Evolution

She was in pain constantly now. Her bones felt as if they were working their way out through her skin, which was like one giant ulcer. She could barely close her dried eyelids. Her memory was a disorganized hall of images: the feel of her sister’s strong, grooming fingers, the warm, safe scent of her mother’s milk, the brazen cries of the males who believed they owned them all. But then her soft dreams would be shattered by the irruption of great slavering jaws from the floor of the world…

Now came another jolt, a rustle of the dry timber around her. She heard the noise of waves breaking, quite different from the languorous lapping of the deep ocean.

Birds clattered overhead.

She peered up. They were the first birds she had seen since she had been washed from the land. They were brilliant white, and they wheeled high above her.

Something moved on her chest. It felt like fingers, tentatively scratching: perhaps someone was trying to groom her. With an immense effort she lifted her head. It lolled, her skin tight like a mask, her tongue a block of wood in her mouth. She had difficulty focusing her bleeding eyes.

Something was crawling over her: a flat orange shape with many segmented legs and big raised claws. She yelped, a thin, dry sound, and brushed her arm over her chest. The crab scuttled away, indignant.

With nostrils baked black as tar, she could smell something new. Water. And not the stinking brine of the sea, but fresh water.

She lifted an arm and grabbed at the foliage. Every scrap of her raw flesh, as scabs and blisters pulled and broke, was a source of lancing pain. With an immense heave she managed to get herself upright, her feet under her, her legs folded. Her head lolled, too heavy for her neck. It took her more energy yet to raise it, to squint through her broken eyes.

Green.

She saw green, a great horizontal slab of it, running from horizon to horizon. It was the first green she had seen since the last of the mango’s leaves had curled and browned. After so many days of blue and gray, of nothing but sky and sea, the green seemed vibrantly bright, so bright it almost hurt her eyes, beautiful beyond imagining, and just looking at it seemed to strengthen her.

She levered herself forward, half crawling. The mango’s dead foliage pricked and cut her, but there was no blood to flow, nothing but dozens of tiny sources of pain.

She reached the edge of the raft. No ocean, no water. She saw a shallow beach of coarse, young sand, stretching up a short rise to the foot of a sparse forest. Birds, bright blue and orange, flittered through the tops of the trees, piping brightly.

Her first impression could have been summarized as I am home. But she was wrong.

She pulled herself over the branches and half fell onto the sand. It was hot, very hot, and it burned her exposed skin. She mewled, pulled herself up, and limped forward, as if she had grown very old, up the beach toward the forest.

At the forest edge was an undergrowth of low ferns and blessed shade. Taller trees towered above her. On their branches were clusters of a red fruit she didn’t recognize. Her mouth was too dry to salivate, but her tongue clicked against her teeth.

She glanced back the way she had come. The mango tree and its raft of vegetation was just a scrap of driftwood, broken, rotten, seaweed clinging to it, now washed up on this shore. She could see the unmoving form of an anthro — Patch or Crest — lying inert on the broken, salt-crusted foliage. And beyond the raft the sea rolled, huge, eternal, blue gray, reaching as far as she could see to a horizon of chilling geometric perfection.

Now there was a crashing tread, a great snapping of foliage. Roamer shrank back.

A giant form emerged from the forest, like a tank rolling through the undergrowth. Huge, squat, under a great bony dome of a shell, it looked like a giant tortoise — or perhaps an armored elephant — a great plated body supported by four stumpy legs. Behind it a tail swung carelessly, tipped by a spiky club. And as its small reinforced head pushed out into the light, armored eyelids blinked. This tremendous ankylosaur-like creature was a glyptodont. Roamer had never seen anything like it in Africa.

But then, this wasn’t Africa.

The giant armored monster lumbered away. Cautiously Roamer followed the glyptodont deeper into the forest. She came to a clearing, surrounded by a wall of tall, imposing trees. The floor was carpeted by aloes. Experimentally Roamer nibbled at a leaf. It was succulent, but bitter.

She moved further forward, and found the glimmer of still water. It turned out to be a shallow, reed-choked freshwater pond. At its shore browsed a pair of huge animals. They grazed on the plants at the pond’s edge with snouts like spatulas. They looked like hippos, but were actually immense rodents.