Evolution (32 page)

On his way back he passed the adolescent Howl. Briefly he considered mating her again, but Capo’s attention once a day was enough of an honor for any female.

Anyhow she was sitting with an infant, an odd-looking male with a peculiarly elongated upper lip: Elephant. He was actually one of Capo’s sons. He was sitting on the ground clutching his stomach and moaning loudly. Perhaps he had a worm, or some other parasite. Howl was moaning along with him, as if some of the pain had transferred to her body. She was plucking bristly leaves and making the youngster swallow them; the leaves contained compounds that were toxic to many parasites.

And there were Finger and Frond, he saw, grubbing their way along the forest floor. The young males were aiming for a little light thievery, it seemed to Capo— in fact, he realized angrily, they had their eyes on Capo’s own heap of fronds.

Capo contained his impatience. He sat under a tree, dropped his hammer-stone, picked up a stick and began to work methodically to clean out the spaces between his toes. He knew that if he made a dash for his palm nuts the others would get there first and pilfer the nuts. By loitering like this, he was making Frond and Finger believe that no nuts had been hidden at all.

Unlike Roamer, Capo was able to read the intentions of others. And Capo understood that others could have beliefs different from his own, that his actions could affect others’ beliefs. It was a capability that even made a limited kind of empathy possible: Howl really had been sharing the suffering of Elephant. But it also made possible ever more elaborate modes of deceit and treachery. He was able, in a sense, to read minds.

This new ability had even made him self-aware, in a new way. The best way to model the contents of another’s mind was to be able to study your own:
If I saw what she sees, if I believed what she does, what would I do?
It was an inward look, a reflection: the birth of consciousness. If Capo had been shown his face in a mirror he would have known it was
him,
not another ape in a window. His were the first animals since the hunters of Pangaea to have achieved such sophistication.

At last Frond and Finger moved away from the stash. Capo grabbed his hammer-stone and descended on his palm nuts. Capo would deliver beatings to the two of them later anyhow, on principle; they would never quite understand why.

He brushed aside the concealing fronds to expose his favorite anvil stone, a flat rock embedded in the ground. To protect his backside he spread some broad leaves over the moist ground. He sat down, legs tucked up to his chest. He set a palm nut on the anvil, holding it steady with finger and forefinger— and then brought down the hammer, snatching his fingers out of the way at the last moment. The nut rolled a little and squirted sideways unbroken; Capo retrieved it and tried again. It was a tricky procedure that took a lot of coordination. But it took Capo only three goes before he had cracked the first nut and was chewing out its flesh with his teeth.

Twenty-seven million years after Roamer and her habit of slamming nuts against branches, this was the height of technology on Earth.

Capo worked steadily on the nuts, losing himself in the tricky little procedure, pushing out of his mind the obscure worries that niggled him. It was high morning now, and for a time he felt content, satisfied in the knowledge that he had gotten enough food to stave off hunger pains for a few hours at least.

Elephant, drawn by the nuts’ rich smell, came to see what was happening. This youngster’s stomach problem had evidently been eased by Howl’s rough-and-ready bush medicine— or perhaps he had been faking it, to get some attention— and he was starting to feel hungry. He made out bits of nutshell scattered around the anvil stone, and even a few scraps of kernel. The youngster snatched these up and crammed them into his mouth.

Capo, grandly, let this pass.

Now Leaf came by with her infant clinging to her back.

Capo dropped his hammer-rock and reached for Leaf. Gently he began to groom her belly, an attention to which she submitted gracefully. Leaf, a big, gentle creature, was one of his favorite females. In fact she was favored by all of the troop’s males, and they would compete for grooming time with her.

But that wasn’t Capo’s way. Very soon his lumpy penis had sprouted from his fur, and Leaf had had all the grooming she was going to get. Leaf carefully lifted the infant from her back and put her down on the ground. Then she lay back and let Capo enter her. She arched her back as he thrust, so that her head was upside down, her weight balanced on her skull. These apes often mated face to face like this. Empathy again: They could share each others’ pleasure in grooming or mating.

Capo and Leaf were close. Though mating was promiscuous, sometimes Capo and Leaf would take themselves off into the forest for days on end— just the two of them— and during such safaris of tenderness, previsioning the sexual privacy of later kinds, most of Leaf’s children by Capo had been conceived, including Elephant.

What Capo and Leaf felt for each other at such moments as this was nothing like human love. Each of the apes remained locked inside a wordless prison; their “language” still wasn’t much more sophisticated than a cry of pain. But they were among the least lonely creatures on the planet, the least lonely who had ever lived.

Meanwhile young Elephant pored over Capo’s tool kit. He started tapping nut against cobble, cobble against anvil.

Capo’s apes, as they grew from infancy, had much to learn about their environment. They needed to learn where to find water and food, how to use occasional tools to get at the food, how to apply their simple bush medicine. They had been driven to live this way, in fact, because of competition from the monkeys: They had to figure out how to extract food the monkeys couldn’t steal, and that took smarts.

But there was no schooling here. It wasn’t that Elephant was trying to figure out what Capo had been doing. But by experimenting, using trial and error and the tools the adults left lying around— all the time driven by the lure of the delicious palm nuts— Elephant would eventually learn how to smash nuts for himself. It would take him three more years before he got it right. Elephant had to figure everything out from scratch himself, as if repeating in his own lifetime the whole intellectual progression of the species.

On and on he pounded at the shells, as if he were the first ape ever to try this trick.

Capo brought himself to a slow, shuddering orgasm, his first of the day. He withdrew from Leaf and rolled onto his back, rather unjustifiably proud of himself, and allowed her to groom him, picking knots from the fur of his belly.

But now his peace of mind was disturbed by a sudden cacophony from deeper into the forest: hooting cries, drumming, the rustle of large bodies clambering and swinging.

Capo sat up. In his world it wasn’t good to have too much excitement in which he wasn’t involved. He vaulted over a tree stump, drummed on a branch, routinely cuffed Elephant about the head, and loped off toward the source of the noise.

A group of young males were hunting a monkey.

To Capo’s eye it looked like the little vervetlike creature he had disturbed munching on acacia flowers earlier. Now it sat cowering at the top of a young palm.

The hunters had spread out around the base of the tree, and were clambering stealthily up neighboring trees. Others, Frond and Finger among them, had gathered around to see the excitement. It was these spectators who were making all the noise; the hunters themselves moved with stealth and silence. But to the monkey the din was terrifying and disorienting.

Capo was unpleasantly surprised when he saw who the hunters were. They were the rowdy young males who had loped off not days before on a foraging trip to another part of the forest clump. Their informal leader, a burly creature called Boulder, had given Capo some trouble in the past with his rebellious ways, and Capo had been happy to see him go: Let him blow off steam, make a few mistakes, even get hurt, and he would soon defer to Capo’s authority once more.

But Boulder had been away just days, where Capo had expected weeks to pass. And from the look of his bristling aggression, his jaunt hadn’t made him any calmer.

Capo was worried by the hunt, too. Monkey hunting usually happened only when other food was scarce, such as during periods of drought. Why hunt
now
?

One of the clambering apes made a sudden leap. Chittering, the monkey jumped the other way— straight into the arms of a waiting hunter. The watching apes hooted and barked. The hunter swung the screaming monkey around and slammed its skull against a tree trunk. Its cries were cut off immediately. Then the hunter hurled the limp carcass to the ground, its smashed head making a bright red splash in the forest’s green murk.

That was Capo’s moment. He vaulted past Boulder to be first onto the body. He grabbed up the still-warm scrap, got hold of one ankle and twisted, hard, ripping the little limb loose at the knee.

But, to his astonishment, Boulder challenged him. The burly male leapt at him feetfirst, ramming him in the chest. Capo fell sprawling, an ache spreading along his rib cage, the breath knocked out of him. Boulder deliberately picked up the monkey limb and bit into it, blood spurting over his mouth. All the apes were madly excited now, and they hooted and drummed and scrambled over one another.

Ignoring the pain in his chest Capo leapt to his feet with a roar. He couldn’t let Boulder get away with this. He scrambled up into the lower branches of a tree, drummed ferociously, hooted loudly enough to disturb birds that roosted high above him, and vaulted back to the ground. He let anger surge through him so that he bristled, and a proud pink-purple erection stuck out before him: a nice touch that, his trademark.

But Boulder kept his nerve. With the monkey limb wielded in his hand like a club, he began his own display, his stamping, leaping, and drumming just as impressive as Capo’s.

Capo knew he couldn’t afford to lose this one. If he did, given Boulder’s circle of blood-stained hunters, he might lose not just his status but his very life.

With an agility that belied his years, he leapt forward, knocked Boulder flat, and sat on his chest. Then he began to batter Boulder about the head and chest as hard as he could. Boulder fought back. But, save for youth, Capo had all the advantages: surprise, experience, and authority. Boulder couldn’t shift Capo’s weight, and he couldn’t bring his own powerful arms and legs fully into play.

Gradually, Capo saw, he was winning the battle in the minds of the rest of the troop, which was just as important as subduing Boulder. The young male’s followers seemed to have melted away into the trees, and the whoops of excitement and approval Capo heard now seemed to be directed at him.

But even as he battled to subdue Boulder, a slow deduction worked through Capo’s roomy mind.

He thought of the dying trees he had glimpsed beyond the fringe of the forest island, the speedy return of Boulder and his wanderers, their apparent hunger, their need to hunt.

Boulder had found nowhere to go.
The forest patch was shrinking.
That had been true all of Capo’s life, and now it was becoming unavoidable. There was no longer enough room for them here. If he tried to keep the group here, the tension between them, as they competed for dwindling resources, would become too intense.

They would have to move.

At last Boulder gave in. He lay limp under Capo, cupped the older male’s buttocks, and even briefly stroked his still-erect penis, all gestures of submission. To drive home his point Capo kept battering at Boulder’s head for long minutes. Then he clambered off the prone younger male. Still bristling, he made his way into the forest, where he could afford to limp and massage the pain in his chest and nobody could see how he hurt.

Behind him the others fell on the vervet. Their stomachs could not digest flesh well, and later they would pick through their feces for lumps of meat to eat again. It was a digestive system that was going to have to improve, if the descendants of these rummaging creatures were to prosper on the savannah.

Since Roamer’s time, grass had remade the world.

The great epochal cooling of the Earth continued. As water was locked up in the Antarctic ice cap, sea levels diminished, and inland seas shrank or became landlocked. But with more continental landmass exposed, there was less sea to buffer the climate from extremes of heat and cold, and the weathering rock drew carbon dioxide from the air, making it less able to retain the sun’s heat. Cooler and drier: The planet had developed a vast feedback mechanism, driving its surface to still more arid, chilly conditions.

Meanwhile tectonic collisions created new mountain ranges: the Andes of South America, and the Himalayas of Asia. These new uplifts cast gigantic rain shadows across the continents; the Sahara Desert would soon be born in such a shadow. In the new desiccation, great belts of broad-leaved deciduous woodland spread from south and north toward the equator.

And the grasses spread.

Grass plants— huddling in their great crowds, able to rely on fertilization by windblown pollen— might have been designed for the new open, dry conditions. Grass was able to subsist on the sporadic rainfall that now fell, whereas most trees, with their roots delving ever deeper into the ground, found only dryness and could not compete. But the real secret of grass lay in its stems. The leaves of most plants grew from the tips of shoots, but not grass’s. Grass blades grew from underground stems. So grass could be cropped by a hungry animal, right down to the ground, without losing its power to regenerate.

These unspectacular properties had enabled grass to take over a world, and to feed it.

The new grass-eating herbivores developed specialized ruminant guts able to digest the grassy fodder over long periods and hence extract the maximum nutrient from it, and teeth able to withstand the abrasive effect of silica grains in grass blades. Many herbivores learned to migrate, because of the seasonality of the rainfall. These new mammals were larger than their archaic ancestors, lean and long-legged with specialized feet and a reduced number of toes to help them walk and run long distances and at speed. And meanwhile there was a sharp rise in the types of rodents, like voles and field mice, able to eat grass seeds.