Evolution

She reached down, pushing away the snow, until she found Millo’s shoulders. She hauled him out into the air. Soon he was blinking in the light and rubbing his eyes. The snow where he had been lying had turned piss-yellow. "Are you all right?" She cleared the snow from his hair and face, took off his mittens and manipulated his fingers. "Can you feel your toes?"

"I’m thirsty," he said plaintively.

"I know."

"I want Rood. I want Mesni."

"I know." Jahna was furious with herself. Careless, careless again, to have fallen asleep like that. And it was carelessness that might yet cost Jahna her life and Millo his. "Let’s get back to the headland."

"All right."

She put on her mittens and took his hand. They walked around the ice block that had sheltered them, back the way they had come yesterday. There was no headland. She could make out the land, but it was a low, worn-looking shore, blanketed by a crisp layer of unbroken snow.

Millo moaned, "Where’s Rood?"

For a time Jahna struggled to accept what she was seeing. Everything had been made unfamiliar by the spring storm. And her knowledge of the land was not as deep as her father’s. But still she could see that that was not the shore she had left before the storm. Give me strength, Jahna, mother of my father. "I think the pack ice must have broken up during the storm. We drifted over the sea—" she remembered now those dreams of languid rocking " — and finished up here."

"I don’t recognize that place," Millo said, pointing to the land.

"We must have been carried a long way."

"Well," Millo said, businesslike, "that’s where we’ve got to go. Back to the land. Isn’t it, Jahna?"

"Yes. That’s where we’ve got to go."

"Come on then." He took her hand. "This is the way. Watch your step."

She let him lead her.

They trekked along the coast. Blanketed by the snow, the land was silent. Hardly anything moved — just an occasional arctic fox, a bedraggled gull, an owl — and the quiet was eerie, unnerving.

It was difficult walking through the heaped-up snow, even close to the shore, especially for Millo with his shorter legs. They had no idea where they were, no idea how far the drifting ice might have carried them. They didn’t even know if they were walking back the way they had come, toward the headland. At that they were lucky, Jahna reflected with a shudder, that the ice floe hadn’t simply carried them out to sea, where, helpless, they would quickly have frozen to death.

They found a stream running fast enough to have stayed clear of this unseasonal snow. They bent to drink, up to their elbows in snow, their breath steaming. Jahna was relieved. If they had not found fresh water they might have been forced to eat snow. That would have quenched their thirst but it would have put out the fire that burned inside their bodies — and, as everybody knew, when that happened, you died.

Water, then. But they found no food, none at all. They walked on.

They stuck to the coast, feeling unwilling to penetrate that central inland silence. There were many dangers there — not the least of which were people.

As primates with bodies built for tropical climes strove to survive the rapidly changing extremes of the Pleistocene, they had built on the ancient traits they had inherited from the wordless creatures of the forests: on bonds of kinship and cooperation.

The clans scattered over Eurasia and Africa lived in almost complete isolation from one another. And the isolation went very deep. Fifty kilometers from Jahna’s birthplace lived people who spoke a language more different from hers than Finnish would be from Chinese. In the days of Far and even Pebble, there had been a transcontinental uniformity; now there could be significant differences between one river valley and the next. Humans were capable of altruism so generous one would suffer injury, maiming, even death to save another — and yet they indulged in extreme xenophobia, even deliberate and purposeful genocide. But in a harsh land where food was short, it made sense for members of a community to support one another selflessly — and to fend off others, who might steal scarce resources. Even genocide had a certain horrible logic.

If the children were discovered by strangers, it was possible Jahna’s life would be spared — but only so she could be taken for sex. Her best hope would be to fall pregnant, and win the loyalty of one of the men. But she would always be lowly, never one of the true people. Millo, meanwhile, would simply be killed, perhaps after a little sport. She knew this was so. She had seen it happen among her own kind. So it was best they remain undiscovered.

As the children plodded on, their hunger gnawed.

They crossed a low rocky ridge. In its lee a stand of spruce had grown — dwarfed. The trees were no taller than Jahna was, but in the rock’s shelter they were at least able to lift up from the ground.