Evolution

Noth, shivering, crawled through the branches. With the wind low, the rain fell in massive drops that pounded exposed flesh and hammered against the trees’ broad leaves.

Following lingering traces of his mother’s scent, he found his baby sister. She still clung motionless to the tree trunk where her mother had parked her — where she would have clung, probably, until she starved. Noth sniffed her damp fur. He huddled up close and wrapped his arms around her. She was a tiny shivering mass against his belly fur, but he was sheltering her from the rain.

He was drawn to stay with her. She smelled of family; she shared much of his genetic inheritance, and therefore he had a stake in any offspring she might one day have.

But the rain fell through a night and a day, as the sun continued its purposeless dance around the sky. The forest floor became sodden, and glimmering pools, laden with floating leaf debris, began to cover the ground, hiding gnawed and scattered bones.

And the continuing rain washed away the last traces of the scent markers of Noth’s troop from the trees. Noth and his sister were lost.

II

As the endless day wore on, as the sun wheeled through its meaningless cycles, Noth and Right stumbled through the forest’s branches.

They had already been lost for a week. They had found none of their own kind. But here in the forest canopy there were many adapids, cousins of the notharctus. Many of them were smaller than Noth. He would glimpse their glowing eyes, like eerie yellow pits, peering out of a shadowed nook. These miniature insect hunters looked more like mice. Some of them scuttled along branches, racing from shaded cover to cover. But one made a spectacular upright leap from tree to tree, its powerful hind legs dangling, its paws reaching. Its membranous ears swiveling like a bat’s, it caught an insect, plucking it out of the air in its jaws in midjump.

One solitary little creature clung to the rotten bark of an ancient tree. It had a scruffy black coat, batlike ears, and prominent front teeth, and it tapped patiently at the wood with a claw-tipped finger, its large ears swiveling. When it heard a larva burrowing under the bark, it ripped off the bark with its teeth and plunged in a peculiarly long middle finger to hook the larva and deliver it to its gaping, greedy mouth. This was a primate that had learned to live like a bird, like a woodpecker.

Once Noth blundered into a giant, slothlike creature hanging upside down from a thick branch, its primate’s hands locked around the wood. This monster’s head swiveled to inspect Noth and Right, its eyes blank. Its mouth chewed slowly, crammed full of the fat deciduous leaves that were its principal diet. Its kind had been driven to larger sizes by the need to accommodate a gut big enough to break down the cellulose in the leaves’ cell walls. The sloth-thing’s face was oddly immobile, static, limited in its expressiveness. The social life of this gloomy hanging creature was unexciting; its slow metabolism, and lack of spare energy to devote to social activities, saw to that.

The world had warmed steadily since the terrible impact. Waves of vegetation had migrated away from the equator, until tropical rain forest eventually covered all of Africa and South America, North America to what would become the Canadian border, China, Europe as far north as France, and much of Australia. Even at the poles there were jungles.

North America was still joined by mighty land bridges to Europe and Asia, while the southern continents lay in a great band below the equator, like scattered islands. India and Africa were both migrating north, but for now the Tethys Sea still girdled the equator, a mighty current that spread warmth around the belly of the planet. The Tethys was like a river through Eden.

In response to the great warming, the children of Plesi and other mammals had at last thrown off their past. It was as if the Earth’s inheritors had finally realized that the empty planet offered them a lot more than just another kind of grub to chew. While the reptilian survivors, the lizards, crocodiles, and turtles, clung on largely unchanged, soon the foundations of the successful mammalian lineages of the future would be laid down.

Plesi, like Purga, had been a low-slung crawler, with the typical mammalian four-footed head-down body stance. But her primate descendants grew larger, with more powerful hind limbs to support upright bodies and heads. Meanwhile the primates’ eyes had moved forward to the front of their faces. This would give them three-dimensional vision, enabling them to judge their increasingly long leaps, and to triangulate on the prey insects and small reptiles that still formed part of their diet. And as they explored different ways to make a living, the primates would fan out into many different forms.

There was no design in this: no sense of improvement, of purpose. All that was happening was that each organism was struggling to preserve itself, its offspring, and its kin. But as the environment slowly changed, so through relentless selection did the species that inhabited it. It was not a process fueled by life, but by death: the elimination of the less well adapted, the endless culling of inappropriate possibilities. But the potential of an unseen future was no consolation to those who lived through the relentless culling.

Many of the adapids had become too specialized. This comfortable planet-swaddling warmth would not last forever. In cooler times in the future, as the forests became sparse and seasonal differences became more pronounced, it wouldn’t seem so smart to be a fussy eater. Extinctions would follow, as they always had.

Meanwhile, amid this clutter of exotic primates, the siblings found no notharctus.

Exploring the forest floor, Noth found a plant with podded fruit, a kind of pea. He broke open a few pods and let his sister feed.

A kind of anteater, a meter long, approached a pillarlike ants’ nest. It fell on the nest, wielding its powerful arm and shoulder muscles. As though it wielded a pickaxe, all its force was concentrated on a single point, the tip of its strongly flexed middle finger. The ants swarmed — they were huge, each some ten centimeters long — and the anteater quickly ingested them with its long, sticky tongue before the soldiers could unite in defense. The anteater was a descendant of South American stock, which had wandered here over temporary land bridges many generations before.

Noth and Right watched, wide-eyed. But as he kept an eye on the anteater, concern gnawed at Noth’s unconscious.

He had tried to keep them both feeding, to fatten up their tails with the winter storage that would see them through the long months of hibernation to come. That was just as his i

He could have gone back. Like all his species — the mobile males more than the sedentary females — he kept track of his position by dead reckoning, integrating time, space, and the angle of the slanting sunlight. It was an ability that helped him find scattered sources of food and water. If he needed to Noth could find his way back “home,” to the stand of trees that had been the center of his troop’s range. But he never heard the distinctive warbling song of his troop; his rudimentary decision-making machinery pressed him to keep searching for a troop that would accept him and his sister.

Meanwhile, though the sun still circled endlessly above the horizon, much of the daylight was tinged with the red of sunset, and here on the forest floor brown spores clung to the fern fronds. Autumn was coming. And then there would be winter. They were underfed, and time was ru