Evolution

It was a ball some ten meters across. Its thick wall was made of twigs and dead leaves, crudely crammed together. The leaves had been softened by chewing before being pressed into gaps in the structure. The whole thing was neatly lodged in the crooks of the robust branches of the tree, in which it had been constructed over generations. And it was lived in: A thin stream of shit and piss slid down the tree’s great trunk, sewage trickling out of the openings that pocked the colony’s base.

This ball of spittle and twigs was the most advanced construction any posthumans were now capable of. But it was the result of instinct, not mind, as empty of conscious planning as a bower bird’s nest or a termite mound.

Remembrance could see small faces peering out timidly through gaps in the colony’s crude wall. She remembered her time with her own child inside those dank, ill-smelling walls. The colony’s basic purpose was to shelter the most vulnerable from the forest’s predators: at night the prepubescent young, the old and sickly would cram within its walls. But only the smallest infants and their mothers were allowed to stay in its shelter during the day while the rest risked the open spaces to forage.

And, as stray canopy-filtered rays of sunlight caught the colony, the walls sparkled. Embedded in the packed-together twigs and leaves were bright stones gathered from the forest floor. There were even bits of glass. Across millions of years glass was unstable, becoming opaque as tiny crystals formed within it — but nevertheless these fragments had retained their shapes, bits of windshields or taillights or bottles, now retrieved and gathered to adorn the walls of this shapeless building.

It looked like decoration, but it was not. The glass and bright stones were meant for defense. Even now predators on these postpeople could be deterred by the remnants of buildings, by glittering stones and shining glass, haunted by deep-buried instincts developed in the time of the most dangerous killers who had ever walked the Earth. So Remembrance’s folk aped the structures of their ancestors, not even capable of imagining what they were imitating.

Once, of course, the trees had been the domain of primates, where they had been able to roam with little fear of predation. Monkeys and chimpanzees had not needed fortresses of leaf and twig. Times had changed.

As Remembrance lingered, a young male hissed at her. He had a bizarre white patch of fur on his backside, almost like a rabbit’s. She knew what he was thinking: He suspected she might be after the patch of bark he was working with his mother and siblings. People’s minds were not what their ancestors’ had been, but Remembrance was still capable of working out the beliefs and intentions of others.

But White-patch’s troop had been weakened today. Since the last time Remembrance had seen them, their elder son had gone. He might have left to seek some other colony, suspended somewhere in the forest’s green depths. Or, of course, he might be dead. The family members themselves showed they were still aware of the lost one’s absence in the way they looked over their shoulders at nobody, or left a space for a big male who never came. But soon their memories would heal over, and the brother would vanish into the unremembering mists of the past, as lost as had been all the children of man since the construction of the last tombstone.

Remembrance herself would never learn what had become of the other son. This was not an age of information. Nobody told anybody else anything anymore. All she knew for sure was what she saw for herself.

For Remembrance, though, this was an opportunity. She could probably fight this weakened group for a place on their tree. But her poor sleep had left her feeling brittle, restless. It was a mood that had plagued her since the loss of her child. The child’s death had been more than a year ago, but so sharp was the pain, so vivid was it still in her kaleidoscopic, unstructured mind, that it might have been yesterday. Like all her kind, Remembrance was a creature not of purposeful planning but of impulse. And today her impulse was not to fight these squabbling folk for the privilege of a place on their crowded branch, to peel back a bit of bark in search of grubs.

She turned away and began to make her way through the tangled levels of trees.

As she swung, clambered, and leapt her way from branch to branch, she began to feel better. The stiffness quickly worked out of her muscles, and it was as if she were coming fully awake. She even forgot, briefly, the loss of her child. She was still young; her kind often lived beyond twenty-five or even thirty years. And, long after a remote ancestor had crawled, baffled, out of a sewer into the greening daylight, her body was well adapted to her way of life, if not yet the deepest chapels of her mind.