Evolution

Watching this scene with half-closed eyes it would not have been impossible to imagine that the animals obliterated by human action had been restored. But on this new African savannah the familiar roles had been taken up by new actors, descended from creatures that had best survived the human extinction event. These were those that had resisted all of mankind’s attempts at extirpation: the vermin, especially the generalists — starlings, finches, rabbits, squirrels — and rodents like rats and mice. Thus there were rabbits morphed into gazelles, rats become cheetahs. Only subtleties were changed — a nervous twitchiness about the rabbits, a hard-running intensity about the rats that had replaced the cats’ languid grace.

There was a sudden flurry of activity, a great clash like a bone breaking. Two of the great goat-elephants, males, had begun a dispute. Their heads bobbed and swayed atop long giraffelike necks, and their horns, elaborately curling before their faces, clashed like baroque swords.

Remembrance cowered deep into the shade of her acacia. As the great herbivores began to mill around her, disturbed by the battle, she wasn’t so safe. This tree, trunk and all, could be smashed up and devoured in a few heartbeats.

And now the watchful predators took advantage of the confusion.

A pack of them erupted from cover. Lean and vulpine, with long, powerful shanks and thickly padded feet, they were more rats. Working closely together, they moved wedgelike to separate one older goat-elephant from the rest of the herd. His huge horn-tusks chipped and scarred by a lifetime of battles, this big male bellowed his rage and fear and began to run. The rats settled into the pursuit, running closely together.

These rat derivatives were like dogs, yet they were not dogs. Their characteristic rodents’ incisors had been subtly modified from teeth designed for processing seeds and insects into blades with stabbing points. Their rear molars were like shears, well equipped for shredding meat. And they moved more closely than any dog pack had ever run, with a liquid, slithering power. But, like a dog pack, their basic strategy was to chase the goat-elephant until he was exhausted.

Soon the prey and his pursuers had passed out of sight.

The goat-elephants settled down once more to their drinking and fighting — though some of them turned their great heads to the place where the old one had stood, remembering his absence.

Remembrance took the opportunity to creep forward.

The water was scum laden. But she scooped it up in her hands and let it trickle into her mouth, leaving her palms and fingers coated with fine green slime.

From the water, two yellow eyes watched her with abstract instinct. It was a crocodile, of course. These ancient survivors had ridden out the human apocalypse as they had survived so many before: by living off the gruesome brown food chain of the dying lands, by burrowing into the welcoming mud in drought. And even now no animal, no pig or rabbit or primate, no fish or bird, reptile or amphibian — not even the rodents — had managed to dislodge the crocodiles from their watery kingdom.

Remembrance shuddered, and backed off from the water’s edge.

A new predator stalked over the bluff toward the lake. Again Remembrance scurried for cover, screened by the huge, impassive bodies of a herd of duck-billed goats.

This predator was more rodent stock; in fact it came from a kind of mouse. But its behavior was not like any dog or cat’s. It came to the edge of the water, and lifted itself up on its massive hind legs. The herbivores at the water’s edge cowered away. But the mouse-raptor had no interest in the creatures milling before it. With lordly dismissal it dipped its ferocious muzzle to taste the water. Then it stalked back to dry land where it used its small, feeble-looking hands to pluck at the grass, as if testing it.

It looked like one of the great carnivorous dinosaurs of the Cretaceous days. Its forearms were small, its tail was thickened for balance, and its hind legs were awesomely powerful machines of muscle and bone. Its incisors had developed into ferocious slashing weapons, to be deployed by thrusts of the heavy head. The mouse-raptor was a land shark, like a tyrannosaur, a body design rediscovered and made devastatingly effective. And yet this arrogant creature retained the small ears and brown fur of the diminutive rodents from which it had derived.

The mouse-raptor seemed satisfied with the water and the grass. It squealed, spat, and drummed its tail on the ground. From the distance there was a series of answering calls, drums, and cries.

More mouse-raptors approached the lake. They fanned out over a swath of grassland, sniffing the air. A few kits ran around the legs of the adults, wrestling and nipping at each other with the ancient playful curiosity of predators.