Evolution

By contrast the forest floor was a dark, humid place. Shrubs, herbs, and fungi grew sparsely in the endless twilight. Though leaves and other debris fell in a continual slow rain from the green galleries above, the ground cover was shallow: the ants and termites, whose mounds stood around the floor like eroded monuments, saw to that.

She came to a huge mushroom. She stopped and began to cram its tasty white meat into her mouth. She had eaten little so far that day, and she had used up a lot of energy in fleeing the Chatterers.

Beyond a stand of spindly saplings something moved through the shadows: huge shapes, grunting, snuffling at the dirt. Remembrance ducked behind the mushroom.

The creatures emerged from the shadows, dimly outlined in the gray-green twilight. They had bulky, hairy bodies, stocky heads, and short trunks that scraped at the ground and plucked foliage and fruit from the trees’ lower branches. A couple of meters tall at the shoulder, they looked like forest elephants, though they were tuskless.

These browsers’ small pointed ears and oddly curling tails gave away their ancestry. They were pigs, descended from one of the few species domesticated by mankind to survive the great destruction, and now shaped into this efficient form. The last true elephants, in fact, had gone with humans into extinction.

More large, hairy creatures shouldered their way into Remembrance’s view. They were elephantine forms too, the same size and shape as the pigs. But where the pigs had trunks but lacked tusks, these animals had no trunks, but carried great sweeping horns that curled before them and served as elephants’ tusks once had, clearing the ground and upturning roots and tubers. More skittish and aggressive than the pigs, these animals were descended from another generalist survivor of human farmyards, the goats.

The two kinds of browser, pig- and goat-elephants, worked the shallow ground, different enough to be able to share this space, loftily ignoring each other’s presence. Remembrance cowered, waiting for a chance to get away from these much-evolved descendants of farm animals.

And then she smelled a breath on her neck: the faintest trace of warmth, the putrid stink of meat.

Immediately she hurled herself forward. Ignoring the elephantine pigs and goats, she ran until she reached a tree trunk and swarmed up, clinging to crevices in the bark. She didn’t hesitate for a moment, not even to look back to see what it was that had so nearly crept up on her.

She caught glimpses, though. It was a creature the size of a leopard, with red eyes, long limbs, grasping paws, and powerful incisors.

She knew what it was. It was a rat. When you smelled rat, you ran.

But the rat followed.

To pursue its climbing prey, the rat-leopard’s kind had learned to climb too. The rat-leopard had claws, opposable fingers to grasp branches, forelimbs that could swing wide to allow it to hurl itself from branch to branch, even a prehensile tail. It wasn’t as good a climber as the best of the primates, like Remembrance. Not yet. But it didn’t need to be as good as the best. It only needed to be better than the worst, the weak and the ill — and the unlucky.

And so Remembrance climbed, on and on, ascending into the pale green light of the upper canopy, faster and faster, ignoring the bursting pain in her lungs and the ache in her arms. Soon she was dazzled by the light. She was reaching the upper reaches of the canopy. But still she climbed, for she had no choice.

Until she burst into open daylight.

She almost stumbled, so suddenly had she erupted out of the green. She clung to a narrow branch that swayed alarmingly under her, bright with leaves that, green and lush, drank in the sunlight.

She was perched right on top of the giant tree’s uppermost branch. The canopy was a blanket of green that stretched away to the ocean. But she could make out the rocky shoulders of the gorge within which her dense pocket of forest grew, the ancient roadway of her ancestors. She had nowhere to go. Panting, exhausted, her depleted muscles trembling, she could only cling to this spindly branch. The sun beat down, too hot. Unlike her remote ancestors she was not built for the open: Her kind had given up the ability to sweat.

But the rat did not follow her. She thought she glimpsed its red-rimmed eyes, glittering, before it descended back into the gloom of the forest.

For a heartbeat she exulted. She threw back her head and whooped her joy.

Perhaps it was that that gave her away.

She felt a breeze first. Then came an almost metallic rustle of feathers, a swooping shadow over her.

Claws dug deep into the flesh of her shoulders. The pain was immediately agonizing — and grew worse as she was lifted by those claws, her whole weight suspended from scraps of her own flesh. She was flying. She glimpsed the land wheeling beneath her — scraps of forest, swaths of green grassland and brown borametz groves, all laid over a broken, eroded volcanic landscape, and that belt of glimmering sea beyond.

In Remembrance’s world there were ferocious predators both above and below, like red mouths all around you, waiting to punish the slightest mistake. In escaping from one peril, she had run straight into the grasp of another.

The bird was like a cross between an owl and an eagle, with a fierce yellow beak and round forward-facing eyes, adapted for its forays into the gloom of the forest canopy. But it was neither owl nor eagle. This ferocious killer was actually descended from finches, another widespread generalist survivor of the human catastrophe.

The finch was hauling her toward a high complex of volcanic plugs, the eroded core of ancient volcanoes. The debris-littered ground nearby was green with grass, here and there browned by groves of borametz trees. And, tucked into the high ledges, Remembrance glimpsed nests: nests full of pink, straining mouths.

She knew what would happen if the finch succeeded in getting her to its nest.

She began to scream and struggle, pounding her fists against the legs and underbelly of the bird. As she fought, the hooked flesh in her shoulder ripped, sending blood streaming down her fur, but she ignored the pulses of agonizing pain.

The finch cawed angrily and flapped its wings, great tents of oily feathers that hammered at her head and back. She could smell the iron staleness of its blood-caked beak. But she was a big piece of meat, even for this giant bird. As she fought they spun toward the ground, hominid and bird tied up in their clumsy midair battle. At last she got her teeth into the softer flesh above the bird’s scaly talons. The bird screamed and spasmed. Its claws opened.

And she was falling through sudden silence. The only noise was her own ragged breathing, the buffeting of the air, like a wind. She could still see the bird, a wheeling shadow above her, fast receding. She reached for branches or rocks, but there was nothing to grab.

Oddly, now that she was lost in her own deepest nightmare of falling, she was no longer afraid. She hung limp, waiting.

She smashed into a tree. Leaves and twigs clutched painfully at her skin as she crashed through them. But the foliage slowed her, and she plummeted at last to the grassy ground. Battered, torn, bruised, she was only winded. For a few heartbeats she could not move.

A human’s shock would have been deeper. Who was to blame for this sequence of calamities? The rat, the bird of prey, a spell-casting enemy, a malevolent god? Why had this happened? Why me? But Remembrance asked herself no such questions. For Remembrance, life was not something to be controlled. Life was episodic, random, purposeless.

That was how things were now, for people. You didn’t live long. You didn’t get to shape the world around you. You barely understood much of what happened to you. All you thought about was now: drawing another breath, finding another meal, evading the next random killer.