Evolution Read online

  Sharks had already been the ocean’s top predators for three hundred million years. They had endured through the great extinctions, while families of land predators had come and gone. They had seen off competition from new classes of animals, some much younger, like the true fish. Over that vast period of time, the sharks’ body design had barely modified, for there was no need.

  The shark was relentless, unable to be deflected by guile, prepared to keep on attacking as long as its senses were appropriately stimulated. It was a machine designed for killing.

  The shark could sense the great mass of dead meat drifting at the heart of this raft, but it could also hear the scurrying of live animals on its surface. The dead thing could wait.

  Time to attack. It went in headfirst, its jaws open. The shark had no eyelids. But to protect its eyes, it rolled them back, so that they turned white, in the last instant before it struck.

  Patch was the first to see the approaching fin, to glimpse the white torpedo body gliding through the water toward the raft, to look into the white eyes. She had never seen such a thing before, but her instincts yelled that this sleek form spelled trouble. She ran over the loose foliage to the raft’s far side.

  The other anthros were panicking. The two crowders were squalling like tiny birds, running and leaping this way and that. Only the potbelly sat placidly on its branch, munching another handful of leaves.

  Scrap, separated from her mother, didn’t react.

  Patch was terrified. She had expected her infant to follow her to the far side of the raft. But the infant hadn’t seen the approaching peril. A human mother would have been able to visualize her child’s point of view, understand that the child might not be able to see everything she saw. That transference of understanding was beyond Patch; in that respect, just like Noth, she was like a very young human child herself, imagining that every creature in the world saw what she saw, had the same beliefs she did.

  The shark rammed its blunt nose up through the loose foliage. To Roamer this eruption of a gaping mouth from under the world was a nightmarish vision. She hooted and ran helplessly, unable to escape the raft’s confines.

  The infant was lucky. As the raft shuddered under the shark’s assault she lodged in an angle of branch and trunk. Her mother lurched across the spinning raft, leaping over the gaping hole the shark had ripped, and snatched up the child.

  But the shark came again. This time it drove its wedge-shaped nose between two of the great trunks that formed the raft’s crude structure. The trunks separated, a great lane of leaf-strewn water opening up between them. One of the crowders fell, squeaking, into the widening gap.

  The shark’s mouth was like a cavern opening up before it. The crowder’s pinprick mind was snuffed out in a second. The shark was barely aware of taking the tiny warm morsel. Its work was barely begun.

  The anthros screamed and ran to the edge of the raft, getting as far from the rift as they could — but they cowered back from the desolate ocean beyond.

  Whiteblood saw that the fat, complacent potbelly sat where she had always sat, on her leafy branch, that ridiculous red swelling blazoned across her chest — even though the shark’s vandalism had opened up the ocean right before her. In this instant of ultimate stress, new circuits closed in Whiteblood’s inventive mind. It was a chain of logic beyond all but the brightest of his kind. But then, on average, every generation of anthros was just a little brighter than the last.

  Whiteblood took a flying leap. Both his feet rammed into the potbelly’s back. She was pitched precipitately into the sea.

  This fat struggling creature was what the shark had been waiting for. It bit into its prey, in the middle of its torso. The shark’s whole body flexed as it shook the potbelly, and its jagged-edged teeth tore a lump out of the hapless creature. Then, closing through a cloud of diffusing blood, it waited for its victim to bleed to death.

  The potbelly was utterly bewildered, suddenly immersed in water, overwhelmed by stunning pain. But her brain flooded with chemicals, and the centers of her functional mind closed down, granting her a sort of peace in this bloody darkness.

  Whiteblood sat panting over the scene of his assault, where nothing remained of the potbelly but a pile of thin, ill-smelling shit, and handfuls of crushed leaves. Gradually the gap in the raft closed, as if it were healing itself. The anthros cowered, too stressed even to groom.

  And the sun climbed down into the western sky, in the direction they helplessly sailed.

  III

  Days and nights, nights and days. There was no noise save the creaking of the branches, the soft lapping of the wavelets.

  The nights revealed a crushing sky from which Roamer wanted to cower.

  But the light of day, under the glaring sun or gray lids of cloud, showed nothing but the elemental sea. There was no forest, no land, no hills. She could smell nothing but salt, and her ears brought her no calls of birds or primates, no herbivorous lowing. The river’s outflow had dispersed now into the greater ocean, and even the other fragments of debris washed down by that torrential storm had dispersed, sailing over the horizon to their own mindless destinies.

  The raft itself was diminished.

  The anthracothere corpses stuck in the branches of the mango tree had long since slithered away. The last crowder had gone too. Perhaps it had fallen into the sea. The great indricothere had swollen as the bacteria of its huge gut ate their way out toward the light. But the invisible mouths of the sea had been at work on the indricothere, eating into it from beneath. As its meat was steadily stripped away, the huge corpse had imploded, at last sliding beneath the sea.

  The anthros had long since eaten all the fruit.

  They tried to eat the tree’s leaves, and at first they would be rewarded at least by a mouthful of pleasing moisture that would, for a few heartbeats, ease their thirst. But the tree, uprooted, was dead, and its remaining leaves were shriveling. And, unlike the wretched potbelly, the anthros could not digest such coarse fare, and they lost still more fluid in the watery shit that erupted from their backsides.

  Roamer was a small animal built for a life in the nourishing embrace of the forest, where food and water were always plentiful. Unlike a human, whose body was adapted to survive long periods in the open, her body carried very little fat, a human’s main fuel reserve. Things got bad quickly. Soon Roamer’s saliva became thick and tasted foul. Her tongue clung to the roof of her mouth. Her head and neck were very painful, for her skin was shrinking as it dried. Her voice was cracked, and she seemed to have a hard, painful lump in her throat that wouldn’t dislodge no matter how many times she tried to swallow. She and the other anthros would have suffered even more, in fact, if not for the overcast skies that mostly spared them from the glare of the sun.

  Sometimes Roamer dreamed. The dead mango would suddenly sprout, its roots reaching out like primate fingers to bury themselves in the unforgiving ocean-soil, the leaves would grow green and wave like grooming hands, and fruit would bloom, huge clusters of it. She would reach for the fruit, even crack it and bury her face in the clear water that mysteriously filled each husk. And here would come her mother and her sisters, fat and full of vigor, ready to groom her.

  But then the water would evaporate, as if drying in the harsh sun, and she would find she was gnawing nothing more than a bit of bark or a handful of dead leaves.

  Patch came into estrus.

  Whiteblood, as the top male of this little lost community, was quick to claim his rights. With nothing else to do and nowhere to go, Whiteblood and Patch coupled frequently — sometimes too often, and the bout would be a perfunctory matter of a few dry thrusts.

  In normal times subordinates like the brothers would probably have been able to mate Patch in these early days of her estrus. Whiteblood, with plenty of potential mates to choose from, would have excluded them only when Patch’s peak of fertility approached and the best chance of impregnating her arrived.

  This would have been in Patch’s interests
too. Her swelling was there to advertise Patch’s fertility to as many males as possible. For one thing, the resulting competition kept the quality of her suitors high without requiring any effort from her. And if all the males in the group mated with her at some time, none of them could be sure who exactly was the father of an infant — so any male tempted to murder an infant to speed up a female’s fertility cycle ran the risk of killing his own offspring. The swellings, her very public estrus, were thus a way for Patch to control the males around her at minimal cost to herself, and to reduce the risk of infanticide.

  But on this tiny raft there was only one adult female, and Whiteblood wasn’t about to share. Crest and Left looked on, sitting side by side, chewing on leaves, their comical erections sticking out of their fur. They could stare all they liked at Patch’s refulgent swelling. But every time either of them approached Patch, let alone touched her for the most tentative grooming, Whiteblood would fly into a fury, displaying and attacking the perpetrator.

  As for Roamer, she would always be subordinate to Patch, always a stranger. But in these stripped-down conditions she had quickly grown as close to Patch as to one of her own sisters.

  While Whiteblood and Patch were coupling, Roamer would often take Scrap. After the first few days Scrap had accepted Roamer as an honorary aunt. The infant’s tiny face was bald and her fur was olive-colored, quite different from her mother’s; it was a color that triggered protective feelings in Roamer, and even in the males. Sometimes Scrap would play alone, clambering clumsily over the matted branches, but more often she wanted to cling to Roamer’s chest or back, or to be held in Roamer’s arms.

  Sharing the load of child rearing was common among anthros — although it was usually only kin who would be allowed to serve as child minders.

  Anthro infants grew much more slowly than had the pups of Noth’s era because of the time it took their larger brains to develop. Though they were well developed at birth compared to human infants, with open eyes and the ability to cling to their mothers’ fur, anthro pups were uncoordinated, weak, and utterly dependent on their mothers for food. It was as if Scrap had been born prematurely and was completing her growth outside her mother’s womb.

  This put a lot of pressure on Patch. For eighteen months an anthro mother had to juggle the daily demands of survival with the need to care for her infant — and she had to keep up grooming time with her sisters, peers, and potential mates. Even before her stranding on this raft, all these pressures had left Patch exhausted. But the society of females around her provided her with a ready supply of would-be aunts and nannies to take the infant away and give her a break. Roamer’s amateur aunting was helpful to Patch, and besides it gave Roamer a lot of pleasure. It was a kind of training for her own future as a mother. But also it let her indulge in a lot of grooming.

  They all missed grooming. It was the most difficult thing about this oceanic imprisonment. Even now Whiteblood was showing signs of overgrooming by his two acolytes; parts of his head and neck had been rubbed raw. So Roamer was happy to indulge the infant with long hours of gentle fur pulling, finger combing, and tickling.

  But as the days went by the infant, perpetually hungry and thirsty, became increasingly unhappy. Scrap would wander around the raft, and even pester the males. Sometimes she would throw tantrums, tearing at the leaves or her mother’s fur or racing precariously around the raft in her tiny fury.

  All of which served to wear out Patch further, and irritate everybody else.

  So it went, day after long day. The anthros, trapped together on this sliver of dryness in an immense ocean, were continually, intensely aware of one another. If there had been more space, they could have gotten away from the infant’s annoying scampering. If there had been more of them, the younger males’ jealousy of Whiteblood would not have mattered; they could have easily found more receptive females, and relieved their tension with furtive matings out of Whiteblood’s sight.

  But there was no larger group to soak up their tensions, no forest into which to escape — and no food but dry leaves, no water but the ocean’s brine.

  One featureless day it all came to a head.

  Scrap threw yet another tantrum. She hurled herself around the raft, coming perilously close to the patiently waiting ocean, ripping at leaves and bark, making throaty cries. She had grown skinny, the flesh hanging off her tiny belly, her fur bedraggled.

  This time, the males did not slap her away. Instead they watched her, all three of them, with a kind of calculation.

  At last Patch retrieved Scrap. She clutched the infant to her chest and let her suckle, though there was no milk to be had.

  Whiteblood moved toward Patch. Generally he approached her alone — but this time the bigger of the brothers, Crest, followed him, the spray of fur over his eyes gleaming in the harsh sun. With Whiteblood sitting alongside him, Crest began to groom Patch. Gradually his fingers worked their way toward her belly and genitals. It was a clear precursor to an attempt at mating.

  Patch looked startled and pulled away, Scrap clinging to her belly. But Whiteblood stroked her back, soothing her, until she settled and let Crest approach her again. Though Crest continually cast nervous glances at him, Whiteblood did not intervene.

  Slumped against the crook of a branch, Roamer stared at the males, baffled by their behavior in a way Noth could never have been. As the minds of the primates became steadily more elaborate, it was as if a sense of self was diffusing outward, from the solitary Purga to her increasingly social descendants. All this enabled the anthros to develop new, complex, subtle alliances and hierarchies — and to practice new deceptions. Noth had had a firm understanding of his own place in the hierarchies and alliances of his society. The anthros could go one step beyond this: Roamer understood her own rank as junior to Patch, but she also understood the relative ranking of others. She knew that a senior like Whiteblood should not be allowing Crest to behave like this, as if encouraging him to mate with “his” female.

  At last Crest moved behind Patch and placed his hands on her hips. Patch gave in to the inevitable. Presenting her pink rump to Crest, she pulled the sleepy pup from her chest and held her out to Roamer.

  But Whiteblood leapt forward. With the precision of the tree-dwelling primate he was, Whiteblood grabbed the infant from Patch’s hands. Then he scampered over to Left, carrying the infant by her scruff, quickly followed by a nervous Crest.

  Patch seemed baffled by what had happened. She stared at Whiteblood, her rump still raised to her vanished suitor.

  The males had formed a tight huddle, their furry backs making a wall. Roamer saw how Whiteblood cradled Scrap, almost as if nursing her.

  The infant kicked her tiny legs and gurgled, gazing up at Whiteblood. Then Whiteblood put his hand over her scalp.

  Suddenly Patch understood. She howled and hurled herself forward.

  But the brothers turned to meet her. Both of these immature males outsized Patch. Though they were nervous about showing hostility to a senior female, they easily kept her at bay with slaps and hoots.

  Whiteblood closed his hand. Roamer heard the crunch of bone — a sound like a potbelly biting into a crisp leaf. The infant kicked convulsively, and then was limp. Whiteblood looked down on the little body for a heartbeat, his expression complex as he stared at the olive-colored face, now twisted in final pain. And then the males fell on the tiny body. A bite at the neck and the head was soon severed; Whiteblood pulled the limbs this way and that until cartilage snapped and bones cracked. But it was not meat the males wanted most but blood, the blood that poured from the child’s severed neck. They drank greedily of the warm liquid, until their mouths and teeth were stained bright red.

  Patch howled, displayed, rampaged around the raft tearing at branches and dying leaves, and beat at the males’ stolid backs. The raft shuddered and rocked, and Roamer clung to her branch nervously. But it made no difference.

  Whiteblood had not lied, not really. Like Noth before him, he was unable to
imagine what others were thinking, and therefore couldn’t plant false beliefs in their heads — not quite. But anthros were very smart socially, and they had a good problem-solving faculty when facing new challenges. Whiteblood, a kind of genius, had managed to put these facets of his intelligence together to come up with the ploy that had succeeded in stealing Scrap from her mother.

  With a final hoarse cry, Patch threw herself against the mango trunk and pulled broken foliage around her in a kind of nest. And still the males fed, to the sound of slurping tongues and bones crunching between teeth.

  Her head full of the stink of blood, Roamer made her way to the edge of the raft, where dead branches trailed in the water like fingers.

  The murky ocean water was like a thin soup, full of life. The upper sunlit layers were thick with a rich algal plankton, a crowded microscopic ecology. The plankton was like a forest in the ocean, but a forest stripped of the superstructure of leaves, twigs, branches, and trunks, leaving only the tiny green chlorophyll-bearing cells of the forest canopy floating in their nutrient-rich bath. Though the ecological structure of the plankton had remained unchanged for half a billion years, the species within it had come and gone, falling prey to variation and extinction like any other; just as on land this ocean-spanning domain was like a long-running play whose actors changed repeatedly.

  A jellyfish wafted by. A plankton-grazer itself, it was a translucent sac, pulsing with a slow, languid dilation and contraction. It was strewn with silvery fronds, tentacles that contained the stinging cells with which it would paralyze its planktonic food.