Stephen Baxter - Evolution

Evolution

Stephen Baxter

Evolution

To Sandra, again. And to the rest of us, in hope of long perspectives

Judging from the past, we may safely infer that not one living species will transmit its

unaltered likeness to a distant futurity. And of the species now living very few will

transmit progeny of any kind to a far distant futurity.

—Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the

Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859)

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Evolution

Prologue

As the plane descended toward Darwin it ran into a cloud of billowing black smoke. The windows

suddenly darkened, blocking out the Australasian summer light, and the engines whined.

Joan had been talking quietly to Alyce Sigurdardottir. But now she shifted in her seat, the belt

uncomfortably tight across her bulge. This was a roomy, civilized airplane, with even the economy

seats set in blocks of four or six around little tables, quite unlike the cattle truck conditions Joan

remembered from a childhood spent traveling around the world with her paleontologist mother. In

the year 2031, a time of troubles, not so many people traveled, and those who did were granted a

little more comfort.

Suddenly, as danger brushed by, she was aware of where she was, the people around her.

Joan watched the girl sitting opposite Alyce and herself. The girl, aged around fourteen at a guess,

with a silvery gadget stuck in her ear, had been viewing tabletop images of the toiling Mars lander.

Even here, ten thousand meters above the Timor Sea, she was connected to the electronic web that

united half the planet's population, immersed in noise and shining, dancing images. Her hair was

pale blue—aquamarine, perhaps. And her eyes were bright orange red, the color of the Martian dust

that filled up the smart tabletop. Doubtless she featured many other genetic "improvements" less

visible, Joan thought sourly. Cocooned in her own expanded consciousness the girl had not even

registered the presence of the two middle-aged women sitting opposite her—nothing save for a slight

widening of the eyes at Joan's figure when she had sat down, a reaction which Joan could read like a

book: Somebody so old got pregnant? Yuck...

But as the plane labored through the cluttered sky, the girl had turned to gaze out of the obscured

window, distracted from her high-technology bubble, and the flawless skin of her brow was slightly

furrowed. The girl looked scared—as well she might, Joan thought; all her genriched perfection

wouldn't help her a bit if this plane fell out of the sky. Joan felt an odd touch of meanness, envy

wholly inappropriate in a woman of thirty-four. Be an adult, Joan. Everybody needs human contact,

genriched or not. Isn't that the whole point of your conference, that human contact is going to save us

all?

Joan leaned forward and reached out her hand. "Are you all right, dear?"

The girl flashed a smile, showing teeth so white they all but glowed. "I'm fine. It's just, you know,

the smoke." Her accent was nasal U.S. West Coast.

"Forest fires," Alyce Sigurdardottir said, her leathery face creased into a smile. The primatologist

was a slender woman of about sixty, but she looked older than that, her face deeply lined. "That's all

it is. The seasonal fires in Indonesia, and the Australian east coast; they last for months now, every

year."

"Oh," the girl said, not really reassured. "I thought it might be Rabaul."

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Joan said, "You know about that?"

"Everybody knows about it," the girl said, a hint of dummy in her intonation. "It's a huge volcanic

caldera in Papua New Guinea. Just to the north of Australia, right? It's suffered minor earthquakes

and eruptions every two years or so for the past century. And in the last couple of weeks there have

been Richter one earthquakes like every day."

"You're well informed," Alyce said.

"I like to know what I'm flying into."

Joan nodded, suppressing a smile. "Very wise. But Rabaul hasn't suffered a major eruption in more

than a thousand years. It would be a little unlucky if it were to come just when you happen to be

within a few hundred kilometers, uh—"

"I'm Bex. Bex Scott."

Bex—for Rebecca?—Scott. Of course. Alison Scott was one of the conference's more high-profile

attendees, a very media-friendly genetic programmer with a brace of beautifully engineered

daughters. "Bex, the gunk outside the window really is from the forest fires. We aren't in any

danger."

Bex nodded, but Joan could see that under her bluster she wasn't reassured.

"Well," Joan said brightly, "if we are all going to get crisped in a volcanic caldera, we ought to get to

know each other first. My name's Joan Useb. I'm a paleontologist."

Bex said brightly, "A fossil hunter?"

"Near enough. And this lady—"

"My name's Alyce Sigurdardottir." Alyce extended a slim hand. "I'm pleased to meet you, Bex."

"Sorry, but your names are kind of strange," Bex said, staring.

Joan shrugged. "Useb is a San name—or an anglicized version; the real thing is pretty much

unpronounceable. My family has deep roots in Africa, very deep roots."

"And I," said Alyce, "had an American father and an Icelandic mother. A military romance. Long

story."

Joan said, "We live in a mixed-up world. Humans have always been a wandering species. Names

and genes scattered all over the place."

Bex frowned at Alyce. "I know your name, I think. Chimpanzees?"

Alyce nodded. "I took over some of Jane Goodall's work."

Joan said, "Alyce is one of a long line of prominent female primatologists. I always wondered why

women did so well in the field."

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Evolution

Alyce smiled. "Isn't that stereotyping, Joan? But, well, primate behavioral studies in the wild take—

took—decades of observation, because that's how long the animals themselves take to live out their

lives. So you need patience, and an ability to observe without interfering. Maybe those are female

traits. Or maybe it was just nice to get away from all the usual male hierarchies in academia. The

forest is a lot more civilized."

"Still," Joan said, "it's a powerful tradition. Goodall, Birute Galdikas, Dian Fossey."

"I'm the last of a dying breed."

"Like your chimps," said Bex, with surprising brutality. She smiled at their silence. "They're all gone

from the forests now, aren't they? Wiped out by climate change."

Alyce shook her head. "No, actually. It was the bushmeat trade." Briefly she told Bex how, toward

the end, she had worked in Cameroon, as the loggers had worked their way out into the virgin rain

forest, and the hunters had followed.

"Wasn't it illegal?" Bex asked. "I thought all those old species were protected."

"Of course it was illegal. But bushmeat was money. Oh, the locals had always taken apes. A gorilla

was prestige meat; if your father-in-law visited, you couldn't give him chicken. But when the

European loggers arrived, it got much worse. Bushmeat actually became a faddish food."

The black hole theory of extinction, Joan thought: all life, everything, ultimately disappears into the

black holes in the centers of human faces. But what next? Will we keep on eating our way out

through the great tree of life until there's nothing left but us and the blue-green algae?

"But," said Bex reasonably, "there are still chimps and gorillas in the zoos, right?"

"Not all the species made it," Alyce said. "Even the populations we did save, like the common

chimps, don't breed well in captivity. Too smart for that. Look: The chimps are our closest surviving

relatives. In the wild they lived in families. They used tools. They mounted wars. Kanzi, the chimp

who learned a little sign language, was a bonobo chimp. Did you ever hear of her? And now the

bonobos are extinct. Extinct. That means gone forever. How can we understand ourselves if we

never understood them?"

Bex was listening politely, but she looked distant. She has grown up with such earnest lectures, Joan

thought. It must all mean little or nothing to her, echoes of a world vanished before she was even

born.

Alyce subsided, the old frustration showing in her face. And meanwhile the plane continued to limp

through the smoky sky.

To break the slight tension—she hadn't meant to lecture this girl, only to distract her—Joan changed

the subject. "Alyce studies creatures that are alive today. But I study creatures from the past."

Bex seemed interested, and in response to her questions Joan told her how she had followed the

example of her own mother, and about her work, mostly out in the desert heartlands of Kenya.

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"People don't leave many fossils, Bex. It took me years before I learned to pick them out, tiny specks

against the soil. It's a tough place to work, dry as a bone, a place where all the bushes have thorns on

them to keep you from stealing their water. After that you return to the lab and spend the next few

years analyzing the fragments, trying to learn more of how this million-year-dead hom lived, how

she died, who she was."

"Hom?"

"Sorry. Hominid. Fieldwork slang. A hominid is any creature closer to Homo sap than the chimps—

the pithecines, Homo erectus, the Neandertals."

"All from bits of bone."

"All from the bone, yes. You know, even after a couple of centuries' work, we have dug up no more

that two thousand individuals from our prehistory: two thousand people, that's all, from all the

billions who went before us into the dark. And from that handful of bones we have had to try to infer

the whole tangled history of mankind and all the precursor species, all the way back to what

happened to our line after the dinosaur-killer comet." And yet, she thought wistfully, lacking a time

machine, the patient labor of archaeology was all there was, the only window into the past.

Bex was starting to look distant again.

Joan remembered a trip she had taken to Hell Creek, Montana, when she was about this girl's age,

thirteen or fourteen. Her mother had been working there because it was a famous dinosaur-extinction

boundary site. You could see traces of the huge event that had ended the dinosaur era, there in the

rocks, in a layer of gray clay no thicker than her hand; it was the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary clay,

laid down in the first years after the impact. It was full of ash, the fallout of a huge disaster.

And underneath the clay, one day, her mother had found a tooth.

"Joan, this isn't just a tooth. I think it's a Purgatorius tooth."

"Say what?"

Her mother was big, bluff, her face coated with sweat and dust. "Purgatorius. A dinosaur-era

mammal. Found it right under the boundary clay."

"You can tell all that from a tooth?"

"Sure. I mean, look at this thing. It's a precise piece of dental engineering, already the result of a

hundred and fifty million years of evolution. It's all connected, you see. If you're a mammal you need

specialized teeth so you can shear your food more rapidly, because you have to fuel a faster

metabolism. But if your mother produces milk, you don't need to be born with your final set of teeth;

the specialist tools can grow in place later. Didn't you ever wonder why you had milk teeth? Joan, a

lot of people are going to care a great deal about this. You know why? Because it's a primate. This

little scrap could be all that's left of the most remote ancestor of you and me—and everybody alive—

and the chimps and gorillas and lemurs and—"

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Evolution

And so on. The usual lecture, from the great Professor Useb. Joan, at age thirteen, had been a lot

more interested in spectacular dinosaur skulls than ratty little teeth like this. But still, something

about it had stuck in her mind. And, in the end, such moments had shaped her life.

"That's the point of the conference, you see, Bex," Alyce was saying. "It's a synthesis. We want to

pull together the best understanding we have of how we got here, we humans. We want to tell the

story of humankind. Because now we have to decide how we are going to deal with the future. Our

theme is the globalization of empathy."

That was true. The real purpose of the conference, known only to Joan, Alyce, and a few close

colleagues, was to found a new movement, establish a new way of thinking, a new approach that

might actually stave off the human-induced extinction event.

Bex shrugged. "You think anybody's going to listen to a bunch of scientists? No offense. But nobody

has so far."

Joan forced a smile. "No offense taken. We're going to try anyway. Somebody has to."

"And there's no point in all that stuff anymore, is there? Your archaeology."

Joan frowned. "What do you mean?"

Bex clapped her hands over her mouth. "I shouldn't say anything. My mother will be furious." Her

Martian eyes were bright.

Alyce had withdrawn into herself again; she gazed out of the window at the billowing debris of

forest fires a thousand kilometers away.

Suppose I threw you down the strata, back into time, Joan's mother had said to her. After just a

hundred thousand years you'd lose that nice high forehead of yours. Your upright-walker legs would

be gone after three or four million years. You'd grow your tail back after twenty-five million years.

After thirty-five million, you'd lose the last of your ape features, like your teeth; after that you'd be a

monkey, child. And then you'd keep on shrinking. Forty million years deep you'd look something like

a lemur. And eventually—

Eventually, she would be a little ratty thing, hiding from dinosaurs.

Sometimes she had been allowed to sleep in the open, in the cool air of the badlands. The Montana

sky was huge and crammed with stars. The Milky Way, a side-on view of a giant spiral galaxy, was

a highway across the night. She would lie on her back, gazing up, imagining the rocky Earth had

vanished, its cargo of fossils and all, and that she was adrift in space. She wondered if that little

Purgatorius critter would have seen the same sky. Had the stars swum about the sky, across sixty-

five million years? Did the Galaxy itself turn, like some huge pinwheel in the night?

But tonight, she thought, the smoke from the volcano would hide any stars.

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Evolution

ONE

Ancestors

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Evolution

CHAPTER 1

Dinosaur Dreams

Montana, North America. Circa 65 million years before present.

I

At the edge of the clearing, Purga crept out of a dense patch of ferns. It was night, but there was

plenty of light—not from the Moon, but from the comet whose spectacular tail spread across the

cloudless sky, washing out all but the brightest stars.

This scrap of forest lay in a broad, shallow lowland between new volcanic mountains to the west—

the mountains that would become the Rockies—and the Appalachian plains to the east. Tonight the

damp air was clear; but often mists and fogs blew in from the south, born over the great inland sea

that still pushed deep into the heart of North America. The forest was dominated by plants that could

extract moisture from the air: Lichen coated the gnarled bark of the araucaria trees, and even the low

magnolia shrubs dripped with moss. It was as if the forest had been coated with a layer of thick

green paint.

But everywhere the leaves were soured, the moss and ground cover ferns browned. The rains,

poisoned by gases from the great volcanic convulsion to the west, had been hard on plants and

animals alike. It wasn't a healthy time.

Still, in the clearing, dinosaurs dreamed.

The thick night dew glistening from their yellow-black armor, ankylosaurs had gathered in a

defensive circle, their young at the center. In the gentle Cretaceous air, these cold-blooded giants

stood like parked tanks.

In the milky light Purga's large black eyes had fixed on a moth. The insect sat on a leaf, brown wings

folded, fat and complacent. With an efficient lunge Purga caught her prey in her paws. She severed

off the wings with a couple of nips of her tiny incisors. Then, with a noise like the crunch of a tiny

apple, she began to munch with relish at the moth's abdomen. For this brief moment, with food in

her mouth, Purga found a scrap of contentment in her crowded, difficult life.

The moth quickly died, its sparklike awareness incapable of recording much pain.

The moth consumed, Purga moved on. There was no grass cover here—the grasses had yet to

dominate the land—but there was a green covering of low ferns, mosses, ground pine, horsetails, and

conifer seedlings, even a few gaudy purple flowers. Through this tangle, scuttling between scraps of

cover, she was able to progress almost silently. In the dark, solitary foraging was the best strategy.

Predators worked by ambush, exploiting the shadows of the night; no group could have been as

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invisible as a lone prowler. And so Purga worked alone.

To Purga the world was a plain picked out in black, white, and blue, lit up by the uneasy light of the

comet, which shone behind high scattered clouds. Her huge eyes were not as sensitive to color as the

best dinosaur designs—some raptors could make out colors beyond anything that would be visible to

humans, somber infrareds and sparkling ultraviolets—but Purga's vision worked well in the low light

of night. And besides she had her whiskers, which fanned out before her like a tactile radar sweep.

Purga looked more rodentlike than primate, with whiskers, a pointed snout, and small folded-back

ears. She was about the size of a small bush baby. On the ground she walked on all fours, and she

carried her long bushy tail behind her, like a squirrel. To human eyes she would have seemed

strange, almost reptilian in her stillness and watchfulness, perhaps incomplete.

But, as Joan Useb would one day learn, she was indeed a primate, a progenitor of that great class of

animals. Through her brief life flowed a molecular river with its source in the deepest past, its

destination the sea of the furthest future. And from that river of genes, widening and modifying as

thousands of millennia passed, would one day emerge all of humanity: Every human ever born

would be descended from the children of Purga.

She knew none of this. She didn't give herself a name. She was not conscious like a human—or even

like a chimp or monkey; her mind was more like a rat's or a pigeon's. Her behavior was made up of

fixed patterns, controlled by innate drives that constantly shifted in balance and priority, reaching a

new sum each moment. She was like a tiny robot. She had no sense of self.

And yet she was aware. She knew pleasure—the pleasure of a full belly, the safety of her burrow, the

snouts of her pups as they nuzzled her belly for milk—and, in this dangerous world, she knew fear

very well.

She crept among the feet of dreaming ankylosaurs. As she moved beneath the immense bellies Purga

could hear the huge rumble of the dinosaurs' endless digestion, and the air was thick with their

noxious farts. With their crude teeth, all the work of processing and digesting their coarse food had

to be done in the dinosaurs' vast guts, which labored even as the ankylosaurs slept.

The ankylosaurs were herbivorous dinosaurs. But this was a time of huge, ferocious predators. So

these animals, larger than African elephants, were covered with armor, a fusion of bones, ribs, and

vertebrae. Great yellow-black spines were embedded in their backs. Their skulls were so heavily

reinforced there was little room left for brain. Their tails ended in heavy clubs that could smash legs

or skulls.

The dinosaurs were too huge for Purga to comprehend. Hers was a small world, where a fallen log or

a puddle was a major obstacle, where a scorpion could be a significant predator, where a fat

millipede was a rare treat. To her, the dozing ankylosaur herd was a forest of immense stumpy legs

and drooping tails that had no connection to each other.

But for Purga there was a rich prize here: dinosaur dung, immense heaps of it scattered in the

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muddy, trampled ground. Here, in fibrous mountains of roughly digested vegetation, she might find

insects, even dung beetles, laboring to destroy the tremendous turds. She burrowed into the steaming

stuff eagerly.

Thus had been the role of the ancestors of humanity, all through the long dinosaur summer: relegated

to the fringe of the reptiles' great society, emerging from their burrows only at night, foraging for a

living from dung, insects, and the small pickings of the forest.

But tonight the rewards were meager, the droppings watery and foul-smelling. The volcano-damaged

vegetation had provided poor fodder for the ankylosaurs, and what came out the other end was of

little value to Purga.

She moved across the clearing and into the forest. Here conifers towered grandly, rising to spreading

mats of leaves far overhead. Among them were smaller trees a little like palms, and a few low

bushes bearing pale yellow flowers.

Purga scrambled briskly into the angular branches of a ginkgo tree. As she climbed she used the

scent glands in her crotch to mark the tree. In her world of night, scent and sound were more

important than sight, and if others of her kind found this mark, any time within the next week, it

would be a sign like a neon light, telling them she had been here, even how long ago she had passed.

It was pleasing to climb, to feel her muscles work smoothly as they hauled her high above the

dangerous ground, to use the delicate balance afforded by her long tail—and, most of all, to jump, to

fly briefly from one branch to another, using all her body's equipment, her balance, her agility, her

grasping hands, her fine eyes. She was forced to shelter in burrows on the ground. But everything

about her had been shaped by an existence in the complex three-dimensional environment of the

trees, where almost all primate species, throughout the family's long history, would find refuge.

But the acid rain of recent months had withered the trees and undergrowth; the bark was sour, and

there were few insects to be found.

Purga was perpetually hungry. She needed to consume her body weight every day: It was the price

of her warm blood, and the milk she must produce for her two pups, safe in their burrow deeper in

the forest. She clambered reluctantly back down the trunk of the ginkgo. Fear and hunger warring in

her mind, she tried one or two more trees, but with no better luck.

But now she lifted her head, whiskers twitching, bright eyes wide, to peer into the green dark of the

forest. She could smell meat: the alluring stench of broken flesh. And she heard a forlorn, helpless

piping, like that of baby birds.

She scuttled away, following the scent.

In a small clearing at the base of a huge, gnarly araucaria there was a heap of roughly piled moss. At

its edge, a small patch of debris-littered silt began to move. Soon the patch rose like a lid, and a

small, scrawny neck poked out of the ground and through the layer of mud and debris. A beaklike

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Stephen Baxter - Evolution

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