Evolution (23 page)

The whiteness of Roamer’s fur made her face seem sketchy, unformed, and oddly wistful. But she had a youthful prettiness. In fact, she was three years old, still a year short of her menarche. A juvenile female independent of spirit, not yet fully absorbed into the troop’s hierarchies and alliances, she retained something of the solitary instincts of more distant ancestors. She liked to keep herself to herself. Besides, the group wasn’t a particularly happy bunch right now.

The last few years had been times of plenty, and the troop’s numbers had expanded. There had been a baby boom, of which Roamer was a part. But growth brought problems. There was too much competition for food, for one thing. Every day there were squabbles.

And then there was the grooming. In a small group there was time to groom everybody. It all helped to maintain relationships and cement alliances. When a group got too big, there just wasn’t the time to do that. So cliques were forming, subgroups fragmenting out whose members groomed each other exclusively, ignoring the rest. Already some of the cliques were traveling separately during the day, although they would still come together to sleep.

Eventually all of this would become too intense. The grooming cliques would fission off, and the group would split up. But the new, smaller groups each had to be large enough to offer protection against predators— the main purpose of these daytime bands in the first place— so it would be a long time yet, perhaps even years, before any fission was permanent. It happened all the time, an inevitable consequence of the growing sizes of primate communities. But it meant there was a lot of squabbling to be done.

So Roamer was happy to get away from all the bickering for a while.

The bug thoroughly masticated, Roamer inspected her palm nut. She knew that the kernel was delicious to eat, but her hands and teeth were not strong enough to break open the shell. So she began to pound the shell against the branch.

She became aware of two bright eyes watching her, and a slim, rust-colored body clinging to a branch. She was not alarmed. This was a crowder, a type of primate closely related to Roamer’s kind but smaller, more slender— and a lot less smart. Beyond its slim form Roamer made out many more of its kind, clinging to the branches of this tree and the next, arrayed through the forest’s green-lit world. The crowder was not competing for Roamer’s nut, and was certainly not threatening her; all the little primate wanted was Roamer’s leavings.

Roamer was mostly a fruit eater. But the crowders, like their common adapid ancestors, relied heavily on the caterpillars and grubs they snatched from the branches, and they had sharp, narrow teeth to process their insect prey. They lived in great crowded mobile colonies of fifty or more. This gave them a defense against predators and other primates. Even a troop of anthros would have had trouble driving off one of these agile, coordinated mobs.

But Roamer was a lot smarter than any crowder.

It would be tens of millions of years before any primate used anything that could be called a true tool. Much of Roamer’s intelligence was of a specialized kind, designed to enable her to cope with the fast-shifting intricacies of her social life. But Roamer was clever at understanding the natural environment around her and manipulating it to get what she wanted. Smashing a nut against a tree trunk was hardly advanced engineering, but it required her to plan one or two steps ahead, a precursor of much greater inventiveness in ages to come. And such nut smashing was a cognitive leap beyond the grasp of any crowder, which was why the crowders were hanging around now.

Roamer heard a rustling far below. She clung to her branch, peering down into the green gloom.

She could see the litter of the forest floor, and a shadowy shape moving through the trees with a rustle of feathers, tentative pecks at the ground. It was a flightless bird, something like a cassowary. And when she tracked back the way the bird had come to the middle of the clearing, Roamer made out a rounded, polished gleam.

Eggs.
There were ten of them, nestling in the bird’s crude nest, each of them a reservoir of yolk as big as Roamer’s head. In the stillness of noon, with her mate away, the bird had left her nest briefly unguarded, taking the chance that no harm would come to it while she briefly assuaged her hunger. She was unfortunate that Roamer’s sharp eyes had detected the nest so quickly.

Roamer hesitated for a heartbeat. If she went after the eggs she would be taking a risk. Her nut cracking had already delayed her long enough for the troop to move away, and it would be bad to get lost. And the bird itself was a menace. A stalking monster, it was one of the last representatives of a twenty-million-year dynasty. After the comet, around the world, the land mammals had at first remained small, crammed into the dense forests— but some birds had grown large, and flightless monsters like this had briefly contested the role of top predator. Released from the weight limitations of flight they had become heavily built, muscular, and monstrously powerful, with beaks that could snap a backbone. But they had been out of time: When the mammalian herbivores grew large, so did mammal carnivores, and the birds could not compete.

The eggs were
there,
right below Roamer. She could take them easily.

If she had been older, more integrated into the group, her decision might have been different. But as it was she slid down the tree’s rough bark toward the ground, her small mouth already moist with anticipation. It was this moment of decision that caused a great divergence in her own life— and the destiny of the greater family of primates in the future.

She had dropped the remains of her nut kernel. Behind her the little crowder, its patient wait over, fell on the sweet fragments. But in an instant more of its fellows came swarming over the branch to steal its prize.

As she climbed down the tree Roamer disturbed a troop of screechers. These primates were very small, with manes of fine silky hair and bizarre white moustaches. Startled by her passing they chattered and scurried away into the deeper recesses of the foliage, almost birdlike in the speed of their movements and the brightness of their furry “plumage.”

Screechers made a living by digging into tree bark with their bottom teeth to make the gum flow. When they were done with a hole, they urinated into it to deter others from feeding there. There were many species of these little creatures, each specializing in the gum of one particular tree, and they were differentiated by their hairstyles. With their extravagant fur and trilling calls they made the forest canopy a place of color, life, and noise.

On the ground was still another form of primate. This was a potbelly, a solitary male. He was four times Roamer’s size, his bulky body coated in thick black fur. He sat squat, steadily pulling leaves off a bush and cramming them between his powerful jaws. His muzzle was stained black: he had been chewing charcoal from a lightning-struck stump, a supplement which neutralized the toxins in his leafy diet.

As Roamer dropped lightly to the floor he glared at her, his mouth a ferocious downturn, and let out a roar. She glanced around nervously, fearing his call might have attracted the attention of the careless mother bird.

Roamer was under no threat from the potbelly. He had an enormous stomach with an enlarged lower intestine within which his low-nutrition food could be partially fermented. To let this mighty organic factory work effectively, he had to remain motionless for three-quarters of his time. This close she could hear the endless rumbling of his huge ungainly stomach. He was remarkably clean, though; given his lifestyle, he had to be sanitary, like a sewer rat. As she moved away from his precious patch of forest floor the potbelly subsided into a sulky silence.

The forest clearing was cluttered. Grasslands were still rare. In the absence of grass, the ground cover was rarely less than a meter tall, a clutter of low shrubs and bushes including aloe, cactus, and succulents. Most spectacular of all were giant thistlelike plants strewn, in their season, with psychedelically colored flowers. Such spectacles graced most of Earth’s landmasses in this era, but it was an assemblage that would be unusual in human times; it was something like the fynbos flora of southern Africa.

To reach the bird’s nest, Roamer would have to leave the cover of the trees. But the open sky today seemed very bright— bright and washed-out white— and there was a peculiar electric stink to the air. She would be exposed out there; she hesitated, uneasy.

Clinging to the edge of the forest, she tried to work her way closer to the eggs.

She skirted a marshy area, part of the mighty river’s floodplain. She could see the water: Clogged with scummy vegetation, it glimmered, utterly flat, under a high sun. But there was a smell of salt in the air. Here, not far upstream of the river’s delta, she was close to the ocean, and occasional floods and high tides had laden the soils with brine, making the vegetation sparse.

Animals moved through the clearing, seeking the open water. In low scrub a group of gazellelike stenomylus cropped, moving in a tight, nervous cluster and peering about anxiously as they chewed. They were trailed by a smaller herd of cainotheres, like small, long-eared antelope. Other deerlike browsers worked through the forest itself. But the stenomylus were not gazelles but a kind of camel— as were the cainotheres, with their oddly rabbitlike heads.

Close to the shore clustered a family of bulky herbivores reminiscent of rhinos. These were not true rhinos, and the sad curve of their upper lips gave a clue to their ancestry: They were actually arsinoetheres, creatures related to elephants. In the water itself wallowed a mating pair of metamynodons, very like hippos; wading birds stepped cautiously away from their clumsy passion. The metamynodons were actually more closely related to rhinos than were the arsinoetheres.

Where herbivores gathered, so predators and scavengers came to watch with their calculating eyes, as they had always done. The strange protorhinos and camel-gazelles were followed by cautious packs of bear-dogs— amphicyonids, predators and scavengers, walking like bears with their feet flat on the ground.

So it went. For a human observer it would have been like a fever dream— a bear like a dog, a camel like an antelope— shapes familiar if seen through half-closed eyes, and yet eerily different in detail. The great mammal families had still to find the roles they would occupy later.

But this age could boast its champions. At the forest’s edge Roamer saw a shadow moving through the trees, immense, lumbering, menacing. This was a magistatherium. It walked four-footed, like a bear— but it was immense, twice the size of a Kodiak bear. Its canine teeth, five centimeters thick at the root, were twice the size of a tyrannosaur’s. And, like the tyrannosaurs, it was an ambush hunter. For now it ruled these African forests— and it would prove to be the largest carnivorous mammal ever to live on land. But its shearing teeth, essential tools for a meat eater, came in pairs, unlike those of the true carnivores of the future, and more prone to damage. That slight design flaw would eventually doom the magistatherium to extinction.

Meanwhile, through the largest of the pools cruised the stippled back of a crocodile.
She
didn’t care about any of this strangeness. As long as you were stupid enough to approach the crocodile’s domain, as long as you had flesh that filled the belly and bones that crunched in the mouth, you could be any shape you pleased: Your fate would be the same.

At last Roamer came close enough to the nest. She dashed out of cover, attracting blank stares from the rooting herbivores, and reached her eggs.

The nest was partially covered by fallen fern fronds, and so she had some shelter to work in. With saliva flooding her mouth she picked up the first egg— and was baffled. Her hands slid over the egg’s smooth surface, finding nothing to rip or tear. When she squeezed the egg against her chest, she did no better; the thick shell was too tough. There was no branch nearby against which she could smash the eggs. She tried cramming the whole egg into her mouth to bring her powerful back teeth into play, but her tiny lips could not reach around more than a fraction of its volume.

The trouble was, her mother had always cracked eggs open for her. Without her mother she had no idea what to do.

The light in the sky seemed to grow brighter, and a wind picked up suddenly, ruffling the surfaces of the ponds and scattering brown fronds across the ground. She felt a rising sense of panic; she was a long way from her troop. She dropped the egg back into the nest and reached for another.

But suddenly the sweet, sickly smell of yolk reached her nose. The egg she’d dropped, falling against the others in the nest, had broken. She jammed her hands into the jagged crack and pushed her face into the sweet yellow goo, and was crunching on half-formed bones. But when she took another egg, she couldn’t remember how she had opened the first. She fingered the egg and tried to bite it, starting the whole trial-and-error process over.

Dropping eggs onto each other was how her mother had opened them before. But even if her mother had been here to demonstrate how to do it, Roamer would not have learned the technique, for Roamer was not capable of reading another’s intentions, and so she couldn’t imitate. Psychology was beyond the anthros, and every generation had to figure everything out from scratch from basic raw materials and situations. It made for slow learning. Still, Roamer soon got into another egg.

She was so intent on the food she wasn’t aware of the lustful eyes that studied her.

Before she broke into a third egg the rain started. It seemed to come out of nowhere, huge droplets falling out of a blank, bright sky.

A great wind swept over the marshes. Wading birds took flight, heading west toward the ocean, away from the approaching storm. The big herbivores turned to face the rain, stoic misery in their posture. The crocodile slid beneath the surface of its pond, preparing to wait out the storm in the changeless depths of its murky empire.

And now clouds fled across the sun, and darkness closed in like a lid. To the east, at the center of the continent where the storm had brewed, thunder clattered. It was a storm of a ferocity that lashed the area only a few times in a decade.