Evolution

A part of her never slept soundly, no matter how well she constructed her nests. Her dreams were always troubled by the huge spaces beneath her, into which she might fall. Since the treetops were the only safe place for her people to live, this didn’t make sense, but there it was. It was going to take more time yet for people to get used to their return to the trees.

It didn’t help, of course, that her only child so far had been taken by those spaces beneath her, his grip loosened from her fur by rain, his little body tumbling into the green depths.

She had never discussed this with anyone. In fact nobody discussed anything anymore. The days of endless talking were long gone, the larynxes and cognitive capacities of a loquacious folk put aside, irrelevant to life in the trees.

She didn’t even have a name. But perhaps something in her retained a deep memory of vanished, different days. Call her Remembrance.

She heard a rustling in the layers of vegetation beneath her, a trickle of discarded fruit husks falling through the leaves, the first tentative hooting pants of the males.

She rolled on to her belly and pressed her face into her bed of twigs. She could just make out the colony itself, a dark, pendulous mass in the deeper layers of the canopy, like a wooden submarine somehow lodged high in the green. All around the colony slim figures were moving, working, bickering. The business of the day was starting. And it didn’t pay to be a late arrival.

Remembrance stood upright and broke open her nest, like a bird bursting from its egg. With her small head raised to her full meter-tall height above the branch, she peered around at her world.

Everywhere the forest lapped in great green layers of life. The highest canopy was a roof far above her own elevation. To north, west, and east, beyond the trees, Remembrance could make out a blue, sparkling glimmer. The light off the ocean had always intrigued her. And though she could not make out the southern shore, she had a correct intuition that the ocean continued even there, making a great belt around the land: she knew that she lived on a vast island. But the ocean was another irrelevance, too far away for her to be troubled with.

This particularly dense pocket of forest had sprouted from a gorge cut deep into the bedrock. Sheltered by walls of hard rock, fed by streams that ran along the base of the gorge, this was a crowded, vibrant place, full of life — though here and there were bare patches cleared by borametz trees and their servants, a new kind of life.

But the gorge itself wasn’t natural. Long ago blasted out of ancient bedrock, it was the result of human road building. Erosion had taken its toll: When the drainage ditches and culverts were no longer maintained, the cutting slopes had collapsed. But nevertheless a patient geologist could have detected a fine dark layer in the sandstone that had slowly gathered at the bottom of the gorge. The dark layer was metamorphosing bitumen, a stratum still sprinkled here and there with fragments of the vehicles that had once come this way.

Even now the passing of humans left its mark.

A shadow flickered over the leaves that rustled around her, fast-moving, silent, cast by the low sun. Hastily she ducked down, seeking the safety of the green’s cover. It had been a bird, of course. The predators of the upper canopy had already started their day, and it did not do to be too visible.

With a last glance at the remains of her nest — littered by bits of shit and discarded hair, stained by her urine, soon to be forgotten — she began to clamber down.

As the tropical day brightened, the people had already spread out through the trees, lithe and graceful, beginning the day’s relentless search for fruit, bark-burrowing insects, and leaf-cupped water.

Remembrance, still listless, hung back, watching.

There were males and females alike, some of the women laden with clinging infants. The males also did a great deal of displaying, hooting, aggressive leaping to and fro. Here was something that had not changed down the long years: the structure of primate society was still the same, a flashy male-hierarchy superstructure imposed on top of a network of patient female clans.

In these middle layers of the canopy the taller trees thrust upward past the crowns of their smaller brethren. In this intermediate place, neither low nor high, the people were relatively safe from threats from above and below. And it was here, surrounded by the tall, slim stripes of the great trees’ trunks, that they had built their colony.