As she climbed out of the shallow bowl it wasn’t long before Remembrance came to another obstacle.
There were trees here — twisted, stubborn-looking trees — and termite mounds, and broad, low ant colonies, scattered like statues over an otherwise dry and lifeless plain. It was not a forest — it wasn’t crowded enough for that — it was more like an orchard, with the individual trees well spaced, surrounded by their little gardens of termite mounds and ant nests. These were borametz trees, the new kind. The orchard stirred deep, instinctive feelings of unease in Remembrance. Something inside her knew that this was not the kind of landscape within which hominids had evolved.
But this stark landscape of trees and termites was another barrier across her path, stretching to left and right as far as she could see. And, as the sun began its swift descent to the horizon, she was growing ever thirstier and hungrier.
Tentatively she walked forward.
Something tickled her foot. She yelped and jumped back.
She had disturbed a double line of ants. They were walking to and from a nest — she could see the holes in the ground — along a trail that led to the broad roots of one of the trees. She crouched down and began to swipe at the ants with her cupped palms. She scooped up more dust than insects, but she managed to cram a few of the ants into her mouth and crunched the gritty goodies. More ants clambered around her feet, intent on their task, oblivious to the sudden fate of their fellows.
The tree that was the destination of these ants was unspectacular: It was low and squat, with a thick, gnarled trunk, branches coated with small round leaves, and broad roots that spread across the ground before plunging into it like digging fingers.
Remembrance walked up and inspected the borametz tree skeptically. No fruit clung to its low branches. There were what looked like hard-shelled nuts growing in clusters from the base of the trunk, close to the roots of the tree. But there were very few of the nuts, less than a dozen. When she tried to prize them off, she found they were bound too strongly for her fingers, and the shells were too tough for her teeth. She pulled off a few leaves and chewed them experimentally. They were bitter and dry.
She gave up, dropping the last of the leaves, and made her way to a more promising food source. The nearest termite mound was as tall as she was, a great rough cone of hardened mud. She went back to the tree to look for a twig. She’d done a little termite-fishing in the past, though she was not as good as Capo had been. She was not even as expert as chimps had been in the age of man. But she might be able to get enough of the squirming goodies to allay her hunger -
She glimpsed a lunging head, incisors like blades scything through the air. Rat. She leapt upward, reaching for the branches of the borametz. The branches were narrow, tangled, and hard to grasp. But she forced her way into them, for they were all the cover she had.
It was a mouse-raptor: one of the colony that had herded the posthuman elephantines to the lake. Squealing its high-pitched rage the raptor reared up on its huge hind legs, slashed at the lower foliage with its blood-stained incisors, and rammed the borametz’s trunk with its massive skull.
Young, restless, inquisitive, the raptor had never hunted this kind of animal. Tracking Remembrance this far had been a good game. But now the raptor had played enough, and had become curious about how she would taste.
The borametz’s gnarled bark scraped Remembrance’s skin painfully. The raptor couldn’t reach up into the branches. But under the battering of its huge head the whole tree shook, and Remembrance knew she would soon fall, like a piece of fruit. Growing frantic, she squirmed through the branches, trying to get further away from the raptor.
But the branches of the borametz were fragile and easily snapped. They had evolved that way, to discourage birds, bats, and climbing mammals from trying to make a living here.
The branch under her belly gave way suddenly. She fell through the air and hit the ground, but the dirt collapsed under her in a cloud of dust.
Shocked, she fell through a further body-length, landing hard. Winded, she lay on her back. She looked up at a patch of sky and the head of the raptor, framed by a ragged, broken roof of packed earth.
And then the surface beneath her gave way in turn. She fell again, followed by dust and chunks of earth. She landed hard, once again, deeper still. Rubble fell across her face, clogging her mouth and nose and eyes.
There was a smell like milk: milk laced with urine and feces. Something swarmed over Remembrance’s belly — something small, but heavy and hot and hairless. She grabbed blindly. She found herself clutching a torso, naked, slithery, moist. Arms and legs beat at her feebly. It was like holding a hairless baby.
But now one of those little hands reached her chest, and claws sliced into her skin. She yelled and hurled the creature away. She heard it land with a thump, and slither away into the dark.
But they were all around her — she heard them in the dark, sliding and rustling, saw them in the indistinct light.
Mole people. That was how they seemed. They had loose, fleshy skin that hung in folds around their necks and bodies. They were hairless: Their heads were bald, their pink scalps wrinkled, and they lacked eyelashes and eyebrows. Their ears were small, vestigial; their noses had pulled forward into snouts. They even had whiskers. And they had no eyes: There were only layers of skin covering the sockets where their eyes had been.
They had the arms and legs and torsos and heads of people. But they were all small, none of them larger than a child among her own kind, and yet many of them were adults. She saw breasts and functional penises on those small bodies.
Blind or not, they were flinching from the light. They swarmed away, disappearing into tunnels cut into the ground. The nails of their hands were shovel-like claws, equipped for digging. One touch of those claws had left deep furrows in Remembrance’s shoulder.
She was in a nest, a nest of people who squirmed and burrowed. She screamed, driven by a deep horror of these distorted posthumans, a horror she couldn’t understand, and she reached up toward the light.
And found herself staring straight into the eyes of the mouse-raptor. It hissed and braced to leap.
She hurled herself into an empty tunnel.
The walls were packed hard and worn smooth by the passage of many, many squirming bodies, and she was immersed in the characteristic stink of milk and piss. The tunnels had been built by the mole folk to take their own slim, scrabbling little bodies, and they were too small for Remembrance. She had to crawl on her belly, dragging herself along with arms and legs that soon ached painfully. It was a nightmare of enclosure.
But there was light. Narrow chimneys snaked to the surface. Thin, angled, they were intended to allow the passage of air while excluding any predator. But enough light diffused down to give her partial impressions of what she was passing through.
Tunnels, branching everywhere, a whole network of them. She could hear echoing spaces beneath and around her, chambers and tunnels and alcoves branching away forever. She caught occasional glimpses of the mole folk — a scrabbling limb or retreating rump, or smoothed over eye sockets gazing blindly.
Fear and dread filled her mind. But she had no choice but to go on.
Without warning she fell through a thin wall, and tumbled through into a crowded chamber. Babies instantly swarmed over her, biting and scratching.
This large chamber was crowded with children, miniature versions of the adults she had first glimpsed. The place stank overwhelmingly of blood and shit and milk and vomit. Struggling, she pushed the babies away. Almost all of them were female. Their soft, hot little bodies were somehow even more repulsive than the adults’. She turned and tried to clamber back up to the tunnel from which she had fallen.
But now adults came tumbling out of the tunnel. These newcomers did not retreat, as had those she had first encountered. These mole folk were soldiers, come to protect the birthing chamber from the intruder.
The first of the soldiers leapt at her, its digging c
laws extended. Remembrance raised her arm to protect her throat. Under the mole creature’s soft weight she fell back into the wriggling heap of infants.
The soldier was an adult, a female. But her breasts were as tiny as a child’s, her pudenda undeveloped. She was sterile. Nevertheless, squirming, biting, and scratching, she fought as ferociously as if her own children were at risk.
Remembrance might have succumbed to the soldier’s assault, but she got in a lucky kick. The heel of her foot caught the soldier just below her breastbone. The little creature went flying back, colliding with those who were trying to follow her, so they dissolved into a wriggling mass of limbs and claws.
Dimly making out a tunnel mouth on the far side of the chamber, Remembrance hurled herself that way. She went on all fours, wading through mewling infants.
But still the soldiers pursued her. She struggled on through the tunnels, selecting branches at random. She could not tell if she were climbing upward or deeper into the ground. But for now nothing mattered but to flee.
She broke through another wall, fell, landed on something hard, like a heap of rocks. No, not rocks — they were nuts, big heavy nuts, the nuts of the borametz tree. Stumbling further, she found an immense heap of seed and roots. This huge chamber was crammed full of food.
Still the soldiers came, swarming, snuffling.
She leapt to the far side of the chamber and dug herself in against the wall, behind a pile of the heavy seeds. She picked up nuts and hurled them as hard as she could. She could hardly miss, and she was rewarded by the crack of the heavy shells on those eyeless heads. There was whimpering and confusion as the front line of the soldiers pushed back into those who followed, trying to get away from this missile-throwing demon.
But not all the soldiers retreated. Several stayed at the mouth of the tunnel, hissing and spitting at her.
Remembrance, exhausted and battered, really didn’t care. She couldn’t get out of here, but the soldiers couldn’t get to her either. She stopped hurling the nuts.
She smelled dampness. She found a place in the earth wall behind her where a thin tree root pushed through. She had broken the root, and now it was dripping a thin, watery sap. She clamped the root to her mouth and began to suck down the sap. It was sweet, and it trickled over her parched throat. She found some tubers under the nut pile. In the near dark, she bit into sweet flesh, sating her hunger.
She lay down over what was left of her stolen roots, with heavy nuts grasped against her chest. Soon the hissing of the impotent soldiers seemed no more disturbing than the noise of a distant rainstorm. Her energy drained, shocked, bewildered, she actually dozed.
But there was movement in the chamber, scrabbling, slithering. Reluctantly she poked her head above the barrier of nuts. She saw mole folk moving around the chamber, but these were not soldiers. They seemed to have forgotten she was here. They were picking up nuts and passing them out of the chamber, into the tunnel entrance. She had no idea what they were doing. She didn’t have the intellectual capacity even to formulate the question. All that mattered was that they were no threat to her.
She slumped back into her improvised nest and, nibbling on a bit of root, fell asleep.
The mole folk’s underground way of life had started as a response to the aridity of this place — that and the usual ferocious predation. Even the rats couldn’t get you if you burrowed in the ground.
Of course there had been prices to be paid. People had shrunk, generation by generation, the better to fit into the growing complexes of burrows. And over time bodies had been shaped by the restrictions of tunnel life: useless eyes were lost, nails became digging claws, body hair evaporated save for vibrissae, whiskers, which sprouted from lengthening muzzles, the better to help them feel their way in the dark.
The aridity had also promoted cooperation.
The mole folk lived off roots and tubers, riches buried in the ground. But in the dryness the tubers grew large and widely spaced. It was better for the plants that way, because big tubers did not desiccate so easily. A solo mole person, however, burrowing away at random, was likely to starve long before stumbling across the scattered bounty. But if you were prepared to share what you found, then having many colony members digging in all directions brought a more likely chance of success for the group as a whole.
All posthumans were social, like their ancestors, but they specialized in the way they had developed that sociality. These mole folk had taken sociality about as far as you could go. They came to live like social insects, like ants or bees or termites. Or perhaps they were like naked mole rats, the peculiar hive-dwelling rodents that had once infested Somalia, Kenya, and Ethiopia, now long extinct.
This was a hive. There was no conscious mind at work here in the hive. But then consciousness wasn’t necessary. The hive’s global organization emerged from the sum of the interactions of its members.
Most of the inhabitants of the colony were female, but only a few of those females were fertile. These “queens” had produced the infants Remembrance had stumbled upon in the birthing chamber. The rest of the females were sterile — indeed they never entered puberty — and their lives were devoted to the care not of their own children, but of those of their sisters and cousins.
For the genes it made sense, of course. Otherwise it would not have happened. The colony was one vast family, bound together by inbreeding. By ensuring the preservation of the colony, you could ensure that your genetic legacy was transmitted to the future, even if not directly through your own offspring. In fact, if you were sterile, that was the only way you could pass on your genes.
More sacrifices. As the bodies of these colony people had shriveled, so had their brains. You didn’t need a brain. The hive would take care of you — rather as the mouse-raptors took care of the elephant folk they farmed. There were better things to be done with your body’s energy than fuel an unnecessary brain.
And, with time, the mole folk were even giving up that most precious of all mammalian inheritances: hot-bloodedness itself. As they rarely ventured out of their burrows, the mole folk did not need such expensive metabolic machinery — and a cold-blooded scout cost less food than a hot-blooded one. It was done without sentiment. With time, the colony folk would grow smaller yet, smaller than any hot-blooded mammal’s design could maintain. In another few million years these mole folk would swarm like tiny lizards, competing with the reptiles and amphibians who had always inhabited the microecology.
So the mole folk scuttled through their spit-walled corridors, their whiskers twitching, fearful and ignorant. But in their dreams their residual eyes, covered by flesh, would flicker and dart as they dreamed strange dreams of open plains, and running, running.
She lost track of time. Suspended in the suffocating heat of the chamber, she slept, ate roots and tubers, sucked water from the tree roots. The mole folk left her alone. She was in there for days, not thinking, with no impulse to act save to eat, piss, shit, sleep.
At last, though, something disturbed her. She woke, looked up drowsily.
In the dim, diffuse light, she saw that mole folk were clambering into the chamber, and out again through a narrow passageway in the roof. They moved in a jostling column, the flaccid skin on their pale bodies crumpling as they pressed against each other, their whiskers twitching, clawed hands scrabbling.
Though the mouse-raptor and other dangers lingered at the back of her mind, Remembrance found herself longing for openness — for a glimpse of day, for fresh air, for green.
She waited until the mole folk had passed. Then she clambered over the low heapings of roots and pushed her way into the narrow breach in the roof.
It was a kind of chimney that led up toward a crack of purple-black sky. The sight of the sky drove her on, and she wedged her body ever more tightly into the narrow, irregular chimney, scrabbling at the dirt with her hands and feet, knees and elbows, forcing her chest and hips through gaps that seemed far too small for them.
At last her he
ad broke above ground level. She took in great gulps of fresh air and immediately felt invigorated. But the air was cold. The twisted forms of the borametz trees occluded a star-laden sky. It was night, the most natural time for the mole folk to venture to the surface. She forced her arms out of the hole, got her hands onto the surface, and with a tree-climber’s strength she pushed herself upward, prizing her body out of the chimney like a cork from a bottle.
The mole folk were everywhere, running on hind legs and knuckles, snuffling, shuffling, and squirming. But their movement was orderly. They moved in great columns that wound through the termite heaps and ant nests, to and from the borametz trees. They were picking off the nuts that grew in clusters at the roots of the trees, nuts that were sometimes as large as their heads. But they did not seem to be trying to break them open, to get at their flesh. They weren’t even taking them into their underground stores. In fact, she saw now, they were actually bringing nuts up from the underground chambers.
They were taking the nuts, one at a time, out to the fringe of the borametz grove. There workers dug into the dirt, scattering the thin grass to make little pits into which the nuts were dropped and buried.
Each borametz was the center of a symbiotic community of insects and animals.
Symbioses between plants and other organisms were very ancient: The flowering plants and the social insects had actually evolved in tandem, one serving the needs of the other. And it was the social insects, the ants and termites, who had been the first to be co-opted by the new tree species’ reproductive strategies.
Every symbiosis was a kind of bargain. Attendants, insect or mammal, would remove the borametz trees’ seeds from their root bases, but they would not devour them. They would store them. And when conditions were right they would transport them to a place suitable for planting, usually at the fringe of an existing grove, where there would be little competition with established trees or grasses. And so the grove would grow. In return for their labors the attendants were rewarded with water: water brought up even in the most arid areas from deep water tables by the borametz’s exceptionally deep-growing roots.
Evolution Page 69
