Evolution

But for now, Sapling and his party were hunting people, not animals.

When the attack came, the river folk didn’t stand a chance. It was not their weapons that gave the attackers their advantage, not their numbers, but their attitude.

Mother’s people fought with a kind of liberating madness. They would fight on when their fellows were cut down around them, after suffering an injury that ought to have disabled them, even when it seemed inevitable that they would be killed. They fought as if they had a belief that they could not die — and that, in fact, was close to the truth. Had not Mother’s child survived death, suffusing into the rocks and dirt and water and sky, to live with the invisible people who controlled the weather, the animals, the grass?

And just as they were able to believe that things, weapons or animals or the sky, were in some way people, it wasn’t a hard leap to make to believe that some people were no more than things. The old categories had broken down. In attacking the river folk they weren’t killing humans, people like themselves. They were killing objects, animals, something less than themselves. The river folk, for all their technical cleverness with fire and clay, had no such belief. It was a weapon they could not match. And this small but vicious conflict set a pattern that would be repeated again and again in the long, bloody ages to come.

When it was done, Sapling stalked through the remains of the encampment. He had most of the river folk men slaughtered, young or old, weak or strong. He tried to spare some of the children and the younger women. The children would be marked and trained to respect Mother and her acolytes. The women would be given to his fighting men. If they became pregnant, they would not be allowed to keep their babies unless they themselves had become acolytes. He had also identified some of those with an understanding of the kilns, the lamps, and the other clever things here, and they would be spared, if they were cooperative. He meant his people to learn the techniques of the river folk.

It was another successful operation, part of the long-term growth of Mother’s community.

When she was shown the village of the river folk, Mother was pleased, and accepted Sapling’s bowed obeisance. But again she saw a frown on Sapling’s face. Perhaps he was growing discontented with obeying her instructions, she thought. Perhaps he wanted more for himself. She would have to consider, do something about it.

But it was too late for such plotting. Even as she surveyed this latest conquest, she had begun to die.

Mother never understood the cancer that devoured her from within. But she could feel it, a lump in her belly. Sometimes she imagined it was Silent, returned from the dead, preparing for a new birth. The pain in her head returned, as powerful as ever. Those sparking lights would flash behind her eyes, zigzags and lattices and stars bursting like pus-filled wounds. It got to the point where she could do nothing but lie in her shelter, smoky animal-fat lamps burning, and listen to the voices that echoed through her roomy cranium.

At last Sapling came to her. She could barely see him through the dazzle of patterns, but there was something she needed to tell him. She grabbed his arm with a hand like a claw. "Listen," she said.

He crooned softly, as if to a child, "You sleep."

"No, no," she insisted, her voice a rasp. "No you. No I." She raised her finger and tapped her head, her chest. "I, I. Mother." In her language it was a soft word: "Ja-ahn."

Another connection had closed. Now she had a symbol even for herself: Mother. She was the first person in all of human history to have a name. And, though she was dying without a surviving child, she thought she was the mother of them all.

"Ja-ahn," Sapling whispered. "Ja-ahn." He smiled at her, understanding. He bent over her, covering her mouth with his lips. Then he pinched her nose shut.

As the gruesome kiss went on, as her weakened lungs pulled for air, the darkness quickly gathered.

She had suspected everyone in the group, at one time or another, of harboring malice for her. Everyone except Sapling, her first acolyte of all. How strange, she thought.

A growing belief that behind every event lay intention — be it an evil thought in the mind of another, or the benevolent whim of a god in the sky — was perhaps inevitable in creatures with an innate understanding of causality. If you were smart enough to make multicomponent tools, you eventually came to believe in gods, the end of all causal chains. There would be costs, of course. In the future, to serve their new gods and shamans, the people would have to sacrifice much: time, wealth, even their right to have children. Sometimes they would even have to lay down their lives. But the payback was that they no longer had to be afraid of dying.

And so now Mother was not afraid. The lights in her head went out at last, the images faded, even the pain soothed.