Evolution

by Stephen Baxter

  Cahl saw her staring. “These are fields,” he said. “This is how we feed our children. See? You clear the ground. You plant the seed. You kill the weeds while the crops grow. You take your harvest.”

  She struggled to make sense of this; there were too many unfamiliar words. “Where is your shaman?”

  He laughed. “We are all shamans, perhaps.”

  They passed another open area — another “field,” as Cahl called it — where goats were penned by a fence of wooden stakes and bramble. When they saw Cahl and Juna approaching, the goats ran bleating to the fence, their heads lunging forward. They were hungry, Juna saw immediately. They had eaten all the grass in their enclosure, and they longed to be free, to go find food in the valley and the hills. She had no idea why the people kept them shut up like this.

  They reached the valley bottom. The grass petered out, giving way to churned-up mud that was thick with shit and piss — human waste, just dumped here. It must be like living on a huge midden, she thought.

  At last they reached the settlement itself. The huts were very solid and permanent, built on frames of tree trunks rammed into the muddy ground, and plastered over with mud and straw. They had holes in their roofs, from many of which smoke curled, even now in the middle of the day. Huts were huts. But there were many, many of them, so many she couldn’t even count them.

  And there were people everywhere.

  They wore the strange, tightly sewn, all-covering clothes that Cahl favored. They were all smaller than she was, men and women alike, and their dark skin was pocked and scarred. Many of the women carried huge burdens. Here was one small woman bent over under a great sack; the sack was tied to her forehead, and it looked like it must weigh more than she did. By contrast the men seemed to carry little beyond what they could hold in their hands.

  She had never seen so many people in her life, still less all crammed together in such a small space. Despite what she had glimpsed of the fields she still had no idea how such a dense knot of people could feed themselves; surely they must soon drive off all the game, devour all the edible vegetation in the area. And yet she saw butchered carcasses stacked outside one hut, grain baskets outside another.

  And there were many children here. Several trailed after Juna, plucking at her shift and gazing at her shining hair. Then that much at least was true: There really were more children here than her own community could ever afford to support. But many of the children had bent bones and pocked skin and browned teeth. Some of them were scrawny, even displaying the ominous potbellies of malnutrition.

  The men crowded around Cahl and Juna, jabbering in an incomprehensible language. They seemed to be congratulating Cahl, as if he were a hunter home with game. When the men leered at her she saw their teeth were bad, as bad as Cahl’s.

  Suddenly her nerve gave out. Too many people. She shrank back, but they followed her, pressing closer, and children plucked at her yellow hair, yelling. She found herself panicking, breathless. She longed for a glimpse of green, but there was no green, nothing but the shit brown of this dung heap of a place. The world spun around her. She fell, helplessly dumping Cahl’s meat in the dirt. She was aware of Cahl’s angry yell. But still children and adults clamored around her, prying, laughing.

  She came to herself slowly, reluctantly.

  She had been taken inside one of the huts. She was on her back, on the floor. She could see daylight poking through cracks and seams in the roof above her.

  And Cahl was on her again, thrusting, heavy. She could smell nothing but the beer on his breath.

  There were other people in the hut, moving in the dim dark, jabbering a language she couldn’t understand. There were many children, of various ages. She wondered if they were all Cahl’s. A woman came close. She was short, like the rest, scrawny, her face slack and lined, her black hair lying flat beside her face. She was carrying a bowl containing some liquid. She looked older than Juna -

  Cahl’s meaty hand clamped painfully around her jaw. “Watch me, you sow. Watch me, not her.” And he continued his thrusting, harder than before.

  At dawn the black-haired woman — whose name turned out to be Gwerei — came to rouse Juna with a kick to her backside. Juna climbed off the rough, filthy pallet she had been given, trying not to gag on air dense and laden with the stink of sweat and farts.

  The woman jabbered at Juna, pointing at the hearth. Then, irritated at Juna’s incomprehension, she stamped out of the hut. She returned with a fat day log that she threw on the fire. Pushing children out of the way, she uncovered a pit in the ground, which contained a mass of billowy white shapes. At first Juna thought they were fungi, perhaps mushrooms. But the woman bit into one of the masses, and broke up others, throwing handfuls to the clamoring children.

  She threw a chunk of the white stuff to Juna. Juna tried it cautiously. It was bland, tasteless; it was like biting into wood. And it was gritty, with hard bits inside that ground against her teeth. But she had eaten nothing since her last stop with Cahl on the high plain, and hunger gnawed. So she devoured the food as readily as the children did.

  It was her first mouthful of bread, though it would be many days before she learned its name.

  While they ate, Cahl snored on in his pallet. It seemed strange to Juna that he should choose to stay with the women, but there seemed to be no men’s hut here.

  When they had eaten, Gwerei took her out of the town, up the valley, and to the open spaces on the far side. They walked in silence, since they shared not a word of common language: Juna was trapped in a bubble of incomprehension. But she was relieved just to get out of the great anthill of people that was the town.

  Soon they were joined by more women, older children, a few men. They followed ruts worn into the ground by innumerable feet. Some of the women gazed at Juna curiously — and the men speculatively — but they seemed exhausted before their day had even started. She wondered where they were all going. Nobody was carrying any weapons, any spears or snares or traps. They weren’t even looking for spoor, tracks or dung, any signifiers that animals had been here. They didn’t even look around at the land they inhabited.

  At last she came to the open spaces she had glimpsed yesterday, the fields. Gwerei led her into one of these fields, where people were already at work. Gwerei handed her a tool, and began to jabber at her, miming, holding her fists together and scratching imaginary gouges in the air.

  Juna inspected the tool. It was like an ax, with a stone head fixed to a wooden handle by a binding of sinew and resin. But it was big, surely too heavy to use as an ax, yet the curved stone blade made it impractical to use even as a thrusting spear. As Gwerei yelled at her with increasing frustration, she just stared back.

  At last Gwerei had to show her. She bent over the dirt, clasping the tool, and stuck the blade deep into the ground. Then she began to walk backward, legs stiff, bent over, dragging the blade through the earth. She had made a furrow a hand’s length deep in the ground.

  Juna saw that other people were doing just as Gwerei had, dragging their curved axes through the ground. She remembered seeing people do this yesterday. It was so simple a task a child could have done it, with enough strength. But it was hard work. After engraving furrows just a few paces long they were all grunting, their faces slick with sweat and dirt.

  Still Juna had no idea why they were doing this. But she took the tool from Gwerei and rammed the blade into the ground. Then she bent as Gwerei had done and hauled the handle backward, until she had scraped a furrow just like Gwerei’s. One woman clapped ironically.

  Juna handed the tool back to Gwerei. “I’ve done that,” she said in her own language. “Now what?”

  The answer turned out to be simple. She had to do the same thing again, a little further on. And again after that. She, and the rest of the people here, had nothing to do but scrape these marks in the ground.

  All day.

  Where was the skill in this muck-scraping compared to even the simplest hunt, the setting of
a rabbit snare? Did these people have no minds, no spirits? But perhaps this was part of the magic that the shamans here used to make their heaps of food, the abundance that allowed them to gather in great maggoty swarms and litter the ground with children. And besides, she reminded herself, she was a stranger here, and she must learn Gwerei’s ways, not the other way around.

  So she bent to her dull, repetitive work. But before the sun had risen much higher, she longed to get away from this tedium, to be running on the high plain. And after a day of forcing her body — a machine exquisitely designed for walking, running, throwing — to endure this repetitive hard labor, the aches became so overwhelming that all she wanted was for it to stop.

  The next day, she was taken to another field, and put to the same dull plowing. And the next day was the same.

  And the day after that.

  It was agriculture: primitive, but agriculture. This new way of living had never been planned. It just emerged, step by step.

  As far back as Pebble’s time, even before true humans had emerged, people had been gathering the wild plants they favored and eliminating others that competed for resources. The domestication of animals had also begun accidentally. Dogs had learned to hunt with humans, and been rewarded for it. Goats had learned to follow human bands for the garbage they left behind — and the humans in turn learned to use the goats not just for their meat, but for their milk. For hundreds of thousands of years, there had been an unconscious selection of those plant and animal kinds most useful to humans. Now it had become conscious.

  It had begun in a valley not far from here. For centuries the people there had enjoyed a steadily warming climate, and a rich diet of fruit, nuts, wild grains, and wild game. But then there had been a sudden drier, colder spell. The forests had shrunk back. The sources of wild food had begun to vanish.

  So the people had focused their efforts on the grains they favored — the ones with big seeds that were easy to remove from the seed coats, and with nonshattering stalks that held all the seeds together — trying to ensure their growth at the expense of the less desirable plants around them.

  Peas were another early success. The pods of wild peas would explode, scattering the peas on the ground to germinate. People preferred the occasional mutants whose pods failed to pop because they were easier to gather. In the wild such peas would fail to germinate, but they flourished under human attention. Similar nonpopping varieties of lentils, flax, and poppies were also favorites.

  And so, by spreading the seeds of their preferred plants and eliminating those they did not favor, the people had begun to select. Very quickly the plants began to adapt. Within just a century, fatter-grained cereals, like rye, had begun to emerge. Some plants were favored for the large size of their seeds, like sunflowers, and others for the smallness of their seeds, like bananas, which became all fruit and no seed. Some genes that would once even have been lethal were now favored, like those for the nonpopping pea pods.

  The first rye growers had not settled down immediately. For a time they had still collected their wild staples alongside their thin harvests. The new fields had served as dependable larders, a hedge against starvation in difficult times: As with all innovations, farming had grown out of the practices that had preceded it.

  But the new cultivation had proved so effective that soon they devoted their lives to it. Most of what grew wild was inedible; nine-tenths of what a farmer could grow could be eaten. That was how these people were able to afford so many babies; that was what fed the great anthill heaping of the town.

  It was the most profound revolution in hominid living since Homo erectus had left the forest and committed themselves to the savannah. Compared to this phase shift, the advances of the future — even genetic engineering — were details. There would never be so significant a change again, not until humans themselves disappeared from the planet.

  But the farming revolution did not make Earth a paradise.

  Farming meant work: endless, bone-cracking drudgery every day. As the ground was cleared of everything except what people wanted to grow, humans had to do all the work that nature had once done for them: aerating the soil, fighting pests, fertilizing, weeding. Farming meant the sacrifice of your whole life — your skills, the joy of running, the freedom to choose what you would do — to the toil of the fields.

  It was not even that the food they so laboriously scraped from the ground was rich. While the old hunter-gatherers had enjoyed a varied diet with adequate amounts of minerals, proteins, and vitamins, the farmers took most of their sustenance from starchy crops: It was as if they had exchanged expensive, high-quality food for nutrition that was plentiful but poor in quality. As a result — and because of the relentless hard work — they had become significantly less healthy than their ancestors. They had worse teeth, and were plagued by anemia. Women’s elbows were wrecked by the constant work of grinding. Men suffered vastly increased social stress, resulting in frequent beatings and murders.

  Compared to their tall, healthy ancestors, people were actually shrinking.

  And then there were the deaths.

  It was true that the mothers here did not have to sacrifice their babies. Indeed, the women were encouraged to have children as rapidly as possible, for children fulfilled the endless demand for more laborers for the fields: By the age of thirty, many of the women were exhausted by the endless drain of nursing and caring for weaned infants.

  But where many were born, so did many more die. It did not take long for Juna to see it. Disease was rare among Juna’s folk, but it was not rare here, in this crowded, filthy place. You could almost see it spreading, as people sneezed and coughed, as they scratched weeping sores, as their diarrhea poisoned the water supply of their neighbors. And the myriad afflictions targeted the weakest, the oldest and youngest. Many, many children died, far more than among Juna’s folk.

  And there was barely a handful of people her grandmother’s age. Juna wondered what happened to all the wisdom when the old died so cheaply and so early.

  The days wore by, identical, meaningless. The work was routine. But then everything here was a routine, the same thing, day after day.

  Cahl continued to use her, most nights. He seemed to lack vigor, though. Sometimes he would come at her hard, pushing her down and ripping aside her shift, or pushing her on her face to take her from behind. It was as if he had to work himself up, to excite himself. But if he had taken too much beer, his pisser would not rise at all.

  He was a weak man, she realized. He had power over her, but she did not fear him. In the end even his taking of her had become routine, just part of the background to her life. She was relieved, though, that she couldn’t become pregnant with his brat — not while Tori’s child continued to grow inside her.

  One day, while she was straining to drag her stone plough across dry, rocky ground, sheep came blundering over a bluff, bleating noisily. Always ready for a break, the workers in the field straightened up to watch. They laughed as the sheep stumbled over the broken ground, nudging each other nervously and nuzzling in search of grass.

  But now there was a frenzied barking. A dog came tearing over the bluff, chased by a boy wielding a wooden staff. As the workers laughed, clapped and whistled, the boy and the dog began to chase the sheep, with comical incompetence.

  Gwerei was at Juna’s side. She peered into her baffled face. Then, not unkindly, she pointed at the sheep. “Owis. Kludhi.” She picked out the sheep with her finger, one by one. “Oynos. Dwo. Treyes. Owis.” And she nudged Juna, trying to get her to respond.

  Juna, her back aching, her hair matted, had had enough strangeness. “I’ll never understand.”

  But Gwerei, remarkably, stayed patient. “Owis. Kludhi. Owis.”

  And she began to speak to Juna, in her own tongue, but much more slowly and clearly than usual — and, to Juna’s shock, with one or two words of Juna’s language, presumably picked up from Cahl. She was trying to tell Juna something, something very important. />
  Juna subsided and listened. It took a long time. But gradually she pieced together what Gwerei was trying to tell her. Learn the language. Listen and learn. Because that is the only way you will ever get away from Cahl. Listen now.

  Reluctantly she nodded. “Owis,” she repeated. “Sheep. Owis. One, two, three—”

  And so Juna learned her first words in the language of Gwerei and Cahl, these first farmers: her first words in the language that would one day be called proto-Indo-European.

  As the days wore by, so her bump grew steadily. It began to hinder her work in the field, and her strength seemed drained. The other workers observed this, and some grumbled, though most of the women seemed to forgive Juna her slowing down.

  But she worried. What would Cahl do when the child was born? Would he find her so attractive without a swollen belly? If he turned her out, she would be in as bad a position as if she had simply taken her chances on the high plain — worse, perhaps, after months of bad diet and backbreaking work, in a place she neither knew nor understood. The worry grew into a gnaw that consumed her mind, just as the growing child seemed to consume her body’s strength.

  But then the stranger with the shining necklace came to the town.

  It was evening. She was shambling back from the fields as usual, mud-covered and exhausted.

  Cahl was making his way to the hut of the beer maker. Juna had glimpsed the great wooden vats inside the hut, where the beer maker churned domesticated grasses and other unidentifiable substances to make his crude wheat ale. The beer seemed to have little effect on Cahl’s people — not until they had consumed vast quantities of it — little, anyhow, compared to what it did to Acta and the others. No wonder it was such a useful trade good for Cahl: cheap for him, priceless to Acta.

  But this evening Cahl had with him a man — tall, as tall as she was, if not quite as lofty as some of the men of Juna’s folk. His face was shaven clean, and his long black hair was tied in a knot at the back of his head. He looked young, surely not much older than she was. His eyes were clear, alert. And he wore extraordinary skins, skins that had been worked until they were soft, carefully stitched and decorated with dancing animal designs in red, blue, and black. She was frightened by the thought of the hours of work that had been invested in such garments.