Evolution

I

She loved to run, more than anything else in her life. It was what her body was made for.

When she sprinted, she covered a hundred meters in six or seven seconds. At a more steady pace, she could finish a mile in three minutes. She could run. As she ran, her breath scorched in her lungs, and the muscles of her long legs and pumping arms seemed to glow. She loved to feel the sting of the dust where it clung to her bare, sweat-slick skin, and to smell the scorched, electric scent of the land’s hot dryness.

It was late in the dry season. The day’s most powerful heat lay heavy on the savannah, and the overhead sun skewered the scene with bright symmetry. Between the pillowlike volcanic hills the grass was sparse and yellow, everywhere browsed and trampled by the vast herds of herbivores. Their pathways, across which she ran, were like roads linking pastures and water courses. In this era the great grass eaters shaped the landscape; none of the many kinds of people in the world had yet usurped that role.

In the noon heat the grass eaters clustered in the shade, or simply lay in the dust. She glimpsed great static herds of elephant types, many species of them, like gray clouds in the distance. Clumsy, high-stepping ostriches pecked listlessly at the ground. Sleek predators slept lazily with their cubs. Even the scavengers, the wheeling birds and the scuttling feeders, were resting from their grisly chores. Nothing stirred but the dust that she kicked up, nothing moved but her own fleeting shadow, shrunk to a patch of darkness beneath her.

Fully immersed in her body, her world, she ran without calculation or analysis, ran with a fluency and freedom no primate kind had known before.

She was not thinking as a human would. She was conscious of nothing but her breath, the pleasurable ache in her muscles, her belly, the land that seemed to fly beneath her feet. But, running naked, she looked human.

She was tall — more than a hundred and fifty centimeters. Her kind were taller than any earlier people. She was lithe, lanky, and didn’t weigh more than forty-five kilograms; her limbs were lean, her muscles hard, her belly and back flat. She was just nine years old. But she was at the cusp of adulthood, her hips broadening and her breasts small, firm, already rounded. And she was not done with growing yet. Though she would keep her slim body proportions, she could expect to grow to around two meters. Her sweat-flecked skin was bare, save for a curly black thatch on her head, and dark scraps at her crotch and armpits. In fact, she had as many body hairs as any other ape, but they were pale and tiny. Her face was round, small, and she had a fleshy, rounded nose, protruding like a human’s, not lying flat like an ape’s.

Perhaps her chest was a little high, a little conical; perhaps in the proportion of her long limbs she might have looked unusual. But her body was within the boundaries of human variation; she might have looked like a denizen of a desert country, like the Dinka of the Sudan, or the Turkana, or the Masai, who would one day walk the land she now crossed.

She looked human. Her head was different, though. Above her eyes ran a broad ridge of bone, which led back to a long, back-sloping forehead. From there, the bone ran with almost no rise to the back of her skull. The shape of her head was masked by her thick mass of hair, but it would have been impossible to mistake its flatness, the smallness of her cranium.

She had the body of a human, the skull of an ape. But her eyes were clear, sharp, curious. Nine years old, suffused with the joy of her body in this brief moment of life and light and freedom, she was as happy as it was possible for her to be. To human eyes, she would have been beautiful.

Her people were hominids — closer to humans than chimps or gorillas — and were related to the species one day tentatively labeled Homo ergaster and Homo erectus. But all across the Old World there were many, many variants, many subspecies based on the same overall body plan. They were a successful and diverse kind, and there would never be enough bones and bits of skull to tell their whole story.

Something darted out at her feet. She pulled up, startled, panting. It was a cane rat, a rodent; disturbed from its slow foraging it scuttled away, indignant.

And she heard a cry. “Far! Far!”

She looked back. Her people, a remote blur, had gathered on the rocky outcrop where they intended to stay for the night. One of them — her mother or grandmother — had clambered to the rock’s highest point, and was calling to her through cupped hands. “Far!” It was a cry no ape could have made, not even Capo. This was a word.

The sun had begun to slide away from the zenith, and already the shadow at her feet had lengthened. Soon the animals would begin to stir; she would no longer be safe, no longer be shielded by the noon world’s somnolence.

Alone, far from her people, she felt a delicious frisson of fear. Every day, every chance she got, she ran too far; and every day she had to be called back. She did not have a name. No hominid had yet given herself a name. But if she had, it would have been Far.

She turned back toward the rock and began to run again, at her steady, ground-devouring pace.

There were twenty-four people in the band.

Most of the adults were dispersed over the landscape near the eroded sandstone bluff. They moved like slim shadows across the dusty ground, seeking out nuts and small game, silent, intent, expert. Mothers had taken their youngest children along, clamped to their backs or scuttling at their feet.

Far’s mother was working through a small stand of acacia trees that had been comprehensively destroyed by the passage of a herd of deinotheres. These ancient elephant types had used their downward-pointing tusks and stubby trunks to leave the trees broken and splintered, the ground churned up, and the roots hauled out. People weren’t the only foragers here: warthogs and bushpigs grunted and squealed as they pushed their ugly faces into the churned-up earth. The destruction was recent. Far could see giant beetles at work burying fresh deinothere dung, and aardvarks and honey badgers rooting in the ground, seeking the beetles’ larvae.

Such a place made for good foraging. A good strategy for finding food in an unfamiliar land was to seek out the leftovers of other animals, especially destructive types like elephants and pigs. In the smashed-up stand of trees, Far’s mother would find food that would have otherwise been hidden or inaccessible. Among the broken trunks there were even ready-made levers, struts, and digging sticks to prize out roots from the ground, broken branches to shake to get at fruit, and slivers of palm to dig out pith.

Far’s mother was a serene, elegant woman, tall even for her kind; she might have been called Calm. She walked with her two children, the sleeping baby cradled over one shoulder, and a son. The boy was half Far’s age but already nearly as tall as she was, a skinny youth Far thought of as the Brat: irritating, clever, and much too successful at competing for their mother’s attention and generosity.

Calm’s own mother, Far’s grandmother, was at her side. In her mid-forties now, the grandmother was too stiff to be of much help digging for food. But she assisted her daughter by keeping an eye on the youngest child. No human would have been surprised to see old people in this group; it would have looked very natural. But no previous types of primates had grown old; few had survived much past their fertile years. Why should their bodies continue to keep them alive when they could not contribute further to the gene pool? But now it was different; among Far’s kind, old people had a role.

Panting, dusty, Far climbed the rock. It was just an outcrop a hundred meters across bearing nothing but strands of tough grass and a few insects and lizards. But for the people it was a temporary home base, an island of comparative sanctuary in this open savannah, this sea of danger. On the outcrop itself a couple of men were repairing wooden spears. They worked absently, eyes roving, as if their hands were working by themselves. Some of the older children played, rehearsing for the adulthood to come. They wrestled, chased, mock-stalked each other. Two six-year-olds were engaged in clumsy foreplay, fingering each other’s nipples and bellies.

Far was neither an adult nor a child, and in this small band there was nobody close to her age. So she kept away from the rest and walked to the summit of the eroded sandstone lump. She found a bit of antelope jaw, deposited here by some scavenger, now scraped clean by hungry mouths and the patient work of insects. She cracked the bone into fragments on the rock, and used a sharp edge to scrape the sweat and dirt from her legs and belly.

From this vantage, the landscape was laid out, presenting a complex panorama. This was an immense valley. Huge geological anguish showed in a panorama of domes, lava flows, tiltings, and craters. To the east — and, beyond the horizon, in the west — the land had been uplifted, forming a plateau some three thousand meters high at its maximum, laden with fertile volcanic soil. The great plateau came to an end in a precipitate wall that plunged down into the valley.

This was the Rift Valley: a fracture between two separating tectonic plates. It ran for three thousand kilometers from the Red Sea and Ethiopia in the north down through Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Malawi, terminating in Mozambique to the south. For twenty million years geological activity along the length of this great wound had created volcanoes, built highlands, and collapsed lowlands into valleys that channeled the waters into some of the continent’s largest lakes. The land itself had been remolded, laid down as layer upon layer of volcanic ash, interspersed with broad beds of shale and mudstone. On the volcanic hills grew humid forests, and a complex mosaic of vegetation, from woodland to savannah to scrub, filled the floor. It was a crowded, jumbled, varied place.

And it was full of animals.

As the sun continued to roll down the sky, so the creatures of the savannah became more active: the hippos wallowing in the marshes, the herds of stately elephant types washing serenely across the grasslands. There were many species of elephant, in fact, subtly differing in the shape of their backs, skulls, trunks. They trumpeted shrilly to each other, sailing like dusky ships through the sea of dust they kicked up. As well as these large herbivores there were many other species directly dependent on the grass: hares, porcupines, and cane rats, rooting pigs. Predators upon the grass eaters — and themselves prey for still more dangerous animals — included jackals, hyenas, and mongooses.

The animals of the savannah would have looked startlingly familiar to human eyes, for they had already become finely adapted to savannah conditions. But the richness and variety of the life here would have astounded an observer used to the Africa of human times. This was the richest region on Earth in terms of the number of mammalian species, their diversity and abundance, and this was one of its most prolific periods. In this crowded, complicated place, plains creatures like antelopes and elephants lived close to forest dwellers like pigs and bats. The Rift provided a rich, sprawling landscape that presented opportunities for adaptation for many species of animals, like elephants, pigs, antelopes — and people. This, indeed, was the crucible from which Far’s kind had emerged.

But they had not stayed here.

After Capo’s time, liberated from the last ancestral ties to the forest, Far’s people had become a wandering species. They had walked out of Africa: The first hominid footsteps had already been planted all along the southern coasts of the Asian landmass. Far’s grandmothers, though, had unwittingly completed a great circuit to north, east, and south, over many generations returning here, to the place their kind had originated.

Sitting on her outcrop, Far surveyed the landscape with a professional, calculating eye. In their wanderings, the people mostly followed water courses. They had come to this place from the north, and she could see the streambed they had followed, a silver snake that slashed through the grass and scrub. Along the riverbank the land was silty, watered, and dense with nutrients, and a vigorous mix of trees, thicket, and grassland grew there, marked by pillars of termite mounds. To the east the ground rose, becoming dry and barren, and to the west the forest grew thicker, making an impassable belt. But if she looked south she could see possibilities for tomorrow, a great corridor of savannah with the mixture of grass, scrub, and forest patches that her people preferred.

Far was still young, still learning about the world and how best to use it. But she had a deep, systematic understanding of her environment. She was already capable of assessing an unfamiliar landscape like this and picking out sources of food, water, and danger, even spying out routes for onward migration.

It was a necessary skill. Committed to the open, Far’s kind had been pushed by a harsh winnowing to develop a new kind of awareness of nature. They had been forced to understand the habits of game, the distribution of plants, the changes of seasons, the meanings of tracks — to solve the endless puzzles of the complex, unforgiving savannah. By comparison, her remote ancestor Capo, who had lived and died thousands of kilometers northwest of this place, had learned the features of his generous forest world by rote: Unable to read the land, to figure out new patterns, he had been endlessly baffled by the unfamiliar.

Now the adults and their infants were coming back to the rock, carrying food. They were naked, and they carried only what they could cram into their hands and cradle in their arms. Most of them came back with mouths still full and chewing. The people ate as fast as they could, helping themselves, feeding only close family members, not averse to stealing when they thought they could get away with it. And they ate silently save for belches, grunts of pleasure or disgust when a bit of rotten food turned up — and an occasional word. “Mine!” “Nut,” “Break,” “Hurt, hurt, hurt…”

They were simple nouns and verbs, possessives and challenges, one-word sentences with no structure, no grammar. But nevertheless it was a language, the words labels that referred to definite things — a system far advanced over the jabbering of Capo’s time, and that of any other animal.

Here came Far’s brother, the Brat. He was carrying the limp corpse of some small animal, maybe a hare. And her mother, Calm, had an armful of roots, fruit, and palm pith.

Far was suddenly hungry. She hurried forward, mewling, her hands held out and her mouth open.

Calm hissed at her, theatrically holding her armful of food away from her daughter. “Mine! Mine!” It was a rebuke, and it was backed up by glares from the grandmother. Far was getting too old now to be fed like an infant. She should have come to help her mother rather than waste her energy running purposelessly about the landscape. Why, here was her brother, the Brat, who had been hard at work and had even returned with his own scrap of meat. All of that was conveyed in a word.

Life was not as it had been in Capo’s time. Nowadays the adults tried to coach the youngsters. The world had become too complex for children to be given the time to reinvent all the technology and techniques of survival from scratch; they had to be taught how to survive. And one of the roles of elders like Far’s grandmother was to drive such wisdom home.

But Far held her hands out again, making piteous animal mewls. Just once more. Just for today. I’ll help tomorrow.

“Graah!” Calm, as Far had known she would, dumped the food on the rock. She had gathered nuts, tsin beans, cowpeas, and asparagus bean tubers. She handed Far a fat tuber; Far bit into this quickly.

The Brat sat close to his mother. He was still too young to sit with the men, who were pawing through their own pile of food. The Brat had pulled apart his hare by main force, twisting off the limbs and head, and was using a chip of rock to lay open the chest. But as he performed this miniature butchery his gestures were tense, shivery.

None of his family knew it, but he was already gravely ill, through hypervitaminosis. A few days before one of the men had given him a few scraps of hyena liver, brought down in a brief battle over the remains of an antelope. Like that of most carnivorous predators, the liver had been full of vitamin A, and that subtle poisoning would soon become visible in the boy’s body.

In a month he would be dead. In twelve, forgotten, even by his mother.

But for now Calm cuffed him, reasonably gently, and grabbed some of his hare away from him, making him share with his sister.

Since Capo’s time the world had continued to cool and dry.

North of the equator, a great belt of taiga stretched right around the world, through North America and Asia, a forest of nothing but evergreen trees. And in the far north tundra had formed for the first time in three hundred million years. For the animals, the living offered by the taiga was meager compared to the old mixed deciduous and coniferous temperate forests. Similarly, the great grasslands continued to expand — grass was less thirsty than trees — but grass made arid plains, able to support only a much-reduced assemblage of animal species compared to the vanishing forests. As the slow desiccation continued, there were extinctions again.

But if the quality was diminished, the quantity of life was tremendous, astonishing.

The need to ride out periods of seasonal food shortages, and the need for guts able to process coarse diets all year round, favored the development of large herbivores. Giant mammals, a new “megafauna” on a scale not seen since the death of the dinosaurs, spread across the planet. Ancestral mammoths had already spread across northern Eurasia and, crossing the land bridges periodically exposed by the falling ocean levels, walked into North America. For now, living in equable climes, they were hairless and ate foliage rather than grass. They looked like typical elephants, but they had the high crowns and curling tusks of their woolly descendants.

Meanwhile there were giant camels in North America, and in Asia and Africa wandered the huge, mooselike sivatheres. A type of large rhino called an elasmotherium roamed across northern Eurasia. For a rhino it had long legs and a horn that could grow to two meters in length: It looked like a muscular unicorn.

And along with these huge packages of meat came new, specialized predators. The cats, freshly evolved, had perfected the technology of killing. They had side teeth like shears that could slice through skin, rip it aside, and get inside a body, where their incisors could nibble at the flesh. The saber-tooths were the acme. The saber-tooths would grow to twice the size of the lions of human times, becoming vast muscular predators built like bears, with short stocky limbs. They were built for power, not speed, and were ambush hunters, with mouths that could open hugely wide to crush prey. But all cats made even the dogs look like generalists by comparison; cats were perhaps the ultimate land predators.

But then, some half million years before Far’s birth, a new and dramatic worsening of the climate began. For the world’s creatures, the rules changed again.

There was a call from the plain. “Look, look! Me, look, me!” People stood up, gathering to see.

A man was approaching. He was tall, more heavily muscled than the rest, with a powerful, abnormally prominent browridge. This man, Brow, was dominant right now, the boss man in the tight, competitive world of the males. And he had a dead animal draped across his shoulder, a young eland.

The eight other adult men in the band began dutifully to whoop and yell, and they ran down the rocky slope. They slapped Brow on the back, stroked the eland respectfully, and ran and capered, kicking up a spectacular cloud of dust that hung, glowing, in the light of the descending sun. Together they hauled the eland up the slope and hurled it to the ground. The older children ran to see the eland, and began competing for its meat. The Brat was amongst them, but he was weaker even than others younger than himself, and he was easily pushed aside. Far could see a snapped-off wooden spear buried in the animal’s chest. That was how Brow had killed his prey, probably after an ambush, and perhaps he had left the spear in there to show how he had achieved this feat.

Brow, meanwhile, had sprouted an impressive erection. The women, including Calm, Far’s mother, made subtle signs of availability — a crooked hand here, thighs smoothly parting there.

Far, neither woman nor child, hung back from the rest. She nibbled on a root and waited as events unfolded.

Some of the adults had brought volcanic pebbles from the nearby stream. Now men and women began briskly to knap the pebbles, their hands working rapidly, their fingers exploring the stone. The tools emerged from the stone without real conscious effort — this was a skill that was already ancient, embedded in a self-contained section of a rigidly divided mind — and within a few minutes they had fashioned crude but serviceable choppers and cutting flakes. As quickly as each tool was finished its manufacturer fell on the eland.

The skin was sliced open from anus to throat, and pulled briskly off the carcass. The hide was discarded; nobody had thought up a use for animal skins, not yet. Now the carcass was briskly butchered, with the fine stone blades slicing into joints to separate the limbs from the body, through the rib cage to expose the soft, warm organs within, and then into the meat itself to separate it from the bone.

It was a fast, efficient, almost bloodless affair, a skillful butchering born of generations of ancestral learning. But the butchers did not work together. Though they deferred to Brow, allowing him to take the prime cuts and to extract the heart and liver, they competed as they scavenged the corpse, grunting and prodding at each other. Despite the tools in their hands, they worked at the eland like a pack of wolves.

Few of the women fought for the meat. Their unglamorous scavenging in the acacia grove and elsewhere had been successful today, and their bellies, and those of their children, were already full of figs, grewia berries, grass shoots, roots — fruits abundant in these dry lands that did not require much preparation before eating.

When most of the meat had been taken from the eland’s bones, the bargaining began in earnest. Brow stalked among the men with a blade in one hand and a mighty slab of haunch in the other. He sliced off chunks of the meat and handed them to some of the men — and not to others, who turned away as if it were unimportant, but who would later try to snatch bits of the best meat from the rest. It was all part of the endless politicking of the men.

Then Brow walked among the women, handing out bits of meat like a visiting king. When he reached Calm, he paused, his erection proud, and sliced off a large and succulent slab of eland haunch. Sighing, she accepted it. She ate some of it quickly, then put the rest to one side, close to her infant, who was asleep in a nest of dead grass. Then she lay on her back and opened her thighs, and held up her arms to accept Brow.

Brow hadn’t gone hunting primarily to bring food to his people. Large game provided maybe only a tenth of the group’s intake; the vast majority of it came from the plants, nuts, insects, and small game foraged by the women and older children as much as by the men. Large game was a useful emergency food supply in hard times — drought or flood, perhaps, or in tough winters. But hunting was useful to the hunter in a whole range of ways. With his eland meat Brow was able to reinforce his political position among the men — and buy access to the women, which was ultimately the only purpose of his endless battle for dominance.

With their greater intelligence, tall, hairless bodies, and rudimentary language, these were the most human creatures yet to exist. But much of the way they ran their lives would have been immediately familiar to Capo. Brow’s ancestors had fallen into this social pattern — of males fighting for dominance, of females linked along bloodlines, of hunting to buy favors — far back in time, long before Capo’s fateful decision to leave his pocket of forest. There were other ways for primates to live, other kinds of societies that could be imagined. But once the pattern had been set, it was all but impossible to break.

Anyhow the system worked. The food was shared out; the peace was kept. One way or another, most people got fed.

When Brow was done Calm wiped her thighs with a leaf and returned to the meat. She used a discarded stone flake to slice it up, and handed some to her mother — who was too old to be of interest to Brow — and gave the rest to Far, who fell on it eagerly.

And later, as the light faded, Brow approached Far herself. She saw him as a tall, beefy silhouette against the sky’s fading red purple. Most of his eland meat was gone now, but she smelled its blood on him. He carried a foreleg bone. He crouched down before her, sniffing her curiously. Then he slammed the bone against the rock, cracking it. She could smell its delicious marrow, and her mouth filled with saliva. Without thinking she reached for the bone.

He held it back, making her come closer.

As she approached she could smell him more clearly: the blood, the dirt, the sweat, and a lingering stink of semen. He relented and gave her the bone, and she pushed her tongue into the marrow, sucking at it eagerly. As she ate he put his hand on her shoulder and ran it down her body. She tried not to flinch when he explored her small breasts, pulling her nipples. But she squealed when his probing fingers parted her legs. He drew back his hand and sniffed her scent. Then, evidently deciding she had nothing to sell him, he grunted and moved away.

But he left her the marrow. Eagerly she devoured it, finishing most of it before the bone was stolen from her by an older woman.

The light leached quickly out of the sky. All across the savannah the predators called, marking their bloody kingdoms in their ancient way.

The people gathered on their island of rock. All of them felt a shiver of apprehension as they huddled together — children at the center, adults with their backs facing outward — and prepared to enter a long night of unbroken darkness. They ought to be safe here, in this inhospitable place: any ambitious predator would have to leave the ground and clamber up here, where it would face smart, large, and armed hominids. But there was no guarantee. There was a saber-tooth around called dinofelis, an ambush predator like a stocky jaguar, that specialized in killing hominids. Dinofelis could even climb trees.

As the darkness fell, the people went about their business. Some fed. Some tended to their bodies, digging dirt out of toenails or fingering blisters. Some worked on tools. Many of these activities were repetitive, ritualistic. Nobody was truly thinking about what they were doing.

Some groomed: mothers with infants, siblings, mates, women, and men reinforcing their subtle alliances. Far worked on her mother’s dense head hair, teasing out knots and pulling it into a kind of plait. Even now hair needed a lot of work — it would tangle, mat, and attract lice, all of which needed fixing.

These people were the only species of mammal whose heavy hair was not self-maintaining; the spectacular tonsorial plumage of some monkeys, for instance, just grew that way. Far’s hair even needed cutting regularly. But people’s hair had developed that way because they needed something to groom. Out here on the savannah it paid to be part of a large group, and the group needed social mechanisms to hold itself together. There wasn’t time now for the old ape ways, the elaborate full-body grooming indulged in by Capo and his ancestors. Anyway you couldn’t groom skin that had become bare so it could sweat. But still, in this primitive hairdressing, they retained links with their heritage.

The grammar of the people as they went about their diverse activities was not like that of a human group. In the gathering dark they huddled together for protection, but there was no real sharing. There was no fire, and nothing like a hearth, no central focus. They looked human, but their minds were not like humans’.

Just as in Capo’s time, their thinking was rigidly compartmented. The main purpose of consciousness was still to help people figure out what was in each others’ minds: They were only truly self-aware in the human sense when dealing with each other. The boundaries of awareness were much more narrow than in human minds; there was much beyond, out in the darkness, that they did essentially without thinking about it. Even those making tools or working on food did so wordlessly, their hands working impulsively, with no more conscious control than lions or wolves. Their awareness at such times was rolling, fleeting. They made tools as unconsciously as humans would walk or breathe.

However, human or not, a soft susurrus of language washed over the group. The talking was among the mothers and infants, the groomers, and the couples. There wasn’t much information being passed on; much of the talk was little more than sighs of pleasure, like the purring of cats.

But their words sounded like words.

People had had to learn to communicate with equipment designed for other tasks — a mouth intended for eating, ears intended to listen for danger — now jury-rigged for a new use. Their bipedalism had helped: the repositioning of their larynxes and changes in the pattern of breathing improved the quality of the sounds they could make. But to be useful, sounds had to be identifiable quickly and unambiguously. And the ways the hominids could achieve that were limited by the nature of the equipment they had to use. As people listened to each other, and imitated and reused useful noises, phonemes — the sound content of the words, the basis of all language — had selected themselves, driven by communicative necessity and engineering limitations.

But there was nothing yet like grammar — no sentences — and certainly no narratives, no stories. And the main purpose of talking right now wasn’t to pass on information. Nobody talked about tools or hunting or food preparation. Language was social: It was used for commands and demands, for blunt expressions of joy or pain. And it was used for grooming: Language, even without much content, was a more efficient way to establish and reinforce relations than picking ticks out of pubic hair. It even worked to “groom” several people at once.

A lot of the evolution of language, in fact, had been driven by mothers and infants. Right now the ancestors of Demosthenes and Lincoln and Churchill spoke nothing much more than motherese.

And the children didn’t talk at all.

The minds of the adults were about equivalent in complexity to a five-year-old human’s. Their children were not capable of speech — nothing beyond chimplike jabbers — until they reached adolescence. It had only been a year or two since the adults’ words had made any sense to Far, and the Brat, at seven, couldn’t talk at all. The kids were like apes born to human parents.

As the light died, so the group settled toward sleep.

Far huddled against her mother’s legs. The ending day became just one of a long chain that stretched back to the beginning of her life, days dimly remembered, only vaguely linked. In the darkness she imagined running in the blinding brightness of day, running and running.

She had no way of knowing that this was the last time she would fall asleep close to her mother.

II

A million years ago, tectonic drift, slow but relentless, had caused North and South America to collide, and the isthmus of Panama was formed.

In itself it seemed a small event, Panama an inconsequential sliver of land. But, as with Chicxulub, this region had once more become the epicenter of a worldwide catastrophe.

Because of Panama, the old equatorial flows through the Americas — the last trace of the Edenic Tethys current — had been cut off. Now the only Atlantic currents were the huge interpolar flows, great conveyor belts of cold water. The worldwide cooling intensified drastically. The scattered ice caps covering the northern ocean merged, and glaciers spread like claws over the northern landmasses.

The Ice Ages had begun. At their greatest extent the glaciers would cover more than a quarter of all Earth’s surface; the ice would reach as far as Missouri and central England. Much was immediately lost. Where the glaciers passed, the land was scraped clean — down to the bedrock, which was itself pulverized and ground to dust — leaving a legacy of mountains with scored flanks, polished surfaces, scattered boulders, and gouged-out valleys. There had been no significant glaciation on Earth for two hundred million years; now a legacy of rocks and bones dating back deep into the age of the dinosaurs was comprehensively destroyed.

On the ice itself, nothing could live: nothing. Below the ice, great impoverished belts of tundra spread. Even in places far from the ice, like the equatorial regions of Africa, changes in wind patterns intensified the aridity, and vegetation shrank back to the coasts and river valleys.

The cooling was not a uniform trend. The planet tipped and bobbed in its endless dance around the sun, subtly shifting its degree of tilt, its inclination, and the fine-tuning of its orbit. And with each cycle the ice came and went, came and went; ocean levels fluctuated like the pumping of a heart. Even the land, compressed under kilometers of ice or released by its melting, rose and fell like a rocky tide.

Sometimes the climate shifts could be savage. Within a single year the amount of snowfall in an area could double, the average temperature fall by ten degrees. Faced with such chaotic oscillations, living things moved, or died.

Even the forests marched. Spruce proved a fast migrant, followed by pine, capable of marching at a kilometer every two years. The great chestnuts, massive trees with heavy seeds, could manage a pace of a hundred meters a year. Before the Ice Age the animals of the middle latitudes of the northern hemisphere had been a rich mixture of fleet grazers like deer and horses, giant herbivores like rhinos, and fast-running carnivores like lions and wolves. Now the animals were driven south in search of warmth. Populations of animals from different climatic zones were mixed up and forced to compete in fast-changing ecological arenas.

But some creatures began to adapt to the cold, to exploit the food supplies that still existed at the feet of the ice sheets. Many animals grew thick fur and layers of fat — large animals, like rhinos, and smaller animals, like foxes and horses and cats. Others began to take advantage of the huge temperature swings between the seasons. They migrated, moving north in the summer and south in the winter; the plains became a huge tidal wash of life, great mobile communities patiently stalked by predators.

There had been a catastrophe of mixing in the Americas. The two continents, north and south, had been separated since the shattering of Pangaea some one hundred and fifty million years ago. The fauna of South America had evolved in isolation, and was dominated by marsupial mammals and ungulates. There were marsupial “wolves” and saber-toothed “cats”; there were ungulate “camels” and trunked “elephants,” and giant ground sloths that could weigh three tons and stood six meters tall when they stood up to browse on palm leaves. There were still glyptodonts, not so dissimilar from the huge armored beast that had terrified Roamer, and the top predators were giant flightless birds, just as in archaic times. This exotic assemblage had been left alone to develop — though it was supplemented from time to time by waifs, brought by rafting or temporary bridges, like Roamer and her hapless companions, whose children had populated the South American jungles with monkeys.

But when the Panama land bridge was closed there was a massive migration from north to south of insectivores, rabbits, squirrels, mice, and later dogs, bears, weasels, and cats. The natives of South America failed to compete with these new arrivals. The extinctions took millions of years, but the empire of the marsupials was done.

For all the difficulty and dying, this time of fast and savage changes was, perversely, a time of opportunity. In the entire four-billion-year history of the Earth there had been few times more propitious for diversification and evolutionary innovation. Amid much extinction there was wild speciation.

And right at the center of this ecological cauldron were the children of Capo.

The next morning dawned brightly, with a washed-out blue sky. But the air was very dry and smelled oddly sharp, and the heat was soon stifling. The animals of the savannah seemed subdued. Even the birds were quiet; the carrion eaters clung to their tree roosts like ugly black fruit.

With their bare, sweating skin, the people were as well equipped for this hot, open dryness as any other species here. But they too began their day listlessly. They milled about their island of rock, picking at what was left of yesterday’s food.

This wasn’t a particularly rich area. The people didn’t discuss their plans — they never did, and anyhow they had no real plans — but it was obvious they shouldn’t stay here. Before long some of the men started to set off toward the water course to continue their walk to the south.

But the Brat’s condition had worsened overnight. The soles of his feet were cracked and oozing a watery pus, and when he tried to put his weight on them he cried out in pain. He wouldn’t be walking anywhere today.

Calm, Far’s grandmother, and most of the other women stayed close to the Brat. As for the men, the women just ignored their antics as they impatiently paced up and down the trail they had begun toward the south.

This conflict, all but wordless, over the day’s course was hurtful for them all. It was a genuine dilemma. The savannah was not like the bountiful, reliable forest of earlier times; you couldn’t just walk off in any random direction. Every day, in this sparse, changeable land, the people were faced with decisions about where to go to find food, water, what dangers to avoid. If they got it wrong, even once, the consequences were drastic. But the walkers had few children, and invested much effort in each one; you didn’t abandon one lightly.

At last the men gave up. Some of them returned to the rock to laze in the light of the high, hot sun. A handful of others set off under Brow’s leadership on the trail of an elephant herd, one of whose infants appeared to be limping. The rest of the men — and the women and older children — dispersed to the foraging sites they had explored yesterday.

The way these people were living — setting up a central home base, retrieving food, and sharing food and labor — was necessary. On the open plain the people had to work hard for food, and their slow-growing young extracted a high cost in care. They had to cooperate and share, one way or another. But there was no real planning. In many ways this was more like a wolf pack than any human community.

Far spent most of the morning in the same trampled thicket her mother had worked yesterday. The ground had already been thoroughly worked over, and to find new roots and fruit required much digging. Soon she was hot, dirty, and uncomfortable. She felt restless, confined, and her long legs, folded under her in the trampled dirt and debris, seemed to ache.

As noon approached, the desultory stillness of this strange, heavy day deepened. The savannah, open and free, beckoned Far, as it had done yesterday. As the emptiness in her belly diminished, the pressures of survival and familial duty were overcome by her longing to get out of here.

One spindly palm had survived the deinotheres’ attention, and it had a cluster of nuts at its top. A young man shimmied up the tree with a grace that came from his body’s deep-buried memory of earlier, greener times. Far watched his lithe torso working, and felt a peculiar ache at the base of her belly.

She came to a kind of decision. She dropped the last of the food, clambered out of the thicket, and just sprinted off to the west.

She felt a vast relief as her limbs worked, her lungs pumped, and she felt clean crisp dirt beneath her feet. For a time, as she ran without thinking, even the day’s heat seemed alleviated as the breeze of her passing cooled her skin.

Then there was a deep, menacing rumble that echoed across the sky. She pulled up, crouched, and peered around fearfully.

The bright sunlight dimmed. Thick black clouds were pouring across the sky from the east. She was startled by a flash of purplish light that lit up the clouds from within. Almost immediately there was a shattering crash and a deeper, drawn-out rumble that seemed to roll around the sky.

Looking back at the rocky outcrop, which suddenly seemed very far away, she saw the people running, gathering up their infants. Her heart hammering, Far straightened up and began to head back.

But now rain lashed down from the blackening sky. The drops were heavy enough to sting her bare skin and unprotected scalp, and they dug small craters in the dirt. The ground rapidly turned to sticky mud that clung to her feet, slowing her down.

Light flashed again, this time a great river of it that briefly connected sky to ground. Dazzled, she stumbled and fell in the mud. Shattering noise pealed around her, as if the world were falling apart.

She saw that the tall palm at the center of the trampled clearing had been split in two, and it was blazing, the flames licking at the fronds that dangled forlornly from its tip. The fire quickly spread through the rest of the smashed thicket — and then the dry grass on the plain beyond began to catch.

A pall of gray-black smoke began to rise up before her. She got to her feet and tried to continue. But, despite the continuing rain, the fire spread quickly. The season had been exceptionally dry, and the savannah was littered with yellowed grass, dried shrubs, fallen trees ripe for burning. Somewhere an elephant trumpeted. Far glimpsed spindly forms fleeing through the murk: giraffes, perhaps.

The hominids were safe, though. The flames would lap harmlessly around their rocky outcrop. Though they would all suffer from the smoke and heat, nobody would die because of this. And if Far could reach the outcrop, she, too, would be safe. But she was still hundreds of meters away, and the screen of smoke and flame cut her off. The flames were leaping hungrily over the long, dry grass, each blade of which burned in an eye blink. The air turned smoky, making her cough. Bits of burning vegetation drifted through the air, blackened, still glowing. When they fell on her skin they stung.

She did the only thing she could do. She turned and ran: ran to the west, away from the fire, away from her family.

She didn’t stop running until she came to a dense thicket of forest. Facing a blank, green wall, she hesitated for one heartbeat. Other dangers lurked here, but this place was surely invulnerable to the fire. She plunged inside.

Crouched close to the root of a tree fern, surrounded by damp clinging fronds, she peered out at the savannah. The fire still swept voraciously through the long grass, and smoke billowed, seeping into the dense forest. But this forest clump was indeed too dense and moist to be under threat. And the fire was quickly consuming its fuel; the rain was starting to douse the flames.

Soon she would be able to get out of here. She squatted down to wait it out.

A scuttling movement close to her foot drew her attention. At the base of the tree fern’s textured root a scorpion moved with metallic precision toward her foot. Without hesitation, but taking care to avoid the sting, she slammed the heel of her hand down on the scorpion. Carefully she picked up the scorpion between two fingers, and lifted it to her mouth.

Something rammed into her back. She was thrown forward onto her belly, with a mass on her back, hot, heavy, muscular. She was surrounded by screeching and hooting, and fists pounded at her back and head.

Winded, summoning up her strength, she rolled over.

A slim figure capered over her. It was not much more than half her height, with a skinny body covered with brown-black fur, long arms, an apelike head stuck over a narrow, conical chest, and a thin pink penis sticking out below its belly. Its fur was wet from the rain, and it stank, the smell musty and strong. And yet it — he — stood upright over her, like one of her own kind, like no ape.

This was a pithecine: an ape-man, a chimp-man, a representative of the first hominids of all, Far’s remote cousin. And there were more of them in the jumbled branches above her, climbing down like shadows.

She turned to get up. But something slammed against her head, and she fell into blackness.

When she came to she was flat on her back. Her chest, legs, and buttocks ached.

Pithecines were all around her.

Some of them had clambered into pod mahogany trees in search of fruit. Others were digging in the ground, pulling out corkwood roots. They were active, foraging bipeds, working wordlessly. But, unlike her, they were short, hairy, their skin slack like chimps’.

Somebody was screaming. Far turned her head to see.

A pithecine was crouched in the dirt. It — she — was straining, her face contorted, her slack breasts heavy with milk. Far, blearily, saw a small solid mass emerge from her rump: mucus-covered, hairy, it was the head of a baby. This pithecine woman was giving birth.

Other females surrounded her, sisters, cousins, and her mother. Chattering and hooting softly, they reached between the new mother’s legs. Gently they fumbled with the baby as, moistly, it was pushed out of the birth canal.

The new mother faced problems no earlier primate had endured, for the baby was being born facing away from her. Leaf, a female of Capo’s time, would have been able to see her baby’s face as it emerged, and would have been able to reach down between her legs to guide her baby’s head and body out of her birth canal. If this pithecine were to try that she would bend the baby’s neck backward and risk injuring its spinal cord, nerves, and muscles. She could not cope alone, as Leaf could have — but she did not have to.

When the baby’s hands were free, it grabbed at its mother’s fur and began to pull. Even now it was strong enough to aid in its own delivery.

It was all a consequence of bipedalism. A quadruped supported its abdominal organs with connective tissue hung from its backbone. The pelvis was just a connecting element that translated the pressure on the backbone down and outward to the hips and legs. But if you decided to walk upright your pelvis had to support the weight of your abdominal organs — and the weight of a growing embryo inside you. The pelvises of the upright pithecines had quickly adapted, becoming like a human’s basin-shaped supporting structure. The central opening for the birth canal changed too, becoming larger side to side than front to back, an oval shape to match a baby’s skull.

This pithecine mother’s birth canal was narrower in comparison to her baby’s head than any previous primate’s. Her baby had entered the canal facing its mother’s side, to let its head through. But then it had to turn so its shoulders lined up with the canal’s widest dimension. Sometimes the baby would finish up in the easiest position, facing its mother, but more often than not it would turn away from her.

In the future, as hominid skulls increased in size to accommodate larger brains, still more elaborate redesigns of the birth passageways would be required, so that Joan Useb’s baby would have to twist and turn in a complicated fashion as it headed for the light. But even in these deep times, the first bipedal mothers already needed midwives — and a new kind of social bond had been forged among the pithecines.

At last the baby emerged fully, falling to the leaf-strewn ground with a plop, its small fists closing. The mother fell to the ground with a gasp of relief. One older pithecine picked up the child, cleared plugs of mucus from its mouth and nose, and blew into its nostrils. At the hairy little scrap’s first wail, the midwife peremptorily thrust the baby at its mother and loped away.

Suddenly Far felt strong hands around her ankles. She was jolted, leaves and dirt scraped under her back, and she lost sight of the mother and baby.

She was being dragged over the floor. Every time her head clattered on a rock or tree root pain exploded. Hooting, screeching creatures were all around her. These were all males, she saw now, with knotty pink genitals half-buried in their fur, and astonishingly large testicles that they would scratch absently. When they walked their gait was oddly awkward, the joints of their hips peculiar.

She realized dimly that they were hauling her deeper into the forest. But she seemed to have no strength, no will to fight.

Suddenly another bunch of pithecines came rushing out of the deeper green, howling angrily. The males who had taken Far rose to confront these newcomers.

For a time there was a festival of yelling, hooting, and displaying. The pithecines bristled their fur, making some of them look twice their usual size. The larger ones crashed through branches, ripped leaves from the trees, and leapt and slapped at the ground. One of Far’s group sprouted an immense pink erection that he waggled at the interlopers. Another leaned back and pissed over his challengers. And so on. It was cacophonous, baffling, stinking, a skirmish between two groups of creatures who looked identical to a bewildered Far.

At last Far’s captors drove off the intruders. Bristling with leftover aggression they hurled themselves around the trees, screeching and snapping at one another.

Now, calming, the pithecines began to forage on the ground, their long fingers raking through the debris of leaves and twigs. One of them found a chunk of black rock, a cobble of basalt. He quickly found another rock, and he turned the first over and over in his hands, his pink tongue comically protruding from his mouth.

At last he seemed satisfied. His eyes on the basalt rock, he set it on the ground, holding it precisely between thumb and forefinger. Then he slammed down his hammer-stone. Splinters sprayed away from the target rock, many of them so small they were barely visible. The pithecine rummaged in the dirt, rumbling his disappointment, then he turned back to his rock and started to turn it over in his hands once more. The next time he struck it, a thin black flake the size of his palm sheared off neatly. The pithecine hefted his flake in his hand, turning it around between thumb and forefinger while he studied its edge.

This stone knife was just a cracked-off splinter of stone. But its manufacture, involving an understanding of the material to be shaped and the use of one tool to make another, was a cognitive feat that would have been far beyond Capo.

The pithecine eyed Far. He was aware that Far was conscious, but he was going to begin his butchery anyhow.

His arm flashed out. The stone flake sliced into Far’s shoulder.

The sudden sharpness of the pain, and the warm gush of her own blood, brought Far out of her passive shock. She screeched. The pithecine roared in response and raised his flake again. But, just as she had crushed the scorpion, Far slammed the heel of her hand into his face. She felt a satisfying crunch of bone, and her hand was covered in blood and snot. He recoiled, blood gushing.

The pithecines fell back, startled, hooting their alarm and slapping their big hands on the ground, as if reassessing the strength and danger of this large angry animal they had brought into their forest.

But now one of them bared his teeth and began to advance on her.

She forced herself to her feet and ran, deeper into the forest gloom.

She clattered against tree trunks, got lianas and roots wrapped around her legs, and pushed through dense knots of branches. Her long legs and powerful lungs, designed for hours of running over flat, open ground, were all but useless in this dense tangle, where she couldn’t take a step without tripping over something.

And meanwhile the pithecines moved like shadows around her, chattering and hooting, climbing easily up trunks and along branches, leaping from tree to tree. This was their environment, not hers. When they had committed themselves to the savannah, Far’s kind had turned their backs on the forest — which had, as if in revenge, become a place not of sanctuary but of claustrophobic danger, populated by these pithecines which, like the sprites they resembled, would inhabit nightmares long into the future.

Before long the pithecines had overtaken her on both sides, and began to move closer.

She stumbled suddenly into a twilight-dark clearing — where a new monster reared up before her, bellowing. She squealed and fell flat in the dirt.

For a heartbeat the monster stood over Far. Beyond it squat forms sat; broad faces turned toward her, incurious, huge jaws chewing.

The monster was another hominid: another pithecine, in fact, a robust form. This big male, with an immense swollen belly, was taller and much bulkier than the gracile types who had captured her. His posture, even when he stood erect, was much more apelike; he had a sloping back, long arms, and bent legs. His head was extravagantly sculpted, with high cheeks, an immense, rocklike jaw filled with worn, stubby teeth, and a great bony crest that ran down the length of his skull.

Exhausted, in pain, her shoulder bleeding heavily, Far curled up on the ground, expecting those immense fists to come slamming down on her. But the blows never came.

The blocky creatures on the ground behind the big male huddled a little closer together. They were all females, with heavy breasts over those giant bellies, and as they stared at Fur, they pulled their tubby infants toward them. But still they sat and ate, Far saw. One female picked up a hard nut — so hard Far would have had to use a rock to crack its shell — placed it between her teeth and, pushing up on her jaw with her hand, cracked it easily. Then she began to crunch it down, shell and all.

But now the skinny pithecines came hurtling into the clearing. When they saw Big Belly they clattered to a halt, stumbling over one another like clowns. Instantly they began to display, stalking to and fro with their fur erect; they slapped the ground and hurled twigs and bits of dried shit at their new opponent.

Big Belly growled back. The truth was this gorilla-man was a vegetarian, forced by the low quality of his diet to spend most of his day sitting still while his vast gut strove to process his food. But this immense brute with his stumps of teeth, powerfully muscled frame, and cowering harem seemed a much more intimidating proposition than the skinny pithecines. He dropped to a knuckle-walk posture with a slam that seemed to make the ground shake, his huge gut wobbling. He stalked back and forth before his little domain, his own fur bristling, roaring back at the impertinent graciles.

The pithecines backed away, hooting their frustration.

Far scrambled out of the way and blundered on, still deeper into the seemingly unending forest. This time, she wasn’t pursued.

She couldn’t see the sun, not directly; there was only a scattering of green-tinged dappled light to mark her way. She had no sense of how long she plunged on through the forest, how far she had come. The deep cut in her shoulder had crusted over, but still she lost blood. Her head ached from the slamming it had taken from the pithecine’s rock, and her chest and back were just masses of bruises. And shock and bewilderment at losing her mother, and the small band of people who had made up her world, began to overwhelm her.

Exhaustion crept up.

At last she tripped over a root. She fell at the foot of a tree fern into soft, frond-littered loam.

She tried to push herself up, but her arms seemed to have no strength. She got to her hands and knees, but the color leached out of the world, its deep swallowing green turning gray. Then the ground seemed to tilt, the loamy ground swiveling up to slap into her face, hard.

The earth was cool under her cheek. She closed her eyes. The aches of her bruises and cuts seemed to fade, rattling into the distance like the storm’s thunder. A clamor filled her head, monotonous and loud, but somehow comforting. She let herself sink into the noise.

After Capo had come the great divergence from the chimps. The new kinds of apes that followed were hominids — that is, closer to humans than chimps or gorillas.

In the grand drama of the evolution of the hominids, learning to walk upright had been the easy part. Millions of years of apelike tree-climbing had seen to that. Now, as Capo’s descendants adapted to their new life on the interface between forest and savannah, to become more bipedal actually meant less body reorganization than needed to revert to all fours.

Their feet, no longer required to grip branches at odd angles, became simplified into compact pads that lost much of their flexibility, and their big toes no longer worked as thumbs — but their new arched feet served as shock absorbers that enabled them to walk long distances without injury. Knee joints and thigh bones were redesigned to absorb the new upright load. The uprights’ spines became longer and curved to push their centers of gravity forward so it lay over their feet, and on the center line of their vertical bodies. New, specialized hip joints arose, a design that enabled them to lift one leg off the ground without losing their balance, as chimps would, so that they could walk without swaying. Their hands no longer had to combine manipulation with support and so became more flexible: their knuckles slimmed; their thumbs were freed up for more complex and delicate grasping. They became less strong, weight for weight, now that they didn’t need to haul themselves through the trees all the time.

Bipedalism helped the new savannah apes by allowing them to walk or run long distances between scattered sources of food and shelter, and by enabling them to reach fruit and berries at higher levels. As time went on they became more upright and taller, succumbing to the same pressures that had shaped giraffes. Bipedalism was such a major advantage, in fact, that it had already evolved independently in other ape lineages — although all of those creatures would succumb to extinction long before true humans appeared.

The graciles, the skinny pithecines who had hunted Far, were like upright chimps. They were more upright than Capo or any ape. But their heads were like those of apes, with protruding muzzles, small brain pans, and flattened nostrils. Their posture, even when standing upright, was bent, the head thrust forward, and their arms were long, their grasping hands reaching almost to their knees. When they walked, they had to use more steps than Far would have done to cover the same ground, and they could not move so fast. But over the short distances they usually covered they were efficient and effective movers.

They had stuck to the forest fringe. But they had learned to exploit the resources of the savannah: especially the carcasses of the great herbivores laid low by predators. When the opportunity presented itself, they would rush out of the cover of their forest to a carcass, clutching their simple flake tools, and slice through tendons and ligaments. Stolen limbs could quickly be brought back to the safety of the forest for butchery and consumption, and hammer-stones could be used to crack the remnant bones for marrow.

All of this forced a selection for smartness. Hominids lacked the teeth of hyenas or the beaks of the carrion birds; if they were to scavenge effectively they needed better tools than Capo’s rudimentary kit. Meanwhile their bodies had gotten better at processing meat. Many pithecine types had teeth capable of shredding uncooked flesh, and a more efficient digestive system able to tolerate such rich fodder.

Still they were marginal scavengers, at the bottom of the hierarchy of meat eaters; they had to wait their turn until the lions and hyenas and vultures had taken what they wanted from the larger kills. And scavenging, and even their rudimentary hunting, wasn’t the only pressure on the savannah apes.

The savannah was predator hell. The leopards and bears of the forests had been bad enough. Out on the savannah there were huge flesh-shearing hyenas, and saber-tooths, and dogs the size of wolves. Small, slow, and defenseless, the hominids, walking blinking out of their forests, were an easy target for such creatures. Soon some of the predators, like the dinofelis, even learned to specialize in taking hominids.

It was a ruthless attrition, a relentless pressure. But the hominids responded. They learned to understand the predators’ behavior, and how to seek effective refuge. They learned to cooperate better with one another, for there was safety in numbers, and they used tools to drive off their assailants. Even the development of language was driven, in part, by these pressures, as the specialized alarm cries that dated back to the forests of the notharctus slowly morphed into more flexible words.

The savannah shaped the hominids. But they were not hunters; they were the hunted.

The pithecines had their limitations. They needed the shelter of the forest as their base, for they were not built to withstand long periods out in the open. And they were tied to rivers, lakes, and marshes, for their bodies had little fatty tissue and so were not resilient to long periods without water.

But as time went on, and Africa’s climate and habitat range fluctuated, the forest-fringe environment the pithecines favored spread: In a landscape of forest clumps, there was plenty of edge. The pithecine form had proved effective and enduring, and there had been a great churning of speciation events, a radiation of ape people.

The robust gorilla folk had abandoned the adventure of the forest fringe and had taken to the deeper green. Here they had begun to exploit a source of food for which there was little competition: leaves, bark, and unripe fruit unfit for any other hominid type to digest, and nuts and seeds too hard for other animals to crack. To adapt to this lifestyle they had, like potbellies and gigantopithecines, developed huge energy-expensive guts to process their low-quality food and heavily engineered skulls capable of driving those huge jaws with their slablike teeth.

Their social lives had changed too. In the dense forest, where there was always a supply of leaves and bark, stable groups of females came together to live off a single patch of forest. Males became solitary, each trying to maintain his hold over the females in his territory. So the males became larger than the females, and there was a premium on brute physical strength, so that each male could fight off those who would usurp him.

The gorilla-man’s kind were among the least intelligent of the hominids of his day. That big gut was very energy expensive; to balance its budget his body, in the course of its adaptation, had had to make sacrifices elsewhere. Smarts weren’t essential among the harems in the dim, stable gloom of the deep forest, and so the gorilla folk’s big primate brains, very costly in blood and energy, had dissolved.

But because the gorilla-man could be sure of sexual access to his females, his testicles were small. By comparison the skinny pithecine chimp-men had to mate as often as possible with as many females as they could, and needed the large, pendulous balls they displayed so readily, to produce oceans of sperm.

Within these basic pithecine types, the gracile chimp folk and the robust gorilla types, there were many variants. Some enhanced their bipedalism. Some all but abandoned it. Some skinnies were smarter than others; some gorilla folk were dumber than the rest. There were skinnies who used tools even less advanced than Capo’s, and gorilla types who used tools more sophisticated than the gracile pithecines’ stone flakes. There were large and small, skulkers and runners, pygmies and giants, slim omnivores and pillar-toothed herbivores. There were creatures with protruding faces like a chimp’s and others with delicate, flat features almost like a human’s. And there was much crossbreeding among the types, a proliferation of subspecies and hybrids, ornamenting the carnival of hominid possibilities.

Baffled paleontologists of the future, trying to piece this diversity together from fragmentary fossils and stone tools, would devise elaborate family trees and nomenclatures, calling their imagined species Kenyanthropus platypus; or Orrorin tugenenis; or Australopithecus garhi, africanus, afarensis, bahrelghazali, anamensis; or Ardipithecus ramidus; or Paranthropus robustus, boisei, aethiopicus; or Homo habilis. But few of the names fit the reality. And besides, the boundaries between these categories of creature were very blurred. Out in the real world, of course, such labels did not matter; there were only individuals, struggling to survive and raise their offspring, as they always had.

Most of the diverse assemblage here would be lost in time, their poor bones swallowed up forever by the forest’s voracious green. No human would ever know how it was to live in a world like this, crowded with so many different types of people. It was a bubbling evolutionary ferment, as many variants were spun off a fundamentally successful new body plan.

But none of this myriad of species had a future, for all these ape folk had clung to the forest. Their fingers and toes remained long and curved to help grab hold of tree trunks, and their legs were a peculiar compromise between the needs of knuckle-walking tree climber and those of biped. At night they would even make treetop nests like their forest-dwelling ancestors before them. And their brains never developed much beyond the size of Capo’s, and those of their cousins, the ancestral chimps, because their low-quality diet could sustain nothing bigger.

For four million years the pithecines had been a wide, diverse, very successful flourishing of the hominid family. Once, in fact, the only hominids in the world had been ape-men. But their time of significant change was already over. They had been seduced by the shelter and protection of the forest, and this had robbed them of much possibility. The future lay with another group of hominids — descendants of pithecine stock themselves — but who, unlike any pithecine, had made the decisive break away from the forest.

The future lay with Far.

III

Reluctantly she opened her eyes. She saw a patch of dirty ground, tilted up under her face. When she raised her head she could see brightness filtering through the dense tree trunks.

She pushed at the ground, and got her body off the floor. Leaves and dirt stuck to her breasts and injured shoulder. She used a tree trunk to pull herself upright, and stood still until the pounding of her heart subsided. Then she began to stagger as best she could through the forest toward the light.

She stumbled out into the day. She raised her hand, shielding her eyes against a low, reddening sun. The land was scorched, the grass blackened, the ground cracked and dried. But beyond a low rise she saw the glint of water: a stream that rolled from eroded hills a little further away.

She didn’t know this place. She had come right through the patch of forest, from east to west.

She stepped forward gingerly. The scorched ground was still hot — here and there tree stumps and bushes still smoked — and the crisped grass blades hurt her feet. Soon her lower legs, already filthy from her time in the forest, were coated with a deep black soot.

But she made it to the water. The stream was clear and fast moving. It ran over a bed of rounded volcanic cobbles, and bits of blackened vegetation skimmed over its surface. She plunged in her face and drank deeply. The dirt and dried blood washed off her skin, and the lingering stink of smoke in her nose and throat began to dissipate.

And then she heard a call. A voice. A word. But it wasn’t a word she knew.

She scrambled out of the water and threw herself flat behind an eroded boulder. In her world, strangers were bad news. Like their pithecine cousins her nomadic people were fiercely xenophobic.

A man knelt on the ground, his hands nimbly exploring the scorched soil for any pickings the fire had left behind. He was young, his skin smooth, his hair thick.

He picked up a blackened lizard, stiff and immobile. With a kind of shaped stone — its form wasn’t familiar to her — he scraped off the charred skin, exposing a morsel of pink flesh that he gulped down quickly. Now he found a snake, an adder, scorched to stiffness. Though he tried cutting through its burned skin it was too tough, and he threw the little corpse away.

Now the man found a real treasure. It was a tortoise, cooked in its shell. He picked it up and turned it over, muttering to himself. He took his handheld tool — it was a stone flake, but it was triangular, with each face worked, and a sharp edge all around it — and jammed it into the tortoise’s neck entrance. With a little effort he cracked open the shell, and soon he was using the tool to slice up the meat. Tortoises were actually a favorite prey of pithecine hunters. They were one of the few savannah animals that were even smaller and slower than hominids, and the tortoises’ habit of burrowing into the ground did not save them from clever animals able to dig them out with sticks and who had tools able to open up shells impervious to the teeth of lions and hyenas.

Far was fascinated by the young man’s stone ax. With its finely worked edge and shaped faces, it was far beyond her own people’s chopping stones and pithecine-like flakes. But she understood it immediately, at a deep somatic level; she had an impulse to reach out and take the stone teardrop, to try it out for herself.

As long as she knew him, she would associate this young man with the stone tool he wielded so expertly. She would think of him as Ax.

Suddenly Ax looked up, straight into Far’s eyes.

She cowered back behind her boulder, but it was too late.

He growled and dropped the tortoise — its shell clattered on the sooty ground — and held up his stone ax.

She had nowhere to run. She stood up. She thought his gaze wandered over her body, her back and buttocks still wet from the stream. He lowered the ax and grinned at her. Then he went back to his tortoise and resumed carving it out of its shell.

Calls came floating from the distance.

She saw more people — folk like herself, adults and children, slim upright forms moving like shadows over the ash-strewn plain. They were exploring a miniature forest of blackened, twisted forms. It had been a birthing herd of antelopes; many of these unlucky creatures, straining over their last calves, had been unable to flee the flames. Now the people were slicing into this treasure with their marvelous stone axes, and even from here she could smell the delicious scent of cooked meat. Ax dropped the tortoise and ran off toward his people.

After a few heartbeats, torn between caution and ravening hunger, Far began to jog after him.

Night fell quickly, as it always did. The people gathered in a rocky hollow, which would give them some defense against the predators of the night.

Far, with nowhere else to go, followed them.

She couldn’t spend a night on her own; she knew that. Even now she sensed cold yellow eyes tracking her, eyes that glowed with the knowledge that she was an outlier of this group — not quite embraced within its protection — a target, like the old, the very young, the lame.

The people didn’t drive her away. They didn’t exactly make her welcome, either. But when she tucked herself into a corner of the roomy hollow, huddled over a scrap of meat she had scavenged from one of the burnt carcasses, they tolerated her presence.

She watched a man knapping a bit of rock. The man was old — in his late forties — and skinny, with one eye almost closed by an ugly scar. Two children, a boy and a girl, sat at his feet. Not much younger than Far, they watched what Scar-face was doing, and with big stones held clumsily in their own small hands, they tried to copy him. The girl trapped her thumb, and squealed in pain. Scar-face wordlessly took the rock from her hands, turned it around and by guiding her hands showed her how to hold the cobble more effectively. But when he saw this the boy was jealous, and he pinched the girl, making her drop the rock. “Me! Me!”

As the darkness deepened, many of the people resorted to gentle, wordless grooming, the habit that had come with them from the ancestral forests. Mothers caressed infants, men and women alike played wordless politics as they cemented alliances and reinforced hierarchies. Sometimes the grooming turned to noisy sex.

Far, the stranger, was excluded from all this. But as she sank toward sleep, exhausted and battered, she was aware of Ax’s eyes on her.

When she woke, the sky beyond the hollow was already very bright.

Everybody had gone, leaving behind a few scraps of food, patches of infant shit, damp urine marks.

She got to her feet quickly. The bruises on her back and chest seemed to have consolidated into a single mass of pain. But her young body was already throwing off the damage it had suffered yesterday, and her head was clear. She hurried out into the light.

The people had walked north, toward a lake. They were slim upright shadows, walking purposefully, their outlines softened by the shimmering heat haze. She ran after them.

The lakeshore was crowded. Far made out many kinds of elephants, rhinos, horses, giraffes, buffaloes, deer, antelope, gazelles, even ostriches. In the water there were crocodiles and turtles, and birds flapped over it noisily. The giant herbivores, concentrated around the water, had devastated the landscape. From this muddy arena, their wide, well-trodden avenues snaked off in every direction. On the hardpan around the lake nothing grew but a few hardy plant species distasteful to the elephants and rhinos and able to recover quickly from trampling.

The people moved down to the water. They picked a spot close to an elephant herd. Everybody knew that predators avoided elephants. The elephants ignored the people and continued with their own complex business. Some of them entered the water and were splashing and playing noisily; groups of cows rumbled mysteriously, and males trumpeted and clashed their huge tusks. These massive animals, the architects of the landscape, were slabs of muscle and power, with their own stately, flat-footed grace.

Most of the women were working the water’s edge. Far saw that one of them had turned up the nest of a freshwater turtle; its long eggs were quickly cracked, their contents devoured. Other women were harvesting the mussels that grew abundantly in the shallow waters, especially freshwater clams.

Far saw that Ax, like most of the men, had waded into the water. He was carrying a wooden spear, and he stood very still, eyes fixed on the glimmering water’s surface. After a few heartbeats he stabbed down with a powerful splash — and when he brought up the spear, a fish had been neatly skewered, its silver body wriggling. Ax hooted, pulled the fish off his spear, and threw it to the shore. Another man, a little further out, was creeping up on a water fowl that paddled complacently across the surface. The man leapt, but the bird got away, amid much comical splashing, squawking, and shouting.

Far joined the women.

She quickly found a horseshoe crab, crawling stiffly along a muddy channel. It was easy to catch. She held it upside down, and it waved its clawed legs feebly. She used a bit of stone to open up its head shield, which was the size of a dinner plate. Inside, near the front, there was a mass of eggs, like fat rice grains. She scooped them out with her fingers and gulped them down. The flavor was very strong, like oily fish. The rest of the crab’s meat proved too tough to be worth digging out. She flipped away the smashed head shield, and moved on in search of more food.

Thus the day wore on, as the people foraged for their food, just another type of animal on this crowded savannah.

As midday approached, the hominids moved away from the water, relaxed, satiated.

But Ax struck out on his own. Far trailed after him. He gazed back at her. She knew he was aware she was following him.

Ax came to a dried-up streambed laced with worn cobbles. He walked up and down the bed, examining the rocks, until he found what he wanted. It was a cobble about the size of his fist, flattened and rounded. He sat squat in the streambed and rummaged around until he found a suitable hammer-stone. He had brought some dried brush that he spread over his crossed legs for protection. Then he went to work, tapping at the core he had selected. Soon flakes flew away, briskly rattling off the cobble.

Far sat ten meters away, her legs folded before her, hugging her knees, fascinated by his toolmaking. It was like nothing she had seen before.

In fact, Ax and Far had grown up in toolmaking traditions separated by millennia.

Once they had put the trees behind them and moved definitively out onto the savannah, a new range of possibilities had opened up for the walkers. They were more than merely mobile. They migrated. But it wasn’t purposeful. For each individual, it was just a question of making a living. For people able to exploit new landscapes, it was often easier to walk to somewhere that looked a better place to live than to try to adapt to harsh conditions.

But as the generations ticked by the people covered thousands of kilometers. They even walked out of Africa, into lands where no hominid had set foot before. Before the great clamp of the glaciations tightened, equable conditions had spread well out of Africa into southern Europe, the Middle East, and southern Asia. Walking into these familiar surroundings the people followed the easy living of the coastlines, west around the Mediterranean and diffusing inland, at last colonizing Spain, France, Greece, Italy — as did animals later associated only with Africa, like elephants, giraffes, and antelope. To the east, they worked through India to the Far East, suffusing through what would become China, even working south to reach Indonesia.

It was not a conquest. Far’s kind had become far more widespread than any other ape species. But other animals, like the elephants, spread much further. And there were fewer of them. Their numbers in any given area were less than lions, say. Despite their tools the people were still just big animals in a landscape on which they had minimal impact.

And the great wandering was not purposeful. One of Far’s distant grandmothers had reached as far as Vietnam; now, in Far’s time, chance and the endless walking had brought her lineage back to East Africa, to home.

But here, in the ancient homelands, the returning migrants encountered new pressures.

Some hominid populations had elected not to move, despite the climate’s treacherous fluctuations. To survive they had been forced to become smarter. Better tools — crucially, the hand axes — had been the key to their survival. The ax’s secret was its teardrop shape. A flattened bi-faced shape gave a long cutting edge for minimal weight. Though they would still use simple pithecine-like flake tools if they needed to — the flakes, easy to make, were “cheap” and were actually better for some tasks, like tackling small prey — the hand axes were used not just for butchering meat, but for hacking sticks and clubs from branches, sharpening wooden spears, opening up beehives, digging into logs to get at larvae, peeling off bark, shredding pith, and opening the shells of tortoises and turtles. It was from a group of these stay-at-homes that Ax was descended.

Which was how Far, descendant of wanderers who had crossed southern Eurasia all the way to the Far East, now found herself confronted by the startlingly advanced technology of Ax and his kind.

Ax worked patiently. Her gaze wandering, Far noticed now that the dry bed here was littered with hand axes: many of the rocks she had assumed were just cobbles had actually been shaped. They all had the characteristic teardrop shape, and were all worked to a greater or lesser degree to give that fine edge all the way around the tool.

But these axes were strange. Some of the axes were tiny, the size of butterflies, while some were huge. Some of them were broken, some smeared with blood. But when she tried to pick up one of the larger axes, its edge cut into her fingers; it had hardly been used, if at all.

Someone walked up to her. She cowered back.

It was Scar-face, the man who had taught the children how to knap rock. He was looking at Far with a kind of hungry intensity. He had one of the huge axes in his hands. It was impractically large, too large to use to butcher. Still gazing at her he turned it over in his hands, and tapped at it with a hammer-stone, tidying up an edge. Then he scraped it over his leg, and removed a swath of the fine black hair that grew there. All through this he watched Far’s face and body, his half-covered eye gleaming.

She had absolutely no idea what he wanted — none, that is, until she saw the erection poking out of his tuft of pubic hair.

Ax had more or less finished the blade he was making: hand-sized, utilitarian, rough and ready, it was clearly a functional tool, manufactured in minutes. But when he saw what Scar-face was doing he threw down his ax angrily. He got up, scattering his spill of flakes, and punched the man’s shoulder. “Away! Away!”

Scar-face snarled back, his erection subsiding. At last Ax grabbed the huge gaudy ax out of his hands, and threw it to the ground. Part of its beautiful edge sheared off. Scar-face looked at the ax, at Far, and, with a final glare at Ax, walked away.

Far sat where she was, her knees tucked against her chest, fearful and baffled.

Ax stared at her. Then he stalked up and down the dry stream again, surveying the stones. At last he came across a big malformed volcanic block, so heavy it took two hands to lift it. He sat down again, picked up a few hammer-stones, scattered more brush over his legs.

He started to slam at the rock, displaying all his strength. Flakes and sheets of it began to fall away. But very quickly, thanks to his skill and strength, a crude hand ax teardrop shape emerged. Now he started to use a succession of smaller stones to shape the two lenticular surfaces, and to finish the edge to a fine blade.

Where his first effort had come easily, borne out of a rock that had already had the rough shape of the final ax, this rock was much more difficult. He couldn’t have picked a tougher challenge — and he had chosen it deliberately. And all through this he made sure Far was watching him.

The walking folk had already been making tools more or less like this for two hundred thousand years. Over such an immense span of time, the axes had become more than mere tools, more than functional.

To Ax, this feat of toolmaking was a kind of courtship. He was displaying his fitness as a mate to Far. By making the tool he was showing her in one clear demonstration the strength of his body, the precision of his working, the clarity of his mind, his ability to conceive and see through a design, his skill for locating raw materials, his coordination of hand and eye, his spatial skills, his understanding of the environment around him. All of these were traits he expected she would want to pass on to her offspring — and that was why such displays had acquired a logic of their own, divorced from the utility of the hand axes.

Driven by lust and longing, men and boys would make dozens of axes, over and over. They would labor for hours over a single ax, seeking perfect symmetry. They would make tiny axes the size of their thumbnails, or they would make huge unwieldy affairs that would have to be held in two hands like an open book. They would, as Ax had, seek out particularly difficult raw materials and go ahead and carve out axes anyhow. Sometimes they would even throw away their axes, deliberately, to show how rich they were in strength and skill.

It was even worth trying to cheat, as Scar-face had done. It didn’t work very often — women quickly learned they had to see the most impressive ax being made before them — but occasionally it paid off, and the liar got a chance to pass on his genes at very low cost.

This mixing up of toolmaking with sexual courtship would have a profound effect on the future. As no male could afford not to make axes just as his forefathers had done, it was a recipe for stultifying conservatism. These people would make the same tool to the same plan, over and over, across several continents, despite several glacial cycles, for a million years. Even the different species who followed them would continue with the same technology. It was a continuity and a consistency that no institution, no religion would ever match. Only sex had a strong enough hold on the human mind to have achieved such a vast freezing.

When he worked on his tools, Ax had to think, to some extent, like a human. Unlike the pithecine stone-slammer who would take whatever shape and size of flake his cobble offered him, Ax had to have an image of the final artifact in his mind. He had to select the raw materials and hammer-stones to match that vision, and he had to work systematically toward his goal. But his mind was divided as no human’s could be. Ax made his tools like a human, but he attracted mates like a peacock or a bower bird.

When Ax was done, he turned the tool he had made over and over in his hands, showing her its fine faces, its smoothly finished edge. It was magnificent, if impractical.

Far, brought up in a subtly different culture, had no clear idea of what he was doing — and she was just as baffled by Scar-face’s attempt to cheat. But she did sense Ax’s interest in her, and a warmth in her belly spread in response. And a more calculating corner of her mind was aware that if she mated with Ax, if she became pregnant, then she would become part of this group, and her future would be secured.

But she had never had sex, not with anybody. Longing, fearful, she sat there at the edge of the streambed, her legs still tucked against her chest. She didn’t know how to respond.

At length he dropped the beautiful ax, among so many others. Baffled, casting backward glances at her, he walked away.

Speciation — the emergence of a new species — was a rare event.

One species did not morph smoothly into another. Rather, speciation relied on a group of animals being isolated from the larger population and put under pressure to survive. The isolation could be physical — say, if a group of elephants was cut off by a flood — or it could be behavioral, if, for instance, one group of hominids that had adopted a particular way of scavenging was shunned by another group that hadn’t.

Variation was implicit in the genome of every species. It was as if every species, at any given moment, was contained in a field, fenced off by the habitable limits of its environment. Every viable variation would come into play, to fill up every available corner of the field. An isolated group was stuck in a fenced-off corner of the field. But perhaps a little of the outer fence came down, opening up a new and empty field, into which they began, slowly, to diffuse. More variation might be necessary to fill the newly available space — and if the necessary variation wasn’t available in the genome, perhaps it could be generated by mutation.

In the end, those who reached the furthest corner of the new range might have gone a great distance, genetically, from those who had remained in the old field. If the distance became too great for the old and new kinds to crossbreed, a new species was born. Later, when the isolating barriers came down, the evolved kind might interact with the parent type — perhaps to supplant them.

Some three hundred thousand years earlier, in another part of Africa, a group of nondescript forest-fringe pithecines had found themselves cut off from their home range by a lava flow, cast out of their forest once and for all.

There were many challenges to be met. The old pithecine habits of forest-fringe hunting had been a start, something to build on. But out on the savannah the food supply was very different from that in the forest. Whereas the forest had provided a steady supply of fruit, the main savannah food was meat. Meat was high-quality nutrition, but it came in packages scattered sparsely over an arid, inhospitable landscape, packages you had to be smart to spot, get hold of, and use. And stranded out on the savannah, away from the trees’ shelter, a new kind of body was needed to cope with the aridity and the heat, new kinds of behavior needed to extract the resources needed from the new environment — and to survive in predator hell.

Within a mere few dozen generations Far’s ancestors had adapted drastically.

The ancient primate body plan had been rebuilt, stretched tall almost to human proportions. Far’s body was much bulkier than that of the ancestral apes. She was twice as heavy as an adult gracile pithecine. That bulk was an adaptation for openness: a larger body was more efficient at storing water, a key advantage on a plain where there could be many hours’ walking between water sources.

And her metabolism had become efficient at creating and storing subcutaneous fat, for fat was a key fuel reserve. Ten kilograms of fat would be sufficient to see her through forty days without food, enough to ride out all but the most severe seasonal fluctuations. The fat had fleshed out her body, giving her swollen breasts, buttocks, and thighs, a much more human shape than the pithecines’ chimplike slackness. But Far was not a round ball; instead she was tall and thin, so that her body was also an efficient radiator of waste heat, and when the sun beat down from above, comparatively little of her skin was directly exposed to its radiation.

More heat adaptations: Apart from her head, with its grooming patch of hair, her skin was all but bare. And she sweated, unlike Capo, unlike any other ape outside her species family, for bare, sweating skin was a better temperature regulator than hair for creatures destined to spend their lives in open tropical sunlight. Sweating was a paradox, for it meant Far lost water. So she had to be smart enough to find water sources to make up for that, and, unlike some of the true savannah creatures, her kind would always be tied to some extent to water courses and the coasts.

The most apelike characteristics of the pithecines — their grasping feet, long arms, and stooping gait — had soon been abandoned. Far’s feet were best fit for running and walking, not climbing: her big toe was now a toe, not a thumb. But Far’s rib cage was a little high, her shoulders a little narrow: even now her body still carried with it traces of its vanishing adaptation to the trees — as would modern humans’, as would Joan Useb’s.

Meanwhile her brain had grown to more than three times the mass of a pithecine’s, the better to handle the puzzles of a difficult landscape and the intricacies of still more complex societies of large groups of savannah foragers. That big brain was very energy-hungry, but Far’s diet was much richer than any pithecine’s, with plenty of high-protein foods like meat and nuts, which in turn required greater intelligence to gather. Thus her smartness had been driven by a virtuous circle of development.

All these changes were drastic, and yet they had been achieved by an evolutionary strategy of remarkable economy. It had been heterochrony — different timing. Walker infants looked much as their more apelike ancestors had — as would human babies — with relatively large skulls, small faces and jaws. If you wanted to become Capo, you grew your jaw large and kept your brain relatively small. But Far’s brain had grown large while her jaw had stayed small. Even the much larger size of her body had been achieved by stretching out growing phases: her body had something like the relative dimensions of a fetal Capo, inflated to adult size.

But that large body size and big brain came at a price. She had been born with her development incomplete, because that was the only way her head would have squeezed through her mother’s birth canal. She had been born premature. Unlike the apes and even the pithecines, walker infants could not forage for themselves until long after weaning: aside from their physical immaturity, the ability to exploit food sources like hunted meat, clams, and heavy-shelled nuts was not innate in the newborn, and so had to be learned. But at the same time the children of the walkers were being born into the predator hell of the savannah. So, while they were young, kids needed a lot of care.

These costly, dependent children made it difficult for the walker types to compete with the fast-breeding pithecines, with whom they often shared the same habitats. And that was why the walkers began to live longer.

Most pithecine females, like the apes before them, died not long after their fertility ended — indeed, few long outlived their last birth. Walker women, and men, began to live for years, even decades after their reproductive career was apparently over. These grandmothers and grandfathers began to play a crucial role in shaping walker society. They helped with the division of labor: They helped their daughters care for the children, they helped gather food, they were essential in passing on the complex information required by the walkers to survive.

All this had required a new efficiency in body design. Walker bodies were much better than pithecines’ at maintenance and longevity — all save their reproductive systems; a forty-year-old walker woman’s ovaries were as badly degenerated as would be the rest of her body at age eighty, if she lived that long.

Crucially, the grandmothers’ support meant their daughters could afford to have children more often. That was how the walkers outcompeted the pithecines and apes. Almost all walker children survived long after weaning. Almost all pithecine infants did not.

For the pithecines the emergence of this new form was a disaster. Walkers and pithecines were too close cousins to share the ecology easily. There were few direct conflicts between the types of people: Sometimes pithecines hunted walkers or walkers hunted pithecines, but they found each other too smart and dangerous a prey to be worth the trouble. But in ages to come the walkers — big-brained, flexible, mobile — would slowly drive their smaller-brained cousins to extinction.

Toolmaking and even consciousness were, ultimately, no guarantee of survival.

Of course it need not have happened. If not for the fluctuation of the climate, the chance isolation of Far’s ancestors, there might have been no mankind: nothing but pithecines, upright chimps screeching and making their crude tools and waging their petty wars for millions of years more, until the forests disappeared altogether, and they succumbed to extinction.

Life always had been chancy.

Far spent the night alone, cold, drifting through an uneasy sleep.

The next day, as she tried to join in the group’s activities, a woman, heavily pregnant, glared into her eyes, an ancient primate challenge. Was Far here to take food that might otherwise reach the belly of her unborn child?

Far felt more isolated than ever. She had no ties with anybody here. There was no reason why they should share their space, their resources with her. It wasn’t as if this place was brimming with riches. And now even Ax seemed to be rejecting her.

As the afternoon wore on she was the first to return, alone, to the hollow in the sandstone outcrop. She tucked herself into the peripheral corner she had come to think of as her own.

But she noticed some lumps of crimson rock scattered deeper at the back of the hollow. She picked them up, turning them over curiously. Their redness was bright in the daylight, and they were soft. They were lumps of ocher, the iron red of ferric oxide. Someone had been attracted by their color and, on impulse, brought them here.

She saw scrapes of red on scattered basalt rocks at the back of the hollow: red the same color as the ocher, red like blood. Experimentally she pushed the ocher over the rock, and was startled to see more bloody streaks smear over the rock surface.

For long minutes she played with the bits of ocher, not really thinking, her clever fingers working by themselves to add their own meaningless scribbles to the scrawls on the rock.

Then she heard the hollers of the people as they started to drift back to their temporary base. She dropped the bits of ocher where she had found them, and made for her corner.

But the palms of her hands were bright red: red like blood. For an instant she thought she had cut herself. But when she licked her palms she tasted salty rock, and the scraping of ocher came away.

Red like blood. A tentative connection formed in her mind, a chink of light shining between her compartments of thought.

She went back to the bits of ocher. Now she tried scraping them over the back of her hands, where she made a hatchery of lines, and on the healing pithecine cut on her shoulder, which she made bright red again.

And she marked herself between her legs — marking her skin red like blood, as if she were bleeding, as she had seen her mother bleed.

She went back to her corner and waited until the light faded. As the people tended and crooned to each other, she huddled over and tried to sleep.

Someone approached: warm, breathing softly. It was Ax. She could smell the dusty scent of rock chippings on his legs and belly. His eyes were pits of shadow in the fading light. The moment stretched. Then he touched her shoulder. His hand was heavy and warm, but she shivered. He leaned toward her and sniffed quietly, scenting her just as had Brow before she had become separated from her family.

She opened her legs, so he could see the “blood” in the fading light. She sat tense, watching him.

Her life hung on his acceptance; she knew that. Perhaps it was that basic desperation and longing, a longing for him to see her as a woman, which had driven her to come up with this peculiar deceit.

Unlike his forest-dwelling ancestors, Ax was a creature of sight, not smell; the message from his eyes overrode the warning of his nose. He leaned forward. He touched her shoulder, her throat, her breast. Then he sat beside her and his strong fingers began to comb through her tangled hair.

Slowly she relaxed.

Far stayed with Ax and his people for the rest of her life. But as long as she could, whenever she could — as she grew in wisdom and strength, as her children grew until they gave her grandchildren to protect and mold in turn — she ran, and ran, and ran.

I

Pebble had found a yam vine. He bent and inspected it.

He was eight years old, naked save for smears of ocher on his barrel chest and broad face. He pulled out a little grass from around the yam’s base. This was a spot for yam, not grass, and it was best to keep it that way.

People had been here before to dig out these tubers. Perhaps he had even been here himself. At eight years old he had already covered every scrap of his people’s range, and he thought he remembered this spot, here between these eroded bluffs of sandstone.

He took his digging stick. This was a heavy pole shoved through a hole crudely bored in a small boulder. Despite the tool’s weight, he lifted it easily, and he used the mass of the boulder to ram the digger’s point into the hard ground.

Pebble was a solid slab of muscle built over a tough, robust skeleton. If Far, his long-dead, distant grandmother, had looked like a long-distance runner, Pebble might have been a junior shot-putter. His face was large, massive-featured, dominated by a great ridge of bone over his brow. He had a mountainous nose and large sinuses that gave his face an oddly puffed-out look. His teeth were flat-topped pillars of enamel. His skull, which would become considerably larger than Far’s, housed a large and complex brain — in fact comparable in size to a modern human’s — but it sat much more directly behind his face than a human’s brain would have.

When he had been born, wet from the womb, Pebble’s body had been sleek and round, inspiring an odd image in his mother’s mind, a pebble worn by a stream. Names for people still lay far in the future — with just twelve people in Pebble’s group there was no need for names — but nevertheless this boy’s mother would often look on a glistening rock in a stream, and remember her child as he had been as a baby in her arms.

Pebble, then.

In this age there were many kinds of robust folk like Pebble’s spread through Europe and western Asia. Those who inhabited Europe would one day be called Neandertals. But just as in Far’s time, most of these new kinds of people would never be discovered, let alone understood, classified, linked to a hominid family tree.

His were a strong people, though. Even at eight years old, Pebble performed work essential to his family’s survival. He wasn’t yet up to joining the adults on the hunts, but he could dig out yams with the best of them.

The wind picked up a little, bringing him the delicious scent of wood smoke, of home. He went at his work with a will.

Already his digging had broken up the earth. He plunged his hands into the dry ground and began exposing a fat tuber that looked as if it might go down a long way, perhaps as deep as two meters. He went back to his digging stick. Bits of dust and rock flew up, sticking to his sweat-covered legs. He knew what to do with yams. When he had the tuber he would cut off the edible flesh, but then replace the tuber’s stem and top in the ground so that it would regrow. His digging aided the yam in more subtle ways, too. He was loosening and aerating the soil, further fostering regrowth.

His mother would be pleased if he brought home three or four fat tubers, ready to be thrown onto the fire. And yams were useful in a lot of other ways besides eating. You could use them to poison birds and fish. You could rub their juice into your head to kill the lice that crawled there…

There was a crunching noise.

Startled, Pebble pulled back his digging stick. He leaned forward, shielding his eyes from the sun’s brightness, trying to see what was down there in the hole. It could be some deep-burrowing insect. But he could see nothing but a scrap of rust brown, like a bit of sandstone. He reached down and, his clumsy fingers stretching, grabbed the scrap and pulled it to the surface. It was a ragged-edged dome, small enough to fit in the palm of his hand. When he held it up before his face two empty eye sockets peered back at him.

It was a skull. The head of a child.

That was no great horror. Children died all the time. This was a harsh place: There was little pity to spare for the weak and hapless.

But all the children who had died within Pebble’s own short lifetime had been put in the ground close to the huts. Like all the dead, they were buried to keep the scavengers from harassing the living. Perhaps this child was long dead, then. Perhaps its people had buried it here before Pebble was born, where the yam clump grew now.

But the skull was oddly fine, light. Pebble weighed it in his hand. Its brow was a heavy lid of bone, from which a forehead sloped back almost horizontally. Pebble ran a hand over his own scalp and compared the slightly bulbous swelling of his forehead. There were tooth marks in the little cranium, he saw: precise puncture wounds inflicted by the teeth of a cat — but inflicted after the child was already dead, its body abandoned on the plain.

Pebble could not know that he was holding the remains of the Brat, brother of Far, who had lived and died not far from here. The Brat had succumbed to his infant vitaminosis and died while still a child, without issue. It would have been little comfort to the Brat if he could have known that one day, when his brief, forgotten life was already more than a million years gone, his small head would be cradled in the hand of a remote great-nephew.

And the Brat would have recognized little of this landscape, the place where he had once played.

The geological infrastructure of the Rift Valley — the plateau, the rocks, the volcanic mountains, the great sweep of the valley itself — had been left largely unchanged by time. But since Far’s time this had become a sparse, dry place. Scattered stands of acacia, leadwood, and wild laurel had replaced the denser thickets and forest pockets of the past. Even the grasslands were subtly different, great swaths of them dominated by a handful of fire-resistant species. Meanwhile, the great animal communities of the past had imploded. There was not an elephant to be seen across this great dust bowl, not an antelope or giraffe. It was as if life had crashed here. The place was depleted. Far would have been startled by its impoverishment.

But the Brat’s wretched remains had left their mark on the world: a scrap of moisture trapped in that buried, upturned skullcap had been enough to help establish the yam.

Incuriously Pebble closed his fist. The little skull was crushed to thin shards, and he let the dust fall back into the hole. He reached for his digging tool; there was still some root to be dug out.

That was when he glimpsed the strangers.

He crouched down behind a bluff, holding his breath.

They were hunters; he could see that immediately. They were following an old elephant track. Elephants walked to water, and where there was water, there would be many animals, including the medium-sized creatures like deer that people hunted by preference.

There were four of them, three men and a woman, all adults. As they walked the hunters’ legs swung powerfully, with their torsos tipped a little forward. It was a gait built for strength, not elegance or speed: the hunters had none of the fleetness of Far. Thick beards hid the men’s dark faces, and the woman had tied her long hair back with a bit of leather. Unlike Pebble this group wore clothes: just bits of hide, unsewn and tied around the body with strips of leather or plaited bark. Pebble could see the bite marks in the clothes. Leather was treated by chewing and stretching it with the teeth, and a major function of that big ridge of bone on Pebble’s brow was to provide an anchor for the jaws that must do such mighty work.

And they carried weapons: narrow wooden throwing spears, and shorter, stubby thrusting spears, great logs of hardwood with slabs of stone stuck to the end with blobs of resin and leather ties. They were giants’ weapons that a human would have had trouble lifting, let alone wielding in anger.

They were robust folk, people like Pebble’s kind. But Pebble could see ocher markings scrawled on the skin of their faces, hands, and arms. Where Pebble’s own adornment was made up of vertical lines — bars and stripes and bands, all pointing to the sky — these people wore a kind of clumsy Crosshatch, sketched by thick fingers.

They were strangers. You could tell that by the markings. And strangers meant trouble. That was a law that worked as invariably as the rising of the sun, the waxing of the Moon.

Pebble waited until the newcomers had passed out of sight behind a stand of sparse acacia. Then, as silently as his slablike body would allow him, he began to run for home. The yam tubers he had dug up lay abandoned on the ground behind him — with his digging stick.

Pebble’s home was a kind of village, with four large huts set roughly around a clearing. And yet it was not a village, for his people lived not quite as any humans ever would.

Pebble stood, panting, in the central clearing. Nobody was around. Close to the door of one hut a fire smoldered. The trampled ground was scattered with bone, vegetable debris, tools, mattresses of leaves and grass, trays of bark, pegs, wedges, a broken spear, discarded bits of leather. The place was a mess.

The huts were crude and ugly, but serviceable. They had been built of thick saplings set in rough circles in holes in the ground. The gaps between the saplings were filled with rattan cane split into switches, and overlapping leaves, bunches of rushes, bark. The saplings were bent over together and their ends pushed over and under each other. It was a kind of weaving that Capo would have recognized, for five million years earlier he had made his treetop nests in much the same way: Every innovation of necessity was built on what had gone before.

The huts were old. The people had lived here for generations. The dirt beneath Pebble’s feet was thick with the bones of his ancestors. The people felt safe here. This was their place, their land.

But now, Pebble knew, all that might change.

He raised his head to the washed-out sky. “U-lu-lu-lu-lu! U-lu-lu-lu-lu!…” It was a cry of danger, of pain, the first cry any child learned after the feed-me yell.

Soon the people came running, from the huts, from the land beyond where they foraged and hunted. They gathered around Pebble in concern. There were twelve of them: three men, four women, three older children — including Pebble himself — and two infants in their mothers’ frightened grasp.

He tried to tell them what he had seen. He pointed back to where he had seen the strangers, and ran a few paces back and forth. “Others! Others, others, hunters!” He began an elaborate performance, gesticulating, posturing, puffing himself up to walk like powerful hunters, even miming to show how they would smash in the people’s heads with their mighty fists.

His audience were impatient. They turned away, as if eager to return to their foraging, or eating, or sleeping. But one man watched Pebble’s performance more carefully. He was a squat man even more powerfully built than most, and his face was distorted by a childhood accident that had smashed the cartilage in his great fleshy nose. This man, Flatnose, was Pebble’s father.

Pebble’s language was sparse. It was just a string of concrete words with no grammar, no syntax. And, a million years after Far, talking was still basically a social skill, in fact used mainly for gossip. To convey detail or complex information, you had to repeat, use endless circumlocution — and mime, gesture, perform. Besides, Pebble had to convince his audience. It was hard for the adults to accept what Pebble had to say. They couldn’t see the strangers for themselves. He might be lying or exaggerating: He was, after all, little more than a child. The only way they had to gauge his sincerity was by the passion and energy he put into his performance.

It was always this way. To get anyone to listen, you had to shout.

At last Pebble gave up, panting, and sat squat in the dirt. He had done his best.

Flatnose kneeled beside him. Flatnose believed his son: His performance had cost him too much to be lies. He rested his hand on his son’s head.

Reassured, Pebble touched his father’s arm. There he found a series of scars, long and straight, following the line of the forearm. These scratches were the marks of no animal. Flatnose had inflicted them on himself, with the sharp blade of a stone knife. When he was older, Pebble knew he would join in the same game, the same silent, grinning self-mutilation: It was part of what his father was, part of his strength, and Pebble found it reassuring now to stroke those scars.

One by one the other adults joined them.

Then, the moment of silent acceptance over, Flatnose got to his feet. There were no words now. Everybody knew what had to be done. The adults and the older children — Pebble and a girl a little younger than himself — started to move around the settlement, gathering weapons. There was no particular order to the settlement, and weapons and other tools lay where they had last been used, amid piles of food, debris, ash.

Despite the urgency the people moved sluggishly, as if even now reluctant to accept the truth.

Dust, Pebble’s mother, tried to soothe her squalling baby as she gathered up her gear. Her loose, prematurely grayed hair was, as always, full of dry, aromatic dust, an eccentric affectation. At twenty-five she was aging quickly, and she limped when she walked, the effect of an old hunting wound that had never healed right. Since then Dust had had to work twice as hard, and the cumulative effect showed in her stooped posture and careworn face. But her mind was clear and unusually imaginative. She was already thinking of the difficult times ahead. Watching her face, Pebble felt guilty at having brought this trouble down on her.

There was a soft sigh, a flash. Pebble turned.

In a dreamlike moment, he actually saw the wooden spear in flight. It was hewn from a fine piece of hardwood, thickest near the point and tapered back toward the other end, shaped to make it fly true.

Then it was as if time began to flow again.

The spear slammed into Flatnose’s back. He was thrown to the ground, the spear sticking straight out of his back. He shuddered once, and a burst of shit cascaded from his bowels, and a black-red pool spread under him, soaking into the dirt.

For a heartbeat Pebble couldn’t take this in — the thought that Flatnose had gone so suddenly — it was as if a mountain had suddenly vanished, a lake evaporated. But Pebble had seen plenty of death in his young life. And already he could smell the stink of shit and blood: meat smells, not person smells.

A stranger was standing between the huts, squat and powerful. He was wrapped in skins, and he held a thrusting spear. His face was daubed with crosshatched ocher marks. He was the one who had hurled the spear at Flatnose. And Pebble saw his own abandoned digging stick in the stranger’s hand. They had seen him at the yam stand. They had tracked his footsteps. Pebble had led them here.

Full of rage, fear, and guilt, he hurled himself forward.

But he went clattering to the ground. His mother had grabbed his waist. Lame or not she was still stronger than he was, and she glared at him, jabbering, “Stupid, stupid!” For an instant sanity returned to Pebble. Naked, unarmed, he would have been killed in an instant.

A man burst out of the heart of the settlement. He was naked and he carried his own thrusting spear. He was Pebble’s uncle, and he hurled himself at the killer of his brother. The stranger fended off the first blow, but his assailant closed in. The two of them fell to the dirt, wrestling, each trying to get in a decisive blow or thrust. Soon they had disappeared in a cloud of blood-spattered dust. They were two immensely muscled beings using all their mighty strength against each other. It was like a fight between two bears.

But more of the hunters came boiling out of the cover of the rock bluffs and trees. Men and women together, all armed with spears and axes; they were dirt-crusted, lean, hard-eyed. They had come hunting Pebble and his group, as if they were a herd of unwary antelope.

Pebble could see desperation in the eyes of the others. These newcomers were not nomads, not invaders by instinct, any more than Pebble’s people would have been. Only a dire catastrophe of their own could have forced them to this plight, to make them come into a new and strange land, to wage this sudden war. But now that they were here, they would fight to the death, for they had no choice.

There was a howl. The hunter who had taken on his uncle was standing now. One arm dangled, bloody and broken. But he was grinning, his mouth a mass of blood and broken teeth. Pebble’s uncle lay at his feet, his chest split open.

Already Pebble’s folk had lost two of their three adult men, Flatnose and his brother. They had no chance of resisting.

The survivors ran. There was no time to grab anything, no tools or food — not even the children. And the hunters fell on them as they fled, using the butts of their spears to fell and disable. The third man was cut down. The hunters caught two of the women, and the girl younger than Pebble. The women were thrown to the ground, face first, and the young men pulled their legs apart, jostling for the right to be first.

The others ran, on and on, until the pursuers gave up.

Pebble looked back the way they had come. The hunters were pawing through the settlement, the ground that had been Pebble’s ancestors’ for time out of memory.

There were five of them left from the village, Pebble realized. Two women, including his mother, Pebble himself and a smaller girl, and one of the infants — not Pebble’s sister. Just five.

Her face hard, Dust turned to Pebble. She laid a hand on his shoulder. “Man,” she said gravely. “You.”

It was true, he saw with horror. He was the oldest male left: of the five, only the squalling infant in the dirt at his feet was male.

Dust scooped up the motherless infant and held him close. Then she turned resolutely away from her settlement and began to stomp away to the north, her lame gait leaving uneven tracks in the dirt. She didn’t look back, not once.

Bewildered, terrified, Pebble followed.

II

The Pleistocene, this era of ice, was an age of brutal climatic turbulence. Droughts and floods and storms were commonplace: in this age a “once-in-a-century” climatic disaster came around every decade. It was a time of intense variations, a noisy time.

This created an environment that was intensely challenging for all the animals who inhabited it. To cope with the changes many creatures got smarter — not just hominids, but carnivores, ungulates, and others. The average mammalian brain size would double across the two million years of the Pleistocene.

The great family of hominid species to which Pebble belonged had been born in Africa, as had so many others, far to the south of here. Smarter, stronger than Far’s folk, they had pushed in a great arc out of Africa into Europe, south of the ice, and into Asia, as far as India. They had adapted their technology, their ways, and, over enough time, even their bodies to the disparate conditions they encountered.

And they had displaced the older forms of people. Elegant, skinny walkers like Far still survived in eastern Asia, but they clung on in Africa only in pockets. In Europe they were extinct altogether. As for the pithecine types, the last of them had succumbed long ago, squeezed out between the chimps and the new savannah folk. Still, the hominid range was narrow. There were still no people in the cold northern lands, none in Australia, and none in the Americas, none at all. But the Old World felt ever more full of them.

Meanwhile the land was growing poorer.

Once more there had been extinctions. And this time the people had had a lot to do with it. Under climate pressure, many of the larger, slow-breeding species of animals had found themselves increasingly tied to the water sources. They therefore became an easier target for increasingly clever hominid hunters, who, looking for the lowest-risk kills, selectively picked off the old, the weak — and, crucially, the very young.

The largest and least versatile species had been taken out first. In Africa, of the wide and ancient elephantid family, only the true elephants remained. Many varieties of giraffe, pig, and hippo had followed.

And then there was fire.

The harnessing of fire, not so many generations before Pebble’s time, had been one of the most significant events in hominid evolution. Fire offered many advantages: warmth, light, protection from carnivores. It could be used to harden wood, and its heat could be used to make many plant and animal foods digestible. There was still no organized large-scale firing and ground clearing; that would come later. But already the daily use of fire had had, little by little, a profound impact on the vegetation, as those plants able to withstand fire were favored at the expense of less hardy cousins. And meanwhile, though true agriculture lay far in the future, hominids had begun to select those plant species they favored for their own purposes — just as Pebble had cleared grass from the yam stand.

Such small actions, repeated every day across hundreds of thousands of years, had an immense impact. Once the landscape had been shaped by the trampling of elephants: Far and her kind had been marginal. Not so now. This landscape had been made by people.

By now it was as if this bare landscape of fire-resistant trees and sparse grass-eaters were somehow natural, and had been here forever, for all time. It had been this way so long that no mind on Earth could remember how things might have been different.

Seal had caught a spider on the beach. He scampered over the sand and brought it to Pebble, grinning. “Spider web spider fish.” Pebble tapped Seal on the head, warming to his infectious energy, and wishing he shared some of it.

Seal ran back to the clump of dune grass where he had found the spider. The web was built on a fan of strong radial lines, over which the spider had laid a spiral of continuous sticky web. Now — delicately, delicately, holding a small stick in his wide fingers — the boy lifted the spiral off its nonsticky guide ropes. He moved the rod spoke by spoke, twirling it so that the sticky stuff formed a dangling mass at the end of the rod. Then he hurried to a tidal pool, sheltered by lumpy, eroded rocks. He put his stick in the water, letting the sticky mass dance on the water’s surface.

A tiny fish came to nibble the enticing lure. But with every bite its jaws got stuck more firmly in the web. At last it was glued to the stick and was easily scooped out of the water. Seal popped it straight into his mouth with a grin of triumph. Then he dipped his makeshift rod into the dead spider’s glue sac and settled it back into the water.

Seal, brought out of the abandoned settlement in the arms of Dust eleven years back, was twelve years old now — seven years younger than Pebble himself. His early years had been quite different from Pebble’s: They had been years on the move. But Seal didn’t seem disturbed by his experiences. Perhaps he had got used to migrating, like one of the big grass-chewers that followed the seasons. And he had taken to the ocean. He was too heavy to swim — they all were — but whenever Pebble saw him in the shallow water close to the shore, he was reminded of a playful mammal of the sea.

But, eleven years after the trauma of the attack that had killed his father, Pebble had nothing in common with Seal’s inventive playfulness.

At nineteen Pebble was fully mature, his frame as squat and powerful as his father’s had been. But he was battered. His body bore old scars from ferocious, desperate hunting incidents. In a collision with a wild horse he had suffered a cracked rib that had never healed properly, and for the rest of his life he would suffer a diffuse pain every time he took a breath. And he bore the marks of wounds inflicted by people; too often he had had to fight.

Forced to grow up too quickly, he had become introspective. He hid his thoughts behind a mass of beard that, year after year, became more dense and knotted, and his eyes seemed to recede beneath their great browridge of bone.

And, like his father, on each of his arms he bore long, ragged scars.

With a sigh Pebble returned to his own gloomy inspection of the nets and lures he had strung out in the deeper water. This pebbly beach was protected from the sea by an outstretched arm of land, and a freshwater stream trickled down over the beach from the base of the bluffs. The sea was the Mediterranean: This was Africa’s northern coast. Behind him, to the south, the land rose up in a series of bluffs. It was here that Pebble’s refugee people had at last made their home, on the dry grassy dunes above the high-water mark, in a hut constructed from driftwood and saplings.

As far as he knew Seal, playing with spiders and their webs, had come up with his own miniature way of fishing. But then, on this dismal shore, they had all been forced to learn fast about the use of the sea. In the early days there had been much splashing around as hunters used to chasing down antelope had hurled themselves through the shallows after darting fish and dolphins that evaded them easily. They had gone hungry, and despaired.

They had got the right idea, in the end, from watching the spiders, and the birds and small animals that occasionally got tangled up in bushes or canes with sticky foliage, or in thickets with trailing vines.

Gradually they had figured out the use of nets and traps and snares, woven from bark and bits of leather. Their first attempts had failed more often than not. But they had slowly developed skills in exploiting natural cords and vines, and learned how to weave, repair, and tie fibers. And it worked. If you were lucky you could trap fish, octopus, and turtles. The deeper into the water you went, the better the catch would be.

Well, it had had to work. Otherwise they would surely have starved.

Ironically the land to the south, beyond these coastal bluffs, was rich, a mosaic of woodland and grass and fresh- and saltwater pools. And there were plenty of animals, beyond the marshes and on the higher ground: red deer, horse, and rhinoceros, and many smaller herbivores. Sometimes the animals would even come down to the beaches in search of salt.

If the land had been empty of people it might have been a paradise for Pebble’s group. But the land was not empty, and that was the entire trouble.

On the horizon there was an island. His gaze was drawn there now. Though it was made misty blue by distance, even from here he could see how rich the island was, with lush vegetation running down every cleft of rock, almost to the ocean. And there were people there. He had seen them on clear days: skinny, tall people, who would run across their beaches and hilltops, pale flitting figures.

There he and his people would be safe, he thought. On an island like that, a scrap of land of their own, they could live forever, untroubled by strangers. If he could get there, perhaps he could fight those skinny folk for possession of their land.

If he could get there. But people could not swim like dolphins, and they could not walk over the water like insects. It was forever impossible.

So here they were, stuck.

They had never planned to come so far as this. None of them had planned any of this at all. They had just been forced to keep going, and going, while the years had worn away.

Pebble’s kind were by nature sedentary; these robust folk had long lost the wanderlust of Far’s day. It had stressed them hugely to be thrust into unfamiliar landscapes: For Pebble it was as if the great trek had been a long, slow breakdown, a time of madness and bewilderment.

During the journey the children had grown — Pebble himself had become a man — and their numbers had slowly risen, as more refugees from one disaster or another tagged along with them. And their numbers had grown in another way. Pebble had become a father; he had coupled with Green, the wistful woman who had come with them from the old settlement. But as they crossed a particularly harsh and dry land, the child had died.

And still they had found nowhere they could live. For the world was full of people.

Before the attack there had been twelve people in Pebble’s close extended family. They were self-sufficient, and very sedentary. They did not trade, never traveled much further than could be reached in a day’s walk.

But they had been aware of similar groups nearby, studded around the landscape, as immobile as trees.

In all there were over forty tribes in the larger clan of which Pebble’s people were part, around a thousand people. Sometimes there would be exchanges as youngsters from one “village” sought mates in another. And there was occasional conflict as two parties found themselves competing over a rich foraging ground or the target of a hunt. But such incidents were usually settled with nothing much more than a slanging match, some inconclusive wrestling, and in extreme cases a spear in the leg, a maiming which had evolved as a ritual punishment.

And every one of this thousand-strong band, from the smallest baby to the most wizened thirty-five-year-old crone, was marked with the characteristic red or black vertical stripes that Pebble still wore on his face.

Far would have been astonished to see what had become of her innocent innovation with the bits of ocher. What had started out as a half-unconscious sexual deception had become, over immense stretches of time, a kind of looser celebration of fecundity. Women and even some men would mark their legs with the characteristic color of fertility. Slowly, dim minds and fumbling fingers had experimented with other forms of markings, new symbols.

By now, though, this crude scribbling had a purpose. Pebble’s vertical markings were a kind of uniform, setting a boundary between his folk and others. You didn’t need to remember everybody in your group personally — as Capo had had to when he had tried to lead his followers. You didn’t need to know faces. All you needed was the symbol.

The symbols united the bands. In a way the symbols had become what they fought for. These crude stripes and body markings were the birth of art, but they were also the birth of nations, the birth of war. They would make possible conflicts that would transcend even the deaths of those who had started them. That was why hominid minds were becoming smarter at creating the symbols, with each new generation.

All across this landscape there were clans like this, clans of more or less the same size. They were all sedentary, all staying where they had been born, where their parents and grandparents had lived and died. Their languages were mutually incomprehensible. Indeed many of these communities were no longer even able to interbreed, so long had they been isolated. And there they stayed, until they were displaced by some natural catastrophe like a climate shift or a flood — or by other people.

Which was why the clans had formed in the first place, of course: to keep out the refugees.

It had been terribly hard for them. At last, after eleven years, they had come to this place, this beach, and they had been forced to stop, for here the land had run out.

Now Pebble heard a mournful cry from up the beach. “Hey, hey! Help, help!”

Pebble stood and peered that way. He saw two stocky figures staggering toward the hut. They were Hands and Hyena, the one characterized by his huge, powerful hands, the other by his habit, when hunting, of laughing like a scavenger. These two men had joined Pebble’s group during their long odyssey. But now they were struggling. Hyena was leaning heavily on the powerful shoulders of his companion, and even from here Pebble could hear Hyena’s wheezing gasps.

Dust came out of the hut. Pebble’s mother, in her late thirties now, had grown gaunt and bent with the stresses her body had endured during the long walk, and her hair was white and wispy. But she was still doggedly alive. Now she began to hobble up the beach toward Hyena and Hands, and called out. “Stab, stab!”

Hyena collapsed to the beach, and Pebble could see a stone blade sticking out of his back. Hands struggled to get him to his feet again.

Muttering darkly Pebble stalked across the beach after his mother.

By the time they had brought Hyena back to the hut, the light was beginning to leave the sky.

Preparing themselves for the tasks of the night, the people moved around the hut. The men and women alike had immense bulging shoulder muscles that showed humplike through their leather wraps. Even their hands were huge, with broad spadelike fingertips. Their bones were thick-walled, capable of enduring great stress, and their joints were heavy and bony. These were massive people, solid, as if carved out of the Earth themselves.

They had to be strong. In a tough environment, they had to work very hard all their lives, making up in brute force and endless labor what they lacked in smarts. Few reached the end of their lives without the pain of old wounds and such problems as degenerative bone diseases. And hardly anybody lived beyond forty.

Hyena’s wound was unremarkable. Even the fact that he had clearly been stabbed in the back by a hominid from a rival band beyond the bluffs did not arouse much interest. Life was hard. Injuries were commonplace.

Inside the low, irregular, poky hut there was no light save from the fire and whatever daylight leaked through the gaps in the plaited walls. There was little organization. At the back of the hut were piled up bones and shells, discarded after meals. Tools, some broken or just half-finished, lay where they had been dropped, as did bits of food, leather, wood, stone, unworked skin. On the floor could be spotted traces of the staples that the group relied on: bananas, dates, roots and tubers, a great deal of yam. The adults did dump their feces and urine outside, to keep out the flies, but the younger children had yet to learn that trick, and so the floor was littered with half-buried infant shit.

There weren’t even any fixed places for the fires. The scars of old fires were visible across the floor of the hut and outside in the blackened circles of scuffed pebbles and sand. When the wind changed or a part of the hut collapsed, they would just move the embers from yesterday’s fire to a new place and start again.

A human would have found the hut dark, low, claustrophobic, cluttered, disorganized, and filled with an unbearable stench, the stench of years of living. But to Pebble this was just the way things were, the way they always had been.

There were actually two fires being tended tonight. Hands had turned to the hot fire that had smoldered all day. He prowled around the settlement gathering bits of dried wood, and he carefully built up a pyramid of wood and chips to make a more intense, hotter fire. He had stripped the flesh off the head and limbs of a baby rhino, and now he would use his fire to crack the bones and get at the rich marrow inside.

Toward the rear of the hut, Dust and the woman Green were working on a second fire with Seal and Cry and some of the children. They had a handful of stones which they knapped quickly to make knives and borers, and with these they worked the food they had managed to gather during the day within a few hundred meters of the hut. This included shellfish — even a rat.

Soon, as they worked, smoke curled up into the plaited roof of the hut. All this took place against a background of grunts, murmurs, belches, and farts. Scarcely a word was spoken.

Cry was another survivor: She was the girl, younger than Pebble, who had escaped the occupation of their old settlement. She had taken her experiences hard. She had always been sickly and prone to weeping. Now she was seventeen and a full woman, and Pebble, like Hands and Hyena, had coupled with her more than once. But she had yet to fall pregnant, and her body, skinny and comparatively lightly built, had given Pebble no pleasure.

There was a peculiar economic arrangement among these people. Men and women largely foraged separately, ate separately.

Those who foraged for vegetation, seafood, and small game close to home — mostly women, but not exclusively — sat cooking it over their warm fire, relying on tools quickly made of local resources to help them eat. Those who roamed further to hunt — mostly men but not always — would devour much of the meat they secured on the spot themselves. Only if they had a surplus would they bring it home to share. The treat of the bone marrow was always kept back for the hunters, after the bones were cracked in the intense heat of their own fire.

Most of the time, the women’s foraging actually supplied most of the groups’ food, and in a way it subsidized the men’s hunting. But hunting, as it had always been, was about more than acquiring food. There was still an element of peacocklike display in the male hunters’ activities. In that, these people had not moved on much from Far’s time.

Other things were different, though. The stone tools the women used to prepare their food were massive, but their surfaces and edges looked crudely finished compared to the exquisite hand axes Ax had been able to make more than a million years ago. But for all its beauty a hand ax was not really a great deal more useful for most tasks than a simple, large-edged flake. In harsher times, men and women had had to learn to make their tools as efficiently as possible to suit the task at hand. Under this pressure, the ancient grip of the hand ax template began to weaken. It had been a mental unfreezing. Though in some corners of the planet the hand ax makers still wooed with their tokens of stone, with the dead hand of sexual selection lifted there had been a burst of inventiveness and diversity.

Gradually, a new kind of toolmaking had been discovered. A core of stone would be prepared in such a way that a single blow could then detach a large flake of the desired shape, which could then be retouched and finished. The flakes came with the finest possible edges — sometimes just a molecule thick — all the way around. And with sufficient skill you could make a wide variety of tools this way: axes, yes, but also spear points, cutters, scrapers, punchers. It was a much more efficient way of making tools, even if they looked cruder.

But this new method involved many more cognitive steps than the old. You had to be capable of seeking out the right raw materials — not every type of stone was suitable — and you had to be able to see not just the ax in the stone, but the blades that would eventually flow from the core.

When the eating was finished, the people drifted to other tasks. The woman Green prepared a bit of antelope leather, biting on it and pulling it across her teeth. She was an expert at working animal skin, and her teeth, worn and chipped, showed their years of use. The smaller children were getting sleepy now. They gathered into a rough ring and began to groom each other, running their little fingers through the knotted hair on each other’s heads. Hands was trying to tend to Hyena. He inspected the wound under its poultice, sniffed, and pushed the poultice back into place.

Dust, exhausted as she often was these days, had already lain down beside her fire. But she was awake, her eyes gleaming. Pebble understood. She was missing Flatnose, her “husband.”

The people had paid a price for the increasingly large brains of their children. Pebble had been born utterly helpless, with much of his brain development still to come, a long period of growth and learning ahead of him before he could survive independently. The support of grandmothers was no longer enough. A new way of living had had to evolve.

Parents had to stick together, for the sake of their children: it was not monogamy, but it was close. Fathers had learned it was essential to stay around if their genetic inheritance was to go on to further generations. But women’s ovulation was concealed, and they were almost continually sexually receptive. It was a lure: If a man was going to invest in raising a kid, he needed to be confident the kid really was his — and if he didn’t know when his partner was fertile, the only way to ensure that was to stay around.

But it wasn’t all compulsion. Couples preferred sex in private — or as much as was possible in such a close, small community. Sex had become a social cement that bound couples together. Relentless Pleistocene selection was shaping everything that would make up humanity. Even love was a by-product of evolution. Love, and the pain of loss.

But the shaping was not complete. The desultory talk in this crude hut was not much more than gossip. Toolmaking, food gathering, and other activities were still walled off from consciousness, in compartmented, if roomy, minds. And they still groomed like apes.

They were not human.

Pebble felt irritable, restless, confined. Gruffly he grabbed a slice of rhino belly from Seal, who protested loudly: “Mine, mine!” Then he went to sit, alone, in the doorway, facing the sea.

Close by, he could see the scrubby land where the people cleared away weeds from peas and beans and yams. But beyond that, looking north and west, a sunset towered into the sky, its purple-pink light painting the planes of his face. It was a magnificent Ice Age sunset. The glaciers, scouring across the northern continents, had thrown vast amounts of dust into the air; the sun’s light was refracted through great clouds of ground-up rock.

Pebble felt stuck, like one of Seal’s little fish glued to his blobs of spiderweb.

Barely conscious of what he was doing, he felt around on the ground for a sliver of rock. When he had found one sharp enough he lifted it to his right arm — he had to look for a patch that wasn’t already scarred — and he pressed the stone to his flesh, relishing the delicious prickling pain.

He wished his father were here, so they could cut together. But the stone remained, the pain almost comforting as it pushed through his epidermis. He ran the stone blade down his arm, feeling the warmth of his own blood. He shuddered with the pain, but relished its cold certainty, knowing he could stop at any moment, yet knowing he would not.

Isolated, depressed, his life blocked, Pebble had turned in on himself, and a behavior that had once served to enable young men to compare their strength in a reasonably harmless way had become solitary and destructive. Pebble’s kind were not human. And yet they knew love, and loss — and addiction.

In the darkness behind him, his mother watched, her bone-hooded eyes clouded.

Pebble was woken in the gray of the predawn — but not by the light or the cold.

A tongue lapped at his bare foot. It was almost comforting, and it penetrated his uneasy dreams. Then he woke enough to wonder what was doing the licking. His eyes snapped open.

A shaggy, muscular wolf stood on all fours before him, silhouetted against the dawn sky.

He yelped and dragged his legs back. The wolf whined, startled. Then it scampered away a few paces, turned and growled.

But a person stood beside the wolf.

She was at least a handbreadth taller than he was. Her body was slender, her shoulders narrow, her long legs elegant, like a stork’s. She had narrow hips and shoulders, small high breasts, and a long neck. Her body was all stringy muscle: He could see the firm bulges of her arms and legs. She looked almost like a child, a great stretched-out child, her features unformed. But she was no child — he could tell that from the breasts, the thatches of hair under her arms, and from the fine lines that had gathered around her eyes and mouth.

The skinny folk on the island were just like this, from the neck down, anyhow. But from the neck up, Pebble had never seen anything like her.

Her chin stuck out into a kind of point. Her teeth were pale and regular — and unworn, like a child’s, as if she had never used them to treat animal skin. Her face seemed flattened, her nose small and squashed back. Her hair was frizzy and black but hacked short. And the ridge over her eyes — well, there was no ridge. Her brow rose smoothly and straight up, and then her skull swept back into a great bulging shape like a rock, quite different from the turtle-shell shape of his own cranium.

She was a human — anatomically, a fully modern human. She might have stepped out of a tunnel through time from Joan Useb’s chattering crowd in Darwin Airport. She could not have been a greater shock to heavy-browed Pebble if she had.

Her eyes flickered as she glanced from Pebble to the people — Hands, Cry, others — who had come out to see what was going on. She said something incomprehensible, and held out the harpoon at Pebble, point first.

Pebble stared, fascinated.

The harpoon’s shaft was notched at the end, and in the notch, attached by resin and sinew thread, there was a carved point. It was a slim cylinder, not more than a finger’s-width wide at the center. On one side fine barbs had been carved into the surface, pointing away from the direction in which the harpoon would be thrust. Its surface wasn’t roughly finished like his own tools; it looked smooth as skin.

Her harpoon wasn’t her only artifact, he saw now. She wore a scrap of some treated hide around her waist. A thing like a net, woven of vines, perhaps, was slung around her neck. Inside it nestled a collection of worked stones. They looked like flint. Flint was a fine stone, easy to shape, and he had encountered it several times during his trek out of Africa. But there was no flint to be found anywhere near this beach. So how had it got here? His confusion deepened.

But his attention was drawn back to that harpoon point. It was made of bone.

Pebble’s people used bits of broken bone as scrapers or as hammers to finish the fine edges of their stone tools, but they did not try to shape it. Bone was difficult stuff, awkward to handle, liable to split in ways you didn’t anticipate. He had never seen anything like this regularity, this finishing, this ingenuity.

In the future he would always associate her with this marvelous artifact. He would think of her as Harpoon. Unthinking, helplessly curious, he reached out with his long, broad fingers to touch the harpoon’s point.

“Ya!” The woman backed off, grasping the harpoon. At her side, the wolf bared its teeth and growled at him.

Tension immediately rose. Hands had picked up heavy cobbles from the beach.

Pebble raised his arms. “No no no…” He had to work hard, gesturing and jabbering, to persuade Hands not to hurl his stones. He wasn’t even sure why he did this. He ought to be joining Hands in driving her off. Strangers were nothing but trouble. But the dog, and the woman, had done him no harm.

And she was staring at his crotch.

He glanced down. An impressive erection thrust out. Suddenly he was aware of the pulse that beat in his throat, the hotness of his face, the moistness of his palms. Sex was a commonplace with Green or Cry, and it was usually pleasurable. But with this child-woman, with her flattened, ugly face and her harpoonlike body? If he were to lie on her, he would probably crush her.

But he had not felt like this since his first time, when Green had come to straddle him in the night.

The wolf growled. The woman, Harpoon, scratched the creature’s ruff. “Ya, ya,” she said gently. She was still looking at Pebble, her teeth showing. She was grinning at him.

Suddenly he felt ashamed, as if he were a boy who could not control his body. He turned and ran into the sea. When the water was deep enough to cover him he plunged forward face first. There, his mouth clamped closed, he grabbed at his erection and tugged it. He ejaculated quickly, the stringy white stuff looping in the water.

He kicked and stood up, gasping for breath. His heart still hammered, but at least the tension had gone. He stalked out of the water. The cuts he had made in his arm the night before had not yet healed, and red blood, diluted by salt water, dripped down his fingers.

The woman had gone. But he could see a trail of footsteps — narrow feet, delicate heels — that led off back the way she must have come, beyond the headland. The dog’s clawed prints followed hers.

Hands and Cry were walking toward him. Cry was studying Pebble uncertainly. Hands called, “Stranger stranger wolf stranger!” He threw his cobbles down with a clatter, angry. He couldn’t see why Pebble had reacted as he had, why he hadn’t quickly driven off or killed this stranger.

Suddenly Pebble’s dissatisfaction with his life came to a focus. “Ya, ya!” he snapped. And he turned away from the others and began to walk in the tracks the slender woman had made.

Cry ran after him. “No, no, trouble! Hut, food, hut.” She even grabbed his hand and pulled it to her belly, and tried to slide it down to her crotch. But he shoved the heel of his hand into her chest, and she fell to the ground where she sprawled, staring forlornly after him.

III

He followed the tracks along the beach. His broad prints covered Harpoon’s, obliterating them.

The shore was crusted with mussels and barnacles and the wrack of the sea: kelp, stranded jellyfish, and hundreds of washed up cuttlefish bones. Soon he was sweating, panting, his hips and knees aching subtly, a forerunner of the joint pains that would plague him as he grew older.

As he calmed down, his normal instincts began to reassert themselves. He remembered he was naked, and alone.

He cast around the beach until he found a large, sharp-edged rock that fit comfortably into his hand. Then, as he walked, he kept close to the water’s edge. Even though the sand here was a soft, soggy mud that clung to his feet, at least there was only one side from which he could be approached.

Still those neat tracks, with the wolf’s padding alongside, arrowed neatly through the softer sand. At last the tracks cut back up the beach. And there, in the shade of a clump of palms, he saw a hut.

He stood for long heartbeats, staring. Nobody was around. Cautiously he approached.

Set above the water’s high-tide marks, the hut was built on a frame of saplings that had been thrust into the ground. The saplings had been woven together at their tops — no, he saw, they had been tied, not woven, tied up with fine bits of sinew. On this frame branches and fronds had been laid and tied into place. Tools and bits of debris, unidentifiable from this distance, lay around the hut’s rounded opening.

The hut was nothing special. It was a little bigger than his own — perhaps big enough for twenty people or more — but that seemed to be the only difference.

His feet crunched softly over the debris on the trampled ground around the hut’s entrance. He stepped inside the hut, eyes wide. There was a rich scent of ash.

It wasn’t dark in here, but suffused by a warm brown light. He saw that a hole had been knocked in one wall, and a piece of hide, scraped thin, had been stretched over it, enough to shut out the wind but not the light. Briefly he inspected the bit of hide, looking for the marks and scrapes of teeth, but saw none. How could you prepare hide without using your teeth?

He looked around. There was dung on the floor: shit from children, what looked like spoor from wolves or hyenas. There was plenty of food litter, mostly clam shells and fish bones. But he also saw animal bones, some with scraps of meat still clinging to them. They were heavily worked, cut and gnawed. They were mostly from small animals, perhaps pigs or small deer, but even that stirred a vague envy. As far as he knew the ferocious folk of the interior kept the produce of the forests and grassy spaces to themselves.

He sat, legs crossed, and peered around, his eyes gradually adapting to the gloom.

He found the remains of a fire, just a circular patch of black on the ground. The ashes were hot, smoldering in places. He cautiously probed its edge with a finger. His finger sank into layers of ash. A pit had been dug into the ground, he saw, like the pits into which you would stick a dead person. But this pit had been made to contain the fire. The ash was thick, and he saw that many, many days and nights of burning had contributed to this dense accumulation. And on the side of the pit closest to the entrance, where the breeze was strongest, a low bank of cobbles had been built up.

It was a hearth, one of the first true hearths to be made anywhere in the world. Pebble had never seen anything like it.

Covering the ground, he saw, were sheets of some brown substance. He touched one of the sheets gingerly. It turned out to be bark. But the bark had been carefully stripped off its tree and somehow shaped, woven, and treated to make this soft blanket. When he lifted the bark blanket he saw a hole in the ground. There was food inside the hole: yams, piled up.

He found a heap of tools. A thick pile of spill showed that this was a place where stone tools were habitually made. He rummaged idly through the tools. Some were only half-finished. But there was a bewildering variety — he saw axes, cleavers, picks, hammer-stones, knives, scrapers, borers — and other designs he didn’t even recognize.

Now he saw what looked like an ordinary ax, a stone head fixed to a handle of wood. But the head was bound by a bit of liana so tightly wound he couldn’t unpick it. He had seen lianas strangle other plants. It was as if someone had put this ax head and its handle into the grip of a living liana, and then waited until the plant had grasped the artifacts, binding them more tightly together than any fingers could manage.

Here was a bit of netting like the one he had seen Harpoon wearing on the beach. It was a bag with tools of stone and bone inside it. He picked the bag up experimentally and lifted it to his shoulder, as he had seen Harpoon do. Pebble’s kind did not make bags. They carried only what they could hold in their hands or sling over their shoulders. He teased at the stringy netting. He thought it might be creepers or lianas. But the fibers had been twisted tightly into a strong rope that was finer than any liana.

He dropped the bag, baffled.

It was like his hut, and yet it was not. For one thing it was strange to have everything separated. At home, you ate where you liked, made your tools where you liked. The space was not divided up. Here there seemed to be one place to eat, one to sleep, one to make the fire, one to work on tools. That was disturbing. And -

“Ko, ko, ko!”

A man had come in through the entrance. Silhouetted against the daylight he was tall, skinny like Harpoon, and had the same bulging dome of a head. There was fear in his weak face, but he raised a spear.

Adrenaline flooded Pebble’s system. He got to his feet quickly, assessing his opponent.

The man, dressed in tied-on skins, was whip thin, with stringy muscles. He would be no match for Pebble’s brute strength. And that weapon was just a spear of carved and hardened wood, light for throwing: It wasn’t a thrusting spear, which was what was needed for fighting in this tight space. Pebble would be able to snap that scrawny neck easily.

But the man, frightened, looked determined. “Ko, ko, ko!” he yelled again. And he took one step forward. Pebble growled, bracing himself to meet the thrust.

“Ya ya.” Here was Harpoon. She grabbed the man’s arm. He tried to pull away. They began to argue. It was a conversation just as might have occurred in Pebble’s hut: a string of words — none of which he could understand — with no structure or syntax, and only repetition, volume, and gesturing for emphasis. It took a long time, as all such arguments did. But at last the man backed down. He glared at Pebble, spat on the floor of the hut, and stalked out.

Cautiously Harpoon clambered into the hut. Watching Pebble, she sat on the trampled ground. Her eyes were bright in the gloom.

Slowly, Pebble sat before her.

At length Harpoon pushed her slim hand under a bark blanket and pulled out a handful of baobab fruit. She held it out to Pebble. Hesitantly he took it. For long heartbeats they sat in silence, representatives of two human subspecies, with not a word, not a gesture in common.

But at least they weren’t trying to kill each other.

After that day Pebble felt increasingly uncomfortable in his home, with his people.

The stringy folk seemed to accept him. The tall man who had found him in the hut, Ko-Ko — for Pebble would always think of his cries of “Ko, ko!” “Get away!” — never quite trusted him, that was clear. But Harpoon seemed to take to him. They worked tools together, she showing off the subtle skills of her delicate fingers, he his immense strength. They peered across the sea at the rich island that still tantalized Pebble.

And they tried to work out each other’s vocabulary. It wasn’t easy. There were many words, such as directional terms like “west,” which Pebble’s ancestors had never needed.

He even went hunting with her.

These newcomers were by preference scavengers or ambush hunters. With their lithe but feeble frames they used guile rather than brute strength to make their kills, and their weapons of choice were hurled, not thrust. But they grew to welcome Pebble’s mighty contributions during the closing stages of a kill, when the prey had to be finished off at close quarters.

Meanwhile, the two kinds of people started a new kind of relationship. They did not fight, nor did they ignore each other, the only two ways people had had to relate to each other before.

Instead, they traded. In exchange for the fruits of the sea and some of their artifacts, such as their massive thrusting spears, Pebble’s folk began to receive bone tools, meat from the interior, marrow, skins, and exotic items like honey.

Despite the obvious benefits of the new relationship, many of Pebble’s folk felt uneasy. Hands and Seal had inquisitively explored the possibility of the new tools. Dust, aging quickly, seemed sunk in apathy. But Cry was unremittingly hostile to the new people — and to Harpoon in particular. This wasn’t the way things were done.

These were, after all, an immensely conservative people, people who moved house only when forced to by an Ice Age. But they traded anyhow, for the advantages were undeniable.

Harpoon had been able to hold back Ko-Ko from killing Pebble because, to these people, a stranger wasn’t necessarily a threat. You had to be able to think that way if you were going to trade.

For hominids, that was a brand-new way of thinking. But then Harpoon’s kind was only five thousand years old.

There had been a band of people, not unlike Pebble’s, who had lived on a beach, not unlike this one, on the eastern shore of southern Africa. The beach was crowded by thick, buff-colored sedimentary rocks. The vegetation was unique to that part of the world, an antique flora recalling Roamer’s days, dominated by bushes and trees covered by big, thistly flowers. It was a rich place to live. The sea was productive, offering mussels, barnacles, fish, seabirds. In places the forest came right down to the shore, echoing with the calls of monkeys and birds, and in the grassy glades there was game in abundance: black rhinos, springboks, wild pig, elephant, as well as long-horned buffalo and giant horses.

Here Harpoon’s ancestors had had a home base close to the sea. Like Pebble’s folk, they had lived there for generations beyond counting, their bones lying thick in the earth. From here they would work across the landscape, never traveling more than a few kilometers from home.

But then, with terrible suddenness, the climate collapsed. The ocean rose, and flooded their ancestral home. Just like Pebble’s group they had been forced to flee. And like Pebble’s folk, lost in a crowded land, they had had nowhere to go.

Every step they took away from the lands they had known left them more baffled and confused. Many of them died. Many infants, in the arms of starving refugee mothers, failed to live much past birth.

At last, desperate, starving, they were forced along a riverbank. They reached the river’s mouth, where mangroves grew thick. Here they could stay, because it was a place nobody else wanted. Much of the floor was covered with an oily brown water, through which slid crocodiles. Damp, fetid, unhealthy, it was a kingdom of lizards, snakes, and insects, many of which, even the marching ants, seemed to conspire to drive out the people.

There was food to be had: water lily roots, shoots, and stems. Even mangrove fruits were palatable to the starving. But there was scarcely any meat. And there was no stone anywhere with which to make tools. It was as if they were trying to live on a great soaked-through mat of vegetation.

Stranded out of their environment, the people might have died out within a generation, if they hadn’t adapted.

It had started innocently. A woman, Harpoon’s remote grandmother, had wandered as far as she could up the river valley and on to drier land. Here, on the floodplains and in the seasonal swamps, the well-watered, silty soil supported many annuals, herbs, legumes, vines, lilies, and arrowroots. After years in the swamp she had grown adept at using crude wooden tools and her bare hands to harvest food from soggy, unpromising terrain. She had already filled her belly, and was gathering clumps of roots to take home to her children.

Then she came upon the stranger. The man, from another group further upriver, was using a knife of basalt to skin a rabbit. The two of them stared at each other, one with meat, the other with roots. They might have fled, or tried to kill each other. They did not.

They traded: meat for roots. And they went their separate ways.

A few days later the same women returned to the same spot. Again the man returned. Scowling, suspicious, their tongues mutually incomprehensible, they traded again, this time shellfish and barnacles from the river’s mouth for a couple of basalt knives.

That was how it began. The people of the swamp, unable to find everything they needed to stay alive in the scrap of land they had inherited, exchanged the produce of the sea, the swamp, and the floodplain for meat, skin, stone, and fruit from the interior.

After a couple of generations they migrated out, and began a new kind of life. They became true nomads, following the great natural highways, the coasts and the inland water courses. And everywhere they went they traded. As they moved, so they fissured and spread, and tentative trading networks grew. Soon it was possible to find bits of shaped rock hundreds of kilometers from where they had been formed and seashells deep in the interior of the continent.

Living like this was a challenge, though. Trading meant building up a new kind of map of the world. Other people were no longer just passive features of the landscape, like rocks and trees. Now a track had to be kept of who lived where, what they could offer, how friendly they were — and how honest. There was a ferocious pressure on the swamp people to get smarter, fast.

The design of their heads changed drastically. Their skulls enlarged to make room for bigger brains. And changing diets and lifestyles had a dramatic effect on their faces. No longer used to chew tough, uncooked food or to treat leather, their teeth became more feebly rooted. As chewing muscles withered, the upper tooth row shrank back. The lower jaw was left jutting, and the face tilted back, so that these hominids lost the last trace of their ancient apelike muzzles. The declining muzzle and ballooning foreheads provided new anchoring surfaces for the muscles of the face, and the old projecting browridges disappeared.

Meanwhile, as they got smarter, they didn’t need to be as strong. Their bodies shed much of the robustness of their immediate ancestors, and reverted to something like the graceful litheness of Far’s people.

Pebble’s first impression, that Harpoon had seemed childlike, was not accidental. With the proportions of their faces and their thinned bones these new people, compared to ancestral stock, were in some ways like children arrested in their growth. Once again, under ferocious selection pressure, the genes had reached for variations that could be implemented quickly: Adjusting the comparative growth rates of skeletal features was comparatively easy.

All of these changes had been essentially complete within a few millennia. After this process Harpoon, anatomically, was all but identical to a human of Joan Useb’s time, even in her skull and the gross features of her brain. And it had been trading, a new way of dealing with other people, that had made them what they were.

But even Harpoon was not yet human.

There was a little more invention, a little more organization in her life. Her kind built hearths, for instance. But her tool kit was scarcely more advanced than that of Pebble and his ancestors. Her language was the same unstructured babbling. Much of the way she lived her life, like her sexuality, had been inherited with little change from the kinds of people who had gone before. There were still rigid barriers in her mind, a lack of connections in the neural wiring of her brain. A true human of Joan Useb’s age, stranded in this age of her ancestors, would quickly have been driven crazy by the sameness, the routine, and ritual, the lack of art and language — the boring, drab poverty of life.

And, human form or not, these folk had not been dramatically successful. Though they had spread across Africa from their origins in that southeastern swamp, their lifestyle remained marginal. It was difficult to trade if there was nobody like you to trade with. Even now the new nomads’ survival was chancy, and most extant groups, around the continent, would not survive.

The children of Harpoon were destined to pass through this bottleneck, but their genes would always bear the imprint of that narrow passage. In the future, the swarming billions who would spring from this unpromising seed would be virtually identical, genetically; every human would be a cousin.

Pebble’s relationship with Harpoon came to a head during a hunt.

One day, Pebble found himself in a blind, upwind of a herd of giant horse who cropped the long grass peacefully. The blind was just a lean-to frame of saplings, loosely woven together and covered with palm fronds and grass. Here Pebble huddled, his thrusting-spear at his side, peering out at the big, lame animal that was their target. And Harpoon was at his side. He was tense, adrenaline pumping, and the heat of the day and the sweat scent of the horse filled his head.

Suddenly he felt her fingers on his face.

He turned. Her skin seemed to glow in the green gloom. She traced the vertical ocher stripes he still wore. And then her fine fingers moved to his arm, the long-healed cuts he had inflicted there. Her every touch was startling, as if her fingers were made of ice or fire.

He ran his fingers down her arm. His fist enclosed her forearm easily, as if it were a bird’s leg. He felt he could snap the bone with a gesture. Suddenly it was just as it had been on the first day he had met her, on the beach. His mouth dried, his throat tightened.

He didn’t understand his lust: the lust that had never gone away. He thought of the clever tools she made, her long, easy stride across the ground, the food she had brought his people — and that harpoon, the exquisite harpoon point, unimaginable before he had seen it that first day. There was something in her his body wanted; the longing was unbearable.

He rolled on his back. In the rustling shade of the blind, she straddled him and smiled.

IV

Each lump of flint was a miniature cemetery. In some long-vanished sea the corpses of crustaceans had settled into sediment, and minute glassy needles that had once formed the skeletons of sponges became the nuggets of flint embedded inside the gathering chalk seams.

Pebble had always loved the feel of flint. He turned the smooth-faced, brittle rock over in his hands, sensing its structure. Flint knappers got to know all of the stone’s subtle properties. The more a flint was exposed to the elements the more likely it was to contain fractures, caused by frost or a battering by river or ocean currents. But this flint lacked the patina of exposure. It was fresh and clean. It had only recently been dug out of its chalk matrix, after a cliff had collapsed. You couldn’t get such flint in this area, anywhere within the people’s old range. Pebble had missed good flint, in the long years on this beach, before Harpoon had walked into his life.

These days he was never more content than when working stone — or, rather, he was never less discontented.

Seven years had elapsed since his first encounter with Harpoon. At twenty-six, his body was already declining, battered and scarred by the cumulative challenges of a life that continued to be very hard, despite his people’s collaboration with the newcomers.

He had embraced Harpoon, and he had embraced the newness and changes she had brought — but those changes themselves had become bewildering. Pebble’s mind was immensely conservative. And as he grew older he increasingly relished these moments alone with the stone, when he could retreat into the recesses of his roomy mind.

But this moment of peace didn’t last.

“Hai, hai, hai! Hai, hai, hai!”

Here came his son and daughter, squat Sunset and spindly Smooth, running along the beach side by side, jabbering in the patois that had resulted as a merger of Pebble’s tongue and Harpoon’s. “Come, come, come here with us!” The children, naked, their skin crusted with salt and sweat, wanted him to come work on the logs that Ko-Ko and others were pushing into the sea.

He pretended not to hear them until they were almost on top of him. Then he grabbed them both with a roar, and all three of them rolled in the sand, wrestling. At last Pebble relented. He put aside his flint, got to his feet, and lumbered after the kids along the beach.

The morning was bright, the sun hot, and the air filled with the scent of salt and ozone. As the children flew ahead of his own lumbering gait, Smooth quickly outstripping her brother, Pebble felt briefly joyful at their youthful energy. This place would never be home to him, but it had its pleasures.

Ko-Ko, Hands, and Seal were making a kind of raft. Harpoon was here, her hands resting on a belly that was already showing a bump. She grinned fiercely as Pebble came up.

The men had cut down two stout palms from the inland forests, stripped them of their branches, and lashed them together with lianas and plaited vine. Now Hands and Seal were hauling this crude construction across the sand and down to the water. There was much straining and jabbering: “Push, push, push!” “Back back, no, back, back…” “Hai, hai!”

Pebble joined Hands and Seal at their task. Even with three of them it was hard work, and Pebble was soon sweating like the rest, his legs coated with stinging hot sand. Ko-Ko tried to help, but for sheer brute strength the robust folk had no match. And they were helped, and hindered, by the two children, and by Harpoon’s wolf companion who ran around their legs, barking.

The wolf, raised from a captured cub, was all but feral. This was just the start of a relationship longer than any other between people and animals, a relationship that would ultimately shape both species.

Pebble had never forgotten his determination to reach the island. At last, as he sat brooding on his beach, he had watched skinny youngsters playing on bits of driftwood in the water — and a connection had closed in his mind.

In their mangrove swamp the ancestors of Harpoon, no better swimmers than Pebble, had been forced to find ways of crossing crocodile-infested water. After much trial and error — with every error punishable by maiming or death — they had hit on a way of using cut mangrove logs. You could ride on such a log by lying flat on it and paddling with your hands. Through all their journeying, the skinnies had not forgotten that basic technique. And that was what Pebble had seen the children trying to do out on their bits of driftwood. At last he saw a way to get to the island.

But paddling a log across the still waters of a mangrove swamp was one thing. Mastering the choppy surface of an ocean channel was a different challenge.

After a few spectacular failures, Ko-Ko’s inventive mind had come up with the notion of strapping two logs together. That way at least you got a little more stability. But these miniature rafts were still too vulnerable to tipping over.

At last they got the logs into the water. They floated, tied together to make a stable surface.

Ko-Ko and Hands threw themselves forward, splashing heavily. They both lay flat on the logs, legs stretched behind them, and began to paddle. Slowly they pulled away from the shore. But the waves tipped the logs up and down — and eventually over, pitching both men into the water. And then the logs’ bindings came loose.

Hands came staggering back, spluttering and growling. With Ko-Ko, he hauled the logs back out of the water onto the beach.

Pebble knew that there had been no danger, for the water here was shallow enough to walk out to shore. But further away it deepened quickly — and that was where they must travel, if they were to reach the island.

So they kept working, trying different combinations, over and over.

Much had changed in Pebble’s life in seven years.

Gradually those who had come with him from Flatnose’s village faded out of the world. Hyena had never recovered from his stab wound, and they had put him in the ground. And not long after that they had had to put Dust in the ground too. Gradually Pebble’s mother had seemed to have grown fond of Harpoon, this peculiar stranger who lay with her son. But at last her growing frailty overcame her strength of will.

But where life was lost, so new life was created. His two children were close in age — six and seven years old — but they were quite different.

Sunset was the younger, at six. The boy was the result of Pebble’s reluctant union with Cry, who had continued to pursue him long after he had formed his bond with Harpoon. Sunset was squat, round, a ball of energy and muscle, and above a thick, shadowing browridge his hair was still the startling red it had been when he was born, Ice-Age-sunset red.

Sunset had brought poor Cry no pleasure, though. She had died in giving him birth, to the end protesting about the presence of the new people among them.

Pebble’s other child, Smooth, had come from Harpoon. Though she had something of her father’s chunkiness, she was much more like her mother’s kind. Already she was taller than Sunset. Every time he saw her, Pebble was struck by Smooth’s flat face, and the ridgeless brow that swept up above her clear eyes.

Pebble had had no reason to be surprised when his sexual contact with Harpoon had resulted in a child. Now, in fact, she was pregnant again. The changes between the ancestral stock and Harpoon’s generation, though they were so striking, were not yet so fundamental that the two kinds of people could not crossbreed — and indeed their hybrid children would not be mules. They would be fertile.

Thus Harpoon’s modified genes, and her new body plan and way of life, had begun to propagate through the wider population of robust folk. Thus the thread of genetic destiny would pass on through Smooth, child of human-form and robust, into the future.

As the long afternoon wore on, driven by Pebble’s determination, they kept on trying to make the logs work.

It was frustrating. They had no way of discussing their ideas. Their language was too simple for that. And even the new folk were not particularly inventive with technology, for the compartment walls in their highly specialized minds denied them full awareness of what they were doing. They weren’t able to think it through. It was something like trying to learn a new body skill, like riding a bicycle; conscious effort didn’t help. And besides the work was uncoordinated, and only progressed when somebody was passionate enough to bully the rest.

But at last, quite suddenly, Ko-Ko hit on a solution. He splashed into the water. “Ya, ya!” With frantic yells and blows, he forced the swimmers to hold on to a single log and let it float. Then he went to the far end and, swimming strongly himself, guided the log out through the choppy inshore waves to the calmer waters beyond.

Pebble watched, amazed. It worked. Rather than riding the log, they used it as a float to help these nonswimmers swim. Soon the log was so far from the shore that all he could see was a row of bobbing heads and the black stripe of the log between them.

By clinging to the log and paddling for all they were worth even the robusts, too heavy to swim, were able to cross the water, far out of their depth. It was obvious to everybody that at last they had found a way to cross the strait that had baffled Pebble for years.

Pebble hollered his triumph. His sons ran to him. He picked up Smooth and whirled her, squealing, through the sunlit air, while Sunset pulled at his legs, clamoring for attention.

The raiding party landed on a little crescent of shell-strewn sand that nestled beneath walls of eroded blue-black rock. They staggered out of the water and lay gasping on the beach. Pebble saw immediately that everybody, robust and skinny alike, had made it to the shore.

The crossing had been harder than Pebble could have imagined. He would never be able to forget that awful sensation of being suspended over the blue-black depths where unknown creatures swam. But it was over now.

And already Ko-Ko was at work. Leading by example he was having the logs hauled to the shore. The warriors — a dozen robusts, a dozen skinnies — began to unpack their gear. Some of the weapons had been carried strapped to their backs or in pouches of netting, and some — the skinnies’ long throwing spears, for example — had been tied to the logs themselves.

Harpoon stroked her belly and gazed out to sea, back the way they had come. She touched the vertical ocher stripes on Pebble’s face, just as she had the first time they had coupled. But now she wore the same ferocious marking as he did — as did all the people, skinnies and robusts alike. He grinned, and she grinned back.

United by their symbols, two kinds of people prepared to make war on a third.

A woman cried out. Pebble and Harpoon whirled. A heavy basaltic rock had fallen onto the beach, pinning a skinny woman’s leg. When the rock was pulled away, her foot was revealed, a smashed and bloody mess. She began to keen, tears streaking the ocher stripes on her cheeks.

People were jabbering, pointing at the cliffs. “Hai, hai!”

Pebble peered up, shielding his eyes. Something moved up there: a head, narrow shoulders. The rock had not fallen, Pebble realized. It had been pushed, or thrown.

So it had begun. He grabbed his thrusting spear and roared defiance, and ran along the beach. The people followed him.

A few hundred meters along, this sheltered beach gave way to a more open stretch of dunes and grassland. And on the open land Pebble saw a group of wraithlike hominids. There were more than twenty of them — women, men, children, infants. They had gathered around the carcass of a fallen eland. When they saw Pebble they stood up, their heads swiveling.

Pebble hurled himself forward, yelling.

Some of the hominids turned and ran — mothers with infants, some of the men. Others stood their ground. They picked up rocks and began to hurl them at the intruders, as if trying to drive off marauding hyenas. These people were tall, slender, naked, their bodies superficially similar to Harpoon’s. But their heads were quite different, with squat forward-thrusting faces, strong browridges and flat crania.

They were a late variety of Homo erectus. This group had wandered on to this island when a glacial surge had lowered sea levels sufficiently for it to be joined to the mainland. When the sea had returned, they had survived while the rest of their kind had fallen, because nobody else had figured out how to cross the choppy strait to take the island from them.

Nobody until now, that is.

One male, more burly than the rest, grabbed a huge, heavy hand ax and came running toward Hands. The big robust roared in response, his heavy thrusting spear grasped in his fists. With blurring speed the male sidestepped Hands’s charge and brought his hand ax slamming down on the back of Hands’s neck. Blood gushed, and Hands faltered and fell face first. Still he fought. He twisted on to his back, his blood soaking into the dirt, and he tried to raise his thrusting spear. But the big male stood over him, ax raised.

Pebble, enraged, drove his own spear hard through the male’s back. With this weapon Pebble was capable of piercing the hide and rib cage of a baby elephant, and he had little trouble driving his heavy spear point through hominid skin, ribs, heart. He raised the male’s body high, like a speared fish. It flopped, blood spouting from its mouth and back, and sticky crimson gushed down the spear’s shaft and over Pebble’s arms.

When it was done Pebble knelt beside Hands. But the big man was unmoving, his massively muscled limbs splayed in the dirt. Grief spasmed in Pebble: another companion gone. He stood up, his hands and arms running with blood, seeking the next battle.

But the wraithlike naked ones were running. The skinnies were hurling their spears of fire-hardened wood, spears that rained down on the fleeing hominids.

Pebble shuddered, grateful that it was not him who these skinnies were pursuing with such deadly joy. But he picked up his thrusting spear and ran after his allies, abandoning Hands’s body to the hyenas.

Systematic murder of one troop by another was common among many social and carnivorous species — ants, wolves, lions, monkeys, apes. In this, the behavior of the people was, as in many other things, no more than a derivation of deeper animal roots.

But among wolves, apes, pithecines, even the walkers, such campaigns had been inefficient. Without effective weapons, killings could be achieved only with overwhelming numbers, and it could take years for a war between two competing bands of thirty or forty pithecines to resolve itself. Even during the long age of the sedentary robusts, there had been little large-scale slaughter. Isolated strangers were killed, but there were no wars for lebensraum.

But now, as the genetic definition of Harpoon’s new nomadic people continued to spread, that was starting to change. Harpoon’s kind had accurate long-range weapons, and heads increasingly capable of systematic, orderly thinking; they were able to perform mass killing with unprecedented thoroughness. But there was a feedback effect. Warfare with other groups would force hominids to come together in increasingly large bands, with all the social complications that followed. The killing would shape the killers, too: If love was evolving, so was hate.

After cleaning out one particularly dense nest, Ko-Ko and the others had a kind of party. They dragged the bodies of the women, children, and men from the nest to an open space and piled them up — thirty, forty of them, all with ripped-open bellies, cleaved chests, smashed skulls. Then they began a fire, throwing burning branches onto the heap of bodies. Ko-Ko and the others danced around the burning corpses, whooping and hollering.

The skinny hunters dragged forward live captives. They were a mother and child, a spindly boy small enough to carry. The hunters had cornered her by a rock bluff where she had been trying to hide. Skinnies and robusts alike gathered around, hooting and yelling, and thrusting spears were raised before the mother’s face.

To Pebble the mother seemed numbed. Perhaps there was a kind of guilt written on that slim, protruding face. She had survived while others had fallen around her, all save her small child, and she was unable to feel anymore.

Ko-Ko stepped forward. With a simple efficient thrust, he drove the point of his thrusting spear into the woman’s chest. A black fluid burst from her skin. She convulsed — there was the too-familiar smell of death shit — and she slumped.

Still the infant lived. He was wailing, clinging to his mother and even trying to gnaw at her blood-streaked breast. But, just as a mother chasma had once pushed her pups toward hapless Elephant, so now Harpoon, her swollen belly proud before her, thrust Smooth toward the infant. Pebble’s daughter carried a stone chopping tool. With a lithe body so like her mother’s, she looked feverish, eager. And she raised the chopping stone over the infant’s flat skull.

Though he never shirked the fighting, the killing, suddenly Pebble longed to be away from here, sitting on a beach under a tall sunset, or digging for yams to bring home to his mother.

By the next morning the fire was burned out. The hominids had been reduced to gaunt skeletons, their blackened bodies wizened into fetal postures. Ko-Ko and Smooth stalked amongst the smoking remains, smashing them to pieces with the butts of their heavy thrusting spears.

I

Mother walked alone, a slim, upright figure in a tabletop landscape. The ground was hot under her feet, the dust sharp and prickling. She came to a stand of Hoodia cactus. She crouched down, cut off a stem about the size of a cucumber, and munched on its moist flesh.

She went naked save for a bolt of eland leather tied round her waist. She had a shaped stone in one hand, but carried nothing else. Her face was fully human, her brow smooth and upright, her chin sharp. But her mouth was pinched and her eyes were sunken, her gaze darting suspiciously.

The savannah around her was arid, dismal. The empty shadowless flatness stretched away, dissolving into a ghostly heat haze that obscured the encircling horizon, a flatness broken only by an occasional drought-resistant bush or the remains of an elephant-trampled copse. There wasn’t even any dung to be seen, for the great herbivores passed rarely now, and the beetles had long done their tidy and efficient work.

Clutching the cactus stem, she moved on.

She reached the edge of the lake — or where its edge had been last year, or perhaps the year before that. Now the ground was dry, a patina of dark, heat-cracked mud so hard it didn’t crumble when she put her weight on it. Here and there scrubby grass, yellow white, clung to life.

She cupped her hands over her eyes. The water was still there, but far from where she stood, just a remote shimmer. Even from here she could detect the dank stench of stagnation. On the lake’s far side she glimpsed elephants, black shapes moving like clouds through the glassy heat haze, and animals rooting in the mud — warthogs, perhaps.

But on the lake’s clogged surface she made out waterfowl, a flock roosting peacefully at the center of the water, safe from the hungry predators of the land.

Mother smiled. The birds were just where she wanted them. She turned and walked back from the lake’s barren muddy aureole.

At thirty years old, Mother’s body was as lithe and upright as it had been in her youth. But her belly bore marks from the birth of her single child, her son, and her breasts sagged. Her buttocks were full; this was an adaptation to the long periods of drought, to help her store water in fat. Her limbs showed stringy muscles, and her belly showed none of the malnutritional swelling affecting many of the folk. She was evidently effective at the business of life.

But she couldn’t remember a time when she had been happy. Not even as a child, when she had been clumsy, slow to talk, slow to fit in. Not even when her son had been born, healthy and wailing.

She saw too much.

This drought, for instance. The clouds had gone away, which enabled the sun to beat down all day, which dried the land and made the water vanish, which made the animals die, which made the people go hungry. So the people went hungry because of the clouds. What she couldn’t figure out was what had made the clouds go away in the first place. Not yet.

This was what she had a talent for: seeing patterns and connections, networks of causes and effects that intrigued and baffled her. Her talent for spotting causal links brought her no comfort. It was more a kind of obsessive suspicion. But it did help her get through life sometimes — like today.

She came to a baobab tree, and studied its twisted branches. She knew what she wanted to make — a boomerang, a curved throwing weapon — and she inspected the branches and buttresses, looking for a place where the grain of the wood and its growth direction matched the weapon’s final shape, as she could see it in her mind.

She found one slender branch that might work. With a brisk snap she broke it off close to where it joined with the tree. Then she sat down in the baobab’s scrap of shade, took her stone tool, stripped off the bark, and began to carve the wood. She turned her stone blade over and over in her hand to bring favored edges into use. This tool — not quite an ax, or a knife, or a scraper — was her current favorite. Because any tool she couldn’t make on the spot had to be carried, she had manufactured this one tool to do many jobs, and she had retouched it several times.

Soon she had produced a smoothly curved stick some thirty centimeters long, flat on one side and rounded on the other. She hefted the boomerang in her hand, assessed its balance and weight with a judgment born of long practice, and quickly scraped away a little excess.

Then she walked out of the baobab’s shade and around the perimeter of the lake’s muddy fringe. She found the place where she had stashed a net of plaited bark fiber a few days before. The net was undisturbed. She shook it clear of dust, and the beetles that gnawed its dry fibers.

She hung the net across two gaunt, conveniently placed baobabs so that it faced the lake. She had chosen this site, in fact, because of the baobabs.

Now she walked back around the lake, until she was sideways when compared to the position of her net. She took her throwing stick. Her tongue protruding, she hefted it, rehearsing the throw she would make. She would get only one shot at this, and she had to get it right.

Pain pulsed at her temples, distant, like thunder in remote mountains.

She lost her balance, and grimaced, annoyed at the distraction. The pain itself was trivial, but it was a precursor of what was to come. Her migraine was a relentless punishment she endured frequently, and there was nothing to be done about it — it had no cure, of course, not even a name. But she knew she had to get on with her task before the pain made it impossible. Otherwise she would go hungry today, and so would her son.

Ignoring the throbbing in her head, she set herself once more, hefted the stick, and hurled it with strength and precision. The whirling stick followed a sweet curving arc high into the air over the lake, its wooden blades whirling with a subtle whoosh.

The roosting waterfowl rustled and cawed irritably, and when the stick turned in the air and fell on them they panicked. With a clatter of ungainly wings the birds took to the air and fled from the lake — and the flock’s low-flying outliers ran straight into Mother’s net. Grinning, she ran back around the lake to claim her prize.

Connections. Mother threw the boomerang, which scared the birds, which flew into the net, because Mother had placed it there. As examples of Mother’s causal-link thinking went, this had been elementary.

But with every step she took her headache worsened, as if her brain were rattling in her capacious skull, and her brief pleasure at her success was crowded out, as it always was.

Mother’s people lived in a camp close to a dry, eroded channel that ran into a gorge. Shelters had been set up among the rocky bluffs, just lean-tos, sheets of hide or woven rattan propped up on simple frames. There were no permanent huts here, unlike the structures in Pebble’s long-vanished encampment. The land wasn’t rich enough for that. This was the temporary home of nomadic hunter-gatherers, people forced to follow their food supply. The people had been here for a month.

The site had its advantages. There was a stream, the local rock was good for toolmaking, and there was a clump of forest nearby, a source of wood for fires, and bark, leaves, liana, and vines for cloth, netting, and other tools and artifacts. And the site was a good place to ambush animals that came wandering foolishly toward the gorge. But the produce of the area here had not been good. The camp was poor, the undernourished people listless. They would probably move on soon.

Mother stumbled home, three waterfowl slung on bits of leather rope over her shoulder. The pain in her head had grown sharp now, and every surface seemed overbright and tinged with strange colors. The ballooning of the human brain, in the millennia before the birth of Mother’s distant ancestor Harpoon, had been spectacular. This hasty rewiring brought unexpected benefits — like Mother’s pattern-making ability — but costs, like her plaguing migraine.

“Hey, hey! Spear danger spear!”

She looked around dimly.

Two of the younger men were staring at her. They wore wraparound hides tied in place with bits of sinew. They both held wooden spears, crudely finished, their tips hardened by charring. They had been hurling their spears at an ox hide they had draped over the branches of a tree. Mother, distracted by the pain and the strange lights, had almost blundered into their path.

She had to wait while the spear throwers completed their contest. Neither of the two young men was particularly skillful, and their hide wraps were shabby. Only one of their spears had pierced the hide to embed itself in the tree; the rest lay scattered in the dirt.

But one of the hunters was at least hurling his spears with more power, she saw. This boy held the spear unusually far back along its shaft, and used the length of his bony arms to get a little more leverage.

Tall for his age, whip thin, she thought of him as a sapling, drawn up by the sunlight. When Sapling threw the spear, it hissed through the air, oscillating slightly. The spear’s movement was intriguing. But as her eyes tracked it, her head hurt even more.

When the spear throwers were done she blundered on, seeking the dark of the hide she shared with her son.

Inside Mother’s hut was a stocky woman of thirty-five. She had ragged, graying hair and a habitually pinched, sour face. This woman, Sour, was using a pestle to grind a piece of root. She glared at Mother, her expression as hostile as usual. “Food, food?”

Mother waved a hand vaguely, caring nothing about Sour. “Birds,” she said.

Sour put down her pestle and root, and went outside to see the birds Mother had hung up.

Sour was Mother’s aunt. She had become embittered when she had lost her second child to some unknown illness a couple of days after childbirth. She would probably steal the birds, giving Mother and Silent a fraction of what Mother had brought home. But Mother, her head full of pain, felt too weary to care.

She tried to focus on her son. He sat with his back to the slanting woven roof, his knees tucked up to his chest. A sickly boy of eight, short and bony, he was using one bit of twig to push another around the dirt floor. Mother sat beside him and ruffled his hair. He looked up at her with heavy, sleepy eyes. He spent a lot of his time like this — silent, withdrawn from the rest, waiting for her. He took after his father, a short, unsuccessful hunter who had lovelessly coupled with Mother just once — and in that one coupling had succeeded in impregnating her.

Her experience of sex had been sporadic and not very pleasurable. She had met no man strong enough, or kind enough, to withstand the intensity of her gaze, her obsessiveness, her quickness to anger, and her frequent pain-driven withdrawals into herself. It was her great misfortune that the man who finally made her pregnant had quickly moved on to another — and that he had soon fallen to the ax blow of a rival.

The child was Silent, for that was his defining characteristic. And likewise, since it sometimes seemed that she had no identity in the eyes of other people here — no identity for anybody except the boy — she was Mother. She had little to give him. But at least he was spared the swollen-belly hunger that was already afflicting some of the other little ones in this time of drought.

At length the boy lay on his side and curled up, thumb in his mouth. She lay down herself on her pallet of bundled-together straw. She knew better than to try to fight the pain.

She had always been isolated, even as a child. She could not throw herself into the games of chase and wrestling and chattering that the other youngsters had indulged in, or their adolescent sexual experiments. It was always as if the others knew how to behave, what to do, how to laugh and cry — how to fit in, a mystery she could never share. Her restless inventiveness in such a conservative culture — and her habit of trying to figure out why things happened, how they worked — didn’t make her any more popular.

As time had gone on she had come to suspect that other people were talking about her when she wasn’t there, that they were plotting against her — planning to make her unhappy in ways she couldn’t even understand. None of which helped her get along with her fellows.

But she had her comforts.

The headache would not go away. But it was during the headaches that she saw the shapes. The simplest were stars — but they were not stars, for they flared, bright and evanescent, before fading away. She would try to turn her head to follow them, hoping to see where the next came from. But the stars would move with her eyes, drifting like reeds in a lake. Then would come more shapes: zigzags, spirals, lattices, nested curves, parallel lines. Even in the deepest darkness, even when the pain blinded her, she could see the shapes. And when the pain faded, the memory of the strange, brilliant shapes stayed with her.

But even as she willed her body to relax, she thought of long-armed Sapling and his spear throwing, and little Silent pushing his bits of twig back and forth, back and forth…

Connections.

Sapling tried again.

A look of irritability on his face, he hooked the spear in the notch on the stick Mother had given him. Then, holding the stick in his right hand, he used his left hand to support the spear over his shoulder, point facing forward. He took a couple of hesitant steps forward, whipped his right arm forward — and the spear tipped up, its charred point gazing at the sky, before falling back to the dirt.

Sapling dropped the shaped stick and stamped on it. “Stupid, stupid!”

Mother, frustrated herself, slapped the back of his head. “Stupid! You!” Why couldn’t he see what she wanted? She picked up the spear and the stick and thrust them into Sapling’s hands, closing his fingers around the artifacts to make him try again.

She had been working at this all morning.

After that ferocious migraine Mother had woken with a new vision in her head, a peculiar mélange of Silent’s indirect stick poking and Sapling’s long, leverage-rich throwing arm. Ignoring her son, she had rushed to the clump of woods nearby.

Soon she had made what she wanted. It was a short stick with a notch cut into one end. When she put the spear in the notch and tried to thrust the spear forward — yes, it was as she had thought; the stick was like an extension of her arm, making it longer even than Sapling’s, and the notch was like a finger that grasped her spear.

There were very few people on the planet who could have thought this way, drawing an analogy between a stick and a hand, a natural object and a part of the body. But Mother could.

As always, when she had latched on to some project like this, she had become completely immersed in it, resenting the time she spent away from it to eat, drink, sleep, gather food — even to be with her son.

In her more lucid moments she was aware of her neglect of Silent. But Sour, her aunt, was around to take care of him. That was what aging female relatives were for, to share the burden of child rearing. Deep down, though, Mother was suspicious of Sour. Something had indeed soured inside her when she lost her second child; even though she had a daughter of her own, she took an interest in Silent that wasn’t healthy. But Mother had no time to think about that, not while the spear throwing obsessed her.

She kept trying with Sapling, over and over, as the sun arced over the sky and the young man grew restive, hot, thirsty, his day’s chores not even started. But every time he failed.

At length Mother started to see what the problem was. It wasn’t a question of clumsy technique. Sapling didn’t understand the principle of what she was trying to show him: that it was not his hand that would do the throwing, but the stick. And until he got that, he could never get the spear-thrower to work.

There were rigid compartment walls in Sapling’s mind, almost as rigid as in Pebble’s, his remote grandfather’s. He was supremely intelligent socially; in his maneuverings, coalition-building, wooings and betrayals, he could rival Machiavelli. But he didn’t apply that intelligence to other activities, like toolmaking. It was as if a different mind were switched on at such times, a mind no more advanced than Far’s.

But it wasn’t quite like that for Mother — and that was the source of her strangeness, and her genius.

She took the thrower from him, set the spear in its notch, and made as if to throw. “Hand, throw, no,” she said. Now she mimed the stick pushing the spear. “Stick, throw. Yes, yes. Stick. Throw. Spear. Stick throw spear. Stick throw spear…”

Stick throw spear. It wasn’t much of a sentence. But it had a rudimentary structure — subject, verb, object — and the honor of being one of the first sentences spoken in any human language, anywhere in the world.

As she repeated her message over and over, it gradually sank in.

Sapling grinned and grabbed the spear and thrower from her. “Stick throw spear! Stick throw spear!” Quickly he fitted the spear into its notch, reached back, set the spear over his shoulder — and hurled with all his might.

It was a lousy throw, that first time. The spear ended up skidding in the dirt far short of the palm she had identified as a nominal target. But he had gotten the idea. Excited, jabbering, he ran after the spear. With an obsession that briefly matched Mother’s own he tried over and over.

She had come up with this idea thanks to her peculiar ability to think about the throwing stick in more than one way. It was a tool, yes — but it was also like her fingers in the way it held the spear — and was even like a person in that it could do things, it could throw the spear for you. If you were capable of thinking of an object from more than one point of view, you could imagine it doing all sorts of things. For Mother, consciousness was becoming more than just a tool for lying.

Sapling probably would never have come up with this insight by himself. But once she had gotten through to him he had grasped the concept quickly; after all his mind wasn’t so much different from hers. As Sapling hauled the throwing stick forward, the great force it applied to the spear made it bend: the spear, flexing, actually seemed to leap away, like a gazelle escaping a trap. Mother’s mind spun with satisfaction and speculation.

“Sick.” The flat, ugly word cut through her euphoria. Sour, her aunt, was standing outside the shelter they shared. She pointed inside.

Mother ran across the trampled dirt to the shelter. As soon as she stepped inside she could smell the harsh stink of vomit. Silent was doubled over, clutching his distended belly. He was shivering, his face sleek with sweat, and his skin was pale. Vomit and shit lay smeared around him.

Standing in the bright light outside the shelter, Sour was grinning, her face hard.

It took Silent a month to die.

It nearly destroyed Mother.

Her instinctive understanding of causality betrayed her. In this ultimate emergency, nothing worked. There were some illnesses you could treat. If you took a broken limb, pulled it back into shape and bound it up, very often it would set as good as before. If you rubbed dock leaves on insect bites, the poison could be drawn. But there was nothing she could do for this strange wasting away for which there wasn’t even a word.

She brought him things he had loved — a tangled chunk of wood, bright bits of pyrite, even a strange spiral stone. In fact it was a fossilized ammonite, three hundred million years old. But he would just finger the toys, his eyes sliding, or he would ignore them completely.

There came a day when he didn’t stir from his pallet. She cradled him and crooned wordlessly, as she had when he was an infant. But his head lolled. She tried to cram food into his mouth, but his lips were blue, his mouth cold. She even pressed those cold lips to her breast, but she had no milk.

At last the others came.

She fought them, convinced that if she only tried a little longer, wanted it a little more, then he would grin, reach for his bits of fool’s gold, and get up and run into the light. But she had let herself grow weak during his illness, and they took him away easily.

The men dug a pit in the ground, outside the encampment. The boy’s stiffening body was bundled inside, and the debris from the pit was hastily kicked back in, leaving a discolored patch of dirt.

It was functional — but it was a ceremony, of sorts. People had been sticking bodies in the ground for three hundred thousand years. Once it had been an essential way of disposing of waste: When you could expect to grow old and die in the same place you were born, you had to keep it clean. But now people were nomadic. Mother’s folk would be gone from here soon. They could have just dumped the boy’s body and let the scavengers take it, the dogs and birds and insects; what difference would it have made? And yet they still buried, as they always had. It had come to seem the right thing to do.

But no words were spoken, no marker was left, and the others dispersed quickly. Death was as absolute as it had always been, deep back down the lineages of hominids and primates: death was a termination, an end of existence, and those who had gone were as meaningless as evaporated dew, their very identities lost after a generation.

But it wasn’t that way for Mother. No, not at all.

In the days that followed that brutal ending and efficient burial, she returned again and again to the patch of ground that held her son’s bones. Even when the upturned ground began to fade in color, and the grass began to spread over it, still she remembered exactly where that hole’s ragged edges had been, and could imagine how he must be lying, there deep in the earth.

There was no reason for him to have gone. That was what plagued her. If she had seen him fall, or drown, or be trampled by the herds, then she could have seen why he died, and perhaps could have accepted it. Of course she had seen disease afflict many members of the tribe. She had watched many people die of causes no one could name, let alone treat. But that only made things worse: If someone had to die, why Silent? And if blind chance had killed him — if someone so close could be taken so arbitrarily — then it could happen to her, at any time, anywhere.

It couldn’t be accepted. Everything had a cause. And so there must be a cause of Silent’s death.

Alone, obsessing, she retreated into herself.

II

Soon after the time of Pebble and Harpoon had come an interglacial, an interval of temperate climes between the long, icebound millennia. The bloated ice caps had melted, and the seas had risen, flooding the lowlands and deforming the coastlines. But, twelve thousand years after Pebble’s death, this latest great summer drew to a close. A savage cooling cut in. The ice began to advance once more. As the ice sucked the humidity out of the air, it was as if the planet were drawing in a great, dry breath. Forests shrank, grasslands spread, and desertification intensified once more.

The Sahara, cupped in its mighty Himalayan rain shadow, was not yet a desert. Wide, shallow lakes lay across its interior — lakes, in the Sahara. These bodies of water waxed and waned, and sometimes dried out completely. But at their greatest extents they were full of fish, crocodile, and hippos. Around the waters gathered ostriches, zebra, rhinos, elephants, giraffes, buffalo, and various antelope — and animals that modern eyes would not have thought so characteristically African, like oxen, Barbary sheep, goats, and asses.

Where there was water, where there was game, there were people. This was the environment that cradled Mother’s people. But it was a marginal place, the skim of life shallow. People had to work hard to survive.

And people were still scattered remarkably thin.

No humans had yet moved out of Africa. In Europe and across Asia, there were only the heavy-browed robusts and, in places, the older forms, the skinny walkers. America and Australia were still empty altogether.

Even in Africa people were thin on the ground. The more mobile, trade-based way of life that had been born with Harpoon and her kind had not been a uniform blessing. Ever since the move out of the forests, hominids had been vulnerable to trypanosomes — the parasites that caused sleeping sickness — carried by the clouds of tsetse flies that followed the savannah’s ungulate herds. Now such diseases were spreading. The people’s trading networks had proven very effective at exchanging goods, cultural innovations, and genes — but also at transmitting pathogens.

And, culturally, things weren’t happening.

Pebble would have recognized almost everything in Mother’s camp. People still split stone flakes off prepared cores, and still wrapped hide around their bodies, tied in place with bits of sinew or leather. Even their language was still a formless jabber of concrete words for things, feelings, actions, useless for transmitting complex information.

Across seventy thousand years these people — humans with as modern a body plan, even as modern a brain, as any twenty-first-century citizen — had scarcely made a single innovation in their technology or techniques. It had been a time of stupefying passivity, stunning stasis. After all this time, people were just another tool-using animal in the ecology, like beavers or bowerbirds, still little more than glorified chimps. And, bit by bit, they were losing their battle to survive.

Something was missing.

She could just walk off into the dust, alone.

Why live in a world without Silent?

But in the end she came out of the worst of her darkness.

Once again she started to gather food, eat, and drink. She had to: If she had not, she would have died. This was not a rich society. Though care was taken of the weak, the injured, and the elderly, there was little energy to spare for those who would not help themselves.

She had always been a skillful hunter and sharp-eyed forager. With the tools she invented, modified, or improvised, she was actually more effective than some of those younger and stronger than she was. She recovered rapidly. But the confusion in her head didn’t dissipate.

She wasn’t sure what first gave her the impulse to make the markings in the rock.

It wasn’t even conscious. She was sitting beside an outcropping of soft, buttery sandstone, with a basalt scraper in her hand; she had been preparing a goat hide. And there, incised neatly into the rock, was a pair of zigzag lines, running crisply parallel to each other.

At first the marks puzzled her. But then she saw a scattering of sand grains under the scraping. She understood, the causal connections linking up as they always did. Without thinking, she had used the scraper; the scraper had made the markings. So she had made the markings.

What sparked her interest was that they were like the lines in her head.

Dropping the bit of leather she had been working, she knelt before the rock. She felt peculiarly excited. She turned the blunted scraper over to expose a fresh edge and dug it into the rock, tracing a line. She managed a neat spiral, circling to nothing at its center. It wasn’t as clean and bright as the shapes in her head; it was clumsily scratched, the depth of line uneven, the curve angular and awkward.

So she tried again. She had always had a delicate skill when crafting tools from stone or wood or bone. This time the spiral was a little smoother, a little closer to the ideal inside her eyes. So she did it again. And again and again, until the unprepossessing lump of rock was covered in spirals, loops, whorls, and tracks.

It really was just like what she saw when she closed her eyes. It seemed miraculous to find that she was able to make the same shapes outside her head as she saw inside.

Later it occurred to her to try ocher.

People still used the red iron ore as a crayon to mark their skin with tribal scribbles, just as they had in Pebble’s day. Now Mother experimented with the soft stuff, and found it much easier to use on rock than a scraper. And it could be applied to other surfaces as well. Soon her arms and legs — and the bits of skin she wore or draped over her shelter, and her tools and scrapers of stone and bone and wood — were all covered with loops and whorls and zigzags.

It was the flower that sparked the next stage of her peculiar development.

It was a kind of sunflower: not spectacular, its seeds neither edible nor poisonous, of no great interest. But its petals surrounded a neat spiral of yellow, twisting down toward a black central heart. She fell on the flower with a cry of recognition.

After that she started to see her shapes everywhere: the spirals of shells and cones, the lattices of honeycombs, even the spectacular zigzags of lightning that arced from the sky during storms. It was as if the contents of her dark skull were mapping themselves on to the world outside.

It was a girl who was the first to emulate her.

Mother saw her walking past, a rabbit over her shoulder — and a crimson spiral on her cheek, coiled under her eye. Next it was Sapling, with wavy lines on his long arms.

After that she started to see the lines and loops appearing everywhere, like a rash spreading over the surfaces of the encampment and the people’s bodies. If she came up with some new design, a lattice or a nest of curves, it would quickly be copied and even elaborated on — especially by the young.

It was oddly satisfying. People were not avoiding her now. They were copying her. She became a kind of leader, in a way she never had been before.

But Sour was less pleased with Mother’s new status. She kept her distance from Mother. In fact the two women had scarcely acknowledged each other’s existence since the death of the boy.

Still, none of the designs, drawn by herself or others, came close to the glowing geometric perfection that came drifting silently through her head. It got to the point when she almost wished for the pain to return, so she could see them again.

At times, the changes in her consciousness scared her. What did this mean? She instinctively sought connections; that was her nature. But what connection could there be between a flash of light in her eyes and a towering storm in the sky? Did the storm cause the light in her head — or the other way around?

Life continued, the endless cycles of drawing breath, gathering food, the arcing of sun and Moon, the body’s slow aging. And as the months wore by Mother sank deeper into the strangeness of her sensorium. She was beginning to see connections everywhere. It was as if the world were crisscrossed by causes like the threads of a vast, invisible spider’s web. She felt as if she were dissolving, her sense of self dissipating.

But in all her inward wandering she clung to the memory of her son, a memory that was like an unending ache, like the stump of an amputated limb.

And gradually Silent’s death began to seem to her the focus of all those causal tracks.

A wordless consensus was reached that the encampment should be broken up. The people prepared to move on.

Mother came with them. Sapling and others showed relief. Some had thought she might insist on staying beside the hole in the ground that contained the bones of her son.

After a long trek they reached a new camp, close to a mud-rimmed lake. They set up their hides and made their pallets. But as the dryness continued, life remained hard, and the children and old ones suffered.

One day Sapling brought Mother the head of a young ostrich. Its neck had been severed a hand’s length below the jaw, and the head neatly punctured by a spear.

To bring down a fleet ostrich — to aim for the tiny head of a running bird, from fifty or seventy meters, and to bring it down — was a feat indeed. After months of practice Sapling and the other young hunters had learned to use the spear-thrower to hurl their weapons across unprecedented distances and with stunning accuracy. Mother’s invention was a powerful one. With growing confidence the hunters had begun to penetrate further into the savannah, and soon the prey animals of the plains would learn to fear them greatly. It was as if the hunters had suddenly been given guns.

Today Sapling seemed bursting with the memory of his kill. Before the woman who had first showed him how to use the spear-thrower, he mimed how he had hurled the spear, how it had flexed and leapt, how it had flown to its precise target. “Bird fast, fast,” he said, his feet paddling the ground. “Run fast.” He pointed to himself. “I, I. Hide. Rock. Bird fast, fast. Spear…” He leapt out from behind his invisible rock and mimed hurling his triumphant spear once more.

Mother had little time for people these days. She was becoming increasingly absorbed in her own new perceptions. But she tolerated Sapling, who was the nearest thing to a friend she had. Absently she listened to his babbling.

“Wind carry smell. Smell touch ostrich. Ostrich run. Now, here. Stand, stand, hide. Wind carry smell. Ostrich here, wind there, wind carry smell away…”

His language was something like a pidgin. The words were simple, just nouns, verbs, adjectives with no inflectional endings. There was still much use of repetition and mime for emphasis. And with little real structure, there was a linguistic free-for-all: It didn’t help communication that no two people, even brought up as siblings, ever talked quite alike.

But still, Sapling now occasionally used sentences. He had picked up the habit from Mother. Each sentence was a genuine subject-verb-object compound. The people’s protolanguage was quickly developing around this seed of structure. Already the chattering people had had to invent pronouns — you, me, him, her — and different ways of expressing actions and their outcomes: I did kill, I am killing, I did not kill… They were able to express comparatives and negatives, explore alternatives. They could consider going to the lake today, or not going to the lake, all in a universe of words, where before they would have had to pick one path or another, or split into factions.

It wasn’t yet a full language. It wasn’t even as rich as a creole. But it was a start, and it was growing fast.

And in a sense Mother had discovered, not invented, that basic sentence structure. Its central logic reflected hominids’ deep apprehension of the world — a world of objects with properties — which reflected in turn a still deeper neural architecture common to most mammals. If a lion could have spoken, or an elephant, it would have spoken this way too. This central underpinning would be shared by almost all the myriad human languages that would follow in the ages to come, a universal template reflecting the essential causality of the world and the human perception of it. But it had taken Mother’s dark genius to give that deep architecture expression, and to inspire the linguistic superstructure that rapidly followed.

And now it was time for another step.

Sapling said something that grabbed her attention. “Spear kill bird,” he said excitedly. “Spear kill bird, spear kill bird…”

She frowned. “No, no.”

He stopped in midflow. Wrapped up in his performance he seemed to have forgotten she was there. “Spear kill bird.” He mimed the spear’s flight. He even picked up the ostrich’s ragged head and arced his outstretched hand toward it just as his spear had flown, straight and true.

“No!” she barked. She got up and grabbed his hand. “You lift hand.” She slapped the spear-thrower into his grip. “Hand push stick. Stick push spear. Spear kill bird.”

He pulled back, baffled. “Spear kill bird.” Isn’t that what I said?

Irritated, she went through it again. “You lift hand. Spear kill bird. You kill bird.” There was a causal chain, but the intention resided only in one place; in Sapling’s head. She could see it clearly. He had killed the bird, not the spear. She slapped his head. This is where the bird died, dummy. Inside your mind. The rest is detail. They argued for a while, but Sapling grew increasingly confused, his simple boyish pleasure in his kill waning now that his boasting had degenerated into this peculiar philosophical discussion.

Then a bolt of pain stabbed through Mother’s temples, as sharply and suddenly as Sapling’s spear of hardened wood must have slammed through the head of that hapless ostrich. She stumbled to her knees, her fists pressed to her temples.

But now, suddenly, in that instant of pain, she could see a new truth.

She imagined the spear arcing through the air, like the bright lightning in her head, piercing the bird’s skull and extinguishing its life. She knew that Sapling had thrown the spear. He had willed the bird dead, and everything else that followed was irrelevant.

But what if she hadn’t seen Sapling throw the spear? What if he had been hidden by a rock, a tree? Would she have believed that the spear was the ultimate cause — that the spear itself had intended to kill the bird? No, of course not. Even if she couldn’t see the whole causal chain, it must exist. If she saw the spear fly, she would know somebody must have thrown it.

Her peculiar vision of the world, the spiderweb of causes stretching across the world and from past to future, deepened further. If an ostrich fell, a hunter had willed it. And if a person died, another was to blame. As simple as that. She saw all this immediately, understood it on a deep intuitive level below words, as new connections opened in her complex, fast-developing consciousness.

The logic was clear, compelling. Appalling. Comforting.

And she knew how she had to act on this new insight.

She became aware that Sapling was kneeling before her, holding her shoulders. “Hurt? Head? Water. Sleep. Here…” He took her arm, trying to help her stand.

But that flash of pain had come and gone in an instant, a meteor leaving a trail of shattered and remade connections in her mind. She stood up and pushed past him, stalking back toward the settlement. There was only one person she needed now, one thing she had to do.

Sour was in her shelter, a rough lean-to of palm fronds, sleeping off the heat of the day.

Mother stood over her. In her arms she held a massive boulder, the largest she could carry; she cradled it as once she had cradled Silent.

Mother had never forgotten the day when Silent had first fallen ill. On that day everything had changed for her, as if the land had pivoted around her, as if the clouds and rocks had exchanged places. It had been the start of the pain. And she hadn’t forgotten Sour’s half smile. If I can’t have a kid of my own, she had been saying, I’m glad you will lose yours.

Now she saw everything clearly. Silent’s death had not been random. Nothing happened by chance in Mother’s universe: not anymore. Everything was connected; everything had meaning. She was the first conspiracy theorist.

And the first person she indicted was her closest surviving family member.

Mother didn’t know how Sour had committed her crime. It might have been a look, a word, a touch — some subtle way, an invisible weapon that had brought the boy down as surely as a spear of carved wood — but how didn’t matter. All that mattered was that Mother now knew who to blame.

She raised the rock.

In her last moment Sour woke, disturbed by Mother’s movement. And she saw the rock falling toward her head. Her world ended, as thoroughly and suddenly extinguished as Cretaceous Earth’s by the Devil’s Tail.

The hominid brain, fueled by the need for increasing smartness, fed by the people’s new fat-rich diet, had grown rapidly. It was more complex than any computer that humans would ever build. Inside Mother’s head were a hundred billion neurons — interacting biochemical switches — a number comparable to the number of stars in the Galaxy. But each of those switches was capable of taking a hundred thousand variable positions. And this whole suite of complexity was bathed in a fluid laced with more than a thousand chemicals that varied with time, season, stress, diet, age, and a hundred other influences, each of which could affect the functioning of the switches.

Before Mother, people’s minds were compartmented, with their subtle consciousness restricted to their social dealings while specialized modules dealt with such functions as toolmaking and environmental understanding, as well as more basic physiological functions such as breathing. The various functions of the brain had developed to some degree in isolation from one another, like separate subroutines not united into a master program.

It was all very jury-rigged, though. And this hugely complex biochemical computer was prone to mutation.

The physical difference between Mother’s brain and those of the people around her was tiny, the result of a minor mutation, a small change in the chemistry of the fat in her skull, a slight rewiring of the neuronal circuitry that underpinned her consciousness. But that was enough to give her a new flexibility of thinking, a breaking-through between the different compartments of her intelligence — and a hugely different perception.

But the rewiring of so immensely complicated an organic computer inevitably had side effects — not all of them desirable.

It wasn’t just the migraine. Mother was suffering from what might have been diagnosed as a kind of schizophrenia. Her symptoms had been triggered by the death of her son. Even in this first flowering of human creativity, Mother foreshadowed many of the flawed geniuses who would illuminate, and darken, human history in the generations that lay in the future.

There was no police force here. But random killers were not welcome in such a small, close-knit community. So they came to seek her out.

But she had gone.

Alone, she walked for days across the savannah, back to the place they had last camped, the place of the dry gorge. The patch of ground was now so weathered and overgrown that surely only she could have recognized it.

She cleared away the vegetation, grass, and scrub. Then she took a digging-stick and, like long-dead Pebble digging for yams, she began to beat her way into the earth.

At last, a meter or so deep, she glimpsed the white of bone. The first fragment she retrieved was a rib. In the harsh sunlight it gleamed white, utterly cleansed of flesh and blood; she was struck by the awful efficiency of the worms. But it wasn’t ribs she wanted. She dropped the bone and dug her hands into the soil. She knew where to look, remembered every detail of that terrible day when Silent had been flung into this bit of ground, how he had fallen with head lolling back and limbs splayed, the stains of his death shit still showing on his thin legs.

Soon she closed her hands on his head.

She lifted the skull into the air, the gaping eyes facing her. A scrap of cartilage held the jaw in place — but then the rotting cartilage gave way, and the jaw creaked open, as if the fleshless child were trying to say something to her. But the gaping smile kept widening, grotesquely, and a fat worm wriggled where the tongue had been, and then the jaw fell off, back into the dirt.

That didn’t matter. He didn’t need a jaw. What were a few teeth? She spat on the cranium and polished it clean of dirt with the palm of her hand. She cradled the skull, crooning.

When she returned to the lake, the people were waiting for her. They were all here, all but the youngest children and the mothers with infants. Some of the adults carried weapons — stone knives, wooden spears — as if Mother were a rogue bull elephant who might suddenly turn on them. But as many of the group were dismayed as were overtly hostile. Here was Sapling, for instance, his spear-thrower slung over his back on a length of sinew, his pale eyes clouded as he watched the woman who had taught him so much. Many of them even wore the markings she had inspired on their flesh or clothes.

Sour’s only surviving child was a girl, thirteen years old. She had always been prone to chubbiness, and that had gotten worse now that she was coming into womanhood; already her breasts were large, pendulous. And her skin was an odd yellow-brown color, like honey, the legacy of a chance meeting with a wandering group from the north a couple of generations back. Now this girl, Honey, Mother’s cousin, stared at Mother with baffled anger, her dirty face streaked with tears.

Hostile, sad, pitying, or confused, they were all uncertain. When she recognized that uncertainty Mother felt a kind of inner warmth. Without yelling, without using violence, without so much as a gesture, she was in control of the situation.

She held up the skull and swiveled it so that its sightless eyes turned on the people. They gasped and flinched — but most looked more baffled than frightened. What use was an old skull?

But one girl turned away, as if the staring skull were looking at her accusingly. She was a skinny, intense fourteen-year-old with wide eyes. This girl, Eyes, had a particularly elaborate spiral design sketched on her upper arms in ocher. Mother made a mental note of her.

One man stepped forward. He was a huge fellow with a ferocious temper, like a cornered ox. Now Ox pointed back at Sour’s shelter. “Dead,” he said. He pointed his ax at Mother. “You. Head, rock. Why?”

For all the control she was exerting on the situation, Mother knew that what she said now would determine her entire future. If she was driven out of the camp she could not expect to survive long.

But she was confident.

She looked at the skull, and smiled. Then she pointed at Sour’s body. “She kill boy. She kill him.”

Ox’s black eyes narrowed. If that was true that Sour had killed the boy, then Mother’s actions could be justified. Any mother, even a father, would be expected to avenge a murdered child.

But now Honey pushed forward. “How, how, how?” Struggling to express herself, her plump belly wobbling, she mimed stabbing, strangling. “Not kill. Not touch. How, how, how? Boy sick. Boy die. How, how?” How is my mother supposed to have done this?

Mother raised her face to the sun, which sailed through a cloudless dome of white-blue sky. “Hot,” she said, wiping her brow. “Sun hot. Sun not touch. She not touch. She kill.” Action at a distance. It isn’t necessary for the sun to touch your flesh for it to warm you. And it wasn’t necessary for Sour to touch my son to kill him.

There was fear in their faces now. There were plenty of invisible, incomprehensible killers in their lives. But the notion that a person could control such forces was new, frightening.

Mother forced herself to smile. “Safe. She dead. Safe now.” I killed her for you. I killed the demon. Trust me. She held up the skull, stroking its cranium. “Tell me.” And so it had been.

Ox glared at Mother. He growled and stamped, and pointed at her chest with his ax. “Boy dead. Not tell. Boy dead.”

She smiled. She nestled the skull in the crook of her arm, like the head of a baby. And as they stared at her, half-believing, she could feel her power spread.

But Honey wouldn’t accept any of this. Crying, jabbering meaninglessly, she lunged at Mother. But the women held her back.

Mother walked away toward her shelter. The people shrank back as she passed, eyes wide.

III

The dryness intensified. One hot, cloudless day gave way to another. The land dried quickly, the streams shriveling to brownish trickles. The plants died back, though there were still roots to be dug out with ingenuity and strength. The hunters had to range far in search of meat, their feet pounding over dusty baked-dry ground.

These were people who lived in the open, with the land, the sky, the air. They were sensitive to the changes in the world around them. And they all quickly knew that the drought was deepening.

Paradoxically, though, the drought brought them a short-term benefit.

When the dry period had lasted thirty days, the group broke up its encampment and trekked to the largest lake in the area, a great pool of standing water that persisted through all but the most ferocious dry seasons. Here they found the herbivores — elephant, oxen, antelope, buffalo, horses. Driven to distraction by thirst and hunger, the animals crowded around the lake, jostling to get at the water, and their great feet and hooves had turned the lake’s perimeter into a trampled, muddy bowl where nothing could grow. But already some of them were failing: the old, the very young, the weak, those with the least reserves to see them through this harsh time.

The humans settled, watchful, alongside the other scavengers. There were other human bands here — even other kinds of people, the thick-browed sluggish ones you glimpsed in the distance sometimes. But the lake was big; there was no need for contact, conflict.

For a time the living was easy. It wasn’t even necessary to hunt; the herbivores simply fell where they stood, and you could just walk in and take what you needed. The competition with other carnivores wasn’t too intense, for there was plenty for everybody.

The people didn’t even have to take the whole animal: The meat of a fallen elephant, say, was more than they could consume before it spoiled. So they took only the choicest cuts: the trunk, the delicious, fat-rich footpads, the liver and heart, the marrow of the bones, abandoning the rest to less choosy scavengers. Sometimes they would close in on an animal that wasn’t yet dead, but was too weak to resist. If you let it live, the ravaged animal was a larder of fresh meat for those who preyed on it, as long as it survived.

So the animals fell and their meat was consumed, their bones were scattered and trampled by their surviving fellows, until the muddy margin that surrounded the shrinking lake glinted with shards of white.

But the drought wasn’t a disaster for the people. Not yet.

Mother had moved to the lake with the people, of course; no matter what remarkable internal trajectory she was now following, she still had to eat, to stay alive, and the only way she could do that was as part of the group.

But life began to get subtly easier for her.

Nothing could grow close to this mud hole, and as the drought continued — and the elephants and other browsers demolished the trees over an increasingly wide radius — the people had to range further to gather raw materials for their fires, pallets, and shelters.

Mother got help with this chore. Eyes, the staring, intense girl who had been so impressed by Silent’s stare, brought Mother wood, her skinny arms laden with the scratchy, dried-out stuff. Mother accepted this without comment. Later she let Eyes sit and watch as she made her markings in the dirt. After a time, shyly, Eyes joined in.

One of the younger men had been close to Eyes. He was a long-fingered boy, oddly fond of consuming insects. This boy, Ant-eater, jeered at Mother and tried to pull Eyes away. But Eyes resisted.

At length Mother took a long straight sapling trunk, thrust it into the ground, and set Silent’s empty skull up on top of it. The next time Ant-eater came sniffing around Eyes, he walked straight into Silent’s eyeless glare. Whimpering, he scuttled away.

After that, with the skull watching over her day and night, Mother’s power and authority seemed to grow.

Soon it wasn’t just Eyes who brought her wood and food, but several of the women. And if she walked down to the water’s edge, even the men would grudgingly make way and let her have first cut of the drought’s latest victim.

It was all because of Silent, of course. Her son was helping her, in his own subtle, characteristically quiet way. In gratitude she set his favorite toys out at the base of the post: the bits of pyrite, the twisted chunk of wood. She even took to leaving out food for him — elephant calf meat, well cooked and chewed by his mother, the way he had liked it as a small child. Every morning, the meat was gone.

She was no fool. She knew Silent wasn’t alive in any brute physical sense. But he wasn’t dead. He lived on in other, more subtle, dispersed ways. Perhaps he was in the animals who fed on the food she put out for him. Perhaps he was in the pallet that cushioned her when she slept. Perhaps he was working in the hearts of the people who gave her food. It didn’t matter how he was here. It was enough that she knew now that death was just a stage, like birth, the sprouting of body hair, the withering of the aging. It was nothing to fear. The ache she had endured had gone. When she lay on her pallet, alone in the dark, she felt as close to Silent as she had when he was an infant snuggling at her breast.

She was certainly schizophrenic. Perhaps she was no longer sane. It would have been impossible to tell; in all the world, there were only a handful of people like Mother, only a few heads filled with such a light, and there was no meaningful comparison to make.

But, sane or not, she was happier than she had been for a long time. And, even in this time of drought, she was growing fat. From the point of view of simple survival, she was succeeding better than her fellows.

Her insanity — if it was insanity — was adaptive.

One day Eyes came up with something new.

Inspired by the carved ivory figurine Mother still kept at her side, Eyes began to make new kinds of marks on a bit of flattened-out elephant skin. At first they were very crude, just scribbles of ocher and soot on dusty hide. But Eyes persisted, struggling to replicate in ocher on skin what she could see in her head. Watching her, Mother recognized something of herself, the painful early times as she strove to get the strange contents of her head out.

And then she understood what Eyes was trying to do.

On this scrap of elephant hide, Eyes was drawing a horse. It was a crude picture, even infantile, the line poor, the anatomy distorted. But this was no abstract shape, like Mother’s parallel lines and spirals. This was definitely a horse: There was the graceful head, the flowing neck, the blur of hooves beneath.

For Mother it was another thunderbolt moment, an instant when the connections closed and her head reconfigured once again. With a cry she fell to the ground, scrabbling for her own bits of ocher and charcoal. Startled, Eyes quailed back, fearful she had done something wrong. But Mother only grabbed a bit of hide and began to scratch and scribble as Eyes had done.

She felt the first sun-bright premonitory tingling of pain in her head. But she kept on working through the pain.

Soon Eyes and Mother had covered the surfaces around them, rocks and bone and skin and even the dry dust, with hasty images of leaping gazelles and towering giraffes, with elephants, horses, eland.

When they saw what Eyes and Mother were doing, others, immediately fascinated, tried to copy them. Gradually the new imagery spread, and throughout the little community ocher animals leapt and sooty spears flew. It was as if a new layer of life had entered the world, a surface of mind that changed everything it touched.

For Mother it was a new kind of power. When she had recognized that the shapes she saw in her head had matches in the world outside, she had begun to understand that she was at the focus of the global web of causality and control — as if the universe of people and animals, rocks and sky, was just a map of what lay inside her own imagination. And now, with this new technique of Eyes’s, there was a whole new way to express that control, those connections. Taking the horse into her head and then transferring it, frozen, to a rock or a bit of skin was as if she owned it forever — no matter that the animal ran unimpeded across the dry plains.

Many people feared the new images and those who produced them. Mother herself had grown too strong to be challenged; few would meet the sightless gaze of that skull on the post. But Eyes, her closest acolyte, was an easier target.

One day she came to Mother, weeping. She was bedraggled and muddy, and the elaborate designs she had painted on her skin were smudged and washed away. Eyes’s language skills remained poor, and Mother had to listen to a lot of her circumlocutory pidgin before she understood what had happened.

It had been Ant-eater, the boy who had shown interest in Eyes. He had pursued her again. When she had shown no desire for him he had tried to force himself on her. But still she resisted. So he carried her to the lake and threw her into the water, smeared her with mud, tried to destroy her skin markings.

Eyes looked at Mother as if she expected comfort, a hug, as if she were an upset child. But Mother merely sat before her, her face hard.

Then she went to her pallet and returned with a fine stone scraper. She made the girl rest her head in her lap — and Mother jabbed the stone into her cheek. Eyes cried out and pulled away, baffled; she touched her cheek and looked in horror at the blood on her fingers. But Mother coaxed her back, made her lie down again, and again punctured her cheek, this time a little below the first wound. Eyes struggled a little, but she submitted. Gradually, as the pain seeped through her, she went limp.

When Mother was done with the awl she wiped away the blood and took a piece of ocher, rubbing the crumbling rock deep into the wounds she had made. Eyes mewled as the salty stuff stung her damaged flesh.

Then Mother took her hand. “Come,” she said. “Water.”

She led the reluctant, baffled girl through the listless herbivores down to the lake. They splashed out into the water, their toes sinking into the clinging lake-bottom mud, until the water came up to their knees. They stood still until the ripples had settled, and the muddy water lay still and smooth before them.

Mother bade Eyes look down at her reflection.

Eyes saw that a vivid crimson spiral looped from her eye and over her cheek. Blood still seeped from the rudimentary tattoo. When she splashed water over her face the blood washed away, but the spiral remained. Eyes gaped and grinned — though the flexing of her face made her aching wounds hurt even more. She understood now what Mother had been doing.

The tattooing was a technique Mother had tried out on herself. It was painful, of course. But it was pain — the pain in her head, the pain of her loss of Silent — that had given birth to the great transformations of her life. Pain was to be welcomed, celebrated. What better way to make this child one of her own?

Hand in hand, the two of them walked back to the shore.

For day after relentless day the drought continued.

The lake became a dank puddle at the center of a bowl of cracked mud. The water was fouled by the droppings and corpses of the animals — but the people drank it nonetheless, for they had no choice, and many of them suffered diarrhea and other ailments. Among the animals the die back continued. But there was little fresh meat now, and there was ferocious competition from the wolves and hyenas and cats.

The bands, of skinny folk and bone-brows alike, stared at each other sullenly.

Among Mother’s people, the first to die was an infant. Her little body had been depleted by diarrhea. Her mother keened over the little corpse, then she gave it up to her sisters, who took it away to put it in the ground. But the dirt was dry, hard packed, and the weakened folk had trouble digging into it. Next day another died, an old man. And two the next, two more children.

It was after that, after they had started to die, that the people began to come to Mother.

They approached her pallet, with the gleaming skull on its post. They would sit on the dusty ground, gazing at Mother or Eyes or the animals and geometric designs they had scratched everywhere. More of them began to copy Mother’s practices, pasting spirals and starbursts and wavy lines on their faces and arms. And they would gaze into Silent’s empty eye sockets, as if seeking wisdom there.

It was a matter of why. Mother had been able to tell them why her son had died, of an invisible illness nobody else had even been able to name; she had been able to pick out and punish Sour, the woman who had caused that death. Surely if anybody knew why this drought was afflicting them, it would be Mother.

Mother studied this rough congregation, her mind working relentlessly, ideas and interconnections sparking. The drought had a cause; of course it did. Behind every cause there was an intention, a mind, whether you could see it or not. And if there was a mind, you could negotiate with it. After all her people had already been traders, instinctive negotiators, for seventy thousand years.

But how was she to negotiate with the rain? What did she have to trade?

And overlaid on such musings was her suspicions about the people. Which of them could be trusted? Which of them talked about her when she wasn’t present? Even now, as they gazed up at her in a kind of desultory hope, were they somehow communicating, sending secret messages to each other with gestures, looks, even scribbled marks in the dust?

In the end, the answer came to her.

Ox, the big short-tempered man who had challenged her after the death of Sour, came to join her rough congregation. He was weakened by diarrhea.

Mother stood abruptly and approached Ox. Sapling followed her.

Ox, weakened and ill, sat piteously in the dirt with the rest. Mother placed a hand on his head, gently. He looked up, bewildered, and she smiled at him. Then she beckoned him to follow her. Ox stood, clumsy, dizzy, stumbling. But he let Sapling guide him back to Mother’s own pallet. There, Mother bade him lay down.

She took a wooden spear, its end charred, blood-soaked, hardened from use. She faced the people. She said, “Sky. Rain. Sky make rain. Earth drink rain.” She glanced up at the cloudless bowl of the sky. “Sky not make rain. Angry, angry. Earth drink much rain. Thirsty, thirsty. Feed earth.”

And, with a single fluid movement, she plunged the spear into Ox’s chest. He convulsed, his fists grabbing the spear. Blood spewed from his wide-open mouth, and urine spilled down his legs. But with all her strength Mother twisted the spear, and felt it rip at the soft organs within. Flopping, Ox fell back on the pallet, and did not move again. Mother smiled and wrenched out the spear. Blood continued to spill onto the ground.

There was silence. Even Sapling and Eyes were staring, open-mouthed.

Mother bent and grabbed a handful of sticky, blood-soaked dust. “See! Dust drinks. Earth drinks.” And she crammed the dust into the half mouth of her child; it stained its small teeth red. “Rain comes,” she said gently. “Rain comes.” Then she glared around at the staring people.

One by one they looked down, yielding before her gaze.

Honey, daughter of Sour, broke the spell. With a scream of despair she picked up a handful of cobbles and hurled them at Mother. They clattered uselessly on the ground. Then Honey ran away toward the lake.

Mother watched her go, eyes hard.

In her heart Mother believed everything she had said, everything she had done. The fact that it served a political purpose to have sacrificed poor Ox — for he was one of those who most openly opposed her — did not perturb her belief in herself and her actions. Ox’s death had been expedient, but it would also mollify the rain. Yes, that was how it was. Leaving Sapling to dispose of the corpse, she walked into her shelter.

Despite the sacrifice, the rain did not come. The people waited as day succeeded arid day, and not a cloud broke the washed-out dome of the sky. Gradually they grew restive. Honey, particularly, became more openly derisive of Mother, Eyes, Sapling, and those who clung to them.

But Mother simply waited, serene. She was convinced she was right, after all. It was just that Ox’s death had not been sufficient appeasement for the sky, the soil. It was simply a question of finding the right trade-off, that was all. All she needed was patience — even though her own flesh was hanging on her bones.

One day Eyes came to her. She was led by Ant-eater. Gaunt as they were, Mother could see that they wanted to couple.

Ant-eater was not mocking now, but supplicating. And now it would be a kind of love, or pity, on the part of the young man, for the tattoo Mother had crudely carved into Eyes’s face had become infected by the stagnant lake water. Its spiral shape was barely visible beneath a mass of swollen, leaking flesh that covered one half of the girl’s face.

But Mother frowned. This match wouldn’t be right. She stood and took Eyes’s hand, prizing it away from the dismayed Ant-eater. Then she walked the girl through the scattered people until she found Sapling. He was lying on his back, gazing up at an empty sky.

Mother pushed Eyes into the dirt beside Sapling. He looked up at Mother, baffled. Mother said, “You. You. Fuck. Now.”

Sapling looked at Eyes, obviously trying to mask his revulsion. Though they had spent much time in each other’s company with Mother, he had never shown any sexual interest in Eyes, even before her face had become so badly disfigured, nor had she shown any in him.

But now, Mother saw, it was right that they should couple. Ant-eater would have been wrong; Sapling was right. Because Sapling understood. She stood over them until Sapling’s hand had moved to the girl’s small breast.

A full month after Ox’s death, the people were woken by a wild, high-pitched keening. It was Mother. Bewildered, most of them already terrified of this disturbing woman in their midst, they came running to see what new strangeness was going to befall them.

Mother was kneeling beside the sapling trunk that had borne the skull of her child. But now the skull lay on the ground, broken into pieces. Mother pawed at the fragments, wailing as if the child had died a second time.

Eyes and Sapling hung back, unsure what Mother wanted them to do.

Mother, cradling the pathetic, broken bits of skull in her left hand, glared around at the people. Then her right hand shot forward, pointing. “You!”

People flinched. Heads turned, following her line. Mother was pointing at Honey.

“Here! Walk, walk here!”

The sagging jowls under Honey’s chin shook with terror. She tried to pull back, but those around her stopped her. At last Sapling stepped forward, grabbed the girl by the wrist, and dragged her to Mother.

Mother threw the bits of skull in her face. “You! You throw stone. You smash boy.”

“No, no. I—”

Mother’s voice was hard. “You stop rain.”

Honey squealed, as terrified as if it might be true, and urine dribbled down her thighs.

This time, Mother didn’t even have to perform the kill herself.

It did not start to rain that day. Or the next. Or the next after that. But on the third day after Honey’s sacrifice thunder pealed across a dry sky. The people cowered, an ancient reflex that dated back to the days when Purga had huddled in her burrow. But then the rain came at last, pouring out of the sky as if it had burst.

The people ran, laughing. They lay on their backs, mouths open to the water falling from the sky, or they rolled and threw mud at each other. Children wrestled, infants wailed. And there was a great round of coupling, an instinctive, lusty response to the end of the drought, this new beginning of life.

Mother sat beside her blood-soaked pallet and watched this, smiling.

As always she was thinking on many levels simultaneously.

Her sacrifice of Honey had once again been politically astute. Honey had not been a calculating opponent, but she was a focus of dissent; with her gone it would be easier for Mother to consolidate her power. At the same time the sacrifice had clearly been necessary. The sky and earth were appeased; mankind’s first gods had relented, and let their children live.

But on still another level of calculation Mother knew that the storm would have come whatever she did. If the rain had not followed her sacrifice of Honey, she would have been prepared to continue, working through the people one by one — pushing her spear even into Eyes’s heart if she had to.

She knew all these things simultaneously; she believed many contradictory things at once. That was the essence of her genius. She smiled, the water running down her face.

IV

Sapling walked slowly along the grassy river bank. He wore a simple skin wrap, and carried nothing more than a spear tied over his back and a net bag containing a few bone tools and artwork — no stone tools; if they were needed, it was easier to knap them on the spot than carry them.

In his thirties now — fifteen years after the deaths of Ox and Honey and the installation of Mother as the troop’s de facto leader — Sapling had filled out, his face harder, his hair thinning and streaked with gray. But his body was as whiplash thin as ever. It wasn’t possible to hide the tattoos that covered his arms and face, but he had been careful to rub dirt and mud over his skin to subdue their effect. Over the years the tattoos had proved alarming to strangers, and the barrier of mistrust was high enough anyhow.

He looked like a hunter, out exploring at random far from his troop, perhaps seeking to trade. But he was not alone; others watched every step, hidden in the foliage of the riverbank. His appearance was an elaborate lie. And his exploration was anything but random. He was scouting.

He was spotted first by a child, a chubby little girl playing with worn pebbles at the water’s edge. Aged maybe five, she was naked save for a string of beads around her neck. She looked up, startled. He smiled at her, eyes wide and empty. She screamed and bolted down the riverbank, as he had expected her to do. He walked slowly after her.

The signs of settlement were soon apparent. The muddy ground underfoot was pocked with footprints, and he saw fishing nets strung across the river. After following a tight curve in the river’s flow he came into view of the settlement itself. From a cluster of huts, roughly conical, threads of smoke curled up into the afternoon sky.

This was no temporary camp, he saw immediately. The huts had been built on sturdy logs driven deep into the ground. These river folk had been here for a while, and they evidently intended to stay.

A glance at the river showed why. Not far along the bank, the vegetation on both sides of the water had been trampled down, and he could see the glimmer of stones on the riverbed. This was a ford, where the migrating herds could cross the water. All the people had to do was wait here for the animals to come to them. And, indeed, he saw a great pile of bones, what looked like antelope, ox, even elephant, stacked up behind the huts.

But he was puzzled by the huts themselves. Their walls were solid, save for a break at each cone’s apex to allow the smoke out, and there was no way for light to get in. Who would live in such darkness?

Two adults came running toward him — both women, he saw. They carried unremarkable wooden spears and stone axes, and wore straightforward skin wraps, much like his own. Their faces were daubed with crude but fierce-looking ocher designs, and they both had bits of bone pushed through their noses. One of the women raised her spear toward his chest. “Fu, fu! Ne hai, ne, fu!…”

He recognized none of the words. But he could tell that this crude jabber was like the pidgin he had grown up speaking, with none of the richness that had been steadily developing among Mother’s people.

This was going to be easy.

He forced a smile. Then, moving slowly, he slid his bag from his shoulder and let it fall open. Watching the women, he produced a carved seashell. He put the shell on the ground before the women, and backed away, hands spread and empty. I am a stranger, yes. But I am no threat. I want to trade. And this is what I have. See how beautiful it is…

The women were disciplined. One kept her weapon aimed at his chest, while the other bent to inspect the shell.

The shell itself had last seen the sea a decade ago, and had since traveled hundreds of kilometers inland via tenuous, long-distance trading chains. And now it had been engraved with an exquisite elephant-head design by one of the people’s best artisans, a young girl with long, delicate fingers. When the woman recognized the elephant’s face, she gasped, childlike. She grabbed the shell and clutched it to her chest.

After that, the women beckoned Sapling to follow them toward the settlement. He walked easily, not looking back, confident his companions would remain concealed.

In the settlement of the river folk he created a stir. People glared as he passed, though they stared greedily at the carved shell. A couple of children, including the little girl who had first raised the alarm, tailed him, skipping, curious.

He was led into one of the huts. This was a typical living space, with an elaborate hearth, sleeping pallets, and food, tools, and skins stacked up. It looked as if ten or a dozen people lived here, including kids. But the family had cleared out, leaving only a couple of bearded men, at least as old as he was, and the women who had brought him here. The floor was well trampled and littered with the usual detritus of human occupation — bones, stone flakes from knapping, a few half-eaten roots and fruit.

The men sat before the smoldering embers in the hearth. They all had huge bones stuck through the septa of their noses. One of them gestured. “Horn!” The word was unfamiliar, the gesture unmistakable.

Sapling sat on the far side of the fire. He was offered a cooked root to eat and a drink of some thick liquid. As he laid out his goods he cast greedy looks around the hut. The hearth was elaborate — far more so than the simple holes in the ground made by Mother’s people. And there was a pit nearby, skin-lined and filled with water and big flat riverbed boulders. He could immediately see how the water could be heated by dropping in fire-hot stones. There was a structure of clay bricks and straw that he failed to understand: He had never seen a kiln before. There were a few unusual artifacts, like well-made baskets — and a bowl made of what he thought at first was wood, but turned out to be a strange kind of hardened clay.

But most entrancing were the lamps.

They were just clay bowls of animal fat, with bits of juniper twig used as wicks. But they burned steadily, filling the hut with a clear yellow light. He could see now why these huts needed no windows — and his mind raced as he realized that with these lamps it would be possible to have light whenever it was wanted, even in the depths of night, even without a fire.

It was clear that these people were far ahead of his own in toolmaking. But their art was much more limited, although several of them wore strings of the beads he had spotted around the little girl’s neck, beads that turned out to be made of elephant-tusk ivory.

So he wasn’t surprised when the elders were stunned by the array of goods he was able to lay out before them. There were ivory and bone figurines of animals and humans, images, abstract and figurative, carved in relief into shell and bits of sandstone — and one of Mother’s own more extraordinary figures, a creature with the body of a human but the head of a wolf.

It was a reaction he had seen many times before. The art of Mother’s people had advanced hugely in the couple of decades since her own first uncertain fumblings. The people had been ready for it, with their big brains and nimble fingers; all it had taken was for somebody to come up with the idea — just as these river folk’s roomy minds were ready for the art too. It was as if Mother had dropped a grain of dust into a supersaturated solution, and a crystal had immediately formed.

Sapling had no way of communicating with these river folk save for gestures and guessed-at words. But soon the parameters of the discussion were clear. There would be trade: Sapling’s art for these sedentary strangers’ advanced tools and artifacts.

By the time he left to rejoin his hidden companions, about midday the next day, he had a bag full of sample goods. And he had carefully memorized the location of every kiln, every elaborate hearth.

He had done all of this for Mother, as he had carried through so many other similar assignments. But Mother was not here, at his side, sharing the labor and the risks. In his heart he found, somewhat to his surprise, a dark particle of resentment.

Mother sat by the entrance to her shelter. Legs folded under her, hands resting on her knees, her face was in the sun, her back warmed by the remnants of last night’s fire. She was growing old, gaunt, and she seemed to have trouble staying warm. But for now she was comfortable. Oddly satisfied.

Every square centimeter of her skin was covered with tattoos. Even the soles of her feet were adorned with lattice designs. She wore a skin wrap today, as she usually did, so much of her decoration was covered up, but the skin itself was alive with color and motion, leaping animals, darting spears, exploding stars. And on a wooden pillar beside her sat the skull of her long-dead child, stuck back together with a gum made of tree sap.

She watched the people come and go about their daily work. They would glance at her, sometimes nodding respectfully — or else they would turn away hurriedly, avoiding the stare of Mother and her eyeless son — but either way they were deflected, like planets drifting past the gravitational field of some immense black star.

After all, it was Mother who spoke to the dead, Mother who interceded with earth and sky and sun. If not for Mother, the rain would no longer fall, the grass would no longer grow, the animals would stay away. Even sitting here silently she was the most important person in the community.

The latest camp was a riot of color and shape. It was as if Mother had gradually taken the whole of this troop into her head, into her lightning-threaded imagination — and, in a sense, she had. The forms of animals, people, spears, axes — and strange beings that were mixtures of people and animals and trees and weapons — leapt from every surface, from rocks selected for their smooth workability, and from the treated hides that were draped over every shelter. And interlaced with these figurative forms were the abstract shapes that had always marked out Mother’s domain, spirals and starbursts and lattices and zigzags. These symbols were invested with multiple meanings. The image of an eland could represent the animal itself — or people’s knowledge of its behavior — or it could stand for the hunting activity that was required to bring it down, the tool-making, planning, and stalking — or something more subtle yet, the animal’s beauty, or the richness and joy of life itself.

Between the domains of Mother’s mind — and in the minds of those who followed her — the ancient walls were coming down at last. No longer was her full awareness restricted to dealings with other people, while hands and legs and mouths worked independently of thought; no longer was consciousness restricted to its old function of a model of others’ intentions. Now she could think about an animal as if it were a person, a tool as if it were a human to be negotiated with. It was as if the world were populated by new kinds of people — as if tools and rivers and animals, even the sun and the Moon were people, to be dealt with and understood as any other.

After millennia of stasis, consciousness had become a powerful multipurpose tool, reflected in the multiple layers and meanings of the art pieces, like mirrors of a new kind of mind. For the high-browed people this was a time of intellectual ferment.

And Mother wasn’t the only catalyst. Scattered throughout the human range were many others like her. Each of these genius-prophets — if she were not quickly killed by her suspicious fellows — was similarly serving as the focus of a new kind of thinking, new ways of life, a new kind of fire. It was the beginning of an explosive change in the way people interacted with the world around them.

It was the instability of the climate that had driven the development of this new type of mind. The savagely fluctuating environment of this Pleistocene age, like nothing seen in later times, was an unforgiving filter: Only exceptional individuals survived the exceptional harshness, to pass on their genetic legacy. And, not only was the average mind improving, exceptional individuals like Mother were becoming more common — like the prescient technologists who had given the river folk their advanced tool kit. From the point of view of the species it was useful for the mind to be able to produce occasional geniuses. They might wither in the dirt — or they might invent something that would transform human fortunes.

And when such an innovation was made, the roomy heads of their fellows were ready for it. It was as if they longed for it. For seventy thousand years the people had had the necessary hardware. Now Mother, and others like her, supplied the software.

This new way of thinking about the world was already bringing Mother’s people unprecedented new rewards. The encampment, save for its adornment, was the usual jumble of lean-tos. But this latest camp was large; there were twice as many people here now compared to the time before Mother’s awakening. And it was a long time since anybody had suffered the sunken cheeks and swollen belly of hunger. Mother’s ways were successful.

Mother saw the girl Finger sitting alone in the shade of a giant baobab. Finger, just fourteen, was working carefully at some new sculpture, whittling gently at a bit of ivory. She had her legs crossed and a scrap of leather over her lap; Mother’s eyes, still sharp, could make out the gleam of waste bits of the ivory on the ground around her. It was she who had made the exquisite elephant-head shell carving Sapling had given to the river folk.

Finger wore the spiral-design cheek tattoo that had become the badge of those privileged to be closest to Mother: the insignia of her priesthood. But Finger was second generation. She was the daughter of Eyes — who was long dead now, killed by the infection of that first crude tattoo. Finger had been marked with the spiral insignia when she was still an infant; you could tell that by how much the tattoo had distorted and faded as she had grown, a mark of special honor.

But the girl was growing fast. Soon, Mother knew, she would have to find her a partner — just as she had selected partners for her mother, Eyes. Mother had several candidates in mind, boys and young men among her priesthood; she would trust her instincts to make the right choice when the time came.

A shadow passed across her. A woman approached Mother, hesitantly, gaze fixed on the dusty ground. She was young, but she walked stooped over. She had brought a haunch of deer meat; she laid this token on the ground before Mother. “Sore,” said the woman feebly, her head downturned. “Back sore. Walk head up, back hurt. Lift baby, back hurt.”

Mother knew she was only in her early twenties, but this girl had been plagued with problems with her back since foolishly engaging in a wrestling match with her brother — much older, much heavier — some years back.

Mother turned down almost all such requests. It would do her no good to be seen to grant miracles on demand, whether they worked or not. But today, having watched the small genius of Finger at work, warmed through by the sun, she was in an expansive mood. She snapped her fingers. She gestured for the girl to take off her skin wrap and kneel with her back turned.

The girl complied eagerly, bowing naked before Mother.

From the hearth behind her Mother took a handful of cold ash. She spat into it, making a thin, dusty paste, and she lifted it up to Silent’s bony gaze for him to see. Then she rubbed the ash into the girl’s back, muttering wordless jabber. The girl flinched as the ash touched her flesh, as if it were still hot.

When she was done Mother slapped the girl’s backside and let her stand up. Mother waggled a finger. “Be strong. Think no bad. Say no bad.” If the treatment worked, Mother would get the credit. If it failed, the girl would blame herself, for not being worthy. Either way Mother would garner a little more credit.

The girl nodded nervously. Mother let the girl go, satisfied. She took the meat and pushed it into her hut. Somebody would cook it and store it for her later.

All in a day’s work.

Mother’s crude treatment had given her patient a real sense of relief from the pain of her bad back. It was no more than what would one day be called the placebo effect: Because she believed in the power of the treatment, the girl felt better. But the fact that the placebo effect worked on the girl’s mind rather than her body did not make it any less real, or less useful. Now she would be better able to care for her children — who would therefore have a better chance of survival than those of a comparable family with an unbelieving mother whose symptoms could not be relieved by a placebo — and so those children were more likely to go on to have children of their own, who would inherit their grandmother’s internal propensity for belief.

It was the same for the hunters. They had begun to draw images of their prey animals on rocks and the hide walls of their shelters. They would stalk these images, spear them in the heart or the head, even reason with the animals about why they should lay down their lives for the benefit of the people. With these rituals the hunters’ fear was anesthetized out of them. They were often wounded or killed for their recklessness — but their success rate was high, higher than those who did not believe they had any way of reasoning with their prey.

The emergent humans were still animals, still bound by natural law. No innovation in the way they lived would have taken root if it had not given them an adaptive advantage in the endless struggle to survive. An ability to believe in things that weren’t true was a powerful tool.

And Mother was, half consciously, doing her very best to help this propensity for faith to take hold and spread. By selecting mating pairs among her believing followers, Mother was creating a new reproductive isolation. Thanks to this, the divergence of one kind of person from another — believers from those unable to believe — would be surprisingly rapid, leading to marked differences in brain chemistry and organization within a dozen generations. It was the beginning of a plague of thought that would quickly burn through the entire population.

And yet in the world beyond the human range, in northern Europe and the Far East, the older people, the robust beetle-brows and the lanky walkers, still made their simpler tools, even their ancient bower bird hand axes, and lived their simpler lives, just as they always had.

Later, Mother saw the girl again. She was walking more easily, her stoop much lessened. She smiled and even waved at Mother, who allowed herself to smile back.

At the end of the day Sapling returned from his expedition along the river, dusty, hot, thirsty. Of all the artifacts he had brought back he selected a single one to show Mother. It was a lamp, made of the miraculously hard-fired clay. He lit its bark wick and set it up inside her hut, illuminating the dark interior as the daylight faded. Mother nodded her head. We must have this. In terse sentences they began to make plans.

But Mother noticed an oddity in Sapling’s behavior. Her closest lieutenant since the death of Eyes, he was as respectful as he had ever been toward her. However there was a certain impatience in his manner. But the sparkling light of the little lamp crowded such thoughts out of her head.

Sapling took his best hunters on scouting trips around the river folk’s encampment.

He had explained how he wanted the attack to proceed. He drew sketchy maps in the dust, and set stones to serve as models of shelters and people. A talent for symbology had many uses. Social hunters had always had to coordinate their attacks. Wolves did it, as did the great cats, as had the raptors of vanished ages. But never before had planning been so meticulous and complete as in these clever hominids.

As the raiding party approached the river folk’s base, they encountered few animals. The prey creatures were already learning to fear these clever new hunters with their far-reaching weapons and overwhelming intelligence.

And already some animals — some pigs, certain forest antelope — had become scarce in this area, exterminated by the humans.

This was, of course, like an advance echo of the future.

But for now, Sapling and his party were hunting people, not animals.

When the attack came, the river folk didn’t stand a chance. It was not their weapons that gave the attackers their advantage, not their numbers, but their attitude.

Mother’s people fought with a kind of liberating madness. They would fight on when their fellows were cut down around them, after suffering an injury that ought to have disabled them, even when it seemed inevitable that they would be killed. They fought as if they had a belief that they could not die — and that, in fact, was close to the truth. Had not Mother’s child survived death, suffusing into the rocks and dirt and water and sky, to live with the invisible people who controlled the weather, the animals, the grass?

And just as they were able to believe that things, weapons or animals or the sky, were in some way people, it wasn’t a hard leap to make to believe that some people were no more than things. The old categories had broken down. In attacking the river folk they weren’t killing humans, people like themselves. They were killing objects, animals, something less than themselves. The river folk, for all their technical cleverness with fire and clay, had no such belief. It was a weapon they could not match. And this small but vicious conflict set a pattern that would be repeated again and again in the long, bloody ages to come.

When it was done, Sapling stalked through the remains of the encampment. He had most of the river folk men slaughtered, young or old, weak or strong. He tried to spare some of the children and the younger women. The children would be marked and trained to respect Mother and her acolytes. The women would be given to his fighting men. If they became pregnant, they would not be allowed to keep their babies unless they themselves had become acolytes. He had also identified some of those with an understanding of the kilns, the lamps, and the other clever things here, and they would be spared, if they were cooperative. He meant his people to learn the techniques of the river folk.

It was another successful operation, part of the long-term growth of Mother’s community.

When she was shown the village of the river folk, Mother was pleased, and accepted Sapling’s bowed obeisance. But again she saw a frown on Sapling’s face. Perhaps he was growing discontented with obeying her instructions, she thought. Perhaps he wanted more for himself. She would have to consider, do something about it.

But it was too late for such plotting. Even as she surveyed this latest conquest, she had begun to die.

Mother never understood the cancer that devoured her from within. But she could feel it, a lump in her belly. Sometimes she imagined it was Silent, returned from the dead, preparing for a new birth. The pain in her head returned, as powerful as ever. Those sparking lights would flash behind her eyes, zigzags and lattices and stars bursting like pus-filled wounds. It got to the point where she could do nothing but lie in her shelter, smoky animal-fat lamps burning, and listen to the voices that echoed through her roomy cranium.

At last Sapling came to her. She could barely see him through the dazzle of patterns, but there was something she needed to tell him. She grabbed his arm with a hand like a claw. “Listen,” she said.

He crooned softly, as if to a child, “You sleep.”

“No, no,” she insisted, her voice a rasp. “No you. No I.” She raised her finger and tapped her head, her chest. “I, I. Mother.” In her language it was a soft word: “Ja-ahn.”

Another connection had closed. Now she had a symbol even for herself: Mother. She was the first person in all of human history to have a name. And, though she was dying without a surviving child, she thought she was the mother of them all.

“Ja-ahn,” Sapling whispered. “Ja-ahn.” He smiled at her, understanding. He bent over her, covering her mouth with his lips. Then he pinched her nose shut.

As the gruesome kiss went on, as her weakened lungs pulled for air, the darkness quickly gathered.

She had suspected everyone in the group, at one time or another, of harboring malice for her. Everyone except Sapling, her first acolyte of all. How strange, she thought.

A growing belief that behind every event lay intention — be it an evil thought in the mind of another, or the benevolent whim of a god in the sky — was perhaps inevitable in creatures with an innate understanding of causality. If you were smart enough to make multicomponent tools, you eventually came to believe in gods, the end of all causal chains. There would be costs, of course. In the future, to serve their new gods and shamans, the people would have to sacrifice much: time, wealth, even their right to have children. Sometimes they would even have to lay down their lives. But the payback was that they no longer had to be afraid of dying.

And so now Mother was not afraid. The lights in her head went out at last, the images faded, even the pain soothed.

I Indonesian Peninsula, Southeast Asia. Circa 52,000 years before present.

The two brothers pushed the canoe out from the riverbank. “Careful, careful — to my left. All right, we’re clear. Now if we head to the right I think we can get through that channel.” Ejan was in the prow of the bark canoe, his brother Torr in the stern. Aged twenty and twenty-two respectively, they were both small, slim, wiry men with nut dark skin and crisp black hair.

They maneuvered their boat through water clogged with reeds, tangled flood debris, and stranded trunks. The trees lining the banks were cheesewood, teak, mahogany, karaya, and tall mangrove. A tremendous translucent curtain of spiderwebs hung over the forest, catching the light and dimming the intensity of the green within. But the heat lay over the river like a great lid, and the air was drenched with light. Already Ejan was sweating heavily, and the dense moist air lay thick in his lungs.

It would have been hard to believe that this was the middle of the latest glaciation, that in the northern hemisphere giant deer roamed in the lee of ice caps kilometers’ thick.

At last they reached the open water. But they were dismayed to see how crowded it was.

There was a dense traffic of bark canoes and dugouts. Some families were using two or three canoes lashed together for stability. Between these stately fleets scuttled cruder craft, rafts of mangrove and bamboo and reed. But there were also fisher folk working without boats or rafts at all. One woman waded from the shore with a pair of sticks she clapped around any fish that foolishly swam near. A group of girls were standing waist-deep, holding a series of nets across the river, while companions converged on them, with much splashing, to drive fish into the nets.

It was all a great divergence of technology from the simple log floats once used by Harpoon’s people. Spurred on by the great riches available from the coasts, rivers, and estuaries, inventive, restless human minds had come up with a whole spectrum of ways to work the water.

The brothers maneuvered through this crowd.

“Busy today,” growled Ejan. “We’ll be lucky to eat tonight. If I was a fish I’d be far from here.”

“Then let’s hope the fish are even more stupid than you.”

With a flick of his wooden paddle Ejan casually splashed his brother.

There was a cry from further down the river. The brothers turned and peered, cupping their eyes.

Through the murky cloud of sunlit insects that hovered over the water, they made out a raft of mangrove poles. Three men stood on this platform, slim dark shadows in the humid air. Ejan could see their equipment, weapons and skins, lashed to the raft.

“Our brothers,” said Ejan, excited. He took a chance and stood up in the canoe, relying on Torr to keep the little craft stable, and waved vigorously. Seeing him, the brothers waved back, jumping up and down on their raft and making it rock. Today the three of them were going out into the open ocean on that raft, attempting a crossing to the great southern land.

Ejan sat down, his concern outweighing his evaporating elation at spotting his brothers. “I still say that raft is too flimsy,” he murmured.

Torr paddled stoically. “Osa and the rest know what they are doing.”

“But the ocean currents, the way the tide surges—”

“We killed a monkey for Ja’an last night,” Torr reminded him. “Her soul is with them.”

But, Ejan thought uneasily, it is me who bears the ancient name of the Wise One, not any of them. “Perhaps I should have gone with them.”

“Too late now,” said Torr reasonably. And so it was; Ejan could see that the three brothers had turned away and were paddling evenly downstream, toward the river’s mouth. “Come, Ejan,” Torr said. “Let’s fish.”

When they had reached an open stretch of deep water the brothers took their net of woven flax and slipped into the water. The brothers swam apart until the net was stretched out, then Ejan hooked his big toe into the net’s lower margin to open it out vertically. They had turned the net into a fence across the current; it was about fifteen meters long. The brothers began to swim forward, sweeping the water.

Languidly flowing, the water was warm on Ejan’s skin, muddy, murky with green life.

After about fifty meters they swam together, closing the net. Their haul was not great — the fish had indeed been scared off today — but there were a few fat specimens that they threw into the canoe. They took care to release the smallest, most immature fish; nobody would eat a morsel when he could wait and take a fat adult in a few months. They pulled the net taut and prepared to swim upstream once more.

But now a cry went up from the shore, an eerie wail.

Ejan turned to Torr. “Mother.”

“We must go back.”

They lodged their net over a tree stump; there it could wait. They scrambled back into the canoe, turned it, and thrust it back into the tangle of drifting debris that lined the riverbank.

When they got back to the encampment, they found their sisters trying to comfort their distraught mother. The three brothers hadn’t even got out of sight of the shore before a tidal surge had smashed their fragile craft. None of them had been seen since; all of them had drowned.

Never again would Osa, Born, or Iner lash their canoes to Ejan’s.

Ejan pushed his way through his siblings to his mother, and laid his hand on her shoulder. “I will make that journey,” he said. “For Osa and the others. And I will not die trying.”

But his mother, her graying hair ragged, her eyes blurred with tears, only wailed more loudly.

Ejan was a remote descendant of Eyes and Finger, acolytes of the original Mother of Africa.

After Mother, the progress of mankind was no longer limited by the millennial pace of biological evolution. Now language and culture were themselves evolving at the speed of thought, feeding back on themselves, becoming ever more complex.

Not long after Mother’s death, a new exodus from Africa had begun, a great diffusion of people, in all directions. Ejan’s folk had gone east. Following the ancient footsteps of Far’s walker kind, they had worked their way along the southern fringe of Eurasia, following the coastlines and archipelagos. Now there were people strung out in a great strip from Indonesia and Indochina, through India and the Middle East, all the way back to Africa. And as the populations slowly grew, there had been a gradual colonizing push out of those beachheads along the inland waterways into the interior of the great continent.

Ejan and Torr were the product of the purest strand of coastal wanderers, those who had kept up their seashore migrations generation after generation. To exploit the riches of the rivers, estuaries, coastal strips, and offshore islands, these people had gradually honed their skills in boat-building and fishing.

But now they faced a quandary. On this archipelago, off the southwestern corner of the Asian landmass, they had traveled as far as they could go: They had run out of land. And the place was getting crowded.

There were opportunities to go further; everybody knew that.

Though the latest glaciation had yet to reach its deepest cold, the sea level had already dropped hundreds of meters. In the coastal reshaping that resulted, the islands of Java and Sumatra had been joined with Southeast Asia to form a great shelf, and much of Indonesia had become a long peninsula. Similarly Australia, Tasmania, and New Guinea had been merged into a single mighty mass.

In this unique, temporary geography, there were places where the Asian landmass was separated from greater Australia by only a hundred kilometers or so.

Everybody knew the southern land was there. Brave or unfortunate sailors, washed far from the coast and the offshore islands, had glimpsed it. Nobody knew its true extent, but over the generations enough travelers’ tales had accumulated for everyone to be sure that this was no mere island: this was a new land, extensive, green, rich, with a long and abundant coast.

To get there would be quite a feat. The people had gotten this far by island-hopping, moving through reasonably equable seas from one scrap of land to another, each clearly visible, one from the next. Moving from this last island to the southern lands — passing out of sight of land altogether — would be a challenge of a different order.

But still, to open up a new world, all it would take was for somebody bold enough to attempt the crossing. Bold enough, smart enough — and lucky.

Ejan took many days to select the tree he wanted.

With Torr at his side he walked through the fringes of the forest, studying sterculias and palms. He would stand beneath the trees, eyeing the lines of their trunks, tapping on their bark with his fist to detect any inner defect.

At last he selected a palm — very fat, very true, its trunk a bulky unblemished pillar. But it was a long way from his band’s settlement. Not only that, the palm was a long way from any riverbank; they wouldn’t even be able to float it home.

Torr thought about complaining about this, but when he saw the set expression on Ejan’s small face he kept his counsel.

First the brothers felled the palm with their stone axes. Then they briskly stripped the bark off the trunk. The exposed wood was perfect, as Ejan had hoped, and very hard under his hand.

They hiked back to the encampment to enlist help to bring back the trunk. Though there was a great deal of sympathy for the loss of their three brothers, nobody relished the prospect of such a long and difficult haul through the forest. In the end it was only family members — only Ejan, Torr, and their three sisters — who returned to the felled palm.

When he had gotten the palm back to camp Ejan immediately got to work. Sliver by sliver he hollowed out the stem of the trunk, taking care to leave the pith intact at stem and stern. He used stone axes and adzes — quickly blunted, yet equally quickly knapped.

Torr helped for the first couple of days. But then he drew away. As the oldest remaining sibling, responsibility now lay heavily on him, and he devoted himself to the basic chores of the family, to staying alive.

After a few days Ejan’s youngest sister, Rocha, brought him a small net bag full of dates. He set the dates down on the stern platform he was carving into the wood, and absently pushed them into his mouth while he worked.

Rocha, fifteen years old, was small, dark, slim — a quiet, intense girl. She walked around the trunk, seeing what he had done.

The hollow now extended through much of the trunk’s length. The trunk’s broad base would be the prow, and Ejan was leaving a broad platform here on which a harpooner could stand. A smaller flat seat at the stern would accommodate the helmsman. It was remarkable to see a boat emerging from the wood. But the great notch Ejan was digging into the trunk was still heartbreakingly shallow, the surfaces rough and unfinished.

Rocha sighed. “You are working so hard, brother. Osa used to put together a raft in a day, two at most.”

He straightened up. He wiped sweat from his brow with his bare arm, and dropped another worn ax blade. “But Osa’s raft killed him. The ocean between us and the southern land is not like the placid waters of the river. No raft is strong enough.” He ran his hand along the inside of the hollow. “In this canoe I will be tucked safely inside the craft. So will my belongings. Even if I capsize, I will not be harmed, for the boat will easily be righted. Look here.” He rapped on the trunk’s exterior. “This trunk is very hard on the outside, but the pith is light inside. The wood is so buoyant it cannot even sink. This is the best way to make the crossing, believe me.”

Rocha ran her small hand along the worked wood. “If you must make a canoe, Torr says, you should use bark. Bark canoes are easy to make. He showed me. You can use a single sheet of bark that you hold open with lumps of clay fore and aft, or else you sew it together from strips, and—”

“And you spend the whole journey bailing, and before you have got halfway across, you sink. Sister, I don’t have to sew my hull together, and it cannot rip; my canoe will not leak.”

“But Torr thinks—”

“Too many think,” he snapped. “Not enough do. I have finished the dates. Leave me now.” And he bent to his work, scraping assiduously at the wood.

But she did not leave. Instead she clambered nimbly into the boat’s rough interior. “If my words are of no use to you, brother, perhaps my hands will be. Give me a scraper.”

Surprised, he grinned at her, and handed her an adze.

After that the work progressed steadily. When the canoe was roughly shaped Ejan thinned out the walls from the inside, making enough room for two people and their gear. To dry and harden the wood, small fires were lit carefully inside and outside the canoe.

It was a great day when brother and sister first took the canoe out onto the river, Ejan in the prow, Rocha in the stern.

Rocha was still an inexperienced canoeist, and the cylindrical craft would capsize at the slightest opportunity. But it would right itself just as easily, and Rocha learned to extend her sense of her own body’s balance down through the canoe’s center line, so that she and Ejan were able to keep the canoe upright with small muscular counteractions. Soon — at least on the still waters of the river — they were able to keep the canoe balanced without thinking consciously about it, and with their paddles they were able to generate good speed.

After the trials on the river Ejan spent more days working on the canoe. In places the wood had cracked and split as it dried. He caulked the flaws with wax and clay, and he applied resin to the inner and outer surfaces to protect against further splits.

When that was done, he judged the craft was ready for its first ocean trial.

Rocha demanded that she be allowed to accompany him. But he was reluctant. Although she had learned fast, she was still young, unskilled, and not as strong as she would eventually become. In the end, of course, he respected her opinion. Young or not, her life was her own to spend as she wished. That was the way of hunter-gatherer folk like these, and always would be: Their culture of mutual reliance bred mutual respect.

At last, for the first time, the canoe slid out of the river’s broad mouth toward the open ocean. Ejan had loaded the canoe with boulders to simulate the cargo of food and water they would have to take with them for the real ocean crossing, which would likely be a journey of some days’ duration.

As they passed, fisher folk on rafts and canoes stood up and yelled, waving their harpoons and fishing nets, and children ran along the bank, screaming. Ejan flushed with pride.

At first everything went well. Even when they had emerged from the river’s mouth the water remained placid. Rocha gabbled excitedly about how easy the ocean was, how quickly they would make their crossing.

But Ejan was silent. He saw that the water around the canoe’s prow was stained faintly brown, littered with bits of leaf matter and other debris. They were still in the river’s outflow, where it pushed into the sea. If he tasted the water, probably it would be fresh. It was as if they had not yet left the river at all.

When they did hit the true ocean’s currents, as Ejan had feared, the water suddenly became much more turbulent, and sharp, malevolent waves scudded across its surface. The simple cylindrical canoe rolled, and Ejan was immersed in cold, salty water. With practiced coordination they threw their bodies sideways to right the boat, and they came up gasping and soaked. But almost immediately the canoe capsized again. As the rolling went on, the bindings of their dummy cargo broke, and Ejan glimpsed the boulders he had stowed falling away into the deeper water.

When at last the boat stabilized he saw that Rocha had been thrown out. She quickly came up, spluttering and gasping.

He knew that the experiment was over. He dumped out the rest of the rocks, briskly paddled the canoe to his sister and hauled her out, and they began to make their way back to the river’s mouth.

When they got back to their camp, their reception was subdued. Torr helped them berth the canoe, but he had little to say. Their mother was nowhere to be found. They had been close enough to the shore for their antics to be visible to everybody, painfully reminiscent of what had become of their brothers, Osa, Born and Iner.

Still Ejan was not put off. He knew that the crossing was possible in the canoe; it was just a question of skill and endurance — and he knew that determined as she was, poor Rocha did not yet have those qualities. If he was to reach the southern lands, he needed a stronger companion.

So he approached Torr.

Torr was working on a new canoe of his own, an elaborate construction of sewn bark. But he spent most of his time now gathering food and hunting. His back was bent from stooping over bushes and roots, and a great gash over his ribs, inflicted by a boar, was slow to heal.

Ejan thought his brother looked much older. In Torr he saw the solid, earthbound sense of responsibility that he took from the great-grandfather who had given him his name.

“Come with me,” Ejan said. “It will be a great adventure.”

“To attempt the crossing is not — necessary,” Torr said awkwardly. “There is much to do here. Things are difficult for us now, Ejan. There are so few of us. It is not as it was.” He forced a smile, but his eyes were flat. “Imagine the two of us out on the river in your magnificent canoe. How the girls will holler! And I pity any crocodile that breaks its teeth on our hull.”

“I did not build the canoe for the river,” Ejan said evenly. “I built it for the ocean. You know that. And to reach the southern land was the reason our brothers gave their lives.”

Torr’s face grew hard. “You think too much about our brothers. They are gone. Their souls are with Ja’an until they return in the hearts of new children. I have tried to help you, Ejan. I helped you bring back your log. I hoped all this work would clear your head of your troubled dreams. But now it has gotten to the point where you are prepared to let the ocean kill you, as it did our brothers.”

“I have no intention of being killed,” Ejan said, his anger burning deep.

“And Rocha?” Torr snapped. “Will you lead her to her death for the sake of your dream?”

Ejan shook his head, baffled. “If Osa were alive, he would come with me.” He slapped the sewn hull of Torr’s new canoe. “Two canoes are better than one. If this were Osa’s canoe, he would strap it to mine and we would sail side by side across the ocean, until—”

“Until you both drowned!” Torr cried. “I am not Osa. And this is not his canoe.” His anger and frustration were visible in his face now, Ejan saw, shocked — as was his fear. “Ejan, if we lose you—”

“Come with me,” Ejan said evenly. “Strap your canoe to mine. We will defeat the ocean together.”

Torr shook his head tightly, avoiding Ejan’s eyes.

Sadly Ejan prepared to take his leave.

“Wait,” said Torr softly. “I will not go with you. But you will take my canoe. It will ride alongside yours. My body will be here, digging roots.” He grinned now, wistfully. “But my soul will be with you, in the canoe.”

“Brother—”

“Just come back.”

The use of Torr’s canoe gave Ejan a new idea.

The second canoe, though it would be laden with food and other supplies, would not be manned. That meant it would not be as heavy as Ejan’s, and to lash the canoes together side by side would not be the best solution for stability.

After a little thought and much experimentation, Ejan attached Torr’s sturdy bark canoe to his own with two long crosspieces of wood. With this arrangement, the two canoes connected by an open framework of wood, it was almost as if he was building a kind of raft, founded on the canoes.

As his concept developed he became excited by the idea. Perhaps with this new way he could combine the best of the two designs. The rowers and their possessions would be tucked snugly inside the body of the dugout canoe, rather than being exposed on the surface of a raft, but the second canoe would give them the stability of a raft’s wide platform.

With Rocha he took the new arrangement out for trials, in the river and skirting the ocean shore. The double-hull design proved more difficult to maneuver than a single canoe, but it was far more stable. Though they progressed farther out into the ocean than the first time they had tried out the dugout, they didn’t capsize once. And because they didn’t have to work constantly to keep the craft upright as they had the simple dugout, the journey was much less tiring.

At last Ejan felt he was ready.

He tried one last time to dissuade Rocha from coming with him. But in Rocha’s eyes he saw a kind of hard restlessness, a rocky determination to meet this great challenge. Like Ejan’s, her name had been handed down from the past; perhaps somewhere in the line of Rochas before her there had been another great traveler.

They loaded up the canoes with provisions — dried meat and roots, water, shells and skins for bailing, weapons and tools, even a bundle of dry wood to make a fire. They were trying to be prepared. They had no idea what they would find on that green shore to the south, no idea at all.

As they set off this time, there was no sense of celebration. People turned away, attending to their chores. Even Torr was not there to see the double canoe sliding smoothly out of the estuary. Ejan could not help but feel oppressed by their disapproval, even as he felt the smooth rocking of his craft as it cut through the deepening water.

But this modest expedition was the start of a great adventure.

All over the peninsula, Ejan’s outrigger design was being derived independently. In some places the design evolved from double canoes, like Ejan’s, with the eventual outrigger float descending from a degenerate second canoe. In some, the design was more like an opened-up raft. Elsewhere people were experimenting with simple poles lashed across a canoe’s gunwales to improve its handling. Whatever its disparate origins, the outrigger design was a solution to the instability that before now had confined canoes to the rivers.

And in the generations to come the descendants of these folk in their outriggers would spread out across Australasia, the Indian Ocean, and Oceania. They would reach as far west as Madagascar off Africa’s coast, east across the Pacific to Easter Island, north to Taiwan off the Chinese coast, and as far south as New Zealand, taking their language and culture with them. It was an epic migration: Indeed, it would take tens of thousands of years.

But in the end the children of these riverine folk would travel around more than two hundred and sixty degrees of the Earth’s circumference.

Their smooth crossing of the strait to the new land was so easy as to be almost anticlimactic.

Ejan and Rocha followed an unknown coast. Eventually they reached a place where they could see a stream of what must be fresh water cutting out of the inland tangle of vegetation. They turned their craft to face the shore and paddled hard, until they felt the canoes’ prows grinding into the bed of the shallowing sea. They had landed on a strip of beach, fringed by dense, tangled forest.

Rocha cried, “Me first, me first!” She leapt out of the dugout — or tried to; after a couple of days at sea, her legs gave way under her, and she slipped and fell on her backside in the water, laughing.

It wasn’t a very dignified landing. Nobody made a speech or raised a flag. And there would be no monument here; in fact, in another thirty thousand years, this first landing site would be drowned by the rising sea. Nevertheless this was an extraordinary moment. For Rocha had become the first hominid ever to touch Australian soil, the first to set foot on the continent.

Ejan clambered out more carefully. Then, knee-deep in the warm, coastal water, they dragged their canoes until they were firmly grounded.

Rocha ran straight to the freshwater stream. She threw herself into it and rolled, sucking up great mouthfuls of it and scraping at her skin. “Ugh, the salt! I am caked in it.” With the exuberance of youth, she scrambled up the stream and into the fringe of forest, seeking fresh fruit.

Ejan took a tremendous drink of the cold, crisp water, and immersed his head for long heartbeats. Then, his legs trembling, he walked up the beach. He studied the jungle. He recognized mangroves, palms; it was much as it had been at home. He wondered how far this new island stretched. And he wondered if there were, after all, people here.

Rocha squealed softly. He hurried to her side.

Through the tangle of vegetation something was moving. It was massive, yet it moved all but silently. It had a terrible reptilian stillness about it that evoked deep primal fears in their hearts. And now it came slithering out of the undergrowth. It was a snake, Ejan saw immediately, but a snake of a size he had never seen before. It was at least a pace across, and seven or eight paces long. Brother and sister grabbed each other and hurried from the forest, back to the beach.

“Beasts,” Rocha whispered. “We have come to a land of mighty beasts.”

They stared into each other’s eyes, panting, sweating. And then they started to laugh, their fear transmuting into exhilaration.

They limped back to the canoe to retrieve their wood and make a fire, the first artificial fire this huge land had ever seen.

But not the last.

II Northwestern Australia. Circa 51,000 years before present.

On a spit of rock-strewn beach, Jana had been gathering mussels. He was naked save for a belt from which dangled the net sacks containing his haul. His skin was deep brown, and his curly hair was piled on top of his head. At twenty-one he was slim, strong, tall, and very healthy — save for one slightly withered leg, the relic of a childhood brush with polio.

Sweating, he looked up from his work. To the west the sun was making its daily descent into the ocean. If he shaded his eyes he could make out outriggers, and silhouettes made gaunt by the light off the sea: people, out on the water. The day was ending, and the bags at Jana’s waist were heavy.

Enough. He turned and made his slow way back along the spit. As he walked, he limped slightly.

All along the coast the people were returning home, attracted like moths to the threads of smoke that already climbed into the sky. People were crowded here, living in their dense little communities, feeding off the resources of the sea and the rivers.

It had already been some fifty generations since the first human footfalls in Australia. Ejan and Rocha had returned home, bringing news of what they had found, and more had followed. And their descendants, still largely keeping to their shore-based and riverine economy, had spread around the coast of greater Australia, and along the rivers into the crimson plains of the interior. But Ejan and Rocha had been the first. Still their spirits were handed down from generation to generation — Jana himself bore the name and housed the soul of Ejan himself — and still the story of their crossing, how they had flown over the water on a boat lined with gull feathers, and had battled giant snakes and other monsters on landing, was told by the shamans in the firelit dark.

Jana reached his home. His people lived in a cluster of lean-tos in the shelter of a heavily eroded sandstone bluff. The ground was crowded with the detritus of a seagoing folk: canoes, outriggers, and rafts had been hauled up on to the beach for the night, a dozen harpoons were stacked up against one another teepee-style, and nets, half-manufactured or half-repaired, lay heaped everywhere.

In the open space at the center of the settlement, a large communal fire had been built of eucalyptus logs. Smaller fires burned in the cobble-lined hearths of the huts. Cooking stones had been placed in the big fires, and men, women, and older children were busy scaling and gutting fish. Younger children ran everywhere, making trouble and noise as children always did, acting as a glue of good humor that bound everybody together.

But Jana couldn’t see Agema.

Clutching his string bags, he made his way to the largest of the lean-tos. Agema shared this shelter with her parents — second cousins to Jana’s own parents — and her wide brood of siblings. Jana took a breath at the darkened entrance to the hut, gathered his courage, and then stepped into the lean-to. Inside there was much activity and a rich mixture of scents, of wood smoke, cured meat, babies, milk, sweat.

Then he saw her. She was cleaning an infant, a tangle-haired little girl whose face was encrusted with snot.

Jana held up his net bag. The mussels within glistened. “I brought you these,” he said. Agema looked up, and her mouth twitched in a smile, but she averted her eyes. The kid was staring at him, wide-eyed. Jana said, “They’re the best, I think. Maybe we could—”

But now a foot shot out of the dark, catching his withered leg. It crumpled immediately, and he fell to the hard-trodden ground, spilling the mussels. He was surrounded by laughter. A strong hand grabbed his armpit and hauled him back to his feet.

“If you want to impress her you shouldn’t try to walk, not with a leg like that. You ought to hop like a kangaroo.”

Jana, his face burning, found himself staring into the deep, handsome eyes of Osu, Agema’s brother. More of her siblings surrounded him. Jana tried to control his anger. “You tripped me.”

When Osu made out the genuine anger in Jana’s eyes his face clouded. “I didn’t mean disrespect,” he said gently.

His decency only made it worse. Jana bent to pick up the mussels.

Osu said, “Here, let me help.”

Jana snapped, “I don’t need your help. They’re for—”

“Ah. For my sister?” Osu looked up at the girl, and Jana saw him wink.

Another of the brothers — Salo, impossibly tall, impossibly good-looking — stepped forward. “Look, fellow, if you want to impress her, this is what you ought to bring home.” And he showed Jana a mussel shell — a huge one, so big he needed two hands to hold it.

Jana had never seen a mussel of such a size, not in a lifetime of gathering the mollusks — in fact nobody alive had seen such a giant. “Where did you find this?”

Salo nodded vaguely. “Along the beach, in an old midden. I’m thinking of using it as a bowl.”

Osu nodded. “Giant mussels, eh? Ejan and Rocha must have eaten well in those days. All gone now, of course. Bring back one of those, little kangaroo, and Agema will open her legs faster than a mussel on the fire opens its shell.”

More laughter. Jana saw that Agema was hiding her face, but her shoulders were shaking. Again that uncontrollable anger surged, and Jana knew he had to get out of there before he behaved like a child by displaying his anger — or, even worse, by striking one of these infuriating brothers.

He gathered up his mussels and got out with as much dignity as he could muster. But even as he left he could hear Osu’s gently mocking voice: “I hear his dick is as bent as his leg.”

Jana got very little sleep that night. But, as he lay awake, he knew what he had to do.

He rose before dawn. He gathered up his ropes, fire-hardened spears, bow, arrows, and fire tools, and crept out of the encampment.

Following the bank of a river, he worked his way inland.

As Jana stepped silently across the dead matter of the forest floor, he disturbed a cluster of scurrying, rodentlike creatures. They were a kind of kangaroo. They peered at him with large, resentful eyes before fleeing. He barely noticed them as he pushed on.

Many of the trees in the sparse riverbank forest were eucalyptus, wreathed by strips of half-shed bark. These peculiar trees, like much of the flora, were distant descendants of Gondwanaland vegetation, stranded when this raft continent had broken away from the other southern lands. And through the river water, shaded by the trees, cruised more relics of ancient times. They were crocodiles, rafted here like the eucalyptus — but unlike the trees, and like their cousins elsewhere, they were barely changed by time.

He came to a clearing.

A family of four-legged creatures the size of rhinos was working its way across the clearing. They had small ears, stubby tails, and they walked on flat feet, like bears. They were making a mess of the forest floor: With their tusklike lower teeth, they scraped steadily at the ground, seeking the salt bushes they favored. These herbivorous marsupials were diprotodons — a kind of giant wombat.

There were many kinds of kangaroo here. Some of the smaller kinds searched for grass and low vegetation on the ground. But the larger ones were much taller than Jana; these giants had grown so tall so they could browse at the trees’ foliage. As they searched for food the kangaroos levered themselves forward using their forelegs, tails, and those powerful hind legs, a unique means of locomotion. They were slow and oddly graceful despite their size.

But now, from the forest on the far side of the clearing, there was a roar. The kangaroos, large and small, turned and fled, bouncing away with their extraordinary elastic leaps. The originator of the roar loped casually into the clearing. It looked like a lion, but it was not a close relation of any cat. It was a thylacoleo — another marsupial, like the diprotodons and the kangaroos — but this one was a carnivorous predator, molded into its leonine form by identical opportunities and roles. The catlike creature moved with silky stealth around the clearing, its cold eyes studying its prey.

Jana moved cautiously around the fringe of the clearing, eyeing the thylacoleo.

While in the rest of the world the placental mammals had become dominant, Australia had become a continent-sized laboratory of marsupial adaptation. There were carnivorous kangaroos that hunted in ferocious, high-bounding packs. There were strange creatures unlike any elsewhere: huge relatives of the platypus, giant tortoises the size of family cars, land-going crocodiles. And in the forests walked immense monitor lizards — related to the komodo dragons of Asia, but much larger — an eerie Cretaceous memory, one-ton carnivorous lizards big enough to take out a kangaroo, or a human.

Jana moved on, his thoughts far away.

Jana had known Agema all her life, as she had known him; here in this tight community everybody knew everybody else. But it was only in the last year, as she had passed seventeen, that he had become so attracted to her. Even now he could not have said what it was about her that had so enthralled him. She was not tall, not very shapely, with breasts that would always be small, hips and buttocks too wide, and her face was a wide moon of flesh with a small nose and downturned mouth. But there was about her a quietness, like the quiet of the sea when your canoe was far from land, a stillness masking depths and richness.

He had barely spoken to her of this. He had barely spoken to her at all, in fact, for a year, since becoming aware of her in this way.

What really hurt was that Osu and those other braying idiots were right to goad him, to point up his limping, his unsuitability as a husband for Agema. They were trying to protect their sister from a poor match. He knew that his damaged leg was no real impediment to his making a living, to his being able to help Agema raise the kids he wanted to share with her so badly, but what he had to do was convince her and her family of that.

And he was never going to do that by scraping mussels off rocks like a child. He was going to have to hunt, that was all. He was going to have to go out and bring home some big game — and he would have to do it alone, so he could prove to Agema and the rest that he was as strong, resourceful, and capable as any man.

The bulk of the people’s food came from hunting small creatures or just simple foraging, in the sea, the river, and the coastal strip of forest: straightforward, low-risk, unspectacular stuff. Hunting bigger prey was pretty much a male preserve, a risky game that gave men and boys the chance to show off their fitness, just as it always had. And this ancient game was what Jana was going to have to play now.

Of course he wasn’t foolish enough to take on anything too massive alone. The largest animals could be brought down only by a cooperative hunt. But there was one target that a solo hunter could bring home.

He kept walking, heading deeper into the forest.

At length he came to another clearing. And here he spotted what he wanted.

He had found a nest of roughly assembled foliage inside of which a dozen eggs had been carefully arranged. What made the nest extraordinary was its size — probably Jana himself could have laid down inside it — and some of those eggs were as big as Jana’s skull. Purga, if she could have seen this tremendous structure, might have believed that the dinosaurs had indeed returned.

Jana laid his trap with skill. He scouted around the clearing until he spotted the mother bird’s huge splay-footed tracks. He followed the tracks a little way into the forest. Then he strung ropes between the trees across the tracks, and he took his double-pointed spears and rammed them into the ground.

After that, it was time to set the fire.

It was quick work to gather bits of dry wood. To create a flame he used a tiny bow to rotate a stick of wood in a socket in a small log. He nursed the blaze with bits of kindling. When the fire had caught he thrust torches into the flames, and hurled them around the forest.

Everywhere the torches landed, flames blossomed like deadly flowers.

Birds rose with a shriek, fleeing the rising smoke, and ratty little kangaroos scurried at his feet, their eyes wide with alarm. By the time he had retreated to the clearing the flames were spreading, the separate pockets of fire joining up.

At last a huge bipedal form came screeching out of the forest. She bristled with dark feathers, her head held up on a long neck, and her muscular legs seemed to make the ground shake as she ran. She was a genyornis, a giant flightless bird twice the size of an emu. In fact she was one of the largest birds that would ever live. But she was terrified, Jana could see that: her eyes were wide; her startlingly small beak gaped.

And the bird’s great feet caught in his rope. She plummeted forward toward the ground. Her own momentum skewered her neatly on Jana’s spear. She did not die immediately. Trapped, the bloody spear protruding from her back, the genyornis flapped her feeble, useless wings. A deep part of her awareness experienced a kind of regret that her remote ancestors had given up the gift of the air. But now here was a capering, yelling hominid, and an ax that fell.

The flames were spreading. Jana was going to have to hurry his butchery and get out of here.

There had been fires in Australia before the arrival of humans, of course. They had come mostly in the monsoon season, when there were many lightning strikes. Some fire-resistant species of plants had developed in response. But they were not widespread or dominant.

But now things were changing. Everywhere they went the people burned, to encourage the growth of edible plants and to drive out game. The vegetation had already begun to adapt. Grasses, as hardy and prevalent as they were everywhere, were able to burn fiercely and yet survive. Candlebark eucalyptus trees had actually evolved to carry flame; bits of bark would break off and, borne by the wind, ignite new blazes tens of kilometers away. But for each winner there were many, many losers. The more fire-sensitive woody plants couldn’t compete in the new conditions. Cypress pines, which had once been prevalent, were becoming rare. Even some plants prized by the people as food sources, like some fruiting shrubs, were extinguished. And as their habitats were scorched, animal communities imploded.

From Ejan’s original pinprick landing site, people were diffusing out, generation by generation, along the coasts and river courses. It was as if a great wave of fire and smoke were spreading out from Australia’s northwestern fringe, working across the interior of this vast red land. And before this front of destruction, the old life succumbed. The loss of the giant mussels had been just the first of the extinctions.

As Jana left the forest the fire still blazed, spreading rapidly, and great pillars of smoke towered into the sky. Uninterested, he did not turn back.

He could not carry the whole bird home, of course. But then, bringing back food wasn’t really the point. And when Jana walked into his camp with the genyornis’s head mounted on a spear, he was gratified by the slaps of approval from Osu and the others — and by the shy acceptance of his gifts by Agema.

III New South Wales, Australia. Circa 47,000 years before present.

The bark canoe sat motionless on the lake’s murky water.

Jo’on and his wife, Leda, were fishing. Jo’on was standing up, holding his spear ready for the fish. The spear was tipped with wallaby bone, ground sharp and set in gum resin. Leda had made her line from pounded bark fiber, and had fitted it with a hook made from a bit of shell. But the hooks were brittle, the line weak, so Leda’s intention was to lead in a hooked fish as gently as possible, while Jo’on stood ready to spear it.

Jo’on was forty years old. He was scrawny, but his wrinkled face was good-humored, though lined by a lifetime of hard work. And he was proud of his boat.

The canoe had been made by cutting a long oval of bark from a eucalyptus and tying up its ends to make bow and stern. The gunwale was reinforced with a stick sewn on with vegetable fiber, and shorter sticks served as spreaders. The cracks and seams were caulked with clay and gum resin. The canoe was unstable, though; low in the water it flexed with every ripple and leaked enthusiastically. But, leaky or not, with a little skill you could handle this canoe even in rough water. And if it was crudely finished, its main beauty was its simplicity; Jo’on had knocked it together in a day.

Jo’on’s ancestors, starting with Ejan’s very first landing, had walked right across Australia, from the northwest to this southeast corner, right across the continent’s arid center. But they had never lost the knack for building a fine boat. Jo’on’s canoe even had a fire, burning on a slab of wet clay sitting on the bottom, so they could cook the crayfish they caught.

Or could have, if they had caught any.

Jo’on didn’t really care. He could have stood here in the seductive silence of his boat all day, whether the fish came to see him or not. Even the crocodiles that slid past, eyes glinting, failed to disturb his equilibrium. It was better than being back in the camp by the shore, where kids ran everywhere, men boasted, and women ground roots. Not to mention the yapping dingoes. In his opinion those half-wild dogs were more of a nuisance than they were worth, even if they did sometimes help flush out game.

Leda’s patience snapped. With a snort of disgust she hurled her line into the water. “Stupid fish.”

Jo’on sat down before her. “Now, Leda. The fish are just shy today. You shouldn’t have thrown away your line. We’ll have to—”

“And stupid, useless, leaking boat!” She kicked at the puddle of river water that lay in the flexing bottom of the boat, splashing him.

He sighed, fetched a bowl of carved wood, and began to bail. He kept his counsel, hoping to let her calm down.

Fish entrails were piled on Leda’s head, slowly frying in the sun and leaking foul-smelling oil over her body and head. The oil kept away the mosquitoes that plagued the lake at this time of year. Her small nose was screwed up, her mouth a pucker. Only a year younger than Jo’on, as she aged she had become a heavy, nervous woman, quick to anger.

She had never looked uglier, he thought. And yet he knew he would never leave her. He remembered as if it were yesterday the day he had had to take her youngest child off her — he had smashed its head with a rock, then thrown its body on the fire — and the day only a few moons later when he had been forced to induce an abortion, thumping her belly until the child came out to see the world too early.

She had understood why he had had to take the children away. The people had been on the march, and she was already laden with a barely weaned toddler. She could not have afforded to bear another child. She had known all that. She had not even formed close bonds with either of her lost children; they had been taken too early for that. Yet those incidents had shaped her personality, set its pattern forever like the cracked mud of a dried-up lake bed. And, for the pain she suffered, she blamed Jo’on.

“We have to do better than this,” she snapped now.

“Umm.” He stroked his chin. “A thicker line? Or maybe—”

“I’m not talking about thicker lines, you crocodile turd. Look at this.” She held up his spear with its bits of glued-on bone. “You are a fool. You fish with bits of bone, while Alli uses a harpoon pronged with flint. No wonder his children are growing fat.”

He closed his eyes, suppressing another sigh. Alli, Alli, Alli: some days all he seemed to hear was the name of her older brother, so much smarter than Jo’on, not to mention better-looking, who lived life so expertly. “Shame you couldn’t have your kids by him,” he muttered.

She snapped like a dingo. “What did you say?”

“Never mind. Leda, be reasonable. We don’t have any flint left.”

“Then get some. Go to the coast and trade.”

He restrained an impulse to argue. After all, stripped of the insults, her suggestion wasn’t a bad one; the hundred-kilometer route to the sea was well trodden. “All right. I’ll ask Alli to come with me—”

“No,” she said, and now she looked away.

He frowned. “Why not? You spoke to your brother yesterday, before the dancing. What did you say to him?”

Her mouth pinched tighter. “We had words.”

“Words. What about?” Now he was growing irritated. “About me? Have you been insulting me before your brother again?”

“Yes,” she hissed now. “Yes, if you must know. So if you don’t want to look like a foolish boy in front of everybody you should keep away from him. Go yourself.”

“But such a journey…”

“Go yourself.” She grabbed a paddle from the bottom of the canoe. “Now we’re going back.”

He had no choice, in the end, but to prepare for a solitary walk to the coast. But before he left he found out the truth. When Leda spoke to Alli, she hadn’t been attacking Jo’on, but defending him against her brother’s mockery. He didn’t say anything to Leda before he left, but he kept that little bit of warm truth close to his heart.

When he set off a couple of the dingoes followed him out of the encampment. He threw rocks at them until they backed off, snarling.

Away from the lake, he walked into silence. The ground was flat and red, littered with ghost-white spinifex grass. Nothing moved save his own puddle of shadow at his feet. There were no people, not as far as he could see, all the way to the horizon.

Australia would always be a marginal place to live. After five thousand years of human habitation there were less than three hundred thousand people in the whole continent — only one person for every twenty-five square kilometers — and most of them were concentrated around the coasts, the riverbanks, and lakes. And in the great red heart of the continent, the vast, ancient limestone plain and saltbush desert, less than twenty thousand people lived.

But humans, though sparse, had covered Australia in a thin web of their culture, in middens and hearths and shells, in images scrawled in the crimson rocks. And Jo’on had the confidence, even alone, even aged a creaky forty, to walk out naked into the red dust, armed only with his spear and woomera. He was confident because his family’s knowledge was soaked into the landscape.

He was following the coiled trail of the ancestral snake: the first snake of all, which, it was said, had greeted Ejan on his first landing in his boat from the west. And every centimeter of the trail was laden with story, which he chanted to himself as he walked. The story was a codification of the people’s knowledge of the land: It was a map story, very specific and complete.

The most important details concerned water sources. There was a tale attached to every category of waterhole and a variety of rock clefts and cisterns, hollow trees and dew traps. The first source he stopped at, in fact, was a slow seepage. Its particular story was of how in days gone by you would often see huge kangaroos gathered here, fascinated by the water and so easy to kill. But now the kangaroos were gone, leaving only the battered remnant of a eucalyptus as guardian of the water.

And so on. To Jo’on the land was as crammed with vivid detail as if it had been painted over with signposts and arrows — even though he had walked this way only once before in his life.

Such tales were the beginning of the Dreamtime. The tales would last as long as Jo’on’s descendants kept their independent culture alive, mutating, growing steadily more elaborate — and yet always retaining a core of truth. It would always be possible to use the story of the ancestral snake to find water and food.

And no matter how far the people wandered, how deep into time they sank, it would always be possible to trace the Dreamtime trails back across the landscape, back to the northwest, to the place where Ejan and his sister had made their first footfalls.

Still, for all this oral wisdom, Jo’on could not know that this land was emptier, far emptier, than when his remote ancestor had first arrived here.

After a day’s walking he reached a patch of forest, as he knew he would. Here he intended to do some hunting, to round out his store of trade goods with meat, before passing on to the coast. He moved silently into the forest.

He quickly found a treat: wild honey, retrieved from a hive hanging from a gum tree. As he dismantled the hive a blacksnake approached him, but he was able to grab its tail and crack it like a whip, easily smashing its head on a branch.

His greatest triumph that evening was spotting a goanna — a varanid lizard a couple of paces long. On seeing him the goanna took fright and hid in a hollowed-out log. But Jo’on had patience. As soon as the goanna had spotted him, he froze in midstride. Then he stood unblinking, as the sun sank further into the west, and the soil glowed still more brightly crimson. He saw the goanna’s flickering tongue probing cautiously out of the log. Everybody knew goannas liked to taste the air to see if predators or prey were nearby. Still Jo’on stood still as a lump of rock; there was no wind, and his scent would not carry to the goanna.

At last, as he knew it would, the goanna’s slow, patient brain forgot Jo’on was there. It scuttled out of the cover of its log. His spear got it in a single strike, pinning it to the ground.

At the foot of a eucalyptus, Jo’on made a fire with a rubbing stick. He briskly skinned and gutted the goanna, softened its flesh in the fire, and enjoyed a rich meal. Above him the sparks from the fire rose up into the towering dark.

When he woke in the dawn, the fire had subsided, but it was still alight. He yawned, stretched, voided briskly, and munched down a little more of the goanna.

Then he made a torch of dead wood, lit it in his hearth, and began to walk through the forest, setting fires. He looked especially for hollow trees that would burn well, and set alight the detritus at their roots.

After all this time the basic strategy of the forest hunters had not changed: to use fire to flush out game.

The smoke soon forced out possums, lizards, and marsupial rats from inside the trunks. They were small creatures all, but he managed to club some of them, and added their little corpses to the pile he accumulated close to his original hearth. But to impress the fisher folk by the sea he needed larger game than this. So he began to roam wider through the forest, setting alight more trees and undergrowth.

Gradually the flames spread and merged, self-organizing, feeding on each other’s energy, generating draughts and winds that fed back to intensify the fires further. Soon the separate blazes were merging into a bushfire, a writhing wall of flame that moved forward faster than a human could run.

But Jo’on, by that time, was safely out of the forest. And as the treetops exploded into flame as if they were made of magnesium, he stood ready with his spear-thrower.

At last the animals started to rush out of the blazing forest pocket. There were kangaroos, possums, lizards, and many marsupial rats, all terrified. They ran in all directions. Some, blinded and bewildered, came dashing straight toward Jo’on. He ignored the small, fast-moving creatures. But here came two large animals, a pair of red kangaroos bounding with extraordinary speed toward him. He took his spear, lodged it in his grandfather’s spear-thrower. He waited; he would get only one chance.

At the last moment the kangaroos saw him and veered away. His spear sailed uselessly into the smoky air.

Yelling his frustration he ran to retrieve his weapon. Cursing Leda’s stubbornness and his own foolishness, he set his spear in the thrower and settled down to wait once more. But he knew that his best chance was already gone. He would have to make do with his pitiful pile of possums and lizards, because there were no large animals left to kill.

The goanna Jo’on had trapped was a relative of the giant lizard carnivores that had once stalked the red center of the continent. This hapless wretch had been a fraction of the size of those immense ancestors; the giants had all gone, hunted and burned to extinction. The red kangaroos he had tried to trap were similarly diminished echoes of mighty lineages. All the big ones had been killed off. Those that survived now were the small, fast-moving, fast-breeding creatures able to outrun fires and the hunters’ spears.

Since Ejan’s arrival, fifty-five species of large backboned animals had gone into the dark. Across the continent, in fact, every creature larger than a human had disappeared.

Eventually Jo’on reached the sea. He had come to the eastern coast of Australia, not far from the place that would one day be called Sydney. The light here, so much brighter than inland, dazzled his eyes, the stinks of salt and seaweed and fish overpowered his nose, and the restless grumbling of the sea filled his ears. After his trek across the dusty red center he wasn’t accustomed to so much sensory clamor.

As he descended to the shore he made out people working the sea, in canoes and on rafts. In the bright light off the sea, they were slender upright figures working with their lines and nets and spears. These people stuck to the coast, and their main food resource was fish, which was why they were open to trading for meat from the interior.

Jo’on approached the people, his hands empty save for his bits of meat, yelling greetings in his few words of the local language.

The first locals he met were women with nursing infants. They were methodically eating their way through a pile of oysters. They watched him incuriously. As he walked toward them he found himself crunching over oyster shells, all broken open, a layer that grew thicker as he approached the women. Eventually, he saw with amazement, he was walking on top of a midden of shells taller than he was, the deposit of centuries of uninterrupted gathering. The midden was outside one of the scores of sandstone caves that lined the shores of this harbor. Some of the cave entrances were covered by crude sheets of woven bark. In the shade of the nearest cave, children played with heaps of ancient shells.

The women showed little interest in him. He walked on.

At last an elderly woman came limping out of one of the caves. Her hair was gray, and her naked skin hung on her like an empty sack. She said something incomprehensible, glanced at his wares dismissively, and beckoned him into the cave.

The floor was littered with flint chips, middens of shells, bone points, and charcoal. Where his feet disturbed this detritus he saw deeper layers of garbage beneath — even human turds, dried up and without odor. Like his own people, these fisher folk were not enthusiastic about tidying up their garbage, and would just walk away when a camp became unlivable, trusting in the invisible forces of nature to take care of the mess for them.

But he could see a great pile of flints piled up at the rear of this cave, an enviable treasure. It was said that there were caves on another coast to the south where you could just pry such flints out of the wall. But people of the interior like Jo’on understood little of the provenance of the valuable stones, and had to trade with those who did.

The fisher folk were hospitable enough, in the interest of future relations. They gave him food and water. In their mutually incomprehensible languages, they tried to talk over what he had seen on his journey, what new features of the land he had noticed. But they were not eager to trade. They took his ocher and what poor scraps of meat he had. But it was clear that this was valued at only a handful of flints. Better than nothing, he thought gloomily.

The fisher folk let him stay the night.

He lay down on a pallet of dried seaweed. It stank of salt and decay. He found himself peering by the dying firelight at paintings on the roof, pictures in charcoal, ocher, and a purplish dye that, it turned out, came from a sea creature. There were vivid images of wombats, kangaroos, and emus; the people shown hunting them loomed over the fleeing animals.

But — he peered more closely to see better — these pictures were laid over still stranger images: Giant birds, lizards, even kangaroos towered over the humans who hunted them. These images must be older than those he had first made out, he thought, because they lay underneath. But he was confused about what they showed. He supposed they meant nothing. Perhaps they had been drawn by a child.

He was wrong, of course. It was a peculiar tragedy that Jo’on’s generation had already forgotten what had been lost.

Jo’on lay down and closed his eyes, settling himself to ignore the noisy lovemaking of a couple in the corner, and waited for sleep. He wondered what Leda was going to say to him when he returned home with just a handful of flints. Meanwhile, over his head, the ancient, vanished birds, the giant kangaroos and snakes and diprotodons and goannas, all danced mournfully in the firelight.

I

Hiding the carved mammoth in her fist, Jahna approached the bonehead girl.

The sullen creature looked up at Jahna, baffled, dimly frightened. She sat in the frosty dirt, filthy, ragged, doing nothing.

Jahna sat on her ankles and peered straight into the creature’s eyes. They were dark globes hidden under the great bony browridge that gave her kind their name. Jahna was twelve years old — and so, as it happened, was this bonehead cow. But the similarities ended there. Where Jahna was tall, blond, slender, and supple as a young spruce, the bonehead was short and squat and fat — strong, yes, but as round and ugly as a boulder. And where Jahna wore close-fitting clothes of stitched leather and plant fiber, with straw-stuffed moccasins, a fur-lined hood and woven cap, the bonehead cow wore simple wraps of filthy, well-worn leather, tied on with bits of sinew.

“Look, bonehead,” Jahna said now, raising her fist. “Look. Mammoth!” And she opened her fingers to reveal the little trinket.

The bonehead squealed and stumbled back, making Jahna laugh. You could almost see the cow’s slow mind working. The boneheads just couldn’t hold it in their heads that a bit of ivory could look like a mammoth; to them an object could only be one thing at a time. They were stupid.

Now Millo came running up. Jahna’s brother, eight years old, was a little bundle of energy and noise, wrapped up in an ill-fitting sealskin coverall. On his feet he wore the skins of gulls turned inside out, so that their feathers kept his feet warm. Seeing what she was doing he grabbed the mammoth out of Jahna’s hand. “Me, me! Look, bonehead. Look! Mammoth!” He jabbed the little carving at the bonehead cow’s face.

Piss trickled down the cow’s legs, and Millo squealed with delight.

“Jahna, Millo!” Both of them turned. Here came their father, Rood, tall and strong, arms bare despite the chill of this early spring day. Wearing his well-loved boots of mammoth skin, he was striding strongly. He looked exhilarated, excited.

Responding to his mood the youngsters forgot their game and ran to him. While Millo hugged his legs as he always did, Rood bent to embrace them. Jahna could smell smoked fish on his breath. He greeted them formally, according to their names. “My daughter, my mother. My son, my grandfather.” Then he reached around Millo’s waist and efficiently tickled his son; the boy squealed and writhed away. “Last night I dreamed of seals and narwhal,” Rood said now. “I talked to the shaman, and the shaman cast his bones.” He nodded. “My dream is good; my dream is the truth. We will go to the sea and hunt for fish and seals.”

Millo jumped up and down, excited. “I want to ride the sled!”

Rood peered into Jahna’s face, searching. “And you, Jahna? Will you come?”

Jahna pulled back from her father’s embrace, thinking carefully.

Her father had not been flattering her in asking her approval. In this community of hunters, children were treated with respect from birth. Jahna bore the name, and hence the soul, of Rood’s own mother, and so her wisdom lived on in Jahna. Similarly little Millo bore the soul of Rood’s grandfather. People were not immortal — but their souls were, and their knowledge. (Jahna’s name, of course, was doubly special. For it was the name not just of Jahna’s grandmother but of her grandmother before her: It was a name that had roots thirty thousand years deep.) And besides the business of the names, how were children to grow into adults if they were not treated as adults? So Rood waited patiently. Jahna’s judgment might not prevail, of course, but her reasoning would be listened to and tested.

She glanced at the sky, assessing the wind, the thin scattering of clouds; she probed at the frozen ground with her toe, estimating if it was likely to thaw significantly today. She had an odd sense of unease, in fact. But her father’s enthusiasm was overwhelming, and she pushed down the particle of doubt.

“It is wise,” she said seriously. “We will go to the sea.”

Millo whooped and jumped on his father’s back. “The sled! The sled!” Together the three of them headed back toward the village.

Throughout the exchange they had all ignored the bonehead cow, who lay huddled and quaking in the dirt, urine leaking down her legs.

At the village, the preparations for the hunt were already under way.

Unlike the boneheads’ ugly shantytown, the village was an orderly grid of dome-shaped huts. Each hut had been erected over a frame of spruce saplings, brought from the forests to the south. Skin and tundra sod had been piled over the frame, and a doorway, windows, and chimney hole cut into the walls. The floors of the huts were paved, after a fashion, with riverbed cobbles. Even some of the open areas between the huts had been paved, to save the people from sinking into the mud of the fragile tundra loam.

Each hut was layered over with huge bones from mammoth or megaloceros antlers. These carapaces were there to help the huts endure the savage winds of winter and to obtain the animals’ protection: The animals knew that human beings took their lives only when they had to, and in return they lent their great strength to the people’s shelters.

Around these huts of bone, there was a hum of activity and anticipation.

One tall hunter — Jahna’s aunt, Olith — was using a fine bone needle to repair her deerskin trousers. Others, in a small open area used as a workshop, were making nets and baskets and barbed harpoons of bone and ivory, and weavers were using looms to make cloth of vegetable fiber. Much of the clothing the people wore was made of animal skin for warmth and durability, but there were luxury items of woven cloth — skirts, bandeaus, snoods, sashes, and belts. This expertise in cordage dated back many tens of thousands of years, fueled by the need to find an alternative to animal sinew to strap together rafts and canoes.

Everybody wore decoration, pendants, necklaces, beads sewn into their clothing. And every surface, every tool of bone or wood or stone or ivory, was adorned with images of people, birds, plants, and animals: there were lions, woolly rhinos, mammoth, reindeer, horses, wild cattle, bears, ibexes, a leopard, even an owl. The images were not naturalistic — the animals leapt and pranced, their legs and heads sometimes a blur of movement — but they contained many precise details, captured by people who over generations had grown to know the animals on which they depended as intimately as they knew one another.

Everything so shaped was loaded with significance, for each element was part of the endless story by which the people understood themselves and the world they lived in. There was nothing with only one meaning, one purpose; the ubiquitous art was a testimony to the new integration of people’s minds.

But even now ghosts of the old compartmentalism lingered, as they always would. An old man struggled to explain to a girl how she should use her flint blade to carve her bit of mammoth ivory just so. In the end it was easier for him to take the tool from her and just show her, letting his body’s half-independent actions demonstrate themselves.

These people, as they went about their tasks, looked remarkably healthy: tall, long-limbed, confident, keen-faced, their skin clear and unlined. But there were very few children here.

Jahna passed the shaman’s hut. The big, scary man was nowhere to be seen. He was probably sleeping off the exertions of last night, when once more he had danced and chanted his way into the trance world. Outside his hut was scattered a handful of broken shoulder blades, from deer and horses. Some of them had been mounted on slotted sticks and held in a fire. Even at a glance Jahna could read the fortunes told in their patterns of scorching; today would indeed be a good day for hunting by the water.

Though their language abilities were hugely advanced, the people were reaching out to distant and unknowable gods. And so they fell back on older instincts. As Pebble had once known, communication in a situation where you had no or limited language had to be simple, exaggerated, repetitious, unequivocal — that is, ritualistic. And, as Pebble had once tried to convince his father he spoke the truth about approaching strangers, so the shaman now labored to make his indifferent gods hear, understand, and respond. It was hard work. Nobody resented him sleeping late.

Millo and Jahna reached the hut they shared with their father, mother, infant sister, and aunts. Mesni, their mother, was here in the gloom. She was smoking megaloceros meat, scavenged from a lion kill a few days earlier.

“Mesni, Mesni!” Millo ran to his mother and grabbed her legs. “We’re going to the sea! Are you coming?”

Millo hugged her son. “Not today,” she said, smiling. “Today it’s my turn to fix the meat. Your poor, poor mother. Don’t you feel sorry for her?”

“Bye,” Millo snapped, and he turned tail and ran out of the hut.

Mesni humphed, pulling a pretend-offended face, and continued patiently working.

Most of the megaloceros carcass had been stored in a pit dug into the permafrost. Mesni used a stone knife to slice the meat paper-thin, then hung it up on a wooden frame beside the hearth. In a few days’ time the slices would be perfectly preserved; they were a source of protein that could be stored for many months. But Jahna’s nose wrinkled at the smell of the meat. Only in the last month had the spring opened up enough to enable them to hunt and forage and to bring home fresh meat; before that, they had all endured a long winter consuming the dried remnants of last season, and Jahna had grown thoroughly sick of the leathery, tasteless stuff.

She stroked her mother’s back. “Don’t worry. I will stay with you and smoke meat all day while Millo rides the sled.”

“I’m sure you would love that. You’ve done your duty by offering. Here.” Mesni gave Jahna a bundle of meat wrapped in skin. “Don’t let your father starve his wretched bonehead runners. You know what he’s like. And I wouldn’t trust him with these.” She gave Jahna a handful of dried eulachon.

These were sardinelike fish, so rich in fat you could stand them on end and burn them like a candle. More parochially you could boil out the grease to use as a sauce, medicine, and even mosquito repellent — or in a pinch you could just eat the fish; the fatty flesh would sustain you for a long time. These precious items were an emergency kit.

Jahna took the fish solemnly and tucked them into a fold of her jerkin. It was quite a responsibility she had been given — but the soul of her grandmother, riding in her heart, gave her the confidence to accept that responsibility. She kissed her mother. “I’ll look after everybody,” she promised.

“I know. Now go help get ready. Go on.”

Jahna grabbed her favorite harpoon and followed Millo out of the hut.

The hunting party briskly loaded up the sled with nets, harpoons, lines, sleeping bags made of reindeer hide, and other provisions. The sled was a sturdy affair, already ten years old, a wooden frame mounted on long runners of mammoth ivory. The lashing and lines were made from tough sealskin, and the reins that would control the bonehead haulers were made of mammoth leather. The sled was useful only in the early spring or late autumn, when the ground was frozen or snow-covered; in the late spring and summer, the ground grew too boggy for the sled’s runners. Still, in a world where the wheel had yet to be invented and the horse yet to be tamed, this sled of wood and ivory was the height of transportation technology.

Meanwhile, Rood had stalked into the boneheads’ camp, looking for haulers.

The camp was a shanty on the edge of the human village. The huts and shacks were as squat and misshapen as the boneheads themselves. They just sat on the tundra like huge turds, with adults and grotesque kids lumbering everywhere. In places like this, wherever they survived across the Old World, the robust boneheads made their simple tools and built their ugly huts — just as they had for half a million years, all the way back to the time of Pebble and long before. Unlike the cultural explosion of the humans, there had been no significant variation in the boneheads’ industry across huge swaths of space and time.

With a tap of his whip handle Rood selected two powerful-looking young bucks. Passively the bucks followed him, and allowed themselves to be harnessed to the sled.

All too soon the sled was loaded. It took only a touch from Rood’s whip to encourage the boneheads to begin their hauling. The first heave, to free the sled’s runners from the hard earth, took some effort. Boneheads were bandy-legged and clumsy, their frames built for strength, not speed. But soon the two bucks had the sled hissing along at a little over walking pace. The hunters followed with whoops and hollering.

To the eerie wail of their bone flutes, the party crossed kilometer after kilometer of tundra. Rood sat on top of the bundles piled up on the sled, his whip of cured hide ready for the boneheads’ backs. Millo sat up beside his father, hair streaming.

This was northern France. The hunting party, traveling southwest toward the Atlantic coast, would pass close to the eventual site of Paris. But the tree line — the latitude at which trees could grow tall — ran mostly many kilometers south of here. And not so far north of here lay the edge of the ice cap itself. Sometimes you could hear the wind howling off the ice, cold air that had spilled off the pole itself, a heavy, restless, relentless wind that had scoured clean a great chill desert at the feet of the glaciers.

The land was a patchwork of white and blue, with splashes of premature green. The sled’s runners hissed as they ran over trees: they were dwarf willows and birches, flattened forests that clung to the ground, hiding from the wind. It was a shallow land, a skim of life-bearing soil over a deeper layer of permafrost. It was dotted with lakes, most of them still frozen, glimmering blue with the deeper ice that would not melt all summer. The ponds and lakes and marshes of summer were actually little more than transient lenses of meltwater pooled over the permafrost.

But spring was coming. In places the grass was growing already, and ground squirrel ran and foraged busily.

The tundra was a surprisingly productive place. The plants included many species of grass, sedges, small shrubs, and herbaceous plants like types of pea, daisy, and buttercup. The plants grew quickly and abundantly, whenever they could. And the various plants’ short growing seasons did not overlap, so that for the animals that thrived here there was a long period of good feeding each year.

This complex, variegated mosaic of vegetation supported a huge population of herbivores. In eastern Europe and Asia there were hippos, wild sheep, and goat, red, roe, and fallow deer, boar, asses, wolves, hyenas, and jackals. In the west, here in Europe, there were rhinos, bison, boar, sheep, cattle, horses, reindeer, ibex, red and roe deer, antelope, musk oxen — and many, many carnivores, including cave bears and lions, hyenas, arctic fox, and wolves.

And — as Jahna saw, in the far south, as they worked across the snow-littered ground — mammoths.

There was a great herd of them — walking ponderously, in no hurry — a wall of bodies that stretched from one horizon to the other. They were not true migrants, but had spent the winter sheltering in valleys to the south, where immense herds would gather, channeled by geography. Their hair was a deep black-brown, but as they walked the curtains of guard hairs that hung from their trunks and flanks flowed and waved, shining golden in the low spring sunlight. They looked like boulders, bulky fur-covered boulders. But occasionally one would lift her head, and there would be a flash of trunk or curling tusk, and a thrilling, unmistakable trumpet. The woolly mammoths had become the most successful of all the ancient elephant lineages. They could be found throughout the great tundra belt that wrapped right around the planet’s pole, making a giant herd that outnumbered by far any other proboscidean species that had ever lived.

On these great open lands, where such huge prey walked across open ground, the hunting was as easy for humans as it would ever be, in all their history. But already times were changing; soon the ice would begin its retreat once more. And already, whether they realized it or not, people had started to reshape the life and the land, just as in Australia.

They were thinly scattered, and life seemed hard. But in a sense humans had already reached the peak of their fortunes.

As they traveled the hunters pointed out the features of the land to each other, every bluff and ridge, every river and lake. Everything was named, even features off in the far distance, and everybody was listened to with respect as they shared and confirmed their knowledge. In this marginal land accurate information was at a premium; to know the land was to prosper, not to know it meant starvation, and experts were a lot more valuable than bosses.

They told stories, too, about the animals they glimpsed — how they lived, what they thought, what they believed. Anthropomorphism, attributing to animals personalities and characters, was a powerful tool for a hunter. A mammoth or a bird did not think about its foraging and movement in the same way as a human would, of course, but imagining that it did could be an excellent predictor of the animal’s behavior.

So, as they traveled, they talked, and talked, and talked.

This land was Jahna’s home, as it was Rood’s, and his mother, Jahna’s, before him. Her people owned it — but not as property that could be disposed of; they owned it as they owned their own bodies. Jahna’s ancestors had always lived here, back through the generations, into the unending mists of time, when, so it was said, humans had sprung into existence from fire and trickery. Jahna could imagine living no place else.

At the precise midpoint of the journey, the party stopped.

Snow had drifted in the shelter of a sandstone bluff. Rood briskly cleared the snow with sweeps of his arms, and he dug out a large slice of narwhal skin, with subcutaneous fat still clinging to it. The meat had been there since last autumn, and much of it had been devoured by passing foxes, gulls, and ravens. But Rood cut off chunks with a fine stone knife, and soon they were all chewing. The tough, partially decomposed meat was a luxury. It had a name of its own, meaning something like meat-of-dead. It had been left here as an emergency cache in case a traveling party should find itself stranded.

The two bonehead bucks, panting, their hips and clumsy knees obviously aching, were allowed to rest awhile, chewing on bits of meat.

The hunters began to talk of the shaman’s prophecies. Little Millo piped up. “I had a dream. I dreamed I was a big gull. I dreamed I fell in the sea. It was cold. A big fish came and ate me. It was dark. And then, and then—”

The hunters listened gravely, nodding.

Dreams were important. Each day the people faced decisions about what kind of gathering or hunting to attempt, what kind of animals to pursue, how the weather might behave. It was essential to make the correct call; a run of bad guesses could quickly starve your family. But their heads were crammed full of specific knowledge, about the land, the seasons, the plants, the behavior of animals, acquired over a lifetime and distilled from the experience of generations. On top of that there was a mass of daily data to absorb, on weather, animal marks. All this voluminous, tentative, fast-changing data had to be processed to support rapid, firm decision making.

The hunters’ thinking was as a result much more intuitive than systematic and deductive. Dreams, in which the unconscious mind had a chance to sort and explore all the data available to it, were an essential part of that processing. And with their chants and dances, trances and rituals, the shamans were the most intense dreamers of all.

The convergence of the shaman’s visions and fortune-telling and the dreams of Rood and Millo was reassuring, a valid piece of information to guide the hunters. It showed that their deep intuition about the nature of the world was in accord.

Still, Jahna thought, Rood looked troubled. As he kicked the boneheads to their feet she approached him. “Father? Your face is long.”

He glanced down at her, frowning. “It was just that dream of Millo’s. The water, the cold, the dark. Yes, it may be that he dreamed of hunting in the sea, of catching fish. But…” He raised his head, sniffing the air. “Millo’s nose is smarter than yours or mine, daughter. Perhaps he smells something we don’t. But we are committed. Let us go and raid the sea.”

With a smart slap on the buttocks of one of the buck boneheads, he launched the sled off across the frozen ground once more. Millo, perched on a pile of sleeping bags, squealed with joy.

When they reached the coast, Rood released the two boneheads and let them forage on the cold ground. They wouldn’t have the energy to run off, or even the wit to imagine escape.

The ocean was frozen.

At this time of year only the coastal fringe was completely free of pack ice. But the ice was broken by leads, huge open channels of black water that radiated out from the tip of a headland. The hunters knew the leads formed in this place every year because of the shape of the coast — and that was why they had come here.

Eagerly, the hunters clambered on to the sea ice. Their bone harpoons in their mittened hands, Jahna and Millo hurried ahead of the others, hoping to be the first to get to the seals.

Jahna found herself surrounded by miniature mountain ranges, hillocks of ice pushing four or five meters into the air. Wisps of ice crystals blew languidly, and gulls wheeled, seeking fish. As the sea swelled impatiently, its skin of ice groaned and cracked; the air was full of sharp noise. But the ice was rough: autumn storms and the tides around the headland had piled up heaps of huge fractured slabs.

Rood and a number of the others had gathered around the open water, and were calling excitedly. A narwhal had come up to breathe, and perhaps the hunters would make a spectacular kill.

But Millo, cawing like a gull, hurried ahead through the maze of ice. Jahna scampered after him. They came to a place where the water was crusted over by grayish new ice. But the ice was broken by circular holes, a pace or two across.

Millo and Jahna came to a hole and peered into it. In the chill waters, life teemed. Jahna could not make out the tiny plankton that crowded the waters, but she could see the tiny fish and shrimplike creatures that fed on them. In these cold, dry, windy times, dust eroded from the land was blown far out to sea, depositing iron salts; and the iron, always in short supply in the ocean, made life bloom.

But now Millo grabbed her arm and pointed. A little farther out to sea, close to a larger, slush-capped hole, seals lay on the ice. They were brown slabs of limp flesh, totally relaxed, frost sparkling on their fur. Seals were always attracted to such holes, so they could breathe or come up to bask.

Jahna thrilled at the opportunity here.

With immense care, making as little noise as possible, Jahna and Millo made their way across the ice. If one of the seals raised its head, they froze in place, crouching down against the ice, until the seal had relaxed again. Meanwhile, a moaning wind rose. Jahna welcomed it. She wasn’t interested in the weather right now; she had eyes, ears for nothing but the seals. But the wind helped mask their crackling footsteps.

They were almost there, almost close enough to touch the nearest seals. They raised their harpoons.

Then, without warning, the wind howled like a wounded animal.

The seals woke up, startled. They looked around, honking, and with liquid grace and speed they slid into the water. Millo howled his frustration and hurled his harpoon anyway; it slid uselessly into the water and out of sight.

But Jahna had looked up. A wall of wind-driven snow was descending on them, turning the world white.

Jahna grabbed Millo’s hand and dragged him into the shelter of an obtruding block of ice. They huddled up against the ice, knees tucked against their chests. The wind screamed through hollows and flutings in the ice, too loud for her to hear her own voice, too loud to think.

Then the snow was on them.

She could see nothing but white — no sea, no horizon, no sky. It was as if they had been thrust inside an egg, she thought, a perfect, closed-over egg, sealed off from the world.

Soon the snow was sticking to their furs and piling up against the ice wall. She knew there was a danger that the snow would drift, here in the lee of this boulder, and she tried to clear away the gathering layers of sharp white crystals.

But the storm went on, and on. And with every heartbeat that passed, the chances were that Rood and the others were getting farther and farther away.

Millo’s patience ran out. He pushed her away and stood up, but the swirling wind almost knocked him off his feet. She pulled him back down.

“No!” he screamed through the wind, struggling. “We’ll die if we stay here.”

“We’ll die if we leave,” she yelled back. “Look at the snow! Listen to the wind! Think — which way is the land?”

He turned vaguely, his small round face battered by the snow.

“We already made a bad mistake,” she said. “We didn’t see the storm coming. What does your soul tell you to do? What does Millo, your great-grandfather, tell you?” She could probably have overpowered him, just forced him to stay, but that would have been wrong. She had to convince him to stay put. For if he chose to leave — well, that was his prerogative.

At last he relented. With tears freezing to his cheeks he dropped back to the ice and huddled up against his sister. She held him until the weeping was done.

She kept up her routine of clearing off the loose snow. But as darkness fell — as the bubble of white turned gray, then black, with no letup in the storm — she became increasingly weary, hungry, and thirsty.

At last she couldn’t fight off the sleep any longer. Just for a while, she thought; I will rest just for a while, and wake before the snow gets too thick. She dreamed of rocking, as if she were an infant in her father’s arms.

When she woke she felt the weight of her brother’s head on her lap. The noise of the storm was gone. She was in darkness; but it was warm here, dark, warm, safe. She closed her eyes and settled back. It would surely do no harm to rest a little longer.

But now Millo gasped, as if struggling for air. She remembered his dream, of darkness and immersion and drowning. Maybe she was in the same dream now.

Darkness.

In sudden panic Jahna pushed Millo away. Reaching up, she felt a thick layer of loose snow above her. She forced herself to her feet, pushing her face through the clinging snow.

And found herself in dazzling light. She gasped in the sudden richness of the clean, cold air. The sky was a perfect deep blue dome through which the sun sailed. She gazed around at a landscape of jumbled ice blocks embedded in blue-gray pack ice, scattered with frost and snow drifts, all of it unfamiliar. She was waist-deep in snow. She had been lucky to wake when she did, she knew; the drifting snow had kept her warm, but had nearly suffocated her.

She reached down, pushing away the snow, until she found Millo’s shoulders. She hauled him out into the air. Soon he was blinking in the light and rubbing his eyes. The snow where he had been lying had turned piss-yellow. “Are you all right?” She cleared the snow from his hair and face, took off his mittens and manipulated his fingers. “Can you feel your toes?”

“I’m thirsty,” he said plaintively.

“I know.”

“I want Rood. I want Mesni.”

“I know.” Jahna was furious with herself. Careless, careless again, to have fallen asleep like that. And it was carelessness that might yet cost Jahna her life and Millo his. “Let’s get back to the headland.”

“All right.”

She put on her mittens and took his hand. They walked around the ice block that had sheltered them, back the way they had come yesterday. There was no headland. She could make out the land, but it was a low, worn-looking shore, blanketed by a crisp layer of unbroken snow.

Millo moaned, “Where’s Rood?”

For a time Jahna struggled to accept what she was seeing. Everything had been made unfamiliar by the spring storm. And her knowledge of the land was not as deep as her father’s. But still she could see that that was not the shore she had left before the storm. Give me strength, Jahna, mother of my father. “I think the pack ice must have broken up during the storm. We drifted over the sea—” she remembered now those dreams of languid rocking ” — and finished up here.”

“I don’t recognize that place,” Millo said, pointing to the land.

“We must have been carried a long way.”

“Well,” Millo said, businesslike, “that’s where we’ve got to go. Back to the land. Isn’t it, Jahna?”

“Yes. That’s where we’ve got to go.”

“Come on then.” He took her hand. “This is the way. Watch your step.”

She let him lead her.

They trekked along the coast. Blanketed by the snow, the land was silent. Hardly anything moved — just an occasional arctic fox, a bedraggled gull, an owl — and the quiet was eerie, unnerving.

It was difficult walking through the heaped-up snow, even close to the shore, especially for Millo with his shorter legs. They had no idea where they were, no idea how far the drifting ice might have carried them. They didn’t even know if they were walking back the way they had come, toward the headland. At that they were lucky, Jahna reflected with a shudder, that the ice floe hadn’t simply carried them out to sea, where, helpless, they would quickly have frozen to death.

They found a stream running fast enough to have stayed clear of this unseasonal snow. They bent to drink, up to their elbows in snow, their breath steaming. Jahna was relieved. If they had not found fresh water they might have been forced to eat snow. That would have quenched their thirst but it would have put out the fire that burned inside their bodies — and, as everybody knew, when that happened, you died.

Water, then. But they found no food, none at all. They walked on.

They stuck to the coast, feeling unwilling to penetrate that central inland silence. There were many dangers there — not the least of which were people.

As primates with bodies built for tropical climes strove to survive the rapidly changing extremes of the Pleistocene, they had built on the ancient traits they had inherited from the wordless creatures of the forests: on bonds of kinship and cooperation.

The clans scattered over Eurasia and Africa lived in almost complete isolation from one another. And the isolation went very deep. Fifty kilometers from Jahna’s birthplace lived people who spoke a language more different from hers than Finnish would be from Chinese. In the days of Far and even Pebble, there had been a transcontinental uniformity; now there could be significant differences between one river valley and the next. Humans were capable of altruism so generous one would suffer injury, maiming, even death to save another — and yet they indulged in extreme xenophobia, even deliberate and purposeful genocide. But in a harsh land where food was short, it made sense for members of a community to support one another selflessly — and to fend off others, who might steal scarce resources. Even genocide had a certain horrible logic.

If the children were discovered by strangers, it was possible Jahna’s life would be spared — but only so she could be taken for sex. Her best hope would be to fall pregnant, and win the loyalty of one of the men. But she would always be lowly, never one of the true people. Millo, meanwhile, would simply be killed, perhaps after a little sport. She knew this was so. She had seen it happen among her own kind. So it was best they remain undiscovered.

As the children plodded on, their hunger gnawed.

They crossed a low rocky ridge. In its lee a stand of spruce had grown — dwarfed. The trees were no taller than Jahna was, but in the rock’s shelter they were at least able to lift up from the ground.

Suddenly Jahna grabbed Millo and unceremoniously dumped him to the ground. Their bodies concealed, they poked their heads over the ridge.

On a frozen pond beyond the ridge walked a small flock of ptarmigan. The birds were pecking at the ice, plunging their beaks into cracks and leads. They were brilliant white against the ice’s steely blue gray. These early-arriving birds were invisible against the snow, but they would stand out brightly against the greens and browns of the later spring.

“Come on,” she said. They turned and slithered down the ridge, back to the little stand of spruce.

Jahna selected a fine, supple young tree. With a stone ax from her pocket, she quickly felled it, a hand’s breadth above the snow, and she lopped away its crown, leaving a length of trunk nearly as tall as she was. Now, with Millo’s help, she made a notch in the trunk and drove in a wedge. The trunk split easily, leaving her with a thin, springy strip. She began to scrape it quickly. Meanwhile Millo peeled the bark off the rest of the trunk. He split it up into fibers and quickly wove it together into a length of string. The bow was so unfinished it had bits of string dangling where they had been hastily tied. Not perfect, she thought, but it would serve its purpose.

She turned hastily to splitting arrows off the remnants of the trunk. There was no fire to harden the arrows, of course — and, more seriously, no feathers to serve as flights. So she improvised; she took bits of peeled-off bark and jammed them in slits in her arrows.

They worked as fast as they could. But the sun had slid a little further down the sky by the time she was done.

She poked her head and shoulders above the ridge once more, wielding her bow. The birds were still there. She took aim, pulling back the bowstring.

The first arrow went so wide it didn’t even disturb the birds. The second served only to startle them, and the birds took off, shrieking in protest, their shining wings rattling. She loosed off her last shot — a much more difficult attempt at a moving target — but one of the birds crumpled and fell out of the sky.

Whooping, brother and sister clambered over the ridge and ran down to the frozen pond. The bird lay sprawled on the ice, a splash of blood on its ragged feathers. The children knew better than to rush on to the ice. Millo found a length of spruce branch. They lay flat on their bellies on the firm land at the edge of the ice and used the branch to bring the bird to the shore.

In death the bird looked ugly, ungainly. But Jahna cupped its small head in her hands. She took a bit of snow, let it melt into her palm, and trickled the water into the bird’s unmoving beak: a final drink. “Thank you,” she said. It was important to pay this kind of respect to animals and plants alike. The world was bountiful — but only so long as you did not trouble it too much.

When the little ceremony was done, Jahna quickly plucked the bird, slit open its belly, and flensed it. She folded up the skin and put it in her pocket: she would make better arrows tomorrow, with the feathers the ptarmigan had given her.

They ate the meat raw, the blood trickling down their cheeks and making crimson spots in the snow beneath them. It was a moment of triumph. But Jahna’s satisfaction at the kill did not last long. The light was fading, and the air was growing colder.

They would die without shelter.

Her bow on her back, the last of the bird’s meat in her mouth, Jahna led Millo a little way inland. Soon they came to an open, snow-covered plain. Toward the center of the meadow, the snow came almost up to her knees.

Good enough.

She shaped blocks out of the snow around her. It was hard work; she had nothing to use but her hands and stone blades, and the upper layers of snow were soft and crumbled easily. But deeper down the snow was compressed and satisfyingly hard.

She began to pile the blocks in a tight ring around herself. Millo joined in with a will. Soon they were building a circular wall of snow blocks around an increasingly deep pit. With care they turned their spiraling lines of blocks inward, until they had made a neat dome shape. Jahna punched a tunnel into the wall through which they could come and go, and Millo smoothed over the dome’s surface, inside and out.

The snow house was small, rough and ready, but it would do.

The light was fading fast now, and the first wolves’ calls were already echoing. Hurriedly they dug themselves into their snow house.

We are more secure than last night, Jahna thought as they huddled together for warmth. But tomorrow we must find more food.

And we must build a fire.

II

The hunters returned from the sea. They dispersed among their families, bearing the food they had brought. There were no expressions of gratitude. These people had no words for please or thank you; among these hunter-gatherer folk there were no social inequalities that would have required such niceties. The food was simply shared out, according to need.

Of Jahna and Millo there was much quiet talk.

Mesni, mother of Millo and Jahna, visibly strove for self-control. She went about the tasks of the day, caring for her infant, gutting the fish and preparing the rest of the ocean harvest Rood had brought home. But sometimes she would put down her knife or her bowls and give way to open despair. She even wept.

She became insane with grief: that was how it seemed to Rood. The people prized themselves for their equanimity and control. To show visible anger or despair was to behave like a small child who knew no better.

As for Rood, he withdrew into himself. He stalked around the village, and out into the country, in his shame and sorrow struggling to keep his face expressionless. There was nothing he could do for Mesni. He knew she must adjust to her loss, must regain her own inner sense of calm and control.

But the loss was indeed terrible for the little community. There weren’t that many of them to begin with. This little village of around twenty people consisted essentially of three large families. They were part of a more extended clan, who every spring would gather at the bank of a great river to the south of here for a great celebratory festival of trade, partner seeking, and storytelling. But, though they came from far away, there were never more than about a thousand at these gatherings: The tundra could support no higher a density of people than that.

In later times, archaeologists would find artifacts left behind by people like Rood’s and wonder if some of them signified fertility magic. They did not. Fertility was never a problem for Rood’s folk. Quite the opposite: The problem was controlling their numbers. The people knew they must not overstretch the carrying capacity of the land that sustained them — and that they must stay mobile, in case of flood or fire or freeze or drought.

So they took care over the number of children they raised. They spaced their births by three or four years. There were a number of means to achieve this. Mesni had breast-fed both Jahna and Millo to advanced ages to suppress her fertility. Simple abstinence, or nonpenetrative sex, would do the trick. And, just as it always had, death stalked the very young. Disease, accident, and even predators could be relied upon to take away a good fraction of the weak.

If necessary — though Rood was grateful he had not gone through this himself — if a healthy child arrived for whom there really was no room, death could be given a helping hand.

As long as they met the basic constraint of numbers, even in this sparse landscape at the edge of the habitable world, Rood’s people ate well, enjoyed much leisure and, with their nonhierarchical, respectful society, were granted great health in body and mind. Rood inhabited a boggy, half-frozen Eden — even if a price had to be paid in countless small lives snuffed out in the cold and regretful dark.

But none of this grim calculus applied to Millo and Jahna.

They had both arrived at a time when their parents had been able to cope with supporting them. They had survived the hazards of early childhood. They were growing healthy and intelligent. Jahna had even been approaching her menarche, so that Rood had been anticipating his first grandchild. Now, thanks to a freak spring storm and his own unforgivable carelessness, all of that investment in energy and love had been taken away from him.

Preoccupied, Rood had walked out of the settlement. He was approaching the crude shantytown of the boneheads.

The boneheads looked up dully as he passed. Some of them were gorging on scraps of narwhal skin. One cow had an infant clamped to her scrawny breast; she turned away from him, cowering. The boneheads had no place in this land owned by human beings. Indeed the boneheads would have starved if not for the largesse, and waste, of the people. Neither animal nor person, nothing about the boneheads was worthy of respect. The boneheads didn’t even have names.

But they could be useful.

He came across one cow younger than the rest. In fact she was the cow whom Jahna had tormented not long before the disastrous expedition to the sea.

She looked up at him dully, her absurdly flat skull smeared with dirt. He knew this one was the same age as Jahna, but she was more advanced than his daughter; the boneheads grew up faster, lived harder, died younger. She sat in the dirt, dressed in an untied skin wrap, toying with a worn, broken pendant. The boneheads seemed to have enough mind to be fascinated by the artifacts of the people, yet not enough to make them for themselves: You could buy whatever you wanted from a bonehead for the sake of a mammoth-ivory bead or a carved bone harpoon.

On an impulse he didn’t fully understand, Rood reached down and pulled the wrap away from the cow’s body. If not for that pulled-forward face, that flattened head, her body wasn’t so bad, he thought; she had yet to develop the full, bearlike stockiness of the adults.

He found an erection pushing out of his own wrap.

He knelt down, grabbed the cow’s ankles, and twisted her onto her back. She complied easily, spreading her legs; evidently it wasn’t the first time she had been used like this. Probing at her warm flesh he found her crotch and anus were crusted with filth. He scraped her clean with his fingers.

And then, with a single, savage thrust, he entered her. For a brief, oceanic time, he was able to forget that disastrous moment when the storm closed in and he realized he had lost Jahna and Millo on the ice.

But it was quickly over. Pulling away from the girl he felt a deep, stomach-churning sense of revulsion. He used a corner of his wrap to clean himself.

The girl, still naked, rolled on her back and held up her hands, pleading silently.

Around his neck he wore a pendant, the tooth of a cave bear. He ripped it off his neck, breaking its deerskin thong, and threw it in the dirt. The bonehead girl scrabbled for the pendant and held it up before her face, turning it over and over, peering into its endless mysteries. A trickle of blood seeped from her bruised thighs.

Jahna and Millo continued to follow the coast, still hoping to come across the headland where they had last seen their father and his companions. At night they built snow houses, if there was snow, or slept under hastily constructed lean-tos. Jahna’s bow and Millo’s fast reflexes kept them provided with some food; small animals and birds.

They could keep themselves fed, even build shelter. But already Millo had spent one agonizing night after unwisely eating a fish that had not been properly gutted. Worst of all they had failed, night after night, to make a fire, no matter how earnestly they rubbed sticks or smashed bits of rock together. And that was costing them dearly. The uncooked meat was beginning to make Jahna’s teeth and stomach ache, and in the dead of night she imagined she would never be truly warm again.

The children plodded on; they had no choice. But they were losing weight, growing more tired every day, their clothing more ragged. They were slowly dying, Jahna knew. Though they were guided by the elder spirits within them, they did not yet know all they needed to know to keep themselves alive.

They came to a place where the tree line had strayed north, so they had to push through a scrap of forest. The trees, pines and spruce, grew sparse and tangled: gaunt and without leaves, they looked oddly frail. The path the children followed, worn by deer or goats, was soft with moss. It twisted through the trees, passing occasionally through more open glades.

As the light faded, ending another dismal day, the shadows of the trees striped over the ground, and the undergrowth turned black. Jahna and Millo were five million years removed from Capo, their last forest-dwelling ancestor, and to them the forest was a place well stocked with monsters and demons. They hurried forward anxiously.

At last they burst out of the trees. They found themselves on a scrap of snow-littered grassland where the yellow sward terminated in a ragged cliff edge. Beyond that blunt horizon the sea rolled, the pack ice distantly groaning and cracking, as it always did.

But the children faced a wall of flesh and antlers. It was a herd of megaloceros — creatures that would one day be called Irish elk. They walked massively, cropping at the new grass that poked hopefully through the scattered snow.

In the van was a huge male. He peered down his long nose at the children. His back bore a fleshy hump, a mound of fat to help sustain him through harsh times; in this early spring the hump was deflated. And his antlers, each twice as wide as a human was tall, were great heavy sculptures oddly like the open hands of a giant, with fingerlike tines branching off smooth palms.

There were thousands of deer in this herd alone, crowding out of the children’s sight. Like many giant herbivores in this paradoxically rich time, the megaloceros flourished in vast migrant crowds, wandering all across the Old World from Britain to Siberia and China. And this vast herd was bearing down on Jahna and Millo. It was a slow-moving barrier, immense antlers clattering, stomachs rumbling. The air was full of the overwhelming stink of musk and dung.

The children needed badly to get out of the way. Jahna saw immediately that they couldn’t evade the herd by running inland; it was too big, too widespread for that. The deer surely wouldn’t penetrate far into the forest, but they would force the children back into that deepening darkness, which was a place she really didn’t want to go back into.

On impulse she grabbed her brother’s hand. “Come on. The cliff!”

They ran across the frozen grass. The cliff edge sloped away sharply beneath a lip of turf. Hastily the children scrambled down. The bow on Jahna’s back caught on outcroppings of the rock, slowing her down. But they made it. They huddled on a narrow ledge, peering up at the ocean of black-brown fur that washed slowly along the cliff top.

The huge male looked on indifferently. Then he turned away, his burdened head dipping.

The antlers were heavy to carry, like weights held at arms’ length, and the buck’s neck had been redesigned to bear that load, with huge vertebrae and muscles like cables. The antlers were for sexual display — and for fighting; it was an awesome sight when two of these giant bucks clashed, heads down. But those great antlers would doom these animals. When the ice retreated and their habitat shriveled, there would be a selection pressure for smaller body sizes. While other species shrank to fit, the megaloceros would prove unable to give up their elaborate sexual displays. They had become overspecialized, their tremendous antlers over-expensive, and they would prove unable to cope with change.

The children heard a muffled growl. Jahna thought she saw a pale form, low-slung, stocky, move over the snow like a muscled ghost, trailing the deer. It might have been a cave lion. She shuddered.

“What now?” Millo whispered. “We can’t stay here.”

“No.” Jahna cast around. She saw that their ledge led down the cliff face to a hollow a few body’s lengths below. “That way,” she said. “I think it’s a cave.”

He nodded curtly. He led the way, edging his way down the narrow ledge, clinging to the chalk. But he was more frightened than he was prepared to admit, she realized.

At last, the perilous descent over, they threw themselves into the hollow and lay panting on the rough floor. The cave, worn in the chalk, reached back into dark recesses. The floor was littered with guano and bits of eggshell. It must be used as a nesting ground, by gulls, perhaps. There were blackened patches scattered over the floor — not hearths, but obviously the sites of fires.

“Look,” said Millo, his voice full of wonder. “Mussels.”

He was right. The little shellfish were piled up in a low heap, surrounded by a scattering of flint flakes. A flicker of curiosity made her wonder how they had got there. But hunger spoke louder, and the two of them fell on the mussels. Frantically they tried to prize open the shells with their fingers and stone blades, but the shells were stubborn and would not yield.

“Graah.”

They both whirled.

The gravely voice had come out of the darkness at the back of the cave. A figure came forward. It was a burly man, dressed in a wrap of what looked like deer hide — no, Jahna thought, not a man. He had a vast, prominent nose, and powerful stocky legs, and huge hands. This was a bonehead, a massive bull. He glared at them.

The children backed away, clutching at each other.

He had no name. His people did not give themselves names. He thought of himself as the Old Man. And he was old, old for his kind, nearly forty years old.

He had lived alone for thirty of those years.

He had been dozing at the back of this cave, in the smoky, comforting glow of the torches he kept burning there. He had spent the early morning combing the beaches below the cliffs at low tide, seeking shellfish. With the coming of evening he would soon have woken up anyway; evening was his favorite time of day.

But he had been disturbed early by the noise and commotion at the cave’s entrance. Thinking it might be gulls coming after his piles of shellfish — or something worse, an arctic fox maybe — he had come lumbering out into the light.

Not gulls, not a fox. Here were two children. Their bodies were tall and ludicrously spindly, their limbs shriveled and their shoulders narrow. Their faces were flat, as if squashed back by a mighty punch, their chins were pointed, and their heads bulged upward into comical swellings like huge fungi.

Skinny folk. Always skinny folk. He felt a vast weariness — and an echo of the loneliness that had once plagued his every waking moment and poisoned his dreams.

Almost without conscious thought he moved toward the children, his huge hands outstretched. He could crush their skulls with a single squeeze, or crack them together like two birds’ eggs, and that would be the end of it. The bones of more than one skinny robber littered the rocky beach below this cave; and more would join them before he grew too old to defend this, his last bastion.

The children squealed, grabbed each other, and scurried to the wall of the cave. But the taller one, a girl, pushed the other behind her. She was terrified, he could see that, but she was trying to defend her brother. And she was holding her nerve. Though panic piss trickled down the boy’s bare legs the girl kept herself under control. She dug into her jerkin and pulled out something that dangled on a string around her neck. “Bonehead! Bonehead man! Leave us alone and I’ll give you this! Pretty, pretty magic, bonehead man!”

The Old Man’s deep-set eyes glittered.

The pendant was a bit of quartz, a little obelisk, gleaming and transparent; its faces had been polished to shining smoothness, and one side had been painstakingly carved into a design that caught your eye and dazzled your mind. The girl swung the amulet back and forth, trying to draw his eyes, and she stepped forward from the wall. “Bonehead man, pretty, pretty…” The Old Man peered into blue eyes that stared straight back at him in that unsettling, direct way of the skinnies: a predator’s gaze.

He reached out and flicked at the amulet. It flew around the girl’s neck and smashed against the wall behind her. She yelped, for its leather string had burned her neck. The Old Man reached out again. It could be over in a heartbeat.

But the children were jabbering again, in their fast, complicated language. “Make him go away! Oh, make him go away!” “It’s all right, Millo. Don’t be afraid. Your great-grandfather is inside you. He will help you.”

The Old Man let his huge hands drop to his sides.

He looked back at the mussels they had tried to take. The shells were scraped and chipped — one showed teeth marks — but not one was broken open. These children were helpless, even more so than most of their kind. They couldn’t even steal his mussels.

It had been a long time since voices of any kind had been heard in this cave — any save his own, and the ugly cawing of gulls or the barking of foxes.

Not quite understanding why, he stalked off to the back of his cave. Here he stored his meat, his tools, and a stock of wood. He brought back an armful of pine logs, brought down from the forested area at the top of the cliff, and dumped them close to the entrance of the cave. Now he fetched one of his torches, a pine branch thick with resin and bound up with fat-laden sealskin. The torch burned steadily but smokily, and would stay alight all day. He set the torch on the ground and began to heap wood over it.

The children still cowered against the wall, eyes wide, staring at him. The boy pointed at the ground. “Look. Where’s his hearth? He’s making a mess…” The girl clamped her hand over his mouth.

When the fire was burning brightly, he kicked it open to expose red-hot burning logs within. Then he picked up a handful of mussels and threw them into the fire. The mussels’ shells quickly popped open. He fished them out with a stick and scooped out their delicious, salty contents with a blunt finger, one after another.

The boy squirmed and got his mouth free. “I can smell them. I’m hungry.”

“Hold still; just hold still.”

When the Old Man had had his fill of the mussels he lifted his leg, let out a luxurious fart, and clambered painfully to his feet. He lumbered to the entrance to his cave. There he sat down with one leg folded under him, the other straight out, with his skin wrap over his legs and crotch. He picked up a flint cobble he had left there days before. Using a granite pebble as a hammer-stone he quickly began to shape a core from the flint. Soon waste flakes began to accumulate around his legs. He had seen dolphins today. There was a good chance one of those fat, lithe creatures might be washed up on the shore in the next day or two, and he needed to be prepared, to have the right tools ready. He wasn’t planning, exactly — he wasn’t thinking as a skinny might have thought — but a deep intuition of his environment shaped his actions and choices.

As he let his hands work — shaping this lump of compressed Cretaceous fossils, as the hands of his ancestors had worked for two hundred and fifty millennia — he gazed out to the west, where the sun was starting to set over the Atlantic, turning the water to a sheet of fire.

Behind him, unnoticed, Jahna and Millo crept to the fire, threw on more mussels, and gulped down their salty flesh.

As the days passed, the spring thaw advanced quickly. The lakes melted. Waterfalls that had spent the winter crusted with ice began to bubble and flow. Even the sea ice began to break up.

It was time for the gathering. It was a much-anticipated treat, a highlight of the year — despite the walk of several days across the tundra.

Not everybody could go: The very young, the old, and the ill could not make the journey, and some had to remain behind to look after them. This year, for the first time in many years, Rood and Mesni were freed of the burden of children — save for their youngest, still an infant small enough to be carried — and were able to travel.

Rood would not have chosen the situation; of course not. But he believed they must make the best of their damaged lives, and he urged Mesni to come with him to the gathering. But Mesni wanted to stay at home. She turned away from him, retreating into her dark sadness. So Rood decided to walk with Olith, Mesni’s sister, the aunt of his children. Olith herself had one grown boy, but his father had died of a coughing illness two winters ago, leaving Olith alone.

The party set off across the tundra.

In this brief interval of warmth and light, the ground underfoot was full of life, saxifrages, tundra flowers, grasses, and lichens. Clouds of insects gathered in the moist air above the ponds, mating frantically. Great flocks of geese, ducks, and waders fed and rested on the tundra’s shallow lakes. Olith, taking Rood’s arm, pointed out mallards, swans, snow geese, divers, loons, and cranes that looped grandly, filling the air with their clattering calls. In this place where the trees lay flat, many of these birds built their nests on the ground. When they stepped too close to a jaeger’s nest, two birds dived at them, squawking ferociously. And, though most of the migrant herbivores had yet to return, the people glimpsed great herds of deer and mammoth, washing across the landscape like the shadows of clouds.

Yet how strange it was, Rood thought, that if he were to dig just a few arms’ lengths anywhere under this carpet of crowded color and motion, he would find the ice, the frozen ground where nothing could live.

“It has been too long since I walked this way,” said Rood. “I had forgotten what it is like.”

Olith squeezed his arm and moved closer to him. “I know how you must feel—”

“That every blade of grass, every dancing saxifrage, is a torture, a beauty I do not deserve.” Distantly he was aware of the scent of the vegetable oil she rubbed into her cropped hair. She was not like Mesni, her sister; Olith was taller, more stringy, but her breasts were heavy.

“The children are not gone,” Olith reminded him. “Their souls will be reborn when you next have children. They were not old enough to have gathered wisdom of their own. But they carried the souls of their grandparents, and they will bring joy and exuberance to—”

“I have not lain with Mesni,” he said stiffly, “since we last saw Jahna and Millo. Mesni is — changed.”

“It has been a long time,” Olith murmured, evidently surprised.

Rood shrugged. “Not long enough for Mesni. Perhaps it will never be long enough.” He looked Olith in the eyes. “I will not have more children with Mesni. I do not think she will ever want that.”

Olith looked away, but dipped her head. It was, he realized, startled, a gesture of both sympathy and seduction.

That night, in the crisp cold of the open tundra, under a lean-to hastily constructed of pine branches, they lay together for the first time. As when he took the young bonehead cow, Rood felt relief from the guilt, the constant nagging doubts. Olith meant much more to him than any bonehead animal, of course. But afterward, when Olith lay in his arms, he felt the ice close around his heart once again, as if in the midst of spring he was still stranded in the depths of winter.

After four days’ steady hiking, Rood and Olith reached the riverbank.

Already hundreds of people had gathered. There were shelters set up on the bank, stacks of spears and bows, even the carcass of a great buck megaloceros. The people had marked themselves with exuberant flashes of ocher and vegetable dye. Their designs had common elements, proclaiming the unity of the greater clan, and yet were elaborate and diverse, celebrating the identity and strength of their individual bands.

Probably around five hundred people would come to this gathering — not that anybody was counting. That would comprise about half of all the people on the planet who spoke a language even remotely resembling Rood’s.

The group from home who had walked with Rood and Olith fanned out. Many of them were looking for partners: perhaps for a quick spring tumble, or perhaps with a view toward a longer-term relationship. This few days’ gathering was the only chance you got to meet somebody new — or to check out if the skinny kid you remembered from last year showed signs of blossoming in the way you hoped he would.

Rood spotted a woman called Dela. Round, fat, with a booming laugh, she was a capable hunter of large game. In her younger days she had been a beauty with whom Rood had lain a couple of times. He saw that she had, typically, set up a large, flamboyant shelter of stretched hide painted gaily with designs of running animals.

Rood and Olith marched down the bank. Dela welcomed him with an embrace and a hearty back slap, and she served them bark tea and fruit. Though Dela eyed Olith, evidently wondering what had become of Mesni, she kept her counsel.

A huge fire already blazed on open ground before the shelter, and somebody was throwing handfuls of fish grease onto it, making explosions and crackles. It was Dela’s folk who had brought in the megaloceros. Brawny young women were carving open the deer carcass, and the smell of blood and stomach contents filled the air.

Rood and Olith sat with Dela around a low fire. Dela began to ask Rood how this year’s hunting had gone so far, and he responded in kind. They talked of how the season had unfolded this year, how the animals were behaving, what damage the winter storms had done, how high the fish were jumping, on a new way somebody had found to treat a bowstring so it lasted longer before it snapped, a way somebody else had found of soaking mammoth ivory in urine so you could straighten it out.

The purpose of this gathering was to exchange information, as much as food or goods or mates. Speakers did not exaggerate success or minimize failure. To the best of their ability they spoke with detail and precision, and allowed other participants in the discussion to ask questions. Accuracy was much more important than boasting. To people who relied on culture and knowledge to keep themselves alive, information was the most important thing in the world.

At last, though, Dela was able to move on to the subject that clearly fascinated her.

“And Mesni,” she said carefully. “Has she stayed home with the children? Why, Jahna must be tall now — I remember how she caught the boys’ eyes even last year — and—”

“No,” Rood said gently, aware of Olith’s hand covering his. Dela listened in silence as he described, in painful detail, how he had lost his children to the ice storm.

When he had finished Dela sipped her tea, her eyes averted. Rood had the odd sense that she knew something, but held it back.

To fill the silence, Dela recited the story of her land.

“…And the two brothers, lost in the snow, fell at last. One died. The other rose up. He grieved for his brother. But then he saw a fox, digging under a log, its coat white on white. The fox went away. But the brother knew that a fox will return to the same spot to retrieve what it has buried. So he set a snare, and waited. When the fox returned the brother caught it. But before he could kill it the fox sang for him. It was a lament for the lost brother, like this…”

Like Jo’on’s Dreamtime tales, though they were a blend of myth and reality, such stories and songs were long, specific, fact-heavy. This was an oral culture. Without writing to record factual data, memory was everything. If dreams and the shaman’s trances were a means of integrating copious information to aid intuitive decision making, the songs and stories were an aid to storing that information in the first place.

Remarkably, the story Dela told was itself evolving. As the story passed from one listener to another, through error and embellishment its elements changed constantly. Most of the changes were incidental details that didn’t matter, churning without effect, like the coding of junk DNA. The essentials of the story — its mood, the key nodes, its point — tended to remain stable. But not always: Sometimes a major adaptation would take place, by a speaker’s intention or accident, and if the new element improved the story, it would be retained. The stories, like other aspects of the people’s culture, had begun an evolutionary destiny of their own, played out in the arenas of the new humans’ roomy minds.

But Dela’s story was more than a mere tale, or aid to memory. With her story, by her setting out the narrative of her land and by her listeners’ accepting it by hearing it, she was proclaiming a kind of title. Only by knowing the land well enough to tell its story truly could you affirm your right to that land. There were no written contracts here, no deeds, no courts; the only validity for Dela’s claim came from the relationship of narrator to listener, reaffirmed at gatherings like this.

There was a ferocious sizzling noise, a great celebratory roar from outside the shelter. The first great slabs of the butchered megaloceros had been hurled on to the fire. Soon the mouth-watering smell of its meat filled the air. The festivities of the night began.

There was much eating, dancing, hollering. And at the end of the night, Rood was surprised when Dela approached him.

“Listen to me now, Rood. I am your friend. Once we lay together.”

“Actually twice,” he said with a rueful smile.

“Twice, then. What I say to you now I say out of friendship, and not to cause you suffering.”

He frowned. “What are you trying to tell me?”

She sighed. “There is a tale. I heard it here, not two days ago; a group from the south told it. They say that in a stretch of worthless ground near the coast, a bonehead infests a cliff-top cave. Yes? And in that cave — so it is said, so a hunter claims to have seen — two children are living.”

He didn’t understand. “Bonehead cubs?”

“No. Not boneheads. People. The hunter, engrossed in his prey, saw all this from a distance. One of the children — so the hunter said — is a girl, maybe so high.” She held up her hand. “And the other—”

“A boy,” breathed Rood. “A little boy.”

“I apologize for telling you this,” said Dela.

Rood understood. Dela perceived that Rood had accepted his loss. Now she had ignited the cold pain of hope in his deadened heart once more. “Tomorrow,” he said thickly. “Tomorrow you will show this hunter to me. And then—”

“Yes. But not tonight.”

Later, in the deepest night, Olith lay with Rood, but he was restless.

“Morning will soon come,” she whispered. “And then you will leave.”

“Yes,” he said. “Olith — come with me.”

She thought briefly, then nodded. It was not wise for him to travel alone. She heard his teeth grind. She touched his jaw, felt the tense muscles there. “What is it?”

“If there is a bonehead buck, if he has harmed them—”

She crooned, “Your mind flies too far ahead; give your body a chance to catch up. Sleep now.”

But for Rood, sleep proved impossible.

III

The bonehead returned to the cave. Jahna saw that he had a seal — the whole animal, a fat, heavy male — slung over one shoulder. Even now, after weeks in this cliff-top cave, his strength could surprise her.

Millo came running forward, his bonehead-style skin wrap flying. “A seal! A seal! We’ll eat well tonight!” He hugged the bonehead’s tree-trunk legs.

Just as he used to hug his father’s. Jahna pushed the unwelcome thought out of her mind; it had no place here, and she must be strong.

The bonehead, perspiring from the effort of hauling such a weight up the cliff path from the beach, peered down at the boy. He made a string of guttural, grunting noises, a jabber that meant nothing… or at least Jahna didn’t think it meant anything. Sometimes she wondered if he spoke words — bonehead words, what a strange idea — that she just couldn’t recognize.

She walked forward and pointed to the rear of the cave. “Put the seal down there,” she commanded. “We’ll soon get it butchered. Look, I’ve built a fire already.”

And so she had. Days ago she had dug out a pit to serve as a proper hearth, and had swept over the ugly ash stains that had randomly scarred the floor. Likewise she had sorted out the clutter of this cave. It had been a jumble, with food scraps and bits of skin and tools all mixed up with all sorts of waste. Now it almost seemed, well, habitable.

For a person, that is. It didn’t occur to her to wonder what “habitable” might mean for the huge creature she thought of as the bonehead.

Right now the bonehead didn’t seem happy. He was unpredictable like that. Growling, he dumped the seal on the floor. Then, sweating, filthy, his skin crusted with salt from the sea, he stamped off to the back of the cave for one of his naps.

Jahna and Millo fell to slicing open the seal carcass. It had been killed by a spear thrust to the heart, leaving a wide and ugly puncture, and Jahna quailed as she imagined the battle that must have preceded this killing strike. But with their sharp stone blades the children’s small hands made efficient work of flensing and dismembering the big mammal. Soon the first slices of seal belly were on the fire.

The bonehead, as was his wont, woke up when the meat was ready. The children ate their meat well-cooked. The bonehead preferred his raw, or almost. He grabbed a big steak out of the fire, took it to his favorite spot by the entrance, and pulled at the meat with his teeth, facing the setting sun. He ate a lot of meat, about twice as much as Rood, say. But then he worked very hard, all the time.

It was an oddly domestic scene. But it had been like this for the weeks since Jahna and Millo had stumbled in here. Somehow it worked.

It had always hurt the Old Man to live alone; his kind were intensely social. But he had suffered more than just loneliness. His mind was of the old compartmented design. Much of what went on inside his cavernous skull was all but unconscious; it was as if his hands made his flint tools, not him. It was only when he was with people that he became truly alive, fully, intensely aware; it was as if without others he was in a dream, only half-conscious. To the Old Man’s kind, other people were the brightest, most active things in the landscape. With no other people around, the world was dull, lifeless, static.

That was why he had tolerated the skinny children, with their jabber and their meddling, why he had fed and even clothed them. And why he would soon face death.

Jahna whispered, “Millo. Look.” Watching to be sure the bonehead couldn’t see, she brushed aside some dirt, and revealed a collection of blackened bones.

Millo gasped. He picked up a skull. It had a protruding face and a thick ridge over its gaping eyes. But it was small, smaller than Millo’s own head; it must have been a child. “Where did you find them?”

“In the ground,” she whispered. “At the front of the cave, when I was clearing up.”

Millo dropped the skull; it clattered onto the other bones. The bonehead looked around dully. “It’s scary,” whispered Millo. “Maybe he killed it. The bonehead. Maybe he eats children.”

“No, silly,” Jahna said. Seeing her brother’s fear was real, she put her arms around him. “He probably just put it in the ground when it was dead.”

But Millo was shivering. She hadn’t meant to scare him. She pushed the skull out of his sight and, to calm him, began to tell him a story.

“Listen to me now. Long, long ago, the people were like the dead. The world was dark and their eyes were dull. They lived in a camp as they do now, and they did the things they do now. But everything was dark, not real, like shadows. One day a young man came to the camp. He was like the dead too, but he was curious — different. He liked to go fishing and hunting. But he would always go deeper into the sea than anybody else. The people wondered why…”

As she crooned the story, Millo relaxed against her, sinking into sleep just as the sun sank into the ocean. Even the big bonehead was dozing, she saw, slumped against a wall, belching softly. Perhaps he was listening too.

Her story was a creation myth, a legend already more than twenty thousand years old. Such tales — which said that Jahna’s group were the pinnacle of creation, that theirs was the only right way, and that all others were less than human — taught the people to care passionately about themselves, their kin, and a few treasured ideals.

But to the exclusion of all other humans, let alone such nonpeople as the Old Man’s kind.

“…One day they saw that the young man was with a sea lion. He was swimming in the waves with it. And he was making love to it. Enraged, the people drove out the young man, and they caught the sea lion. But when they butchered it they found a fish inside, in its womb. It was a fat fish.” She meant a eulachon. “The fish had been fathered by the young man. He was neither person nor fish, but something different. So the people threw the fish-boy on their fire. His head burst into flames and made a bright light that dazzled them. So the fish-boy flew into the sky. The sky was dark, of course. There he sought the place where the light was hiding, because the fish-boy thought he could trick the light to come down to the dark world. And then…”

And then her father walked in.

The Old Man was a Neandertal.

His kind had endured in Europe, through the savage swings of the Ice Age, for a quarter of a million years. In their way the robust folk had been supremely successful. They had found ways to live here in the most marginal of environments, on the edge of the world, where the climate was not only harsh but could vary treacherously fast, where animal and plant resources were sparse and prone to fluctuate unpredictably.

For a long time they had even been able to resist the children of Mother. During warming pulses the new humans pushed into Europe from the south. But with their stocky bodies and big air-warming sinuses and heavily meat-tolerant digestion systems, the robusts were better able to withstand the cold than the moderns. And their bearlike builds made them formidable infighters: tough opponents for the humans, better technology or not. Then, when the cold intensified again, the moderns would retreat back to the south, and the robust folk could repopulate their old lands.

This had happened over and over. In southern Europe and the Middle East there were caves and other sites where layers of human detritus were overlaid by Neandertal waste, only to be reoccupied by humans again.

But during the last thaw the moderns had looked again to Europe and Asia. They had advanced, culturally and technologically. And this time the robusts hadn’t been able to resist. Gradually the robusts were eliminated across much of Asia, and pushed back into their chill fortress, Europe.

The Old Man had been ten years old when skinny hunters had first stumbled on his people’s encampment.

The camp had been constructed on a south-facing riverbank a few kilometers back from the cliff top, placed close to the trails of the great herds of migrant herbivores that washed over the landscape. They lived here as they had always lived, waiting for the seasons to bring the herds to their porch. The riverbank had been a good place.

Until the skinnies came.

It wasn’t a war. The engagement had been much more complex, messy, and protracted than that.

At first there had even been a kind of trade, as the skinnies swapped sea produce for meat from the giant animals the people were able to kill with their thrusting spears and great strength. But the skinnies seemed to want more and more. And, as they came roaming over the land with their strange slender spears and the bits of wood that would hurl them far, the skinny hunters were just too effective. Soon the animals grew wary and changed their habits. No longer did they follow their old trails and gather at the lakes and ponds and rivers, and the robusts had to roam far in search of the prey that had once come to them.

Meanwhile, for the Old Man’s folk, contact with the skinnies had inevitably increased.

There had been sex, willing and unwilling. There had been fights. If you got a skinny in close combat you could crush his or her spine, or smash that big bubble skull with a single punch. But the skinnies wouldn’t close with you. They struck from a distance, with their hard-thrown spears and flying arrows. And the people could not strike back: even after tens of millennia of living alongside the skinnies the descendants of Pebble had failed to copy even their simplest innovations. Besides, as the skinnies ran around you hollering to each other in their birdlike voices — with their elaborately painted clothes and bodies, and with a restless blur of speed as if the world was too slow, too static for them — it was hard to even see them. You couldn’t fight what you couldn’t see.

Eventually there had come a day when the skinnies had decided they wanted the place where the Old Man’s people lived, their riverbank home.

It had been simple for them. They had killed most of the men, and some of the women. They chased the survivors away, to forage for themselves as best they could. By the time the Old Man returned, from a solo expedition to the river, the skinnies were burning the huts and cleaning out the caves, places where the Old Man’s grandmothers’ bones lay a hundred generations deep.

After that, the people wandered aimlessly, sedentary creatures forced to be nomads. If they tried to set up a new base, the skinnies would quickly break it up again. Many of them starved.

At last, inevitably, they had been drawn to the camps of the skinnies. Even now, many of his kind still lived on, but they were like the boneheads who followed Jahna’s encampment, where they lived like rats on garbage, and even then only as long as the skinnies tolerated them. Their eventual fate was already obvious.

All save the Old Man. The Old Man had stayed away from the dismal skinny places. He was not the last of his kind. But he was the last to live as his ancestors had before the coming of the moderns. He was the last to live free.

When Mother had died, just sixty thousand years before the birth of Christ, there had still been many different kinds of people in the world. There had been Mother’s humanlike people in parts of Africa. In Europe and western Asia lived robust folk like Pebble, like Neandertals. In eastern Asia there were still bands of the skinny, small-brained walkers, the Homo erectus types. The old hominid complexity had reigned still, with many variants and subspecies and even hybrids of the different types.

With the revolution started in Mother’s generation, with the great expansion that had followed, all this changed. It was not genocide; it was not planned. It was a matter of ecology. The different forms of humans were competing for the same resources. All over the world there had been a wave of extinctions — human extinctions — a wave of last contacts, of regret-free good-byes, as one hominid species after another succumbed to the dark. For a time the last of the walkers had hung on in isolation on Indonesian islands, still living much as Far had, so long ago. But when the sea levels dropped once more, the bridges to the mainland were reestablished, and the moderns crossed over — and for the walkers, after a long and static history spanning some two million years, the game was up.

And so on. The outcome was inevitable. And soon the world would be empty of people — empty, save for just one kind.

After he had lost his family the Old Man had fled from the skinnies, heading ever west. But here, in this coastal cave, the Old Man had reached the western shore of Europe, the fringe of the Atlantic. The ocean was an impassable barrier. He had nowhere left to go.

Jahna’s encounter with the Old Man was the last contact of all.

Rood, silhouetted against the sunset, looked dusty, hot. At his side was Olith, Jahna’s aunt. Rood’s eyes were wide, as he took in what he saw in the cave.

For Jahna, it was like snapping awake from a nightmare. She dropped the bit of hide she had been working, ran forward across a cave floor that suddenly seemed filthy and cluttered, and hurled herself into her father’s arms. There she wept like a very small child, while her father’s hands hesitantly patted the crude bonehead wrap she wore.

The bonehead roused. The shadows of the two adults, cast by the setting sun, striped over him. He raised a hand to shield his eyes. Then, bleary with sleep, heavy with meat, he struggled to get to his feet, growling.

Rood pushed the children to Olith, who held them. Then he raised a cobble over the struggling bonehead’s cranium.

Jahna cried, “No!” She struggled free of Olith and grabbed her father’s hand.

Rood stared down at her. And she realized she had a choice to make.

Jahna thought about it for a heartbeat. She remembered the mussels, the seals, the fires she had built. And she looked at the ugly, lumpy brow of the bonehead. She released her father’s arm.

Rood let his arm fall. It was a heavy blow. The bonehead fell forward. But bonehead skulls were thick. It seemed to Jahna that the Old Man could have got up, fought on even now. But he didn’t. He remained in the dirt of his cave, on his hands and knees.

It took four, five blows before Rood had gotten through his skull. Long before the last blow Jahna had turned away.

They stayed in the cave one more night, with the fallen bonehead slumped on the floor, blood pooled beneath his shattered skull. In the morning they wrapped up what was left of the seal meat, and prepared to begin the journey back. But before they left Jahna insisted they dig a hole in the ground, wide but shallow. Into the hole she dropped the bones of the infant she had found, and the big carcass of the bonehead. Then she kicked the dirt back into the hole, and tamped it down with her feet.

After they had gone the gulls came. They pecked at the bits of seal meat, and the patch of dried blood in the entrance of the cave that faced the sea.

I

The two girls, lying side by side, nibbled at their kernels of wild grain.

“So you like Tori better than Jaypee,” said Sion.

Juna, at sixteen a year younger than her sister, flicked her hair out of her eyes. Her hair was a pale blond, strikingly bright. She said carefully, “Maybe. I think he likes me better than Jaypee does.”

“But you said Tori was a runt. You said you liked the way Jaypee’s hair falls when he runs, and those big thighs he has, and—”

“I know what I said,” Juna said uncomfortably. “But Tori has a better—”

“Cock?”

“A better personality,” Juna forced out.

Sion’s pealing laughter billowed out over the empty space. A dog, slumbering in the shade of the men’s hut, deigned to move one eye to check out the disturbance, then fell back asleep.

The girls were surrounded by the bare, trampled dust of the village. The place was dominated by the great slumped form of the men’s hut, a ramshackle construction of timber and reeds. The women’s huts were smaller satellites of this rude giant. Gravelly snoring from within the men’s hut told the girls that the shaman was sleeping off another hard night of beer and visions. Nobody was moving: not the dogs, not the adults. Most of the men were out hunting; the women were dozing in their huts with their infants. There weren’t even any children around.

Sion sprinkled a little more ground fennel on her grain. The fennel’s aromatic oil was actually a defense evolved by the plant before the death of the dinosaurs, intended to make its leaves too slippery for the legs of boring, nibbling insects; now the result of that ancient evolutionary arms race flavored Sion’s snack. “You are joking,” said Sion. “Juna, I love you dearly. But you are the most shallow person I know. Since when has personality mattered a dried fig to you?”

Juna felt her face burn.

“Ah. There’s something you aren’t telling me.” Sion studied Juna’s face with a hunter’s expert knowledge of her prey. “Have you two lain together? ”

“No,” Juna snapped.

Sion was still suspicious. “I didn’t think Tori was lying with anybody yet. Apart from Acta, of course.” Acta was one of the oldest of the men — not to mention the fattest — but he continued to prove his strength with his wily leadership of the hunts, and so he continued to assert his rights over the boys and young men. “I know Tori’s getting sick of being poked with Acta’s stinking dick; that’s what Jaypee told me! Soon he’s going to want to be with a woman, but not yet—”

Juna couldn’t meet her sister’s eyes — for the truth was, she had lain with Tori, just as Sion suspected. It had been out in the bush, with Tori boastfully full of beer. She didn’t know why she’d let him do it. She hadn’t even been sure he had done it right. She longed to tell her sister everything — how her bleeding had stopped, how she already felt the new life moving inside her — but how could she? Times were hard — times were always hard — and it wasn’t a good time to be producing a baby by a feckless boy. She hadn’t yet told Tori himself. She hadn’t even told her mother, Pepule, who was herself expecting a child. “Sion, I—”

There was a hand on her arm, hot and heavy, a breath redolent with unfamiliar spices. “Hello, girls. Something on your mind?” Juna flinched away, pulling her arm free.

This was Cahl, the beer man. He was a big man, fatter even than Acta, and he wore strangely constraining clothes: a tightly sewn jacket and trousers, heavy leather shoes, a hat stuffed with straw. On his back was a heavy skin full of ale; it sloshed as he squatted down beside them. His skin was cratered, like soil after rain, and his teeth were ugly brown stumps. But his gaze, as he smiled at Juna, had a kind of predator’s intensity.

Sion glared at him. “Why don’t you go back where you came from? Nobody wants you here.”

He frowned briefly, striving to translate what she had said. His language was different from theirs. It was a common speculation that Cahl’s folk had come from somewhere far to the east, bringing their peculiar language with them. “Oh,” he said at last, “plenty of people want me here. Some want me an awful lot. You’d be surprised what people will give me, in return for what I can give them.” And he leered again, showing a mouthful of brown, rotten teeth. “Maybe we should talk about it, you and me,” he said to Juna. “Maybe we should find out what we can do for each other.”

“Keep away from me,” Juna said tremulously.

But Cahl kept on staring at her, a snake’s stare, hard and intense.

It was with relief that she heard the footsteps of the returning men, their bare feet grinding in the dirt. Their naked bodies were caked with dust, and they were obviously weary. Juna saw that once again the dozen men had returned home empty-handed save for a few rabbits and rats; bigger game was very rare.

Old man Acta had his fat arm draped over Tori’s shoulders. Juna didn’t want to meet the slim boy’s gaze, and yet she longed to know what he was thinking. How would he react if she told him what had happened as a result of their foolish fumble?

Cahl broke away from the girls, stood up, and raised his sack of beer over his head. “Welcome the hunters!”

Acta strode up to him. His tongue hung out doglike, as if the pendulous sack contained the only drink in the world. “Cahl, my friend. I hoped you would be here. You are a better shaman than that old fool in the hut.”

Sion gasped at that casual blasphemy.

Cahl handed over the beer sack. “You look like you need this.”

Acta grabbed it and held it close. But a trace of his old wiliness showed in his deep, piglike eyes. “And the payment? You can see how we are. We have little enough meat for ourselves. But—”

“But,” said Cahl evenly, “you will take the beer anyway. Won’t you?” And he kept staring, until he had faced down Acta. Some of the men muttered uncomfortably at this show of weakness. But what Cahl said was obviously true. Cahl slapped Acta’s shoulder amiably. “We can talk about it later. Go rest in the shade. And as for me—”

“Take her,” Acta mumbled, gazing at the beer. “Do what you like.” He shambled toward the men’s hut. The other failed hunters dumped their meat outside the women’s huts and followed Acta, eager for a share in the beer. Soon Juna heard the growling of the shaman, who was always quickly revived by the stink of ale.

Cahl came back to the girls. He shook his head. “In my home such a depraved oaf would be cast out.”

Sion prickled at this new insult. “The boys live with the men, in the men’s hut. It is a place of wisdom, where the boys learn to be men. And each man has a small house for his wife and his daughters and his infant sons. It is our way. It has always been our way.”

“It might be your way, but it isn’t mine,” Cahl said bluntly.

Juna found her curiosity pricked by that.

The only thing anybody knew about the new people, save for their marvelous ability to make beer, was that there were many, many of them. Some of the women whispered that no baby was discarded among the strangers — not one, not ever. And that was why there was so many of them, though nobody had any idea how they fed themselves. Perhaps in their valleys and lowlands the animals still ran in great herds, just as they had in the days long gone, the days of legends.

“Who?” Sion asked softly.

“Who?”

“Acta said, ‘Take her.’ Who?”

“Why, his wife,” Cahl said. “Pepule. Ah. I can see why you’re interested. Acta isn’t your father, but Pepule is your mother, isn’t she?” He grinned, and gazed at Juna with that stone-hard intensity. “That will add spice. While I hump her I will think of you, little one.”

Sion said coldly, “Pepule is with child.”

“I know.” He grinned. “I like them that way. Those big bellies, no?” Again his hard, calculating gaze turned on Juna. Then he took a pinch of ground corn from her mortar and strode away to their mother’s hut.

Dissatisfied, vaguely afraid, Juna left the men to their drinking. She walked out into the country with her grandmother, Sheb. Sheb, nearly sixty, moved with caution, but in her long life she had avoided injury and serious illness and stayed limber.

The people lived on a high plateau. The land was dry, flat, all but featureless. Vegetation clung to the ground, deep-rooted, searching for water. There were streams and rivers, but they were trickles of waters that flowed between mighty banks; they seemed niggardly, starved, a relic of what had evidently passed away.

Naked, carrying lengths of rope and small stone-tipped spears, the women moved from place to place, setting and checking traps for the small game that provided the staple of the people’s diet. They would have been astonished could they have glimpsed the mighty herds of giant herbivores that Jahna and her people had once followed, even though their folk tales talked of richer times in the past.

“Why do the men drink beer?” Juna fretted. “It makes them ugly and stupid. And they have to go to that slithery Cahl. If they must drink beer, they should make their own. They would be just as stupid, but at least Cahl would keep away.”

Sheb sighed. “It isn’t so simple. We can’t make beer. Nobody knows how, not even the shaman. It is a secret Cahl’s people keep to themselves.”

“When the men are stupid they cannot hunt. All they think about is the beer. It is all they see.”

Sheb shook her head. “I won’t argue with you, child. My father never drank beer — we had never heard of beer in those days — and he was a fine hunter. Look, now. A rabbit is near.”

Juna dutifully studied the bits of rabbit dropping, pressing them to see how fresh they were. She badly wanted to talk about Tori.

But Sheb had her own agenda. “I remember when I was your age,” she was saying. “Once it rained as if the sky had split open, for day after day. The ground turned to mud, and we all sank in up to our knees. And water filled this valley here — not the muddy trickle you see now — all the way up the bank. See where the lip has been scoured?” And, yes, if she looked hard, Juna could make out how the bank had been eroded far above the current water level.

But so what? Absently Juna rubbed her belly. Her grandmother’s tales of huge rain storms, a land turned to mud, the explosive blossoming of life that had followed, were like the fantastic visions of the shaman. They didn’t mean anything to her. What did rain and rivers matter compared to the growing lump inside her?

Her grandmother slapped her head. Juna flinched, startled. Sheb scowled, making her wrinkles deepen. “It would pay you to listen to me, you foolish child. I remember how it was, the last time the rains came. I remember how we coped. How we moved to the higher ground. How we forded the river. All of it. Maybe I won’t live to see the rains come again as they did before, but maybe you will. And then all that will keep you alive is what I have told you today.”

Juna knew she had a point. Old people were cared for deeply: Before Sheb’s own mother’s death, Juna had seen Sheb chew her food until soft and spit it into a bowl for her. In this society without writing, old people were libraries of wisdom and experience. And now she was determined to make her granddaughter listen.

But today Juna was in no mood for a lesson in humility. She tried to stare back, defiant, resentful, but, before Sheb’s ferocious glare, she broke down. “Oh, Sheb—” The weeping came suddenly and easily; she rested her head on Sheb’s shoulder and let her tears fall to the arid ground.

“Tell me. What can be so bad?”

Sheb listened gravely to what she had to say. She asked specific questions: Who was the father, how he had approached her or she him, why she had chosen to conceive now. She seemed most dissatisfied with the news that it had all been a childish mistake. In response to Juna’s agonized questions — “Sheb, what am I to do?” — for now, at least, Sheb would say nothing. But Juna thought she saw the shape of her future in the hard, sad lines of Sheb’s set expression.

And then there was a keening wail from the village. Juna took her grandmother’s arm and helped her to hurry home.

It turned out that Pepule, Juna’s mother, Sheb’s daughter, had gone into labor early.

As she entered the camp with Sheb, Juna saw the beer man, Cahl, walking away eastward, back toward his mysterious home. A sack of goods over his arm, he ignored the labor cries of the woman with whom he had lain only that morning, and Juna glared with futile hostility at his retreating back.

In Pepule’s hut, Sion and other kinswomen had gathered. Juna hurried to Pepule’s side. Pepule’s bleary, pain-filled eyes turned toward her daughter, and she grasped Juna’s hand. Juna saw a bruise the shape of a man’s grip on her mother’s shoulder.

As was their way, the women had set up a frame of wood to which Pepule clung, squatting. Meanwhile others were moistening the patch of earth under Pepule to soften it, and were digging a shallow hole nearby. There was a strong smell of vomit and blood.

Juna had witnessed and aided at many births before, but, bearing her own small burden within, she had never before shared so much pain herself.

At least this birth was quick. The baby dropped easily into the arms of one of Pepule’s sisters. With a brisk, confident motion she cut the infant’s umbilical and tied it off with a strip of sinew, and wiped off the birthing fluid with a bit of skin. Then the older women, including Sheb, clustered around the baby, examining it closely, picking over its limbs and face.

Juna experienced a sudden, unexpected surge of joy. “He’s a boy,” she said to Pepule. “He looks perfect…”

Her mother gazed back at her, her face empty. Then she turned away. Juna became aware that there was muttering from the women working on the baby; some of them glared up at Juna disapprovingly.

Now Juna saw what they were doing. They had put the baby on the ground, where he grasped at the air feebly. He had wisps of blond hair, Juna saw, stuck to his scalp by the fluids from the birth. Pepule’s sister took a stick. She pushed the baby into the hole the women had dug, as if she was shoving away a bit of sour meat. Then the women started to fill in the hole. The first dirt fell on the baby’s uncomprehending face.

“No!” Juna lunged forward.

Sheb, with surprising strength, took her shoulders and pushed her back. “It must be done.”

Juna struggled. “But he is healthy.”

“It,” said Sheb. “Not he. Only people are he, and that baby is not yet a person, and never will be.”

“But Pepule—”

“Look at her. Look, Juna. She is not hurt, not grieving. It is the way. She does not yet feel anything for the baby, not for these first few heartbeats when the decision must be made. If it were to live, to become a he, then the bond would grow firm, of course it would. But the bond is not there yet, and now it can never be.”

On and on.

Pepule was coughing. She sounded exhausted — ill. Juna thought of Cahl lying with her mother just hours ago, and she wondered what filth he had brought with him.

Still Sheb was talking to her.

At last Juna dropped her head. “But the baby is healthy,” she whispered. “He is healthy.”

Sheb sighed. “Oh, child, don’t you see? We cannot feed it, however healthy it is. This is not a time for a child — not for Pepule, anyhow.”

“And me?” Juna raised her head and whispered. “What will become of me? What of my baby?”

Sheb’s eyes clouded.

Juna twisted away and ran out of the hut, with its stink of shit and blood and useless milk.

The two sisters sat whispering in a corner of the small shelter they had constructed for themselves as children.

Juna had told Sion everything.

“I have to go,” she said. “That’s all. I knew it the moment they pushed the baby into that hole. Pepule is strong and experienced, where I am a child. And Acta, for all his drunken flaws, is beside her still. Tori doesn’t even know my baby is his. If her baby is pushed into a hole, then what of mine?”

In the dusty dark, Sion shook her head. “You shouldn’t speak like that. Sheb was right. It was not a person, not until it was named.”

“They killed him.”

“No. They could not let it live. For if all the babies were allowed to live, there wouldn’t be enough to eat, and that would kill us all. You know the truth of it. There is nothing to be done.”

It was ancient wisdom, drummed into them since birth, an echo of tens of millennia of human subsistence. Jo’on and Leda had had to face this. So had Rood’s people. It was the price you paid. But for some in each generation, it was too high a price.

“I don’t care,” said Juna.

Sion reached for her sister’s hand. “You can’t leave. You must give birth here. Let the women come to you. And if they decide the time is not right—”

“But I’m not like Pepule,” Juna said miserably. “I won’t be able to give it up. I just know it.” She looked into her sister’s shadowed face. “Is there something wrong with me? Why am I not as strong as our mother? It feels as if I love my baby even now, as strongly as Pepule ever loved you or me. I know that if they take it from me, then I may as well follow it into the hole, for I could not live.”

“Don’t talk like that,” said Sion.

“I will go in the morning,” Juna said, trying to sound stronger. “I will take a spear. That is all I need.”

“Where will you go? You can’t live alone — and definitely not with a baby at your breast. And wherever you go the people will drive you off with stones. You know that. We would do the same.”

But there is one place, Juna thought, where the people are at least different, where, perhaps, they do not murder their babies, where the people may not drive me off.

“Come with me, Sion. Please.”

Sion, her eyes drying, pulled back. “No. If you want to kill yourself, I — I respect your choice. But I will not die with you.”

“Then there is nothing more to be said.”

Carrying nothing but a spear and a spear-thrower, wearing a simple shift of tanned goat hide, she jogged easily. She covered the ground quickly, despite the unaccustomed burden in her belly.

The land was so dry that Cahl’s footsteps were crisp. Here and there she found his spoor — splashes of half-dried piss on rocks, a neatly coiled turd — hunting beer men, it seemed, was not hard. Even far from the village, farther than the hunters would usually roam, the land was empty.

After Jahna’s time, once more the ice had retreated, brooding, to its Arctic fastnesses. The pine forests had marched north, greening the old tundra. And across the Old World people spread out from the refuges where they had survived the great winter, islands of relative warmth in the Balkans, the Ukraine, Spain. Quickly their children began to fill up the immense depopulated plains of Europe and Asia.

But things were not as they had been the last time the ice retreated.

In Australia, since Ejan’s first footsteps, it had taken a mere five thousand years to achieve the grand erasing of the megafauna, the great kangaroos, reptiles, and birds. Now, everywhere people went, similar patterns unfolded.

In North America there had been ground sloths the size of rhinos, giant camels, bison with sharp-tipped horns that measured more than a man’s arm span from tip to tip. These massive creatures were the prey of muscular jaguars, saber-toothed tigers, dire wolves with teeth able to crunch bone, and the terrible short-faced bears. The American prairies might have looked like Africa’s Serengeti Plain in later times.

When the first humans marched from Asia into Alaska, this fantastic assemblage imploded. Seven in ten of the large animal species were lost within centuries. Even the native horses were destroyed. Many of the creatures that did survive — like the musk oxen, bison, moose, and elk — were, like the humans, immigrants from Asia, with a long history of learning how to survive in a world owned by people.

Similarly, in South America, once humans walked across the Panama land bridge, eight in ten of the large animal species would be destroyed. It happened across the great plains of Eurasia too. Even the mammoths were lost. All the large animals vanished like mist.

The damage was not always proportionate to the size of the territory occupied. In New Zealand, where there had been no mammals but bats, evolution had playfully filled the roles of mammals with other creatures, especially birds. There were flightless geese instead of rabbits, little songbirds instead of mice, gigantic eagles instead of leopards, and seventeen different species of moa, giant flightless birds, eerie avian parallels to deer. This unique fauna, like that of an alien planet, was wiped out within a few hundred years of human settlement — not always by humans themselves, but by the creatures they brought with them, especially the rats, which devastated the nests of the ground-dwelling birds.

All these animals had been under pressure from the fast-changing climate at the end of the glaciation. But most of these ancient lines had survived many similar changes before. The difference this time was the presence of humans. It was no great blitzkrieg. People were often pretty inept as hunters, and big game contributed only a fraction of their diet. Many communities, like Jahna’s folk, actually believed they were touching the animals lightly. But by pressuring the animals at a time when they were most vulnerable, by selectively killing off the young, by disrupting habitats, by taking out key components of the food webs that sustained communities of creatures, they did immense damage. It was only in Africa, where the animals had evolved alongside humans and had had time to adapt to their ways, that something like the old Pleistocene diversity was maintained.

Rood’s chill Eden had long gone. There had been a hideous shriveling, leaving an empty, echoing world, through which people walked as if bewildered, quickly forgetting that the great exotic beasts and different kinds of people had even existed.

People still lived by hunting and gathering, of course. But it turned out to be much harder to hunt deer and boar in the forests than it had been to ambush reindeer crossing rivers on the open steppe. After the extinctions, life was impoverished compared to what it had been in the past, with poorer quality food and less leisure time. Worldwide, people’s culture actually devolved, becoming simpler.

Always, deep down, they would know that there was something wrong. And now they faced a new pressure.

Juna had been traveling only half a day when she caught up with Cahl. He had sprawled in the shade of a worn sandstone bluff, and he was eating a root. The meat and artifacts of shell and bone he had taken from the people had been dumped in the dirt at his side.

He watched her as she approached, his eyes bright in the shade. “Well,” he said silkily. “Little gold head.”

She didn’t understand that word, “gold.” She slowed as she approached, dismayed by his hard stare.

He got to his feet clumsily. His belly strained at his skin shirt. “What a frightened rabbit!” he said. “Look, you came all this way to find me, not the other way around. And I notice that no matter how repulsive I am, you aren’t yet running off. So, why are you here?”

She stood frozen, staring at him. Her mind seemed flattened, as if a great rock had fallen on her, pinning her to the dirt. Although she had rehearsed this encounter — imagining herself taking control, making demands — this wasn’t going remotely as she had planned.

He said, “No reply? Here’s why. You want something from me.” He approached her, his gaze raking over her body. “That’s how I make my living. Everybody wants something. And if I can figure out what that one thing is, then I can make anybody do whatever I like.”

She forced herself to speak. “As Acta wants beer.”

He grinned. “You follow. Good. So, just like Acta, you want something from me. But you’re not going to get it, little girl, until you figure out what I might want from you.” He walked around her, and let his fingertips slide over her buttocks. “You’re skinny for my taste. Lean. All that chasing after wild goats, I suppose.” He yawned, stretching, and looked off into the distance. “Frankly, child, I wore out my cock humping that fat mother of yours.”

Impulsively she pulled up her shirt, exposing her belly.

Startled, he ran his hand over her skin, feeling the bump there. The flesh of his palm was oddly soft, without calluses. “Well,” he said, breathing harder. “I knew there was something different about you. I must have good instincts. And as for you, you’re getting the idea. My strange lust for pregnant sows; my one weakness—” He stroked his chin. “But I still don’t know what you want. I can’t believe it’s the alluring thought of my fat belly on your back—”

“The baby,” she blurted. “They killed it.”

“What baby? Ah. Your mother’s. They wouldn’t let her keep her calf, eh? I know that’s what you animals do, kill your young. Some say you feast on the tender little corpses.” He continued to study her, calculating. “I think I see. If you have your baby, they’ll take it away too. So that’s why you came running after a greedy wretch like me — to save your unborn baby.” Briefly his expression dissolved, and she thought she glimpsed sympathy.

She murmured, “They say—”

“Yes?”

“They say that in your place no babies are killed.”

He shrugged. “We have a lot of food. We don’t have to spend all of every day running after rabbits, as you people do. That’s why we don’t have to murder our children.”

She wondered how this miracle could come about: Cahl’s people must have a powerful shaman indeed.

But that brief lightening of Cahl’s face had already dissipated, to be replaced by a kind of desperate greed. He approached her and grabbed her breast, pinching hard; she forced herself not to cry out. “If you come with me it will be hard for you. The way we live is—” he waved a hand at the open plain “—different from all this. More than you can imagine. And you will have to do as I say. That is our way.”

She could smell his breath. She closed her eyes, shutting out his moonlike, pockmarked face. This was the decision point, she knew. She could still turn away, still run home. But her baby would be doomed. When Acta and Pepule found out they might even try to beat it out of her belly.

“I’ll do what you say,” she said hastily. What could be worse than that?

“Good,” he said, his breath coming in short, hot gasps. “Now, let’s get down to business. Kneel down.”

So it began, there in the dirt. She was grateful that nobody she cared about could see her.

II

He made her carry his load of meat, his bag of half-chewed roots, and his empty beer sack. He said it was the way, in his home. It wasn’t heavy — the meat was nothing more than the spindly catch of small game brought back by the men the day before — but it seemed very strange to Juna to have to walk behind Cahl with meat piled on her shoulder while he strutted ahead, inexpertly brandishing her spear.

Soon they had walked far from her familiar range. It was deeply frightening to think that she was entering land where, probably, none of her ancestors had set a foot, not once; deep taboos, inspired by her well-founded fear of death at the hands of strangers, warred against her impulse to continue. But continue she did, for she had no choice.

They had to spend one night in the open. He brought her to the shelter of a bluff, a half cave he had evidently used before, for she saw more signs of his unpleasant spoor. He would not let her eat any of the meat, nor even hunt for more. Evidently he didn’t trust her that far. But he gave her some of the thin, ill-tasting roots he had carried.

As darkness fell he used her again. The brutal coupling made her juvenile fumbling with Tori seem full of tenderness. But to her relief Cahl finished quickly — he had already spent himself that day — and when he rolled off her he quickly fell asleep.

She massaged her bruised thighs, alone with her thoughts.

In the morning they began to descend from the high, dry plateau into a broad valley. This was a greener land; grass grew thickly, and she could see the blue thread of a sluggish river, with trees clustered in a green ribbon along its bank. This would be a good place to live, she thought — better than the arid upper lands. There must be plenty of game here. But as they descended further she caught only fleeting glimpses of rabbits and mice and birds. There was no sign of the spoor of large animals, none of their characteristic tracks.

At last she made out a broad brown scar close to the bank of the river. Smoke rose from a dozen places, and she made out movement, a pale wriggling, like maggots in a wound. But the maggots were people, crowded, diminished by distance.

Gradually she understood. It was a town: a huge, sprawling settlement. She was astonished. She had never seen a human gathering on such a scale. Deepening dread settled in her stomach as they moved on.

Even before they got to the settlement they began to encounter people.

They all seemed short, dark, and bent, and they wore filthy clothes. And men, women, and children alike worked at patches of ground. Juna had never seen anything like it. In one place they were bent over, scratching roughly at the bare soil with stone tools mounted in wood. A little further on there was a meadow full of grass — nothing but grass — and the people here were pulling at the grass stems, plucking seeds to collect in baskets and bowls. Some of them peered up as she passed, showing a dull curiosity.

Cahl saw her staring. “These are fields,” he said. “This is how we feed our children. See? You clear the ground. You plant the seed. You kill the weeds while the crops grow. You take your harvest.”

She struggled to make sense of this; there were too many unfamiliar words. “Where is your shaman?”

He laughed. “We are all shamans, perhaps.”

They passed another open area — another “field,” as Cahl called it — where goats were penned by a fence of wooden stakes and bramble. When they saw Cahl and Juna approaching, the goats ran bleating to the fence, their heads lunging forward. They were hungry, Juna saw immediately. They had eaten all the grass in their enclosure, and they longed to be free, to go find food in the valley and the hills. She had no idea why the people kept them shut up like this.

They reached the valley bottom. The grass petered out, giving way to churned-up mud that was thick with shit and piss — human waste, just dumped here. It must be like living on a huge midden, she thought.

At last they reached the settlement itself. The huts were very solid and permanent, built on frames of tree trunks rammed into the muddy ground, and plastered over with mud and straw. They had holes in their roofs, from many of which smoke curled, even now in the middle of the day. Huts were huts. But there were many, many of them, so many she couldn’t even count them.

And there were people everywhere.

They wore the strange, tightly sewn, all-covering clothes that Cahl favored. They were all smaller than she was, men and women alike, and their dark skin was pocked and scarred. Many of the women carried huge burdens. Here was one small woman bent over under a great sack; the sack was tied to her forehead, and it looked like it must weigh more than she did. By contrast the men seemed to carry little beyond what they could hold in their hands.

She had never seen so many people in her life, still less all crammed together in such a small space. Despite what she had glimpsed of the fields she still had no idea how such a dense knot of people could feed themselves; surely they must soon drive off all the game, devour all the edible vegetation in the area. And yet she saw butchered carcasses stacked outside one hut, grain baskets outside another.

And there were many children here. Several trailed after Juna, plucking at her shift and gazing at her shining hair. Then that much at least was true: There really were more children here than her own community could ever afford to support. But many of the children had bent bones and pocked skin and browned teeth. Some of them were scrawny, even displaying the ominous potbellies of malnutrition.

The men crowded around Cahl and Juna, jabbering in an incomprehensible language. They seemed to be congratulating Cahl, as if he were a hunter home with game. When the men leered at her she saw their teeth were bad, as bad as Cahl’s.

Suddenly her nerve gave out. Too many people. She shrank back, but they followed her, pressing closer, and children plucked at her yellow hair, yelling. She found herself panicking, breathless. She longed for a glimpse of green, but there was no green, nothing but the shit brown of this dung heap of a place. The world spun around her. She fell, helplessly dumping Cahl’s meat in the dirt. She was aware of Cahl’s angry yell. But still children and adults clamored around her, prying, laughing.

She came to herself slowly, reluctantly.

She had been taken inside one of the huts. She was on her back, on the floor. She could see daylight poking through cracks and seams in the roof above her.

And Cahl was on her again, thrusting, heavy. She could smell nothing but the beer on his breath.

There were other people in the hut, moving in the dim dark, jabbering a language she couldn’t understand. There were many children, of various ages. She wondered if they were all Cahl’s. A woman came close. She was short, like the rest, scrawny, her face slack and lined, her black hair lying flat beside her face. She was carrying a bowl containing some liquid. She looked older than Juna -

Cahl’s meaty hand clamped painfully around her jaw. “Watch me, you sow. Watch me, not her.” And he continued his thrusting, harder than before.

At dawn the black-haired woman — whose name turned out to be Gwerei — came to rouse Juna with a kick to her backside. Juna climbed off the rough, filthy pallet she had been given, trying not to gag on air dense and laden with the stink of sweat and farts.

The woman jabbered at Juna, pointing at the hearth. Then, irritated at Juna’s incomprehension, she stamped out of the hut. She returned with a fat day log that she threw on the fire. Pushing children out of the way, she uncovered a pit in the ground, which contained a mass of billowy white shapes. At first Juna thought they were fungi, perhaps mushrooms. But the woman bit into one of the masses, and broke up others, throwing handfuls to the clamoring children.

She threw a chunk of the white stuff to Juna. Juna tried it cautiously. It was bland, tasteless; it was like biting into wood. And it was gritty, with hard bits inside that ground against her teeth. But she had eaten nothing since her last stop with Cahl on the high plain, and hunger gnawed. So she devoured the food as readily as the children did.

It was her first mouthful of bread, though it would be many days before she learned its name.

While they ate, Cahl snored on in his pallet. It seemed strange to Juna that he should choose to stay with the women, but there seemed to be no men’s hut here.

When they had eaten, Gwerei took her out of the town, up the valley, and to the open spaces on the far side. They walked in silence, since they shared not a word of common language: Juna was trapped in a bubble of incomprehension. But she was relieved just to get out of the great anthill of people that was the town.

Soon they were joined by more women, older children, a few men. They followed ruts worn into the ground by innumerable feet. Some of the women gazed at Juna curiously — and the men speculatively — but they seemed exhausted before their day had even started. She wondered where they were all going. Nobody was carrying any weapons, any spears or snares or traps. They weren’t even looking for spoor, tracks or dung, any signifiers that animals had been here. They didn’t even look around at the land they inhabited.

At last she came to the open spaces she had glimpsed yesterday, the fields. Gwerei led her into one of these fields, where people were already at work. Gwerei handed her a tool, and began to jabber at her, miming, holding her fists together and scratching imaginary gouges in the air.

Juna inspected the tool. It was like an ax, with a stone head fixed to a wooden handle by a binding of sinew and resin. But it was big, surely too heavy to use as an ax, yet the curved stone blade made it impractical to use even as a thrusting spear. As Gwerei yelled at her with increasing frustration, she just stared back.

At last Gwerei had to show her. She bent over the dirt, clasping the tool, and stuck the blade deep into the ground. Then she began to walk backward, legs stiff, bent over, dragging the blade through the earth. She had made a furrow a hand’s length deep in the ground.

Juna saw that other people were doing just as Gwerei had, dragging their curved axes through the ground. She remembered seeing people do this yesterday. It was so simple a task a child could have done it, with enough strength. But it was hard work. After engraving furrows just a few paces long they were all grunting, their faces slick with sweat and dirt.

Still Juna had no idea why they were doing this. But she took the tool from Gwerei and rammed the blade into the ground. Then she bent as Gwerei had done and hauled the handle backward, until she had scraped a furrow just like Gwerei’s. One woman clapped ironically.

Juna handed the tool back to Gwerei. “I’ve done that,” she said in her own language. “Now what?”

The answer turned out to be simple. She had to do the same thing again, a little further on. And again after that. She, and the rest of the people here, had nothing to do but scrape these marks in the ground.

All day.

Where was the skill in this muck-scraping compared to even the simplest hunt, the setting of a rabbit snare? Did these people have no minds, no spirits? But perhaps this was part of the magic that the shamans here used to make their heaps of food, the abundance that allowed them to gather in great maggoty swarms and litter the ground with children. And besides, she reminded herself, she was a stranger here, and she must learn Gwerei’s ways, not the other way around.

So she bent to her dull, repetitive work. But before the sun had risen much higher, she longed to get away from this tedium, to be running on the high plain. And after a day of forcing her body — a machine exquisitely designed for walking, running, throwing — to endure this repetitive hard labor, the aches became so overwhelming that all she wanted was for it to stop.

The next day, she was taken to another field, and put to the same dull plowing. And the next day was the same.

And the day after that.

It was agriculture: primitive, but agriculture. This new way of living had never been planned. It just emerged, step by step.

As far back as Pebble’s time, even before true humans had emerged, people had been gathering the wild plants they favored and eliminating others that competed for resources. The domestication of animals had also begun accidentally. Dogs had learned to hunt with humans, and been rewarded for it. Goats had learned to follow human bands for the garbage they left behind — and the humans in turn learned to use the goats not just for their meat, but for their milk. For hundreds of thousands of years, there had been an unconscious selection of those plant and animal kinds most useful to humans. Now it had become conscious.

It had begun in a valley not far from here. For centuries the people there had enjoyed a steadily warming climate, and a rich diet of fruit, nuts, wild grains, and wild game. But then there had been a sudden drier, colder spell. The forests had shrunk back. The sources of wild food had begun to vanish.

So the people had focused their efforts on the grains they favored — the ones with big seeds that were easy to remove from the seed coats, and with nonshattering stalks that held all the seeds together — trying to ensure their growth at the expense of the less desirable plants around them.

Peas were another early success. The pods of wild peas would explode, scattering the peas on the ground to germinate. People preferred the occasional mutants whose pods failed to pop because they were easier to gather. In the wild such peas would fail to germinate, but they flourished under human attention. Similar nonpopping varieties of lentils, flax, and poppies were also favorites.

And so, by spreading the seeds of their preferred plants and eliminating those they did not favor, the people had begun to select. Very quickly the plants began to adapt. Within just a century, fatter-grained cereals, like rye, had begun to emerge. Some plants were favored for the large size of their seeds, like sunflowers, and others for the smallness of their seeds, like bananas, which became all fruit and no seed. Some genes that would once even have been lethal were now favored, like those for the nonpopping pea pods.

The first rye growers had not settled down immediately. For a time they had still collected their wild staples alongside their thin harvests. The new fields had served as dependable larders, a hedge against starvation in difficult times: As with all innovations, farming had grown out of the practices that had preceded it.

But the new cultivation had proved so effective that soon they devoted their lives to it. Most of what grew wild was inedible; nine-tenths of what a farmer could grow could be eaten. That was how these people were able to afford so many babies; that was what fed the great anthill heaping of the town.

It was the most profound revolution in hominid living since Homo erectus had left the forest and committed themselves to the savannah. Compared to this phase shift, the advances of the future — even genetic engineering — were details. There would never be so significant a change again, not until humans themselves disappeared from the planet.

But the farming revolution did not make Earth a paradise.

Farming meant work: endless, bone-cracking drudgery every day. As the ground was cleared of everything except what people wanted to grow, humans had to do all the work that nature had once done for them: aerating the soil, fighting pests, fertilizing, weeding. Farming meant the sacrifice of your whole life — your skills, the joy of running, the freedom to choose what you would do — to the toil of the fields.

It was not even that the food they so laboriously scraped from the ground was rich. While the old hunter-gatherers had enjoyed a varied diet with adequate amounts of minerals, proteins, and vitamins, the farmers took most of their sustenance from starchy crops: It was as if they had exchanged expensive, high-quality food for nutrition that was plentiful but poor in quality. As a result — and because of the relentless hard work — they had become significantly less healthy than their ancestors. They had worse teeth, and were plagued by anemia. Women’s elbows were wrecked by the constant work of grinding. Men suffered vastly increased social stress, resulting in frequent beatings and murders.

Compared to their tall, healthy ancestors, people were actually shrinking.

And then there were the deaths.

It was true that the mothers here did not have to sacrifice their babies. Indeed, the women were encouraged to have children as rapidly as possible, for children fulfilled the endless demand for more laborers for the fields: By the age of thirty, many of the women were exhausted by the endless drain of nursing and caring for weaned infants.

But where many were born, so did many more die. It did not take long for Juna to see it. Disease was rare among Juna’s folk, but it was not rare here, in this crowded, filthy place. You could almost see it spreading, as people sneezed and coughed, as they scratched weeping sores, as their diarrhea poisoned the water supply of their neighbors. And the myriad afflictions targeted the weakest, the oldest and youngest. Many, many children died, far more than among Juna’s folk.

And there was barely a handful of people her grandmother’s age. Juna wondered what happened to all the wisdom when the old died so cheaply and so early.

The days wore by, identical, meaningless. The work was routine. But then everything here was a routine, the same thing, day after day.

Cahl continued to use her, most nights. He seemed to lack vigor, though. Sometimes he would come at her hard, pushing her down and ripping aside her shift, or pushing her on her face to take her from behind. It was as if he had to work himself up, to excite himself. But if he had taken too much beer, his pisser would not rise at all.

He was a weak man, she realized. He had power over her, but she did not fear him. In the end even his taking of her had become routine, just part of the background to her life. She was relieved, though, that she couldn’t become pregnant with his brat — not while Tori’s child continued to grow inside her.

One day, while she was straining to drag her stone plough across dry, rocky ground, sheep came blundering over a bluff, bleating noisily. Always ready for a break, the workers in the field straightened up to watch. They laughed as the sheep stumbled over the broken ground, nudging each other nervously and nuzzling in search of grass.

But now there was a frenzied barking. A dog came tearing over the bluff, chased by a boy wielding a wooden staff. As the workers laughed, clapped and whistled, the boy and the dog began to chase the sheep, with comical incompetence.

Gwerei was at Juna’s side. She peered into her baffled face. Then, not unkindly, she pointed at the sheep. “Owis. Kludhi.” She picked out the sheep with her finger, one by one. “Oynos. Dwo. Treyes. Owis.” And she nudged Juna, trying to get her to respond.

Juna, her back aching, her hair matted, had had enough strangeness. “I’ll never understand.”

But Gwerei, remarkably, stayed patient. “Owis. Kludhi. Owis.”

And she began to speak to Juna, in her own tongue, but much more slowly and clearly than usual — and, to Juna’s shock, with one or two words of Juna’s language, presumably picked up from Cahl. She was trying to tell Juna something, something very important.

Juna subsided and listened. It took a long time. But gradually she pieced together what Gwerei was trying to tell her. Learn the language. Listen and learn. Because that is the only way you will ever get away from Cahl. Listen now.

Reluctantly she nodded. “Owis,” she repeated. “Sheep. Owis. One, two, three—”

And so Juna learned her first words in the language of Gwerei and Cahl, these first farmers: her first words in the language that would one day be called proto-Indo-European.

As the days wore by, so her bump grew steadily. It began to hinder her work in the field, and her strength seemed drained. The other workers observed this, and some grumbled, though most of the women seemed to forgive Juna her slowing down.

But she worried. What would Cahl do when the child was born? Would he find her so attractive without a swollen belly? If he turned her out, she would be in as bad a position as if she had simply taken her chances on the high plain — worse, perhaps, after months of bad diet and backbreaking work, in a place she neither knew nor understood. The worry grew into a gnaw that consumed her mind, just as the growing child seemed to consume her body’s strength.

But then the stranger with the shining necklace came to the town.

It was evening. She was shambling back from the fields as usual, mud-covered and exhausted.

Cahl was making his way to the hut of the beer maker. Juna had glimpsed the great wooden vats inside the hut, where the beer maker churned domesticated grasses and other unidentifiable substances to make his crude wheat ale. The beer seemed to have little effect on Cahl’s people — not until they had consumed vast quantities of it — little, anyhow, compared to what it did to Acta and the others. No wonder it was such a useful trade good for Cahl: cheap for him, priceless to Acta.

But this evening Cahl had with him a man — tall, as tall as she was, if not quite as lofty as some of the men of Juna’s folk. His face was shaven clean, and his long black hair was tied in a knot at the back of his head. He looked young, surely not much older than she was. His eyes were clear, alert. And he wore extraordinary skins, skins that had been worked until they were soft, carefully stitched and decorated with dancing animal designs in red, blue, and black. She was frightened by the thought of the hours of work that had been invested in such garments.

But what most caught her eye was the necklace he wore around his neck. It was a simple chain of pierced shells. But in the central shell, below his chin, was fixed a lump of something that shone bright yellow, catching the light of the low sun.

Cahl was watching her. He let the young man go on ahead to the beer maker’s hut. In her own tongue he said to her silkily, “Like him, do you? Like the gold around his neck? Think you’d prefer his slim cock to mine? He’s called Keram. Much good that will do you. He’s from Cata Huuk. You don’t know where that is, do you? And you’ll never know.” He grabbed her between the legs and squeezed. “Keep yourself warm for me.” And he pushed her away and walked off.

She had barely noticed his latest assault. Keram. Cata Huuk. She repeated the strange names to herself, over and over.

For she thought that — just for a moment, just before he turned his back to walk to the beer maker’s — the young man had looked at her, and his eyes had widened in a kind of recognition.

It was three months before Keram traveled out from Cata Huuk to the town again.

He’d actually put off the call. As the youngest son of the Potus, he routinely got the worst jobs, and checking on the tribute collection from these outlying towns at the fringe of the city’s hinterland was about as bad as it got.

“And this place,” he told his friend Muti, “is the worst of them all. Look at it.” The riverbank town was just a huddle of dung-colored huts, eroded to shapelessness by rain, stinking smoke curling up from their roofs. “You know what they call this place? Keen” The word meant “Heart” in the language the two young men spoke, a language that was used throughout a wider belt of colonization spreading back from this place far to the east.

Muti grinned. “Keen I like that. Can this be the heart of the world? Why does it look so much like its arsehole, then?” The two of them laughed together, their necklaces of shell and gold nuggets tinkling softly.

Cahl came up to them. The trader joined in with their laughter, his gaiety forced, his dim, piglike eyes darting from one to the other. The guards behind Keram moved subtly, showing their alertness, tilting the tips of their pikes.

Cahl said, “Master Keram. It is a pleasure to see you. How fine you look, how your clothes shine in the sunlight!” He turned to Muti. “And I don’t believe—”

Muti introduced himself. “A second cousin of Keram. Cousin and ally.”

Keram was amused to see the naked calculation in Cahl’s eyes as the trader added Muti’s name and position to the tentative map he was so obviously making of the power structures within Cata Huuk. Cahl began to flap and fuss as he led them into the town. “Come, come. Your tribute is ready, of course, piled in my hut. I have food and beer for you, fresh from the country. Will you stay the night?”

Keram said, “We have many more places to visit before—”

“But you must enjoy our hospitality. Your men too. We have girls, virgins, who are ready for you.” He eyed Muti and winked. “Or boys. Whatever you desire. You are our guests, for as long as you choose to be with us.”

As they walked delicately over the muddy, shit-strewn ground, Muti leaned closer to Keram. “What a repulsive fat slug.”

“He’s just trying his chances. He isn’t even the chief of this little band of dirt-grubbers. And he has some interesting weaknesses, notably for fat women. Perhaps they remind him of the pigs who are no doubt his real loves. But he is useful. Easy to manipulate.”

“Will he ever get to Cata Huuk?”

Keram snorted. “What do you think, cousin?”

Now they were approaching Cahl’s hut — one of the grander in the town, but still a heap of mud in the eyes of the young men.

Keram asked Muti, “Do you want to stay awhile?” He nodded toward the four guards. “I usually let the dogs out of their pen for a while. And Cahl’s usefulness does include digging out the more attractive sows from this sty. Sometimes their mud-hole desperation makes them — interesting. It’s fun, in a strenuous sort of way. But you have to be prepared for a little filth—”

Muti, distracted, asked, “What’s this?”

A girl had come out of Cahl’s hut. She was quite unlike the dark, dumpy women of the town. Though scrawny and obviously careworn, she was tall — as tall as Keram, in fact — slender, and had blond hair that shone strikingly gold, despite the dirt tangled in it. She might have been sixteen or seventeen.

Cahl looked outraged at the girl’s approach. He slammed his meaty fist into her temple, knocking her down in the dirt. “What are you doing? Get back in the hut. I will deal with you later.” And he made to kick the girl as she lay helpless on the ground.

Smoothly, Muti grabbed Cahl’s pudgy arm and twisted it behind his back. Cahl howled, but he quickly subsided.

Keram took the girl’s hand and helped her to her feet. A bruise was already gathering on her temple. He saw now that her legs and arms were discolored by bruises. She was trembling, but she stood straight and faced him. He said, “What is your name?”

Cahl snapped, “Sir, don’t talk to her—” Muti twisted his arm harder. “Ow!”

“Juna.” Her accent was thick and unfamiliar, but her words were clear. “My name is Juna. I am from Cata Huuk,” she said boldly. “I am like you.”

Keram laughed at that, disbelieving — but his laughter died as he studied her. Certainly her height, her grace, her relatively good condition did not speak of a life with the pigs of Keer. He said carefully, “If you are from the city how did you end up here?”

“They took me as a child. These people, the people of Keer. They raised me with the dogs and the wolves, and so I don’t speak as you. But—”

“She is lying,” Cahl breathed. “She doesn’t even know what Cata Huuk is. She is a savage from the tribes to the west, the animal people I have to deal with. Her mother is a fat slut who sells her body for beer. And—”

“I should not be here,” Juna said steadily, her eyes on Keram. “Take me with you.”

Uncertain, Keram and Muti exchanged glances.

Enraged, Cahl twisted away from Muti. “You want to lie with her? Is that it?” He ripped at Juna’s simple shift, tearing it away from her swollen belly. “Look! The sow is full of piglets. Do you want to hump that?”

Keram frowned. “The child. Is it Cahl’s?”

She trembled harder. “No. Though my belly excites him, and he uses me. The child is a man’s from Cata Huuk. He came here. He used me. He did not tell me his name. He promised me—”

“She is lying!” Cahl raged. “She was with child when I found her.”

“I am not for this place,” said Juna, gazing at the town with faint disgust. “My child is not for this place. My child is for Cata Huuk.”

Keram glanced again at Muti, who shrugged. Keram grinned. “I can’t tell if you’re speaking the truth, Ju-na. But you are a strange one, and your story will amuse my father—”

“No!” Again Cahl broke away. The troops moved forward. “You can’t take her!”

Keram ignored him. He nodded to Muti. “Organize the collection of the tribute. You — Ju-na — do you have any possessions here? Any friends of whom you want to take your leave?”

She seemed to puzzle over his meaning, as if she wasn’t quite sure what “possessions” were. “Nothing. And friends — only Gwerei.”

Keram shrugged; the name meant nothing to him. “Make your preparations. We leave soon.” He clapped his hands, and Muti and the troops proceeded to carry out his orders.

But Cahl, restrained by a guard, continued to beg and plead. “Take me! Oh, take me!”

III

It would take them three days to cover the ground to Keram’s mysterious home, to Cata Huuk.

The grain and meat, what Keram called the “tribute,” was briskly collected. Juna had no idea why the townsfolk — hardly well-off themselves — should wish to hand over so much of their provisions to these strangers. They didn’t even get beer back in return.

But now was not the time for her to inquire into such matters. The speech she had rehearsed for so long, since first seeing Keram, had paid off. Now was the time for her to keep quiet and follow where she was led.

The party formed up into a loose line. Keram and Muti took the lead. Their four squat guards followed, two of them with hands free to deploy weapons, the others loaded up with the tribute. Juna, carrying nothing but the spear with which she had arrived here, approached one of the guards, expecting to be given a share of the load.

Keram rebuked her. “Let them do their job.”

Juna shrugged. “In Cahl’s town, it would be my job.”

“Well, I am not Cahl. You must do as we do, girl. It is our way.”

“I was taken as a child from—”

“I remember what you told me,” Keram said, his eyebrows raised in good humor. “I’m not sure I believe a word of it. But listen now. In Cata Huuk, the word of the Potus is law. I am the son of the Potus. You will obey me. You will not question me. Do you understand?”

Juna’s folk were egalitarian, like most hunter-gatherer folk; no, she didn’t understand. But she nodded dumbly.

They set off. The young men, unburdened, strode ahead easily enough — as did Juna, despite her pregnancy and the four months she had endured of poor diet and hard labor. But the guards puffed and complained of their weary feet.

It was a great relief for Juna to be out of the squalid town and in the open country once more, a great relief to be walking rather than bending her back over some dusty field — even if, as they headed steadily east, she was entering countryside that was increasingly remote from the place where she and her ancestors had always lived.

They stopped each night in small towns, no more or less impressive than Cahl’s had been. The guards were plied with beer and girls. Keram and Muti kept themselves to themselves, spending their nights quietly in huts. They let Juna stay with them, huddled in a corner.

Neither of them touched her. Perhaps it was her pregnancy. Perhaps they were just not sure of her. Part of her, glad to be free of the grubby attentions of Cahl, relished not having to share her body with anybody else. But part of her, more calculating, regretted it. She had no real understanding of what this place, this Cata Huuk, would be like. But she suspected her best chance of surviving was to bind herself to Keram or Muti.

So she made sure that each evening and morning, as she cast off her shift, she showed them her body; and she was aware of how, when he thought she was not looking, Keram’s gaze followed her.

As they walked on, the landscape became more crowded with fields and towns. No trees grew here, though there were stumps and patches of burned-out forest. There was no open land at all, in fact, save for worthless rocky land or marshes. There were only fields, and patches of land that had clearly once been plowed but were now abandoned, useless, exhausted. Soon there was scarcely a footfall she could make without stepping into the track of somebody who had been here before. The extent to which these swarming people had remade the world oppressed her.

And at last they reached Cata Huuk itself.

The first thing Juna saw was a wall. Made of mud bricks and straw, it was a great circular barrier that must have been as high as three people standing on each other’s shoulders, and it bristled with spikes. Outside the wall there was a great ring of shabby huts and lean-tos made of mud and tree branches. The wall was so wide it seemed to cut the land in half.

A broad, well-trodden path led up to the wall itself, a path which Keram’s party followed. But as they approached people came boiling like wasps out of the huts, yelling, plucking at Keram’s robes, holding up meat and fruit and sweetmeats and bits of carved wood and stone. Juna shrank back. But Keram assured her that there was nothing to be concerned about. These people were simply trying to sell things; this was a market. The words meant nothing to her.

A great gate made of wood had been set in the wall. Keram called out loudly. A man on top of the wall waved, and the gate was hauled open. The party walked through.

As she walked into strangeness, Juna found herself trembling.

The huts: that was the first thing that struck her. There were many of them, tens of tens, strewn in great masses across the kilometers-wide compound inside the walls. Most of them were no better than Cahl’s dwelling, simple slumped mounds of mud and wood. But some, toward the center of the city, were grander than that, tottering structures of two or three stories, their frontages walled with woven yellow grasses that shone in the sun. The clusters of huts were cut through by lanes that sliced this way and that, like a spider’s web. Smoke hung in a great gray cloud everywhere. Sewage ran down channels cut into the center of each street, and flies buzzed in great linear clouds over the sluggishly flowing waste.

And people swarmed, the men walking together, the children running and yelling, the women burdened with heavy loads on their heads and backs. There were animals, goats and sheep and dogs, crowded in as tightly as the people. The noise was astonishing, an unending clamor. The smells — of shit, piss, animals, fires, greasy cooked meat — were overwhelming.

This was Cata Huuk. With ten thousand people crammed within its walls, it was one of Earth’s first cities. Even Keer had been no preparation for this. To Juna, it was like looking into a great murky sea full of people.

Keram smiled at her. “Are you all right?”

“What trickster god made this teeming pile?”

“No god. People, Juna. Many, many people. You must remember that. No matter how strange all this appears, it is the work of people, like you and me. Besides,” he said with mock innocence, “this is where you were born. This is where you belong.”

“This is where I was born,” she said, unable to project much conviction. “But I am afraid. I can’t help it.”

“I’ll be with you,” he murmured.

With calculation she slid her hand into his. She caught Muti’s eye; he was smirking, knowing.

They walked down a radial avenue toward the great structures at the center of the city. Now Juna was truly stunned. Three stories high, these buildings were great blocks that loomed like giants over the rest of the city. The buildings were set in a loose square around a central courtyard, where grass and flowers grew thickly. Men armed with barbed pikes stood at every entrance, glaring suspiciously. Women moved with bowls of water, which they sprinkled on the grass.

Muti grinned at Juna. “Again she is staring. What is so strange now?”

“The grass. Why do they throw water on it?” She struggled to express herself. “Rain falls. Grass grows.”

Muti shook his head. “Not regularly enough for the Potus. I think he would command the weather itself.”

They walked into the largest of the buildings. Juna had never been in such a huge enclosed space. Stairways and ladders connected the mezzanine-like floors above. Despite the brightness of the day, torches burned smokily on the walls, banishing shadows and filling the palace with yellow light. People dressed in shining clothes walked through all the levels, and some of them waved down to Keram and Muti as they went by. It was like looking up into the branches of a great tree. Even the floor was extraordinary, made of wood cut so smoothly it felt slippery under her feet, and oil or grease had been worked into it until it shone.

They came to the very center of the building. Here was a platform, raised to shoulder-height above the ground. And on the platform, sitting on an ornately carved block of wood, was the fattest man Juna had ever seen. His breasts were larger than a nursing mother’s. His belly, glistening with oil, was like the Moon. And his head was a ball of flesh, completely devoid of hair; his scalp was shaved, and he had no beard, moustache, or even eyebrows. He was naked to the waist, but he wore finely stitched trousers.

This fat creature was the Potus, the Powerful One. He was one of mankind’s first kings. He was talking to a skinny corpselike man at his elbow, who thumbed through lengths of knotted string with intense concentration.

Keram and Muti waited patiently until the Potus’s attention was free.

Juna whispered, “What are they doing with the string?”

“Tallies,” Muti whispered. “They record, umm, the workings of the city and the farms: how many sheep and goats, how much grain can be expected from the next harvest, how many newborn, how many dead.” He smiled at her wide-open eyes. “Our stories are told on those bits of string, Juna. This is how Cata Huuk works.”

Keram nudged him. The man with the string had withdrawn. The Potus’s great head had swiveled toward them. Keram and Muti immediately bowed. Juna just stared, until Keram dragged her down.

“Let her stand,” said the Potus. His voice was like riverbed gravel. His eyes on Juna, he beckoned her.

Hesitantly Juna walked forward.

He leaned over her. She could smell animal oil on his skin. He pulled at her hair, hard enough to make her yowl. “Where did you get her?”

Keram quickly explained what had happened at Keer. “Potus, she says she was born here — here, in Cata Huuk. She says she was stolen as a baby. And—”

“Take your clothes off,” the Potus snapped at Juna.

She glared back, repulsed by his smell, and did not obey. But Muti hastily ripped her skin shift from her, until she stood naked.

The Potus nodded, as if appraising a hunter’s kill. “Good breasts. Good height, good posture — and a pup in the belly, I see. Do you believe her, Keram? I never heard of a child like this being stolen — what, fifteen, sixteen years ago?”

“Nor I,” said Keram.

“They say the wild ones beyond the fields grow like this: tall, healthy-looking, despite their appalling way of life.”

“But if she is wild, she is a clever one,” Keram said carefully. “I thought her tale would amuse you.”

Juna said, “It is the truth!”

The Potus barked laughter. “It speaks.”

“She speaks well. She is clever, sir, with—”

“Dance for me, girl.” When Juna stared back at him, mute, the Potus said with a quiet hardness, “Dance for me, or I will have you dragged from here now.”

Juna understood little of what was happening, but she could see that her life depended on how she responded now.

So she danced. She recalled dances she and her sister Sion had made up as children, and dances she had joined as an adult, following the capering of the shaman.

After a time, the Potus grinned. And then he, as well as Keram and Muti, began to clap to the rhythm of her bare feet as they slapped against the floor of polished wood.

Naked, stranded in strangeness, she danced, and danced.

From the beginning Juna saw very clearly that if she wished to remain healthy, well-fed — and free of the scourge of endless, repetitive, back-breaking work — then she had to stay as close to the Potus as she could.

And so she made herself as interesting as possible. She rummaged through her memories for skills and feats that had been commonplace among her own people, and yet would seem marvelous to these hive dwellers. She organized long-distance races, which she won with stunning ease, even heavily pregnant. She made spear-throwers, and showed her skill at hitting targets so small and distant most of the Potus’s court couldn’t even see them. She would take random bits of stone, wood, and shell, and, starting with no tools at all, knap out blades and carve ornaments, a process that seemed charming and miraculous to these people, so remote were they from the resources of the Earth.

Her baby was born. He was a slender boy, who might grow up to look like Tori, his now-lost father. As soon as she could she began to train him to run, to dance, to throw as she could.

And when at last she coaxed Keram into her bed — when he forgave her the lies she had told to persuade him to bring her here — and when a year later, wearing his gold-studded shell necklace, she gave birth to his child, she felt her place at the heart of this nest of people was secure.

As for the city, it didn’t take Juna long to see the truth about this cramped hive.

This was a place of layers, of rigidity and control. The mass of the people here slaved their days away to feed the Potus, his wives, sons, daughters, and relatives, and those who served him, and the priesthood, the mysterious network of shamanlike mystics who seemed to live an even grander life than the Potus himself.

It had to be this way. With the taming of the plants, the land had become much more productive. The natural checks that had held back the growth of populations were suddenly removed. Human numbers exploded.

Suddenly people no longer bred like primates. They bred like bacteria.

The new, dense populations made possible the growth of new kinds of communities: large centers of population, towns, cities, fed by a steady flow of food and raw materials from the countryside.

There had never been such numbers before, never such an elaboration of human relations. The cities, of necessity, shook themselves down into a new form of social organization. In communities like Juna’s, decision making had been communal and leadership informal, since everybody knew everybody else. Kinship ties had been sufficient to resolve most conflict. In slightly larger groups, chiefs would gather central control in order to manage affairs.

Now it was no longer possible for everybody to participate in every decision. It was no longer efficient for each family to grow and gather its own food, to make its own tools and clothing, to trade one-on-one with its neighbors. And day by day people could expect to meet perfect strangers — and have to get along with them, rather than just drive them away or kill them, as in the old days. The old inhibitions of kinship were no longer enough: Policing of some kind was required to keep order.

Central control rapidly asserted itself. Power and resources were increasingly concentrated in the hands of an elite. Chiefs and kings arose, with monopolies on decision making, information, and power. A new kind of redistributive economy was developed. There was political organization, rapidly advancing technology, record keeping, bureaucracy, taxation: an explosion of sophistication in the means by which human beings dealt with one another.

And, for the first time in hominid history, there were people who didn’t have to work for food.

For thirty thousand years there had been religion, art, music, storytelling, war. But now it became possible for the new societies to afford specialists: people who did nothing but paint, or perfect melodies on flutes of bones and wood, or speculate on the nature of a god who had given the gifts of fire and agriculture to an unworthy mankind, or kill. Out of this tradition would eventually emerge much of the beauty and grandeur implicit in human potential. But so would emerge armies of professional, dedicated killers, of whom Keram’s guards were a prototype.

And almost everywhere, right from the beginning, the new communities were dominated by men: men competing with each other for power, in societies where women were treated more or less as a resource. During the days of the hunter-gatherers humans had briefly thrown off the ancient prison of the primate male hierarchies. Equality and mutual respect had not been luxuries: Hunter-gatherer communities were innately egalitarian because to share food and knowledge was self-evidently in the interests of everybody. But those days were vanishing now. Seeking a new way to organize their swelling numbers, humans were slipping comfortably into the ways of a mindless past.

The new urban concentrations appeared to be an utterly new way of living. No hominids — indeed no primates — had ever lived in such dense heapings. But in fact they were a throwback to a much more ancient form. The new cities had less in common with the hunter-gatherer communities of their immediate past than with the chimpanzee colonies of the forest.

Juna’s interval of security lasted no more than four years.

In the dark of night, Keram shook her awake. “Come. Get the children. We have to leave.”

Juna sat up, bleary-eyed. The previous evening they had thrown a party, and Juna had drunk too much mead, honey liqueur, than was good for her. Only in farmed lands were alcoholic drinks possible, for they needed cultivated grain for their manufacture — one of the key advantages of the farmers over the hunters, who had grown dependent on beer but could never learn to manufacture it for themselves. As for Juna, it was a luxury she still had to get used to.

She looked around, trying to wake up and cut through her confusion. The room was in darkness, but there was light outside the window. Not the light of day, but of fire.

And now she could hear the shouting.

She slipped out of bed and pulled on a simple, functional shift. She went to the next room and collected the children. The two boys were grumpy at being disturbed, but they settled to sleep again in her arms. She went back to Keram, who was cramming weapons and valuables into a sack. “I’m ready,” she said.

He looked at her, standing waiting for him with their children held in her arms. He ran to her and kissed her hard on the lips. “I do love you, by the Potus’s balls. If he has any left.”

She was puzzled by the non sequitur. “Any what?”

“This is a bad night for Cata Huuk,” he said grimly. “And for us, unless we are lucky.” He turned and made for the door, lugging his sack. “Come on. We’ll leave by the back gate.”

They slipped out of their house. Now she could see the source of the fire. The great yellow palace of the Potus was burning, the flames and sparks rising high into the air. Juna heard screams from within the palace itself, and glimpsed people running.

The streets were full of people. Skinny, filthy, many dressed in ragged skins or rags of vegetable fiber, they swarmed like hungry rats. To Juna the merged voices of the mob were not human: They were like the roaring of thunder or the growling of a rainstorm, something beyond human control. Clutching her children, she tried to control her fear. “It is the hunger,” she said.

“Yes.”

Famine: It was another word Juna had been forced to learn. A blight had affected the main wheat crop of the farms in the area. Nobody understood it; nobody could cure it. When the harvest had failed, the hunger had spread rapidly. The first signs of unrest had been the murder of tribute collectors, trying to gather what was rightfully the Potus’s. And now it had come to this. Juna’s folk fed on many wild plants; no blight would destroy them all, as it could wipe out a single vital crop. Famine: another ambiguous gift of the new way of living.

The family kept their heads down. They avoided the main avenues, and made their way zigzag fashion toward the main gate.

Keram said, “There is a new settlement west of here, by the coast. The farmland is rich, and the resources of the sea are bountiful. It is many days’ travel, but—”

“We will make it,” she said firmly.

He nodded curtly. “We have to.”

At last they reached the open gate. Here Muti waited for them. The three of them, cradling the children, slipped into the night.

As they headed east, everywhere they traveled, they walked through lands transformed by farmers and city builders. Even the land Juna had once crossed, fleeing with Cahl from her home, was now changed beyond recognition, so rapid had been the expansion.

The expansion happened because farmed lands soon became overcrowded. Sons and daughters wanted to own their own slice of the world, to master it as their parents had. This was easily achieved. The farmers’ knowledge was not tied to a particular patch of land, as the hunter-gatherers’ had been. Their thinking was systematic: They knew how to transform the land to make it the way they wanted it — any piece of land. They did not have to accept it as it was. For farmers, colonization was easy.

And so, from the first humble scratched farms in the east of Anatolia, the great expansion began. It was a kind of slow war, waged on the Earth itself, as it was transformed to suit the needs of the growing crowd of human bellies. It became an expansion that would soon outstrip geographically the diffusion of Homo erectus and earlier generations of humans, an expansion that would proceed with astonishing speed.

But the expansion did not occur into a vacuum, but into land already occupied by the ancient hunter-gatherer communities.

It was not possible to share, of course. This was a conflict between two fundamentally different views of the land. The hunters saw their land as a place to which they were attached, like the trees that grew from it. To the farmers, it was a resource to own, to buy, sell, subdivide: Land was property, not a place. There could be only one outcome. The hunter-gatherers were simply outnumbered: Ten malnourished, runtish farmers could always overcome one healthy hunter.

After three days’ traveling, they reached a kind of shantytown, a rough huddle of shelters and lean-tos. Juna peered around, tense, uninterested. “Why have we come here? We should move on before it grows dark—”

Keram placed a kindly hand on her arm. “I thought you would want to stop here. Juna, don’t you recognize this place?”

“You should,” came a woman’s voice, oddly familiar.

Juna turned around. A woman was limping toward her, an ancient piece of skin thrown over her head. Juna’s mind whirled. The words had been strange, yes — because they were in Juna’s birth language, a tongue she had not heard since the day she had followed Cahl out of her village.

Now Juna could see the woman’s face. It was Sion, her older sister. An unidentifiable longing came rushing back. “Oh, Sion—” She stepped forward, arms outstretched.

But Sion drew back. “No! Keep away.” She grimaced. “The sickness did not murder me, as it murdered so many others, but I may carry it yet.”

“Sion. Who—”

“Who died?” Sion barked a bitter laugh. “It would be better for you to ask who survived.”

Juna glanced around. “And is this truly where we lived? Nothing is the same.”

Sion snorted. “The men drink beer and mead. The women labor in the farms of Keer. Nobody hunts now, Juna. The animals have been driven off to make room for fields. We get by. Sometimes we sing the old songs for the farmers. They give us more beer.”

“Who is shaman now?”

“Shamans are not allowed. The last of them drank himself to death, the fat fool.” She shrugged. “It makes no difference. Nothing the shaman could tell us would help us now. It is not the shaman who knows how the wheat grows, nobody but the farmers, and their masters from the city with their bits of string and narrow eyes that peer at the sky.”

The disease, as it happened, had been measles.

Mankind had always been prey to some diseases, of course: leprosy, yaws, and yellow fever were among the most ancient blights. Many of them were caused by microbes that would maintain themselves in the soil, or in animal populations — as yellow fever was carried by African monkeys. But people had had time, evolutionary time, to adapt to most such diseases and parasites.

With the coming of the new, dense communities had come new plagues — crowd diseases, like measles, rubella, smallpox, and influenza. Unlike the older illnesses, the microbes responsible for these diseases could only survive in the bodies of living people. Such diseases could not have evolved in humans until there were sufficiently dense and mobile crowds to allow them to spread.

But, if they infected crowds, they must have come from crowds. And so they had: crowds of animals, the heavily social herd creatures people now lived close to, animals in which the diseases had long been endemic. Tuberculosis, measles, and smallpox crossed to humans from cattle, influenza from pigs, malaria from birds. Meanwhile, with the building of grain stores, the vectors of infectious diseases — rats and mice and fleas and bugs — reached populations of unprecedented density. Still, those who survived developed resistance of some kind, though some of these mechanisms were clumsy, with damaging side effects. The mechanisms of adaptation operated too slowly, compared to the frenzied rate of change of human culture, to iron out the deficiencies.

But the hunter-gatherers at the farms’ expanding borders had no resistance. They were devastated, even as their lands were overwhelmed by their farmer neighbors.

This transition, from the old way of living to the new, was a crucial moment in human history. A mass, unconscious choice was being made between limiting population growth to match the resources available, as the hunter-gatherers of the past had done, or trying to increase food production to feed a growing population. And once that choice had been made, the farmers’ expansion could only accelerate. Henceforth the folk following the older ways would survive only in the most marginal environments, the fringes of deserts, the mountain peaks, the densest jungles — places the farmers could not tame.

It would happen in Africa, where Bantu farmers equipped with iron weapons would spread out of the western Sahara, overwhelming peoples like the pygmies and the Khoisan — ancestors to Joan Useb — at last marching all the way to the east coast of South Africa. It happened in China, where farmers from the north, aided by China’s interconnected geography, would march south to repopulate and homogenize much of tropical southeast Asia, driving existing populations ahead of them in secondary invasions that hit Thailand and Burma.

And the great east-west span of Eurasia proved especially conducive to expansion. Farmers spread easily along lines of latitude, moving into places with a similar climate and length of day to their origin, and so suitable for their crops and beasts. With their cattle and goats and pigs and sheep, their highly productive wheat and barley, and their swelling numbers, the descendants of the farmers of Cata Huuk would build a mighty dominion of wheat and rice. The pyramids of Egypt would be built by workers fed by crops whose ancestors had been native to southwest Asia. They would take their Indo-European language with them, but it would splinter, mutate, and proliferate, generating Latin, German, Sanskrit, Hindi, Russian, Welsh, English, Spanish, French, Gaelic. At last they would colonize a huge east-west band stretching from the Atlantic coast to Turkestan, from Scandinavia to North Africa. One day they would even cross the oceans, in boats of wood and iron.

All across this immense span of cultivated land cities would burgeon, and empires would flourish and decay, like mushrooms. And everywhere the farmers went they carried the great diseases with them, a vicious froth on a tide of language, culture, and war.

Juna said impulsively, “Sister, come with us.”

Sion glanced at Keram and Muti, and laughed. “That will not be possible.” With an expression of anguish, she peered at Juna’s children, who slept in the arms of Muti and Keram. Then she whispered, “Good-bye,” and hurried back to the huts.

Juna made to call good-bye after her, but, she thought, that would be the last word I will ever speak in my own tongue. For I will never come back here. Never.

So, without speaking, she turned her face away and, with her children, resumed her steadfast walk to the west, and the new city on the coast.

I

In Rome, the sun was bright, and the Italian air felt liquid to men used to the milder climes of Gaul. Everywhere lingered the immense stenches of the city: of fires, of cooking, and, above all, of sewage.

When Honorius led him into the Forum, Athalaric tried not to be overwhelmed.

Gaunt old Honorius stumbled forward, his threadbare toga wrapped around him. “I had not expected the strength of this sun. The light must have molded my ancestors, filled them with vigor. Oh! How I have longed to see this place. This is the Sacred Way, of course. There is the Temple of Castor and Pollux, there the Temple of the Deified Caesar with the Arch of Augustus beside it.” He made his way to the shade of a statue — a horseback hero done in bronze, whose plinth alone towered ten to twelve times Athalaric’s height — and he leaned against the marble, wheezing. “Augustus said he found Rome a city of brick and left it one of marble. The white marble, you see, comes from Luna, to the north, and the colored marbles from northern Africa, Greece, and Asia Minor — not so exotic destinations as they are today—”

Athalaric listened to his mentor, keeping his face expressionless.

This was the heart of Rome. It was here that the business of the city had been done even in Republican times. Since then, leaders and emperors as far back as Julius Caesar and Pompey had sought prestige by embellishing this ancient place, and the area had become a maze of temples, processional ways, triumphal arches, basilicas, council halls, rostra, and open spaces. The imperial residences on Palatine Hill still loomed over it all, a symbol of brooding power.

But now, of course, the emperors, like the Republicans before them, had gone.

Today Athalaric had chosen to wear his best metalwork, his belt buckle of bronze with fine lines of silver and gold hammered into its engraved pattern and the bow brooch of gold with silver filigree and garnets that held his cloak in place. His barbarian jewelry, so sneered at by the Romans, caught the light of the fierce Italian sun, even here in the ancient heart of their capital. And to remind himself of where he had come from, around his neck Athalaric wore the tag of beaten tin that had marked his father out as a slave.

He was proud of who he was, and who he might become. And yet, and yet…

And yet the sheer scale of it all, to eyes accustomed only to the small towns of Gaul, was astonishing.

Much of Rome was a city of mud brick, timber, and rubble-work; its predominant color was the bright red of the roofing tiles that covered so many of the residential buildings. The population had long overflowed the fortifications of the ancient city, and even the more extensive walls erected under the threat of barbarian invasion two centuries ago. It was said that at one time a million people had lived in this city, which had ruled an empire of a hundred million. Well, those days were gone — the burned-out and abandoned outer suburbs attested to that — but even in these straitened times, the sheer numbers of the place were stunning. There were two circuses, two amphitheaters, eleven public baths, thirty-six arches, nearly two thousand palaces, and a thousand pools and fountains fed with Tiber water by no less than nineteen aqueducts.

And at the heart of this sea of red tile and swarming people, here he was in an immense island of marble: marble used not just for columns and statues, but for the veneers of the walls, even for paving.

But, though the great spaces of the Forum were thronged with market stalls, Athalaric thought he sensed a great sadness here. Today the city was no longer even under Roman rule. Italy was now governed by a Scirian German called Odoacer, placed there by rebellious German troops, and Odoacer used Ravenna, a northern city lost in marshland, as his capital. Rome itself had been sacked twice.

Athalaric, motivated by a mild cruelty that puzzled him, began to point out evidence of damage. “See where the plinths are empty; the statues have been stolen. Those columns have tumbled, never to be repaired. Even some of the marble from the temples’ walls has been taken! Rome is decaying, Honorius.”

“Of course it is decaying,” Honorius snapped. He shifted to stay in the shade of the plinth. “Of course the city decays. I decay.” He held up his liver-spotted hand. “As do you, young Athalaric, despite your arrogance. And yet I am still strong. I am here, am I not?”

“Yes, you are here,” Athalaric said more kindly. “And so is Rome.”

“Do you believe that nature is running down, Athalaric? That all life-forms are diminishing with successive generations?” Honorius shook his head. “Surely this mighty place could only have been constructed by men with the most tremendous hearts and minds, men one will not find in the present world of squabbling and fracture, men who have evidently, tragically, become extinct. And if so it behooves us to conduct ourselves as did those who came before — those who built this place, rather than those who would tear it down.”

Athalaric was moved by these words. But they subtly excluded him. Athalaric knew he was a good student, that Honorius respected him for his mind. Athalaric had reason to feel protective of the old man, even fond, of course; else he would not have accompanied him on this hazardous jaunt across Europe in search of ancient bones. And yet Athalaric was aware, too, that there were barriers in Honorius’s heart every bit as solid and enduring as these great walls of white marble around him.

It was Honorius’s ancestors who had built this mighty place, not Athalaric’s. To Honorius, whatever he did, Athalaric would always be the son of a slave — and a barbarian at that.

A man approached them. He was dressed in a toga every bit as grand as Honorius’s was threadbare, but his skin was as dark as an olive’s.

Honorius pushed himself away from the plinth and stood up. Athalaric shifted his robe so that the weapon at his waist was visible.

His hands hidden in a fold of his toga, the man appraised them coolly. In clear but highly accented Latin, he said, “I have been waiting for you.”

“But you do not know us,” Honorius said.

The newcomer raised his eyebrows and glanced at Honorius’s travel-stained toga, Athalaric’s gaudy jewelry. “This is still Rome, sir. Travelers from the provinces are usually easily recognized. Honorius, I am the one you seek. You may call me Papak.”

“A Sassanian name — a famous name.”

Papak smiled. “You are learned.”

As Papak smoothly questioned Honorius about the difficulty of their journey, Athalaric appraised him. The name alone told him much: Papak was evidently a Persian, from that great and powerful state beyond the borders of the remnant empire in the east. And yet he was in fully Roman attire, with not a trace of his origin save for the color of his skin and the name he bore.

Almost certainly he was a criminal, Athalaric thought. In these times of disintegrating order, those who worked in the shadows thrived, trading on greed and misery and fear.

He interrupted Papak’s easy conversation. “Forgive my poor education,” he said silkily. “If I remember my Persian history, Papak was a bandit who stole the crown from his sworn ruler.”

Papak turned to him smoothly. “Not a bandit, sir. A rebel priest, yes. A man of principle, yes. Papak’s life was not easy; his choices were difficult; his career was honorable. His is an honored name I am proud to bear. Would you like to compare the integrity of our lineages? Your German forebears chased pigs through the northern forests—”

Honorius said, “Gentlemen, perhaps we should cut to the heart of the matter.”

“Yes,” Athalaric snapped. “The bones, sir. We are here to meet your Scythian, and see his bones of heroes.”

Honorius laid a placating hand on his arm. But Athalaric could sense his intensity as he waited for Papak’s answer.

As Athalaric had half expected, the Persian sighed and spread his hands. “I did promise that my Scythian would meet you here, in Rome itself. But the Scythian is a man of the eastern desert. Which is why he is so difficult to work with. But his rootlessness is why the Scythian is so useful, of course.” Papak rubbed his fleshy nose regretfully. “In these unfortunate times travel from the east is not so secure as it once was. And the Scythian is reluctant—”

To Athalaric’s irritation, the ploy worked.

“It has always been thus,” Honorius said sympathetically. “It was always easier to deal with farmers. Coherent wars can be fought with those who own land; if deals are struck all understand the meaning of the transactions. But nomads make for a much stiffer challenge. How can you conquer a man if he does not understand the meaning of the word?”

“We had an arrangement,” Athalaric snapped. “We engaged in extensive correspondence with you, on receipt of your catalog of curiosities. We have traveled across Europe to meet this man, at great expense and not insignificant danger. We have already paid you half of the fee we agreed, let me remind you. And now you let us down.”

Athalaric, despite himself, was impressed by Papak’s display of hurt pride — the flaring nostrils, the trace of deeper color in his cheeks. “I have a reputation that spans the continent. Even in these difficult days there are many connoisseurs, like yourself, sir Honorius, of the bones of the heroes and beasts of the past. It has been a tradition across the old empire for a thousand years. If I were to be found out a cheat—”

Honorius made placatory noises. “Athalaric, please. I am sure our new friend did not mean to deceive us.”

“It simply strikes me as remarkable,” Athalaric said heavily, “that as soon as we meet, your promises evaporate like morning dew.”

“I do not intend to renege,” Papak said grandly. “The Scythian is — a difficult man. I cannot deliver him like an amphora of wine, much though I regret the fact.”

Athalaric growled, “But?”

“I can propose a compromise.”

Honorius sounded hopeful. “There, you see, Athalaric; I knew this would come good if we have patience and faith.”

Papak sighed. “I am afraid it will demand of you further travel—”

“And expense?” Athalaric asked suspiciously.

“The Scythian will meet you at a rather more remote city: ancient Petra.”

“Ah,” said Honorius, and a little more of the life went out of him.

Athalaric knew Petra was in Jordan, a land still under the protection of Emperor Zeno in Constantinople. In such times as these, Petra was another world away. Athalaric took Honorius’s arm. “Master, enough. He is applying storekeepers’ tricks. He is merely trying to draw us more deeply into—”

Honorius murmured, “When I was a child my father ran a shop from the front of our villa. We sold cheese and eggs and other produce from the farms, and we bought and sold curiosities from all across the empire and beyond. That was how I got my taste for antiquities — and my nose for business. I am old but no fool yet, Athalaric! I am sure Papak senses further profit for himself in this situation — and yet I do not believe he is lying about the fundamentals.”

Athalaric lost patience. “We have much work waiting for us at home. To be hauled across the ocean for a handful of decayed old bones—”

But Honorius had turned to Papak. “Petra,” he said. “A name almost as famous as Rome’s itself! I will have many colorful adventures to recount to my grandchildren on my return to Burdigala. Now, sir, I suspect we must begin to discuss the practicalities of the journey.”

A broad smile spread across Papak’s face. Athalaric studied his eyes, trying to assess his honesty.

It took Honorius and Athalaric many weeks to reach Jordan, much of it consumed by the bureaucracy required to deal with the eastern empire. Every official they met proved deeply suspicious of outsiders from the broken remnants of the western empire — even of Honorius, a man whose father had actually been a senator of Rome itself.

It was Athalaric’s self-appointed duty to care for Honorius.

The old man had once had a son, a childhood friend of Athalaric’s. But Honorius had taken his family, with Athalaric, to a religious festival in Tolosa, to the south of Gaul. The party had been set upon by bandits. Athalaric had never forgotten his feeling of helplessness as, just a boy himself, he had watched as the bandits had beaten Honorius, molested his daughters — and so carelessly killed the brave little boy who had tried to come to his sisters’ aid. A fine Roman citizen! Where are your legions now? Where are your eagles, your emperors?

Something had broken in Honorius that dark day. It was as if he had decided to detach himself from a world in which the sons of senators needed the patronage of Goth nobles, and bandits freely roamed the interior of what had been Roman provinces. Though he had never neglected his civic and family duties, Honorius had become increasingly absorbed by his study of relics of the past, the mysterious bones and artifacts that told of a vanished world inhabited by giants and monsters.

Meanwhile Athalaric had developed a deepening loyalty to old Honorius — it was as if he had taken the place of that lost son — and he had been pleased, though not surprised, when his own father had agreed that he should serve as Honorius’s pupil in the law.

Honorius’s story was only one of a myriad similar small tragedies, generated by the huge, implacable historical forces that were transforming Europe. The mighty political, military, and economic structure built by the Romans was already a thousand years old. Once it had sprawled across Europe, northern Africa and Asia: Roman soldiers had come into conflict with the inhabitants of Scotland in the west and the Chinese to the east. The Empire had thrived on expansion, which had bought triumphs for ambitious generals, profits for traders, and a ready source of slaves.

But when expansion was no longer possible, the system became impossible to sustain.

There came a point of diminishing returns, in which every denarius collected in taxes was pumped into administrative maintenance and the military. The empire became increasingly complex and bureaucratic — and so even more expensive to run — and inequality of wealth became grotesque. By the time of Nero in the first century, all the land from the Rhine to the Euphrates was owned by just two thousand obscenely rich individuals. Tax evasion among the wealthy became endemic, and the increasing cost of propping up the empire fell ever more heavily on the poor. The old middle class — once the backbone of the empire — declined, bled by taxes and squeezed out from above and below. The empire had consumed itself from within.

It had happened before. The great Indo-European expansion had spun off many civilizations, high and low. Great cities already lay buried in history’s dust, forgotten.

Although the west had been the origin of the sprawling empire, the east had eventually become its center of gravity. Egypt produced three times as much grain as the west’s richest province in Africa. And while the west’s long borders were vulnerable to attack by land-hungry Germans, Hunni, and others, the east was like an immense fastness. The constant drain of resources from east to west had caused a growing political and economic tension. At last — eighty years before Honorius’s visit to Rome — the division between the two halves of the old empire was made permanent. After that the collapse of the west had proceeded apace.

Constantinople still used Roman law, and the language of the state remained Latin. But, Athalaric found, its bureaucracy was difficult, entangling, altogether more eastern. Evidently Constantinople’s engagements with the mysterious nations that lay beyond Persia in the unseen heart of Asia were influencing its destiny. At last, however, all the paperwork was arranged — even though Honorius’s dwindling supply of gold was diminished further in the process. They joined a boatload of pilgrims, mostly minor Roman aristocracy from the western lands, bound for the Holy Land. After that they traveled by horseback and camel into the deeper interior.

But as the days of their journey wore on, and Honorius grew visibly more frail and exhausted. Athalaric felt increasingly regretful that he had not, after all, persuaded his mentor to turn back at Rome.

Petra turned out to be a city of rock.

“But this is extraordinary,” Honorius said. He dismounted hastily and strode toward the giant buildings. “Quite extraordinary.”

Athalaric clambered down from his horse. Casting a glance at Papak and his porters as they led the horses to water, he followed his mentor. The heat was intense, and in this dry, dusty air Athalaric did not feel protected at all by the loose, bright white local garment Papak had provided for him.

Huge tombs and temples thrust out of a steppe so arid that it was all but a desert. It was still a bustling city, Athalaric could see that. An elaborate system of channels, pipes, and cisterns collected and stored water for orchards, fields, and the city itself. And yet the people looked somehow dwarfed by the great monuments around them, as if they had been shrunken by time.

“Once, you know, this place was the center of the world,” Honorius mused. “There was a battle for ascendancy between Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Egypt — all centered on this region, for under the Nabataeans Petra controlled the trade between Europe, Africa, and the east. It was an extraordinarily powerful position. And under Roman rule Petra grew even richer.”

Athalaric nodded. “So why did Rome come to rule the world? Why not Petra?”

“I think you see the answer all around,” Honorius said. “Look.”

Athalaric could see nothing but a few trees straggling for life among the shrubs, herbs, and grasses. Goats, tended by a ragged, wide-eyed boy, nibbled low branches.

Honorius said, “Once this was woodland, dominated by oak and pistachio trees: so say the historians. But the trees were felled to build houses, and to make plaster for the walls. Now the goats eat what remains, and the soil, overfarmed, grows dry and blows away into the air. As the land has grown poor, as the water is pumped dry, so the population flees — or starves. If Petra did not exist here already, it could never be sustained by such a poor hinterland. In another few centuries it will be abandoned altogether.”

Athalaric was struck by an oppressive feeling of waste. “What is the purpose of these magnificent heapings of stone — all the lives that must have been consumed in their construction — if the people are to eat themselves to barrenness and rain, and all is to decay to rubble?”

Honorius said grimly, “It may be that one day Rome itself will be a place of shells, of fallen monuments, inhabited by filthy people who will herd their goats along the Sacred Way, never understanding the mighty ruins they see all around them.”

“But if cities rise and fall, a man may be master of his own destiny,” Papak murmured. He had come up to them and was listening intently. “And here is one such, I think.”

A man was striding out of the city toward them. He was remarkably tall, and he wore garments of some black cloth that clung tightly to his upper body and legs. A crimson swatch enclosed his head and covered much of his face. The dust seemed to swirl around his feet. It seemed to Athalaric that he was a figure of strangeness, as if from another time.

“Your Scythian, I take it,” Honorius murmured.

“Indeed,” said Papak.

Honorius drew himself up and reached for the fold of his toga. Athalaric felt a flicker of pride, complicated by a sense of envy, or perhaps inferiority. No matter how imposing this stranger was, Honorius was a Roman citizen, afraid of no man on Earth.

The Scythian unwrapped the cloth over his face and head, scattering more dust. His face was sharp-nosed, a thing of weather-beaten planes. Athalaric was startled to see that his hair was quite blond, as yellow as a Saxon’s.

Honorius murmured to Papak, “Bid him greetings, and assure him of our best intentions to—”

Papak cut him short. “These fellows of the desert have little time for niceties, sir. He wants to see your gold.”

Athalaric growled, “We’ve come a long way to be insulted by a sand flea.”

Honorius looked pained. “Athalaric, please. The money.”

Glaring at the Scythian, Athalaric opened his wrap to reveal a sack of gold. He tossed a piece to the Scythian, who tested it with his teeth.

“Now,” whispered Honorius. “The bones. Is it true? Show me, sir. Show me—”

That needed no translation. The Scythian drew a bundle of cloth from a deep pocket. Carefully he began to unwind the cloth, and he spoke in his own liquid tongue.

“He says this is a treasure indeed,” Papak murmured. “He says it comes from beyond the desert with the sand of gold, where the bones of the griffins—”

“I know about griffins,” said Honorius tightly. “I do not care about griffins.”

“From beyond the land of the Persians, from beyond the land of the Guptas — it is hard to translate,” Papak said tightly. “His sense of who owns the land is not as ours, and his descriptions are lengthy and specific.”

At last — with a shopkeeper’s sense of timing, Athalaric thought cynically — the Scythian began to open up the wrapped bandages. He revealed a skull.

Honorius gasped and all but fell on the fragment. “It is a man. But not as we are—”

In the course of his education Athalaric had seen plenty of human skulls. The flat face and jaw of this skull were very human. But there was nothing human about the thick ridge of bone over the brow, or that small brain pan, so small he could have cupped it in one hand.

“I have longed to study such a relic,” Honorius said breathlessly. “Is it true, as Titus Lucretius Carus wrote, that the early men could endure any environment, though they lacked clothing and fire, that they traveled in bands like animals and slept on the ground or in thickets, that they could eat anything and rarely fall ill? Oh, you must come to Rome, sir. You must come to Gaul! For there is a cave there, a cave on the coast of the ocean, where I have seen, I have seen—”

But the Scythian, perhaps mindful of the gold that still lay out of his reach, was not listening. He held up the fragment like a trophy.

The Homo erectus skull, polished by a million years, gleamed in the sunlight.

II

Under Honorius’s pressure, the Scythian eventually agreed to come to Rome. Papak came along too, as a more or less necessary interpreter — and, to Athalaric’s further dismay, so did two of the porters they had used in the desert.

Athalaric confronted Papak during the sea crossing back to Italy. “You are milking the old man’s purse. I know your kind, Persian.”

Papak was unperturbed. “But we are alike. I take his money, you empty his mind. What’s the difference? The young have always fed off the wealth of the old, one way or another. Isn’t it so?”

“I have pledged that I will bring him home safely. And that I will do, regardless of your ambitions.”

Papak laughed smoothly. “I mean Honorius no harm.” He indicated the impassive Scythian. “I have given him what he wants, haven’t I?” But the Scythian’s demeanor, as he coldly watched this exchange, made it clear to Athalaric that he was not to be regarded as anybody’s property, however temporarily.

Still, even Athalaric’s curiosity was pricked when this desert-dwelling nomad was brought to the greatest city in the world.

On the outskirts of Rome, they spent a night in a villa rented by Honorius.

Set on a slight rise on the edge of the city proper, this was a typical imperial-period home, its design drawn from Greek and Etruscan influences. The house was built on a series of bedrooms grouped around three sides of an open atrium. At the back were a dining room, offices, and utility rooms. Two street-facing rooms had been given over to shops. Honorius told him this had not been uncommon in the days of the empire; he reminded Athalaric of the shop his own family had once run.

But, like the city it overlooked, the villa had seen better days. The little shops were boarded up. The impluvium, the pool at the center of the atrium, had been crudely dug out, apparently to get at the lead piping that had once collected rainwater.

Honorius shrugged at this decay. “The place lost a lot of its value when the sackings came — too hard to defend, you see, so far out of the city. That is how I was able to rent it so cheaply.”

That night, amid this battered grandeur, they ate a meal together. Even the mosaic on the floor of the dining room was badly damaged; it appeared that thieves had taken any pieces that showed traces of gold leaf.

The food itself was a signature of the great pan-Eurasian mixing that had followed the expansion of the farming communities. The staples were wheat and rice from the original Anatolian agricultural package, but supplemented by quince originally from the Caucasus, millet from Central Asia, cucumber, sesame, and citrus fruit from India, and apricots and peaches from China. This transcontinental diet was an everyday miracle, unremarked on by those who ate it.

The next day they took the Scythian into the old city itself.

They walked to the Palatine, the Capitol, the Forum. The Scythian gazed around him with his horizon-sharp eyes, assessing, somehow measuring. He wore his desert garb of black clothing with scarlet wrap around his head; it must have been uncomfortable in Rome’s humid air, but he showed no signs of discomfort.

Athalaric murmured to Papak, “He doesn’t seem very impressed.”

Now the Scythian snapped out something in his terse, ancient language, and Papak translated automatically. “He says he understands now why the Romans had to take slaves and gold and food from his land.”

Honorius seemed obscurely pleased. “A savage he may be, but he is no fool — and he is not intimidated, not even by mighty Rome. Good for him.”

Away from the monumental areas, central Rome was a clotted network of streets and alleys, narrow and gloomy, the product of more than a thousand years’ uncontrolled building. Many of the residences here were five or six stories tall. Raised by unscrupulous landlords determined to get as much income as possible out of every scrap of precious land, they towered unsteadily. Walking through sewage-littered, unpaved streets, with buildings crowded so closely they almost touched above their heads, it seemed to Athalaric that he was passing through an immense network of sewers, like one of the famous cloacae that ran beneath Rome to the Tiber.

The crowds in the streets wore masks over their mouths and noses, gauze soaked in oil or spices. There had been a recent outbreak of smallpox. Disease was a constant threat: People still talked of the mighty Plague of Antoninus of three centuries earlier. In the millennia since the death of Juna, medical advances had barely slowed the march of the mighty diseases. Immense trade routes had united the populations of Europe, northern Africa, and Asia into a single vast resource pool for microbes, and the increased crowding of people into cities with little or no sanitation had exacerbated the problem. Throughout Rome’s imperial period it had been necessary to encourage a constant immigration of healthy peasants into the cities to replace those who died, and in fact urban populations would not become self-sustaining until the twentieth century.

This swarming place was a pathological outcome of the farming revolution, a place where people were crowded like ants, not primates.

It was almost a relief when they reached an area that had been burned out during one of the barbarian sackings. Though the destruction was decades past, this scorched, shattered area had never been rebuilt. But at least here among the rubble Athalaric could see the sky, unimpeded by filth-strewn balconies.

Honorius said to the Persian, “Ask him what he thinks now.”

The Scythian turned and surveyed the rows of heaped-up residential buildings. He murmured, and Papak translated. “How strange that you people choose to live in cliffs, like gulls.” Athalaric had heard the contempt in the Scythian’s voice.

When they returned to their villa Athalaric found that the purse he carried around his waist had been neatly slit open and emptied. He was angry, with himself as much as the thief — how was he supposed to be looking after Honorius if he couldn’t even watch over his own purse? — but he knew he should be grateful that the invisible bandit had not slit open his belly in the process and robbed him of his life as well.

The next day Honorius said he would take the party out into the country, to what he called the Museum of Augustus. So they piled into carts and went clattering over metaled but overgrown roads, out through the farms that crowded around the city.

They came to what must once have been an exclusive, expensive small town. An adobe wall contained a handful of villas and a cluster of meaner dwellings that had housed slaves. The place was obviously abandoned. The outer wall had been broken down, the buildings burned out and looted.

Honorius, with a scrawled map in his hand, led them into the complex, muttering, turning the map this way and that.

A thick layer of vegetation had broken through the mosaics and floor tiles, and ivy clung to fire-cracked walls. There must have been agony here, Athalaric thought, when the strength of the thousand-year empire had failed at last and its protection was lost. But the presence of the new vegetation in the midst of decay was oddly reassuring. It was even comforting to imagine that after another few centuries, as the green returned, nothing would be left of this place but a few hummocks in the ground, and oddly shaped stones that might break an unwary farmer’s plow.

Honorius brought them to a small building at the center of the complex. It might once have been a temple, but it was as burned out and ruined as the rest. The porters had to haul aside a tangle of vines and ivy. Honorius rummaged over the ground. At last, with a cry of triumph, he retrieved a bone, a great scapula the size of a dinner plate. “I knew it! The barbarians took the petty gold, the shiny silver, but they knew nothing of the true treasures here.”

At the sight of Honorius’s spectacular find, the others began to root in the dirt and vegetation with the enthusiasm of prospectors. Even the doltish porters seemed fired by intellectual curiosity, perhaps for the first time in their lives. Soon they were all unearthing huge bones, tusks, even misshapen skulls. It was an extraordinarily exciting moment.

Honorius was saying, “This was once a bone museum, established by Emperor Augustus himself! The biographer Suetonius tells us that it was first set up on the island of Capri. In later times one of Augustus’s successors imported the best of the pieces here. Some of the bones have crumbled away — look at this one — they are clearly very ancient, and have been subject to grievous misuse.”

Now Honorius found a heavy slab of red sandstone, with startling white objects embedded within it. It was the size of a coffin lid and much too heavy for him, and the porters had to help him raise it. “Now, sir Scythian. No doubt you will recognize this handsome fellow.”

The Scythian smiled. Athalaric and the others crowded around to see.

The white objects, suspended in the red matrix, were bones: the skeletal remains of a creature embedded in the rock. The creature must have been as long in its body as Athalaric was tall. It had big hind limbs, clearly visible ribs suspended from its spine, and short forearms, folded before its chest. Its tail was long, something like a crocodile’s, Athalaric thought. But its most surprising feature was its head. The skull was massive, with a great hollow crest of bone, and a huge, powerful jaw hinged under what looked like a bird’s beak. Two empty eyes stared out of time.

Honorius was watching him, rheumy eyes glittering. “Well, Athalaric?”

“I have never seen such a thing before,” Athalaric breathed. “But—”

“But you know what it is.”

It must be a griffin: the legendary monsters of the eastern deserts, four-footed, and yet with a head like a great bird’s. The images of griffins had permeated paintings and sculpture for a thousand years.

Now the Scythian began to talk, rapidly, fluently, and Papak scrambled to keep up his translation. “He says that his father, and his father before him, prospected the great deserts to the east for the gold that washes down from the mountains. And the griffins guard the gold. He has seen their bones everywhere, peering out of the rocks, just like this.”

“Just as Herodotus described,” Honorius said.

Athalaric said, “Ask him if he has seen one alive.”

“No,” the Scythian said through Papak, “but he has seen their eggs many times. Like birds they lay their eggs in nests, but on the ground.”

Athalaric murmured, “How did the beast get into the rock?”

Honorius smiled. “Remember Prometheus.”

“Prometheus?”

“To punish him for bringing fire to humans, the old gods chained Prometheus to a mountain in the eastern deserts — a place guarded by mute griffins, as it happens. Aeschylus tells us how landslides and rain buried his body, where it was trapped for long ages until the wearing of the rock returned it to the light. Here is a Promethean beast, Athalaric!”

On they talked, rummaging among the bones. They were all strange, gigantic, distorted, unrecognizable. Most of these remains were actually of rhinos, giraffes, elephants, lions, and chalicotheres, the huge mammals of the Pleistocene brought to light by the tectonic churning of this place, where Africa drove slowly north into Eurasia. As in Australia, as all over the world, so here; people had even forgotten what they had lost, and only distorted trace memories of these giants remained.

And as the men argued and pried at the fossil, the skull of the protoceratops — a dinosaur trapped in a sandstorm only a few centuries before the birth of Purga — peered out with the sightless calm of eternity.

“…These are accounts written down by Hesiod and Homer and many others, but handed down by generations of storytellers before them.

“Long before the existence of modern humans, the Earth was empty. But the primordial ground birthed a series of Titans. The Titans were like men, but huge. Prometheus was one of them. Kronos led his sibling Titans to slay their father, Uranos. But his blood produced the next generation, the Giants. In those days, not long after the origin of life itself, there was much chaos in the blood, and generations of giants and monsters proliferated.”

They sat in the half-ruined atrium of the rented villa. The air had remained hot and still as the evening had drawn on, but the wine, the hum of the insects, and the luxuriant, unlikely greenery draped around the atrium made this place somehow welcoming.

And in this decayed place, over glass after glass of wine, Honorius tried to persuade the man from the desert that he must travel with him much further: back across the wreckage of the empire, all the way west to the fringe of the world ocean itself. And so he told him stories of the birth and death of gods.

Another generation of life had passed, and more new forms evolved. The Titans Kronos and Rhea gave birth to the future gods of Olympus, the Romans’ Jupiter among them. Eventually Jupiter led the new, human-form gods against a coalition of the older Titans, Giants, and monsters. It was a war for the supremacy of the cosmos itself.

“The land was shattered,” Honorius whispered. “Islands emerged from the deep. Mountains fell into the sea. Rivers ran dry, or changed course, flooding the land. And the bones of the monsters were buried where they fell.

“Now,” Honorius went on, “the natural philosophers have always countered the myths — they seek natural causes that conform to natural laws — and perhaps they are right to do so. But sometimes they go too far. Aristotle holds that creatures always breed true, that the species of life are fixed for all time. Let him explain the giants’ bones we dig out of the ground! Aristotle must never have seen a bone in his life! The thing embedded in the rock in the museum may or may not be a griffin. But is it not clear the bones are old! How long can it take for sand to turn to rock? What is that great slab but evidence of different times in the past?

“Look beyond the stories. Listen to the essence of what the myths tell us: that the Earth was populated by different creatures in the past — species that sometimes bred true, and sometimes produced hybrids and monsters radically different from their parents. Just as the bones show! Whatever the precise facts, is it not clear that the myths hold truth, for they are the product of a thousand years of study of the Earth, and contemplation of its meaning. And yet, and yet—”

Athalaric laid a hand on his friend’s arm. “Calm yourself, Honorius. You are speaking well. There is no need to shout.”

Honorius, trembling with his passion, said, “I contend we cannot ignore the myths. Perhaps they are memories, the best memories we have, of the great cataclysms and extraordinary times of the past, witnessed by men who might have comprehended little of what they saw, men who might have been only half men themselves.” He caught Athalaric’s frown. “Yes, half men!” Honorius produced the skull that the Scythian had given to him, with its human face and apelike cranium. “A human, but not a human,” he murmured. “It is the greatest mystery of all. What came before us? What can answer such a question? What but the bones? Sir Scythian, you told me that this skullcap comes from the east.”

Papak translated. “The Scythian cannot say where it originated. It passed through many hands, traveling west, until it reached you.”

“And with each transaction,” Athalaric murmured almost genially, “no doubt the price increased.”

Papak raised his thin eyebrows at that. “It is said that in the land of the people with the pale skin and narrow eyes, far to the east, such bones are commonplace. The bones are ground up for medicine and charms, and to make the fields rich.”

Honorius leaned forward. “So in the east we now know that there once lived a race of men of human form but of small brain. Animal men.” His voice was trembling. “And what if I were to tell you that in the furthest west, at the edge of the world, there was once another race of pre-men — men with bodies like bears and brows like centurions’ helmets?”

Athalaric was stunned; Honorius had told him nothing of this.

The Scythian began to talk. His smooth vowels and subdued consonants sounded like a song, barely perturbed by Papak’s clumsy translations, a song from the desert that soared up into the humid Italian night.

“He says there were once many kinds of people. They are all gone now, these people, but in the deserts and the mountains they linger on in stories and songs. We have forgotten, he says. Once the world was full of different men, different animals. We have forgotten.”

“Yes!” Honorius cried, and he suddenly stood up, flushed. “Yes, yes! We have forgotten almost everything, save only distorted traces preserved in myth. It is a tragedy, an agony of loneliness. Why, you and I, sir Scythian, have almost forgotten how to talk to each other. And yet you understand, as I do, that we float, like sailors on a raft, over a great sea of undiscovered time. Come with me — I must show you the bones I have found — oh, come with me!”

III

Athalaric and Honorius came from Burdigala, a city of the thirty-year-old Gothic kingdom that now spanned much of what had once been the Roman provinces of Gaul and Spain. To get home, they were forced to travel back through the patchwork of territories which had emerged as Roman dominion had broken down across western Europe.

The relationship between Rome and the clamoring German tribes of the north had long been problematic, as the Germans pressed down hard on the old empire’s long, vulnerable northern border. For centuries some Germans had been used as mercenaries by the empire, and at last whole tribes had been allowed to settle inside the empire on the understanding that they fought as allies against common enemies beyond the border. So the empire had become a kind of shell, inhabited and controlled not by Romans but by the more vigorous Germans, Goths, and Vandals.

As the pressure on the border increased — an indirect result of the mighty expansion of the Huns out of Asia — the last elements of Roman control had melted away. The governors and their staff had disappeared, and the last Roman soldiers left clinging to their posts, ill-paid, badly equipped, and demoralized, had failed to prevent the breakdown of order.

Thus the western empire had fallen, almost unremarked. New nations emerged amid the political rubble, and slaves became kings.

And so, from the kingdom of Odoacer, covering Italy and the remnants of the old provinces of Raetia and Noricum to the north, Athalaric and Honorius passed through the kingdom of the Burgundians, which spanned much of the hinterland of the Rhone to the east of Gaul, and the kingdom of the Soissons in northern France, before returning at last to their western Gothic kingdom.

Athalaric had feared his jaunt into the failing heart of the old empire might leave him overwhelmed by the inferiority of his people’s meager achievements. But when he at last got home he found the opposite seemed to be true. After the crumbling grandeur of Rome, Burdigala indeed seemed small, provincial, primitive, even ugly. But Burdigala was expanding. Large new developments were visible all around its harbor area, and the harbor itself was crowded with ships.

Rome was magnificent, but it was dead. This was the future — his future, his to make.

Athalaric’s uncle Theodoric was a remote cousin of Euric, the Goth king of Gaul and Spain. Theodoric, who nursed long-term ambitions for his family, had set up a kind of satellite court in an old, expansive Roman villa outside Burdigala. When he heard about the exotic visitors brought back by Honorius and Athalaric, he insisted they stay in his villa, and he immediately began to plan a series of social occasions to show off the visitors, as well as the accomplishments and travels of his nephew.

At these occasions, Theodoric was to entertain members of the new Goth nobility — and also Roman aristocrats.

If political control had been lost, the culture of the thousand-year-old empire persisted. The new German rulers showed themselves willing to learn from the Romans. The Goth king Euric had had the laws of his kingdom drawn up by Roman jurists and issued in Latin; it was this body of law which Athalaric had been assigned to Honorius to study. And meanwhile the old landed aristocracy of the empire continued to live alongside the newcomers. Many of them, with centuries of acquisition behind them, remained rich and powerful even now.

Even after visiting Rome itself, Athalaric found it ironic to see these toga-clad scions of ancient families, many of them still holding imperial titles, among leather-clad barbarian nobles, gliding effortlessly through rooms whose genteel frescoes and mosaics were now overlaid with the cruder imagery of a warrior people, horseback warriors with their helmets, shields, and lances. It could be argued — Honorius did argue — that with their systematic greed, practiced over centuries, these exquisite creatures had destroyed the very empire that created them. But for these aristocrats, the replacement of the vast imperial superstructure with the new patchwork of Gothic and Burgundian chiefs had made no significant difference in their own gilded lives.

In fact, for some of them, it seemed that the collapse of the empire had actually opened up business opportunities.

As a trophy guest the Scythian proved less than satisfactory for Theodoric. The man from the desert seemed revolted by the elaborate atrium, gardens, and rooms of the villa. He preferred to spend his time in the room Theodoric had granted him. But he ignored the bed and the rest of the furniture in the room, spread the rolled blanket he carried on the floor, and set up a kind of tent of sheets. It was as if he had brought the desert to Gaul.

If the Scythian was a social disappointment, Papak was a success, as Athalaric had sourly expected. Bringing a whiff of the exotic, the Persian moved smoothly among Theodoric’s guests, barbarian and citizen alike. He flirted outrageously with the women, and captivated the men with his tales of the peculiar dangers of the east. Everyone was charmed.

One of Papak’s most popular innovations was chess. This was a game, he said, recently invented to amuse the court of Persia. Nobody in Gaul had heard of it, and Papak had one of Theodoric’s craftsman carve a board and pieces for him. The game was played on a six-by-six grid of squares, over which pieces shaped like horses or warriors moved and battled. The rules were simple, but the strategy was deceptively deep. The Goths — who still prided themselves on their warrior credentials, even though many of them had not been near a horse in twenty years — relished the sublimated combat of the new game. Their first tournaments were fast and bloody affairs. But under Papak’s tactful tutelage, the better players soon grasped the game’s subtleties, and the matches became drawn out and interesting.

As for Honorius himself, he was irritated that the parlor games of a Persian were so much more compelling than his tales of old bones. But then, Athalaric thought with exasperated fondness, the old man never had been much of a one for social niceties, and still less for the intricacies of court life. Honorius insisted on sticking to his usual games of backgammon, played with his cronies from the old landed aristocracy — “the game of Plato,” as he called it.

After a few days of the stay, Theodoric called his nephew into a private room.

Athalaric was surprised to find Galla here. Tall, dark-haired, with the classical prominent nose of her Roman forebears, Galla was the wife of one of the more prominent citizens of the community. But at forty she was some twenty years younger than her husband, and it was well known that she was the power in his household.

A grave expression on his bearded face, Theodoric placed his hand on his nephew’s arm. “Athalaric, we need your help.”

“You have a job for me?”

“Not exactly. We have a job for Honorius — and we want you to persuade him to take it. Let us try to explain why—”

As Theodoric talked, Athalaric was aware of Galla’s cool eyes appraising him, the slight opening of her full mouth. There was a myth among some of these last Romans that the barbarians were a younger, more vigorous race. Galla, in exploring intimacy with men she saw as little better than savages, might be seeking a muscular excitement she must lack in her own marriage to an etiolated citizen.

But Athalaric, a mere five years older than Galla’s own twin children, had no desire to be the toy of a decadent aristocrat. He returned her gaze coolly, his face impassive.

This subtle transaction was played out completely beneath the attention of Theodoric.

Now Galla said smoothly, “Athalaric, a mere three decades ago, as even I can remember, this kingdom of Euric’s was still a federate settlement within the empire. Things have changed rapidly. But there are strict barriers between our peoples. Marriage, the law, even the Church—”

Theodoric sighed. “She is right, Athalaric. There are many tensions in this young society of ours.”

Athalaric knew this was true. The new barbarian rulers lived by their traditional laws, which they saw as part of their identity, while their subjects clung to Roman law, which for their part they saw as a set of universal rules. Disputes over differing rulings made under the two systems were common. Meanwhile, intermarriage was forbidden. Though all parties were Christian, the Goths followed the teachings of Arius and were met with hostility by their mostly Catholic subjects. And so on.

All of this was a barrier to the assimilation the imperial Romans had practiced so successfully for so many centuries — an assimilation that had led to stability and social longevity. If this place were still under Roman rule, then Theodoric would have had an excellent chance of becoming a full Roman citizen. But the sons of Galla were forever excluded from being accepted as equals by the Goths, forever denied true power.

Athalaric listened gravely to all of this. “It is difficult, but Honorius has taught me nothing if not that time is long, and that in time everything changes. Perhaps these barriers will ultimately melt away.”

Theodoric nodded. “I myself believe it is so. I sent you to study in a Roman school, and later with Honorius.” He chuckled. “My father would never have allowed such a thing. He didn’t believe in schools! If you learn to fear a teacher’s strap now, you will never learn to look on a sword or javelin without a shudder. To him, we were warriors before anything else. But we, these days, are a different generation.”

“And the better for it,” said Galla. “The empire will never come back. But I truly believe that some day, out of the union of our peoples here and across the continent, new blood will arise, new kinds of strength and vision.”

Athalaric raised his eyebrows. Something in her tone reminded him unfortunately of Papak, and he wondered what she was trying to sell his uncle. He said dryly, “But in the meantime, before that marvelous day comes to pass—”

“In the meantime I am concerned for my children.”

“Why? Are they in peril?”

“In fact, yes,” Galla said, letting her irritation show. “You have been away too long, young man, or else you have your head too firmly buried in Honorius’s teachings.”

“There have been attacks,” Theodoric said. “Property damage, fires, thefts.”

“Directed against the Romans?”

“I am afraid so.” Theodoric sighed. “I, who remember how it was, would like to preserve what was best about the empire — stability, peace, learning, a just system of law. But the young know nothing of this. Like their forefathers who lived simpler lives on the northern plains, they hate what they know of the empire: power over the land, the people, riches from which they were excluded.”

“And so they wish to punish those who remain,” said Athalaric.

Galla said, “Why they behave as they do scarcely matters. What is important is what must be done to stop them.”

“I have raised militia. The disturbances can be quelled, but they erupt again elsewhere. What we need is a solution for the long term. We must restore the balance.” Theodoric smiled. “It is a paradox that I should come to believe it is necessary to make our Romans strong again.”

Athalaric snorted. “How? Give them a legion? Raise Augustus from the dead?”

“Simpler than that,” Galla said, unmoved by his mockery. “We must have a bishop.”

Now Athalaric began to understand.

Galla said, “Remember, it was Pope Leo who persuaded Attila himself to turn back from the gates of Rome—”

“So that’s why I’m here. You want Honorius to become a bishop. And you want me to persuade him to do it.”

Theodoric nodded, pleased. “Galla, I told you the boy is perspicacious.”

Athalaric shook his head. “He will refuse. Honorius is not — worldly. He is interested in his old bones, not in power.”

Theodoric sighed. “But there is a shortage of candidates, Athalaric. Forgive me, madam, but too many of the Roman gentry have proved themselves fools — arrogant, greedy, overbearing.”

“My husband among them,” Galla said evenly. “There is no offense to be given by the truth, my lord.”

Theodoric said, “It is only Honorius who commands true respect — perhaps because of his lack of worldliness.” He eyed Athalaric. “If it had not been so I would never have been able to release you to his tutelage.”

Galla leaned forward. “I understand your misgivings, Athalaric. But will you try nevertheless?”

Athalaric shrugged. “I will try, but—”

Galla’s hand shot out and grabbed his arm. “As long as he lives, Honorius is the only candidate for the position; no other can fill the role. As long as he lives. I trust you will try very hard to persuade him, Athalaric.”

Suddenly Athalaric saw power in her: the power of an ancient empire, the power of an angry, threatened mother. He pulled himself free of her grip, disturbed by her intensity.

Honorius prepared for the last leg of the epic journey he had first conceived on meeting the Scythian on the edge of the eastern deserts.

A traveling party formed up. The core was Honorius, Athalaric, Papak, and the Scythian, just as it had been before. But now some of Theodoric’s militia traveled with them — away from the towns, the country was far from safe — along with a handful of the more inquisitive young Goths and even some members of the old Roman families.

So they journeyed west.

As it happened they were all but retracing the steps taken by Rood’s hunting party, some thirty thousand years earlier. But the ice had long retreated to its northern fortresses — so long ago, in fact, that humans had forgotten it had even come this way. Rood would not have recognized this rich, temperate land. And he would have been astonished at the great density of people living here now — just as Athalaric would have been astounded if he could have glimpsed Rood’s mammoth herds gliding across a land empty of humans.

At last the land ran out. They came to a chalk cliff. Eroded by time, the cliff looked out over the restless Atlantic. The grassy plateau at its top was windswept and barren, save for a skimming of grass littered by rabbit droppings.

As the porters unpacked the party’s belongings from their carts, the Scythian walked alone to the edge of the cliff. The wind caught his strange blond hair, whipping it about his brow. Athalaric thought it a remarkable sight. Here was a man who had peered into the great sand ocean of the east, now brought to the western fringe of the world. Silently he applauded Honorius’s vision; whatever the Scythian made of Honorius’s enigmatic bones, the old man had already crafted a remarkable moment.

Though the members of the party were wearied by the long journey from Burdigala, Honorius was impatient to conclude the jaunt. He would allow them only a brief respite for meat, drink, and the necessary attention to their bladders and bowels. Then, capering gauntly, Honorius led them toward the cliff face. The rest of the party followed — all but Papak’s two porters, Athalaric saw, who seemed intent on making a trap for the rabbits that infested this chalky cliff top.

As they walked together, Athalaric tried to reason with Honorius again about the offer of the bishopric.

It made a certain sense. As the old civil administration of the empire had broken down, the Church, enduring, had proven a bastion of strength, and its bishops had acquired status and power. Very often these churchmen had been drawn from the landed aristocracy of the empire, who had learning, administrative experience drawn from running their great estates, and a tradition of local leadership: their theology might be shaky, but that was less important than shrewdness and practical experience. In turbulent times these worldly clerics had proved able to protect the vulnerable Roman population by pleading for the protection of towns, directing defenses and even leading men into battle.

But, as Athalaric had expected, Honorius refused the offer flat. “Is the Church to swallow us all?” he railed. “Must its shadow extinguish everything else in the world, everything we have built up over a thousand years?”

Athalaric sighed. He had very little idea what the old man was talking about, but the only way to talk to Honorius was on his terms. “Honorius, please — this has nothing to do with history, nor even theology. This is all about temporal power. And civic duty.”

“Civic duty? What does that mean?” From a bag he fished out his skull, the antique human skull that the Scythian had given him, and he brandished it angrily. “Here is a creature half human and half animal. And yet it is clearly like us. What, then, are we? A quarter animal, a tenth? The Greek Galen pointed out two centuries ago that man is nothing more than a variety of monkey. Will we ever walk out of the shadow of the beast? What would civic duty mean to a monkey, what but a foolish performance?”

Hesitantly Athalaric touched the old man’s arm. “But even if that is true, even if we are governed by the legacy of an animal past, then it is up to us to behave as if it were not so.”

Honorius smiled bitterly. “Is it? But everything we build passes, Athalaric. We are seeing it. In my lifetime a thousand-year-old empire has crumbled faster than the mortar in the walls of its capital buildings. If all passes but our own brutish natures, what hope do we have? Even beliefs wither like grapes left on the vine.”

Athalaric understood; this was a concern Honorius had rehearsed many times. In the last centuries of the empire, educational standards and literacy had fallen. In the dulled heads of the masses, distracted by cheap food and the barbaric spectacles of the coliseums, the values on which Rome had been founded and the ancient rationalism of the Greeks had been replaced by mysticism and superstition. It was — Honorius had explained to his pupil — as if a whole culture was losing its mind. People were forgetting how to think, and soon they would forget they had forgotten. And, to Honorius’s thinking, Christianity only exacerbated that problem.

“You know, Augustine warned us that belief in the old myths was fading — even a century and a half ago, as the dogma of the Christians took root. And with the loss of the myths, so vanishes the learning of a thousand years, which are codified in those myths, and the monolithic dogmas of the Church will snuff out rational inquiry for ten more centuries. The light is fading, Athalaric.”

“Then take the bishopric,” Athalaric urged. “Protect the monasteries. Establish your own, if you must! And in its library and scriptorium have the monks preserve and make copies of the great texts, before they are lost—”

“I have seen the monasteries,” Honorius spat. “To have the great works of the past copied as if they were magical spells, by dolts with their heads full of God — pah! I think I would rather burn them myself.”

Athalaric suppressed a sigh. “You know, Augustine found comfort in his faith. He believed that the empire had been created by God to spread the message of Christ, so how could he allow it to collapse? But Augustine concluded that history’s purpose is God’s, not man’s. Therefore in the end the fall of Rome did not matter.”

Honorius eyed him wryly. “Now, if you were a diplomat, you would point out to me that poor Augustine died just as the Vandals swept through northern Africa. And you would say that if he had devoted more attention to worldly matters than spiritual, he might have lived a little longer, and managed a little more studying. That is what you should say if you want to persuade me about your wretched bishopric.”

“I am glad your mood is improving,” said Athalaric dryly.

Honorius tapped his hand. “You are a good friend, Athalaric. Better than I deserve. But I will not take your uncle’s gift of a bishopric. God and politics are not for me; leave me to my bones and my maundering. We are nearly there!”

They had reached the cliff’s edge.

To Honorius’s frustration the path he remembered was overgrown. It was anyhow little more than a scratch in the cliff’s crumbling face, perhaps made by goats or sheep. The militiamen used their spears to clear some of the weeds and grass. “It is many years since I came here,” Honorius breathed.

Athalaric said sternly, “Sir, you were younger when you were here — much younger. You must take care as we descend.”

“What do I care of the difficulty? Athalaric, if the path is overgrown it has not been used since I was last here — and the bones I found are undisturbed. What matters compared to that? Look, the Scythian has already started his descent, and I want to see his reaction. Come, come.”

The party formed up into a line and, one by one, they stepped with care down the crumbling path. Honorius insisted on walking alone — the path was scarcely wide enough to allow two to walk side by side — but Athalaric went first, so at least he would have a chance of saving the old man if he fell.

They reached a cave, eroded into the soft chalk face. They fanned out, the militiamen probing at the walls and ground with their spears.

Athalaric stepped forward carefully. The floor near the entrance was stained almost white by guano and littered with eggshells. The walls and floor were worn butter smooth, as if many creatures, or people, had been here before. Athalaric detected a strong animal scent, perhaps of foxes, but it was stale. Save for the seabirds, it was evident nothing had lived here for a long time.

But it was here that a younger Honorius had found his precious bones.

Honorius hobbled around the cave, peering at anonymous bits of the floor, kicking aside dried leaves and bits of dead seaweed. Soon he found what he was looking for. He got to his knees and cleared away the debris, carefully, using only his fingertips. “It is just as I found it — and left it — for I did not want the bones to be disturbed.”

The others crowded around. Athalaric absently noticed that one of the young Romans, a man of Galla’s entourage, was pressing peculiarly close behind Honorius. But there seemed no harm, nothing but eagerness in the boy.

And everyone was impressed when Honorius gently lifted his osteoid treasure from the dirt. Athalaric could immediately see that it was the skeleton of a human — but this must have been a particularly stocky human, he thought, with heavy limb bones and long fingers — and that the skull was distorted. In fact, it appeared to have been broken from behind, perhaps by a blow. Beneath the bones was a litter of shells and flint flakes.

Honorius pointed to features of his find. “Look here. You can see where he has eaten mussels. The shells are scorched; perhaps he threw them on a fire to make them open. And I believe these flint chips are waste from a tool he made. He was clearly human, but not as we are. Consider that skull, sir Scythian! Those massive brows, the cheekbones like ledges — have you ever seen its like?” He glanced at Athalaric, his rheumy eyes shining. “It is as if we have been transported back to another day, lost unknown centuries in the past.”

The Scythian bent down to scrutinize the skull.

That was when it happened.

The young Roman behind Honorius took one step forward. Athalaric saw his flashing arm, heard a soft crunch. Blood splashed. Honorius fell forward over the bones.

The people, startled, scrambled out of the way. Papak squealed like a frightened pig. But the Scythian caught Honorius as he fell and lowered him to the ground.

Athalaric could see that the back of Honorius’s head had been smashed. He lunged at the young man who had stood behind Honorius, and grabbed his tunic. “It was you. I saw it. It was you. Why? He was a Roman like you, one of your own—”

“It was an accident,” the young man said levelly.

“Liar!” Athalaric slapped his face, drawing blood. “Who put you up to this? Galla?” Athalaric made to strike the man again, but strong arms wrapped around his waist and pulled him away. Struggling, Athalaric gazed around at the others. “Help me. You saw what happened. The man is a murderer!”

But only blank stares met his entreaties.

It was then that Athalaric understood.

It had all been planned. Only the terrified Papak, and, Athalaric presumed, the Scythian, had known nothing of the crude plot — aside from Athalaric himself, the barbarian too unschooled in the ways of a mighty civilization to be able to imagine such poisonous plotting. With his refusal to accept the bishopric, Honorius had become an inconvenience to Goth and Roman alike. The planners of this foolish, vicious conspiracy had cared nothing for Honorius’s miraculous old bones; this jaunt to the remote seashore had been seen merely as an opportunity. Perhaps poor Honorius’s body would be dumped in the sea, not even returned for inconvenient inspection to Burdigala.

Athalaric struggled free and hurried to Honorius. The old man, his ruined head still cradled in the Scythian’s bloodstained arms, was still breathing, but his eyes were closed.

“Teacher? Can you hear me?”

Remarkably Honorius’s eyes fluttered open. “Athalaric?” The eyes wandered vaguely in their sockets. “I could hear it, an immense crunch, as if my head were an apple bit into by a willful child…”

“Don’t talk—”

“Did you see the bones?”

“Yes, I saw.”

“It was another man of the dawn, wasn’t it?”

To Athalaric’s shock, the Scythian spoke in comprehensible but heavily accented Latin. “Man of the dawn.”

“Ah,” Honorius sighed. Then he gripped Athalaric’s hand so hard it was painful.

Athalaric was aware of the silent circle around him, the men from the east, the Goths, the Romans, all save the Scythian and the Persian complicit in this murder. The grip slackened. With a last shudder, Honorius was gone.

The Scythian carefully laid Honorius’s body over the bones he had discovered — Neandertal bones, the bones of a creature who had thought of himself as the Old Man — and the pooling blood soaked slowly into the chalky ground.

The wind changed. A breeze off the sea wafted into the cave, laden with salt.

I

At Rabaul, the sequence of events followed an inevitable logic, as if the great volcanic mountain and its pocket of magma beneath were some vast geological machine.

The first crack opened up in the ground. A vast cloud of ash towered into the smog-laden sky, and red-hot molten rock soared like a fountain. With the bulk of the rising plume of magma still some five kilometers underground, the stress on Rabaul’s thin upper carapace had proved too great.

In Darwin, the quakes worsened.

It was the end of the first day of the conference. The attendees, returning from their disparate dining arrangements, filed into the hotel bar. Sitting on a sofa with her feet up on a low stool, Joan watched as people got their drinks and reefers and pills and gathered in little clusters, chattering excitedly.

The delegates were typical academics, Joan thought with exasperated fondness. They were dressed every which way, from the bright orange jackets and green trousers that seemed to be favored by Europeans from Benelux and Germany, to the open sandals, T-shirts, and shorts of the small Californian contingent, to even a few ostentatiously worn ethnic costumes. Academics tended to joke about how they never planned what they wore, but in their “unconscious” choices they actually displayed a lot more of their personalities than blandly dressed fashion victims — the Alison Scotts of the world, for example.

The bar itself was a typical slice of modern consumerist-corporate culture, Joan thought, with every wall smart and pumping out logos, ads, news, and sports images, and everybody talking as loud as they could. Even the coasters on the table in front of her cycled through one animated beer commercial after another. It was as if she had been plunged into a clamorous bath of noise. It was the environment she’d grown up in all her life, save for the remote stillness of her mother’s field digs. But after that eerie interval on the airport apron — the whining of the jets, the distant popping of guns, grim mechanical reality — she felt oddly dislocated. This continuous dull roar was comforting in its way, but it had the lethal ability to drown out thought.

But now the images of the worsening eruption at Rabaul filled the bar’s smart walls, crowding out the sports and news channels, even a live feed of Ian Maughan’s toiling Martian probe.

Alyce Sigurdardottir handed Joan a soda. “That young Aussie barman is a dish,” she said. “Hair and teeth to die for. If I was forty years younger I’d do something about it.”

Sipping her soda, Joan asked Alyce, “You think people are scared?”

“Of what, the eruption, the terrorists?… Excited-scared right now. That could change.”

“Yeah. Alyce, listen.” Joan leaned closer. “The Rabaul curfew the police imposed on us” — officially the line was that the ash from Rabaul, mixed with forest fire debris from further away, was mildly toxic — “it’s not the full story.”

Alyce nodded, her lined face hard. “Let me guess. The Fourth Worlders.”

“They have planted smallpox bombs around the hotel. So they claim.”

Alyce’s face showed exquisite disgust. “Oh, Jesus. It’s 2001 all over again.” She sensed Joan’s hesitant mood. “Listen to me. We can’t give up because of those assholes. We have to go on with the meeting.”

Joan glanced around the room. “We’re already under pressure. It took an act of courage for most of the participants to come here at all. We were under attack even at the airport. If the attendees get wind of this smallpox scare… Maybe the mood is too flaky for, you know, the Bull Session to start tonight.”

Alyce covered Joan’s hand with her own; her palm was dry and callused. “It’s never going to get any easier. And your Bull Session is the whole point, remember.” She reached out and took Joan’s soda away from her. “Get up. Do it now.”

Joan laughed. “Oh, Alyce—”

“On your feet.”

Joan imagined Alyce jollying some timid student of chimps or baboons into the dark dangers of the bush, but she complied. She kicked off her shoes. And, with Alyce’s help, she clambered on to a coffee table.

She was overwhelmed by a self-conscious absurdity. With her conference literally under attack, how could she think she could get up on her hind legs and lecture an audience of her peers about how to save the planet? But here she was, and people were already staring. She clapped her hands until a quorum was turned her way.

“Guys, I apologize,” Joan began, hesitantly, “but I need your attention. We’ve worked hard all day, but I’m afraid I’m not going to let up on you now.

“We’re here to discuss mankind’s impact on the world against the background of our evolutionary emergence. We’ve assembled here a unique group, cross-disciplinary, international, influential. Probably nobody alive knows more about how and why we got into this mess than we do, here tonight. And so we have an opportunity — maybe unique, probably unrepeatable — to do something more than just talk about it.

“I’ve had an additional purpose, a covert purpose, in calling you together. I want to use this evening as an extra session — an unusual session — if it goes the way I hope, a session that may spark off an entirely new thread. A new hope.” She felt embarrassed at this unscientific language, and there were plenty of pursed lips and raised eyebrows. “So charge your glasses and vials and tubes, find somewhere to sit, and we’ll begin.”

And so, in this nondescript hotel bar, as the conference attendees settled on dragged-over chairs, stools, and tabletops, she began to talk about mass extinction.

Joan smiled. “Even paleontologists, like me, understand cooperation and complexity. Papa Darwin himself, toward the end of Origin of Species, came up with a metaphor that sums up the whole thing.” Feeling awkward, she read from a scrap of paper. “It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by the laws acting around us…”

She put down the paper. “But right now that entangled bank is in trouble. You don’t need me to spell it out for you.

“We are undoubtedly in the middle of a mass extinction. The specifics are heartbreaking. In my lifetime the last wild elephants have disappeared from the savannahs and forests. No more elephants! How will we ever be able to justify that to our grandchildren? In my lifetime, we have already lost a quarter of all the species extant in the year 2000. If we keep going at the current rate, we will destroy some two-thirds of the species extant in 1900 by the end of this century. The event’s severity already puts it up there with the previous big five of Earth’s battered history.

“Meanwhile human-induced climate change has already turned out to be much more severe than any but a few scientists predicted. Africa’s major coastal cities, from Cairo to Lagos, have been partially or completely flooded, displacing tens of millions of people. Bangladesh is almost totally inundated. If it wasn’t for billion-dollar flood defenses, even Florida would be an archipelago. And so on.

“The fault is all ours. We have become overwhelming. About one in twenty of all the people who have ever existed is alive today, compared to just one in a thousand of other species. As a result we are depleting the Earth.

“But even now the question is still asked: Does it really matter? So we lose a few cute mammals, and a lot of bugs nobody ever heard of. So what? We’re still here.

“Yes, we are. But the ecosystem is like a vast life-support machine. It is built on the interactions of species on all scales of life, from the humblest fungi filaments that sustain the roots of plants to the tremendous global cycles of water, oxygen, and carbon dioxide. Darwin’s entangled bank, indeed. How does the machine stay stable? We don’t know. Which are its most important components? We don’t know. How much of it can we take out safely? We don’t know that either. Even if we could identify and save the species that are critical for our survival, we wouldn’t know which species they depend on in turn. But if we keep on our present course, we will soon find out the limits of robustness.

“I may be biased, but I believe it will matter a great deal if we were to die by our own foolishness. Because we bring to the world something that no other creature in all its long history has had, and that is conscious purpose. We can think our way out of this.

“So my question is — consciously, purposefully, what are we going to do?”

She ground to a halt, impassioned, uncertain, standing on her coffee table.

Some people were nodding. Others were looking bored.

Alison Scott was the first to stand up, long legs unfolding languidly. Joan held her breath.

“You aren’t telling us anything new, Joan. The slow death of the biosphere is — ah — banal. A cliché. And I have to point out that what we have done is in fact inevitable. We are animals, we continue to behave like animals, and we always will.” There was a grumble of dissent. Scott plowed on, “Other animals have been known to eat themselves to extinction. In the twentieth century reindeer were introduced to a small island in the Bering Sea. An initial population of twenty-nine ballooned to six thousand in twenty years. But their food was slow-growing lichens, which had no time to recover from their intensive grazing.”

“But,” somebody shouted out, “reindeer don’t know anything about ecology.”

Scott said smoothly, “We’ve done this throughout history. The example of the Polynesian islands is well known. The Mideast city of Petra—”

As Joan had hoped, the group broke up into arguing clusters.

“…those people of the past who failed to manage their resources were guilty simply of failing to solve a difficult ecological problem…”

“We are already handling energy and mass flows on a scale that rivals natural processes. Now we have to use those powers consciously…”

“But the risks of tinkering with the fundamentals of an overcrowded planet…”

“All these technological measures would themselves cost energy, and so would actually add to the planetary burden of waste heat…”

“Our civilization has no common agenda. How would you propose to resolve the political, legal, ethical, cultural, and financial issues implicit in your proposals?…”

“I’ve been listening to this kind of technocratic horseshit all my adult life! What is this, a NASA funding pitch?”

“I say fuck the ecosystem. Who needs horny-backed toads anyhow? Let’s go for a drastic simplification. All you’ve got to do is soak up cee oh two, pump out oxygen, and regulate the heat. How hard can it be?”

“So, madam, you really want to live in Blade Runner world?”

Joan had to intervene again to pull the group back together. “We need a unity of will, a mobilization we haven’t seen before. But maybe we haven’t yet hit on the solution we should be reaching for.”

“Precisely,” said Alison Scott, and she stood up again. She rested her hands on the shining hair, blue and green, of her two daughters. “Big engineering is a defunct dream of the twentieth century. The solution is not out there; it will be found in us.”

More hostility greeted these pronouncements. “She means engineering babies, like her own two little freaks.”

“I’m talking about evolution,” Scott snapped. “That’s what happens to a species when the environment changes. Throughout our history we have proved to be a remarkably adaptable species.”

A woman stood up, sixtyish, black. Joan knew her. Evelyn Smith was one of the premier evolutionary biologists of her time. Smith said coldly, “Natural selection has not been operating on human populations for some tens of millennia. Claims that it has show a lack of understanding of the basic mechanism. We fend off the winnowing processes that drive selection: Our weapons have eliminated predators, agricultural development has beaten back starvation, and so on. But this will change if the imminent collapse occurs. In that case, selection will return. This is the subject of my paper in Session Three, incidentally.”

There were some protests.

“…what ‘imminent collapse’?”

“…for all its surface brilliance, our society shows symptoms of decline: growing inequality, declining returns from economic expansion, collapsing educational standards and intellectual achievement.”

“…yes, and spiritual death. Even we Americans pay only lip service to totems — the flag, the Constitution, democracy — while we surrender power over our lives to the corporations and comfort ourselves with mysticism and muddle. It’s happened before. The parallels with Rome especially are very clear…”

“…except that now we’re all joined up, all over the world. If we do collapse, there might be nothing much left to un-collapse out of.”

“…absurdly pessimistic. We’re resilient — we achieved great things before…”

“We dug out all the easy ores and burnt all the easy oil and coal; if we did fall, we’d have nothing to build from…”

“My point,” said Smith doggedly, “is that we may not have much time.”

These words, softly spoken, briefly silenced everybody, and Joan saw her opportunity.

She said dryly, “So I guess that if we don’t want to go back to the bad old days of being just another animal in the ecology, we need to get a hold of this mess. But I think there’s a way we can do that.” Absently stroking her belly, she smiled. “A new way. But a way we’ve known about all along. A primate way.”

And she began to outline her vision.

Human culture, Joan said, had been an adaptation to help people live through the wild climate swings of the Pleistocene. Now, in a savage millennial irony, that culture was feeding back to cause still more drastic environmental damage. Culture, which had once been so profoundly adaptive, had become maladaptive, and would have to change.

“Life isn’t just about competition,” she said. “It’s also about cooperation. Interdependence. It always has been. The first cells depended on the cooperation of simpler bacteria. So did the first ecologies, the stromatolites. Now, our lives are so interdependent that they must, in the future, develop with a common purpose.”

“You’re just talking about globalization. What corporation is sponsoring you?”

“We’re back to Gaia and other Earth goddesses, aren’t we?”

Joan said, “Our global society is becoming so highly structured that it is becoming something akin to a holon: a single, composite entity. We have to learn to think of ourselves in that way. We have to build on the other half of our primate natures — the part that isn’t about competition and xenophobia. Primates cooperate a lot more than they compete. Chimps do; lemurs do; pithecines and erectus and Neandertals must have; we do. Human interdependence comes from our deepest history. Now, without anybody planning it, we have engulfed the biosphere, and we have to learn to manage it together.”

Alison Scott stood again. “What exactly is it you want, Joan?”

“A manifesto. A statement. A cosigned letter to the UN, from all of us. We have to give a lead, start something new. We have to start showing the path to a sustainable future. Who else but us?”

“Hoorah, we can save the world…”

“She’s right. Gaia will be not our mother, but our daughter.”

“What makes you think anybody with power will listen to a bunch of scientists? They never have before. This is pie in the sky…”

Evelyn Smith said, “They’ll listen if they are desperate enough.”

Alyce Sigurdardottir stood up. “Confucius said, ‘Those who say it cannot be done need to get out of the way of the people who are doing it.’ ” She raised her thin fist in a power salute. “We’re still primates — only more so. Right?”

Despite a few catcalls, Joan thought she saw a warmer response in the faces ranked before her. It’s going to work, she thought. It’s just a start, but it’s going to work. We can fix this. She stroked her belly.

In fact she was right; it might have worked.

The political and economic pressures might indeed have induced a receptivity in the global power brokers that hadn’t existed before. Joan Useb’s ideas could indeed have shown how to ally the interconnections offered by technology with older primate instincts of cooperation. And it might have gone beyond mere ecological management. After all no species before had had the potential to be linked globally, not in four billion years of life on Earth. Given time, Joan’s approach might have inspired a cognitive breakthrough as significant as the integration of Mother’s generation.

Humans had become smart enough to damage their planet. Now, just given a little more time, they might have become smart enough to save it.

Just a little more time.

But now the lights went out. There were explosions, like great footfalls. People screamed and ran.

Meanwhile, over Rabaul, the earthquakes had gotten increasingly severe. At last they cracked the seabed above Rabaul’s magma chamber. The magma was rising to the surface through great tunnels, some of them three hundred meters wide. Now seawater rushed into the tunnels and flashed instantly to steam. Meanwhile, other gases, carbon dioxide and sulfur compounds that had been kept dissolved in the magma by the higher pressure of the depths, like the carbon dioxide in a bottle of soda. But now the bottle was cracked, and the gases came bubbling out.

In the rock chambers, the pressure escalated exponentially.

II

Emergency lights came on, filling the room with a cold glow.

The false ceiling had broken up into polystyrene shards that hailed down on the fleeing attendees. Joan saw Alison Scott grab her two girls and huddle with them in a corner. The exposed roof space, filled with insulation-lagged ducts and cables, was cavernous, dark, dirty.

Fine nylon ropes tumbled down through air thick with polystyrene dust. She glimpsed black-clad shapes that moved, spiderlike, through the roof space, and slid down to the bar’s littered floor. They wore skintight black coveralls and balaclava hoods with silvery eye visors. She counted five, six, seven of them. She couldn’t tell if they were male or female. They all carried slim automatic weapons.

Alyce Sigurdardottir was tugging at her arm, trying to make her climb down from her table. But she resisted, aware that she was still the center here; she felt, maybe irrationally, that things would get even worse if she gave in to the chaos.

One of the invaders looked to be in command. On the floor, the others gathered around him as he surveyed the situation. He, she? No, he, Joan thought; in a group like this, it will be a he. Two of the intruders stayed with the leader. The other four made for the doors. With their backs to the walls they trained their weapons on the delegates, who herded, sheeplike, toward the center of the room.

There was only one hotel staff member here: the barman, the young Australian who had caught Alyce’s eye. He was slim, with curly black hair — at least part Aborigine, Joan thought — and he wore a bow tie and sparkling vest. Now, with great courage, he stepped forward, hands spread. “Listen,” he began. “I don’t know what you want here. But if you will let me call—”

The gun’s sound was quiet, oddly like a leopard’s cough, Joan thought absently. The boy fell, twitching. There was a sudden stink of death shit, a smell she hadn’t encountered since Africa. The delegates screamed, fell back, froze, as they each in their separate ways sought not to attract the attention of the murderers.

Beyond all this, incongruously, the smart walls continued to cycle, showing meaningless images of the New Guinea volcano, the toiling robot factories on Mars, ads for beer and drugs and technological trinkets.

As Joan had expected, the leader, his symbolic killing done, approached her. His gun was at his side, presumably still hot. His visor had been sewn into the balaclava. It was stylish, almost chic.

Before he could speak, she snapped, “Are you afraid to show me your face?”

He laughed and pulled off his balaclava — he, yes, she had been right. His head was shaven. He was white, with brown eyes. He was maybe twenty-five, surely not much older than the barman he had just killed. He eyed her, measuring her unspoken challenge.

His followers peeled off their balaclavas. They all had ostentatiously bare scalps. There were four men, including the leader, and three women.

Joan asked, “Are you Pickersgill?”

The leader laughed. “Pickersgill doesn’t exist. The global police state chases a chimera. Pickersgill is a pleasing joke, and useful.” His accent was Midwestern American, but with a faint exotic burr; such was the worldwide dominance of American English nowadays, this boy could have come from anywhere.

“So who are you?”

“I am Elisha.”

“Elisha, tell me what you want,” Joan said carefully.

“You are not setting the agenda now,” the boy said. “I will tell you what we have done. Dr. Joan Useb, we have released the disease.”

Joan’s skin prickled.

“You are all infected. We are infected. Without treatment, in a few days most of us will die. If this situation is resolved to our satisfaction, perhaps we will all survive. But we are prepared to die for what we believe. Are you?”

Joan considered. “Do you want the table?”

He stalked up and down before the coffee table, thinking it over. The absurd little table was the focus of power in this room: Of course he wanted it. “Yes. Get down.”

With Alyce’s help, she clambered down to the floor. Elisha leapt with some agility on to Joan’s improvised podium and began to bark commands in what sounded like Swedish to his colleagues.

“Classic primate behavior,” Alyce murmured. “Male dominance hierarchies. Paranoia. Xenophobia verging on schizophrenia. That’s what’s going on here, under the horse feathers.”

“But it’s only dealing with the horse feathers that is going to get any of us out of here—”

She was drowned out by a huge flapping noise, as if some vast pterosaur were coming in to land on the roof of the hotel. It was a helicopter, of course, suspended in the sky beyond the roof. And now an amplified voice boomed through the walls, announcing itself as the police.

The terrorists blasted their weapons at the roof, bringing down even more of the ceiling. The conference delegates cowered and screamed — thereby adding to the din the bad guys wanted to create, Joan thought, her hands pressed to her ears. When the police stopped trying to communicate, the guns were shut down.

Joan stood up carefully, brushing away dust. She was oddly unafraid. She looked up at Elisha, who stalked his coffee table podium, flushed, breathing hard, his gun resting on his shoulder. “You haven’t a chance of getting what you want, whatever it is, unless you let them speak to you.”

“But I don’t need to speak to police, or their mind-twisting psychological advisors. Not when I have you here — you, the self-styled head of the new globalization, this holon.”

Alyce sighed. “Why do I get the feeling that such an innocent word is suddenly going to become the name of a new demon?”

“We listened to your grandiose speech in the ceiling space, excluded from the light — how fitting!”

Joan said, “You really—” You really don’t understand. Wrong words, Joan. “Please. Tell me your concerns.”

He eyed her. Then he clambered down off his table. “Listen to me,” he said more quietly. “I heard what you said about the global organism into which we must soon be submerged. Very well. But any organism must have a boundary. What about those beyond the boundary? Doctor Joan Useb, the three hundred wealthiest people on the planet own as much as do the poorest three billion of their fellow human beings. Beyond the bastions of the elite, some poor regions are effectively enslaved, the people mined for their labor and bodies — or body parts. How is your global nervous system to be made aware of their misery?”

Her mind raced. Everything he said sounded rehearsed. Of course it did: This was his moment, the crux of his life; everything she did had to be governed by understanding that. Was he a student? If he was some kind of latter-day cultural colonial type on a guilt trip, maybe she could find weak spots in his commitment.

But he was a murderer, she reminded herself. And he had killed so casually, with not a moment’s hesitation. She wondered what drug regime he was using.

“Excuse me.” A new voice. It turned out to be Alison Scott. She was standing before Elisha, her two terrified daughters at her side, their hair of blue and green shining in the meaningless, flickering light of the walls.

Joan felt a stab of pain in her lower belly, hard enough to make her gasp. She had a sense of things escalating out of control.

Bex was staring at her accusingly.

“Bex, are you OK?”

“You said Rabaul wasn’t going to hurt us. You said it was so unlikely, while we were here. You said we were safe.”

“I’m sorry. Really. Alison, please go sit down. There’s nothing you can do here.”

Scott ignored her. “Look, whoever you are, whatever you want, we are hot, we are tired, we are thirsty, we are already starting to feel sick.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Elisha said evenly. “Psychosomatic. You’re being neurotic.”

Scott actually snarled. “Don’t you psychoanalyze me. I demand—”

“You demand, you demand, yammer, yammer, yammer.” He approached Scott. She held her ground, her arms tightly wrapped around her girls. Elisha lifted Bex’s aquamarine hair, tugged it gently, rubbed it between his fingers. “Genriched,” he said.

“Leave her alone,” Scott hissed.

“How beautiful they are, like toys.” He ran his hand down Bex’s hair to her shoulder, then squeezed her small breast.

Bex yelped, and Scott pulled her away. “She’s fourteen years old—”

“You know what they do, Dr. Joan Useb, these genetic engineers? They stuff a whole extra chromosome into their kids, an extra chromosome full of desirable genes. But, aside from the hair and the teeth, do you know what that extra chromosome does? It stops those perfect kids breeding with us old-style unenhanced Homo sapiens. Now, what higher exclusion barrier can you imagine than that? Today, the rich even set themselves up as a separate species.” As if absently, like pulling a fruit from its branch, he pulled Bex away from her mother’s grasp. One of the female terrorists held back Scott. Elisha ripped open the girl’s blouse, exposing her light, lacy brassiere. Bex closed her eyes; she was muttering to herself, a song or a rhyme.

“Elisha, please—” Now there was another stab of pain in Joan’s belly, a liquid surge. She found herself bent double. Oh, Christ, not now, she thought. Not now.

Suddenly Alyce was here. “Take it easy. Sit down.”

The wall images were changing, Joan saw. Her vision was misted, but there seemed to be a lot more orange, black, gray.

Alyce was grinning, a humorless grimace, like a skull’s. “That’s Rabaul going up. Great timing.”

Elisha had gotten hold of the girl’s wrists and pushed her arms over her head.

Joan said quickly, “Come on, Elisha. You aren’t here for this.”

“Aren’t I?”

Scott said grimly, “If all you want is something to fuck, take me.”

“Oh, but there would be no point,” Elisha said. “It’s not the act but the symbolism, you see. This is the first time since the extinction of the Neandertals that there have been two distinct human species in the world.” He stared down at the girl. “Is it rape, if the act occurs between different species?”

The doors blew in.

There was screaming, running, the crackle of gunfire. Small black pellets were hurled through the open doors and burst. White smoke began to fill the air.

Joan looked for the terrorists, trying to count. Two of them had fallen when the doors were charged. Another two, running and firing, fell as she watched, suddenly turned into tumbling puppets. Most of her delegates were on the floor or cowering under the furniture. Two, three, four looked as if they might be hurt: She saw inert shapes in the smoke, splashes of bloodred in the gray murk.

A new ripple of pain passed over Joan’s abdomen.

Elisha stood before her. He was smiling. He had hold of a length of black cord that extended from his waistband.

At least Bex had been released; the girl, in the arms of her mother, was backing away.

“Elisha. You don’t have to die.”

His smile broadened. “All over the planet, five hundred of us are poised to make the same statement.”

Alyce half reached for him. “Don’t do it, for God’s sake—”

“You won’t be harmed,” he said. He pulled his balaclava back over his head. “I die as I lived. Faceless.”

Joan screamed, “Elisha!”

He tugged on the cord, as if starting a gasoline engine. There was a flash around his waist, a belt of transient light. Then the upper half of his body tipped away from the lower. As the pieces of him fell, neatly bisected, there was a stink of blood, the acid stench of stomach contents.

Alyce clung to Joan. “Oh, God, oh, God.”

The smoke was thickening, blinding, and Joan was coughing like a lifelong smoker. Now the pain came again, washing through her abdomen and back. She held on to Alyce. “Has it ever struck you how maladaptive group suicide is?”

“For God’s sake, Joan—”

“I mean, individual suicide can sometimes be justified, from a biological point of view. Perhaps a suicide is removing a burden from her kin. But what biological rationale can group suicide ever have? The capacity to believe in cultural dictates has been adaptive. It must have been or we wouldn’t have it. But sometimes the mechanism goes wrong—”

“We’re crazy. Is that what you’re trying to say? We’re all crazy. I agree.”

“Ma’am, please come with me.” A shadow before her. It looked like a soldier in a space suit, reaching for her.

Pain rippled through her again, an extinction of purposeful thought. She crumpled against Alyce Sigurdardottir. She heard another explosion. She thought it was just another part of the military or police operation.

She was wrong, as it happened. That had been Rabaul.

Once the sea had penetrated the magma chamber, the explosion became inevitable.

Shreds of molten magma flew into the air faster than sound, reaching heights of fifty kilometers. They broke up into solidifying fragments, ranging from tiny ash particles to chunks a meter wide. Mixed in with all of this were chunks of the shattered mountain itself. These bits of rock had been hurled far above the weather, far above aircraft and balloons, above even the ozone layer, fragments of Rabaul mingling with the meteorites, burning brightly and briefly. It was a sky full of rock.

And on the ground, the shock wave moved out from the shattered caldera at twice the speed of sound. Silent until it hit, it leveled everything in its path, houses, temples, trees, bridges. Where it passed energy poured into the air, compressing it and raising it to enormous temperatures. Anything combustible burst into flames.

People could see the shock was coming, but they could not hear it and they certainly could not flee it. They just popped into flame and vanished, like pine needles on a bonfire. This was just the beginning.

Space suited soldiers bundled Joan out of the smoke-filled bar, out of the hotel, and into fresh air. She was put on to a stretcher that was hauled away at running speed. All around her was a blizzard of movement, people running, cars rushing, tarmac beneath, helicopters flapping through an orange sky.

Now they were bundling her into the back of a van. An ambulance? One, two, three, lift. The stretcher slid inside the vehicle, alongside a kind of narrow bunk bed. There was anonymous equipment on the walls, none of it bleeping or humming, nothing like the equipment in the medical soaps she had once been addicted to.

She waved her hand through the air. “Alyce.”

Alyce grabbed her hand. “I’m here, Joan.”

“I feel like an amphibian, Alyce. I swim in blood and piss, but I breathe the air of culture. Neither one thing nor the other—”

Alyce’s drawn face was above her, distracted, fearful. “What? What did you say?”

“What time is it?”

“Joan, save your breath. Believe me, I’ve been through this; you’re going to need it.”

“Is it day or night? I lost track. I couldn’t tell from the sky.”

“My watch is broken. Night, I think.”

Somebody was working on her legs — cutting away her clothes? The ambulance lurched into motion, and she heard the remote wail of a siren, like some animal lost in the fog. All she could see was the bare, gloomily painted roof of the vehicle, those meaningless bits of equipment, and Alyce’s thin face.

“Listen, Alyce.”

“I’m here.”

“I never told you my family’s true history.”

“Joan—”

She said sharply, “If I don’t make it out of this, tell my daughter where she came from.”

Alyce nodded soberly. “You came to America as slaves.”

“My great-grandfather worked out the story. We came from what is now Namibia, not far from Windhoek. We were San, what they called ‘bushmen.’ We nearly got wiped out by the Bantu, and in colonial days we were killed as vermin. But we kept some cultural identity.”

“Joan—”

“Alyce, gene frequency studies show that female-line DNA among San women is more diverse than anywhere else on Earth. The implication is that San genes have been around in southern Africa much longer than any genes anywhere else on Earth. People of San ancestry are about the closest we’ll ever get to the direct line of descent from our common grandmother, our mitochondrial Eve—”

Alyce nodded soberly. “I understand. So your child is one of the youngest people on the planet — and the oldest.” Alyce covered her hand. “I promise I’ll tell her.”

The pain came in waves now. She felt as if her mind were dissolving; she struggled to think. “You know, normal human births are statistically likely to happen at night. An ancient primate trait. It’s as well to bear your child in the safety of your treetop nest.”

“Joan—”

“Let me talk, damn it. Talking makes the pain go away.”

“Drugs make the pain go away.”

“Ow! That one felt different. Is there a midwife in this damn van?”

“They’re all trained paramedics. You’ve got nothing to be afraid of.”

“I think my daughter is keen to see the inside of this scruffy ambulance.”

“You’ve done your classes. Breathe. Push.”

She began to breathe in gasping snatches, Oof, oof, oof.

Alyce kept glancing down toward the business end. “You’re doing fine.”

“Even if I do have the pelvis of an australopithecine.”

“You really are full of shit, Joan Useb.”

“Not anymore, I fear.”

“She’s coming. She’s coming,” Alyce said.

The baby’s skull bones and their junctions were soft, able to mold under the pressure of being squeezed through the birth canal. And she was able to withstand oxygen deprivation up to the moment of birth.

These last moments were the most extreme physical transformation she would suffer up until the moment of death itself. But the baby’s body was flooded with natural opiates and analgesics. She was feeling no real pain, just a continuation of the long womb dream out of which her self, her identity, had gradually coalesced.

A space suited paramedic took Joan’s child, blew into its nose, and slapped its backside. A satisfying wail filled the ambulance. The soggy little scrap of flesh was hastily wrapped in a blanket and handed to Joan.

Joan, exhausted, wondering, touched her daughter’s cheek. The child turned her head, and her mouth worked, seeking something to suck.

Alyce was smiling down, sweating and exhausted herself, like any proud aunt. “By God, look at her. She’s already communicating with us, in her way. She’s already human.”

“I think she wants to suckle. But I don’t have any milk yet, do I?”

“Let her suckle anyhow,” Alyce advised. “It will stimulate your body to release more oxytocin.”

Now Joan remembered her classes. “Which will cause my uterus to contract, reduce the bleeding, help expel the placenta—”

“Don’t worry about that,” said a space suit. “We injected you already.”

Joan let the child lick her nipple. “Look at that. She’s making grasping motions. And it’s like she’s stepping. I can feel her feet.”

“If you had a hairy chest she could probably support her weight, and maybe crawl over you. And if you moved suddenly, she’d grab even harder.”

“In case I go bounding off through the trees. Look, she’s calming.”

“Give her twenty more minutes and she’ll be pulling her tongue at you.”

Joan felt as if she were floating, as if nothing was real but the fragile warm bundle in her arms. “I know it’s all innate. I know I’m being reprogrammed so I don’t shuck off this damp little parasite. And yet, and yet—”

Alyce laid her hand on Joan’s shoulder. “And yet it’s what your life has been all about, but you just never knew it before.”

“Yes.”

There was a bleep. Alyce pulled a mobile out of her pocket. Its face lit up with bright images, flickers of movement.

A space suit murmured to Joan. “We’re approaching the hospital. You’re not to be afraid. They have a secure, enclosed entrance.”

Joan cradled her baby. “So Lucy, having just passed through one long dark tunnel, is about to enter another.”

The space suit hesitated. “Lucy?”

“What better name for a primate gal?”

Alyce managed a smile. “Joan, you aren’t the only new parent.”

“Huh?”

“Ian Maughan’s robot worker on Mars has managed to build a fully working replica of itself. It has managed to reproduce. From the tone of this text, he is very happy.”

“He texted you about that?”

“You know guys like that. The rest of the world can go to hell as long as their latest gadget does what it’s supposed to. Oh. The Fourth Worlders killed Alison Scott’s pithecine chimera. I imagine they believed she was an abomination. I wonder what she believed.”

“I suppose she only wanted security, as we all do.”

Joan gazed down at her new baby. One world had begun, just heartbeats ago, while another was ending.

“We came close, didn’t we, Alyce? The conference, the manifesto. It could have worked, couldn’t it?”

“Yes, I believe so.”

“We just ran out of time, is all.”

“Yes. That, and luck. But we must be hopeful, Joan.”

“Yes. We must always be that.”

The ambulance rattled to a halt. The doors banged open and cooler air gushed in. More space suits swarmed around, pushing Alyce out of the way, seeking to get Joan on a stretcher. They tried to take her baby off her, but she wouldn’t let them.

The geologists had long known that Earth had been overdue for a major volcanic incident.

Rabaul 2031 was not the worst eruption known — not even the worst in the historical record. Still, Rabaul had been far more severe than the 1991 eruption of Pinatubo in the Philippines, which had cooled the Earth by half a degree. It was worse than the explosion of Tambora in Indonesia in 1815, which had caused the “year without a summer” in America and Europe. Rabaul was the largest volcanic event since the sixth century after Christ, and one of the largest of the previous fifty thousand years. Rabaul was respectable.

Changes in climate were not always smooth and proportional to their causes. Earth was prone to sudden and drastic alterations in climate and ecology, flips from one stable state to another. The effects of even small perturbations could become magnified.

Rabaul was such a perturbation. But it was not going to be a small one.

It wasn’t really Rabaul’s fault. The volcano was just the final straw. Everything had been stretched to the breaking point anyhow by the humans’ extraordinary growth. It wasn’t even bad luck. If it hadn’t been Rabaul, it would have been another volcano or a quake or an asteroid, or some damn thing.

But as the natural systems of the planet broke down, humans would discover conclusively that they were still, after all, just animals embedded in an ecosystem; and as it died back, so did they.

Meanwhile, on Mars, the little robots worked on. Patiently they turned the wan sunlight and the red dust and the carbon dioxide air into little factories, which in turn produced copies of the robots themselves, with jointed legs and solar cell carapaces and little silicon brains.

The robots transmitted news of their endeavors back to their makers on Earth. No reply came. But they kept working anyway.

Under the burnt orange sky of Mars, generations passed quickly.

Of course no replication, biological or mechanical, could ever be perfect. Some variants worked better than others. The robots were actually programmed to learn — to retain what worked, to eliminate what didn’t. The weaker ones died out. The stronger survived, and carried forward their design changes to the next metallic generation.

Thus variation and selection had begun to operate.

On and on the robots toiled, until the ancient seabeds and canyons glistened, covered by insectlike metal carapaces.