Evolution (66 page)

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.