Evolution

Mother had moved to the lake with the people, of course; no matter what remarkable internal trajectory she was now following, she still had to eat, to stay alive, and the only way she could do that was as part of the group.

But life began to get subtly easier for her.

Nothing could grow close to this mud hole, and as the drought continued — and the elephants and other browsers demolished the trees over an increasingly wide radius — the people had to range further to gather raw materials for their fires, pallets, and shelters.

Mother got help with this chore. Eyes, the staring, intense girl who had been so impressed by Silent’s stare, brought Mother wood, her skinny arms laden with the scratchy, dried-out stuff. Mother accepted this without comment. Later she let Eyes sit and watch as she made her markings in the dirt. After a time, shyly, Eyes joined in.

One of the younger men had been close to Eyes. He was a long-fingered boy, oddly fond of consuming insects. This boy, Ant-eater, jeered at Mother and tried to pull Eyes away. But Eyes resisted.

At length Mother took a long straight sapling trunk, thrust it into the ground, and set Silent’s empty skull up on top of it. The next time Ant-eater came sniffing around Eyes, he walked straight into Silent’s eyeless glare. Whimpering, he scuttled away.

After that, with the skull watching over her day and night, Mother’s power and authority seemed to grow.

Soon it wasn’t just Eyes who brought her wood and food, but several of the women. And if she walked down to the water’s edge, even the men would grudgingly make way and let her have first cut of the drought’s latest victim.

It was all because of Silent, of course. Her son was helping her, in his own subtle, characteristically quiet way. In gratitude she set his favorite toys out at the base of the post: the bits of pyrite, the twisted chunk of wood. She even took to leaving out food for him — elephant calf meat, well cooked and chewed by his mother, the way he had liked it as a small child. Every morning, the meat was gone.

She was no fool. She knew Silent wasn’t alive in any brute physical sense. But he wasn’t dead. He lived on in other, more subtle, dispersed ways. Perhaps he was in the animals who fed on the food she put out for him. Perhaps he was in the pallet that cushioned her when she slept. Perhaps he was working in the hearts of the people who gave her food. It didn’t matter how he was here. It was enough that she knew now that death was just a stage, like birth, the sprouting of body hair, the withering of the aging. It was nothing to fear. The ache she had endured had gone. When she lay on her pallet, alone in the dark, she felt as close to Silent as she had when he was an infant snuggling at her breast.

She was certainly schizophrenic. Perhaps she was no longer sane. It would have been impossible to tell; in all the world, there were only a handful of people like Mother, only a few heads filled with such a light, and there was no meaningful comparison to make.

But, sane or not, she was happier than she had been for a long time. And, even in this time of drought, she was growing fat. From the point of view of simple survival, she was succeeding better than her fellows.

Her insanity — if it was insanity — was adaptive.

One day Eyes came up with something new.

Inspired by the carved ivory figurine Mother still kept at her side, Eyes began to make new kinds of marks on a bit of flattened-out elephant skin. At first they were very crude, just scribbles of ocher and soot on dusty hide. But Eyes persisted, struggling to replicate in ocher on skin what she could see in her head. Watching her, Mother recognized something of herself, the painful early times as she strove to get the strange contents of her head out.

And then she understood what Eyes was trying to do.

On this scrap of elephant hide, Eyes was drawing a horse. It was a crude picture, even infantile, the line poor, the anatomy distorted. But this was no abstract shape, like Mother’s parallel lines and spirals. This was definitely a horse: There was the graceful head, the flowing neck, the blur of hooves beneath.

For Mother it was another thunderbolt moment, an instant when the connections closed and her head reconfigured once again. With a cry she fell to the ground, scrabbling for her own bits of ocher and charcoal. Startled, Eyes quailed back, fearful she had done something wrong. But Mother only grabbed a bit of hide and began to scratch and scribble as Eyes had done.

She felt the first sun-bright premonitory tingling of pain in her head. But she kept on working through the pain.

Soon Eyes and Mother had covered the surfaces around them, rocks and bone and skin and even the dry dust, with hasty images of leaping gazelles and towering giraffes, with elephants, horses, eland.