Evolution

The most significant development of primate bodies since Purga’s time was in the teeth; Plesi’s was a species adapted to husk fruit, as would be the possums of Australia, much later. It was a necessary response, if the primates were to find something to eat. Few animals of this time fed off leaves. In an equable world where tropical or paratropical forests spread far from the equator, there was little seasonal variation, and here in Texas the trees did not shed their leaves regularly. In fact, the trees loaded their leaves with toxins and chemicals to make them bitter or poisonous to curious mammalian tongues.

But still, since Purga, there had been little innovation in the primate line — even across two million years. It was the same for many other lineages. Long after the great impact, it was as if the emptied world had been shocked into stasis.

Plesi landed on her target branch without difficulty.

Her two pups were still huddled hesitantly against the tree trunk, and they made the mewling calls of babies. But, though the calls tugged at her, Plesi only raised her head and twitched her snout. She tried to encourage the pups to follow her by nibbling the fruit that clustered on this new tree.

At last the pups reacted. To Plesi’s surprise it was the little one, Weak, who came forward first. She scampered to the end of the branch — nervous, hesitant, but showing good balance. She raised her tail and tensed her muscles — she backed off nervously, preened the fur of her face — and then, at last, she jumped.

She overjudged slightly. She came tumbling out of the air and collided with her mother, making Plesi hiss in protest. But her agile hands and feet soon gripped the lumpy bark, and she was safe. Trembling, Weak scampered to her mother and buried her face in her belly, seeking a nipple that was now dry. Plesi let her suckle, rewarding her with comfort.

But now there was a blur of movement from the other tree. Strong, left behind, suddenly lunged forward, her immature feet slipping on the bark. And — without looking carefully, without trying to use her innate skills to estimate the distance — she leapt into the air.

Fear prickled inside Plesi.

Strong made the branch, but she landed too hard. Immediately she slid backwards. For a heartbeat she hung there, her small hands scrabbling uselessly at the bark, her hind legs waving. And then she fell.

Plesi saw her tumble in the air, wriggling, her white underbelly exposed, her hands and feet clutching at nothing. Even now Strong made the peeping cry of a lost infant. Then she fell into the leaves, and in a moment she was gone, taken by the green below, which swallowed all the forest’s dead.

Plesi clung to her branch, shuddering. It had happened so quickly. One young lost, one runtish weakling left. It was not to be borne. She hissed her defiance into the menacing green.

And, leaving Weak clinging piteously to the trunk of the tree, Plesi began to descend, down toward the green, down to the ground.

At last she reached the lower story of branches, and looked down into an oasis of light.

This was one of the endless forest’s few clearings. Within the last few months, an ancient canopy tree had fallen, eaten from within, wrecked by a random lightning strike. When it had crashed down it had cut a swath through the dense foliage. This clearing would not last long. But for now the plants of the undergrowth, like those hardy survivors, the ground ferns, were taking the opportunity to germinate, and the forest floor here was unusually lush and green. And already saplings were sprouting, beginning a ruthless vegetable race to steal the light and plug that hole in the canopy.

The forest was an oddly static place. The great canopy trees competed with each other to trap as much sunlight as they could. In the gloom of the lower levels, the light was too weak to support growth, and the floor was customarily littered by dead vegetable matter and the bones of any animals or birds unlucky enough to fall. But under the silent ground, seeds and spores abided — waiting centuries, even millennia if necessary, until the day came when chance opened up a gap in the canopy, and the race to live could begin.

Plesi slithered down a buttressing root and reached the ground. Under the broad fronds of a ground fern she scuttled uneasily through a patch of direct sunlight. The solid ground, with no give or sway, felt very strange to her, as peculiar as the shuddering of an earthquake would have felt to a human.

There were other animals here in the clearing, drawn by the prospect of novel pickings. There were frogs, salamanders, and even a few birds, flapping across the air in bright bursts of color, seeking insects and seeds.

And there were mammals.