Evolution

Noth was primarily a fruit eater. But he came upon a fat jewel beetle. Its beautiful carapace, metallic blue green, crunched when he bit into it. As he moved he followed the scent marks of his own kind: I came this way. This way is safe… I saw danger here. Teeth! Teeth!… I am of this troop. Kin, come this way. Others, stay away… I am female. Follow this to find me… That last message gave Noth an uncomfortable tightness in his groin. He had scent glands on his wrists and in his armpits. Now he wiped his wrists through his armpits and then drew his forearms across the trunk, using bony spurs on his wrists to embed the scent, and to cut a distinctive curving scar in the bark. The female patch was old; the brief mating season was long over. But instinct prompted him to cover the patch with his own multimedia signature so that no other male would be alerted by it.

Even now, even fourteen million years after the comet, Noth’s body still bore marks of his kind’s long nocturnal ancestry, like the glands for scent marking. His toes were tipped, but not with nails, like a monkey’s, but with grooming claws, like a lemur’s. His watchful eyes were huge, and like Purga he had whiskers to help him feel his way forward. He retained a powerful sense of hearing and smell; he had mobile radar-dish ears. But Noth’s eyes, while wide and capable of good night vision, did not share the dark-loving creatures’ ultimate adaptation, a tapetum, a yellow reflective layer in the eye. His nose, while sensitive, was dry. His upper lip was furry and mobile, making his face more expressive than those of earlier adapid species. His teeth were monkeylike, lacking the tooth comb — a special tooth used for grooming — of his ancestors.

Like every species in the long evolutionary line that led from Purga to the unimaginable future, Noth’s was a species in transition, ladened with the relics of the past, glowing with the promise of the future.

But his body and mind were healthy and vigorous, perfectly adapted to his world. And today he was as happy as it was possible for him to be.

In the canopy above, Noth’s mother was taking care of her infants.

She thought of her two remaining daughters as something like Left and Right, for one preferred the milk of the row of nipples on her left side, and the other — smaller, more easily bullied — had to make do with the right. The notharctus usually produced large litters — and mothers had multiple sets of nipples to support such broods. Noth’s mother had in fact borne quadruplets. But one of the infants had been taken by a bird; another, runtish, had quickly caught an infection and died. Their mother had soon forgotten them.

Now she picked up Right and pushed her against the trunk of the tree, where the infant clung. Parked like this, her brownish fur blending into the background of the tree bark, Right would remain here until her mother returned to feed her. She was able to stay immobile for long hours.

It was a form of protection. The notharctus were deep enough in the forest to be safe from any diving bird of prey, but the pup was vulnerable to the local ground-based predators, especially the miacoids. Ugly animals the size of ferrets, sometime burrow-raiders who scavenged opportunistically from the kills of other predators, the miacoids were an unprepossessing bunch, but nonetheless were the ancestors of the mighty cats and wolves and bears of later times. And they could climb trees.

Now the attentive mother moved along the branch, seeking a comparable place of safety to leave Left. But the stronger child was happy where she was, clinging to her mother’s belly fur. After gentle pushing, her mother gave up. Laden with her daughter’s warm weight, she worked her way down a ladder of branches toward the ground.

On all fours, Noth walked across a thick mulch of leaves.

The trees here were deciduous, every autumn dropping their broad, veined leaves to cover the ground with a thick layer of decaying vegetation. Much of the mat on which Noth walked was made up of last autumn’s leaves, frozen by the winter’s hard cold before they could rot; now the leaves were mulching quickly, and small flies buzzed irritatingly through the misty air. But there were also butterflies, their gaudy wings making splashes of flitting color against the drab ground cover.

Noth moved slowly, seeking food, wary of danger. He wasn’t alone here.