had lived and died. Their languages were mutually incomprehensible. Indeed many of these communities were no longer even able to interbreed, so long had they been isolated. And there they stayed, until they were displaced by some natural catastrophe like a climate shift or a flood — or by other people.
Which was why the clans had formed in the first place, of course: to keep out the refugees.
It had been terribly hard for them. At last, after eleven years, they had come to this place, this beach, and they had been forced to stop, for here the land had run out.
Now Pebble heard a mournful cry from up the beach. 'Hey, hey! Help, help!'
Pebble stood and peered that way. He saw two stocky figures staggering toward the hut. They were Hands and Hyena, the one characterized by his huge, powerful hands, the other by his habit, when hunting, of laughing like a scavenger. These two men had joined Pebble’s group during their long odyssey. But now they were struggling. Hyena was leaning heavily on the powerful shoulders of his companion, and even from here Pebble could hear Hyena’s wheezing gasps.
Dust came out of the hut. Pebble’s mother, in her late thirties now, had grown gaunt and bent with the stresses her body had endured during the long walk, and her hair was white and wispy. But she was still doggedly alive. Now she began to hobble up the beach toward Hyena and Hands, and called out. 'Stab, stab!'
Hyena collapsed to the beach, and Pebble could see a stone blade sticking out of his back. Hands struggled to get him to his feet again.
Muttering darkly Pebble stalked across the beach after his mother.
By the time they had brought Hyena back to the hut, the light was beginning to leave the sky.
Preparing themselves for the tasks of the night, the people moved around the hut. The men and women alike had immense bulging shoulder muscles that showed humplike through their leather wraps. Even their hands were huge, with broad spadelike fingertips. Their bones were thick-walled, capable of enduring great stress, and their joints were heavy and bony. These were massive people, solid, as if carved out of the Earth themselves.
They had to be strong. In a tough environment, they had to work very hard all their lives, making up in brute force and endless labor what they lacked in smarts. Few reached the end of their lives without the pain of old wounds and such problems as degenerative bone diseases. And hardly anybody lived beyond forty.
Hyena’s wound was unremarkable. Even the fact that he had clearly been stabbed in the back by a hominid from a rival band beyond the bluffs did not arouse much interest. Life was hard. Injuries were commonplace.
Inside the low, irregular, poky hut there was no light save from the fire and whatever daylight leaked through the gaps in the plaited walls. There was little organization. At the back of the hut were piled up bones and shells, discarded after meals. Tools, some broken or just half-finished, lay where they had been dropped, as did bits of food, leather, wood, stone, unworked skin. On the floor could be spotted traces of the staples that the group relied on: bananas, dates, roots and tubers, a great deal of yam. The adults did dump their feces and urine outside, to keep out the flies, but the younger children had yet to learn that trick, and so the floor was littered with half-buried infant shit.
There weren’t even any fixed places for the fires. The scars of old fires were visible across the floor of the hut and outside in the blackened circles of scuffed pebbles and sand. When the wind changed or a part of the hut collapsed, they would just move the embers from yesterday’s fire to a new place and start again.
A human would have found the hut dark, low, claustrophobic, cluttered, disorganized, and filled with an unbearable stench, the stench of years of living. But to Pebble this was just the way things were, the way they always had been.
There were actually two fires being tended tonight. Hands had turned to the hot fire that had smoldered all day. He prowled around the settlement gathering bits of dried wood, and he carefully built up a pyramid of wood and chips to make a more intense, hotter fire. He had stripped the flesh off the head and limbs of a baby rhino, and now he would use his fire to crack the bones and get at the rich marrow inside.
Toward the rear of the hut, Dust and the woman Green were working on a second fire with Seal and Cry and some of the children. They had a handful of stones which they knapped quickly to make knives and borers, and with these they worked the food they had managed to gather during the day within a few hundred meters of the hut. This included shellfish — even a rat.
Soon, as they worked, smoke curled up into the plaited roof of the hut. All this took place against a background of grunts, murmurs, belches, and farts. Scarcely a word was spoken.
Cry was another survivor: She was the girl, younger than Pebble, who had escaped the occupation of their old settlement. She had taken her experiences hard. She had always been sickly and prone to weeping. Now she was seventeen and a full woman, and Pebble, like Hands and Hyena, had coupled with her more than once. But she had yet to fall pregnant, and her body, skinny and comparatively lightly built, had given Pebble no pleasure.
There was a peculiar economic arrangement among these people. Men and women largely foraged separately, ate separately.
Those who foraged for vegetation, seafood, and small game close to home — mostly women, but not exclusively — sat cooking it over their warm fire, relying on tools quickly made of local resources to help them eat. Those who roamed further to hunt — mostly men but not always — would devour much of the meat they secured on the spot themselves. Only if they had a surplus would they bring it home to share. The treat of the bone marrow was always kept back for the hunters, after the bones were cracked in the intense heat of their own fire.
Most of the time, the women’s foraging actually supplied most of the groups’ food, and in a way it subsidized the men’s hunting. But hunting, as it had always been, was about more than acquiring food. There was still an element of peacocklike display in the male hunters’ activities. In that, these people had not moved on much from Far’s time.
Other things were different, though. The stone tools the women used to prepare their food were massive, but their surfaces and edges looked crudely finished compared to the exquisite hand axes Ax had been able to make more than a million years ago. But for all its beauty a hand ax was not really a great deal more useful for most tasks than a simple, large-edged flake. In harsher times, men and women had had to learn to make their tools as efficiently as possible to suit the task at hand. Under this pressure, the ancient grip of the hand ax template began to weaken. It had been a mental unfreezing. Though in some corners of the planet the hand ax makers still wooed with their tokens of stone, with the dead hand of sexual selection lifted there had been a burst of inventiveness and diversity.
Gradually, a new kind of toolmaking had been discovered. A core of stone would be prepared in such a way that a single blow could then detach a large flake of the desired shape, which could then be retouched and finished. The flakes came with the finest possible edges — sometimes just a molecule thick — all the way around. And with sufficient skill you could make a wide variety of tools this way: axes, yes, but also spear points, cutters, scrapers, punchers. It was a much more efficient way of making tools, even if they looked cruder.
But this new method involved many more cognitive steps than the old. You had to be capable of seeking out the right raw materials — not every type of stone was suitable — and you had to be able to see not just the ax in the stone, but the blades that would eventually flow from the core.
When the eating was finished, the people drifted to other tasks. The woman Green prepared a bit of antelope leather, biting on it and pulling it across her teeth. She was an expert at working animal skin, and her teeth, worn and chipped, showed their years of use. The smaller children were getting sleepy now. They gathered into a rough ring and began to groom each other, running their little fingers through the knotted hair on each other’s heads. Hands was trying to tend to Hyena. He inspected the wound under its poultice, sniffed, and pushed the poultice back into place.
Dust, exhausted as she often was these days, had already lain down beside her fire. But she was awake, her eyes gleaming. Pebble understood. She was missing Flatnose, her 'husband.'
The people had paid a price for the increasingly large brains of their children. Pebble had been born utterly helpless, with much of his brain development still to come, a long period of growth and learning ahead of him before he could survive independently. The support of grandmothers was no longer enough. A new way of living had had to evolve.
Parents had to stick together, for the sake of their children: it was not monogamy, but it was close. Fathers had learned it was essential to stay around if their genetic inheritance was to go on to further generations. But women’s ovulation was concealed, and they were almost continually sexually receptive. It was a lure: If a man was going to invest in raising a kid, he needed to be confident the kid really was
But it wasn’t all compulsion. Couples preferred sex in private — or as much as was possible in such a close, small community. Sex had become a social cement that bound couples together. Relentless Pleistocene selection was shaping everything that would make up humanity. Even love was a by-product of evolution. Love, and the pain of loss.
But the shaping was not complete. The desultory talk in this crude hut was not much more than gossip. Toolmaking, food gathering, and other activities were still walled off from consciousness, in compartmented, if roomy, minds. And they still groomed like apes.
They were not human.
Pebble felt irritable, restless, confined. Gruffly he grabbed a slice of rhino belly from Seal, who protested loudly: 'Mine, mine!' Then he went to sit, alone, in the doorway, facing the sea.
Close by, he could see the scrubby land where the people cleared away weeds from peas and beans and yams. But beyond that, looking north and west, a sunset towered into the sky, its purple-pink light painting the planes of his face. It was a magnificent Ice Age sunset. The glaciers, scouring across the northern continents, had thrown vast amounts of dust into the air; the sun’s light was refracted through great clouds of ground-up rock.
Pebble felt stuck, like one of Seal’s little fish glued to his blobs of spiderweb.
Barely conscious of what he was doing, he felt around on the ground for a sliver of rock. When he had found one sharp enough he lifted it to his right arm — he had to look for a patch that wasn’t already scarred — and he pressed the stone to his flesh, relishing the delicious prickling pain.
He wished his father were here, so they could cut together. But the stone remained, the pain almost comforting as it pushed through his epidermis. He ran the stone blade down his arm, feeling the warmth of his own blood. He shuddered with the pain, but relished its cold certainty, knowing he could stop at any moment, yet knowing he would not.
Isolated, depressed, his life blocked, Pebble had turned in on himself, and a behavior that had once served to enable young men to compare their strength in a reasonably harmless way had become solitary and destructive. Pebble’s kind were not human. And yet they knew love, and loss — and addiction.
In the darkness behind him, his mother watched, her bone-hooded eyes clouded.
Pebble was woken in the gray of the predawn — but not by the light or the cold.
A tongue lapped at his bare foot. It was almost comforting, and it penetrated his uneasy dreams. Then he woke enough to wonder what was doing the licking. His eyes snapped open.
A shaggy, muscular wolf stood on all fours before him, silhouetted against the dawn sky.
He yelped and dragged his legs back. The wolf whined, startled. Then it scampered away a few paces, turned and growled.
But a
She was at least a handbreadth taller than he was. Her body was slender, her shoulders narrow, her long legs elegant, like a stork’s. She had narrow hips and shoulders, small high breasts, and a long neck. Her body was all stringy muscle: He could see the firm bulges of her arms and legs. She looked almost like a child, a great stretched-out child, her features unformed. But she was no child — he could tell that from the breasts, the thatches of hair under her arms, and from the fine lines that had gathered around her eyes and mouth.
The skinny folk on the island were just like this, from the neck down, anyhow. But from the neck up, Pebble had never seen anything like her.
Her chin stuck out into a kind of point. Her teeth were pale and regular — and unworn, like a child’s, as if she had never used them to treat animal skin. Her face seemed flattened, her nose small and squashed back. Her hair was frizzy and black but hacked short. And the ridge over her eyes — well, there
She was a human — anatomically, a fully modern human. She might have stepped out of a tunnel through time from Joan Useb’s chattering crowd in Darwin Airport. She could not have been a greater shock to heavy-browed Pebble if she had.
Her eyes flickered as she glanced from Pebble to the people — Hands, Cry, others — who had come out to see what was going on. She said something incomprehensible, and held out the harpoon at Pebble, point first.
Pebble stared, fascinated.
The harpoon’s shaft was notched at the end, and in the notch, attached by resin and sinew thread, there was a carved point. It was a slim cylinder, not more than a finger’s-width wide at the
