Evolution

He didn’t live as they did. He used his snares to trap game up to the size of pigs and small deer, and used knives and fires and lean-tos for protection and butchery. But he walked where they walked.

They wandered impressively widely, through the great forests that blanketed southern England, forests that concealed the ruins of cities and cathedrals, palaces and parks. He became concerned if he lost sight of Weena, reassured when he found her again. He grew to know all the individuals in the little group — he gave them names, like Grandpa and Shorty and Doc — and he followed their lives, their triumphs and tragedies, as if he were watching a small soap opera.

They were frightened of the rats — the big ones, the rat-wolves that seemed to hunt in packs. He found that out quickly.

He wondered how he must seem to them. They were clearly aware of him, but he didn’t interfere with them or the food they gathered. So they let him be, unremarked. He was like a ghost, he thought, a ghost from a vanished past, haunting these new people.

After a few months, with the long, long summer of these late times at last drawing to a close, they came to a beach. Snowy thought he was somewhere on the Sussex shore, on Britain’s south coast.

The hairies did a little foraging at the fringe of the forest, ignoring Snowy as usual.

Snowy wandered along the beach. The forest washed right down to the shore, as if this were a Robinson Crusoe tropical island, not England at all. He found a place to sit, facing the crashing waves.

He picked up a handful of sand. It was fine and golden, and ran easily through his fingers. But there were black grains in there, he saw, and some bits of orange and green and blue. The multicolored stuff must be plastic. And the black stuff looked like soot — soot from Rabaul, the killer volcano, or from the fires that had swept the world as everything went to shit.

It’s all gone, he thought wonderingly. It really has. The sand was a kind of proof. Moon rock and cathedrals and football stadiums, libraries and museums and paintings, highways and cities and shanties, Shakespeare and Mozart and Einstein, Buddha and Mohammed and Jesus, lions and elephants and horses and gorillas and the rest of the menagerie of extinction — all worn away and scattered and ground down, mixed into this sooty sand he trickled through his fingers.

The hairies were leaving. He could see their slim forms sliding silently into the deeper forest.

He stood up, brushed the sand off his palms, shifted the pack on his back, and followed them.

CHAPTER 18 The Kingdom of the Rats East Africa. Circa 30 million years after present.

I

The asteroid had once been called Eros.

Eros had its own miniature geography. Its ground was covered by impact craters, scattered rubble and debris, and strange pools of very fine, bluish dust, electrically charged by the relentless sunlight. Some three times as long as it was wide, it was like Manhattan Island hurled into space.

Eros was as old as the Devil’s Tail. Like the Chicxulub comet it was a relic of the formation of the solar system itself. But unlike the comet the asteroid had coalesced well within the clockwork of the inner system — inside the orbit of Jupiter, in fact. In the early days there had been mass destruction as the young asteroids, following their careening orbits, had smashed helplessly into each other. Most were shattered into clouds of dust, or thrown into the great maw of Jupiter, or into the crowded and dangerous inner system. The survivors, in their depleted swarms, followed orderly orbits around the brightening sun.

But even now gravity’s ghostly tug caused the asteroids’ orbits to resonate like plucked strings.

She surfaced reluctantly into the daylight.

She had had another bad dream. Her head felt muzzy, her limbs stiff. Through the crude roof of her treetop nest she saw the rustling green of the higher canopy, and slivers of bright blue tropical sky. Like the pallet under her body, the roof was just a pulled-together mass of twigs and leaves and slim branches, hastily constructed in the last hour before darkness, soon to be abandoned.

She lay on her back, her right arm pillowed under her head, her legs tucked up against her belly. Her naked body was covered with fine golden hair. At fifteen years of age she was in the prime of her life. Stretch marks on her belly and her small dugs showed that she had already given birth. Her eyes, crusted with sleep, were large, black, watchful: the mark of a slow readaptation to nocturnal living. Behind them a shallow brow led to a small, neat brainpan, its modest outline obscured by a thatch of curly dark hair.