Evolution

Before Mother, people’s minds were compartmented, with their subtle consciousness restricted to their social dealings while specialized modules dealt with such functions as toolmaking and environmental understanding, as well as more basic physiological functions such as breathing. The various functions of the brain had developed to some degree in isolation from one another, like separate subroutines not united into a master program.

It was all very jury-rigged, though. And this hugely complex biochemical computer was prone to mutation.

The physical difference between Mother’s brain and those of the people around her was tiny, the result of a minor mutation, a small change in the chemistry of the fat in her skull, a slight rewiring of the neuronal circuitry that underpinned her consciousness. But that was enough to give her a new flexibility of thinking, a breaking-through between the different compartments of her intelligence — and a hugely different perception.

But the rewiring of so immensely complicated an organic computer inevitably had side effects — not all of them desirable.

It wasn’t just the migraine. Mother was suffering from what might have been diagnosed as a kind of schizophrenia. Her symptoms had been triggered by the death of her son. Even in this first flowering of human creativity, Mother foreshadowed many of the flawed geniuses who would illuminate, and darken, human history in the generations that lay in the future.

There was no police force here. But random killers were not welcome in such a small, close-knit community. So they came to seek her out.

But she had gone.

Alone, she walked for days across the savannah, back to the place they had last camped, the place of the dry gorge. The patch of ground was now so weathered and overgrown that surely only she could have recognized it.

She cleared away the vegetation, grass, and scrub. Then she took a digging-stick and, like long-dead Pebble digging for yams, she began to beat her way into the earth.

At last, a meter or so deep, she glimpsed the white of bone. The first fragment she retrieved was a rib. In the harsh sunlight it gleamed white, utterly cleansed of flesh and blood; she was struck by the awful efficiency of the worms. But it wasn’t ribs she wanted. She dropped the bone and dug her hands into the soil. She knew where to look, remembered every detail of that terrible day when Silent had been flung into this bit of ground, how he had fallen with head lolling back and limbs splayed, the stains of his death shit still showing on his thin legs.

Soon she closed her hands on his head.

She lifted the skull into the air, the gaping eyes facing her. A scrap of cartilage held the jaw in place — but then the rotting cartilage gave way, and the jaw creaked open, as if the fleshless child were trying to say something to her. But the gaping smile kept widening, grotesquely, and a fat worm wriggled where the tongue had been, and then the jaw fell off, back into the dirt.

That didn’t matter. He didn’t need a jaw. What were a few teeth? She spat on the cranium and polished it clean of dirt with the palm of her hand. She cradled the skull, crooning.

When she returned to the lake, the people were waiting for her. They were all here, all but the youngest children and the mothers with infants. Some of the adults carried weapons — stone knives, wooden spears — as if Mother were a rogue bull elephant who might suddenly turn on them. But as many of the group were dismayed as were overtly hostile. Here was Sapling, for instance, his spear-thrower slung over his back on a length of sinew, his pale eyes clouded as he watched the woman who had taught him so much. Many of them even wore the markings she had inspired on their flesh or clothes.

Sour’s only surviving child was a girl, thirteen years old. She had always been prone to chubbiness, and that had gotten worse now that she was coming into womanhood; already her breasts were large, pendulous. And her skin was an odd yellow-brown color, like honey, the legacy of a chance meeting with a wandering group from the north a couple of generations back. Now this girl, Honey, Mother’s cousin, stared at Mother with baffled anger, her dirty face streaked with tears.

Hostile, sad, pitying, or confused, they were all uncertain. When she recognized that uncertainty Mother felt a kind of inner warmth. Without yelling, without using violence, without so much as a gesture, she was in control of the situation.

She held up the skull and swiveled it so that its sightless eyes turned on the people. They gasped and flinched — but most looked more baffled than frightened. What use was an old skull?

But one girl turned away, as if the staring skull were looking at her accusingly. She was a skinny, intense fourteen-year-old with wide eyes. This girl, Eyes, had a particularly elaborate spiral design sketched on her upper arms in ocher. Mother made a mental note of her.