Last and First Contacts (Imaginings) Page 9

  Pala and his parents, fortuitously close to a cave-ridden mountain, had endured the fires, the rain of molten rock, the long dust-shrouded winter. People survived, as they had lived through lesser cataclysms since the ice. And with their ingenuity and adaptability and generalist ability to eat almost anything, they had already begun to spread once more over the ruined lands.

  Once it had been thought that human survival would depend on planting colonies on other worlds, for Earth would always be prone to such disasters. But people had never ventured far from Earth: there was nothing out there; the stars had always remained resolutely silent. And though since the ice their numbers had never been more than a few million, people were too numerous and too widespread to be eliminated even by a comet’s deadly kiss. It was easy to kill a lot of people. It was very hard to kill them all.

  As it happened old Pala was the last human alive to remember the world before the Burning. With him died memories thirty million years deep. In the morning they staked out his body on a patch of high ground.

  The hunting party returned to the river, to finish the job they had started. This time there was no last-minute reprieve for Urlu. She slit open her palm, and let her blood run into the murky river water. Its crimson was the brightest colour in the whole of this grey-black world.

  Urlu’s virginal state made no difference to the silent creature who slid through the water, but she was drawn by the scent of blood. Another of the planet’s great survivors, she had ridden out the Burning buried in deep mud, and fed without distaste on the scorched remains washed into her river. Now she swam up towards the murky light.

  All her life Urlu had eaten nothing but snakes, cockroaches, scorpions, spiders, maggots, termites. That night she feasted on crocodile meat.

  By the morning she was no longer a virgin. She didn’t enjoy it much, but at least it was her choice. And at least she wouldn’t have to go through any more blood-letting.

  III

  The catamaran glided towards the beach, driven by the gentle current of the shallow sea and the muscles of its crew. When it ran aground the people splashed into water that came up to their knees and began to unload weapons and food. The sun hung bright and hot in a cloudless blue dome of a sky, and the people, small and lithe, were surrounded by shining clouds of droplets as they worked. Some of them had their favourite snakes wrapped around their necks.

  Cale, sitting on the catamaran, clung to its seaweed trunks. Looking out to sea, he could see the fine dark line that was the floating community where he had been born. This was an age of warmth, of high seas which had flooded the edges of the continents, and most people on Earth made their living from the rich produce of coral reefs and other sun-drenched shallow-water ecosystems. Cale longed to go back to the rafts, but soon he must walk on dry land, for the first time in his life. He was eleven years old.

  Cale’s mother, Lia, splashed through the water to him. Her teeth shone white in her dark face. ‘You will never be a man if you are so timid as this.’ And she grabbed him, threw him over her shoulder, ran through the shallow water to the beach, and dumped him in the sand. ‘There!’ she cried. ‘You are the first to set foot here, the first of all!’

  Everybody laughed, and Cale, winded, resentful, blushed helplessly.

  For some time Cale’s drifting family had been aware of the land, the line on the horizon. They had prepared their gifts of sea fruit and carved coral, and rehearsed the songs they would sing, and carved their weapons, and here they were. They thought this was an island full of people. They were wrong. This was no island, but a continent.

  Since the recovery of the world from Urlu’s great Burning, there had been time enough for the continents’ slow tectonic dance to play out. Africa had collided softly with Europe, Australia had kissed Asia, and Antarctica had come spinning up from the south pole. It was these great geographical changes – together with a slow, relentless heating-up of the sun – which had given the world its long summer.

  While the rafts had dreamed over fecund seas, seventy million years had worn away. But even over such a tremendous interval people were much the same as they had always been.

  And now here they were, on the shore of Antarctica – and Cale was indeed the first of all to step ashore.

  Unsteadily he got to his feet. For a moment the world seemed to tip and rock beneath him. But it was not the world that tipped, he understood, but his own imagination, shaped by a life on the rafts.

  The beach stretched around him, sloping up to a line of tall vegetation. He had never seen anything like it. His fear and resentment quickly subsided, to be replaced by curiosity.

  The landing party had forgotten him already. They were gathering driftwood for a fire and unloading coils of meat – snake meat, from the fat, stupid, domesticated descendants of one of the few animals to survive the firestorm of Urlu’s day. They would have a feast, and they would get drunk, and they would sleep; only tomorrow would they begin to explore.

  Cale discovered he didn’t want to wait that long. He turned away from the sea, and walked up the shallow slope of the beach.

  A line of hard trunks towered above his head, smooth-hulled. These ‘trees’, as his father had called them, were in fact a kind of grass, something like bamboo. Cale came from a world of endless flatness; to him these trees were mighty constructs indeed. And sunlight shone through the trees, from an open area beyond.

  A few paces away a freshwater stream decanted onto the beach and trickled to the sea. Cale could see that it came from a small gully that cut through the bank of trees. It was a way through, irresistible.

  The broken stones of the gully’s bed stung his feet, and sharp branches scraped at his skin. The rocks stuck in the gully walls were a strange mix: big boulders set in a greyish clay, down to pebbles small enough to have fit in Cale’s hand, all jammed together. Even the bedrock was scratched and grooved, as if some immense, spiky fish had swum this way.

  Here in this tropical rainforest, Cale was surrounded by the evidence of ice.

  He soon reached the open area behind the trees. It was just a glade a few paces across, opened up by the fall of one mighty tree. Cale stepped forward, making for a patch of green. But iridescent wings beat, and a fat, segmented body soared up from the green, and Cale stumbled to a halt. The insect was huge, its body longer than he was tall. Now more vast dragonflies rose up, startled, huddling for protection. A sleeker form, its body yellow-banded, came buzzing out of the trees. It was a remote descendant of a wasp, a solitary predator. It assaulted the swarming dragonflies, ripping through shimmering wings. All this took place over Cale’s head in a cloud of flapping and buzzing. It was too strange to be frightening.

  He was distracted by a strange squirming at his feet. The patch of green from which he had disturbed the first dragonfly was itself moving, flowing over the landscape as if liquid. It was actually a crowd of creatures, a mass of wriggling worms. From the tops of tottering piles of small bodies, things like eyes blinked.

  Such sights were unique to Antarctica. There was no other place like this, anywhere on Earth.

  When its ice melted away, the bare ground of Antarctica became an arena for life. The first colonists had been blown on the wind from over the sea: vegetation, insects, birds. But this was not an age for birds, or indeed mammals. As the world’s systems compensated for the slow heating of the sun, carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, was drawn down into the sea and the rocks, and the air became oxygen-rich. The insects used this heady fuel to grow huge, and predatory wasps and cockroaches as bold as rats made short work of Antarctica’s flightless birds.

  And there had been time for much more dramatic evolutionary shifts, time for whole phyla to be remodelled. The squirming multiple organism that fled from Cale’s approach was a descendant of the siphonophores, colonial creatures of the sea like Portuguese men o’ war. Endlessly adaptable, hugely ecologically inventive, since colonising the land these compound creatures had occupied fresh water, the ground, the
branches of the grass-trees, even the air.

  Cale sensed something of the transient strangeness of what he saw. Antarctica, empty of humans, had been the stage for Earth’s final gesture of evolutionary inventiveness. But relentless tectonic drift had at last brought Antarctica within reach of the ocean-going communities who sailed over the flooded remnants of India, and the great experiment was about to end. Cale gazed around, eyes wide, longing to discover more.

  A coral-tipped spear shot past his head, and he heard a roar. He staggered back, shocked.

  A patch of green ahead of him split and swarmed away, and a huge form emerged. Grey-skinned, supported on two narrow forelegs and a powerful articulated tail, this monster seemed to be all head. A spear stuck out from its neck. The product of another transformed phylum, this was a chondrichthyan, a distant relation of a shark. The beast opened a mouth like a cavern, and blood-soaked breath blasted over Cale.

  Lia was at Cale’s side. ‘Come on.’ She hooked an arm under his shoulders and dragged him away.

  Back on the beach, munching on snake meat, Cale soon got over his shock. Everybody made a fuss of him as he told his tales of giant wasps and the huge land-shark. At that moment he could not imagine ever returning to the nightmares of the forest.

  But of course he would. And in little more than a thousand years his descendants, having burned their way across Antarctica, accompanied by their hunting snakes and their newly domesticated attack-wasps, would hunt down the very last of the land-sharks, and string its teeth around their necks.

  IV

  Tura and Bel, sister and brother, grew up in a world of flatness, on a shoreline between an endless ocean and a land like a tabletop. But in the distance there were mountains, pale cones turned purple by the ruddy mist. As long as she could remember Tura had been fascinated by the mountains. She longed to walk to them – even, she fantasised, to climb them.

  But how could she ever reach them? Her people lived at the coast, feeding on the soft-fleshed descendants of neotenous crabs. The land was a plain of red sand, littered with gleaming salt flats, where nothing could live. The mountains were forever out of reach.

  Then, in Tura’s eleventh year, the land turned unexpectedly green.

  The ageing world was still capable of volcanic tantrums. One such episode, the eruption of a vast basaltic flood, had pumped carbon dioxide into the air. As flowers in the desert had once waited decades for the rains, so their remote descendants waited for such brief volcanic summers to make them bloom.

  Tura and her brother hatched the plan between them. They would never get this chance again; the greening would be gone in a year, perhaps never to return in their lifetimes. No adult would ever have approved. But no adult need know.

  And so, very early one morning, they slipped away from the village. Wearing nothing but kilts woven from dried sea grass, their favourite shell necklaces around their necks, they looked very alike. As they ran they laughed, excited by their adventure, and their blue eyes shone against the rusted crimson of the landscape.

  Bel and Tura lived on what had once been the western coast of North America – but, just as in Urlu’s dark time of global catastrophe, it didn’t really matter where you lived. For this was the age of a supercontinent.

  The slow convergence of the continents had ultimately produced a unity that mirrored a much earlier mammoth assemblage, broken up before the dinosaurs evolved. While vast unending storms roamed the waters of the world-ocean, New Pangaea’s interior collapsed to a desiccated wasteland, and people drifted to the mouths of the great rivers, and to the sea coasts. This grand coalescence had been accompanied by the solemn drumbeat of extinction events; each time the world recovered, though each time a little less vigorously than before.

  The supercontinent’s annealing took two hundred million years. And, since then, another two hundred million years had already gone by. But people lived much as they always had.

  Tura and Bel, eleven-year-old twins, knew nothing of this. They were young, and so was their world; it was ever thus. And today, especially, was a day of wonder, as all around them plants, gobbling carbon dioxide, fired packets of spores through the air, and insects scrambled in once-in-a-lifetime quests to propagate.

  As the sun climbed the children tired, their pace falling, and the arid air sucked the sweat off their bodies. But at last the mountains came looming out of the dusty air. These worn hills were ancient, a relic of the formation of New Pangaea. But to Tura and Bel, standing before their scree-covered lower slopes, they were formidable heights indeed.

  Then Tura saw a splash of green and brown, high on a slope. Curiosity sparked. Without thinking about it she began to climb. Bel, always more nervous, would not follow.

  Though at first the slope was so gentle it was no more than a walk, Tura was soon higher than she had ever been in her life. On she climbed, until her walk gave way to an instinctive scramble on all fours. Her heart hammering, she kept on. All around her New Pangaea unfolded, a sea of Mars-red dust worn flat by time.

  At last she reached the green. It was a clump of trees, shadowed by the mountain from the dust-laden winds and nourished by water from subsurface aquifers. Instinctively Tura rubbed her hand over smooth, sturdy trunks. She had never seen trees before.

  As the sun brightened, Earth’s systems compensated by drawing down carbon dioxide from the air. But this was a process with a limit: even in Jaal’s time the remnant carbon dioxide had been a trace. Already the planet had shed many rich ecosystems – tundra, forests, grasslands, meadows, mangrove swamps. Soon the carbon dioxide concentration would drop below a certain critical level after which only a fraction of plants, with a certain kind of metabolism, would be able to photosynthesise. The rest would die off. And the human population, already only a million strung out around the world’s single coastline, would implode to perhaps ten thousand.

  People would survive. They always had. But these trees, in whose cool shade Tura stood, were among the last in the world.

  She peered up at branches with sparse crowns of spiky leaves, far above her head. There might be fruit up there, or water to be had in the leaves. But it was impossible; she could not climb past the smoothness of the lower trunk.

  When she looked down Bel’s upturned face was a white dot. The day was advancing; as the sun rode higher the going across the dry dust would be even more difficult. With regret she began her scrambled descent to the ground.

  As she lived out her life on the coast of Pangaea, Tura never forgot her brief adventure. And when she thought of the trees she might have climbed her hands and feet itched, her body recalling ape dreams abandoned half a billion years before.

  V

  Ruul was bored.

  All through the echoing caverns the party was in full swing. By the light of their hearths and rush torches people played and danced, talked and laughed, drank and fought, and the much-evolved descendants of snakes and wasps curled affectionately around the ankles of their owners. It was a Thousand-Day festival. In a world forever cut off from the daylight, subterranean humans pale as worms marked time by how they slept and woke, and counted off the days of their lives on their fingers.

  Everyone was having fun – everyone but Ruul. When his mother was too busy to notice, he crept away into the dark.

  Some time ago, restlessly exploring the edge of the inhabited cave, where tunnels and boreholes stretched on into the dark, he had found a chimney, a crack in the limestone. It looked as if you could climb up quite a way. And when he shielded his eyes, it looked to him as if there was light up there, light of a strange ruddy hue. There might be another group somewhere in the caverns above, he thought. Or it might be something stranger yet, something beyond his imagination.

  Now, in the dim light of the torches, he explored the chimney wall. And, lodging his fingers and toes in crevices, he began to climb.

  He was escaping the party. Eleven years old, neither child nor adult, he just didn’t fit, and he petulantly wished the festival wou
ld go away. But as he ascended into profound silence the climb itself consumed all his attention, and the why of it faded from his mind.

  His people, cavern-bound for uncounted generations, were good at rock-climbing. They lived in caverns in deep limestone karsts, laid down in long-vanished shallow seas. Once these hollows had hosted ecosystems full of the much-evolved descendants of lizards, snakes, scorpions, cockroaches, even sharks and crocodiles. The extreme and unchanging conditions of Pangaea had encouraged intricacy and interdependency. The people, retreating underground, had allowed fragments of these extraordinary biotas to survive.

  Soon Ruul climbed up out of the limestone into a softer sandstone, poorly cemented. It was easier to find crevices here. The crimson light from above was bright enough to show him details of the rock through which he was passing. There was layer upon layer of it, he saw, and it had a repetitive pattern, streaks of darkness punctuated by lumpy nodules. When he touched one of the nodules, he found a blade surface so sharp he might have cut his fingers. It was a stone axe – made, used, and dropped long ago, and buried somehow in the sediments that had made this sandstone. Growing more curious he explored the dark traces. They crumbled when he dug into them with a fingernail, and he could smell ash, as fresh as if a fire had just burned here. The dark layers were hearths.

  He was climbing through strata of hearths and stone tools, thousands of layers all heaped up on top of one another and squashed down into the rock. People must have lived in this place a very long time. He was oppressed by a huge weight of time, and of changelessness.

  But he was distracted by a set of teeth he found, small, triangular, razor-edged. They had holes drilled in them. He carefully prised these out of the rock and put them in a pouch; perhaps he would make a necklace of them later.