Evolution

by Stephen Baxter

  What now? He could slug her and take her back to the base camp. But this wasn’t a prey animal, a rabbit or a hare; it wasn’t some interesting specimen, like the huge half-way-flightless parakeet Sidewise had caught stalking the fringe of a stagnant pond. This was a person, no matter what she looked like. And, he reminded himself, those stretch marks told him she had at least one kid out there waiting for her.

  “Did I come all this way, across a thousand fucking years, to make the same mess of your life as I’ve made of mine? I don’t bloody think so,” he muttered. “Pardon me.” And without hesitating he leapt on her.

  It was another wrestling match. He got her pinned to the ground, face down, her arms under her, his buttocks in the small of her back. He used his Swiss Army knife to cut the snare wire, and prized the loop out of the bloody gouge it had dug. Then he used up more of his precious supplies to clean away the dirt and dried blood and pus with antiseptic fluid — he had to pick strands of brown hair out of the scabs — and to apply sealant and cream to the wound. Maybe she would leave the stuff on long enough for the wound to get itself disinfected.

  The moment he released her she was gone. He glimpsed a figure, upright and lithe, shimmering through the long grass toward the trees, limping but moving fast even so.

  It was already late afternoon. They weren’t supposed to be alone in the dark, away from base: Ahmed’s standing orders. He longed to follow the girl into the green mysteries of the denser forest. But he knew he must not. Regretfully he gathered up his gear and set off back to the base camp.

  Snowy was the last to join the group that evening.

  They had decided to settle close to a lake a few kilometers from the ruined town. The site was in the lee of a compact, cone-shaped hill — apparently artificial, maybe an Iron Age barrow, or maybe just a spoil heap of some kind.

  Ahmed made them gather round the stump of a fallen tree, where he sat, a bit grandly. Snowy wanted to tell the others of his encounter, of what he had found. But the mood wasn’t right. So he just sat down.

  Moon had grown increasingly withdrawn as the weeks had worn away; now she just sat cross-legged before Ahmed, her eyes averted. But she was the center of everything, as always, all the wordless maneuvering. Sidewise had his usual detached dreaminess, but he was sitting facing Moon, and Snowy saw how his gaze strayed over the curve of her hip, the centimeters of calf she showed above her boot. Ahmed himself sat beside the girl, raised up on his tree stump, as if he owned her.

  Bonner was the one whose lust for Moon showed most nakedly. He sat awkwardly, muscles tensed, with a great stripe of mud splashed across his face, a hunter’s camouflage marking. He looked like an animal himself, Snowy thought, as if the last bits of his training were barely holding him together.

  They were breaking up, Snowy saw, drifting apart, with great fault lines running through their intense little set of relationships. There was hardly anything left of the timid group of Navy fliers who had huddled in the ruined church that first night, chomping on their rations. They might kill each other over Moon, if Moon didn’t kill them first.

  And Ahmed, their leader, was aware of none of this. Ahmed, in fact, was smiling. “I’ve been thinking about the future,” he said.

  Sidewise gave a muffled groan.

  “I mean, the further future,” Ahmed said. “Beyond the next few months, even the next few years. However we get through the next winter, times are going to be hard for our children.”

  At the talk of children, Snowy cast a glance at Moon. She was glaring at her hands, her nested fingers.

  Ahmed said that during the industrialized period — and especially during the last few insane decades — mankind had used up all its accessible supplies of fossil fuels: coal, gas, oil. “The fossil fuels are probably forming again even now. We know that. But incredibly slowly. The stuff we burned up in a few centuries took around four hundred and fifty million years to form. But there will always be fuel for our descendants,” he said. “Peat. Peat is what you get when bog mosses, sedges, and other vegetation decompose in oxygen-starved wetlands. Right? And in some parts of the world peat-cutting for fuel continued right until the middle of the twentieth century.”

  “In Ireland,” Sidewise said. “In Scandinavia. Not here.”

  “Then we go to Ireland, or Scandinavia. Or maybe we’ll find it here. Conditions have changed a lot since we went into the cold sleep. Anyhow, if we don’t find peat we’ll find something else. We’ve inherited a burned-out world.” He tapped his temple. “But we still have our minds, our ingenuity.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Sidewise said explosively. “Ahmed, don’t you get it? We’re just a bunch of castaways — that’s it — castaways in time. For Christ’s sake, man, we only have one womb between us.”

  “My womb,” said Moon now, without looking up. “My womb. You insufferable prick.”

  “Bog iron,” Ahmed said smoothly.

  They all stared.

  Ahmed said, “You get iron oxide forming in bogs and marshes. When iron-rich groundwater comes into contact with the air, well, it rusts. Right, Sidewise? The Vikings used to exploit that stuff. Why don’t we?”

  As the bickering went on, Snowy’s gaze was drawn to the nearby woods, the shadowed green. Sidewise is right, he thought. We are here by accident, just a kind of echo. We are just going to fall apart, and get pulled down by the green like all the ruined buildings, and just disappear, adding our bones to the billions already heaped in the ground. And it won’t matter a damn. If he hadn’t known it before, known it in his gut, he was convinced of it now, having encountered the ape-girl. She is the future, he thought; she, with her bright lion’s gaze, her naked little body, her nimbleness and strength — her wordless silence.

  As they dispersed, Snowy took Sidewise to one side, and told him about the feral woman.

  Sidewise asked immediately, “Did you fuck her?”

  Snowy frowned his disgust. “No. I felt like it — I got a hell of a rod — but when I saw what she was really like, I couldn’t have.”

  Sidewise clapped him on the shoulder. “No reflection on your manhood, pal. Weena is probably the wrong species, that’s all.”

  “Weena?”

  “An old literary reference. Never mind. Listen. No matter what El Presidente over there says, we ought to find out more about these critters. That’s a hell of a lot more important than digging peat. We need to figure out how they are surviving here. Because that’s the way we are going to have to live too. Go find your girlfriend, Snowy. And ask her if she’d like a double date.”

  A couple of days after that, before Ahmed could implement his plans for rebuilding civilization, he fell ill. He had to retreat to his lean-to, dependent on the food and water the others brought him.

  Sidewise thought it was mercury poisoning, from the spoil heap by the camp. Mercury had been used for centuries in the making of everything from hats to mirrors to bug-control potions to treatments for syphilis. The ground was probably saturated with it, relatively speaking, and even now, a thousand years later, it was still leaching by various slow-dispersal routes into the lake, where it worked its way up the food chain to maximum concentration in the bodies of fish, and the mouths of the people who ate them.

  Sidewise seemed to think all of this was funny: that Ahmed, the great planner — the one who, among them all, had clung the longest and hardest to the expansionist dreams of the long-gone twenty-first century — had succumbed to a dose of poison, a lingering legacy of that destructive age.

  Snowy didn’t much care. There were far more interesting things in the world than anything Ahmed said or did.

  Like Weena, and her hairy folk of the forest.

  Snowy and Sidewise built a kind of blind, a lean-to liberally sprinkled with grass and green leaves, not far from where Snowy had first encountered the ape-girl Sidewise had christened Weena.

  Snowy glanced at Sidewise, stretched out in the blind’s shade. In the dense heat of this un-English summer, both
of them had taken to going naked save for shorts, an equipment belt, and boots. Sidewise’s skin, brown and smeared liberally with dirt, was as good a camouflage as anything invented by the hand of man. Only five or six weeks out of the Pit he was unrecognizable.

  “There,” hissed Sidewise.

  Slim gray-brown figures — two, three, four of them — coalesced out of the shadows at the edge of the forest. They took a few cautious steps out onto the open ground. They were naked, but they were slim and upright, and they carried something in their hands, probably their usual crude stone hammers and knives. Standing in a loose circle, their backs to each other, they peered around with sharp jerks of their heads.

  Sidewise being Sidewise, he had developed a story about where these diminutive hairy folk had come from. “Sewer kids,” he had said. “When the cities fell, who was going to last the longest? The scrubby little kids who were already in the drains and the sewers and living off the garbage. It might have been years before some of them even noticed anything had changed—”

  Now the hairies ran across the grassy meadow toward a slumped, fallen form. It was a deer, a big buck, that Snowy and Sidewise had brought down with a slingshot and dumped here in the hope of attracting the hairies out of their forest cover. The hairies converged on the carcass. They began to hack away at the joints where the hind legs were attached to the lower body. And as they worked in their intent silence, one of them was always on her feet, peering around, keeping guard.

  “That’s their way of working,” murmured Snowy. “Taking the legs — see?”

  “Quick and easy,” said Sidewise. “About the easiest bit of butchery you can do. Hack off a leg, then beat it back to the forest cover before something with bigger teeth than you comes along to make a contest of it. They are coordinated, even if they don’t speak. See the way they are taking turns to be look-out? They are pack hunters. Or scavengers anyhow.”

  Snowy wondered how come they were so cautious if Sidewise was right about there being no big predators around.

  “They look human but they don’t act it,” Snowy whispered. “You see what I mean? They aren’t like a patrol. They’re looking around like cats, or birds.”

  Sidewise grunted. “Those sewer kids must have had no culture, no learning. All they would have known was the sewers. Maybe that was why they stopped talking. In the sewers, maybe the cover of silence was more important than language.”

  “They lost language?”

  “Why not? Birds lose their flight all the time. To be smart costs. Even a brain the size of yours, Snow, is expensive; it eats a lot of energy from your body’s supply. Maybe this isn’t a world where being smart pays off as much as, say, being able to run fast or see sharply. It probably didn’t take much rewiring for language, even consciousness, to be shut down. And now the brains are free to shrink. Give them a hundred thousand years and they’ll look like australopithecines.”

  Snowy shook his head. “I always thought men from the future would have big bubble heads and no dicks.”

  Sidewise looked at him in the dark of the blind. “Being smart didn’t exactly do us a lot of good, did it?” he said sourly. He peered out at the hairies, rubbing his face. “Makes you think, looking at them, how brief it all was. There was a moment when there were minds there to understand: to change things, to build. Now it’s gone, evaporated, and we’re back to this: living as animals, just another beast in the ecology. Just raw, unmediated existence.”

  They watched a little longer, as the hairy, naked folk tore the limbs off the fallen deer and, cooperating and squabbling in turns, hauled the haunches back to the shelter of the forest.

  Then they returned to their base camp.

  Where they found that Bonner was ripping up the place because Moon had disappeared.

  “Where the fuck is she?”

  Moon had set up her own little lean-to, more solidly built and private than the others. Snowy had always thought that if she could have put on a door with a padlock she would have. Now everything was gone — the backpack Moon had made from a spare flight suit, her tools and clothes, her homemade wooden comb, her precious store of washable tampons.

  Bonner was rampaging through what was left, smashing apart the walls of the lean-to. Naked save for now-disintegrating shorts, with his bulked-up muscles and mud smeared over his face and chest and in his spiky hair, Snowy thought there was very little left of the timid young pilot he remembered looking after when they had first met, on assignment to a carrier in the Adriatic.

  Ahmed came out of his own lean-to, wrapped in a silvered survival blanket. “What’s going on?”

  “She’s gone. She’s fucking gone!” Bonner raged.

  Sidewise stepped forward. “We can all see she’s gone, you moron—”

  Bonner hit at him with a slashing blow. Sidewise managed to duck out of the path of the young pilot’s fist, but he was caught on the temple and knocked flat.

  Snowy ran forward and grabbed Bonner’s arms from behind. “For Christ’s sake, Bon, take it easy.”

  “That two-brained bastard has been fucking her. All the time he was fucking her.”

  Ahmed seemed utterly dismayed — as well he might, thought Snowy, for if Moon was gone, taking their only hope of procreation with her, all his grandiose plans were ruined before they had started. “But why would she go?” he moaned. “Why be alone? What would be the point?”

  Snowy said, “What’s the point of any of it? We’re all going to die here. It was never going to work, splot. All the bog iron in the world wouldn’t have made any difference to that.”

  Sidewise managed a grin. “I don’t think Bonner is worried about the destiny of mankind right now. Are you, Bon? All he cares about is that the only pussy in the world has vanished, without him getting any of it—”

  Bonner roared and swung again, but this time Snowy managed to hold him back.

  Ahmed sloped back to his shelter, coughing.

  When relative calm was restored, Snowy went to the rack where they had hung a row of skinned rabbits, and started preparing a meal.

  Before the first rabbit kebab was cooked over the fire, Bonner had made up a pack. He stood there, in the gathering twilight, facing Sidewise and Snowy. “I’m pissing off,” he said.

  Sidewise nodded. “You going after Moon?”

  “What do you think, shithead?”

  “I think she has good land craft. She’ll be hard to track.”

  “I’ll manage,” Bonner snarled.

  “Wait until morning,” Snowy said reasonably. “Have some food. You’re asking for trouble, going off in the dark.”

  But the reasoning part of Bonner’s head seemed to have switched off for good. He glared at them out of his mask of mud, every muscle tense. Then, his clumsy pack bumping on his back, he stalked away.

  Sidewise put another bit of rabbit on the fire. “That’s the last we’ll see of him.”

  “You think he’ll find Moon?”

  “Not if she sees him coming.” Sidewise looked reflective. “And if he tries to force her, she’ll kill him. She’s tough that way.”

  The rabbit was nearly done. Snowy pulled it off the fire, and began to push bits of it off the spit and onto their crude wooden plates. Every night he had divided up their food into five portions. Now, with Bonner and Moon gone, he divided it into three.

  He and Sidewise just looked at the three portions for a while. Ahmed was back in his shelter. Out of sight, out of mind. Snowy picked up the third plate and, with the blade of his knife, scraped off the meat onto the other two plates. “If Ahmed gets better, he can look after himself. If not, there’s nothing we can do for him.”

  For a time they chewed on their rabbit.

  “I’ll leave tomorrow,” Snowy said eventually.

  Sidewise didn’t reply to that.

  “What about you? Where will you go?”

  “I think I’d like to explore,” Sidewise said. “Go see the cities. London. Paris, if I can get across the Channel. Fin
d out more about what’s happened. A lot of it must have gone already. But some of it must be like the ruins of the Roman Empire.”

  “Nobody else will ever see such sights,” Snowy said.

  “That’s true.”

  Hesitantly, Snowy said, “What about after that? I mean, when we get older. Less strong.”

  “I don’t think that is going to be a problem,” Sidewise said laconically. “The challenge will be to pick how you want to go. To make sure you control at least that.”

  “When you’ve seen all you want to see.”

  “Whatever.” He smiled. “Maybe in Paris there will be a few windows left to smash. Thousand-year-old brandy to drink. I’d enjoy that.”

  “But,” Snowy said carefully, “there will be nobody to tell about it.”

  “We’ve always known that,” Sidewise said sharply. “From the moment we clambered out of the Pit into that ancient oak forest. It was obvious even then.”

  “Maybe to you,” Snowy said.

  Sidewise tapped his temple, where a healthy bruise was developing from Bonner’s punch. “That’s my big brain working. Churning out one useless conclusion after another. And all of it making no damn difference, none at all. Listen. Let’s make a pact. We’ll pick a meeting place. We’ll aim to rendezvous, every year. We may not make it every time, but you can always leave a message, something.”

  They picked a site — Stonehenge, on the high ground of Salisbury Plain, surely still unmistakable — and a time, the summer solstice, easy to track with the timekeeping discipline Ahmed had instilled in them. It was a good idea. Somehow it was comforting to Snowy, even now, to think that his future would have a little structure.

  When they had done eating, the dark was closing in. It wasn’t cold, but Snowy fetched himself a blanket of crudely woven bark and wrapped it around his shoulders. “Hey, Side. Was he right?”

  “Who?”

  “Bonner. Did you pork Moon?”

  “Too right I porked her.”