Evolution (36 page)

But in his deepest gut he intuitively knew the truth. In this world of shrinking forests, the surviving animals had already crammed themselves into all the remaining islands of the old vegetation. And that was why the others would fight so hard to exclude them. There were already too many of
them
for this dwindling patch— and they had nowhere else to go either.

There was nowhere safe to go, but no choice but to leave.

With much foot scuffing and branch waving, he began the subtle dance that indicated he wanted to lead his troop away from this place— back to the edge of the forest, back to the savannah. One or two of the females responded. Intimidated by these ferocious others, realizing how hopeless their situation was, Leaf and the others gathered up their infants and prepared to follow. Even Frond, one of the defiant young males, turned in confusion.

But Finger would not accept it.

He had been slamming a hammer-stone against an exposed root, adding its powerful noise to his display. Now, with a sudden, terrifying surge, he turned away from the others and launched a ferocious assault on Capo. He slammed into Capo’s back, knocking him flat, and he pounded his leader’s head with his fists. Then he rolled away and threw himself with equal vigor at the largest of the others’ males. Suddenly the noise, already high, became cacophonous, and the air filled with the stink of blood and panic shit.

Capo rolled on to his back and sat up, his neck aching. The other males subtly moved away, even as they hooted and yelled.

Finger was not faring well. He had managed to pin the big male to the ground. But now more of the others were throwing themselves into the melee. Soon they had hold of Finger. They hauled him away from his opponent, holding his limbs and head as if he were a hunted monkey; already blood streamed from bite-inflicted gashes in his skin. And then they threw him to the ground. But his cries soon became gurgles, drowned in blood, and Capo heard the grisly rip of flesh, the cracking of bone, the snapping of ligaments.

But Finger’s attack had had a profound effect. If anyone was going to attack these others, it should have been Capo. Capo knew he had already lost. He would be lucky to survive the day: If these others did not kill him, then his own former subordinates would.

Capo, though shamed and beaten, resumed his calling dance, trying to get his troop to come away. There was nothing else he could do.

They didn’t all respond, even now. Some of them, spitting fear and defiance, dispersed into the forest to seek their own destinies. He would never see them again.

The young female Howl glanced at her troop with wide, fearful eyes— and then made directly for the others. She would suffer a beating at the hands of the females, but maybe she would be attractive enough to the other males to be allowed to live, especially if she managed to become pregnant quickly through the hard matings she would have to endure.

Those who remained with Capo at last began moving, back toward the fringe of the forest— but only when Frond echoed Capo’s dance.

Capo understood, of course. They were following Frond, not him.

They came back to the fringe of the forest. They were not pursued, not for now. They picked at leaves and scraps of fruit, dismayed, uncertain.

Capo was depressed to be back where he had started. He could even see the corpse of that infant gomphothere, still lying on the ground. He clambered into a tree away from the others, and built an impromptu nest.

Now that Finger was dead, he wasn’t sure who would emerge as his main challenger. Frond, perhaps? It was possible Capo could continue to maintain a powerful position by forming an alliance with one male against the other. He might no longer be the boss of bosses, but like a kingmaker his backing would be crucial, and he would continue to enjoy many of the privileges that came with power, notably mating privileges. Maybe he could even work his way back to the top that way. His subtle mind thought further, considering shifting alliances, treacheries . . . His thoughts dissolved. He felt overwhelmed by the journey he had made, the crashing disappointment that had waited at the end of it. Nothing seemed to matter anymore, not even the intricate political games that had won him so much in the past.

The others seemed to sense his mood. They avoided him, not coming to groom, not even looking at him. His gruesome defeat had been postponed by the death of Finger, but its sad process was still under way. Capo’s day was done, his life nearly over. All his swagger was gone.

But now Leaf came to him. She clambered into his nest alongside him, and, gently, began to groom him, as she had when they were both young and the world was bright and rich and full of possibility.

Frond wasn’t interested in Capo, one way or the other. He had something else on his mind.

He knuckle-walked a few paces out into the sunlit green. There he got to his hind legs once more. As always he was unsteady on his feet. But the elevation of his head gave him a platform from which to view the land, check on any predators or other dangers around.

Frond ducked back into the grass, and made his way cautiously to the gomphothere corpse. As he approached, carrion birds screeched their protest but flapped away. The scavengers had done their work well: The body looked as if it had exploded, with limbs and ribs lying scattered on the ground, bloody bone gleaming, and an eyeless, fleshless head peering back at him accusingly, spadelike tusks lying broken and gnawed. He rooted through the scraps of skin and bits of hyena-chewed flesh, but there was little to be had; the scavenging machinery of the savannah had worked thoroughly to consume the proboscidean’s flesh. The hyenas had even destroyed the soft ribs. But he found a thigh bone, long, thick, terminating at either end in huge, bulging lumps. It was unbroken. He tapped it experimentally against another bone; it sounded hollow.

He found a cobble in the dirt, the right size to fit into his fist. He raised the cobble and smashed it into the bone. The bone split, and rich, delicious marrow began to leak out. It was a resource that had been beyond the reach of the dogs and carrion birds, beyond their teeth and beaks. But now it was not beyond Frond. He raised the bone and began to suck down the marrow greedily.

The others who had driven Capo and his troop out of the forest would stay there, clinging to what they had. Such groups would eventually give rise to the chimpanzees, who would differ little from this ancestral stock. They would survive, even prosper: As the desert spread and the forests retreated to their last redoubts around the equator, the great rivers would provide corridors for the chimps to use to migrate into Africa’s interior.

But the descendants of Capo’s troop were now marching toward a very different destiny. This unremarkable troop of apes, stranded by the disappearance of their forest, would find there was a way to make a living
out here.
But leaving an ecology to which they had been adapting for millions of years was hard: As long as the apes couldn’t walk or run over long distances, while they couldn’t sweat, while they couldn’t even digest meat, many, many would die. But some would survive: just a few, but that was enough.

Frond had finished the marrow. But there were plenty more bones to be broken. He stood up again. He looked back to his troop, hooting to call them over.

Then he turned back to the savannah. He was bipedal, tool wielding, meat eating, xenophobic, hierarchical, combative, competitive— all of which he had brought from the forest— and yet he was imbued with the best qualities of his ancestors, with Purga’s doggedness, Noth’s exuberance, Roamer’s courage, even Capo’s vision. Full of the possibilities of the future, laden with the relics of the past, the young male, standing upright, gazed at the open plain.

Alyce and Joan shuffled with the crowd of passengers toward the airport terminal. They had been out in the dense, smoky air for only a few minutes, and Joan was supported by the arm of Alyce Sigurdardottir. Still, she felt as if she were melting.

And when she had stepped off the plane the first thing Joan had felt was an earthquake. It was an extraordinary sensation, a dreamlike shifting, over almost before it had begun.

The quake had been caused by Rabaul, of course.

Beneath the island of Papua New Guinea, magma was stirring; molten rock, a thousand cubic kilometers of it. This great bleeding had been moving up through faults in the Earth’s thin outer crust, up toward the huge, ancient caldera called Rabaul, at a rate of ten meters every month. It was an astounding pace for a geological event, a testament to the mighty energies. The rising mass had pushed up the overlying rock, putting the land under immense stress.

Rabaul had erupted cataclysmically many times before. Two such eruptions had been identified by human scientists, one some fifteen hundred years ago, the other around two thousand years before that. It would surely happen again sometime.

The other passengers, trooping through the smoky air to the airport’s small terminal, seemed oblivious to the quake. Bex Scott had rejoined her mother, Alison, and her sister, who had golden eyes and
green
hair. Beneath a sky stained by remote fires, as the land shuddered beneath them unnoticed, the beautiful genriched children chattered brightly with their elegant mother. They had their silver earplugs still nestling in their small ears, Joan noticed. It was as if they walked around in a neon fog.

Joan remembered guiltily her bland assurance that Bex would have to be desperately unlucky for Rabaul to go pop just when she was in the vicinity. Out here, on this shuddering ground, such certainty seemed foolish. But she might still be right. The mountain might go back to sleep. One way or another, most people didn’t think about it. It was a crowded world, with plenty of problems to worry about even more immediate than a grumbling volcano.

The walk to the terminal seemed endless. The airport apron was a dismal place despite the corporate logos plastered on every surface. The intermittent shuddering of the ground was a primeval disturbance, and the huge whining of the jet engines sounded like the groan of disappointed animals.

And now Joan heard a distant popping, like damp logs thrown on a fire. “Shit. Was that gunfire?”

“There are protesters at the airport fence,” said Alyce Sigurdardottir. “I glimpsed them as we came in. A great ragged band of them, like a shantytown.”

“Just for us?”

Alyce smiled. “You can’t mount a respectable conference on globalization without the protesters jetting in. Come on, it’s a tradition; they’ve been trashing these conferences so long the veterans have reunions. You should be flattered they’re taking you seriously.”

Joan said grimly, “Then we’ll just have to work harder to persuade them that we have something new to offer. I sense you don’t like Alison Scott.”

“Scott’s whole life, her work, is show business. Even her children have been co-opted— no,
created
— to be part of the performance.
Look
at them.”

Joan shrugged. “But you can’t blame her for genriching her children.” She stroked her belly. “I don’t think I would want it for Junior here. But people have always wanted to give their children the best chance: the best school, the best stone-tipped spear, the best branch in the fig tree.”

That forced a smile from Alyce. But she went on, “Some genriching would be desirable, if
all
could afford it. There is nothing physiologically inevitable about our bodies’ limited repair capabilities, for instance. Why can’t we regrow amputated limbs like a starfish? Why can’t we have several sets of teeth, instead of just two? Why don’t we replace worn out and arthritic joints?

“But do you really think that’s where Alison Scott has made her money? Look at her kids, their hair, teeth, skin. Innards are invisible. What’s the point of spending money if you can’t show off what you’ve got?
Ninety percent
of money currently spent on genriching goes on externals, on the visible. Those wretched kids of Scott’s are nothing but walking billboards for her wealth and power. They didn’t put the
rich
in
genrich
for nothing. I’ve never seen anything so decadent.”

Joan put her arm around Alyce’s waist. “Maybe so. But we have to be a broad church. We need Scott’s contribution just as much as we need yours. You know, I feel like I have a boulder in my belly,” she said breathlessly.

Alyce grimaced. “Tell me about it. I had three of them. But I went back to Iceland for them all. Ah, poor timing?”

Joan smiled. “An accident. The conference has been in the planning for two years. As for the baby—”

“Nature will take its course, as it always has, regardless of our petty concerns. The father?”

Another paleontologist, he had been caught in the middle of a meaningless brushfire war raging in the collapsed state of Kenya. He had been trying to protect hominid fossil beds from thieves; a bandit warlord had thought he was guarding silver, or diamonds, or AIDS vaccine. The experience, and the pregnancy that was its legacy, had hardened Joan’s determination to make her conference a success.

But she didn’t want to talk about it now. “A long story,” she said.

Alyce seemed to understand. She squeezed Joan’s arm.

At last they got inside the airport terminal. The coolness of the air-conditioning fell on Joan like a cold shower, though she felt a pang of guilt at the thought of the kilowatts of heat that must thereby be pumped out into the murky air somewhere else. A Qantas representative, an Aborigine woman, smoothly guided them to a reception lounge. “There’s been some trouble,” she said to the arriving passengers, over and over. “We’re in no danger. There will be an announcement shortly . . .”

Alyce and Joan made their way wearily to an empty metal couch. Alyce went to fetch them both some soda.

The walls of the lounge were smart, filled up with airline information, news bulletins, entertainment, phone facilities. Passengers were milling about. Many of them were conference attendees; Joan recognized their faces from the program booklet and their net sites. All obviously jet-lagged and disoriented, they looked either exhausted or hyper, or a mix of both.