Evolution

Half of all the heat energy released by the burning air was injected into the deeper atmosphere and the ground. All over the planet, the sky was as hot and bright as the sun. Plants and animals burned where they stood. The trees of the mighty Cretaceous forests were consumed like pine needles. Any birds in the air disappeared in a puff of flame, and the pterosaurs vanished into the maw of extinction. The burrows of mammals and insects and amphibians turned into tiny coffins. Purga’s second pup, whimpering and alone, was quickly baked.

Purga was spared. The last clouds, shadowed black, became ragged, dispersing quickly, soon vaporized into steam — but for the crucial minutes of the great heat pulse they served to shield the ground beneath them from a sky as bright as the sun.

It was just an hour after the impact.

III

After the first few days the Earth’s shuddering died away, and the daily stamping of the great mountain-reptiles was gone.

Purga was used to darkness. But not to silence, this eerie stillness that went on and on.

For countless generations the dinosaurs had framed the lives of Purga’s kind. Even after this cataclysmic shock, she had vague visions of arrays of dinosaurs waiting in silent rows to trap any mammal unwise enough to poke her snout out of her burrow.

But she could not stay here, in this hasty burrow. For one thing there was nothing to eat; the family had quickly excavated and consumed any burrowing worms or beetles they could reach. They didn’t even know when it was day and when it was night. Their sleep cycles had been thrown off by their flight during the day of the impact, and they found themselves waking at different hours, their hunger conflicting with their fear of the strange, cold silence above. They bickered among themselves, snapping and biting.

And as time wore on the temperature plunged, from the intense heat of the hours of the burning sky to a bitter cold. The primates were sheltered by the thick layer of earth above them, but even that would not protect them forever.

Finally Third turned on the pup — Last, for she was Purga’s last surviving child. Purga couldn’t see Third. But with her whiskers and well-developed hearing she could sense her mate approaching the pup, step by step, mouth wide, as if stalking a centipede.

Third was angry, confused, frightened, and very, very hungry. But what he was doing made a certain sense. After all, there was nothing to eat here. If the flesh of the pup kept the adults alive a little longer, long enough for them to produce another litter, the genetic program would be fulfilled. The calculations were relentlessly logical.

Perhaps in other times Purga would have submitted to Third’s aggression, even helped him finish off the pup. But Purga’s life had already been long for her kind, and she had suffered a series of extraordinary events: the destruction of her first home, her dogged pursuit by Wounding Tooth — and now the nightmare of the comet impact and her stranding in this world of cold and silence.

The imperatives resolved themselves. She bit Third savagely on the thigh, and scrambled past him to stand alongside her daughter.

Last was just as confused as the others. But she figured out that her mother was defending her from some kind of attack by her father. And so she stood with Purga and bared her teeth at Third. For a full half-minute the burrow was filled with hissing and the sound of tiny paws scraping the ground aggressively; three sets of whiskers filled the space between the primates, each of them waiting for the other to strike.

In the end it was Third who backed off. He gave up quite suddenly, abandoning his aggressive posture and curling up alone in a corner of the burrow. Purga stood with her daughter until the anger and aggression had drained out of her system.

It was this final incident that changed the balance of the forces in Purga’s mind.

They couldn’t stay here, for they would starve, or freeze, if they didn’t kill each other first. They had to go out, regardless of what mysterious dangers lurked in the newly silent world above. Enough was enough. When her body clock next woke her, Purga pushed away the dirt that clogged the entrance to the burrow.

And emerged into the dark.