Evolution

She took the thrower from him, set the spear in its notch, and made as if to throw. "Hand, throw, no," she said. Now she mimed the stick pushing the spear. "Stick, throw. Yes, yes. Stick. Throw. Spear. Stick throw spear. Stick throw spear…"

Stick throw spear. It wasn’t much of a sentence. But it had a rudimentary structure — subject, verb, object — and the honor of being one of the first sentences spoken in any human language, anywhere in the world.

As she repeated her message over and over, it gradually sank in.

Sapling grinned and grabbed the spear and thrower from her. "Stick throw spear! Stick throw spear!" Quickly he fitted the spear into its notch, reached back, set the spear over his shoulder — and hurled with all his might.

It was a lousy throw, that first time. The spear ended up skidding in the dirt far short of the palm she had identified as a nominal target. But he had gotten the idea. Excited, jabbering, he ran after the spear. With an obsession that briefly matched Mother’s own he tried over and over.

She had come up with this idea thanks to her peculiar ability to think about the throwing stick in more than one way. It was a tool, yes — but it was also like her fingers in the way it held the spear — and was even like a person in that it could do things, it could throw the spear for you. If you were capable of thinking of an object from more than one point of view, you could imagine it doing all sorts of things. For Mother, consciousness was becoming more than just a tool for lying.

Sapling probably would never have come up with this insight by himself. But once she had gotten through to him he had grasped the concept quickly; after all his mind wasn’t so much different from hers. As Sapling hauled the throwing stick forward, the great force it applied to the spear made it bend: the spear, flexing, actually seemed to leap away, like a gazelle escaping a trap. Mother’s mind spun with satisfaction and speculation.

"Sick." The flat, ugly word cut through her euphoria. Sour, her aunt, was standing outside the shelter they shared. She pointed inside.

Mother ran across the trampled dirt to the shelter. As soon as she stepped inside she could smell the harsh stink of vomit. Silent was doubled over, clutching his distended belly. He was shivering, his face sleek with sweat, and his skin was pale. Vomit and shit lay smeared around him.

Standing in the bright light outside the shelter, Sour was grinning, her face hard.

It took Silent a month to die.

It nearly destroyed Mother.

Her instinctive understanding of causality betrayed her. In this ultimate emergency, nothing worked. There were some illnesses you could treat. If you took a broken limb, pulled it back into shape and bound it up, very often it would set as good as before. If you rubbed dock leaves on insect bites, the poison could be drawn. But there was nothing she could do for this strange wasting away for which there wasn’t even a word.

She brought him things he had loved — a tangled chunk of wood, bright bits of pyrite, even a strange spiral stone. In fact it was a fossilized ammonite, three hundred million years old. But he would just finger the toys, his eyes sliding, or he would ignore them completely.

There came a day when he didn’t stir from his pallet. She cradled him and crooned wordlessly, as she had when he was an infant. But his head lolled. She tried to cram food into his mouth, but his lips were blue, his mouth cold. She even pressed those cold lips to her breast, but she had no milk.

At last the others came.

She fought them, convinced that if she only tried a little longer, wanted it a little more, then he would grin, reach for his bits of fool’s gold, and get up and run into the light. But she had let herself grow weak during his illness, and they took him away easily.

The men dug a pit in the ground, outside the encampment. The boy’s stiffening body was bundled inside, and the debris from the pit was hastily kicked back in, leaving a discolored patch of dirt.

It was functional — but it was a ceremony, of sorts. People had been sticking bodies in the ground for three hundred thousand years. Once it had been an essential way of disposing of waste: When you could expect to grow old and die in the same place you were born, you had to keep it clean. But now people were nomadic. Mother’s folk would be gone from here soon. They could have just dumped the boy’s body and let the scavengers take it, the dogs and birds and insects; what difference would it have made? And yet they still buried, as they always had. It had come to seem the right thing to do.

But no words were spoken, no marker was left, and the others dispersed quickly. Death was as absolute as it had always been, deep back down the lineages of hominids and primates: death was a termination, an end of existence, and those who had gone were as meaningless as evaporated dew, their very identities lost after a generation.