Evolution

one place; in Sapling’s head. She could see it clearly. He had killed the bird, not the spear. She slapped his head. This is where the bird died, dummy. Inside your mind. The rest is detail. They argued for a while, but Sapling grew increasingly confused, his simple boyish pleasure in his kill waning now that his boasting had degenerated into this peculiar philosophical discussion.

Then a bolt of pain stabbed through Mother’s temples, as sharply and suddenly as Sapling’s spear of hardened wood must have slammed through the head of that hapless ostrich. She stumbled to her knees, her fists pressed to her temples.

But now, suddenly, in that instant of pain, she could see a new truth.

She imagined the spear arcing through the air, like the bright lightning in her head, piercing the bird’s skull and extinguishing its life. She knew that Sapling had thrown the spear. He had willed the bird dead, and everything else that followed was irrelevant.

But what if she hadn’t seen Sapling throw the spear? What if he had been hidden by a rock, a tree? Would she have believed that the spear was the ultimate cause — that the spear itself had intended to kill the bird? No, of course not. Even if she couldn’t see the whole causal chain, it must exist. If she saw the spear fly, she would know somebody must have thrown it.

Her peculiar vision of the world, the spiderweb of causes stretching across the world and from past to future, deepened further. If an ostrich fell, a hunter had willed it. And if a person died, another was to blame. As simple as that. She saw all this immediately, understood it on a deep intuitive level below words, as new connections opened in her complex, fast-developing consciousness.

The logic was clear, compelling. Appalling. Comforting.

And she knew how she had to act on this new insight.

She became aware that Sapling was kneeling before her, holding her shoulders. 'Hurt? Head? Water. Sleep. Here…' He took her arm, trying to help her stand.

But that flash of pain had come and gone in an instant, a meteor leaving a trail of shattered and remade connections in her mind. She stood up and pushed past him, stalking back toward the settlement. There was only one person she needed now, one thing she had to do.

Sour was in her shelter, a rough lean-to of palm fronds, sleeping off the heat of the day.

Mother stood over her. In her arms she held a massive boulder, the largest she could carry; she cradled it as once she had cradled Silent.

Mother had never forgotten the day when Silent had first fallen ill. On that day everything had changed for her, as if the land had pivoted around her, as if the clouds and rocks had exchanged places. It had been the start of the pain. And she hadn’t forgotten Sour’s half smile. If I can’t have a kid of my own, she had been saying, I’m glad you will lose yours.

Now she saw everything clearly. Silent’s death had not been random. Nothing happened by chance in Mother’s universe: not anymore. Everything was connected; everything had meaning. She was the first conspiracy theorist.

And the first person she indicted was her closest surviving family member.

Mother didn’t know how Sour had committed her crime. It might have been a look, a word, a touch — some subtle way, an invisible weapon that had brought the boy down as surely as a spear of carved wood — but how didn’t matter. All that mattered was that Mother now knew who to blame.

She raised the rock.

In her last moment Sour woke, disturbed by Mother’s movement. And she saw the rock falling toward her head. Her world ended, as thoroughly and suddenly extinguished as Cretaceous Earth’s by the Devil’s Tail.

The hominid brain, fueled by the need for increasing smartness, fed by the people’s new fat-rich diet, had grown rapidly. It was more complex than any computer that humans would ever build. Inside Mother’s head were a hundred billion neurons — interacting biochemical switches — a number comparable to the number of stars in the Galaxy. But each of those switches was capable of taking a hundred thousand variable positions. And this whole suite of complexity was bathed in a fluid laced with more than a thousand chemicals that varied with time, season, stress, diet, age, and a hundred other influences, each of which could affect the functioning of the switches.

Before Mother, people’s minds were compartmented, with their subtle consciousness restricted to their social dealings while specialized modules dealt with such functions as toolmaking and environmental understanding, as well as more basic physiological functions such as breathing. The various functions of the brain had developed to some degree in isolation from one another, like separate subroutines not united into a master program.

It was all very jury-rigged, though. And this hugely complex biochemical computer was prone to mutation.

The physical difference between Mother’s brain and those of the people around her was tiny, the result of a minor mutation, a small change in the chemistry of the fat in her skull, a slight rewiring of the neuronal circuitry that underpinned her consciousness. But that was enough to give her a new flexibility of thinking, a breaking-through between the different compartments of her intelligence — and a hugely different perception.

But the rewiring of so immensely complicated an organic computer inevitably had side effects — not all of them desirable.

It wasn’t just the migraine. Mother was suffering from what might have been diagnosed as a kind of schizophrenia. Her symptoms had been triggered by the death of her son. Even in this first flowering of human creativity, Mother foreshadowed many of the flawed geniuses who would illuminate, and darken, human history in the generations that lay in the future.

There was no police force here. But random killers were not welcome in such a small, close-knit community. So they came to seek her out.

But she had gone.

Alone, she walked for days across the savannah, back to the place they had last camped, the place of the dry gorge. The patch of ground was now so weathered and overgrown that surely only she could have recognized it.

She cleared away the vegetation, grass, and scrub. Then she took a digging-stick and, like long-dead Pebble digging for yams, she began to beat her way into the earth.

At last, a meter or so deep, she glimpsed the white of bone. The first fragment she retrieved was a rib. In the harsh sunlight it gleamed white, utterly cleansed of flesh and blood; she was struck by the awful efficiency of the worms. But it wasn’t ribs she wanted. She dropped the bone and dug her hands into the soil. She knew where to look, remembered every detail of that terrible day when Silent had been flung into this bit of ground, how he had fallen with head lolling back and limbs splayed, the stains of his death shit still showing on his thin legs.

Soon she closed her hands on his head.

She lifted the skull into the air, the gaping eyes facing her. A scrap of cartilage held the jaw in place — but then the rotting cartilage gave way, and the jaw creaked open, as if the fleshless child were trying to say something to her. But the gaping smile kept widening, grotesquely, and a fat worm wriggled where the tongue had been, and then the jaw fell off, back into the dirt.

That didn’t matter. He didn’t need a jaw. What were a few teeth? She spat on the cranium and polished it clean of dirt with the palm of her hand. She cradled the skull, crooning.

When she returned to the lake, the people were waiting for her. They were all here, all but the youngest children and the mothers with infants. Some of the adults carried weapons — stone knives, wooden spears — as if Mother were a rogue bull elephant who might suddenly turn on them. But as many of the group were dismayed as were overtly hostile. Here was Sapling, for instance, his spear-thrower slung over his back on a length of sinew, his pale eyes clouded as he watched the woman who had taught him so much. Many of them even wore the markings she had inspired on their flesh or clothes.

Sour’s only surviving child was a girl, thirteen years old. She had always been prone to chubbiness, and that had gotten worse now that she was coming into womanhood; already her breasts were large, pendulous. And her skin was an odd yellow-brown color, like honey, the legacy of a chance meeting with a wandering group from the north a couple of generations back. Now this girl, Honey, Mother’s cousin, stared at Mother with baffled anger, her dirty face streaked with tears.

Hostile, sad, pitying, or confused, they were all uncertain. When she recognized that uncertainty Mother felt a kind of inner warmth. Without yelling, without using violence, without so much as a gesture, she was in control of the situation.

She held up the skull and swiveled it so that its sightless eyes turned on the people. They gasped and flinched — but most looked more baffled than frightened. What use was an old skull?

But one girl turned away, as if the staring skull were looking at her accusingly. She was a skinny, intense fourteen-year-old with wide eyes. This girl, Eyes, had a particularly elaborate spiral design sketched on her upper arms in ocher. Mother made a mental note of her.

One man stepped forward. He was a huge fellow with a ferocious temper, like a cornered ox. Now Ox pointed back at Sour’s shelter. 'Dead,' he said. He pointed his ax at Mother. 'You. Head, rock. Why?'

For all the control she was exerting on the situation, Mother knew that what she said now would determine her entire future. If she was driven out of the camp she could not expect to survive long.

But she was confident.

She looked at the skull, and smiled. Then she pointed at Sour’s body. 'She kill boy. She kill him.'

Ox’s black eyes narrowed. If that was true that Sour had killed the boy, then Mother’s actions could be justified. Any mother, even a father, would be expected to avenge a murdered child.

But now Honey pushed forward. 'How, how, how?' Struggling to express herself, her plump belly wobbling, she mimed stabbing, strangling. 'Not kill. Not touch. How, how, how? Boy sick. Boy die. How, how?' How is my mother supposed to have done this?

Mother raised her face to the sun, which sailed through a cloudless dome of white-blue sky. 'Hot,' she said, wiping her brow. 'Sun hot. Sun not touch. She not touch. She kill.' Action at a distance. It isn’t necessary for the sun to touch your flesh for it to warm you. And it wasn’t necessary for Sour to touch my son to kill him.

There was fear in their faces now. There were plenty of invisible, incomprehensible killers in their lives. But the notion that a person could control such forces was new, frightening.

Mother forced herself to smile. 'Safe. She dead. Safe now.' I killed her for you. I killed the demon. Trust me. She held up the skull, stroking its cranium. 'Tell me.' And so it had been.

Ox glared at Mother. He growled and stamped, and pointed at her chest with his ax. 'Boy dead. Not tell. Boy dead.'

She smiled. She nestled the skull in the crook of her arm, like the head of a baby. And as they stared at her, half-believing, she could feel her power spread.

But Honey wouldn’t accept any of this. Crying, jabbering meaninglessly, she lunged at Mother. But the women held her back.

Mother walked away toward her shelter. The people shrank back as she passed, eyes wide.

III

The dryness intensified. One hot, cloudless day gave way to another. The land dried quickly, the streams shriveling to brownish trickles. The plants died back, though there were still roots to be dug out with ingenuity and strength. The hunters had to range far in search of meat, their feet pounding over dusty baked-dry ground.