Evolution

Sion reached for her sister’s hand. "You can’t leave. You must give birth here. Let the women come to you. And if they decide the time is not right—"

"But I’m not like Pepule," Juna said miserably. "I won’t be able to give it up. I just know it." She looked into her sister’s shadowed face. "Is there something wrong with me? Why am I not as strong as our mother? It feels as if I love my baby even now, as strongly as Pepule ever loved you or me. I know that if they take it from me, then I may as well follow it into the hole, for I could not live."

"Don’t talk like that," said Sion.

"I will go in the morning," Juna said, trying to sound stronger. "I will take a spear. That is all I need."

"Where will you go? You can’t live alone — and definitely not with a baby at your breast. And wherever you go the people will drive you off with stones. You know that. We would do the same."

But there is one place, Juna thought, where the people are at least different, where, perhaps, they do not murder their babies, where the people may not drive me off.

"Come with me, Sion. Please."

Sion, her eyes drying, pulled back. "No. If you want to kill yourself, I — I respect your choice. But I will not die with you."

"Then there is nothing more to be said."

Carrying nothing but a spear and a spear-thrower, wearing a simple shift of tanned goat hide, she jogged easily. She covered the ground quickly, despite the unaccustomed burden in her belly.

The land was so dry that Cahl’s footsteps were crisp. Here and there she found his spoor — splashes of half-dried piss on rocks, a neatly coiled turd — hunting beer men, it seemed, was not hard. Even far from the village, farther than the hunters would usually roam, the land was empty.

After Jahna’s time, once more the ice had retreated, brooding, to its Arctic fastnesses. The pine forests had marched north, greening the old tundra. And across the Old World people spread out from the refuges where they had survived the great winter, islands of relative warmth in the Balkans, the Ukraine, Spain. Quickly their children began to fill up the immense depopulated plains of Europe and Asia.

But things were not as they had been the last time the ice retreated.

In Australia, since Ejan’s first footsteps, it had taken a mere five thousand years to achieve the grand erasing of the megafauna, the great kangaroos, reptiles, and birds. Now, everywhere people went, similar patterns unfolded.

In North America there had been ground sloths the size of rhinos, giant camels, bison with sharp-tipped horns that measured more than a man’s arm span from tip to tip. These massive creatures were the prey of muscular jaguars, saber-toothed tigers, dire wolves with teeth able to crunch bone, and the terrible short-faced bears. The American prairies might have looked like Africa’s Serengeti Plain in later times.

When the first humans marched from Asia into Alaska, this fantastic assemblage imploded. Seven in ten of the large animal species were lost within centuries. Even the native horses were destroyed. Many of the creatures that did survive — like the musk oxen, bison, moose, and elk — were, like the humans, immigrants from Asia, with a long history of learning how to survive in a world owned by people.

Similarly, in South America, once humans walked across the Panama land bridge, eight in ten of the large animal species would be destroyed. It happened across the great plains of Eurasia too. Even the mammoths were lost. All the large animals vanished like mist.

The damage was not always proportionate to the size of the territory occupied. In New Zealand, where there had been no mammals but bats, evolution had playfully filled the roles of mammals with other creatures, especially birds. There were flightless geese instead of rabbits, little songbirds instead of mice, gigantic eagles instead of leopards, and seventeen different species of moa, giant flightless birds, eerie avian parallels to deer. This unique fauna, like that of an alien planet, was wiped out within a few hundred years of human settlement — not always by humans themselves, but by the creatures they brought with them, especially the rats, which devastated the nests of the ground-dwelling birds.