Evolution

Joan felt a flickering of unease. British-born Gregory Pickersgill was the charismatic leader of the central cult; the worst kind of trouble — sometimes lethal — followed him around. Deliberately she put the worry aside. 'Let’s leave it to the police. We have a conference to run.'

'And a planet to save,' said Ian Maughan, smiling.

'Damn right.'

In one corner of the terminal, there was a commotion as a large white box was wheeled in. It was like an immense refrigerator. Light flared, and cameras were thrust into Alison Scott’s face.

'One piece of luggage that evidently couldn’t wait,' murmured Alyce.

'I think it’s live cargo,' Maughan said. 'I heard them talking about it.'

Now little Bex Scott came running up to Joan. Joan noticed Ian Maughan goggling at her blue hair and red eyes; maybe folk were a little backward in Pasadena. 'Oh, Dr. Useb.' Bex took Joan’s hand. 'I want you to see what my mother has brought. You, too, Dr. Sigurdardottir. Please come. Uh, you were kind to me on the plane. I really was frightened by all the smoke and the lurching.'

'You weren’t in any real danger.'

'I know. But I was frightened even so. You saw that and you were kind. Come on, I’d love you to see.'

So Joan, with Alyce and Maughan in tow, let herself be led across the lounge.

Alison Scott was talking to the camera. She was a tall, imposing woman. '…My field is in the evolution of development. Evo-devo, in tabloid-speak. The goal is to understand how to regrow a lost finger, say. You do that by studying ancestral genes. Put together a bird and a crocodile, and you can glimpse the genome of their common ancestor, a pre-dinosaur reptile from around two hundred and fifty million years ago. Even before the end of the twentieth century one group of experimenters was able to ‘turn on’ the growth of teeth in a hen’s beak. The ancient circuits are still there, subverted to other purposes; all you have to do is look for the right molecular switch…'

Joan raised her eyebrows. 'Good grief. You’d think it was her event.'

'The woman’s work is show business,' Alyce said with cold disapproval. 'Nothing more, nothing less.'

With a flourish, Alison Scott tapped the box beside her. One wall turned transparent. There was a gasp from the pressing crowd — and, beyond that, a subdued hooting. Scott said, 'Please bear in mind that what you see is a generic reconstruction, no more. Details such as skin color and behavior have essentially had to be invented.'

'My God,' said Alyce.

The creature in the box looked like a chimp, to a first approximation. No more than a meter tall, she was female; her breasts and genitalia were prominent. But she could walk upright. Joan could tell that immediately from the peculiar sideways-on geometry of her hips. However, right now she wasn’t walking anywhere. She was cowering in a corner, her long legs jammed up against her chest.

Bex said, 'I told you, Dr. Useb. You don’t have to go scraping for bones in the dust. Now you can meet your ancestors.'

Despite herself, Joan was fascinated. Yes, she thought: to meet my ancestors, all those hairy grandmothers, that is what my life’s work has really been all about. Alison Scott evidently understands the impulse. But can this poor chimera ever be real? And if not, what were they really like?

Bex impulsively grasped Alyce’s hand. 'And, you see?' Her crimson eyes were shining. 'I did say you didn’t have to be upset about the loss of the bonobos.'

Alyce sighed. 'But, child, if we have no room for the chimps, where will we find room for her?'

The mock australopithecine, terrified, bared her teeth in a panic grin.

CHAPTER 9 The Walkers Central Kenya, East Africa. Circa 1.5 million years before present.

I

She loved to run, more than anything else in her life. It was what her body was made for.

When she sprinted, she covered a hundred meters in six or seven seconds. At a more steady pace, she could finish a mile in three minutes. She could run. As she ran, her breath scorched in her lungs, and the muscles of her long legs and pumping arms seemed to glow. She loved to feel the sting of the dust where it clung to her bare, sweat-slick skin, and to smell the scorched, electric scent of the land’s hot dryness.

It was late in the dry season. The day’s most powerful heat lay heavy on the savannah, and the overhead sun skewered the scene with bright symmetry. Between the pillowlike volcanic hills the grass was sparse and yellow, everywhere browsed and trampled by the vast herds of herbivores. Their pathways, across which she ran, were like roads linking pastures and water courses. In this era the great grass eaters shaped the landscape; none of the many kinds of people in the world had yet usurped that role.

In the noon heat the grass eaters clustered in the shade, or simply lay in the dust. She glimpsed great static herds of elephant types, many species of them, like gray clouds in the distance. Clumsy, high-stepping ostriches pecked listlessly at the ground. Sleek predators slept lazily with their cubs. Even the scavengers, the wheeling birds and the scuttling feeders, were resting from their grisly chores. Nothing stirred but the dust that she kicked up, nothing moved but her own fleeting shadow, shrunk to a patch of darkness beneath her.

Fully immersed in her body, her world, she ran without calculation or analysis, ran with a fluency and freedom no primate kind had known before.

She was not thinking as a human would. She was conscious of nothing but her breath, the pleasurable ache in her muscles, her belly, the land that seemed to fly beneath her feet. But, running naked, she looked human.

She was tall — more than a hundred and fifty centimeters. Her kind were taller than any earlier people. She was lithe, lanky, and didn’t weigh more than forty-five kilograms; her limbs were lean, her muscles hard, her belly and back flat. She was just nine years old. But she was at the cusp of adulthood, her hips broadening and her breasts small, firm, already rounded. And she was not done with growing yet. Though she would keep her slim body proportions, she could expect to grow to around two meters. Her sweat-flecked skin was bare, save for a curly black thatch on her head, and dark scraps at her crotch and armpits. In fact, she had as many body hairs as any other ape, but they were pale and tiny. Her face was round, small, and she had a fleshy, rounded nose, protruding like a human’s, not lying flat like an ape’s.

Perhaps her chest was a little high, a little conical; perhaps in the proportion of her long limbs she might have looked unusual. But her body was within the boundaries of human variation; she might have looked like a denizen of a desert country, like the Dinka of the Sudan, or the Turkana, or the Masai, who would one day walk the land she now crossed.

She looked human. Her head was different, though. Above her eyes ran a broad ridge of bone, which led back to a long, back-sloping forehead. From there, the bone ran with almost no rise to the back of her skull. The shape of her head was masked by her thick mass of hair, but it would have been impossible to mistake its flatness, the smallness of her cranium.

She had the body of a human, the skull of an ape. But her eyes were clear, sharp, curious. Nine years old, suffused with the joy of her body in this brief moment of life and light and freedom, she was as happy as it was possible for her to be. To human eyes, she would have been beautiful.

Her people were hominids — closer to humans than chimps or gorillas — and were related to the species one day tentatively labeled Homo ergaster and Homo erectus. But all across the Old World there were many, many variants, many subspecies based on the same overall body plan. They were a successful and diverse kind, and there would never be enough bones and bits of skull to tell their whole story.

Something darted out at her feet. She pulled up, startled, panting. It was a cane rat, a rodent; disturbed from its slow foraging it scuttled away, indignant.

And she heard a cry. 'Far! Far!'

She looked back. Her people, a remote blur, had gathered on the rocky outcrop where they intended to stay for the night. One of them — her mother or grandmother — had clambered to the rock’s highest point, and was calling to her through cupped hands. 'Far!' It was a cry no ape could have made, not even Capo. This was a word.

The sun had begun to slide away from the zenith, and already the shadow at her feet had lengthened. Soon the animals would begin to stir; she would no longer be safe, no longer be shielded by the noon world’s somnolence.

Alone, far from her people, she felt a delicious frisson of fear. Every day, every chance she got, she ran too far; and every day she had to be called back. She did not have a name. No hominid had yet given herself a name. But if she had, it would have been Far.

She turned back toward the rock and began to run again, at her steady, ground-devouring pace.

There were twenty-four people in the band.

Most of the adults were dispersed over the landscape near the eroded sandstone bluff. They moved like slim shadows across the dusty ground, seeking out nuts and small game, silent, intent, expert. Mothers had taken their youngest children along, clamped to their backs or scuttling at their feet.

Far’s mother was working through a small stand of acacia trees that had been comprehensively destroyed by the passage of a herd of deinotheres. These ancient elephant types had used their downward-pointing tusks and stubby trunks to leave the trees broken and splintered, the ground churned up, and the roots hauled out. People weren’t the only foragers here: warthogs and bushpigs grunted and squealed as they pushed their ugly faces into the churned-up earth. The destruction was recent. Far could see giant beetles at work burying fresh deinothere dung, and aardvarks and honey badgers rooting in the ground, seeking the beetles’ larvae.

Such a place made for good foraging. A good strategy for finding food in an unfamiliar land was to seek out the leftovers of other animals, especially destructive types like elephants and pigs. In the smashed-up stand of trees, Far’s mother would find food that would have otherwise been hidden or inaccessible. Among the broken trunks there were even ready-made levers, struts, and digging sticks to prize out roots from the ground, broken branches to shake to get at fruit, and slivers of palm to dig out pith.

Far’s mother was a serene, elegant woman, tall even for her kind; she might have been called Calm. She walked with her two children, the sleeping baby cradled over one shoulder, and a son. The boy was half Far’s age but already nearly as tall as she was, a skinny youth Far thought of as the Brat: irritating, clever, and much too successful at competing for their mother’s attention and generosity.

Calm’s own mother, Far’s grandmother, was at her side. In her mid-forties now, the grandmother was too stiff to be of much help digging for food. But she assisted her daughter by keeping an eye on the youngest child. No human would have been surprised to see old people in this group; it would have looked very natural. But no previous types of primates had grown old; few had survived much past their fertile years. Why should their bodies continue to keep them alive when they could not contribute further to the gene pool? But now it was different; among Far’s kind, old people had a role.

Panting, dusty, Far climbed the rock. It was just an outcrop a hundred meters across bearing nothing but strands of tough grass and a few insects and lizards. But for the people it was a temporary home base, an island of comparative sanctuary in this open savannah, this sea of danger. On the outcrop itself a couple of men were repairing wooden spears. They worked absently, eyes roving, as if their hands were working by themselves. Some of the older children played, rehearsing for the adulthood to come. They wrestled, chased, mock-stalked each other. Two six-year-olds