Evolution

Ahmed said that during the industrialized period — and especially during the last few insane decades — mankind had used up all its accessible supplies of fossil fuels: coal, gas, oil. "The fossil fuels are probably forming again even now. We know that. But incredibly slowly. The stuff we burned up in a few centuries took around four hundred and fifty million years to form. But there will always be fuel for our descendants," he said. "Peat. Peat is what you get when bog mosses, sedges, and other vegetation decompose in oxygen-starved wetlands. Right? And in some parts of the world peat-cutting for fuel continued right until the middle of the twentieth century."

"In Ireland," Sidewise said. "In Scandinavia. Not here."

"Then we go to Ireland, or Scandinavia. Or maybe we’ll find it here. Conditions have changed a lot since we went into the cold sleep. Anyhow, if we don’t find peat we’ll find something else. We’ve inherited a burned-out world." He tapped his temple. "But we still have our minds, our ingenuity."

"Oh, for God’s sake," Sidewise said explosively. "Ahmed, don’t you get it? We’re just a bunch of castaways — that’s it — castaways in time. For Christ’s sake, man, we only have one womb between us."

"My womb," said Moon now, without looking up. "My womb. You insufferable prick."

"Bog iron," Ahmed said smoothly.

They all stared.

Ahmed said, "You get iron oxide forming in bogs and marshes. When iron-rich groundwater comes into contact with the air, well, it rusts. Right, Sidewise? The Vikings used to exploit that stuff. Why don’t we?"

As the bickering went on, Snowy’s gaze was drawn to the nearby woods, the shadowed green. Sidewise is right, he thought. We are here by accident, just a kind of echo. We are just going to fall apart, and get pulled down by the green like all the ruined buildings, and just disappear, adding our bones to the billions already heaped in the ground. And it won’t matter a damn. If he hadn’t known it before, known it in his gut, he was convinced of it now, having encountered the ape-girl. She is the future, he thought; she, with her bright lion’s gaze, her naked little body, her nimbleness and strength — her wordless silence.

As they dispersed, Snowy took Sidewise to one side, and told him about the feral woman.

Sidewise asked immediately, "Did you fuck her?"

Snowy frowned his disgust. "No. I felt like it — I got a hell of a rod — but when I saw what she was really like, I couldn’t have."

Sidewise clapped him on the shoulder. "No reflection on your manhood, pal. Weena is probably the wrong species, that’s all."

"Weena?"

"An old literary reference. Never mind. Listen. No matter what El Presidente over there says, we ought to find out more about these critters. That’s a hell of a lot more important than digging peat. We need to figure out how they are surviving here. Because that’s the way we are going to have to live too. Go find your girlfriend, Snowy. And ask her if she’d like a double date."

A couple of days after that, before Ahmed could implement his plans for rebuilding civilization, he fell ill. He had to retreat to his lean-to, dependent on the food and water the others brought him.

Sidewise thought it was mercury poisoning, from the spoil heap by the camp. Mercury had been used for centuries in the making of everything from hats to mirrors to bug-control potions to treatments for syphilis. The ground was probably saturated with it, relatively speaking, and even now, a thousand years later, it was still leaching by various slow-dispersal routes into the lake, where it worked its way up the food chain to maximum concentration in the bodies of fish, and the mouths of the people who ate them.

Sidewise seemed to think all of this was funny: that Ahmed, the great planner — the one who, among them all, had clung the longest and hardest to the expansionist dreams of the long-gone twenty-first century — had succumbed to a dose of poison, a lingering legacy of that destructive age.

Snowy didn’t much care. There were far more interesting things in the world than anything Ahmed said or did.

Like Weena, and her hairy folk of the forest.

Snowy and Sidewise built a kind of blind, a lean-to liberally sprinkled with grass and green leaves, not far from where Snowy had first encountered the ape-girl Sidewise had christened Weena.

Snowy glanced at Sidewise, stretched out in the blind’s shade. In the dense heat of this un-English summer, both of them had taken to going naked save for shorts, an equipment belt, and boots. Sidewise’s skin, brown and smeared liberally with dirt, was as good a camouflage as anything invented by the hand of man. Only five or six weeks out of the Pit he was unrecognizable.

"There," hissed Sidewise.