Evolution

Sidewise nodded. “You going after Moon?”

“What do you think, shithead?”

“I think she has good land craft. She’ll be hard to track.”

“I’ll manage,” Bo

“Wait until morning,” Snowy said reasonably. “Have some food. You’re asking for trouble, going off in the dark.”

But the reasoning part of Bo

Sidewise put another bit of rabbit on the fire. “That’s the last we’ll see of him.”

“You think he’ll find Moon?”

“Not if she sees him coming.” Sidewise looked reflective. “And if he tries to force her, she’ll kill him. She’s tough that way.”

The rabbit was nearly done. Snowy pulled it off the fire, and began to push bits of it off the spit and onto their crude wooden plates. Every night he had divided up their food into five portions. Now, with Bo

He and Sidewise just looked at the three portions for a while. Ahmed was back in his shelter. Out of sight, out of mind. Snowy picked up the third plate and, with the blade of his knife, scraped off the meat onto the other two plates. “If Ahmed gets better, he can look after himself. If not, there’s nothing we can do for him.”

For a time they chewed on their rabbit.

“I’ll leave tomorrow,” Snowy said eventually.

Sidewise didn’t reply to that.

“What about you? Where will you go?”

“I think I’d like to explore,” Sidewise said. “Go see the cities. London. Paris, if I can get across the Cha

“Nobody else will ever see such sights,” Snowy said.

“That’s true.”

Hesitantly, Snowy said, “What about after that? I mean, when we get older. Less strong.”

“I don’t think that is going to be a problem,” Sidewise said laconically. “The challenge will be to pick how you want to go. To make sure you control at least that.”

“When you’ve seen all you want to see.”

“Whatever.” He smiled. “Maybe in Paris there will be a few windows left to smash. Thousand-year-old brandy to drink. I’d enjoy that.”

“But,” Snowy said carefully, “there will be nobody to tell about it.”

“We’ve always known that,” Sidewise said sharply. “From the moment we clambered out of the Pit into that ancient oak forest. It was obvious even then.”

“Maybe to you,” Snowy said.

Sidewise tapped his temple, where a healthy bruise was developing from Bo

They picked a site — Stonehenge, on the high ground of Salisbury Plain, surely still unmistakable — and a time, the summer solstice, easy to track with the timekeeping discipline Ahmed had instilled in them. It was a good idea. Somehow it was comforting to Snowy, even now, to think that his future would have a little structure.

When they had done eating, the dark was closing in. It wasn’t cold, but Snowy fetched himself a blanket of crudely woven bark and wrapped it around his shoulders. “Hey, Side. Was he right?”

“Who?”

“Bo

“Too right I porked her.”

“You fucking dark horse. I never knew. Why you?”

“Atavistic urges, mate. I think she was responding to my smarter than the average brain.”

Snowy mulled over that. “So our big brains are good for one thing, then.”

“Oh, yes. They were always good for that. Probably what they were for in the first place. All the rest was bullshit.”

“You fucking dark horse.”

IV

Snowy followed the ape people.

He didn’t live as they did. He used his snares to trap game up to the size of pigs and small deer, and used knives and fires and lean-tos for protection and butchery. But he walked where they walked.

They wandered impressively widely, through the great forests that blanketed southern England, forests that concealed the ruins of cities and cathedrals, palaces and parks. He became concerned if he lost sight of Weena, reassured when he found her again. He grew to know all the individuals in the little group — he gave them names, like Grandpa and Shorty and Doc — and he followed their lives, their triumphs and tragedies, as if he were watching a small soap opera.

They were frightened of the rats — the big ones, the rat-wolves that seemed to hunt in packs. He found that out quickly.

He wondered how he must seem to them. They were clearly aware of him, but he didn’t interfere with them or the food they gathered. So they let him be, unremarked. He was like a ghost, he thought, a ghost from a vanished past, haunting these new people.

After a few months, with the long, long summer of these late times at last drawing to a close, they came to a beach. Snowy thought he was somewhere on the Sussex shore, on Britain’s south coast.

The hairies did a little foraging at the fringe of the forest, ignoring Snowy as usual.

Snowy wandered along the beach. The forest washed right down to the shore, as if this were a Robinson Crusoe tropical island, not England at all. He found a place to sit, facing the crashing waves.

He picked up a handful of sand. It was fine and golden, and ran easily through his fingers. But there were black grains in there, he saw, and some bits of orange and green and blue. The multicolored stuff must be plastic. And the black stuff looked like soot — soot from Rabaul, the killer volcano, or from the fires that had swept the world as everything went to shit.

It’s all gone, he thought wonderingly. It really has. The sand was a kind of proof. Moon rock and cathedrals and football stadiums, libraries and museums and paintings, highways and cities and shanties, Shakespeare and Mozart and Einstein, Buddha and Mohammed and Jesus, lions and elephants and horses and gorillas and the rest of the menagerie of extinction — all worn away and scattered and ground down, mixed into this sooty sand he trickled through his fingers.

The hairies were leaving. He could see their slim forms sliding silently into the deeper forest.

He stood up, brushed the sand off his palms, shifted the pack on his back, and followed them.

CHAPTER 18

The Kingdom of the Rats

East Africa. Circa 30 million years after present.

I

The asteroid had once been called Eros.

Eros had its own miniature geography. Its ground was covered by impact craters, scattered rubble and debris, and strange pools of very fine, bluish dust, electrically charged by the relentless sunlight. Some three times as long as it was wide, it was like Manhattan Island hurled into space.

Eros was as old as the Devil’s Tail. Like the Chicxulub comet it was a relic of the formation of the solar system itself. But unlike the comet the asteroid had coalesced well within the clockwork of the i

But even now gravity’s ghostly tug caused the asteroids’ orbits to resonate like plucked strings.