Evolution

Mother’s people lived in a camp close to a dry, eroded channel that ran into a gorge. Shelters had been set up among the rocky bluffs, just lean-tos, sheets of hide or woven rattan propped up on simple frames. There were no permanent huts here, unlike the structures in Pebble’s long-vanished encampment. The land wasn’t rich enough for that. This was the temporary home of nomadic hunter-gatherers, people forced to follow their food supply. The people had been here for a month.

The site had its advantages. There was a stream, the local rock was good for toolmaking, and there was a clump of forest nearby, a source of wood for fires, and bark, leaves, liana, and vines for cloth, netting, and other tools and artifacts. And the site was a good place to ambush animals that came wandering foolishly toward the gorge. But the produce of the area here had not been good. The camp was poor, the undernourished people listless. They would probably move on soon.

Mother stumbled home, three waterfowl slung on bits of leather rope over her shoulder. The pain in her head had grown sharp now, and every surface seemed overbright and tinged with strange colors. The ballooning of the human brain, in the millennia before the birth of Mother’s distant ancestor Harpoon, had been spectacular. This hasty rewiring brought unexpected benefits — like Mother’s pattern-making ability — but costs, like her plaguing migraine.

"Hey, hey! Spear danger spear!"

She looked around dimly.

Two of the younger men were staring at her. They wore wraparound hides tied in place with bits of sinew. They both held wooden spears, crudely finished, their tips hardened by charring. They had been hurling their spears at an ox hide they had draped over the branches of a tree. Mother, distracted by the pain and the strange lights, had almost blundered into their path.

She had to wait while the spear throwers completed their contest. Neither of the two young men was particularly skillful, and their hide wraps were shabby. Only one of their spears had pierced the hide to embed itself in the tree; the rest lay scattered in the dirt.

But one of the hunters was at least hurling his spears with more power, she saw. This boy held the spear unusually far back along its shaft, and used the length of his bony arms to get a little more leverage.

Tall for his age, whip thin, she thought of him as a sapling, drawn up by the sunlight. When Sapling threw the spear, it hissed through the air, oscillating slightly. The spear’s movement was intriguing. But as her eyes tracked it, her head hurt even more.

When the spear throwers were done she blundered on, seeking the dark of the hide she shared with her son.

Inside Mother’s hut was a stocky woman of thirty-five. She had ragged, graying hair and a habitually pinched, sour face. This woman, Sour, was using a pestle to grind a piece of root. She glared at Mother, her expression as hostile as usual. "Food, food?"

Mother waved a hand vaguely, caring nothing about Sour. "Birds," she said.

Sour put down her pestle and root, and went outside to see the birds Mother had hung up.

Sour was Mother’s aunt. She had become embittered when she had lost her second child to some unknown illness a couple of days after childbirth. She would probably steal the birds, giving Mother and Silent a fraction of what Mother had brought home. But Mother, her head full of pain, felt too weary to care.

She tried to focus on her son. He sat with his back to the slanting woven roof, his knees tucked up to his chest. A sickly boy of eight, short and bony, he was using one bit of twig to push another around the dirt floor. Mother sat beside him and ruffled his hair. He looked up at her with heavy, sleepy eyes. He spent a lot of his time like this — silent, withdrawn from the rest, waiting for her. He took after his father, a short, unsuccessful hunter who had lovelessly coupled with Mother just once — and in that one coupling had succeeded in impregnating her.

Her experience of sex had been sporadic and not very pleasurable. She had met no man strong enough, or kind enough, to withstand the intensity of her gaze, her obsessiveness, her quickness to anger, and her frequent pain-driven withdrawals into herself. It was her great misfortune that the man who finally made her pregnant had quickly moved on to another — and that he had soon fallen to the ax blow of a rival.

The child was Silent, for that was his defining characteristic. And likewise, since it sometimes seemed that she had no identity in the eyes of other people here — no identity for anybody except the boy — she was Mother. She had little to give him. But at least he was spared the swollen-belly hunger that was already afflicting some of the other little ones in this time of drought.

At length the boy lay on his side and curled up, thumb in his mouth. She lay down herself on her pallet of bundled-together straw. She knew better than to try to fight the pain.