Great Sky Woman
Authors: Steven Barnes
Contents
For my own Great Circle:
Joyce, who taught me to read.
Nicki, who taught me to love.
Jason, my living example of how life and learning begins.
Tananarive, a daily reminder that miracles exist.
Bless you all.
Dramatis Personae
THE INNER BOMAS
Frog Hopping
Fire Ant (
Frog’s brother
)
Hawk Shadow (
Frog’s eldest brother
)
Scorpion (
Frog’s stepbrother
)
Uncle Snake
Lizard Tongue (
an older friend
)
Break Spear (
boma father
)
Little Brook (
Frog’s sister
)
Gazelle Tears (
Frog’s mother
)
Wasp (
little brother
)
Hot Tree (
boma mother
)
Zebra Moon (
T’Cori’s mother
)
Water Chant (
T’Cori’s father
)
Lion Tooth
THE DREAM DANCERS
Stillshadow (
chief dream dancer
)
T’Cori
Small Raven (
Stillshadow’s daughter
)
Blossom (
Raven’s older sister
)
Dove
Fawn Blossom (
Dove’s twin sister
)
Sister Quiet Water
THE HUNT CHIEFS
Cloud Stalker (
grand hunt chief
)
Owl Hooting (
son of Cloud Stalker
)
THE MK*TK
Flat-Nose
Notch-Ear
In the beginning…
A hundred and seventy-five million years before the first men raised their faces to the sun, the lands of Earth were grouped together in a titanic sprawl now referred to as
Pangaea.
Africa, mother to all mankind, lay nestled in its midst. When Pangaea began to fragment, the first to break away were Antarctica and Australia.
Three gigantic cracks appeared on the eastern side of this fractured supercontinent. Arabia broke free, creating the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea. The two other cracks created rift valleys, straight-sided trenches averaging thirty miles across, running south from the Gulf of Aden thirty-five hundred miles to Mozambique.
A hundred and seventy million years later, a desert wasteland that would one day be called the Sahara expanded, creating a barrier virtually impassable to land animals. South of it, the once endless forests contracted, spawning vast grasslands: the savannahs.
One class of monkeys and one of apes moved into these lush green fields. The monkeys were the baboons.
The apes were the earliest ancestors of men.
Here in this new environment, the baboons descended onto all fours, but our ancestors discovered the art of walking erect. In doing so, they freed their hands to create artifacts of wood and stone and shell, to craft tools and weapons.
Biologists and anthropologists have debated for centuries, asking what unique quality separates human beings from other animals. It is possible that only one observable, incontrovertible behavior separates human beings from any other creature: humans are the animals that create and use fire as a tool.
How humans discovered fire, whether through volcanic activity or perhaps lightning strike, no one knows. That we learned to duplicate it with our own tools is a major miracle, dwarfing any other discovery in human history. However it happened, fire changed
everything.
With the conquest of flame, spear tips could be hardened, animals frightened away from campsites or driven into killing grounds. But not only was meat more readily obtained, cooking also made complex animal proteins more digestible, leading to taller, stronger humans with larger brains, brains that in turn devised more complex and efficient hunting strategies.
This positive spiral was one of the forces driving human evolution.
There was another, less tangible benefit.
For the first time in the history of life on Earth, a creature could create and control shadows. In observing the relationships between living things and their two-dimensional representations, these fire users quite possibly began the process of abstract thought itself, as demonstrated in cave paintings dating to thirty thousand years before the birth of Christ. It is very nearly as if the ego awoke and said, “I am.” In addition, as firelight pushed back the night, human beings, poorly adapted for the darkness, had more time in which to interact, to communicate, to dance and speak of the day’s events. These early pantomimes allowed the old hunters to teach young ones the methods of avoiding predators and obtaining prey. Storytelling allowed human beings to create their identities, to ask questions about their world only later generations could answer.
Humans created story, but in another, perhaps deeper sense, story created humanity.
Seven hundred thousand years earlier, the ancestors of these first modern humans witnessed the birth of the mountains called Kilimanjaro and Meru.
By far the larger of the two, Kilimanjaro was born when an ocean of magma burned its way through the earth and broke free to the surface. Liquid rock gushed and then cooled. Every few years or centuries this blazing, viscous fluid deposited layer upon smoldering layer. Eventually the volcanic spire would dominate the equatorial horizon, a beacon to the adventurous long before the first Arab ship logs described it in 200 AD.
Scaling Kilimanjaro is like walking from the equator to the Arctic in a single week. For the first six thousand to nine thousand feet, its vegetation is a virtually impassible tropical rain forest, an eternal dank green canopy thick enough to blot out the sun. From nine thousand to thirteen thousand feet this transforms into equally dense heath and moorland. From thirteen thousand to seventeen thousand feet, all of this changes: vegetation recedes and alpine desert dominates. It is a world of cactus and harsh gravel, of piercing sun and thinning air, a change often disorienting in its abruptness.
Above seventeen thousand feet exists an alien winter world, the only snow to be found in equatorial Africa. Here, where the air pressure is less than half that at sea level, no animals can live. No plant life is to be found save lichens. Europeans say the mountain went unclimbed until 1887, when a German named Hans Meyer found a way through the rock and ice.
If one believes the old stories, the Europeans are wrong.
The Chagga, folk who have lived at Kilimanjaro’s feet for thousands of years, have ancient legends of princes whose courtiers died carrying them to the top, that they might see the sunrise before any of their subjects. The detail in these legends is consistent with the reality of the climb.
This is the story of the first courageous souls to scale this, the tallest freestanding mountain in all the world, folk who lived in the shadow of Kilimanjaro and its nearby, smaller mate, Mt. Meru. It tells of our distant ancestors, the first animals with more information in their brains than in their genes.
This is the tale of the first to look down from this great peak’s impossible heights: a boy who discovered a new world, and a girl who ended the old one.