by Wil McCarthy
“Oh!” Nga said, as if something had just occurred to her. Gently, she reached out to grab Ba’s wrist, and with his acquiescence she lifted the hand that was holding the axe. “Mmm? Mmm?”
She pointed at the little seashell.
Orr peered and squinted.
“Mmm,” he said, nodding as he noticed the seashell. “Mmm.” He held out an axe of his own, which was made from some multicolored stone. Jasper or agate or some other quartz aggregate, Ba thought to himself. He had seen such stones before, but who would have thought to make an axe out of them?
“Mmm?” Ba asked, holding out his hand.
Ba and Orr exchanged axes. This was interesting, because while every axe Ba had ever seen had a fairly sharp point on it. Orr’s came to a line instead. Hand axes were a particular thing in Ba’s mind, and it literally never occurred to him to vary the design even slightly. But he could see at once that this rounded point would make the tool more effective at certain tasks, like beheading fish or shaping logs, and less effective at other tasks, like punching holes in gazelle bones to get the marrow out. However, Ba didn’t do that kind of thing very often, preferring to leave such chores to Mar and Cheek-click. And the elongated point probably worked a whole lot better for cutting down trees and splitting apart fibers from a jute plant, which were things Ba did fairly often.
How had this shape occurred to Orr? Was it like Ba, deciding to make a larger raft, because he needed one and could see the shape of it in his mind?
Ba daydreamed for a moment, about what it would be like if people could really share their thoughts with one another. Not just grunts and pointing and grimaces and smiles, and not just physical demonstrations of how to do something or make something, but actual complicated thoughts, like how he hoped Mar would start having babies soon, and how he liked his fish roasted with the skin on it, so it was crunchy on the outside but soft and flaky on the inside. If two people could share their minds, they could tell each other why and where and how a thing was done, or could be done, and wouldn’t that be interesting!
But the thought was fleeting, and vague. Ba’s ability to think about the past and future was impressive by primate standards, but his grasp of abstract concepts was slippery at best, and so in another moment he was simply admiring the color of the axe, and the heft of it in his hand.
“Mmm?” Orr said, spreading his arms. Shall we hug? Shall we be hand-axe buddies?
Ba consented, and the two of them shared an embrace.
“Aah!” said Nga, now spreading her own arms, revealing her naked breasts, projecting out from a hairy chest. She seemed jealous, like she was the one who’d discovered Ba, and so she should be the one hugging him.
And so Ba hugged her as well, and then Joh and Lih. Then Joh and Lih and Orr all hugged one another for good measure, and then Nga had to hug everyone, and then she hugged Ba again, then kissed him and turned around, offering her rump.
“Mmm?”
Ba laughed. That didn’t take long.
“Mmm,” he agreed, then also nodded at Lih. I’ll mate with you, too, if you like.
Lih also seemed to find it funny, and in another moment they were all laughing. Look! Everyone wants to have sex with the new guy!
Finally, things settled down, and Nga beckoned Ba to follow her. They brushed past Orr and down into the depression, where they found several young children playing. This tribe also had a little campsite set up there beside the stream, with woven reed mats laid out around the firepit. This was another thing Ba had never seen before, but grasped immediately: it kept their fur from getting damp and dirty while they slept. Hmm. And again, while Ba couldn’t count, he could see from the number of mats that this group was smaller than his own. Maybe that was why the women were eager to mate: the poor dears were bored.
Ba did what he could for them, as the sun set and the whole sky turned to fire.
Yeah.
And then the two fisherpeople returned with dinner, and since the tribe’s fire seemed to have gone out, Ba politely picked up a pair of dry sticks and said, “Mmm?” May I light the fire for you?
They agreed, and soon Orr was using a stone flake to peel strips of wood and build a fire nest, and Nga was gathering kindling, and Joh went off to get some driftwood from the beach. As he’d promised, Ba rubbed the sticks together. He was pretty good at starting fires, and although he had no particular conception of time, he was able to rub some little smoldering embers into the fire nest in only a couple of minutes, which was not bad at all.
And as the stars came out, they all ate fish together and groomed each other, and farted and laughed and drummed out rhythms on their thighs, and no Homo sapiens ever did attend a better party.
4.5
In the morning, Ba awoke early, drank from the stream, and waited for the others to stir. When they did, he set about asking them where he could find melons. He held an imaginary round shape in front of him, and bit into it with gusto.
“Mmm!” Nga said, comprehending. She pointed in a direction, and then with a series of gestures, managed to ask Ba whether he wanted her to show him personally to the spot where the melons grew.
“Mmm,” he agreed. He was having fun here, but he was worried about Mar. She’d looked so sad as he paddled away, and he wanted her to know he was still alive and well. Unfortunately, the only way to do that was to go back and tell her. His legs groaned at the thought—they were sore and tired from all of yesterday’s exertions—but a man had to do what a man had to do.
And so, yes, he would need melons.
Just to be safe, he went back and retrieved one of his fishing gaffs from the raft. He didn’t know what sort of dangerous animals might be in the area, and while a gaff wasn’t necessarily a better defense than a hand axe or a pointy stick, or even an ordinary rock plucked straight from the ground, he felt it looked more intimidating, perhaps even to an animal.
Nga came with him, and they mated again on the gritty sand beside the raft, before setting off in search of melons. These turned out to be not very far away, growing in a clearing in the sunlight a little ways upstream from the camp. They looked strange enough that Ba might not have recognized them on his own; they were smaller than the ones at his home, and instead of having smooth green rinds, they were coarse and sand-colored, blending in with the stony ground. Seeing his skeptical look, Nga took the hand axe from him—Orr’s hand axe—and cut one of the melons from its vine. She then sliced it open and handed half to Ba. Inside, it had yellow flesh and black seeds instead of red flesh and white seeds, but when he bit into it, he found it was sweeter, and had a pleasant flavor not quite like anything he’d ever tasted before.
“Mmm,” he said, smiling and nodding.
Nga proceeded to cut several more melons for him, and together they carried the load back to his raft. As she watched, he tied the spiderweb of twine back in place over the top of his melon basket, securing his food and water supply in place.
“Mmm,” he said again, thanking her for her help.
She looked at the twine with such curiosity that it finally occurred to Ba that she’d never seen such a thing before. Did her people not know how to make it? This actually would not be that surprising, as Kaa had been the only one in Ba’s tribe to know and pass on the art, and the only ones to really learn it from him were Ba and Mar. He realized such things must have been invented and forgotten and relearned from strangers, many times over as the generations ticked by. In fact, knowledge and ignorance of all kinds probably diffused in waves throughout the H. erectus population, with only a very few individuals creating any real innovation.
Individuals like Ba himself? Was Ba the very first person ever to think of journeying by water? He found the thought intriguing, but difficult, and it didn’t remain in his mind for more than a passing moment.
And on its heels came another fleeting thought: how peaceful these people were. Even when they were fighting, even when they were afraid for their lives, they seemed relatively unburdened by co
mplexity or worry. If they were the first primates with a complex sense of past and future, well, they didn’t spend a lot of energy on it.
Had some horrible mistake been made, somewhere along the way? Had humanity traded this for billions of lifetimes of pointless strife? For quantum computers and single-malt whiskey and ugly divorces? Ba had everything he would ever need in a square mile of coastline. Had this journey been a mistake? Was it the first step in a much larger, much stranger journey whose final destination was still unknown?
That thought really didn’t stick in his mind, though, and he shrugged it off as easily as he might flick a spider off his arm.
And then it was time to leave.
Aware of the technological shortcomings of Nga’s tribe, Ba handed her the fishing gaff. He figured she, or some other member of her family, could figure out how to copy the design, if only they had twine to wrap it with. So he also gave her one of his twine spindles. This would be harder to replicate, but Kaa had shown Ba several different ways to make twine. Brine-soaked jute fibers were the best, but almost any plants could be used, including ordinary grass. Braiding and splicing the fibers together was not much more difficult than building a fire nest, and he hoped that with an example to work from, Nga would be able to figure it out.
Besides, Ba himself would come back here soon to check up on her. Now that he knew the crossing was possible, there was no reason he couldn’t make it again—perhaps even more than once.
“Mmm?” he asked her.
“Mmm,” she confirmed, nodding.
Goodbyes were not customary among Ba’s people, so he did not walk around looking for any of his other new friends. He did hug Nga, however, and give her a friendly kiss on the lips. She hugged and kissed him back, and swatted his rump as he leaned over to push the raft out to sea.
At the water’s edge, he paused for a moment to wash his hand axe, and his hands, which were still sticky with melon juice. And then he was off.
However, this time he hadn’t given much thought to the wind and the tides. Distracted by Nga and a bit cocky from yesterday’s success, he simply walked out into the sea, pushing his raft through the surf and then mounting it, kicking hard against a headwind and a rising tide and, as he moved out into colder water, a stronger eastward current than he’d faced the last time. None of this was apparent to him at first, and to the extent that he noticed anything at all, it was how tired and sore his legs still were.
Still, by midmorning he began to realize he had not made much headway. The land behind him hadn’t shrunk as much as it should have, and the land ahead remained far off and shrouded in haze. His first response was to kick harder, but this wasn’t particularly sustainable. Once he began to tire out, his second response was to grow increasingly afraid. What if he couldn’t find his way back? Looking across at the shoreline, he didn’t even know which beach he should be aiming for, and if the current carried him too far he’d be facing a very long swim to reach any land at all.
Frustrated, he pulled up onto the raft for a rest and a quick brunch of melons. The salty sea air was cold against his fur, and he realized the wind was against him, so for both of these reasons he instinctively flattened himself against the raft for a short while, until he felt ready to plunge back into the water again.
But then he saw the fin: a gray triangle slicing through the water like a flint blade. Over a period of minutes it circled the raft twice at long range, before spiraling in almost close enough to touch. Ba was only dimly aware that other animals might be conscious beings like himself, so he didn’t attribute much malice or even agency to this behavior, but he did understand very clearly that this was a hungry fish, investigating the raft (and Ba) as a possible meal.
Leaning over, he could see the outline of the fish through the blurry water. It was much too large for him to catch and eat, but at the same time it seemed much too small to eat the raft. Perhaps it was after Ba himself? No doubt he still reeked of the guts and blood of the fishes he’d eaten last night, and perhaps during his swim he’d laid down a scent trail of coppery hemoglobin and fishy trimethylamine that the shark had followed. In any case, the thing was easily big enough to take a fatal bite out of Ba, who could not and would not go back in the water until this threat had been dealt with.
He tried reaching out and poking the dorsal fin with his remaining fishing gaff. Unfortunately the shark was too far away for him to reach. He tried poking with the twine spindle / spare log, and this worked a little better, since the log had slightly longer reach. However, the ends of the log were rounded, and did not seem to cause the shark more than momentary distress.
So, thinking furiously, he lashed the gaff to the spindle, double-checking and triple-checking the knots before jabbing the whole assembly at the shark’s dorsal fin, and the sensitive gills just below and in front. That worked, and the shark thrashed away in confusion.
However, in another minute it was back again, and he had to jab it even harder to get the same response. It returned again, and still again, until Ba could see it bleeding from its gills. He jabbed it harder and harder, leaning out farther and farther over the water. And then the unthinkable happened: he lost his grip on the spindle as the shark wrenched away from him, and it fell, with the gaff still lashed to it, into the waves. He reached out for it, but it was drifting away, and there was no way he was going in after it.
Fortunately, the shark chose that moment to vanish from sight. Ba had no idea how deep the ocean was, but he certainly thought there was enough room down there for it to be hiding, following along underneath the raft somewhere. Noon came and went, and it was a good long while after that—twenty minutes or so—before the fear of getting lost at sea began to outweigh the fear of being eaten.
Finally, finally, he lowered himself back into the water and resumed kicking. The wind had died down by this time, and he was able to get clear of the area and, he hoped, outrun the shark and any of its friends and family that might be following along with it. The fear made him strong, and he was able to reach the midway point of the crossing without tiring noticeably, and then to keep on going.
However, another problem eventually became apparent: all his stabbing and jostling had loosened the lashings of the raft, which had begun to flex along with the waves that passed under it. This was not good. It meant that at least one of his cross-braces had come undone, and was no longer stiffening and stabilizing the structure. Sighing nervously, he climbed back up onto the raft and did what he could, hunting for the ends of the loose strands and threading them back around the logs. This was normally accomplished on dry land, with full visibility, and with the option of flipping the raft over multiple times as he worked on it. Doing it blind and wet and rolling in the waves was something entirely new. One of the strands broke as he was tugging on it, and then broke again as he tried to splice it, and finally floated out of his reach and drifted away on the current.
In the end, the best he could do was sacrifice one of the outer logs of the raft, pulling it up onto the deck as cargo and using the liberated lashings to reinforce the rest of the raft. He had lost the forward stabilizing bar, so while he had a reasonably firm aft end to grab onto, the forward part of the raft was loose and floppy and kept trying to splay itself out like the spreading fingers of a hand.
Sighing again, he slipped back into the water and resumed kicking, his body afire with nervous energy. He needed to get back to land as quickly as possible, but the harder he kicked, the more he seemed to be straining the lashings!
As the afternoon wore on, he had to climb aboard several more times to tighten things down, until finally he ate up the last of his melons and tossed away the nest that had held them, using its lashings to hold the front of the raft together, sparing only enough string to tie down Orr’s hand axe. Things were better after that.
And yet, while the hills and beaches of home were drawing ever closer, he had to angle hard against the current, and he began to realize he was not going to make it ashore befor
e sunset. This filled him with fresh terror, because the night sea was full of mysterious lights and sounds, and slimy things that wrapped and grabbed and bit. Ba’s people almost never went swimming at night.
For a while he was propelled by fright, and for a while longer he coasted on the realization that he was almost there. He could even see little trickles of smoke rising up here and there, possibly from human encampments! But then the sun was igniting the clouds, and light was streaming through the gaps in the sky, and the vast blue expanse was turning yellow and orange and red, and finally purple.
Darkness and exhaustion caught him at almost exactly the same time. He stopped kicking. He breathed heavily, and then deeply, wondering what to do. His legs were nothing more than lengths of floppy twine, and the surf zone was still so far away, and as the light failed he could no longer even tell the difference between beaches and rocks. If he managed to make it to shore, would he be smashed to death on a reef?
He began seriously considering the idea of heaving his body up onto the raft and just spending the night there, letting the current take him wherever it was headed. It was a bit like death, that idea, and yet it contained enough hope to be seductive.
But he was so close to his goal! He scanned the coastline, and to his surprise he saw a pinpoint of orange light. A campfire? Something to aim toward? He didn’t know how big it was, or how far away, but it gave him hope of a different sort, and so he began kicking again, ignoring the protest of his muscles and the pounding of his heart.
He kicked for longer than he thought was possible, and then he kicked some more, and finally he was able to see the fire clearly enough to make out the individual logs that were burning. Someone had built and ignited a smoky cone of sapling trunks, each about the size of his raft timbers, and indeed he could make out a human figure on the beach, lowering yet another sapling onto the cone and then dashing away into the darkness.
