Evolution

They gave up on the maps. Still Ahmed tried to take a lead, to be decisive, and Snowy admired him for that. Ahmed sniffed the air, looked around, and pointed. "The land is rising that way. So that’s the way we’ll go. If we’re lucky, we’ll break out of these woods. Agreed?"

He was rewarded by shrugs and nods.

II

There wasn’t much to take from the Pit — nothing but what they could plunder from the dead: all the weapons and ammo they could find, spare clothing, ration packs. They made backpacks from spare flight suits, and loaded up their gear.

They set off in the direction Ahmed had chosen. The sun looked to be setting, and that meant, Snowy thought, that they had to be traveling roughly north. Unless even that had gotten itself screwed up in the years they had lost in the Pit.

The forest was dominated by the great oaks, though they were interspersed with other species like sycamore, Norway maple, and conifers. There were plenty of birds — mostly starlings, it seemed to Snowy — but he was startled to see a rattle of green and yellow wings pass across the sun. Occasionally they saw animals — rabbits, squirrels, small, timid-looking deer, even what looked like a wolf, which had them all fingering their pistols.

After maybe an hour they came to a neat round hole in the ground. It was full of debris, but was obviously man-made. The bit of human design drew them insistently. They gathered around, sipping water from the small vials they carried.

Snowy said to Sidewise, "Did you see those green birds? They looked like—"

"Budgerigars. The descendants of escaped pets. Why not? There are probably parakeets and parrots too. Some of those deer looked like muntjac to me. Out of zoo stock, maybe. Even some of the trees look like imports — like that turkey oak back there. Like they taught us: Once you disturb the balance of nature, once you start importing species, it never goes back the way it used to be."

Snowy said, "There was a wolf."

"You sure it was a wolf?" Sidewise said sharply. "Didn’t it look too low, too fast?"

Come to think of it, Sidewise was right. It had looked a little furtive, low-slung. Rodentlike.

Bonner said, "All right, two-brains, what about this hole in the ground? Somebody’s removed a tree stump here, and done it deliberately."

"Maybe," said Sidewise coldly. "But holes in the ground last a long time. You can still find holes dug by hunter-gatherers tens of thousands of years ago. All this tells us is there hasn’t been another Ice Age yet."

Ahmed glared at him. "You aren’t doing much for morale, Sidewise."

Sidewise shot back, "And what about my morale? It does me no damn good to ignore what’s blindingly obvious all around us."

There was a moment of strained silence. For a minute Snowy glimpsed Sidewise’s past, a past he never talked about: the too-brainy kid at school, impatient of the rest, constantly bullied back into line by his fellows.

"Let’s move on," Bonner said gruffly. Ahmed nodded and led the way.

Soon they came to what looked like a track. It was nothing but a winding ribbon of earth, almost invisible, crooked and devious. But the vegetation here grew a little sparser, and Snowy could feel how the ground did not give under his feet as it did elsewhere. A track, then — and surely a human-made track, not animal, if the ground had been compacted as much as it felt.

They didn’t say anything. Nobody wanted this little bit of hope to be punctured by another lecture from Sidewise. But they all followed the track, walking single file, moving that much more briskly up the shallow slope.

Snowy already felt exhausted, strung out.

He found he wasn’t thinking of his wife, his buddies back home, the life that seemed to have vanished forever. Everything was too strange for that. But he longed, absurdly, for the snug safety of his cold-sleep bed, with its enclosing carapace and humming machines. Out here he felt very exposed — his PPK didn’t add up to much protection — and he was very aware that when darkness fell in this strange, transformed place they were going to be very vulnerable.

We have to find some answers before then, he thought.

After maybe another hour the trees thinned out, and with relief Snowy found himself walking out in the open. But he still couldn’t see much. He was on the breast of a broad shallow rise, its summit hidden over the nearby horizon. The ground was chalky, he saw, and the soil thin and heavily eroded. Nothing much grew here but heather, and shoulders of bare rock stuck out of the ground.

The sky was clear, save for a scattering of thin, high cloud. The setting sun cast long shadows on the ground. It was so low that Snowy would have expected the sunset to have started already, a tall Rabaul-ash light show. But there was no redness in the western sky; the sun shone bright and white. Was the ash gone?

Moon yelped. "Tracks! Vehicle tracks!" She was pointing a little way down the slope to their right, jumping up and down with excitement.