Evolution (57 page)

And so now Mother was not afraid. The lights in her head went out at last, the images faded, even the pain soothed.

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.