Evolution (20 page)

The species here— derived from ancestral stock adapted to the balmy conditions of the tropics— had had to make ferocious adjustments to survive the extreme conditions at the pole. Every plant, wherever it lived, depended on sunlight for energy and growth, and during the endless days of summer the vegetation had lapped up the light with broad, angled leaves. But now there approached a season when for months there would be no light but that of the Moon and stars, useless for growth: If the plants had kept on growing and respiring they would have burned up their energy store. So the flora were heading for a vegetable hibernation, each according to its own strategy.

Even the plants were sleeping.

The notharctus troop was thirty strong, and they had huddled in the branches of a big conifer. They looked like big furry fruit, their hands and feet clinging to the branches as they slept, their faces buried in their chests, their backs exposed to the cold. Frost sparkled on their new winter coats, and where a muzzle showed breath steamed, glowing blue white.

Noth slept away the lengthening nights, his fur bristling, immersed in the body heat of the others of the troop. Sometimes he dreamed. He saw his mother fall into the jaws of the mesos. Or he was alone in an open space surrounded by hard-eyed predators. Or he was like a pup again, pushed out of a troop by adults bigger and stronger than he was, excluded by rules of which he had no innate understanding. But sometimes the dreams faded, and he fell into a kind of torpor, a blankness that prefigured the long months of hibernation to come.

Once he woke in the night shivering, his muscles involuntarily burning energy to keep him alive.

The sleeping world was full of light: the Moon was high and full and the forest glowed blue white and black. Long, sharp shadows striped the littered floor, and the vertical trunks of the leafless trees gave the scene an eerie geometrical precision. But the tangled branches higher up were a more complex and dismal sight, bone bare and glimmering with frost, a harsh contrast to the warm green glow of the leaves of high summer.

In its way it was a beautiful scene, and Noth’s wide archaic eyes served him well, revealing to him detail and subtle colorations that would have been invisible to any human. But all Noth perceived was a
lack
: a lack of light, of warmth, of food— and a lack of kin in this group of strangers, save for his sister, whose still-growing body was buried somewhere in the huddling troop. And he knew on a deep cellular level that the true winter had yet to begin, long, drawn-out months of a kind of slow agony as his body consumed itself in order to keep him alive.

He squirmed across the branch, trying to force his way deeper into the group. Each of the adults knew that it was in everybody’s long-term interests that she should take her turn at the edge of the group, briefly suffering the cold in order to shelter the rest; it wouldn’t help to have outliers die of frostbite. But still Noth’s lowly rank worked against him, and when the other males picked up his scent they sleepily combined to push him back out of the huddle, so he finished up almost as exposed as when he had started.

He lifted his muzzle and puffed out a breath, hooting mournfully.

These primates could draw no comfort from those around them. Noth found pleasure in grooming— but only in his own physical sensations, and in the effect it had on others’ behavior toward him, not in how others felt. The other notharctus were simply a part of his environment, like the conifer trees and podocarps, the foragers and predators and prey: nothing to do with
him.

These huddling notharctus, despite their physical closeness, were each lonelier than any human would ever be. Noth was forever locked inside the prison of his head, forced to endure his miseries and fears alone.

The morning dawned clear, but a freezing mist lay over the forest. Even though the sun grew bright there was little heat to be had from its rays.

The notharctus stretched limbs stiff with cold and long hours of immobility. Cautiously, watchfully, they headed down to the ground. On the forest floor they scattered slowly. The senior females moved around the edge of this loose clearing, using their wrists, armpits, and genitals to renew scent markers.

Noth picked through the frozen mulch. The dead leaves were of no use to him, but he had learned to burrow under places where the leaf litter was particularly thick. The mulching leaves could trap moisture and keep the frost away; here there was dew to lap up, and unfrozen ground to dig in search of tubers, roots, or even the rhizomes of hardy ferns.

A series of hooting cries broke out, startlingly loud, echoing through the forest. Noth looked up, whiskers twitching.

There was a commotion around a stand of podocarp. Noth saw that a group of notharctus, strange females with a scattering of pups, had come out of the forest. They were approaching the podocarp.

Biggest and some of the other females dashed forward. The troop’s big dominant male— who Noth thought of as something like
the Emperor
— joined in the females’ charge. Soon they were all displaying ferociously, hooting and scraping musk over their long tails. The strange females cowered back, but they responded in kind. The forest briefly filled up with the cacophony of the argument.

The female clans, the heart of the notharctus’ society, were fiercely territorial. These strange females had ignored the scent markers left by Big and the others, bright warning signs in a notharctus’ sensorium. At this time of year food was becoming short; in the final scramble to stoke up their bodies’ stores for the rigors of winter, a rich stand of podocarp was worth fighting for.

The females, with babies clinging to their fur, went further in their wars than their males were prepared to. They quickly escalated the confrontation to lunges and feints and even slashes with canine teeth. The females fought like knife fighters.

But it wasn’t going to work. Though not one notharctus laid a paw on another, the display by Biggest and the rest overwhelmed the newcomers. They backed off toward the long gray-brown shadows of the deeper forest— though not before one older pup had lunged forward, cheekily sunk his teeth into a cold-wizened fruit, and run off with his bounty before he could be stopped.

Suddenly aware of the vulnerability of their treasure, the females closed around the podocarp now, munching greedily at the fruit. Some of the older, more powerful males, including the Emperor, were soon feeding alongside Biggest and the rest. Noth, with the other young males, circled the feeding group, waiting his turn at whatever would be left.

He dared not challenge the Emperor.

Male notharctus had their own complex and different social structure, overlaying that of the females. And it was all about mating, which was the most important thing— the
only
thing. The Emperor had a large territory, including the ranges of many female groups. He would aim to mate with all the females in his territory, and so maximize his chances of propagating his genes. He would scent mark females to repel other suitors. And he would fight fiercely to keep other strong males away from his wide empire, just as Noth’s father had fought to exclude Solo.

The Emperor had done well to hold on to his wide-ranging fiefdom for more than two years. But like all of his short-lived kind, he was aging quickly. Even Noth, the lowliest newcomer, made endless automatic computations of the Emperor’s strength and fitness; the drive to mate, to produce offspring, to see his own line go on, was as strong in Noth as in any of the males here. Soon the Emperor would surely meet a challenge he could not withstand.

But for now, Noth was in no position to challenge the Emperor or any of the stronger males in the loose pecking order above him. And he could see that the supply of podocarp fruit was dwindling rapidly.

With a frustrated hoot he hurried over the forest floor and scampered briskly into a tree. The branches, slippery with residual frost, dew, and lichen, were all but bare of leaves and fruit. But it might still be possible to find caches of nuts or seeds, stashed away by providential forest creatures.

He came to a hollow in an aging tree trunk. In its dank, rotting interior, he saw the gleam of nutshells. He reached in with his small, agile hands and hauled out one of the nuts. The shell was round, seamless, complete. When he rattled it he could hear the kernel inside, and saliva spurted into his mouth. But when he bit into the shell his teeth slid over the smooth, hard surface. Irritated, he tried again.

There was an almighty hissing. He hooted, dropped the nut, and scuttled to a higher branch.

A creature the size of a large domestic cat came scrambling clumsily toward the nut cache. It raised its head to Noth and hissed again, showing a pink mouth with powerful upper and lower incisors. Satisfied that it had driven off the raider, it dug out one of its stored nuts and, with a clench of its powerful jaws, cracked the shell. Soon it was nibbling purposefully, widening the hole it had made. At last it reached the nut’s kernel— Noth, tucked behind the tree trunk, was almost overwhelmed by the sudden sweet aroma— and fed noisily.

This ailuravus looked something like a rudimentary squirrel, with a mouselike face. It had a long bushy tail, the purpose of which was to slow its fall, parachute-like, every time it tumbled out of a tree, as it frequently did. Although it was clumsier than the notharctus as it moved about in the trees, lacking a primate’s grasping hands and feet, it was more than big enough to have fought off Noth.

The ailuravus was one of the first rodents. That vast, enduring family had emerged a few million years earlier in Asia, and had since migrated around the world. This small encounter was a skirmish at the start of an epochal conflict for resources between the primates and the rodents.

And the rodents were already winning.

They were beating primates to the food, for one thing. Noth would have needed a nutcracker to eat hazelnuts or brazil nuts, and a millstone to process grains like wheat and barley. But the rodents, with their ferocious, ever-growing incisors, could break through the toughest nut and grain seed coats. Soon they would begin to consume the fruits of the best trees before they were even ripe.

Not only that, the rodents outbred the primates by a large factor. This ailu could produce several litters within a single year. Many of its young would fall to starvation, competition with their siblings, or predation by birds and carnivores. But it was enough that some should survive to continue the line, and for the ailu each of its young represented little investment— unlike the notharctus who bred just once a year and for whom the loss of a single pup was a significant disaster. And the rodents’ vast litters incidentally offered up much raw material to the blind sculptors of natural selection; their evolutionary rate was ferocious.

Even though primates like Noth were much smarter than rodents like the ailu, his kind could not compete.

It wasn’t just the plesiadapids that were becoming rare in North America. It was no coincidence that Noth’s kind had been pushed up into this marginal polar forest. In the future Noth’s line would migrate further, passing over the roof of the world to Europe and thence to Asia and Africa, adapting and reshaping as they went. But in North America the rodent victory would, within another few million years, be complete. A new ecology would arise, populated by gophers, squirrels, pack rats, marmots, field mice, and chipmunks. There would be
no
primates in North America: none at all, not for another fifty-one million years, not until human hunters, very distant descendants of the notharctus, came walking over the Bering Strait from Asia.

When the rodent was done feeding, Noth crept cautiously out of his hiding place. With his agile hands he sought out the scraps of kernel the ailu had dropped, and crammed them into his mouth without shame.

For a few hours a day the southern sky still grew bright. But the sun made its cycles beneath the horizon now. Almost all of the lakes were frozen over, and the trees were laden with frost, some of it gleaming in thick lacy shards where mist had frozen out on spiderwebs. The notharctus’ movements through the trees and over the silent forest floor were sluggish and dull. But it didn’t matter; the forest could offer them little more food this autumn.

There came a last clear day, when layers of red-tinged cloud stacked up against a violet southern sky, and the purple-green aurora rolled like a vast curtain over the stars.

The notharctus hurried to the ground and began to dig in places where the soil had been kept unfrozen by layers of leaves or under the roots of trees. Tonight would be the hardest frost of the winter so far, and they all knew it was time to get under cover. So the primates dug, building burrows in which Purga would have felt comfortable. It was as if the brief interval in the trees had been nothing but a dream of freedom.

In the deepest dark, Noth pushed his way through tunnels quickly worn smooth by the passage of primate bodies and over a floor littered with loose fur. At last his powerful nose guided him to Right.

Gently Noth sniffed his sister. She was already dormant, curled tightly up with her tail wrapped around her, close to the belly of Big. She had grown during their months with Biggest’s troop, but Right would always be small, always retain traces of the runt who had been bullied by her now-dead twin. Still her winter fur seemed sleek, healthy, and free of knots and dirt, and her tail was fat with the store that should sustain her through the winter.

Noth felt a kind of satisfaction. Given their dreadful start to the summer, they had both beaten the survival odds better than expected. With no pups of his own, this was still the only kin Noth had— his entire genetic future depended on Right— but for now there was nothing more he could do for her.

In darkness, immersed in the scents and subtle noises of his kind, Noth snuggled as close as he could to his sister. He shut his eyes, and was soon asleep.

Briefly he dreamed, of fragments of summer light, of long shadows, of his mother’s fall from the trees. And then, as his body shut down, his mind dissolved.