Evolution

The companions came to a little gully. It was nearly choked: the rainstorm had filled it with pebbles and stones. But there was still a trickle of silty runoff water. Ultimate and Cactus crouched down, Ultimate shielding her baby, and they pushed their faces into the water, sucking at it gratefully.

Ultimate found green here, in the damp. It was a kind of leaf, prostrate, dark, slightly crimped. Its form was very ancient, too primitive even to have the wherewithal to grow up toward the light. It was actually a descendant of a liverwort, all but unchanged by the passage of time, a barely modified copy of one of the first plants ever to colonize land — a land that had not looked so different from this harsh place. The times had come around, and the liverwort found room to live. Curious, Ultimate plucked the leaf from the rock it clung to, chewed it — it was waxy, sticky — and kissed her baby, letting bits of the leaf trickle into her mouth. The baby chomped with a sucking noise, her little eyes rolling.

Close to one of those pebblelike cactuses, Ultimate spotted a beetle, silvery-backed, toiling to push a dried-up pellet of dung along a miniature crevasse. Ultimate briefly considered making a grab for the beetle.

But as the beetle passed the shade of the cactus, a tiny crimson form shot out of the darkness. It was a lizard, smaller than Ultimate’s little finger, and its head was a lot smaller than the beetle itself. But nevertheless the lizard clamped its jaws on the toiling beetle’s rear end. Ultimate could hear the minuscule crunch: The beetle waved its legs and ante

But it wasn’t to be given that luxury. From nowhere a small bird came ru

The mutilated beetle crawled away — only to be scooped up by Cactus’s little paw and delivered to her mouth.

There were plenty of birds around; that great, ancient lineage was much too adaptable not to have found a place even in this harsh, much-changed world. But few birds flew nowadays. Why fly when there was nothing to flee, nowhere to go that wasn’t exactly the same as here? So the birds had taken to the ground, and in the great shriveling, had adopted many forms.

Meanwhile, disturbed by the bird’s attack, more lizards erupted from under the cactus. There were many of them, all of them smaller than the sail-fan caught by the bird, smaller than Ultimate’s own fingernail. They were so tiny, Ultimate saw, they had to clamber over pebbles and irregularities in the dirt as if they were hills and valleys. They scurried in all directions, disturbed from their daily slumber, and made for cover in the rocks and pebbles.

Ultimate watched, fascinated.

As new Pangaea’s great drying had continued, the larger species had fallen away. In the barren emptiness of the supercontinent there was nowhere for a creature the size of Ultimate to hide, still less a gazelle or a lion. On the largest scales the ancient game of predator and prey had broken down.

But on smaller scales, a new ecology proliferated. Under Ultimate’s feet there were holes in the rocks, crevasses in the sand, holes in borametz tree trunks, tangles in root systems. Even in the flattest landscape there was topography where you could hide from predators, or wait to ambush prey, or simply hole up and avoid the rest of the world — if you were small enough.

But if the world of the smallest scales was still rich in opportunity, it was a world largely excluded from the hot-blooded kind.

All hot-bloods had to maintain their high body temperatures. But there was a limit to how much insulating hair and fat you could grow before you became an immobilized little puff-ball, how fast a pulse you could sustain. The last of the shriveling mole folk, their tiny hearts rattling heroically, had been as small as a centimeter. But a centimeter-scale was still huge. There was plenty of room below this, plenty of ways to live.

But all these niches were taken by insects and reptiles and amphibians. Small and ski

Without the Tree’s support, such large hot-blooded mammals as Ultimate’s postpeople could never have survived so long. They were like throwbacks to easier times, out of place in this marginal environment. As the Earth warmed relentlessly, as the great desiccation continued, even the Tree-based communities shrank back and died, one by one. And yet they were here: And yet here was Ultimate, the latest link in a great chain that now passed back through a hundred million grandmothers, morphing and changing, loving and dying, back to Purga herself, and into the formlessness of the still deeper past beyond.

Ultimate and Cactus watched the tiny scramblings in the dirt. Then, hooting, the posthumans fell on the scrambling lizards. Most of them were too small to catch — you would close your hand around them only to see them squirming out the other side — and even when Ultimate managed to cram one into her mouth it was too small a morsel to be satisfying.

But they didn’t need to eat the lizards. They were playing. Even now you could have fun. But in the silence of New Pangaea their whoops and hooting cries echoed from the bare rocks, and as far as could be seen they were the only large creatures moving, anywhere.

The sunset came quickly.

The air was scrubbed clean of dust by the rains. As soon as the sun touched the horizon, darkness striped across the flattened land, small ridges, dunes, and pebbles casting shadows tens of meters long. The light in the sky faded from blue to purple, quickly sinking to black at the zenith. It was like a sunset on the airless Moon.

Ultimate and Cactus huddled together, the baby between their bodies. Every night of her life Ultimate had spent in the Tree’s enfolding vegetable embrace. Now the shadows were like raptor fingers reaching out for them.

But as the temperature fell, so Ultimate’s adaptations to the desert came into operation.

Her skin was actually hot to the touch. During the day her body stored heat, in layers of fat and tissue. In the cooler air of night, her body was able to radiate a lot of the heat back to the environment. If she had not been able to perform this trick of refrigeration she would have had to lose the heat by sweating — and that would have used up water she couldn’t afford to waste. And Cactus and Ultimate were breathing, deeply and slowly. That way a maximum amount of oxygen was extracted from each lungful of air, and a minimum amount of water was lost. Meanwhile Ultimate’s body was manufacturing water from the carbohydrates in the food she had eaten. She would finish the night with more water in her body’s stores than when she had started.