themselves. Perhaps in their valleys and lowlands the animals still ran in great herds, just as they had in the days long gone, the days of legends.

  “Who?” Sion asked softly.

  “Who?”

  “Acta said, ‘Take her.’ Who?”

  “Why, his wife,” Cahl said. “Pepule. Ah. I can see why you’re interested. Acta isn’t your father, but Pepule is your mother, isn’t she?” He grinned, and gazed at Juna with that stone-hard intensity. “That will add spice. While I hump her I will think of you, little one.”

  Sion said coldly, “Pepule is with child.”

  “I know.” He grinned. “I like them that way. Those big bellies, no?” Again his hard, calculating gaze turned on Juna. Then he took a pinch of ground corn from her mortar and strode away to their mother’s hut.

  Dissatisfied, vaguely afraid, Juna left the men to their drinking. She walked out into the country with her grandmother, Sheb. Sheb, nearly sixty, moved with caution, but in her long life she had avoided injury and serious illness and stayed limber.

  The people lived on a high plateau. The land was dry, flat, all but featureless. Vegetation clung to the ground, deep-rooted, searching for water. There were streams and rivers, but they were trickles of waters that flowed between mighty banks; they seemed niggardly, starved, a relic of what had evidently passed away.

  Naked, carrying lengths of rope and small stone-tipped spears, the women moved from place to place, setting and checking traps for the small game that provided the staple of the people’s diet. They would have been astonished could they have glimpsed the mighty herds of giant herbivores that Jahna and her people had once followed, even though their folk tales talked of richer times in the past.

  “Why do the men drink beer?” Juna fretted. “It makes them ugly and stupid. And they have to go to that slithery Cahl. If they must drink beer, they should make their own. They would be just as stupid, but at least Cahl would keep away.”

  Sheb sighed. “It isn’t so simple. We can’t make beer. Nobody knows how, not even the shaman. It is a secret Cahl’s people keep to themselves.”

  “When the men are stupid they cannot hunt. All they think about is the beer. It is all they see.”

  She
b shook her head. “I won’t argue with you, child. My father never drank beer — we had never heard of beer in those days — and he was a fine hunter. Look, now. A rabbit is near.”

  Juna dutifully studied the bits of rabbit dropping, pressing them to see how fresh they were. She badly wanted to talk about Tori.

  But Sheb had her own agenda. “I remember when I was your age,” she was saying. “Once it rained as if the sky had split open, for day after day. The ground turned to mud, and we all sank in up to our knees. And water filled this valley here — not the muddy trickle you see now — all the way up the bank. See where the lip has been scoured?” And, yes, if she looked hard, Juna could make out how the bank had been eroded far above the current water level.

  But so what? Absently Juna rubbed her belly. Her grandmother’s tales of huge rain storms, a land turned to mud, the explosive blossoming of life that had followed, were like the fantastic visions of the shaman. They didn’t mean anything to her. What did rain and rivers matter compared to the growing lump inside her?

  Her grandmother slapped her head. Juna flinched, startled. Sheb scowled, making her wrinkles deepen. “It would pay you to listen to me, you foolish child. I remember how it was, the last time the rains came. I remember how we coped. How we moved to the higher ground. How we forded the river. All of it. Maybe I won’t live to see the rains come again as they did before, but maybe you will. And then all that will keep you alive is what I have told you today.”

  Juna knew she had a point. Old people were cared for deeply: Before Sheb’s own mother’s death, Juna had seen Sheb chew her food until soft and spit it into a bowl for her. In this society without writing, old people were libraries of wisdom and experience. And now she was determined to make her granddaughter listen.

  But today Juna was in no mood for a lesson in humility. She tried to stare back, defiant, resentful, but, before Sheb’s ferocious glare, she broke down. “Oh, Sheb—” The weeping came suddenly and easily; she rested her head on Sheb’s shoulder and let her tears fall to the arid ground.