Evolution

The genes would go on: That was all that mattered. Even this periodic madness was part of the grander design. But many small minds would be extinguished today.

As the predators started to feed — as the air filled with the crunch of bone and gristle, the squeals of the dying, the stink of blood — Remembrance slipped away from this place of madness and death, and resumed her long-broken journey toward the distant purple hills.

IV

Remembrance came at last to a great bay, a place where the ocean pushed into the land.

She clambered down exposed sandstone bluffs. Once this area had been under the sea, and sediment had been laid down over millions of years. Now the land had been uplifted, and rivers and streams had cut great gouges in the exposed seabed, revealing deep, dense strata — in some of which, sandwiched between thick layers of sandstone, were embedded traces of shipwrecks and debris from vanished cities.

At last Remembrance reached the beach itself. She scampered along its upper fringe, sticking to the shade of the rocks and scrub grass. The sand was sharp under her feet and knuckles, and got into her fur. This was a young beach, and the sand was still full of jagged edges, too new to have been eroded smooth.

She came to a freshwater stream that trickled down from the rocks toward the beach. Where the water decanted onto the sand, a small stand of trees clung to life. She ducked down and pushed her mouth into the cool water, sucking up great mouthfuls. Then she clambered into the stream itself and scraped the water through her fur, trying to get rid of the sand and fleas and ticks.

That done, she crawled into the shade of the trees. There was no fruit here, but the leaf-strewn floor, cold and damp, harbored many toiling insects that she popped into her mouth.

Before her the sea lapped softly, the water bright in the high sunlight. The sea meant nothing to her, but its distant glimmer had always attracted her, and it was oddly pleasing for her to be here.

In fact the sea had been the savior of her kind.

Torn by great tectonic forces, Africa’s Rift Valley had eventually become a true rift in the fabric of the continent. The sea had invaded, and the whole of eastern Africa had sheared off the mainland and sailed away into what had been the Indian Ocean, there to begin its own destiny. So chthonically slow was this immense process that the mayfly creatures living on this new island had scarcely noticed it happening. And yet, for Remembrance’s kind, it had been crucial.

After the fall of mankind, there had been pockets of survivors left all over the planet. Almost everywhere the competition with the rodents had been too fierce. Only here, on this rifted fragment of Africa, had an accident of geology saved the posthumans, giving them time to find ways to survive the rodents’ ruthless competitive onslaught.

Once this place, East Africa, had been the cradle that had shaped mankind. Now it was the final refuge of man’s last children.

There was something in the water. Cautiously, Remembrance cowered back into the shade.

It was a great black shape, sleek and powerful, swimming purposefully. It seemed to roll, and a fin a little like a bird’s wing was raised into the air. Remembrance made out a bulbous head lifting above the water, with a broad sievelike beak. Water showered from two nostrils set in the top of the beak, sparkling in the air, expelled with a sharp whooshing noise. Then the great body flexed and dove back under the surface. She caught a last glimpse of a tail, and then the creature had vanished. Despite its immense bulk, it left scarcely a ripple in the water.

In this giant’s wake more slim, powerful bodies leapt from the water, three, four, five of them. They swept through graceful arcs and plunged back into the sea, and then rose to leap again and again. Their bodies were shaped like those of fish, but these dolphinlike creatures were evidently not fish. They were equipped with beaks like birds, stretched into long orange pincers.

Behind the "dolphins," in turn, came more followers, likewise hopping and buzzing over the ocean surface. Much smaller, these were true fish. Their wet scales glistened, and fins like wings fluttered at the sides of their slim, golden bodies as they made their short, jerky flights over the water.