Evolution

Since the fall of man the continents’ chthonic dance had continued. That great ocean, born as a crack in Pangaea over two hundred million years ago, was continuing to widen as new seabed erupted endlessly along the line of the midocean ridge. The Americas had drifted westward, and South America had broken away from North to resume its interrupted career as an island continent. Meanwhile the cluster of continents around Asia had drifted east, so that the Pacific was slowly closing up. Alaska had reached out to Asia, rebuilding the Bering Strait bridge that had been made and undone repeatedly by the Ice Age glaciations.

There had been tremendous, protracted collisions. Australia had migrated north until it rammed itself into southern Asia, and Africa had crashed into southern Europe. It was as if the continents were crowding into the northern hemisphere, leaving the south abandoned save for lonely, icebound Antarctica. But Africa itself had fragmented, as the mighty wound of the ancient Rift Valley had deepened.

Where continents met, new mountain ranges were stitched. Where the Mediterranean had been there was now a mighty mountain range that reached eastward toward the Himalayas. It was the final extinction of the ancient Tethys. No trace of Rome had survived: the bones of emperors and philosophers alike had been crushed, melted, and gone swimming into the Earth itself. But while mountains were built, others evaporated like dew. The Himalayas were eroded to stumps, opening up new migration routes between India and Asia.

Nothing mankind had done in its short and bloody history had made the slightest bit of difference to this patient geographical realignment.

Meanwhile the Earth, left to its own devices, had deployed a variety of healing mechanisms, physical, chemical, biological, and geological, to recover from the devastating interventions of its human inhabitants. Air pollutants had been broken up by sunlight and dispersed. Bog ore had absorbed much metallic waste. Vegetation had recolonized abandoned landscapes, roots breaking up concrete and asphalt, overgrowing ditches and canals. Erosion by wind and water had caused the final collapse of the last structures, washing it all into sand.

Meanwhile the relentless processes of variation and selection had worked to fill an emptied world.

The sun climbed higher. Despite all that had happened to Remembrance, it was not yet midday.

She was stranded on a grassy plain, with purple volcanic hills in the distance, a few sparse stands of trees and shrubs, and a brown patch of borametz, the new kind of tree. Here, in the rain shadow of those purple hills, the rainfall was intermittent and erratic. The soil was habitually dry, and in such conditions trees were unable to establish themselves, and the grasses continued their ancient dominion — almost. Even vegetable communities evolved. And now the grasses had new competitors, in the borametz groves.

The tree that had saved her from the fall was barren of fruit, parched, clinging to life in the dry soil of this grassland. There was nothing to eat here — nothing but the scorpions and beetles that squirmed from beneath the rocks, bugs she popped into her mouth.

She made out a belt of forest, huddled against those remote purple hills, shimmering in the heat haze. Vaguely she realized that if she could get there she would be safer, she might find food, even people of her own kind.

But the forest was far away. Remembrance’s distant grandmothers would have easily walked across this stretch of open savannah. But not Remembrance. She was too clumsy a walker. And like Capo, a chimplike ape of a different time, her kind had regrown their hair and forgotten how to sweat.

So she sat there, her mind empty of plans, waiting for something to turn up.

Suddenly a slim head swooped down from the washed-out sky. Remembrance chattered and flinched back against the tree trunk. She saw black round eyes, wide with surprise, set in a slender, fur-covered face, and two long ears that swept back against an elegant neck. It was a rabbit’s head — but it was large, as large as a gazelle’s.

The rabbit-gazelle evidently decided that the cowering hominid was no particular threat to her. She proceeded to crop at the grass that grew thinly in the shade of the tree.

Cautiously Remembrance crept forward.

Her visitor was one of a herd, she saw now, scattered over the plain and grazing patiently on the grass. They were tall, some twice as tall as she was. Slim, graceful, they looked like gazelles — but they were indeed descended from rabbits, as their long ears and small white tails clearly demonstrated.