Evolution

Sharks had already been the ocean’s top predators for three hundred million years. They had endured through the great extinctions, while families of land predators had come and gone. They had seen off competition from new classes of animals, some much younger, like the true fish. Over that vast period of time, the sharks’ body design had barely modified, for there was no need.

The shark was relentless, unable to be deflected by guile, prepared to keep on attacking as long as its senses were appropriately stimulated. It was a machine designed for killing.

The shark could sense the great mass of dead meat drifting at the heart of this raft, but it could also hear the scurrying of live animals on its surface. The dead thing could wait.

Time to attack. It went in headfirst, its jaws open. The shark had no eyelids. But to protect its eyes, it rolled them back, so that they turned white, in the last instant before it struck.

Patch was the first to see the approaching fin, to glimpse the white torpedo body gliding through the water toward the raft, to look into the white eyes. She had never seen such a thing before, but her instincts yelled that this sleek form spelled trouble. She ran over the loose foliage to the raft’s far side.

The other anthros were panicking. The two crowders were squalling like tiny birds, running and leaping this way and that. Only the potbelly sat placidly on its branch, munching another handful of leaves.

Scrap, separated from her mother, didn’t react.

Patch was terrified. She had expected her infant to follow her to the far side of the raft. But the infant hadn’t seen the approaching peril. A human mother would have been able to visualize her child’s point of view, understand that the child might not be able to see everything she saw. That transference of understanding was beyond Patch; in that respect, just like Noth, she was like a very young human child herself, imagining that every creature in the world saw what she saw, had the same beliefs she did.

The shark rammed its blunt nose up through the loose foliage. To Roamer this eruption of a gaping mouth from under the world was a nightmarish vision. She hooted and ran helplessly, unable to escape the raft’s confines.

The infant was lucky. As the raft shuddered under the shark’s assault she lodged in an angle of branch and trunk. Her mother lurched across the spinning raft, leaping over the gaping hole the shark had ripped, and snatched up the child.

But the shark came again. This time it drove its wedge-shaped nose between two of the great trunks that formed the raft’s crude structure. The trunks separated, a great lane of leaf-strewn water opening up between them. One of the crowders fell, squeaking, into the widening gap.

The shark’s mouth was like a cavern opening up before it. The crowder’s pinprick mind was snuffed out in a second. The shark was barely aware of taking the tiny warm morsel. Its work was barely begun.

The anthros screamed and ran to the edge of the raft, getting as far from the rift as they could — but they cowered back from the desolate ocean beyond.

Whiteblood saw that the fat, complacent potbelly sat where she had always sat, on her leafy branch, that ridiculous red swelling blazoned across her chest — even though the shark’s vandalism had opened up the ocean right before her. In this instant of ultimate stress, new circuits closed in Whiteblood’s inventive mind. It was a chain of logic beyond all but the brightest of his kind. But then, on average, every generation of anthros was just a little brighter than the last.

Whiteblood took a flying leap. Both his feet rammed into the potbelly’s back. She was pitched precipitately into the sea.

This fat struggling creature was what the shark had been waiting for. It bit into its prey, in the middle of its torso. The shark’s whole body flexed as it shook the potbelly, and its jagged-edged teeth tore a lump out of the hapless creature. Then, closing through a cloud of diffusing blood, it waited for its victim to bleed to death.

The potbelly was utterly bewildered, suddenly immersed in water, overwhelmed by stunning pain. But her brain flooded with chemicals, and the centers of her functional mind closed down, granting her a sort of peace in this bloody darkness.

Whiteblood sat panting over the scene of his assault, where nothing remained of the potbelly but a pile of thin, ill-smelling shit, and handfuls of crushed leaves. Gradually the gap in the raft closed, as if it were healing itself. The anthros cowered, too stressed even to groom.

And the sun climbed down into the western sky, in the direction they helplessly sailed.

III

Days and nights, nights and days. There was no noise save the creaking of the branches, the soft lapping of the wavelets.

The nights revealed a crushing sky from which Roamer wanted to cower.