MAN after MAN

Dougal Dixon

FOREWORD by Brian Aldiss

It has become necessary to look into the future. There must have been a time, long past, when animals much like apes

looked up into the night sky and wondered about the stars: what those

pinpoints of light were, and what they were for. Only a brief while after

that, the apelike things acquired language; then stories began to be told, and

fantasies woven about the stars overhead. That cluster resembled a hunter

and, high above, the outlines of a great bear could be discerned. Such

stories, told in the Pleistocene dark, kept the bogeyman away. Animals have no interest in stars. First speculations regarding the stars

represented a revolution in thought. Speculations about the future, such as

this book, mark another revolution. Future speculation is of very recent origin. Yet today no man can call

himself cultured who does not occasionally look beyond his own lifetime

and his children’s, if only to worry about where the cancerous growth of

world population is going. Dougal Dixon’s book is an ambitious attempt to

view a future as far distant from us as those ramapithecine creatures whose

fragmentary remains turn up in African fossil beds. The ability to look into the future is a recently-acquired skill. It has, in

fact, all been done by mirrors: there was no seeing into the future until we

could see into the past. It is the ever-changing panorama of past time which

we extrapolate into future time. The business of comprehending bygone ages was a hard lesson to learn. Fossils, those coinages of past life, were always of interest to mankind. They are mentioned by Greek writers, for instance, and certainly Herodotus

recognized them as being the remains of once-living creatures,

understanding that their presence in the mountains of Upper Egypt was

evidence that those areas had previously been under water. Lucretius, too,

in his wonderful De Rerum Natura, pours scorn on supernatural effects and

speaks of the Earth as having ‘generated every living species and once

brought forth from its womb the bodies of huge beasts’.

The light of reason did not always shine. Huge fossil bones later gave

birth (or so we may surmise) to the legend of giants walking the Earth. The

perceptions of the Greeks were forgotten. Eratosthenes, some time in the third century BC, understood well that the Earth is round, and measured its

circumference with remarkable accuracy, for the latitude of Alexandria. Aristarchus of Samos, in the same period, proposed that the Earth and other

planets proceeded in orbit about the sun. These perceptions were overlaid

by superstition. Greek reasoning was based on careful observation, a quality in which the

Dark Ages and Middle Ages were weak. The mental world became smaller. Not until the Renaissance in the fifteenth century did learning revive. Leonardo da Vinci, for instance, studied fossils and understood their

origins. He explains why leaves are found whole among rocks:

There the mud caused by the successive inundations has covered them over, and then this mud

grows into one mass together with the aforesaid paste, and becomes changed into successive

layers of stone which correspond with the layers of mud. But Leonardo did not know the age of the Earth and, in any case,

accretion of knowledge is as much subject to chance and the processes of

time as the fossils themselves. Homo diluvii testis survived as a fantasy for

a while, as Piltdown Man was to do later; they were, so to say, phantom

fossils. One of the difficulties in the way of understanding the past was that for

centuries the past remained obdurately and orthodoxly small. Religion got

in the viewfinder. A wall rather like the walls of Jericho was built about

antiquity by Archbishop Ussher, a seventeenth-century divine, who, after a

careful study of the Bible, proclaimed that the world began on 26 October,

4004 BC, round about breakfast time. Precision is attractive; Ussher’s

calculations became dogma. The ‘walls of Jericho’ begin to crumble at the beginning of the

nineteenth century. What made them crumble was a tooth, retrieved from a

pile of rubble in Lewes, Sussex, by a young Mrs Mantell, wife of a doctor

Gideon Mantell. The Mantells took the tooth to the learned and eccentric

William Buckland of Oxford, a man who ate his way through the animal

kingdom and had gobbled down the heart of Richard Coeur de Lion. Buckland was a little weak on the Mantellian tooth. After some research of

his own, Mantell named the erstwhile possessor of his tooth Iguanodon. Buckland, meanwhile, discovered another tooth near Oxford, together

with other remains, and named the fossil Megalosaurus. Thus were the first two dinosaurs named. It was not until 1842 that

Richard Owen defined these newly-discovered animals as a distinct group

of large reptiles, and bestowed on them the label Dinosauria. A powerful

new idea, a new dimension of imagination, had been born. By the time of

the Great Exhibition in 1851, dinosaurs had become common property, and

the notion of animals larger than elephants trundling about what became

English watering places had caught the popular fancy. Meanwhile, conceptions of the age of the Earth were being pushed out at

a great rate. It spelt the fall of the house of Ussher. Evolutionary theories

were current in the eighteenth century, for instance in the proposals, many

of them charmingly rhymed, of Erasmus Darwin. In his The Temple of

Nature (1803), he depicts with considerable accuracy the pageant of life

from its beginnings until the arrival of mankind. Darwin’s couplets are often neat and memorable, as he intended they

should be. The formation of strata of chalk is expressed in a striking image:

Age after age expands the peopled plain,

The tenants perish, but their cells remain. Erasmus Darwin celebrated limestone mountains as ‘mighty monuments

of past delight’, thus in some way looking ahead to Jim Lovelock’s Gaia

theory of the totality of terrestrial life as a homeostatic organism. What Erasmus Darwin lacked was proof of his theories, the tooth found

by Mrs Mantell and all the other evidences of remote and continuous life

over millions of years which soon followed Owen’s first christening. As

geology kept pushing back the age of the rocks, it was the testimony of

those rocks which supported the theory of evolution presented by Erasmus’

grandson, Charles Darwin. There had to be enough time in which the whole

great drama of life could be staged. Palaeontology gradually won – by a

long and painstaking accumulation of facts by numerous people, learned

and not so learned. We now know that life on the planet is no less than 2500 million years

old, whereas the age of the Earth is accepted as being something more than

4500 million years. It was my good fortune as a boy of seven to be given an imposing

volume entitled The Treasury of Knowledge. There for the first time I

learned of evolution and of the ages preceding ours. So enamoured was I of the story of the creation of the solar system, of the dawn of life, of the

dinosaurs, and of those early men – like us, unlike us – that I gave lessons

on the subject when at preparatory school, at one penny a time. Although I

do not recollect ever being paid, I recall the pleasure we all had drawing

brontosauruses and shaggy Neanderthal men. That precious book is still in my possession. It was published in about

1933 (no actual date printed).

Nowhere does it give the ages of the various

epochs of past history. A question mark still hung over that subject in the

years before carbon-dating and an understanding of the nuclear nature of

the sun. In one lifetime we have progressed from that grey area to knowing

(or believing we know) how the universe itself came into being – though

some doubt remains about the first few seconds of that event. Until we could look into the past, until the past was seen as a story of

continuous development or change, with the mutability of species which

that implied, the future remained blank. It gave no credible reflection. This

we can see if we read romances of the future penned before evolutionary

theory became a reality in human minds. Futures were like the present but

more so. Mary Shelley’s The Last Man of 1826, for instance, is set at the end of

the twenty-first century. It is a bold stroke, and some play is made with

travel by air balloon and revolution in England; but the Turks are still

causing trouble at the eastern end of Europe. When a plague commences to

wipe out all of humanity, no attempt is made to introduce innoculation or

vaccination, although that would have been a reasonable proposition in the

1820s. The novel is full of interesting reflections; but the motive power

which evolution could supply is absent. It was not until 1895 that readers could take up the first novel to be

formed by evolutionary thought, as a waffle is shaped by the pattern of the

waffle iron. The Time Machine was written by a pupil of Thomas Huxley,

Darwin’s great protagonist, H. G. Wells. In this marvellous narration, Wells

sketches out aeons of future time. It is part of his design that – unlike the

epochs in The Treasury of Knowledge – everything has a date. The date at

which the time traveller eventually arrives is 802,701: not, in fact, a

credible date for the end of the Earth by today’s standards, but one well

designed to seem reasonable to the book’s first readers, who had enough

other marvels to cope with. Indeed, it is difficult to realize now just how subversive the book must have seemed to many at that date, for a gloomy

picture indeed is painted of the bifurcation of society into Morlock and Eloi

to which Victorian society is depicted as heading. Evolution is shown as not

working on behalf of mankind, as was then popularly imagined. And, of course, our species is shown as mutable, as transitory. As the time traveller travels through time into a distant future, he

observes that ‘The whole surface of the earth seemed changed – melting

and flowing under my eyes’.

This is a man who has read Sir Charles Lyell’s

Principles of Geology. ‘I saw great and splendid architecture rising about

me, more massive than any buildings of our own time, and yet, it seemed,

built of glimmer and mist.’ It is not only man’s achievements, but mankind

itself, which proves transitory, a thing of glimmer and mist. Without a fresh understanding of the past, without its decipherment, The

Time Machine could not have been written; or, if written, could not have

been deciphered. Following on from Wells, we have had many visions of the future. Whether mechanical, trivial, or profound, they all rest on the findings of the

nineteenth century; all work as reflections of our understanding of the

preceding millions of years. As much is true of Dougal Dixon’s book. Yet it impresses me as being

startlingly original, perhaps the progenitor of a new breed, future-faction. It

eschews the trappings of fiction upon which Wells seized. It presents itself

as a straight record of the future, the future over the next 5 million years. It

is Darwin, Lyell and Wells rolled into one. They would like this book, and

be horrified by it: for we have, after all, travelled a long way since their day,

and supped on horrors beyond their resources. We have lived through an

age (well, men felt much the same in 1000AD, though for different reasons)

when we have almost daily expected the world to be terminated. So here is the mutability, with human flesh a thing of glimmer and mist. Man After Man is a drama of the oncotic pressure of time on tissue. Dixon

does not tell us of the things his caravanserai of creatures believes and

thinks; it is enough that we know what they eat. For one of the revelations

brought home by evolutionary theory is that we are a part of the food chain,

along with pigs, broiler fowls and the tasty locust. Of course the prospect is melancholy as well as fascinating. This is one

of the characteristics of futurology. After all, we are looking at a period long after our own insignificant individual deaths. Everything we are asked

to consider here reinforces the fact that our world and all we cherish in it is

gone. We are one with Tutankhamun and Archbishop Ussher. Other beings

possess the field. Consider Knut who, Dixon tells us, lives a mere 500 years from now. Knut’s seems a lonely life. He lives in a wilderness of tundra. He subsists

on a diet of mosses, lichens, heathers, and coarse grasses. He has been

adapted, so he finds his diet palatable and nourishing. But the question

arises in our minds: do we not find a little frightening and alien this

inheritor of our world – and where did all the toast and marmalade go?

We ourselves like – need – a coarse mental diet. We pass for human, but

perhaps only among ourselves. Part of us is sane but, at times of crisis, and

not only then, an instinctive drive takes over. We seek to set aside the

human aspect by use of drink, drugs and other means of escape, as if being

human was as yet too much for us. We have a hearty appetite for

apocalypse, as the history of the twentieth century shows. With this appetite goes an obsession with the future. The futures we

visualize are generally dystopian. Dixon’s is science-based, but proves

distinctly ahuman. Sombre, I would call it. And sombre was also a word

that occurred to Thomas Hardy when he considered the change in taste of

our modern age. Hardy was a pall-bearer at Darwin’s funeral, and his

writings are steeped in evolutionary thought, from A Pair of Blue Eyes to

The Dynasts, the great supernatural drama he wrote in the early years of this

century. In The Return of the Native, he reflects on such matters:

Men have oftener suffered from the mockery of a place too smiling for their reason than from

the oppression of surroundings oversadly tinged. Haggard Egdon appealed to a subtler and

scarcer instinct, to a more recently learnt emotion, than that which responds to the sort of beauty

called charming and fair. Indeed, it is a question if the exclusive reign of this orthodox beauty is not approaching its

last quarter....

Human souls may find themselves in harmony closer and closer with external

things wearing a sombreness distasteful to our race when it was young. The time seems near, if

it has not actually arrived, when the chastened sublimity of a moor, a sea, or a mountain will be

all of nature that is absolutely in keeping with the moods of the more thinking among mankind. Hardy there shows his prophetic sense. We might go on to say that

chronicles of change which impress on us the transitory nature of our lives

and our civilization are also in keeping with the mood of the present. The current obsession with the future may also pass away in time; but for now –

just for now – Dougal Dixon has the right idea. INTRODUCTION – EVOLUTION AND MAN

Evolution is the process that brought us to where we are today. It started about 3500 million years ago, when the first living thing,

probably a single complex organic molecule in the form of a long chain,

began to reproduce itself. It did this by latching onto simpler molecules

dissolved in the water around it, until it built up a mirror image of itself. The two parts then split apart to become two identical complex molecules. Each of these had the same power of attracting simpler molecules and

building up a mirror image – similar to the way in which viruses reproduce

themselves. The building up and the splitting took place untold millions of times. Inevitably on occasion the mirror image so produced was not accurate. As a

result the new molecule had slightly different properties from the old, and

may not have been so efficient at reproducing itself. In this case the

changed molecule – the mutation – stopped reproducing and died out. However, the occasional mutation arose that actually helped the

molecule to reproduce itself. The mirror images – the offspring – of this

mutation then survived. This is the basis of the process that we call

evolution. After millions of beneficial chance mutations the single molecule

became more and more complex, if complexity ensured a more efficient

reproductive process. The molecule changed from a virus-like entity to a

living cell, in which the reproductive molecule or molecules were encased

and protected by an outer membrane. This resembled one of our modern

bacteria. The chemical reactions that enabled early molecules to reproduce

themselves may have been insufficient to power the reproduction of more

advanced creatures, and other energy sources developed that allowed the

absorption of energy from sunlight and the use of this energy to build up

raw materials for reproduction. The first single-celled plants had evolved. Other mutated cells did not use the sun’s energy. Instead they digested

the cells that did, and so used the energy already stored. These were the first

animals. Eventually creatures evolved that consisted of more than just a single

cell. This came about either by cells reproducing themselves and then

failing to split, or by several cells coming together. Whichever it was, if the

multi-celled creature were more efficient, then it survived and reproduced

in its multi-cellular form. With the increasing complexity, the different cells in a single creature

evolved to have different functions. Some cells were involved in sense,

helping the creature to find food or light. Other cells were involved in

locomotion, in moving the whole creature towards its food or its light

source. Others were involved in digestion, others in reproduction, and so

on. The different masses of cells are what we call tissues, and the structures

that they form, each with a different function, are called organs. An entire

creature (made up from molecules that make cells, that make tissues, that

make organs) is called an organism. At an early stage the pathways of evolution began to branch, and

different types of organism developed. Wherever there was a food source

that could be exploited, evolution produced an organism able to exploit it. Such a process is called adaptive radiation, and we can see it at work today. Many species of finch live in the Galapagos Islands, off the west coast of

South America. These all evolved from one type of seed-eating ground

finch that came over from the mainland, and spread to all the islands, each

with different habitats and food sources. The finches on each island evolved

to take advantage of their particular habitat. As a result there are now many

species of finch on the islands, including heavy-beaked forms that eat seeds,

short-beaked forms that eat buds and fruit and longbeaked forms that eat

insects. Environments are not stable; they change for one reason or another. When this happens, a creature evolved to live in a particular way in a

certain environment becomes extinct. For example, if all the insects on the

Galapagos Islands died out, then the long-beaked finches would become

extinct: a process known as natural selection. If the insects became extinct,

their places would be taken by another creature, and some other bird would

evolve to eat that. Evolution produces specific shapes of animals to live in particular

environments. Grass is tough to eat, so an animal that eats grass needs strong teeth and a specialized digestive system. Grasslands are wide open

areas in which danger can be seen coming from a long way away, and there

are no hiding places. A grass-eating animal, therefore, tends to have long

running legs, as well as strong teeth, and a long face so that its eyes are

above the level of the grass while its head is down eating. This gives us the

shape of the antelope – the typical grass-eating animal of Africa. However, the grasslands of Australia have evolved a quite unrelated

grass-eating animal – the kangaroo. There seems little resemblance between

this and the antelope of Africa. It does, however, have the same long face

with similar grass-grinding teeth; and the legs are long and built for speed,

albeit in a bounding rather than a running gait. This development of similar

features in unrelated animals in response to similar environmental

conditions is what is known as convergent evolution. It accounts for the

similarities between seals and sealions, aardvarks and anteaters, ants and

termites, vultures and condors. A similar phenomenon is parallel evolution. In this, two branches of the

same family tree develop along similar lines independently of one another. For example, the kit fox of North America and the fennec fox of Africa are

both small, with a sandy pelt and large ears. The ears act as cooling vanes

and prevent each animal overheating in its desert environment, and the pelt

is camouflage. Both are descended from a more conventional fox-like

animal, but each has evolved separately to live in different deserts. The different colours and patterns in animals can also be attributed to

evolutionary processes. Animal patterns may camouflage them: on the other

hand they may, like the skunk, have striking colours that warn a would-be

attacker that the owner is poisonous. Some animals mimic others, as when a

harmless king snake develops the spectacular pattern of the poisonous coral

snake, and consequently turns away potential enemies. All these have

developed because the animals concerned have benefited from them, have

survived and have gone on to reproduce. Throughout the world and throughout time, animals and plants have

changed in response to the changes in the environment. One species has broken with this tradition. Within the last million years

or so the human species Homo sapiens evolved. It has come all the way

from molecules to its present form in 3500 million years by the workings of

evolution. Now, within the last few millennia, intelligence has developed, and with it cultures and civilizations. The species has spread not by

changing to adapt to the environments it found but by changing the

environments to suit itself. Instead of developing furry pelts and layers of

insulating fat to adapt to cold conditions, it manufactures artificial

coverings and uses available energy supplies to generate heat for the body. Instead of evolving heat radiating structures such as big ears to adapt to hot

conditions, it manufactures refrigeration and air-conditioning systems,

again using available energy supplies. Instead of developing speed and

killing strategies that allow it to hunt a particular food, it builds machines to

do it. By using its intelligence it can exploit all food supplies in all

environments without having to change itself. Medical science eliminates much of the effects of natural selection: no

longer does an individual not particularly well adapted to the environment

die out before being able to reproduce. Under natural conditions not all offspring of a species survive, and this is

reflected in the birth-rate. Thanks to medical science, more offspring of

Homo sapiens survive than ever could before, but this has not been

reflected in a corresponding drop in the birth-rate. As a result the

populations of Homo sapiens are growing without the refining and

modifying processes of natural selection. Evolution as we know it for Homo sapiens has stopped. However, this

does not mean that the process of change has necessarily stopped. As science develops, the reproductive molecules – the genes – that exist

within every cell of the human body are becoming better and better

understood. When Homo sapiens finally appreciates which parts control the

development of which features, then the possibility exists for modifying the

process. A stage will be reached when one gene can be suppressed, another

encouraged, with yet another created from new. A human being with

particular features, following a particular preconceived plan, may be born

from modified sperm cells and ova. Without the natural processes of

modification, this unnatural process is the only way of developing the

species into new forms to face the problems that await it in the future:

problems generated by overpopulation, over-use of natural resources and

pollution. Genetic engineering The mechanics of genetic engineering are already complex, yet in their

current state they are primitive compared to what will undoubtedly be

possible within a few decades. The reproductive molecules that lie at the nucleus of each cell of a living

organism are in the form of long structures called chromosomes. These

chromosomes are made up of the chemical substance DNA. Its shape is best

imagined as a long ladder that has been twisted along its length. Each rung

of this ladder consists of two compounds, called bases, locked together. There are only four different kinds of bases: thymine, cytosine, adenine and

guanine, referred to as T, C, A and G. A T always unites with an A, and a

C always with a G. The sequence of these base pairs along the twisted

ladder of the chromosome is almost infinitely variable – there are

something like 6,000,000,000 bases in a full set of human chromosomes. A chromosome is often described as a page in an instruction manual. Each base pair, or rung in the ladder, represents a letter of the alphabet, and

the arrangement along the ladder gives ‘words’ and ‘sentences’.

Each

understandable instruction so formed gives a gene. The genes in a single

cell produce the total information needed for the growth of the entire

organism. When an organism grows and develops, it does so by multiplication of

cells. Each cell splits into two complete cells. When this happens, each

chromosome in the cell actually splits down the middle. The uprights of the

twisted ladder pull away from one another as the rungs split into two along

the joins between the bases. What happens then is that these two half-

ladders build up two complete ladders by attracting free bases made up

from the chemicals drifting in the cell. As a result, when the cell splits into

two each new cell carries exactly the same set of gene instructions. The exception to this process is in sexual reproduction. Reproductive

cells carry half the normal number of chromosomes. Two half-cells unite

during fertilization to produce one cell with the full number. This new cell

is a unique mix of genes, half from the mother and half from the father. This

cell then divides in the usual manner until the entire organism is built up,

following the instructions now carried in every cell. The big mystery now is this: how do the genes – the pattern of base pairs

along a chromosome – actually work?

How do they control the construction

of an organism?

The idea behind genetic engineering is to manipulate natural processes. In some way genetic instructions along the chromosomes in a cell have to

be identified then changed so that as the organism grows, it is to a new set

of instructions. Since all the materials involved (cells, chromosomes,

molecules) are microscopic, a whole new technology has to be applied. Viruses can do it. Viruses essentially consist of a mass of their own DNA

encased in an envelope. When they infect a cell they attach themselves to

the cell’s wall and inject their DNA through it. In the cell’s interior the

invading DNA breaks down the cell’s chromosomes and rebuilds the

material into copies of itself. For genetic engineers to do the same, they would first of all have to

break in through the cell wall, then break down the DNA of the nucleus and

reassemble it in the desired way. Alternatively, they could cut out segments

of the DNA strand, segments that correspond to particular genes, and

replace them with DNA segments already prepared. This would be done by

chemicals that have specific biochemical reactions – enzymes – some of

which have been found to have the ability to cut DNA strands. The greatest experimental successes so far have been with bacteria. These single-celled creatures have cell walls that can be softened by

chemical solutions so that new DNA can be placed inside. The double helix

of the original chromosome can be chopped up using enzymes, and new

DNA can be inserted. The broken ends of the DNA strands have one side

longer than the other, exposing a sequence of bases. If the introduced DNA

segment has matching bases exposed at its end the two DNA pieces will

unite, T to A, and C to G, and produce a complete chromosome. This

technique is known as gene-splicing. Before any of this can be attempted, however, the whole gene pattern has

to be mapped. At the moment only about 100 human genes have been

identified and interpreted; but, since genetics has only been in existence for

a century, and the structure of the chromosome has only been known for

about four decades, and scientific advance in this area is increasing

exponentially, what was speculation about genetic engineering is quickly

becoming fact. 1.

A human being is made of cells – about 10 trillion of them – all grown from a single reproductive cell. 2.

Each cell contains a nucleus, carrying all the genetic information for growing the whole body,

3.

The genetic information in the nucleus is arranged on a number of units called chromosomes. 4.

Each chromosome is made up of a long strand of DNA coiled upon itself again and again,

5.

A DNA strand is a twisted ladder of pairs of amino acid molecules, the sequence of which provides the genetic information,

6.

When a cell reproduces, each DNA strand splits like a zip fastener along the joins between the amino acid molecules, Each half then builds up a complete strand by attracting to itself the free amino acid molecules drifting in the fluid of the cell. Genetic engineering of human beings would consist of removing a reproductive cell from a human, altering a known gene in some predetermined way, and replacing the cell so that it grows to a full-term foetus with the desired characteristics. 1.

The cell is removed. 2.

The gene to be altered is identified on the chromosome. 3.

It is replaced with a predetermined gene. 4.

The cell is replaced in the womb. 5.

An altered human being is born. PART ONE: IN THE BEGINNING – The Human

Story So Far

8 MILLION YEARS AGO

Ramapithecus – ancestor of apes and humans. Her ancestors lived in the treetops that once covered the area. Indeed her

relatives still live in the forests of the steamy lowlands, climbing the

branches, eating the soft fruits and grubs; her way of life is, however,

completely different. Hers is a dry landscape of yellow grass, with brown

and black thickets of hardy thorn trees. Her woodland diet is different, too, because there are no soft fruits and

juicy buds or grubs here. Solid nuts and tough seeds are her main

foodstuffs, and when there is nothing else she makes do with coarse roots

and tubers. Hard-shelled insects and dry lizards abound, and she often

extracts what little nutrition there is from these. Her jaws and teeth reflect

the fact that she has to eat more than her ancestors did to gain the same

amount of goodness, and she has to chew it more thoroughly. Accordingly, her front teeth have become smaller to make room for broad and flat back

teeth that grind down masses of coarse food. This has not happened

suddenly, but has developed over thousands and thousands of years. Those

who study her remains will give her a name. They will call her

Ramapithecus. The other animals that live here show the same specializations in their

teeth. Pigs and antelope feed on low-lying plants, and giraffes browse the

higher trees. These too have broad back teeth; but she has a long way to go

before she is as well-adapted as they are. For one thing, the grasses are very tall, and when she is on the ground

she is lost and cannot peer over them. There are fierce hunting beasts

around, too, so she needs to climb the trees for safety as well as to see

distances. The other animals run away when threatened, but she does not

have the speed, running on all fours on short limbs. Stiffly she pushes herself to her hind feet, and sways unsteadily for a

time. Now she can see over the top of the grass, and, what’s more, she feels

cooler. Less of her back is exposed to the hot sun, and the cool breeze that

she now feels soothes her neck and chest (overheating was not a problem in

forest shade).

The more comfortable temperature, however, is counteracted

by discomfort in her legs, as this is not a natural pose for her. Maybe she

can move more quickly like this, with only two feet touching the ground. She tries but her legs are not strong enough, and are the wrong shape for

this to work. Her body naturally topples forwards, and she cannot move her

hind legs quickly enough to stay upright. She descends once more onto all fours. No. She will have to stay near

the trees if she wants to survive. 3 MILLION YEARS AGO

The climate is much drier now, and the scenery has changed considerably. The continent has been moving, gradually splitting the landscape across

with faults, while elongated slabs have slowly subsided forming long, deep,

rift valleys with strings of shallow lakes in their floors. Molten material has

been brought up from the Earth’s interior, and active volcanoes line the

edges of the rift. Grasslands have spread everywhere and there are many

clumps of trees, but no continuous forest. At the edge of one such clump a small creature drops from a tree to the

ground; and then stands upright. He looks around for danger and, seeing

none, grunts a signal. The dozen others who drop from the branches and

cluster around him include other males, much smaller females (some with

babies) and children – it is a large family group. Food has become sparse in their thicket, and they are moving. Further

down the valley a patch of green by a lake holds out some hope. With a

confident stride, they march downhill, leaving footprints in the volcanic ash

that carpets the whole area from the last eruption. Their stride and their

stance show that their legs have developed considerably in the last 5 million

years. From permanently-bowed structures only good for climbing trees,

their legs have developed into straight limbs that can carry their bodies

vertically. Their arms, however, have changed little during that time: they

still have the curved fingers for grasping branches, and the shoulder-socket

angled upwards allowing a high reach, both features of a tree-living way of

life. If the landscape becomes much drier, though, and the trees more sparse,

beings that are better adapted for a ground-dwelling existence will be more

likely to survive than this partially tree-living creature, Australopithecus

afarensis. That time is not far off. 2.5 MILLION YEARS AGO

Australopithecus robustus – the vegetarian dead-end. Australopithecus africanus – the adaptable survivor. Volcanoes still bubble; grassy plains still spread along the rift valleys, but

now only isolated umbrella-shaped trees and low thorn thickets break up the

yellow of the landscape. Down by the edge of the lake a pack of large

hyenas has brought down an animal that looks like a short-necked giraffe

with moose-like horns, and are tearing its corpse apart. In one mass of bushes a number of heavy-looking beasts forage amongst

the thorny vegetation for leaves and berries. If it were not for their upright

stance they would be mistaken for chimpanzees, as they have the same

heavy bodies and the same deep jaws with massive teeth. These also belong

to a species of Australopithecus, called Australopithecus robustus, and they

are perfectly at home here as they contentedly chew any piece of vegetable

material they find. Suddenly the nearby grass erupts. About a dozen screeching figures run

at the feeders. They look much like the others, but are more lightly built and their faces do not have such a heavy-jawed look. They belong to another

species, A. africanus. The feeders stop eating and snarl back, staring defensively at the

newcomers and showing their teeth and gums. They are not to be chased

away from their feeding ground. The attackers halt in their assault; their intended victims seem more

determined than they anticipated. The attackers back away slowly, keeping

up their aggressive noises and trying not to appear vulnerable, then regroup

some distance away. The berries of the thicket are lost to them. They turn their attention to the hyenas feeding down by the lake and, as

a group, charge them. The hyenas are startled by this sudden assault and in

a panic they abandon their kill. The attackers gather around the corpse,

some of them tearing at the meat while others stand guard, waving sticks

and snarling at the cheated hyenas. These creatures can eat meat as well as plants, and can combine forces in

order to procure it. Their larger relatives in the thicket continue munching

their berries – meat-eating and co-operative hunting is not for them. 1.5 MILLION YEARS AGO

Homo habilis – the tool-maker. It seems the same place, for the landscape has changed very little;

though the climate is now much cooler. Large chimpanzee-like creatures

still forage for berries amongst the bushes, These creatures, however, are

larger than the earlier berry-eaters, and have very heavy jawbones. Later,

anthropologists gave them various names such as Zinjanthropus,

Nutcracker Man, before deciding that they were members of the earlier A. robustus. Not far away several very much smaller ape-like beasts, evolved from

the earlier A. africanus, carry a dead antelope between them. That is not all

they carry: they have stones that haye been chipped into edges, points and

blades, for these creatures are tool-makers, and as such they have a culture,

later referred to as the Palaeolithic, or old stone age. Their scientific name

reflects this tool-making skill: it is Homo Habilis, meaning ‘handy man’.

The two groups pass very close to one another, but totally ignore each

other’s presence. Now they have evolved in such diverse directions, they no longer compete for the same food. 500,000 YEARS AGO

Homo erectus – the fire-maker. She is a member of the first group of humanoid creatures to move out of

Africa and spread across Europe and Asia. She crouches in a cave entrance

in what will be known as China; but far away, in places that will be called

Spain, Java and Tanzania, there are beings just like her. If she stood up she would be seen to be very similar to a twentieth-

century human, but with a heavier jaw, protruding eyebrows and a flat

forehead. Her upright stance gives her species the name Homo erectus. As she watches the hunters drag home the slain bison, while other

females carry back their handfuls of hackberries and pine kernels, her

thoughts are only on the food that they bring, and how this food is to be

prepared. Co-operation with others and skills learned from her parents provide her

with food. With a stick, she stirs the powdery whiteness in the fire pit before her, uncovering the deep red glow. She adds dry twigs to bring the

glowing embers to life. She cannot remember when or how the fire started

but hers is the responsibility for keeping it going. It is a heavy

responsibility, too, since fire makes the meat tender enough to eat easily, its

smoke preserves what meat they do not eat immediately, and its frightening

light keeps away the fierce night animals. She knows that it is her responsibility because the group of 23 who

occupy the cave have ‘talked’ it over – not in words but in significant

sounds that mean something to those in the group – a long stride on the road

to civilization. 15,000 YEARS AGO

Homo sapiens neanderthalensis – our less successful cousin. A horse develops before him. Red soil from one part of his stone dish has

been applied with a pad of moss to the cave wall to block in the basic shape. Now he takes soot and smears it along the figure’s back, pointing up its

ears. The same black pigment goes into making the legs and the hooves. In the confined space, and by the flickering light of his flame, it is

difficult for him to stand back and appreciate his work. He knows, however, that he has done it to the best of his ability, and this gives him a deep

satisfaction. Squeezing through the narrow limestone passage towards the cave

mouth he passes other paintings. Bulls, reindeer, bison and rhinoceros have

been depicted there since long before his time. He blows out his flame and stands, dazzled, on a limestone shelf looking

down the hill at the wooded gorge below. Smoke rising against a far cliff

shows where his people live, sheltered against the coming winter blast

beneath the overhang. He belongs to the species Homo sapiens, subspecies sapiens, and there

are probably no more than 10,000 like him in the area that will one day be

known as central France. Further to the north, on the tundra plains of

Germany, his cousins Homo sapiens neanderthaliensis are now extinct,

either wiped out in the latest surge of the ice age, or else so interbred with

the more successful Homo sapiens sapiens that their characteristics have

disappeared in their offspring. It is Homo sapiens sapiens, or Cro-Magnon

man, with his artistry and his advanced Palaeolithic culture, who will be the

ancestor of mankind to come. 5000 YEARS AGO

The river valley has always produced the best plants and, since most food

comes from one plant or another, the river valleys of northern Europe are

well settled. With the knowledge that plants grow from seed, the people of

the settlement have gathered seed and planted it in the fertile valley soil. When the plants are ripe they are cut down with stonebladed sickles, and

the seeds ground down to flour by rolling them between coarse stones. What can be done for plants can also be done for animals. On the cold

plains to the north people still follow migrating herds of reindeer, so that

meat is always available; but the settlers can do better than this. Their

animals – their cattle, sheep, goats and pigs – are kept penned near the

settlement so that meat, wool and milk are constantly accessible. As a result, for the first time in history substantial houses can be built, on

frames of tree trunks, hewn by the stone implements, walled by dried clay

and sticks. Straw, left over from the grain harvest, goes into making the roof. Now there is also time and opportunity for pottery and horn ornaments

to be crafted. It is the era known as Neolithic, or new stone age. The cultivation of

plants and the domestication of animals have both heralded this new

culture. It will not be long now before the settlers, with their more stable

lifestyle and the time to apply their minds to abstract problems, learn to

smelt and use metals – first bronze and then iron – and this knowledge will

spread throughout most of the populated world. 2000 YEARS AGO

Lucius Septimus chews his twice-cooked bread at the entrance of his hide

tent, having cleaned his iron weaponry and his armour. Out there, in the

rain, the grey choppy sea that beats against the northern limit of Gaul is an

uninviting sight. The wild Britons of the lands to the north have been a

thorough nuisance, giving constant aid to rebellious Gauls and holding up

the establishment of Roman civilization in these northern lands. Also, it is said that there is great mineral wealth to be had there. Stories

abound of wealthy metal merchants making their fortunes by plying these

dangerous waters. Certainly the military victory achieved there by the late Julius Caesar

was small; but the talk is that other invasions are planned. He certainly

hopes not. He would rather be serving in newly-annexed Aegyptus at the

other end of the empire. Only the generals and the officers in the big tent at the end of the row

know what the long-term plans of the new emperor Augustus are. Lucius

merely goes where he is told, and fights where he is told. He feels lucky to

be a part of the great nation of Rome: a nation that controls practically the

whole world and will do so for ever. 1000 YEARS AGO

Empire after empire developed around the Mediterranean sea and spread

across Europe, Africa and Asia, clashing with the other empires found

there. Then they collapsed; and usually the culture and technology

generated with each empire collapsed with it. Eyjolf Asvaldsson understands little of this. He is about to sail home,

guided by the stone that seeks the north star. He does realize, however, that

places visited by long ships during the summer raids seem to have different

histories, and display different ruins. Almost everywhere in the world shaven men teach the Christian faith

and vehemently denounce the sacred names of Thor and Odin; and

everywhere the people are adopting this faith – even some of Eyjolf’s own

people. In this country, the Arab Kingdom of Spain, is a mixture of

religions. Dark-skinned peoples who scorn the Christian religion have been

settling here for a long time, alongside Christian people. They worship God

in domed buildings, surrounded by spindly towers. What’s more, they are

gardeners and poets, and have a technical knowledge that is lacking

elsewhere. Eyjolf’s abiding memory of the last raid is of a tower with sails. Ships,

like his own, use the wind; they catch it in their sails and it drives them

along. These people, however, use the wind to turn wheels and grind grain. 500 YEARS AGO

It is 69 days since they set out from Palos, and all that time they have been

sailing westwards, except for a brief stop for provisioning in the Canary

Islands. Now they have arrived, in India. Pablo Diego chides himself for mistrusting the captain. There was no

way of telling whether or not the voyage was foolhardy. They just kept

sailing westwards – totally the wrong direction for India – to the edge of the

world, possibly to be enmired by sticky seaweed or eaten by sea monsters. They could tell how far north or south they were, by measuring the angles

of the stars, but there was no way of telling how far west they had sailed. Several times he and the crew were on the verge of mutiny. They were wrong, however, and now here they are, safe beneath the

palm trees on the warm beach, while offshore the three proud ships lie

resting at anchor. It is the Indians that puzzle Pablo. Evidently this is not the

mainland of Asia, but one of the outlying islands, possibly the Japans. But where are the fabulous treasures, the gold and jewels that have been

promised?

Friendly or not, the gifts that the Indians bring are rubbish – beads and strangely-coloured birds. Nevertheless, they do have gold rings

in their noses; so there is wealth somewhere. If there is, why are the Indians not using it?

They seem to have nothing,

living in grass huts and growing strange plants for food. That does not

worry Pablo. The captain has said that after a brief rest they will sail around

more of these islands. He can be sure that further to the west is the main

continent – a civilized continent of civilized people who know what to do

with their wealth. 100 YEARS AGO

The train rattles out from between the narrow paper houses, sending up

thick clouds of black smoke that settles as soot on the ornate carvings of the

eaves, then coughs its way along the low embankment between the flooded

fields of rice towards the distant cotton mills. If there is anything that

emphasizes the changes that have come to Renzo Nariaki’s beloved Nippon

it is this. He is an old man now and he can still remember his place in the

feudal society of the Tokugawa Shogunate before it was overthrown. Then, with the civil war and the emplacement of the emperor Meiji, the

barbarians who had long been attempting to gain a foothold finally flooded

in. They arrived at the request of the new emperor, and changed everything. They were altering all aspects of society. At least he still had an emperor,

but the government was now like that of a place called France. They still

had a navy, but run along the lines of the British navy. Their industry was

being reorganized into the American style; while the army was no longer

the army of the Samurai – it was now like the army of Germany. The train has disappeared into the dark mills now, ready to pick up a

heavy load. The traditional road transport could never have handled the

volume of goods now being produced. It is probably like this all over the

world, thinks Nariaki. The foreigners are imposing their way of life

everywhere. Or perhaps we are absorbing the foreigners’ way of life?

Time will tell. PART TWO: MAN AFTER MAN

200 YEARS HENCE

200 YEARS HENCE

THE AQUAMORPH

Homo aquaticus

Fish-like and frog-like, the aquamorph is genetically adapted to live within a totally marine environment. Each physical feature – the streamlined body with the smooth skin and the insulating blubber layer, the gills on the chest, the paddles on the legs – was grown by the embryo. But this embryo was the result of manipulation of the sperm and egg cells. The chromosomal make-up was adjusted, creating genes that would produce features such as skin with a low drag fractor, and the whole organism was allowed to grow to its designed form. Sliding easily towards the surface, the powerful aquamorph prepares to face brief contact with the hostile environment of its genetic ancestors. It does not envy the clumsy land-dwellers their damaged habitat. The skull is shaped and positioned so that a rounded head and short neck add to the streamlining. The lower leg of Homo aquaticus forms a powerful, well-muscled paddle, spread by the toes. Facial expression for the aquamorph is limited to basic responses. It relies on simple sounds to communicate. PICCARBLICK THE AQUAMORPH

The grey-green of deep water is floored by a bed of rubble, sprouting wisps

of red algae and sparse fan coral. Rusting steel hulks, caked with sponge

and algal growth, jut up in incomprehensible shapes in the gloom. A few

fish move slowly in the dark hollows, as the occasional scuffling crab raises

brief clouds of sand and silt particles with its pointed feet. Suddenly these few creatures dart for cover, as a much larger shape

bounds its way slowly over the bottom. It is streamlined, as are all

swimming animals, and its surface is smooth and rounded, all angles

padded out by a thick layer of insulating blubber. The legs are somewhat

frog-like, with webbed feet, but the webs continue up each side of the leg as

far as the knee. The forelimbs are prehensile and adaptable, but for the

moment are held tightly against the torso so as not to disrupt the

streamlined shape. The creature gives off an air of deep sadness, but only because of the face, with its big dark eyes and an enormous lugubrious

downturned mouth. The mouth funnels into a broad throat that connects to a

wide belt of gills across the chest. It ceases its movement and crouches on the bottom, looking upwards

through water above it. Up there is a whole new world, a world that should

not be strange since it is the world of the creature’s immediate ancestors. Its great-grandfather was a librarian, Jon Artur Blick, looking after and

cataloguing the accumulated knowledge of centuries of human civilization. Its grandfather, Jon Blick Jr, was an artist, contributing to that civilization’s

culture. Its father, Jon Blick III, was an astro-physicist, adding to the

information mankind could draw upon. Now Piccarblick is an aquamorph –

a creature engineered to be part of a new frontier. This creature is human. Piccarblick rises slowly towards the undulating silver ceiling that

separates home from the hostile environment above. He rarely comes to the

surface since he is not directly involved in trading with the land people. When ever he does he is always uneasy, even though it was the

environment of his parents. A flurry of bubbles arises about him as he

ascends towards the surface. Controlling his ascent so that the pressure on

his tissues is not released too quickly, he bubbles up through the final few

metres and breaks the oily, scum-laden surface. Many of his family are already there. He can just make out their heads

bobbing around him amid the floating rubbish. The sky, grey-white with an

orange tinge of smog along the horizon, has an alien beauty about it – like

the sparkling surface of the unpolluted Earth as seen by the first astronauts. He looks towards land, but it is indistinct. His eyes will not function

properly, because the difference between the refractive index of air and

water is such that he cannot focus on anything above the surface. From his

utility belt he takes air goggles and slips them over his head. Now he can see clearly. The strip of rubble beach is backed by towering

brown and black buildings of the land people. Down coast the buildings

protrude from the sea, built on top of those already submerged, using the

drowned hulks as their foundations and piles. The city he sees will not last

for long, as the sea levels are continuing to rise and this area will also have

to be abandoned. Not, however, until the establishment has served its purpose. On the flat

runway lies a narrow pointed cylinder, too distant for the details to be seen, but Piccarblick knows it from descriptions. Beneath the small wings at the

rear lie the huge oxygen-compressing rocket engines that will heave the

craft off the ground, through the successively thinner layers of atmosphere

and eventually into orbit. There it will rendezvous with the starship, transfer

its passengers and return to the runway. The starship itself is complete and almost ready to go. All his life

Piccarblick has been involved in its building. He and his family worked the

great underwater deuterium mills that produced the fuel to power it, and

farmed the continental shelf to sustain the land-dwellers and space-dwellers

while they constructed it. Before long, fully manned and equipped, it will

move out of Earth orbit, build up speed through the solar system and leave

the regions of known space forever. Its departure will mark the end of the

work of Piccarblick’s life. He and his fellow aquamorphs have toiled away,

knowing that mankind’s future may not lie on this dirty planet or in its

polluted waters, but elsewhere in the cosmos. Warning klaxons sound across the water. A flight of scavenging birds

takes to the air from the beach as smoke bursts from the tail of the distant

craft. After a seeming age the rumbling roar sweeps over the floating

observers and slowly the vessel increases its speed along the runway and

lifts itself into the air. Out over the sea towards the watchers it flies, rising

as it goes. The sound builds up and, as the elongated shape hurtles

overhead, the impact of the noise disorientates sensory organs more used to

picking up water-borne signals. Then the ship is gone, leaving a lingering

trail of smoke that slowly dissipates and adds its particles to the weight of

atmospheric pollutants that have been building up for the past few

centuries. Piccarblick and his colleagues watch the ship go. Although excited by

the sight, they remain silent because they cannot speak above the water. Quietly they turn over and dive back into the depths, where, as they

descend, they can chatter freely to one another. They are home. 200 YEARS HENCE

THE VACUUMORPH

Homo caelestis

The ultimate triumph of the genetic engineer. The product of grafting, surgery and cell manipulation, the vacuumorph can live and work in the free-fall of orbit and the airless

void of space. The basic human reproductive cells were manipulated to produce the necessary shape, but extra organs had to be grafted on, including a hard impermeable outskin grown from tissue culture. The result, however, is sterile. Homo caelestis has a limited life and no future of its own. The vacuumorph cannot breed and would not survive the rigours of gravity. Protected from the harsh glare of earthlight, tinted eyes peer deep into the darkness of space. If humanity has a future, it is there that potential might be. Without sound, communication in space must be by touch, using their sensitive whiskers. Heavy lids shield the eyes against solar wind, while a sealed lens protects them from the vacuum. The spherical shape and the hard outskin keep in the body pressure, and contain the additional organs. CRALYM THE VACUUMORPH

Cralym does not take after her mother, nor does she have her father’s

features. Both her parents were conventional unengineered humans, exactly

like those that flourished and expanded throughout recorded history,

reached their peak late in the twentieth century, and then declined under the

weight of overpopulation, dwindling resources and hurtling environmental

deterioration. The genetic engineers took her ovum and his sperm, and altered their

genetic make-up according to what would be required for survival away

from the Earth’s atmosphere, united the two and let their offspring develop

in an extrauterine environment on the orbiting laboratory 200 kilometres

above the decaying Earth. The body matured and developed as a being able

to live under conditions of weightlessness. All organs that had evolved to

work in conjunction with gravity – legs and feet, hands with palms, sturdy

backbone – were suppressed. The new legs and feet looked and worked

more like arms and hands, and long fingers grew from muscular wrists; all

these emerged from a compact spherical body designed to contain the

pressures of the internal biology. Extra artificial organs that could not yet be

developed by genetic manipulation were then inserted, such as the third

lung used as a temporary oxygen store and the fourth lung used as a dump

for carbon dioxide and other waste gases. The sealed-lens eyes and

impermeable vacuum-proof outer skin, grown from tissue cultures in the

orbiting biological vats, were later grafted on. The result was Cralym. Throughout history animals were bred for particular purposes. Cattle

were taken from the wild and mated with different strains, to produce

varieties that developed more milk or more palatable meat. Selective

breeding produced dogs with long legs that could hunt swift-footed animals,

and dogs with long narrow bodies that could run down burrows and hunt

subterranean animals. It worked. It was part of the influence that

civilization had on the natural world. When it came to adapting human beings in the same way, however, that

was different. It implied a choice imposed by some individuals upon other

individuals. It implied the wielding of a moral power over those who did

not share that particular morality. It implied the deviation of human

development from its natural course – a course perhaps decreed by a deity. It implied the making, not only of a body, but of a soul; and that soul would

not have been acceptable in any of the faiths of the world. You could do all

that to animals – but not to human beings. The concept was reviled by the

word ‘eugenics’.

Nevertheless, a time came when ethical considerations had to be

compromised. If humanity were to survive, then it had to change. With the

old system of selective breeding, the genetic material from one chosen

individual was combined with that from another, in the hope that the desired

attributes of each would appear in the offspring. It was a gamble. Genetic

engineering was different. The precise function of each gene in the human

system was now known, it was possible to manipulate it: to kill off a certain

gene that produced an undesirable attribute, to add another that would

emphasize a particular physical feature. Now beings could be produced to

any specification. Now aged 25, Cralym climbs along the outside of the starship’s hull,

gripping the struts and rungs with her toes and pedal thumbs. Her grip is

now an entirely reflex action; very rarely has she lost her hold and drifted

uncontrollably into the void. On such occasions she has been able to return

by venting waste gases from her fourth lung and steering herself back to the

ship. Someday the engineers will be able to develop some organ that will

allow the vacuumorphs some effective locomotion through the vacuum

itself. With her pressure-sealed eyes tinted against the glare, she watches for

the ferry to rise from the dazzling white and blue of the Earth below. She is

unsure of its precise arrival time, but hopes that she will see it before she

has to return to the interior of the ship. Sooner or later she will need to

recharge her third lung with oxygen. At the moment she is quite relaxed,

safely protected within her spherical exoskeleton from hard vacuum and

cosmic rays – the environment for which she was developed. By custom

Cralym is referred to as ‘she’, because of the original genetic make-up. The

title, however, is a formality since she is neuter. Someday, perhaps, it will

be possible for a heavily-engineered being to breed – but not yet. It took 20 years to build the starship, and it will probably be only the

first of many as eventually mankind, in one form or another, will spread out

across the whole of the galaxy. The ship is shaped like two great conical

spinning tops, fused nose to nose. The forward cone is the living chamber, a little world in itself that will have to be home to several hundred people for

probably as many years. Around the waist is a ring of spherical propellant

tanks, containing 30,000 tonnes of helium-3 scooped from the gases of

jupiter’s atmosphere, and 20,000 tonnes of deuterium distilled from the

Earth’s oceans, all compressed into frozen pellets. When running, these

pellets will be injected by electromagnetic gun into the aft cone – the

reaction chamber – where they will be compressed into a fusion reaction by

high-power electron beams. Magnetic fields will direct the continuous blast

rearwards and the entire vessel will move out into unknown space,

accelerating continually as it goes, eventually reaching about 15 per cent of

the speed of light. The people who go with it will never return. That does not include Cralym, who would not have been sorry to leave

Earth orbit. She has never set foot or hand on Earth itself, nor has she ever

had any wish to, but she would have liked to travel to another planet,

another system around another star. She could never have survived the

journey, however, as she was designed for living under the conditions of

zero gravity in space. The starship, flying under a constant acceleration,

will generate its own gravity, and allow non-engineered humans to live

without problems. It will be crewed by the non-engineered, but genetic

engineers will be amongst the passengers. Who knows what conditions they

will meet, and need to adapt to, on a planet in a distant star system?

A glint of light is caught and reflected in her sealed lens. The ferry will

soon begin its docking manoeuvre as it drifts towards the starship. Cralym

and her fellows clamber along towards the port to watch. 200 YEARS HENCE

JIMEZ SMOOT

Homo sapiens sapiens

Only the most perfect human specimens are being sent to colonize the stars. Perfection, in this case, is clearly defined. Each colonist is carefully selected to ensure that his or her biological make-up is as flaw-free and reliable as possible. Space will be its own habitat. And later the surgeons will require the best raw material available when it becomes necessary to build new living creatures to fit those unknown environments to be found far beyond the solar system. Physically fit, psychologically stable and rigorously trained, Jimez Smoot is the raw material for one of his world’s most dramatic and desperate experiements – the epic conquest of space. JIMEZ SMOOT THE SPACE TRAVELLER

Jimez Smoot can breathe again. The acceleration of the take-off and the lift

to orbit had squashed the breath out of him. Now, as the ferry coasts into

free-fall, he and his fellow passengers are released from the gravitational

grip of his planet – for ever. He was trained for the accelerations and the

weightlessness, of course, in the acclimatization camp back home, but no

amount of training on simulators could have prepared him for the actual

power and terror of the real thing. Back home?

Yes, he will probably think of Earth as ‘back home’ for the

rest of his life, although he will certainly never go back there. He was taken

from his community and subjected to years of rigorous training for survival

in a small group, the members of which were drilled to accept,

psychologically, that they would be going on a journey from which they

would never return, and which could well end in failure and waste rather

than the founding of a new civilization. He and his colleagues will abandon

everything that they have ever known. They are the lucky ones. No amount of scientific application could have stopped the deterioration

of the Earth’s environment. No amount of moral guidance or medical

technology could have slowed the suicidal birth-rate. No amount of exercise

of the new-found science of genetic manipulation could induce crops to

produce enough food in the right areas to feed all. No amount of political

co-operation ensure a fair distribution of what was available. The most

influential cultures relied entirely on technology; and stable conditions were

necessary for their technologies to flourish. As their systems crumbled, one

by one, the less technological peoples spread to take their place; but

inherited the economic systems left by their predecessors, and quickly

adopted and rebuilt the highly technological way of life, with all the

disadvantages and disasters that implied. Desperate and amoral, but

practical, choices were made. New beings were genetically engineered to fit

into the uninhabitable environments, so that new areas could be exploited

for the good of the whole. Yet industry still generated its waste products. The carbon dioxide level

in the atmosphere rose and the world sweltered under an accelerating

greenhouse effect. The icecaps began to melt and the sea levels worldwide

rose. Already most of the great cities of the world, those built on deltas,

estuaries and low-lying coasts, were flooded and uninhabitable. Temperatures at the equator became intolerably high and populations

migrated to cooler latitudes, abandoning the stripped rainforests and the

desertified grasslands. All this change came about in a mere two centuries; but those two

centuries were the culmination of 4000 years of burgeoning civilization. Yet, on the time scale of the planet, 200 years, even 4000 years, were hardly

noticeable in the context of the 4500 million years that the planet had been

in existence. We will do it better next time, Jimez Smoot muses as he looks out of the

porthole. The dislocated Earth systems are invisible from up here – just the

odd smear of brown or yellow showing where smoke is particularly

concentrated. Across the cabin, past his companions and through the

opposite porthole, he can see the ungainly shape of the starship as they

approach it. The airlock on the payload module, surrounded by the tiny

figures of the vacuumorphs, beckons invitingly. This will be their new

home. Neither he nor his children may be the ones to begin the new

civilization on a new planet; but eventually the ship will reach somewhere

habitable and one of his descendants will be part of the new system of

humanity, which will benefit from the lessons learned from the mistakes of

the old. 200 YEARS HENCE

KYSHU KRISTAAN

Homo sapiens sapiens

In the steamy shell of the once-great cities life is brutal and short. Disease is rampant. Starving hordes, the future beyond their control, squat in the ruins of collapsed civilizations. Electricity and water supplies have failed. Food is scarce and only the strongest and most determined can survive – and then only for a while. As food becomes scarce, order becomes a luxury. Civilization has been replaced by a society on the edges of chaos. Boundaries are clearly defined, and family groups fight to defend their territories. KYSHU KRISTAAN THE SQUATTY

The moving lights in the sky, glimpsed through a brief break in the clouds,

mean nothing to Kyshu Kristaan. He had to work hard to steal the meagre

portion of food he carries wrapped in his rags, and he cannot let his

attention waver from his journey for an instant. Now he has to step quietly

over the sleeping huddles that lie in the dry alleyway. Should anyone wake

up and sense what he is carrying then he would have to fight again, and this

time, exhausted from his last skirmish, he would not win. His wife and seven children lie, hungry, in an old culvert beyond the

flooded thoroughfare. They have not eaten for three days. That was the last

time the reliefer flew over and dropped food on the drowning city for the

squatties. The relief drops were becoming more and more irregular, and

Kyshu Kristaan knows why. Inland government does not care about its

people; all it cares about is producing monsters: monsters in the seas,

monsters in space. As for the weak mockeries of human beings, the hand-

fed who have never had to fight for their food in their lives, the soft ones

that they are sending to the stars...

Kyshu does not even want to think about

them. At the entrance of the alley the road slopes down into the oily water. With his sharp eyes Kyshu Kristaan can make out the tangled tidemark of

discarded artefacts, empty containers and decaying bodies that lies along

the edge of the water. Tide is out, he registers, so he can wade across. His

brother died because he did not have such good eyesight, and would not

have noticed whether the tide were in or out. He had not seen the man who

lay in wait for him in the darkness as he returned home with his food. Kyshu Kristaan hopes that his own children will inherit his sharp eyesight;

Sem Kristaan died before he could father any children and so his weak

eyesight died with him. Chest deep, Kyshu Kristaan crosses the flooded thoroughfare, holding

his precious bundle high so that it will not become any more tainted. Slowly, making sure that no ripple breaks and makes a warning noise, he

rises from the water at the other side. Yet, as he pulls himself from the water

the silent night shatters into a cacophony of yells and shrieks, bursting from

the direction of his sewer home. No!

– he despairs. Not more fighting tonight. Other people do not live

like this. The inland people, the ones that have things to do, do not live like

this. There is plenty of food for them and they do not have to fight. Now his wife Seralia is yelling and his children are screaming, and he

drops his bundle and runs to help. Seralia is at the culvert mouth, flaying

about her with a steel bar. There are still figures at her feet and others

grabbing her by the arms and legs. Kyshu surprises them all. Seizing the

hair of two of the attackers, he cracks their heads together with a force that

must kill them; then he turns and fells a third with a blow of the edge of his

hand. The others disappear into the darkness, as do the shadowy watchers. Then, while Seralia calms the frightened children, Kyshu gropes back to

where he dropped his bundle, but it has gone, stolen by one of the dark

watchers. An exhausted depression creeps over him. Must it always be like

this?

Seralia calls to him for help, as she drags the bodies over to the water to

deposit them (no point in fouling the entrance of their own home).

It is said

that the squatties in the next city eat the victims of a fight like this. That

would be practical, but inhuman, although Kyshu could believe anything of

them. Their attackers appear to be from across the water, probably on their

way back from a raid, and their ragged pouches are full of stolen food: fair

compensation for the food that Kyshu has lost, so he does not feel so bad

now. Six men have been killed, which is a good total for such a skirmish. He and Seralia can feel proud of the night’s work. There may be

monsters in the sea, and monsters in space, and the weaklings can be sent to

the stars; but it is here, in the squats of the drowning cities, that true men

and women are still to be found. 300 YEARS HENCE

300 YEARS HENCE

HITEK

Homo sapiens machinadiumentum

When biological organs consistently fail, substitutes must be developed. The more vital the failed organs that cease to work, the higher the technical back-up needed. Scientists are already working to produce tissue-based replacements. As long as the brain functions, it is worth keeping it alive – even if the body has deteriorated. HARON SOLTO AND HIS MECHANICAL CRADLE

Haron Solto opens his eyes to the soothing light display on his ceiling. Gentle scents exude from the walls, and a hot drink appears instantly in the

alcove by his hand. He speaks a word that would have been meaningless to twentieth-

century people, but it banishes the light display and surrounds him with

bland walls. He lifts his one good hand and takes the beaker of drink. The

cakes of synthetic protein that constitute the first meal of his day

immediately appear behind it. The tastes are delicious – synthetically

produced, but delicious. Having eaten his first meal, he goes for his hygiene session. By moving

one finger of his wizened left hand, contact is made and his cradle turns and

moves his body towards the ablutoir. The whole contrivance, mechanical

and biological, travels on its magnetic levitation motors across the chamber

towards the arch that houses the ultrasonic cleansers. All the switches and

contacts for his cradle are within reach of the little fingers of his left hand. A panel above them shows him instantly that all his life-support systems are

working. The cultured kidneys distil, the synthetic liver produces the

chemicals that help the digestion of his first meal, the external lungs

circulate enough purified air, the metal heart pumps blood through the

biological part of his being, and all the motors, relays and servo-

mechanisms that provide the mobility of the unit function properly. Time for his day’s work. Away below him, in tunnels deep within the Earth, lie the protein

factories. Fully automatic and never seen by humans (except for the

handlers who repair and maintain them), the factories use the power

generated by the mountainside full of solar cells to turn raw carbon dioxide

and oxygen from the air, and water from the reservoirs, into edible

carbohydrates. Elsewhere lie the machines that simulate the biological

processes that produce edible protein, and still other factories house vats

that produce the flavours and textures that are added later to the world’s

food supply, and help to change food from a mere nutritional necessity to an

art form. On his personal display Haron Solto sees the figures for distribution, the

output from the various factories, and the flow of the transportation

systems. With a practised eye, he reads the graphs and evaluates the

estimates; then three quick presses of a button and the day’s production is in

balance. He can rest. The motor units of his cradle lift him away from his workstation. Today

he will contemplate his sculpture collection, which always gives him peace of mind. He sweeps across the room to where the three-dimensional images

are housed, but beneath the healthy hum of the levitation motors there is

another sound – a hissing and grinding noise. His forward motion ceases

abruptly, an edge of his cradle tilting and scraping the floor. Panic!

No, don’t panic: it can all be controlled. Punching a button, he

injects the right amount of sedative into his system to regain calm. It was a

minor malfunction of his locomotor system, nothing more. Summon up one

of the handlers, immediately. After a short time, a time when Haron Solto is beset by thoughts

generated by helplessness and indecision, the handler appears in the

external door. He is a primitive, like Haron Solto’s ancestors must have

been, and obviously male. He walks without mechanical aid, and his body

is symmetrical, with two arms and two legs. Like all handlers, he will have

been taken from the outside ruins. Their versatility makes them useful, and

they are willing to perform distasteful functions in return for food and

comfort. This creature has few mechanical appliances, but his body is

covered with an insulating clothing, and he carries a bag of instruments

around his shoulder. Solto tries to close his mind to the disgust he feels; but

has to acknowledge that these people are necessary. With a few words, in a dialect that Haron Solto can hardly understand,

the handler diagnoses the problem and sets to work. A panel of the cradle is

removed, then tools and artefacts are brought out of the handler’s bag and

fixed into the mysterious innards of the machine. It all takes place out of

Haron Solto’s sight. The inside of the cradle is something he has never seen

and has no wish to see. All he perceives is the hairy top of the handler’s

head as he bows over his work, making a humming noise with his lips and

teeth, a noise that Haron Solto surmises passes for music. The experience is too much. Haron Solto blasts some narcotic into his

vein and drifts into a more pleasant substitute world. He is roused by a loud slam, as the panel in his cradle is rammed home. The handler says two brief words to him. The first denotes work done, and

the second is a mode of address, basically respectful but which, Haron Solto

suspects, has now become a term of amusement and mild mockery amongst

the handlers. Haron Solto dismisses the man, having first endorsed his identity chip to

say that the work has been done. Haron Solto is alone once more, fully functioning, and can continue his

day’s reverie. Someday humanity will not need these grotesque throwbacks

to primitive man. There will be a better method than the present mechanical

contrivances: a system that lives, grows and repairs itself. That is for the

future, however, and someone else will have to develop it. GREERATH HULM AND THE FUTURE

Humanity has a potential which cannot be bound by mere machines. There

must be a better way forward. These are thoughts that have beset Greerath Hulm ever since she

witnessed the last failure of the local food generator. It was a terrible time

during which the handlers fought amongst themselves. On one side, the

disciplined faction struggled to repair the breakage; on the other, those

whose food supplies had been cut off first were trying to break into the

machinery to feed on the raw materials. Order was restored, but only

through massacre. What had human beings come to now?

Wizened bodies encased in

machines, kept alive by mechanical contrivance and synthetically-grown

organs. Once, a long long time ago, humanity developed through the process of

evolution. With the coming of intelligence and civilization, this natural

process was swept away. Medical science developed, and those that would

have died off were now able to survive and reproduce. As a result for man

the directive force of evolution – the process of natural selection – was

eliminated. In consequence, the species deteriorated. Unhealthy changes

that would have been wiped out now survived and were spread. The genetic

stock became weaker as populations became bigger. This did not matter,

because medical science was always there to sustain life. No matter how

degenerate a human body became there were always the technological

systems to keep it alive. The result was certainly a triumph over the raw wildness of nature, but

there must be a better way. Machines keep breaking down and the food and

drug supplies are constantly disrupted. Synthetic organs must hold the key. If they improve, muses Greerath, that would put her and many like her

out of work (she controls the manufacturing process for a series of synthetic enzymes and stimulants that benefit humans the world over).

That might

not be a bad thing. She would like to devote more of her time to listening to

music, looking at art, and wallowing in the newly-developing medium of

hypnotic-involvement-drama. Then, with a start, she remembers two friends who recently retired from

work to do just that – and both of them switched off their life-supports after

a few days. Probably their stimulant-mix was wrong – something that will

not happen to Greerath; after all, she is in the business. Genetic engineering must be the future, though. Humans have already

dabbled in it during the last century, when it produced beings that could live

in space. That was specifically for work on the star-colony project; so, as

always in history, a specific emergency or a specific goal fuelled a burst of

technological development. In the past it was always warfare that provided

the emergency. The technology usually involved the development of more

sophisticated weaponry. Then, as ever, once the emergency passed and the

goal was attained, the newly-developed technology fell fallow. Now that the

star-colony project has come to an end, and the last of the 37 ships has been

dispatched, there are no more space children. Those vacuumorphs were

never perfect; they were not so much bred as built up from pieces grown

synthetically, and there was never a possibility that they would reproduce. The aquamorphs, the humans engineered to live in the sea, are still there,

though, living in the warmer waters of the ocean. A veritable underwater

civilization is developing. A burst of sunlight from behind the clouds, slanting down the fissures

between the tall buildings, cut to geometric dapples by the supporting

girderwork, and discoloured by the translucent filters of Greerath’s habitat,

creeps into her living unit and brings her out of her daydream. Her day’s

work is almost over, and she has hardly done a thing. Once, she thinks,

mankind was ruled by the sun: when it rose people woke up and started

their day, and when it set they slept. Now nobody could care if the sun were

there or not – as long as it powered the solar cells, and kept the ocean

currents churning away and driving the submerged energy units. Out there, where people no longer go, there are wild spaces on the

planet. For a while these were poisoned. Now all that has changed. The big

animals have gone, all right, but the plants have re-established themselves. Steamy tropical forests are growing again along the equator, and grasslands lie in belts to the north and south. Further north and south are the spacious

deserts that, because of the natural pattern of circulation of the wind and

moisture, will never be fertile. Beyond these there are deciduous and

coniferous forests, then towards the north and south poles lie the cold

tundra regions and the icecaps. Greerath knows of all these things from the information banks, but the

subjects with which she is most familiar are found in old recordings. The

tropical forests she now visualizes were full of monkeys, tapirs, anteaters,

snakes, sloths, apes, jaguars, humming birds, toucans and eagles. The

grasslands were alive with herds of zebra, elephant, antelope, giraffe, and

pursued by lions, cheetahs and hyenas. The deciduous and coniferous

forests had deer, beavers, squirrels, badgers, wolves and lynx. The tundra

supported reindeer, musk ox and foxes. She knows that now these animals

are all gone, and are as relevant to the modern world as are the dinosaurs,

the moas and the mamoths. Today these habitats are open and silent, with

only the smallest rodents and birds living there, along with insects and other

invertebrates. Surely out here should be the future of mankind?

If so, a renewed

campaign of genetic engineering could be the means of reaching it. HUEH CHUUM AND HIS LOVE

It is probably the most dangerous and most exciting time of his life. Hueh

Chuum is slowly and purposefully disconnecting himself from his cradle. For a few brief minutes he will be isolated from the things that keep him

alive – but it will be worth it. He has been preparing for months. Gradually his physicians have been

turning off his libido suppressant. He has been trained thoroughly as to

when to switch off this device and that organ. Those that are fundamentally

necessary to his continued existence are connected to trailing cables and

tubes – vulnerable but necessary for the essential few minutes. He is luckier

than most: his heart is his own. It is almost time. His sensors tell him that Bearnida, his love, is outside

the door. He has seen her before, but only on screens and holograms, and

was first attracted to her by the way that she had decorated her cradle. He

realized that this attraction was not as superficial as it seemed. Her artistic taste showed that, deep down, she was similar, and that they would make a

good mating pair. She approved, as did all her colleagues, physicians and

relatives. The environmental lights dim to a soft hue, and the ambient odours and

music produce a gentle and seductive atmosphere. The access slides open

and Bearnida’s cradle wafts in. He is seeing her for the first time without the help of mechanical media. Only her face, of course, is visible, and it looks a little smaller than he

expected. The decorations on her cradle are bright and flamboyant, as befit

the occasion. Inside the mechanisms, he knows she has switched off her

life-supports for the short time necessary. She smiles at him, and he returns

the smile – the first purely personal communication he has had with

anybody. The cradles drift together and their touching panels open. The lights go

out – for who wants to see the wizened deformed body of a naked human,

however much in love they are?

Hydraulic arms, supporting the little bodies

in their harnesses, swing out until they meet...

It is much, much later. Hueh Chuum’s shock is beginning to wear off and

grief is settling in, but that can be dealt with by suitable injections. He is

back in his cradle where he is safe. He is never coming out again as long as

he lives. Never!

He thought that he and Bearnida were well-matched, not only mentally

and emotionally, but physically too. Like him, she had her own heart; but

hers was not nearly as strong as his, and the strain of mating was too much. He can console himself that he is not alone, as only about 10 per cent of

matings these days are successful. If this goes on, the human species will

dwindle and die out. AQUATICS

The sea waves, blasted by a south-western gale, curdle and foam in cold

blue slopes that march remorselessly across the desolate surface of the

northern ocean. From the lead-grey sky the chill rain hisses down in the icy

green hollows and is lost in the streaming foam of the crests. The sea

surface is not a welcoming place. Below the screaming, tumbling chaos of the surface and in the top few

feet of the ocean water the gale is silenced, the waves suppressed to a gentle

to-and-fro motion. Further down, the movement becomes weaker and

weaker until it dies away completely. This is the world of the fish – and of

the creatures that have abandoned their life on land to accept their ancestral

home in the great oceans of the world. To some extent the sea otters did

this, with their sinuous bodies and their webbed feet; the seals and walruses

did it more efficiently with their streamlining and their flippers; but the

now-extinct dolphins and the great whales did it to perfection, even

adopting the fish-shape of their forebears. Now humans have done it too. In the green half-light below the ocean’s turbulence they swim. An

unaccustomed eye might have taken them for dolphins, moving and turning,

dashing away in a sudden streak, hanging for a while motionless. They cannot breathe air, these creatures of the ocean. Instead they

circulate the seawater through their mouths and pectoral gills, extracting the

oxygen as it goes. They also feed constantly, filtering plankton through the

same gills and transferring it to the digestive system. Now and again they

take a fish – turning and streaking after it with a twist of the tailfin, a

balance of the arms and a quick bite. The tailfin is all that is left of the human legs. In embryo, the limb buds

grow together and fuse into one organ. The hip girdle does not develop and

the limb bones become almost an extension of the backbone. The phalanges

of the toes spread and shape themselves into a network that supports the

powerful diamond-shaped fin. The hands retain their human structure, but

the arm has flattened and become modified into a balancing and stabilizing

organ. The development was started a century ago as part of the star-colony

project, but the creatures developed were only partially successful. Later the

engineering laboratories, in a last bid to produce something permanent

before being closed down, refined the design and produced a truly aquatic

human being; and (their final triumph) the genetic changes that they

produced were actually hereditary. Yes, these newly-developed creatures

were fertile, and produced viable offspring. The process really started way back in the early days of civilization

when man’s quest to possess all the things of the world took him to the water. He invented mechanical devices that enabled him to take his air

down into the sea with him and to breathe it at a workable pressure. Implements strapped to his body allowed him to see underwater and to

swim with powerful leg strokes. As time went on great communities, rather

like island cities, were established on the sea bed. The sediment-choked

ruins of these still litter the continental shelves. When genetic engineering

was developed, gills could be cultivated from raw tissue and grafted onto

the human body, enabling humans to breathe like fish. This was still clumsy

and imprecise compared with the later engineering of a creature with no

need of cities or artificial swimming and breathing devices. What swims here is merely the surface race of the creature. In the

blackness below, hundreds of fathoms down, others exist, rarely seen by

any but their own kind, and even then they are not strictly ‘seen’.

In the

blackness they can only feel their way about and communicate with one

another by a kind of echolocation. These creatures are sluggish and

inactive. There is little food at these depths and they must conserve what

energy they have. Since the aquatics rarely meet any other form of human, there is no

enmity between them and any other group. A female suckling a wriggling youngster undulates gracefully towards a

group of males who are chasing fish. She speaks. The ‘voice’ is a rattling

sound, produced from clicks in the relict windpipe in the neck. The young

males clatter their reply and swim off in what seems to be a random three-

dimensional pattern. Suddenly the fish with which they were sporting

congregate in a mass in front of the female’s head, herded there by the

precisely coordinated movements of the males. A quick flick and a snap,

and she has swallowed one – the rest scattering into the green murk. She

clucks her thanks to the males and swims sedately away. To look at, one

would think that these are creatures that had existed in this environment

since the world was young. It is only the face – a grotesque parody of the

human face, with big bulging eyes, tiny degenerate nose and downturned

mouth – that shows it to be derived from a human being. 500 YEARS HENCE

500 YEARS HENCE

PLAINS-DWELLER

Homo campis fabricatus

A human engineered to live on open grasslands needs the adaptations of a grass-eating mammal. For the plains-dweller these include massive teeth that are replaced if they wear out chewing tough silica-rich grasses and, more importantly, a specialized stomach within the bloated abdomen containing engineered bacteria that can break down cellulose – a substance not normally digestible by the human frame. Cutting edges on the hands help to scythe the thick grass while the long legs enable the creature to move swiftly over the open landscape. Harsh sunlight beats down on the plains-dweller’s dark skin as he runs effortlessly through the dusty grasslands. Vegetation is tough and will also be sparse during the seasons of drought. Blade-like callouses provide the plains-dweller with some degree of protection, as well as cutting through tough stems. The dark skin and mane of hair across the shoulders and running down the back protects the grassland-dweller from ceaseless sunlight. The long feet have become an extension of the legs, adding to his speed. His legs are long and slim, like those of earlier veldt-running animals. Speed is essential when you live in the open. Besides adding to the plains-dweller’s swiftness, the long developed feet enable him to see over tall grass. GRAM THE ENGINEERED PLAINS-DWELLER

Gram stands shivering on the dusty plain, not shivering with cold but with

apprehension. The spiky grass round about is familiar enough; he has been

brought up on a diet of it since he was born, ten years ago. During that ten

years, though, all the grass he knew had been grown in the habitat module. He was brought up and cosseted by Family, a group of creatures that saw to

his every need and trained him for life outside. Only in the last two years did he realize that he was not like the people

of Family. He was not encased in metallic outer skins, he did not glide

along the floor and cables and tubes did not spiral out of him, connecting

him to glass and plastic devices – and his face!

The faces were the only

parts of Family that he could see directly, and his was nothing like theirs. Now he is on his own and he knows it. Family cannot live out here, on

the grassy plains, so they are all congregated together in the flying machine

behind him. All this landscape before him is to be his. Delicately he steps away from the flying module. Beneath his tapering

foot the fibrous soil feels strange – not quite like the soil in the habitat. He

can feel the eyes of Family on him, as he wades into the sharp waving

grass, scanning him closely, as he knew they would. Not only are they

watching him directly, but the little instruments that are strapped to various

parts of his body are sending back signals, telling them how he is

performing. He knows what he is supposed to do; he has been trained for long

enough. As in the habitat, he reaches with his long arm and long hand and

grasps a bunch of grass. The calloused cutting edge of his hand shears

through the stems and leaves with a twisting motion, and he thrusts the

bunch into his mouth and begins chewing. His big teeth grind into the

stringy plant material, crushing it to a pulp and disrupting the fibres. He can

feel the toughness, and knows that the wear on his teeth will be immense. He also knows that once a tooth is worn out another one will grow to

replace it, and this will happen for the rest of his life, another thing that

makes him different from the members of Family. He swallows the wad of

grass, and down it tumbles into his voluminous stomach where it is met by

specially-engineered bacteria that complete the digestion. He scythes off another handful and eats it. This is working all right, he

thinks, and hopes that Family think so too. He looks up to the horizon, a

vast distance away. So this is to be his new home. With sudden joy, Gram bounds away towards a clump of low bushes. He

could be happy here, no matter what Family think. Suddenly he does not

care what Family think: this is not their world – it is his. Then in a first and final gesture of defiance he rips off the instruments

that are strapped to his body and flings them away into the dusty grass. 500 YEARS HENCE

FOREST-DWELLER

Homo silvis fabricatus

There is plenty to eat in tropical habitats. The climate is stable and seasons do not regulate the food supply. Like earlier animals that lived there, a human being engineered to live in the abundant rainforest needs only the ability to climb to feed itself. Cunning and intelligence are not necessary – though an instinct for survival is. A level of intelligence will redevelop in Homo silvis fabricatus over the coming millions of years,

as evolution takes place, but not as much as in species faced with more challenging environments. Ape-like arms and long fingers allow the forest-dweller to swing in the canopy of the trees; while its strong prehensile toes can grip the branches tightly. A heavy jaw is adapted to cracking nuts. Atlhough intelligence has been suppressed in the engineering, natural curiosity still comes to the surface. KULE TAARAN AND THE ENGINEERED FOREST-

DWELLER

Kule Taaran looks down at the huge oval shadow of the flyer falling on the

top of the tropical rainclouds, surrounded by a rainbow ring of spectral

colours. As the vessel descends, the clouds clear away below it and the vast

stretch of green forest reaches out as an unbroken carpet with dark rivers

winding across it. The flyer’s shadow on the treetops is now fuzzy and

unclear, but soon it comes into focus and the edges become sharper as it

descends. Now individual trees can be seen, and with an uneven crunch the

vast vessel settles amongst the broken branches and boughs. Kule Taaran looks around him at the rainforest. It is not as it once was. A

few centuries ago the first rainforest was all destroyed, as a burgeoning

population of humans spread into it and removed it, clearing it away to

make room for them to grow food. It was a disaster, not only removing the

entire forest and its animal life from the face of the Earth but also producing

subtle changes to the climate the world over. Such problems are all past

now that there are more efficient ways of producing food. The forests have

returned, but not in their old state. The forest soil which had taken millions

of years to build up was nearly all washed away in the bad times, so the

trees that have repopulated the area are not the magnificent trees of old. They are scrubby and hardy, adapted to find a roothold in what soil there is

left; but the hot climate and the constant rain has made them grow

prolifically. No big animals exist, though. With the great trees of old went the

monkeys, apes, jaguars, parrots, toucans, tapirs, squirrels, opossums, okapis

and bongos. There are plenty of small things – insects, spiders, millipedes,

lizards, snakes and many of the smaller birds – but the bigger mammals and

birds have gone for ever. Now, however, they are to be replaced. In the module behind Kule

Taaran is the prototype of the new forest creature. Mankind has civilized

himself into a synthetic corner: he cannot survive without the full power of

engineering science and medical technology. He has turned his back on the

natural systems of evolution and ecology that brought him into being in the

first place. Now, as the technological systems are beginning to fail more

and more frequently, it is time to look back to the natural environments. The Andlas were overlooked for so long. Once despised because of their

unsophistication, but tolerated because of their versatility and ability to

keep the machines working, they are now recognized as the gene pool for

the future of mankind. It is so obvious. Mankind was in a shambles because

it had turned its back on the natural process of evolution. The Andlas,

however, after the great schism of humanity brought about by the

overpopulation and famine disasters of a few centuries ago, had fallen off

the hurtling escalator of technological complexity. They represented the part

of humanity that had been thrown to the wild and denied the advantages of

the constantly-improving technology and culture. These unfortunate

creatures lived as best they could, and suffered terribly from diseases and accidents. It was these that reinstated the process of natural selection, and as

an ironic result the surviving members became fitter and healthier,

generation by generation. It eventually became obvious to the mainstream

of technological man, however much his soul rebelled against it, however

much his ego denied it, that here lay the purest essence of humanity now

surviving. This is the basis for the humanity of the future. From now on man

should not use his science to change the environment to suit himself; rather

he should use it to change himself to suit his environment. By his own

technological application he can catch up with the thousands of years of

evolutionary change that he has forfeited. It is now possible to breed and

genetically manipulate new creatures that do not need a technological

civilization. Out there, in the tropical jungle, the grasslands, the deciduous

woodlands, the coniferous forests and the tundra, are supplies of food

growing wild. All the necessities for life are there. If the human body can

be regarded as a machine, like a life-support cradle, then the carbohydrates

produced in the leaves and tubers can be used as the body’s fuel. The

proteins in the growing shoots and in the insects can be used as building

materials. The vitamins in all living things can be used for lubrication, and

the water that is found everywhere can be used for cooling and cleaning. All this goodness was once harvested by a vast range of big animals. There

are none left now, and all the food is there for the taking. Kule Taaran looks at the creature in the transportation module. Strange

that this should represent mankind of the future – it looks so much like

mankind of the past. The prehensile feet are there, with the big toe modified

as a thumb, for climbing and grasping branches. The long apelike arms with

the long fingers will also help it to move about in the treetop canopy. The

head seems to be very heavy about the jaw, to accommodate the huge

nutcracking teeth. The genetically-engineered beings that have been developed for the

other vacant habitats seem to be working well, according to the reports. Now they must see how the tropical forest version performs. The naked form of Pann, sitting amongst the bars and perches of his

module, seems ready for his great adventure. He exchanges a few words

with Kule Taaran, who then opens the access of the module. Pann leaps

from the vessel and into the swaying wispy branches of the nearest bush. He hangs there for a moment while he looks around at the infinite vistas of

his new home. Then, with a final wave to those who had nurtured and

developed him, he jumps to the nearest tree, shins up the trunk and is lost to

sight amongst the branches. Kule Taaran turns away from the window and back to his console. Physically the new creatures seem to work well; the next stage is to see if

they breed true. KNUT THE ENGINEERED TUNDRA-DWELLER

Mosses, lichens, heathers, coarse grasses – very meagre fare. Yet such a diet

used to support very large animals like reindeer, musk ox and mammoth. So

there is no reason to suppose that a suitably-engineered human could not

subsist on such a diet. Knut has been raised on it for a decade, but that was in the safety of a

living module. The cold-weather plants were brought in regularly by flying

machine, and the chill conditions were maintained artificially. All this time,

Family have been outside in the warm and looking in. Now the situation is reversed. The Family members, in their cradles,

with all their delicate life-supports, are keeping warm in the modules of the

flying machine, while Knut is outside, standing in the crisply-frosted grass

of the tundra wilderness, beneath the vast cold grey and white sky. This is

what he was brought up for, to take his place in nature. Centuries ago there were herds of big animals here, which moved north

and south as the seasons changed, wintering in the deep forests to the south

and spending the summer on these wild plains. In those days, he was told,

there were fierce hunting animals as well – animals that would harry and

kill the gentle plant-eaters. Now there are none of those left either, and the

whole landscape is his. He looks down at the coarse little plants at his feet; they look the same

as those he has been eating all his life. With the ice-hook developed from

the nail on his big toe, he scrapes up a patch of moss, then he goes down

onto his furry knees and scoops it up with his spade-like hand. Yes, it tastes

just the same. He will survive here. The whiteness that has been building up at one side of the sky descends. Chill flakes of snow begin to swirl past him, settling on his fine-curled fur over the layers of fat. In reaction he rolls up the ruff of fat around his neck

and his face disappears into it. From the direction of the great flying ship

behind him he can hear the clang and hiss of hatches and accesses closing

and sealing. This is too much for Family. There is a sudden blast of warm

air as the great vessel leaves the ground. They are going back to the cities

where it is warm. Knut is left here, where he belongs. Yet too much harsh weather will kill him, and the brief northern summer

is over. He knows what he must do. As the sudden flurry of snow passes, he

brings his face out from the folds of fat and turns it towards the south where

away yonder are the huge coniferous forests and winter shelter. Like the

great herds of grazing animals before him, he moves southwards with the

season. Yet, unlike the animals of the vast seething herds, he is alone – the only

one of his kind – but this does not worry him. If he survives, and he has

every intention of doing so, then the experiment will be a success. Others

like him will be produced and together they will repopulate the chill

northern wastes of the planet. RELIA HOOLANN AND CULTURED CRADLES

This is not the way. Taking Andlas and changing them into wild animals is

not the way. Mankind’s fate does not lie with these low creatures, but with

those who have sustained the technological advances over the centuries. If

mankind’s future is not one of technological progress, then what is it?

Relia Hoolann and her team have worked for decades on the problem,

learning from the genetic experiments of centuries, and at last she has the

potential for success. For long enough it has been possible to grow synthetic

kidneys, livers, lungs and many other organs. It was the connective tissues

and the locomotor systems that were elusive. It is hundreds of years since a child was born that was free of genetic

defects, and able to live without a vast technological back-up (apart from

the Andlas, that is; but they do not count).

A newborn child must be

analysed and diagnosed immediately in order to find out what it needs and

to manufacture a cradle for it that contains the mechanical or synthetic

equivalents of those organs that are defective – a very clumsy process. Now it may well be possible for the mechanical parts of the cradle to be

dispensed with altogether, so that the whole cradle is grown as a biological

unit. What is more, these cultured cradles may well be able to breed, and to

reproduce themselves. This does not spell the end of mechanical technology, however. The

process will be very energy-consuming, and the solar-power plants and the

ocean-current energy units will be as important as they ever were, not to

mention the food carbohydrate and protein factories that will still be

required. This is going to be the saving of the human species, thinks Relia

Hoolann. The cultured cradles will be much safer and much more reliable. The fall in population that has been documented over the last few centuries

will at last be reversed, now that there is a reliable technology to sustain it. The first cultured cradle will have to be huge, as there is no way of

generating synthetic organs that are as compact and neat as the real thing. In

nature most organs have more than one function: you can use your mouth

for eating, breathing or talking and your fingers for feeling or handling. The

synthetic organs that have been developed can only perform one operation

at a time. After all, evolution took 3500 million years to produce natural

organs, but humans have only been dabbling with the process for a few

hundred. 500 YEARS HENCE

FIFFE FLORIA

Homo sapiens sapiens

In isolated communities across the Earth, groups of humans have consciously returned to the old land-based ways of living – farming, fishing and gathering. Descended from those who survived centuries of poverty and savagery while squatting in the city ruins, and now abandoned by those who can use their technology to escape, the farmers have proved particularly healthy and adaptable. Now that the population of Earth has fallen to a low and realistic level, the survivors can husband the limited food resources of the planet at a sustainable rate. Subsistence farming can be harsh and demanding but combined with simple gathering and fishing, it enables small autonomous groups to live in precarious balance with nature. FIFFE FLORIA AND THE HITEK

Fiffe Floria looks up contemptuously at the ugly unnatural form of the

flying ship as it moves silently, blindly overhead and disappears beyond the

tall trees to the east. She cannot regard the Hitek, the beings inside it, as

human. How can you be human if your life is sustained by mechanical

contrivances, and you have to eat food that is made by a machine?

With a dismissive sneer she pulls the coarse veil over her face and tucks

it into the fibre belt of her tunic. Then she removes the lid from her beehive and waits for her swarm to settle in the smoke from her torch before

inspecting the combs. Good. They are filling up nicely, and it will soon be

time for the harvest. There seems to be nothing untoward in the hive: no

thieving by wasps, no break-ins by mice or rats, no sign that the queen is

going to decamp and take half the workforce with her – but it is really past

the season for that now. Yes, the harvest is going to be good this year. Fiffe closes up the hive once more and turns back down the slope

towards the settlement. They have been lucky this season. The patch of

growing crops is beautifully healthy and the smoke house is full of fish

caught in the stream earlier in the summer. Further down the slope lie the

overgrown hulks of the great buildings. Once these were completely

submerged in the ocean, but now, year after year, the sea retreats further and

exposes more of them. This is probably something to do with the climate

becoming gentler and cooler. Centuries ago when the world was teeming

with people this used to be a great city. It must have been a terrible time,

with everybody living on top of everybody else, and no room to expand and

breathe. It may still be like that in the cities of the Hitek. The people in the old

cities suffered from lack of food and land, what there was being poisoned. Then the air got too warm, the sea rose and the cities drowned. Deny nature

and that is what happens, and it will happen to the Hitek as well. Her man, Hamstrom, is playing with little Haria on the beaten earth

outside their hut, and the beautiful smell of cooking fish is wafting out of

the curtained doorway. Harla is their fourth child, and the only one to have

lived. They know that she will survive and thrive. The settlement consists

of about 100 people, which is just enough for their crop land and their

fishing stream to support. If they used the ancient form of measurement

they would say that they occupied 50 square kilometres, or a region that

was a little less than 5 miles square. Over the hill to the north there is a

similar settlement, and to the south another. To think that the Hitek believe them to be inferior, just because they

have not become so inbred and decadent that they need mechanical devices

to keep them alive. You cannot live in a natural world by turning your back

on nature, regarding it as an inconvenience to be overcome, a hazard to be

avoided, an irritation to be shielded against. If that is what they wanted,

they should all have gone to the stars on the colony ships of centuries ago. The time will come when they will see that the future does not belong to

them, with their artificial systems, but to those who can live in balance with

nature. 500 YEARS HENCE

TEMPERATE WOODLAND-

DWELLER

Homo virgultis fabricatus

A human-based creature engineered to survive and flourish in a temperate forest without the backup of civilization would need to be omnivorous. Forests are less abundant than jungle. To reach the full range of foodstuffs available, Homo virgultis fabricatus has to be extremely nimble, and be able to live both at ground level in the undergrowth and high in the treetops. Arms and legs are of similar length and long, but agile, climbing fingers increase its range. A covering of fine hair keeps the woodland-dweller warm in the temperate conditions. The omnivorous diet is reflected in the dentition, with heavy crusing back teeth for nuts, and delicate front teeth for catching insects. Its diet is close to that of early man; as is its evolutionary potential. Long prehensile toes and fingers can grip rough bark. Lack of a supporting big toe means that the forest-dweller walks crouched but climbs with ease. It is the least specialized, and therefore, most adaptable of the engineered species. CARAHUDRU AND THE WOODLAND-DWELLER

This is the one that is going to cause the problems, Carahudru sees that. It

has few adaptations, but looks little like its ancestral Andla. It is covered by

a fine furry pelt, so that it need never manufacture clothing. The arms are

longer, the fingers are more delicate, and the teeth are stronger. What is

more the feet are prehensile, with the big toe developed into a thumb to help

the creature to climb trees. Deprived of the support of the big toe, it can no

longer stand upright, and its position at rest is a four-footed crouch. It is like

an animal, but there is no avoiding that. The traditional human frame is

totally unsuited for anything but a cultured civilization, so if mankind must

live from the fruits of nature without resorting to culture and civilization it

is going to have to abandon any traditional view of beauty and elegance. It

is going to have to return to the beast. It is inside the head, however, in the brain, where the most fundamental

difference of this creature lies. What makes a human being?

That is the solid residue to which the

argument condenses. Are we more human than the Andlas because we

make greater use of technology, and they just live in the wild and grow their

own food?

Are the Andlas more human because they are healthier and look

more like our ancestors?

If the latter is the case then we could argue that the

more primitive the being is then the more human it is. In that event the specimen before him must be the most human of all. Long arms and prehensile feet will allow it to live both in the deciduous

forest trees and on the ground. There is a lack of specialization in the shape,

simply because there are so many different food supplies in a deciduous

forest that it would not be practical to adapt this creature to exploit anyone

in particular. However, all this food is not necessarily palatable. Many

plant-produced substances are poisonous to the human metabolism, and

diseases may abound that have not been anticipated. The engineers have

done their best and built in systems that could combat most of the known

natural poisons, so whatever has been overlooked will have to be regarded

as part of natural selection. As a result, they have engineered a generalized

hunter-grazer-browser-insectivorous scavenger. They also engineered it with low intelligence. If it is to be surrounded by

food, the argument went, then it will only need enough intelligence to allow it to find it. An intelligent creature may cause trouble, may feel resentment

at being experimented upon, envy at not being able to live in the cities,

rebellion against those that engineered it. What is more it may try to better

itself, and build its own civilization – and civilization does not now seem to

mean a longlasting and successful species. In the back of Carahudru’s mind is a lurking misgiving. Throughout

evolutionary time, the unspecialized creatures proved to be the most

adaptable. The new world that is being engineered now is supposed to be

balanced, with an engineered creature installed in each environment. If one

in particular evolves to encroach on another’s environment, what will the

long-term result be?

It may even be that intelligence will re-evolve by itself. That is for the future, though. Carahudru throws open the door and his

creature steps gingerly out into the bracken and brambles of the deciduous

woodland. Immediately it feels at home. Into the thicket it runs, having

totally forgotton Carahudru in the flying vessel. Carahudru catches a last

glimpse of the sunlight casting a dappled pattern on its back before it

disappears into the warm greenery. 1000 YEARS HENCE

KLIMASEN AND THE BEGINNING OF CHANGE

Something is wrong. The ship is not responding properly. Klimasen directs

his brainwaves through the neural contacts but they are not having the right

effect. The ship is drifting out of control. He noticed it on the last trip, but not as strongly as this. Then he was

able to bring the vast vessel into dock safely, and deliver the food with no

real problem. As a desperate measure he disconnects the neural system, and with his

most delicate pair of synthetic arms he removes the guard panel of the

instruments before him. He can detect nothing wrong, nothing

malfunctioning. Yet still he is drifting away from his course, out of control. If there is nothing wrong with the ship, it must be something external. Beneath him he can see brilliant white flecks on the grey of the ocean

surface – icebergs. He has never seen them so far south before, but that is

not really surprising, for the ice has been pushing southwards further each

year as the weather has been cooling. That should not worry anybody

because the whole of civilization is well guarded against changes in the

climate. Only those scattered tribes of primitives will have problems. The presence of the icebergs does not disturb Klimasen. What is

alarming is the direction in which the vessel is travelling over them. It is

evidently the guidance system that is causing the trouble; but that cannot be

– the guidance is worked from the Earth’s magnetic field. A surge of alarm

sweeps through Klimasen’s puny body, and is instantly neutralized by a

burst of sedative generated in the bulbous stack of synthetic glands grafted

to his back. If the Earth’s magnetic field is varying beyond the limits that

the machinery of the ship can tolerate, then there may be trouble for all

trade and communication around the world. It cannot possibly be that, he thinks. More likely it is the strong winds

that are accompanying the edge of the ice pack; but the sensors do not show

any winds that are stronger than expected. Something is seriously wrong. Desperately he brings his manipulator hands into play to work the

seldom-used manual controls, but that does not have any effect either. The

ship is descending at a great speed, faster than he can correct it. Even if he

could stabilize it, there is no way of telling which is the right way to go. He

is totally lost. Cold grey ocean and glistening icebergs are rushing up to meet him. With his feet and his most powerful pair of arms he braces himself for the

impact. THE END OF YAMO

For the tenth day in succession the clouds have obscured the mountain top. The sunlight that does filter through is not enough to activate the solar

collectors and keep the food generators working at full efficiency. For the first time in his life Yamo finds his work overwhelming, and his

efforts largely fruitless. He does not control the process. He just inspects the

machinery that repairs the devices that do control the process. He does not

think that there is anybody now living who knows enough to control the

process, and now this particular plant is collapsing because the machinery is

slowing to a halt. There is no power coming in from the solar collectors, nor

is there any coming in through the network from other collectors in other

areas. Everybody else is having the same problem. What is more, power-

storage facilities are almost exhausted. His massive carrying legs transport him, cocooned in his organic cradle,

down to the depths of the factory. He has lost count of how many times he

has made that journey in the past few days. It is all to no avail, as there is

nothing he can do when he gets there. It is still as silent as ever, but the

smell of decay, as the nutrients and raw materials rot, is stronger. There is something disrupting the weather systems, something that was

never allowed for when the manufacturing process was designed. All right,

the climates are gradually becoming cooler as time goes on, but this is a

gradual process, and something which was taken into account when the

whole system was set up. It should not bring about the effects that are being

produced now. His food cake appears at his dispenser. At least, working in the plant, he

has first call on what food there is left. The door hisses open. Someone else stands there, someone he does not

recognize. The light is behind the figure and all that Yamo can make out is

the silhouette – the lumpy shape of a standard organic cradle, with the

powerful legs, and a selection of arms dangling. What is this person doing here?

No-one has ever come into his module

before. It must be important. Then he realizes that with the power

deteriorating the communications systems must be failing as well. There

has been no communication from outside at all for days. He turns to check

his screens and monitors, but before he can do so he feels a pair of handling

arms seize him. Manipulators rip into his own cradle, reaching for his head. Dimly, as Yamo’s biological back-ups rupture and collapse in a spray of

blood surrogate and synthetic hormones, he realizes that he must be the first

murder victim for centuries. Murder, too, for the oldest of causes. The newcomer steps over the

pulsating form ofYamo’s broken cradle, and picks up the little cake of food. 1000 YEARS HENCE

THE TIC

Homo sapiens accessiomembrum

Medical technology has developed ‘soft’ forms of the backups that keep alive the weakening human form. Replacement organs, grown synthetically, are grafted onto the body. Eyes, ears, mouth and nose still function. The fingers work only as organs of touch. Lifting or handling is left to arms grown artificially. Fashion plays a part in such surgery. Genetic engineering is not so far advanced that something grown artificially can match the complexity of 3500 million years of evolution. Grafted organs are single not multifunctional. WEATHER PATTERNS AND THE TICS

They laughed when it first started, the farmers and fishermen. They could

see that the ocean currents were changing. They knew that somewhere out

there, at a great depth below the sea surface, was one of the great ocean-

current power-generators that supplied the energy for the Tics. Now the

movement of the water had changed and it would not be working any more. How were the Tics going to keep themselves alive now, in their monstrous

living suits and their food factories?

Now, however, it is not so funny. The new weather patterns have brought

unceasing rain, and the crops have failed. The fish have not come to the

river this year, as though they could not find their way to the spawning

ground. The bees are in disarray; they cannot see the sun and their internal

directional instinct is failing them. It seems to be happening throughout nature. Every year the birds move

north and south at the same time, but not so this year; they do not seem to

know their directions. It is affecting people, too. The trading caravans that

move between settlements are becoming confused and lost. Men and

women admit that they are finding it difficult to find their way along even

well-known routes. Then there are the sicknesses. Diseases that have never been known

before are beginning to afflict those who spend their time outside. It seems

to be something to do with the sun, which whenever it appears from behind

the unfamiliar clouds is harsh and glaring. It burns the skin, and produces

growths that do not go away until the victim dies. The collapse is coming all right just as the farmers and the fishermen

have always predicted; but it is not restricted to the Tics. It is going to affect

everybody: those who deny nature and those who live with it. PLAINS-DWELLERS

The hazy grassland stretches away, green and yellow, to infinity, and the

herd of grazing creatures moves gracefully across it. There are about 20 of

them, the adults moving along on the outside of the group, with the

youngsters in the centre. This is some sort of instinctive arrangement,

serving no real purpose, as there are no dangerous animals to defend

against. They have no real speech, these creatures, since all their needs are

simple and amply met. Food grows all around, there are no enemies, and

they have the companionship of their own kind. Towering clouds are building up overhead. The plains-dwellers are

aware, but only dimly, that conditions are changing from year to year. There

seems to be more rain than there used to be, but this no problem. It only

means that the grass – their food – grows more prolifically. It also means

that new types of plants are beginning to grow: saplings that will develop

into bushes and trees. Still, there will be plenty of grass left for them. As they move slowly through the waving leaves and stems, they become

aware of a distant humming noise. Looking up, their leader sees an oval

spiky shape floating above the horizon away to one side. Such things go

over now and again, but they have no effect on the plains-dwellers, who

barely notice them. However, this one is different. It is not pursuing its usual straight

unwavering course but seems to be tilting to one side and descending in a

very irregular manner. This is unusual enough for the herd’s leader to stop

and look at it, as does the rest of the herd. The shape wobbles, and finally drops into the plain some distance away. Immediately it is engulfed in a white flash that fades into a billowing red

and black ball, rising and spreading. A little time later, the explosion is

heard as the sound sweeps across the open countryside, and the infants and

parents alike start in alarm, but feel no fear. The leader, however, does see

the danger. The burst of red has spread as a fire across the landscape and it

is coming towards them. He has seen this before (fires are commonplace on the grasslands), and

is knowledgeable enough not to run away from it when it is sweeping

towards the herd. He assesses the direction of the wind and moves his herd

along at right-angles to it, so that the fire will eventually travel by them. He need not have troubled. The clouds that have been building up

throughout the afternoon now open, and a curtain of torrential rain appears

between the herd and the fire drifting over them and soaking them instantly. By the time the downpour has passed nothing is left of the fire but a

steaming black smudge on the distant landscape. The erstwhile flying shape is steaming and black as well, but the plains-

dwellers ignore it and continue their journey. It has nothing to do with them. HOOT, THE TEMPERATE WOODLAND-DWELLER

The advantage of living in a temperate deciduous forest is that there are so

many different things to eat at different times of the year. In the spring there

are delicate shoots and soft buds; in the summer, the trees and bushes are

full of leaves; and autumn is the time of fruits. It is winter that gives the

problems. With any luck a forest-dweller has eaten so much throughout the

rest of the year that it has built up enough fat to enable it to exist through the lean months, or it may be sensible enough to gather food such as nuts

during the autumn and store them away for winter. Throughout the year,

too, there are insects, grubs and small animals hiding under stones and

beneath the bark of trees. The temperate forest-dwellers were designed as omnivores, in order to

take advantage of all these circumstances. Hoot is typical. He looks very much like his great-great-great-great –

great to the power 20 – grandfather, who was one of the first genetically-

viable forest-dwellers to be engineered. He is built as a climbing creature,

with long arms and legs, but he is just as comfortable on the ground. His

teeth are quite generalized, able to cope with a wide range of foods from

soft fruits to hard insects. His main senses consist of sight, smell, taste and

hearing. In fact, in outward appearance he resembles the ancestral human being. Inside his long body, however, his digestive system contains special organs

for treating particularly tough food, and self-sustaining colonies of

specialized bacteria that can break down tough silica and cellulose,

allowing him to digest just about anything that he swallows. His mind, though, is dull. That was part of the plan as well, as it had

been believed that such a creature would survive better without the typical

human power of logic and reasoning. Its food was all around it, so it would

not need to experiment, to try to make its life more efficient, since its

environment would sustain it perfectly adequately. The prototype worked so

well that many others were engineered, and now there are self-sustaining

colonies throughout the temperate forests of the northern hemisphere. Nevertheless, Hoot now finds something new in his forest. On top of the

hill, close to his own trees, there has always been an array of glistening

things, like the leaves of a tree, but bigger and square. Hoot has always

known that something big exists deep within the hill, connected to these

strange things. A minor sense that came to the surface when his ancestor’s

furry pelt was engineered was sensitivity to electrical fields: a tingling of

his hair roots tells him when he is in the presence of electrical machinery. He understands none of this, of course, but he knows that this sense tells

him that something important lies beneath the hill; and this something big is

important to the lumpy creatures that he has always thought of as some kind

of distant relation to his own people. An unfamiliar noise and increased electrical disturbance has brought him

to the hill this morning. Flying things came in from all round the sky and

descended, disgorging more lumpies than there are woodlice in his tree. Sometimes when his own people are angry with one another – say, if he

wants to mate with the same female as somebody else – he can sense the

tension in the air. Anger and hatred are obvious and can be communicated

without noise, and it is the same here. Hundreds of lumpies have collected

together and they are angry. They want to get into the hill, and are pushing

at the door. Eventually they break through, and other lumpies come out and tackle

them. Hoot has never seen such a fight – dozens of lumpies tearing away at

one another, pulling each other apart, stamping each other into the ground. His own people do not do things like that. Eventually the battle moves on, into the hill. The noise and the chaos

retreat underground, leaving the soil littered with dead. Stealthily, Hoot descends from his tree and scampers over to the site. The first dead lumpy is still warm, and oozing blood. He sniffs all around

the corpse, using his selective sense of smell to ignore the main odours and

concentrate on the smells that seem most interesting. He lowers his mouth

to the seeping wound and, experimentally, licks the blood. It is good. He

licks some more, using his tongue as an organ of touch, to find the parts that

may be palatable. Then he starts drinking. His digestive system was designed to absorb almost anything. This is as

big a feast as he has seen in many a day, and the others of his kind should

have a part of it. Rearing up to his full height, he lets fly his own recognition yodel,

summoning all of his brethren who are within earshot. It looks as if this is

going to be an easier winter than last. As he hears the crashing and scampering of his relatives approaching

through the leaves and undergrowth he turns back to his feast. With a

feeling of contentment he sinks his teeth into the synthetic flesh and

artificial organs of the creature before him. THE END OF DURIAN SKEEL

Some things just cannot be predicted, Durian Skeel muses; but he knew that

the end would come as something like this. Mankind has built defences

against everything that nature can inflict. Throughout human history the

waste products of civilization built up and poisoned the air, the seas and the

land. When the damage became too much to bear, technology was brought

in and in the end halted the process. Nature repaired the damage eventually. Now processes have been found that produce little or no waste; but it has

not been enough. Climates have been gradually changing for ages. Now mankind can

shelter away in artificial habitats, immune to the changes in weather

conditions; but it has not been enough. Only so much food can be grown or manufactured. The only way to

guard against shortages has been to regulate population, so that there are

never too many people for the available resources; but it has not been

enough. There are the larger-scale processes that mankind can do nothing about,

no matter how sophisticated the technology. The moon goes around the

Earth. The Earth goes around the sun. The movement of the Earth’s metallic

core generates the magnetic field that has subtle influences on everything

on its surface. It has always been known from the geological record that the magnetic

field changes. At times in the past there has been a magnetic north pole at

the geographic north pole and a magnetic south pole at the geographic

south. At other times there has been a magnetic south pole at the geographic

north and vice versa. It has never been fully understood how these change,

when they change and how long the change takes to occur. There must be

times, during the changeover, when there is no magnetic field whatsoever,

and this must have an influence on just about everything. The Earth is undergoing just such a change now, and there is no

magnetic field. The most obvious effect is on the technology of

transportation and navigation. With no magnetic field the compasses and

everything that works on a compass principle must cease to function. There

are natural processes of navigation as well: most creatures have organs,

sensitive to the Earth’s magnetic field, which help them to find their way

about. The mechanics of fish and bird migration and the homing processes

of bees have been disrupted and are now ceasing to work. Humans have this ability too, but it has never really been used. Only

now that the field has collapsed is its absence noticed, with even the most

sensible and level-headed of people becoming confused about direction and

time and many other subtle things. In the natural world this should not

really matter, since the magnetic effect is relatively minor, and most animals

navigate by the sun and the stars. However, with no magnetic field the

ozone layer of the atmosphere breaks down – just as in the bad old days of

pollution. This allows for deeper penetration into the atmosphere by ultra-

violet solar radiation, upsetting the normal climatic patterns and producing

abnormal wind circulation and hence abnormal ocean currents. The

resulting overcast skies break down any biological stellar navigation

systems. On top of all that, there is the harmful biological effect of ultra-violet

rays: burns and skin cancers develop wherever the sun does shine through,

and birth abnormalities are increasing to well above normal levels. Then

there is the disruption of radio waves through cosmic interference. Each

human community is now effectively isolated from any other – denied both

the exchange of information and physical travel. Modern civilization and technology are not tuned into any of this. Durian Skeel knew that all this was going to happen, and he tried to warn

people from the start. They would not listen. He takes a grim satisfaction in the knowledge that he, and only he,

foresaw the collapse of human civilization. Its death would be slow, from a

human point of view, but rapid and catastrophic in the historical scale. Eventually the magnetic field will re-establish itself, with the opposite

polarity to before. It may be within months, or it may take decades, but it

will be too late to rescue civilization as it hurtles downwards into rubble. He is not waiting. Purposefully and methodically he disconnects each of

his life-support devices and lapses into peaceful oblivion. The earth’s electromagnetic field fails as the magnetic poles reverse. On land migration ceases and at sea, as a result of changes to the ozone layer, the ocean currents change as

wind patterns are altered. Beneath the waves, giant generators fall silent to be colonized by sealife. AQUAS

Beneath the tumultuous surface of the ocean, the aquas swim around in a

leisurely fashion. Something is different, but they do not quite know what. The huge machine with its constantly-turning rotors and fans is now still

and silent for the first time in memory. That is nothing to do with them – it

was built by the strange beings from above the surface. The movement of

water is different, but that has no effect on them either. The fish and the sea

plants are still there. Even now the sea life is beginning to colonize the vast

dead structures. This may be a good thing for them. They do not now need to travel so

far to find their food, and the new children that are born seem to have a

better chance of survival now that food is more available. What is more the

knowledge has gone out across the seabed, and aquas from other areas are

moving in. It looks as if the population is growing quite fast in this area,

and they no longer travel in small family groups. A whole interactive

society may develop in this region, with all the advantages which that

entails. Things may change from now on. 2000 YEARS HENCE

2000 YEARS HENCE

TUNDRA-DWELLER

Homo glacis fabricatus

Mosses, lichens and heathers provide the slow-moving tundra-dwellers with their diet. A hook-like nail on the foot, developed from the main toe, scrapes up moss and also provides a grip on the snow. Migratory by nature, the dwellers move to open tundra each summer but winter deep in the forests. As with all migrations it is the old, the weak and the young who fall prey to predators. The five engineered forms do not perceive each other as members of the same species. When different types meet, they do so as competitors and enemies; or else ignore one another as irrelevant. RUMM THE FOREST-DWELLER

Still it becomes colder. This is obvious even to a being of such dim

perception as Rumm. His favourite hollow has not yet cleared of snow, and

already the sun has passed its high point. From now on, for the rest of the year, the days will become shorter and the air colder. Therefore the snow

will not melt at all. It is going to be far more difficult to find food. Although his intellect is

basic, his senses are acute enough when food needs to be located. His mate and his children are safe from the cold in their hollow-tree den,

but they will soon be hungry. They may need to move away, to follow the

sun like all the others in the area have done. Rumm has always resisted that

because his instincts told him that if everybody else moves away all

remaining food will be left for himself and his family. So far this

philosophy has worked. The gathering of food has become more and more

difficult, but there has been enough to keep them alive. Now he is not so

sure. If the snow does not melt, then little will grow during the rest of the

year. He gathers the twigs and branches of the scrubby bushes rising above the

snowy ground cover. With a prickly armful he turns back towards his den. The leaves will be bitter and tough, but at least they will be edible. He surmounts a ridge, and glimpses a group of people below him. Fast as a blink, he drops his branches and falls to the ground, off the

skyline. What are people doing here?

Everybody in the area has moved

away, following the sun. Stealthily he moves back up the slope and peers cautiously over the top. They are people, all right, but quite unlike any people he has ever seen. Their bodies are padded out with fat, and their hair is dense and curly. There

are thick rolls of flesh around their necks and wrists, and their faces are

broad, with enormous nostrils but tiny eyes. There are about ten of them

and they are moving towards the sun. It is as if lthese creatures have come from an even colder place, and they

are following the sunshine, just as Rumm’s people have done. Are they really people?

They have a body, two arms, two legs, just like

Rumm, but apart from that they are quite different, with their furs and their

fatty rolls. They are also from a different place, so they cannot be people,

like him. They must, then, be animals. Food!

The coarse leaves and twigs forgotten, Rumm waits until the group has

crossed the open ground and moved into the wispy trees. Then he scampers down the slope towards their track, taking advantage of any cover that lies

in the way. Their smudgy footprints in the snow make their trail easy to

follow. Silently, as he does when he is stalking birds, he creeps up on the

rear of the party, waiting for stragglers. There are none. They are moving as

a tight compact group. After a while the party comes across the stream that runs through the

valley, tinkling along coldly between transparent shelves of ice. They pay it

no heed, but move onwards, except for one youngster. Unnoticed by its

group, it goes down onto its knees by the chilly water, scoops some up in its

broad palm and begins to drink. The remainder of the group presses

onwards. This is Rumm’s chance. Silently he pounces upon its back and the

youngster stiffens beneath him and gives out a single, high-pitched plaintive

yell, like one of his own babies crying. That yell almost stops the attack, so human is it; but he presses home his

advantage. Throwing his hand over the creature’s broad nose and mouth,

stifling the unnerving noise, he wrenches its head backwards, into the folds

of its neck. A cracking noise tells Rumm that the move has been

satisfactorily fatal, and the body goes limp. The yell has alerted the rest of the group, who turn back and with cries

of anger descend upon Rumm and his victim. It is too late, though. The

forest-dweller has hoisted the dead creature onto his shoulder and

disappeared into the snowy thickets. As he goes, he hears the noises of

anger behind him, and hears them change into wails of anguish and loss. What has he done?

Creatures that can feel loss so acutely, and can make

such sounds of despair – surely they must be people after all?

The wailing

fades and disappears behind him, but it will remain long in his memory. It

will come back to him in quiet moments, or when he is concentrating on

something else; and for many a day he will feel sorrow and sympathy with

these strange beings. What has he done?

He has fed his family, that is what he has done. With a more confident

stride he makes his way with his prize back to his mate and his children in

their hollow-tree den. They will see the winter through all right now. LARN THE PLAINS-DWELLER

Larn strides across the grassy plains at the head of his tribe. Not far off he

sees a thicket of bushes and thorn trees that he does not trust. Another group

of plains-dwellers met danger at such a clump not long ago when a pack of

some new kind of animal burst from within, taking them by surprise, and

killing three of their number before the rest could escape. Larn had thought about this incident for some time, and it made him

uneasy. He had noticed that the other animals, the little animals of the

grassy plains, had their enemies. There was always strife and death in the

undergrowth, but not for the plains-dwellers. He had always assumed that

this was because the plains-dwellers were the largest creatures around. They

had no enemies. The plains were theirs, and theirs alone. As a result the populations of plains-dwellers are growing and growing. As a lad, Larn could remember travelling with his tribe for days on end, and

not meeting any others. Now other tribes are seen daily, and each one seems

to be becoming bigger and bigger. In one part of his mind Larn feels pride at this; his people are the masters

of this landscape, and they should spread and fill it. Another, quieter part of

him rebels, however. If there are more and more plains-dwellers as time

goes by, will there always be enough grass to feed them all?

He turns and looks back at this tribe, and counts them: ten females, all

his mates; five young males, that have latched on from other tribes; six of

his children, almost adult; twelve of his juvenile children; and two old

females, members of the original tribes of two of his mates. He took

responsibility for these when he chose the females from those tribes. It was the two old females that kept the tribe moving slowly. They all

had the long legs with muscular thighs and tapering feet that allowed them

to run quickly. However, they rarely had the chance to do so. Sure enough

the youngsters would run about, very actively, but the older members had to

remain close to one another, and so moved at a slow and sedate pace. It was

so long since Larn had run that he thought he might have forgotten how –

not that there was any real need for speed. The children enjoy it, though, he muses as he watches them scamper and

gambol through the long yellow grasses of the open plain. Suddenly there is a hideous howling and baying noise from the

suspicious thicket. He had let his mind wander and had forgotten the danger

that the other tribe had faced. With a yelled warning he brings the whole tribe together, but the

youngsters are scattered too far. A crashing noise issues from the thicket

and about ten indistinct forms burst out and streak through the grass. One of

his children is brought down with a crash and a flurry of dust and broken

plant stems. Without thinking, for the moment, of his loss and grief he runs about,

rounding up the others, trying to get them to crowd together, instinctively

knowing that a large group is stronger. He is dimly aware that the others are doing their best as well. The young

males have rushed together in defence of the younger females and the

juveniles. They stand shoulder to shoulder while the others sprint into the

distance. Then he comes across a horrible sight. One of the old females lies dead,

her throat torn. Over her stands a hideous and misshapen, yet strangely

familiar, figure. It is almost like a plains-dweller, but it does not have the

long legs, its belly is not so round and its teeth are not so massive. These

must be the strange new creatures that have moved onto the plains. It is staring at him, the female’s blood dribbling down its chin. Its eyes

are grey and steady, it bares its teeth, and then it pounces. As a reflex, Larn

brings down the cutting edge of his left hand, thrusting it into the soft flesh

of the creature’s neck, killing it instantly. So they are not invulnerable, Larn

thinks with triumph; we can kill them. Then another dark shape crashes into his back, sinking its teeth into his

neck, and as he falls into the dust he realizes his mistake. He should have

run, like the young females. These creatures have cunning and hunting skill,

but they do not have speed. If plains-dwellers are to continue to be the masters of the plains, they

must learn to keep clear of these monsters. Speed is going to be their

saving, but it is too late for him. 2000 YEARS HENCE

AQUATIC

Piscanthropus submarinus

Developed in the earliest centuries of genetic engineering as a refinement to the aquamorphs, the aquatics were the first group to carry hereditary genetic changes. Clumsy and vulnerable on land, the sea is now their instinctive habitat. Piscanthropus

submarinus can move swiftly and powerfully within water. The ocean provides food and does not vary its temperature as swiftly as air – valuable when the increasing cold forces land-based species such as Homo virgultis fabricatus into adaptation or retreat. Even with long toes and fine balance, the temperate woodland-dweller has to move carefully across the slippery rocks. Curiosity proves stronger than its fear of falling. COOM’S NEW FRIEND

The tide seems to be going out further these days. Coom is only a young

lad, but he is sure that he can remember when the water came right up to the

cliffs. Yes, sure enough, there is still a line of whitened tree-trunks and

bleached sticks, the remains of debris brought up by the waves long ago. His father is much older than he is, and can probably remember when the

sea came right up to the foot of the cliff all the time. He might even

remember it washing to the top of those austere stone faces. Now the water is well out, leaving pools and puddles amongst the

slippery, weed-covered rock. It will return, before the day is out, but it will

not come anywhere near the cliffs. Coom thinks that it probably never will

again. He drops to all fours by the nearest of the rock-pools. The empty woven-

reed bag flops onto the cold rocks beside him. Nothing much in the water

here. Further down, towards the edge of the sea, the pools will be more

alive. Here he has to be careful. The rocks are wet, weed-coated and slippery;

and they are very cold beneath his feet. Now the cracks in the rocks are full

of winkles, limpets lie flat and immobile against the wet algae-clad stone,

and crabs scuttle and hide in the clear waters of the pools. With his long

fingers, Coom pulls the shelly creatures away from their rocks, and dips

into the cold waters for the crabs and sea-anemones. It is meagre fare, and

even when his bag is full it will not give very much nourishment to this

family. He straightens up and looks back towards the cliff. There, in one of the

caves along the foot, live his parents and his three brothers and sisters. It is

a good thing, he thinks, that the sea does not come up to the cliffs any more. He and his family would be washed away. He is far enough down the beach now to see the mountains rising

beyond the cliff. They are white, and have been for some time. He can

remember, when he was very very little, that sometimes they were green

and purple. It is snow and ice that covers them, he knows that. Even the rocks and the cliff are covered in snow and ice now and again. Then a

sudden thought strikes him – snow and ice are made of water, so could it be

that, with so much more snow and ice over the land, the water has been

taken from the sea – and that is why the sea does not come up to the cliff

any more?

A loud splash from behind him breaks his train of thought. Something

big trapped in a pool!

He turns quickly. At first he thinks it is a fish, but he

has never seen a fish as big as that. Then he thinks it is one of his family

who having slipped in is finding it difficult to get out, but no. It is neither of

these. It seems to be something in between. The creature rises half-way out of the water. It has a face like his, with

eyes, a nose and a mouth; but the eyes are enormous, the nose a pair of slits,

and the mouth a vast downturned feature between huge fleshy lips. It has

arms and hands, but the rest of the body is indistinct in the water. It seems

to be smooth and shining. Coom stares at the apparition, and it stares back at him. The great mouth

begins to work, and sounds come out. It is trying to say something. Is it dangerous?

No, Coom does not think so; in a strange way it is

almost like himself. He says a few words back to it, one or two of the few

words that he and his family use, but that is no good. Whatever it is does

not understand. Instead Coom tentatively reaches out his hand; the odd

creature reaches out its own hand, and the two touch. A friend!

Coom has found a friend outside his family. He lets drop the strange slippery hand, and turns to run back to the cave

to tell everybody, full of joy and surprise at his discovery. His father is

there, at the entrance, cracking open and scooping out a shellfish that the

others of the family have brought him. Coom goes running up to him,

grunting out his news. His father is all attention, as are his older brothers. The result is unexpected. Coom is snarled at to move out of the way,

then thrust into the cave while the others run off down the beach towards

the sea. That is not right, thinks Coom, that is not how it should have happened. They do not seem at all pleased about the new friend. He is not going to

stay in the cave while all this is happening, so he runs down the rocks after

them; but he is too late. Already his father and his brothers are throwing rocks and bleached

sticks at his new friend, and shouting the most hideous threats. The strange creature, in panic, has pulled itself out of its rock-pool, and

is wriggling its way across the clammy weed and cold rocks towards the

waves in blind terror, bleating out strange sounds as it goes. Coom stops. He does not want to be any closer, and see in more detail. He can imagine

the weals and bruises on the glossy body, the blood from the fresh cuts, the

look of anguish and pain on the outlandish face. He can only hope that the

strange being reaches the water before his father and his brothers. With sadness he watches it slip into the waves, beyond the gesturing

figures of his family. A flip of the fin-like tail and it is gone. Well, his father must be always right. Coom considers the matter. He

must have done wrong to try to befriend it in the first place. It is obvious

that his people, the people of the land and the creatures of the sea will never

be anything but enemies. YEROK AND THE TOOL

They are not going to be able to stay much longer. Old Yerok knows that

the tribe is finished in this area. They will move on somewhere else,

probably to a place owned by another tribe, and where the Tool is of no use

at all. He looks down at the clay model inside his shelter. It has taken him all

his life to build, and now that life is almost finished it is becoming useless

as well. The boxes, holes and chambers are an accurate reproduction of

what has been found beneath the gravel and sand across the plain, but soon

the whole thing – original and model – will be engulfed. Every year the waters change. The rivers flow out of the ice wall and

wash across the plain to the distant sea, splitting, crossing one another and

rejoining, amongst the shifting pattern of gravel banks, sand bars and clay

pans. They change their courses continually. This has always happened; the

tribe is accustomed to it. Now, however, the ice wall is creeping out so far it

is spreading over the plain itself. Beneath the gravel, the sand and the clay, lies the Mystery. It was built

by people a long time ago, and it was built to live in. Yerok can tell that by

the pictures that he has found in it. Then it was destroyed by the sea, which he can tell by the layers of sand and mud that fill the rooms, chambers and

passages, and the old seashells that cluster on the crumbling walls and the

red powdery metalwork. Other people lived there afterwards, once the sea

had retreated again, probably digging into it like his own tribe does. He can

tell this by the skeletons piled in the mud layers above, that have to be

shifted every time they dig downwards with the Tool. The skeletons are of people, but of people quite unlike those of his tribe. His own people have longer arms and longer fingers and toes, as though

they were designed to climb on things – rocks or even trees. Their teeth are

bigger, as though they were meant to chew harder foods. Yerok feels a great

sympathy with these old people, guessing that when he is dead, and that

occurrence is not too far away, his skeleton will be found to be more like

that of one of these ancient people than that of one of his own tribe. He has known that for years, but of course nobody else noticed. He was

born different, as if he were actually the son of a very distant ancestor, but

one who had lain dormant, generation after generation, and only reappeared

with Yerok’s birth. His resulting greater intellect soon made him the leader

of the tribe, and he led them into peaceful and plentiful times. It is his one

great sadness that his children do not take after him: they are all the same

long-armed, long-fingered, dull-witted, instinctively-acting creatures as

their mothers. He has always known there were riches to be found in the old dwelling

places buried beneath the gravels of the plain. He built the Tool, and used it

to dig into the sediments to find them. Now all the tribes within marching

distance have drinking bowls, clothing and footwear, extracted from this

plain by his tribe and traded for food. Soon all that will be finished. The ice has been encroaching on the plain

for as long as he can remember. In the gloom of his shelter he leans on his

digging Tool and looks down at the meticulously-crafted clay model of the

layout of the ancient dwellings – the model he uses to determine which part

of the area the tribe should dig in next. Some of the places are gone already;

those to one side have now been buried by the ice. The ice surge this

coming winter will probably cover and obliterate the Mystery for ever. Not only that, but the tribe is drifting apart. His two eldest sons, Hrut

and Gultha, detest one another, both wanting to lead the tribe once he has

gone. No amount of training will persuade them that it will be in the interest of all if they compromise. His death will be a sad blow for the tribe, and for

all the other tribes in the area that benefited from the trading. His death comes so suddenly that he has no time to recognize its

approach. Hrut, silently behind him, brings down a rounded boulder from

the gravel banks upon his head, and instantly obliterates the one force that

has lifted the tribe out of the surrounding savagery. The body that once held

the last spark of civilization, a throwback to a sophistication that once was,

falls limply into the clay plan of the ancient city, crushing the delicate walls

and collapsing the whole intricate network. With a cry of triumph Hrut grabs up the Tool. With this symbol he is

now the master. A shadow appears in the doorway of the shelter. It is Hrut’s brother

Gultha. Despite the slowness of his mind he sees instantly what has

happened, and growls out a challenge. Hrut swings up the Tool in a wide

arc, catching Gultha across the face and neck, and sending him staggering

backwards to collapse bleeding on the gravel. He leaps out into the chill

blue daylight and chops downwards with the Tool, until he is sure that

Gultha is dead. Then he stops to catch his breath. He is truly the leader now. He shakes

the bloodstained trophy in the air in triumph – he has discovered the true

function of the Tool. 5000 YEARS HENCE

TRANCER’S ESCAPE

He will be known as Trancer. He really has no name, since neither he nor

his people have sophisticated speech, and so cannot think of themselves or

of each other in terms of words. They have, however, a deep commitment

and affection for members of their own group. Co-operation is necessary in

the bleak mid-latitude tundra and coniferous forest where they live. To the

north lie the snows and glaciers of the vast icecap; to the south, beyond the

narrow belt of conifers, lies the vast sweep of cold steppe. There may be

more habitable places beyond the chill grasslands, but they are too far away

to contemplate. The gnawing cold of winter is reaching downwards again, and the store

of food that they have gathered this year is not very big. It will be difficult

to feed all 20 of the group all through the winter, and impossible if they are

raided by others. Trancer is weary of fighting. Half of the food store in the shelter was

gained by stealing from the other groups of the forest. This should not be. There should be plenty of food for everybody, and if there is not it should

be shared equally. Certainly Trancer would be willing to share the mound of

seed-cones that he is now carrying back to the shelter. His weariness is temporarily overcome by a vague sense of achievement,

as he is now carrying more cones than he has ever been able to before. He

found the sloughed bark of a dying tree, and he kept piling cones onto it

until it could hold no more. Then he carefully lifted it from the ground, and

is now carrying the find, and the food, back to the shelter. If he had been

using a thing like this all summer the whole group would have been able to

gather much more food. He breasts the edge of the narrow gully where the shelter is built, and

begins to descend the slope carefully. Between the straight trunks of the

trees the soil is loose – a yellow fragrant crust of decaying needle leaves

and a rich black soil beneath. The shelter is a tightly-woven hood of sticks

and branches, covered with a cosy layer of soil and needles. It is built half-way up the slope that faces the sun, so that it will be warmed by the earliest

rays of next season, and yet is far enough above the floor of the gully to

avoid the bitter frosts of the hollows. These hints for survival have been

passed on by example from one generation to another. Strong smells of crushed needles stop Trancer in his tracks. There is

something wrong!

He drops his load of cones and finds the shelter of an

isolated bramble bush. Dimly, far along the slope, he can see a dozen

figures heading silently towards the shelter. They are not his own people. It

can only be a raiding party. Trancer leaps from cover and runs down the cascading stream of soil and

needles towards the shelter. He shouts to break up the raiders’ stealth,

causing the surprised faces of his group to appear at the entrance. Then, at

the edge of his vision, he sees that the approaching party has abandoned its

silence and burst out into a full-force attack. The males of his group rush out of the entrance to defend the shelter, and

Trancer turns to join them. Then he sees that the raiders are much more

numerous than he had thought, and realizes that his little group is not going

to stand much of a chance. Wearily he steps back from the front line. He is not going to fight. He

has had enough. He retreats into a corner of the shelter, closes his eyes

tightly and curls himself up into a compact ball. With all his mind he wishes

that this were over, that all the fighting were done and that the raiders had

gone away. He wishes. He wishes!

He opens his eyes to a dark silence. Nothing is moving anywhere, and

there is the unmistakable stench of death about him. His head aches, he is

cold and, as he stretches from his cramped position, he finds himself to be

unbelievably stiff. What has happened?

Slowly he crawls to the jagged shape of lightness that is the entrance to

the shelter. Day is just dawning. He must have been asleep!

In the midst of

a battle!

This could not have been an ordinary slumber. As the sky lightens, he is able to take in what he sees about him. The

raiders have left his tribe all dead; the bodies of his family are scattered

limply around. They must have ignored him, thinking him dead as well. He

does not look at the food store. He knows that it will have gone. He cannot

possibly survive the winter now. Then he looks closer at the bodies of his family. The spilled blood is

dried to blackness, the faces are blue and sunken, the eyes have been taken

by birds. These people have been dead for days!

He has been asleep for days!

How can this be?

For the next few days and nights he can think of nothing else. His last

recollection of the battle was of himself curling in a corner and wishing that

it were all past. Now suddenly it is all past, as if he had wished himself into

a temporary death to avoid danger. If he can do that to avoid permanent death in a battle, could he also do it

to avoid death by cold and starvation through a harsh winter?

It is worth a try. Best thing is to eat as much food as he can now –

presumably his body will still need it while he is ‘asleep’, even though it

will use it more slowly. Then he will have to find a comfortable sheltered

place and wish that winter were all over. He hopes that it will be as easy as that. It is his only chance of seeing the

winter through until the warm growing times return. A few of the swiftest woodland-dwellers have adapted to life in the tundra. SNATCH AND THE TUNDRA-DWELLER

This one will be referred to as Snatch. In shape, he is much like the

generalized dim-witted temperate forest-dwellers generated in the

laboratories of the now extinct genetic engineers 3000 years ago. He has the

long body with the complex digestive system that allows him to eat almost

anything, from leaves to grubs. His arms and fingers are long and nimble,

but his legs are quite short – they were meant for pushing through thicket

and undergrowth and for climbing the thick trunks of the deciduous trees,

not for striding across the wobbly peat bogs and sharp grasses of the open

tundra. Nevertheless the quickness of his actions has enabled him, and a

few like him, to live on in his original area despite the fact that the

landscape has changed from mixed woodland, through coniferous forest, to

chill tundra bleakness in a few thousand years. Now an icecap sparkles on

the northern horizon, where there was once the luxuriant green of forest in

the time of his great-great-great grandfather. The standing waters of the peat

bogs attract huge flocks of ducks and other birds for most of the year, and

Snatch has become adept at catching these. By floating variously-shaped

bits of wood on the surface of a pond he can entice the birds to land there. Then, when they are settled, he darts out of the concealing reed beds and

grabs one before it can fly off. This time the weather has caught him out. The water of the lake is too

cold for a long-term immersion, and the birds have not been coming. The

sun is going down and the sky is about to turn to the misty purple he usually

sees when he is almost back amongst his tribe; but this evening his tribe is a

long, long way away. Yet still he remains, reluctant to return empty-handed. Over on the other side of the lake forages one of the tundra-dwellers,

which also seems to be separated from its group. Its compact appearance,

with its furry rolls of fat and its short arms and thick legs, makes it look as

if it belongs in the landscape. It seems to be at home here, while Snatch,

with his long limbs, does not. The two beings ignore one another. Their

differing lifestyles do not put them in conflict, yet it seems to Snatch that

the tundra-dweller should resent him, for being somewhere he does not

belong; but he does not think about it too much. All he hopes for at the

moment is that the other creature’s movements do not interfere with his

hunt. Then, with a comical quacking noise, half-a-dozen birds settle on the

still water, breaking up the reflection of the cold empty sky. Now Snatch

squats into his hiding place amongst the fluffy heads of the grass, waiting

for his chance. It is a long time before any of the birds paddle close enough for an

attack, but eventually they drift over towards his side of the lake. With a

single dive, he throws himself out from the bank, his long arms and delicate

fingers shooting out towards his prey. Startled ducks leap straight upwards

from the water, flapping towards the sky and safety. One is too slow. The

long fingers close around a webbed foot, and with a flurry of feathers it is

dragged back as Snatch’s body splashes downwards into the chill waters of

the lake. The numbing impact of the icy water cannot subdue Snatch’s yell of

triumph as he leaps out of the lake with his prize. Yet, before he has wrung

the bird’s neck, the chill has crept from his skin, through his flesh and to his

bones. His newly-caught meat will be of no use to him if he freezes to

death. He rips the head off the bird, tears away the crop, and plunges his

numbed fingers into the warmth of the carcass. It is not enough. He must

find more body heat somewhere. There is only one other big living thing nearby. The tundra-dweller stands, still as a dead tree, watching all this with a

dim curiosity. It shows no fear as Snatch approaches it carefully. Why

should it?

Tundra-dwellers have no natural enemies out here on the tundra,

and no capacity for fear was ever designed into them by the genetic

engineers all those millennia ago. For Snatch, there is a problem. How does

he kill a big creature like this?

His hands have only dealt with small

mammals and birds up to now. The face, with the tiny eyes and broad

nostrils, stares at him from within the frame of its voluminous neck ruff. There is no expression, and the creature does not flinch as Snatch drops his

bird and throws himself at it, groping for a soft or vulnerable spot on its

broad chest or its thick neck. Everywhere his fingers find tightly-matted

hair and yielding blubber – nothing to hold or tear. Then, slowly, the great

body leans over him and goes down onto its knees, pinning him to the

springy vegetation. Snatch panics, and writhes and twists to pull himself out from under the mass of bouncing fat, but he is trapped. He can do nothing

now but wait for the great creature to kill him. After a while Snatch realizes that he is not dead. The tundra-dweller has

not tried to kill him – it is just ignoring him. It went down onto the ground

to reach Snatch’s dropped bird, and is now eating it. Snatch was trapped by

accident. Night is falling, and it is warm in the folds of furry fat. As long as the

tundra-dweller remains where it is, Snatch will survive; so he is quite happy

to let it have his catch, in return for this life-saving imprisonment. 5000 YEARS HENCE

MEMORY PEOPLE

Homo mensproavodorian

As the genetic engineers have long gone, there can be no further artificial changes. When climates and conditions shift, altering habitats, the inhabitants must normally adapt or evolve to survive. But the woodland-dwellers have a different option. A genetically-manipulated but latent ability to recall the long-term past is forced to the surface by climatic extremes. A group of Homo virfultis fabricatus become the memory people. HRUSHA’S MEMORY

That way lies the end of the blizzard and the howling white blankness. Somewhere in that direction is the secluded dell of gentle green woodland,

full of berries and nuts, with misty shafts of bright sunlight slanting through

the leaves, bringing dappled patches of warmth, and the relaxed noises of

chattering, twittering birds heard over the gurgling of a little brook as it

splashes over the moss-covered rocks. How does Hrusha know that?

She has never been here before. She has

never even seen a gentle green woodland, would not recognize berries and

nuts for what they were, and would be alarmed at the strange noises of

twittering birds. Yet somehow she knows that these things are to be found

in the direction in which she is walking. Her colony by the seashore is starving. The colder weather this year has

meant that fewer fish have come to the beaches, and fewer herbs are

growing along the spume-blown shingle that separates the grey ocean from

the white of the icecap. Others have travelled out from the colony both

ways along the coast, to try to find new sources of food; but few have

returned, and those who did come back reported no success. Now Hrusha and her mate Vass have tried going inland instead: a bold

and dangerous choice, and one that Vass is constantly regretting. Inland is

nothing but snow and ice. As they trudge onwards the blizzard develops, intensifies and turns

everything to a featureless whiteness. Their vision is blocked by the

relentless glare, their hearing muffled by the unchanging howl of the wind,

and their sense of touch numbed by the cold. Suddenly, with her normal senses dulled by the disorientating surge of

the blizzard, Hrusha remembers something that she could not possibly have

experienced, and with excited gestures urges Vass to follow her. This is too

much for her mate, who turns and tries to find their tracks, hoping to follow

them and make his own way back to the coast. Acting on the hunch that is stronger than her mating bond, she trudges in

the direction her senses dictate, deeper and deeper into the blasting,

blinding blizzard, and suddenly the snow gives way beneath her. She falls,

tumbling with the snowy lumps, and ends up face down in a shallow drift. As she struggles free she finds that the wind has dropped, and she is lying

in a sheltered ice-free valley. Dark rocks jut from black frozen soil, and an

ice-bound stream winds along the valley floor. The most remarkable features of the landscape, though, are the hulks of dead trees, standing black

and branchless, frozen and upright, where they died of cold an

unimaginable time ago. This is the green and leafy dell that she remembers, but changed by time

and creeping coldness. How can she remember this, when the trees she sees

around her have obviously been dead since the time of her father’s father’s

father’s father?

Could that be it?

Could the landscape have been seen by

one of her fathers?

Could the memory have been passed on to her, like her

distinctive hair and eyes?

As far as she knows, none of the others of the

colony have had that experience before. Certainly her mate Vass has not. She settles by the frozen stream, smashes the thin covering of ice, and

drinks from the cold water beneath. Surely this experience could be useful. Surely she must be able to remember other things that her ancestors saw

and knew – things that would help the colony in its time of trouble. She

must think. Where is there food?

Where the stream comes out, comes the answer, in a lake full of fish, a

lake that never freezes over even in the harshest of winters. She remembers

that now. Weary from her journey, but now filled with hope, Hrusha rises and

walks heavily down the frozen soil of the valley following the winding

stream between the dark rocky banks. Eventually the valley gives out and a

plain stretches out before her. The blizzard has abated and she can now see

for some distance. In the middle of the plain is a white expanse of perfectly

flat snow that can only be the lake. It is frozen now, but the ice is quite thin,

and it seems very likely that fish still live in there. That is what the colony needs to know. She turns to retrace her journey

to the coast, and there in the distance she sees a figure corning towards her,

a figure she seems to recognize. It is not Vass, is it?

No. Vass does not have

the knowledge that brought her here. It must be someone else who can

remember this place from long before they were born. Someone else who

has the ability – an ability forced to the surface by the jeopardy of the

colony. The figure is closer now, and she sees that it is Kroff, the son of her

cousin, a person she has always ignored since the two of them have never

had anything in common. That must change now. If Kroff has the knowledge, then he is a far more

suitable mate for her than Vass ever was. This needs to be seriously

considered. TROPICAL TREE-DWELLERS

Plenty of fruit is available in the tropical treetops, so there is nothing to

worry about here. Like the extinct monkeys and apes, the tree-dweller (he

has not the wit to consider himself as an individual let alone as a being with

a name) climbs the vertical trunk through the luminous green of the leafy

canopy, and scampers four-footed along a broad bough, forking on to a

thinner branch and finally along slender waving twigs to reach the point

where the bunches of fruit dangle invitingly. Hanging upside down now, he

reaches outwards with his narrow prehensile fingers and delicately prises

the bunch free from its stalk. Some fruits drop off, falling with a fading

‘plop, plop’ through the layers of leaves and twigs below, away to the forest

depths. These are immediately forgotten, as he has secured enough for his

needs. This is his whole life. It is of no relevance to him that the equatorial

tropical forest belt of the Earth is narrower now than it has been at any time

within the last million years, that the cooler climates have been encroaching

from the north and the south, bringing their windy grasslands and barren

deserts with them. The only significance to him is the fact that when he is in

the gloom of the lower branches he often sees, on the forest floor, bands of

strange creatures moving purposefully in a particular direction. Since he

rarely ventures down onto the floor anyway, he just ignores them. The lost fruits, dented and bruised by their fall through the branches, at

last thump softly down into the decaying plant matter of the forest soil. A

group of gaunt long-legged plains-dwellers, uneasy and out of place in this

strange environment, but driven from their grasslands by increasing cold

and ravening packs of wild creatures, starts at the sudden noise. Then, when

they see the fruit that has fallen, all four of them pounce upon it, scratching

and tearing at one another in their attempts to reach it first. This drama is completely irrelevant to the tree-dweller. There is always

plenty to eat up in the sunny heights and he can leave the lower shades to

those strange beings. It is in the far north and the far south that the ice age is causing its havoc. Fluctuating icesheets and glaciers, together with unstable weather patterns,

are forcing high- and middle-latitude inhabitants to resort to drastic

measures and changes in lifestyle just in order to continue living, and

encouraging genetic changes in body and mind that could not have endured

if the environment had remained constant and unchanging. Here, in the

tropical forest, however, things have not altered for thousands of years. The

tree-dwellers have a constant supply of fruit and insects in their leafy

canopies, so there is no need for them to move to new areas or to change in

any way. 10,000 YEARS HENCE

10,000 YEARS HENCE

SYMBIONT CARRIER

Baiulus moderatorum

Two species form a single unit of value to both – symbiosis. The woodland-dwellers have skills that their carriers lack. The hunting ability of the swift forest-dweller provides enough food both for itself and its slow-moving carrier. The tundra-dweller, in turn, provides both with general movement and protection against the cold. Lacking thick fur and insulating layers of fat, Moderator baiuli can only hunt in short bursts before needing to return to the body heat of its carrier. Communication is by touch. SYMBIONTS

The symbionts are marching. A temporary and small retreat of the northern icecap has created vast

new tundra areas over the northern continents. For the first time in 5000

years the rate of melting of the edge of the glaciers is exceeding their rate of

southward movement. In effect, the edge of the icecap is melting back. Rocky debris, broken up by the weight of the ice and shoved along the

ground by the southward movement, now lies in hummocks and thick beds

of mixed clay and boulders. Here and there a long winding esker (a steep

ridge of rubble marking the old course of a sub-glacial river) snakes across

the plain. Huge lumps of abandoned ice embedded in the clay melt slowly,

gradually becoming lakes. Yet below the ice-free surface the soil is still permanently frozen. Little

grows here, except for the hardy grasses and reeds along the sides of the

lakes, and the mosses, lichens and heathers that form tussocks over the

rocky soil. A way to the south lie the great forests, which are already

spreading northwards into this newly-exposed land, with their outposts of

stunted willows, birches and rowans, backed by the dark palisades of spruce

and pine. It will be a short-lived advance if the ice moves south once more. It is the domain of the symbionts. From a distance as they trek across the

plain they look like the tundra-dwellers of old, but they seem to be bigger

and rather top-heavy. A closer look shows them each to have two heads – a

large one surrounded by the woolly ruff of blubber, with small eyes and

large nostrils, and beneath the chin a smaller head with big ears and active,

darting eyes. The herd consists of about 30 individuals, adult and juvenile. They follow the biggest, whose lower head seems to be looking around all

the time for the best way to travel. It stops, staring away into the distance. A dark flock of birds circles in

the far sky, something that should be investigated. The leader’s arm shoots

out in that direction – an amazingly slender arm for a creature of such a size

– and it turns towards the distant flock. The rest of the herd turn as well,

each one also shooting out an arm. After a while they come to the site of the disturbance. Most of the birds

are hawks, and every now and again one swoops to the ground and carries

away something small and furry. There are small foxes there as well, but

these turn and scatter as the symbionts approach. The cause of the activity

is now visible before them. A mass of small rodents – lemmings – is on the

move. Every now and again, in times of relative plenty, they breed prodigiously, until there are so many that the food in their area runs out. Then they move en masse to find new foraging regions. The symbionts

have just come upon one such migration, a moving furry layer that stretches

in a straight line along the ground towards a possible distant food source. If the movement of the rodents is remarkable, what then happens to the

symbionts is even more strange: about half of the individuals fall apart,

literally. Each one resolves itself into two separate creatures. The huge hairy

arms of the tundra-dweller that were clutched across its chest open up like

doors, and to the ground drops a spindly figure – the owner of the second

head and the pointing arm. The slimly-built creatures are running as soon as

they hit the ground, and ten of them plunge into the moving mass of

lemmings, snatching and killing as they go. The remaining symbionts,

mostly females and young, stand watching, shouting encouragement in

words and noises that only members of their own group can understand. The tundra-dweller shapes vacated by the hunters stand immobile and

silent. After a while the hunters gather up the rodents that they have killed and

bring them back to the group. They are handed around to the figures

clutched to the bosoms of the tundra-dwellers. Then each hunter returns to

its own tundra-dweller/carrier and, with a touch and a word, it is gathered

up into the great arms. For a while they eat. Each lemming is partly eaten

by the being at the symbiont’s chest, but then the greater part of it is handed

up to the great mouth in the head above. The tundra-dweller part of the

creature receives the food passively, and eats it all. This strange state of affairs began thousands of years ago. When the

hunters (the humans that had been engineered to live in the temperate

forests) spread out to hunt on the tundra, with the coming of the current ice

age they had to adopt all kinds of strategies to keep themselves warm and to

survive. Some found that they could live close to the dull tundra-dwellers

and share their body heat. The tundra-dwellers did not mind this, if the

hunters shared their food with them. So the symbiotic situation gradually

developed, until now the hunters could not travel by themselves in the

tundra and these particular tundra-dwellers would not be able to survive on

their own. Once the food is eaten, the group sets off again. The smaller hunters can

talk to one another, using a simple language, but each communicates with its tundra-dweller/ carrier by nudges and gestures – a pointing of the arm is

enough to tell the carrier to go, and which way. They follow the lemming

march, as there will be good eating here for a day or two. HIBERNATORS

The trance-like state is not now as deep as it was a few days ago. The

warmth of spring is filtering through the cocoon’s insulating layers of fibre

and wood, registering slowly on the dulled nerves and sensory system of the

sleeper, triggering a slow increase in his metabolism and bringing

consciousness nearer. His mind emerges from total blankness into a dream

state, in which he relives and consolidates the hunting and gathering

techniques that he learned last season. In his dream he sees the forest of his

home, firstly as it was when he was a child, then as it was more recently. The most recent memory-dream is of his mate of last season, and hopefully

of this season also, and the thought of her excites him so much that the final

barrier of conciousness is broken, and he is awake. With a groan of momentary disappointment that the last vision was only

a dream, he stretches himself, pulling open his eyelids against the mucus

that gums them together, and unfolding his limbs which are so stiff that they

almost creak. With a struggle he breaks through the covering of vegetable

matter and into the spring smells of the coniferous forest. The spring flowers – the gentians, orchids and saxifrages – are out and

blooming, as they are whenever he awakes from his winter sleep, but the

sun is low in the sky. Spring is early this year, therefore the climate must be

becoming warmer. Then the pain of hunger strikes him and he digs at the remains of his

food store. Several times throughout the dark winter he broke his trance to

feed and now there is little left. Most of the tubers have rotted and the seeds

germinated, but there are still a number of items that are edible. These he

devours with no hesitation, to give him the strength to look for more. There is plenty of food about, since it is the beginning of the time of

swarming insects and the damp soil and decaying needles underfoot house a

vast array of luscious wriggling things. Beneath the bark of the trees, too,

grubs and beetles burrow and tunnel in their millions, and birds are here as

well, having travelled up from the south, as his mate will hopefully do, to feed on the insects. When his stiffness has worn off, and he has built up his

strength again he will also be able to catch the birds and the little rodents

that have come out to feed on the tender shoots and saplings. Looking for food, he rips the bark from a fallen tree, one which must

have died during the winter. He remembers when it was merely a sapling –

over 60 years ago, but numbers mean nothing to him. He only remembers. After building up his strength for a few days he sets about the task of

building his fortress. It will be made of wood, comfortable and soft inside,

but harsh, jagged and defensive outside. It needs to be, since there are many

marauding males about that would fight him to death for a fertile female

like his. He builds his fortress on what remains of last season’s, and that is

quite a lot. As the years go by his building techniques improve and his

structures become more durable. Little remains, however, of the guide walls, and these have to be rebuilt

every spring. Reaching out in two directions in a huge V-shape, open end to

the south and with the fortress at the apex, the structure stretches for over

2000 paces in each direction. It is made of sticks pushed into the ground

and thinner sticks woven in between. It is not meant to be a barrier, but

more of a marker across the landscape. His mate has wintered in the milder

climates away to the south, and will be travelling northwards very soon. It

is essential that she does not miss the fortress and go blundering on

northwards, or end up in some other male’s domain. With construction completed, he starts to build up the food supplies in

the fortress itself. After a few days he hears an excited chatter, and he looks

expectantly from the mouth of the now comfortable fortress. She is there,

walking confidently up the side of the barrier. Yes, she carries the winter’s baby with her. With joy, one of the few emotions he can feel, he rushes to meet them,

and to fondle her and stroke the child he sees for the first time. A female. That is good: there are enough males around. This is the first child that he

has had by this female, although he has had many others by other mates. Females are much shorter-lived than males. They cannot sleep the cold

times away, as they have to travel south to give birth in the winter. Many of

his females aged and died during his life, while many others became lost in

the migration, dying on the trek or ending up in other fortresses. Each creature has its allotted life span. Barring accident or disease it

survives for about 2000 million heartbeats. For the migrating females these

heartbeats average about 70 per minute. For the hibernating male this

average is kept up during waking times, but during the late autumn, winter

and early spring it drops to about 20 per minute. The remainder of his

bodily functions slow down accordingly. As a result the male’s lifespan is

between four and five times the length of the female’s. In the dimness of his weak imagination he sometimes thinks that it

would be better if babies were born during the summer so that they could

all hibernate together; but this would not be possible unless the growth of a

baby inside the female could be speeded up or slowed down, so that the

offspring of the spring mating emerged at a more convenient time. That cannot be...

yet. LEADER OF THE CLAN

There is no way across the water any more. In times past, low water

exposed broad expanses of brown rippled mud, with winding glistening

creeks, joining the flat marshes of the clan’s domain and the infinite

woodlands of the country beyond. At these times the clan could squelch

across the mud, churning up the black stinking subsurface, and go on short

forays amongst the trees and forests of the mainland. That is no longer possible for the mud flats are now permanently

submerged. The clan can know nothing of the reason, the shrinking icecap

thousands of kilometres to the north. They would not understand that the

melting ice is pouring water back into the oceans, and that the sea levels are

rising worldwide. They only realize that the island on which they now live

is more isolated than it has ever been at any time they can remember. It does not disturb them. The woods and marshes of the island supply

plenty of food for the small numbers that live there, and the rainy climate

provides enough drinking water. It has been only occasionally, in times of

severe hardship, that any of them have actually crossed the mud to the

mainland to forage. Mathematics and measurement do not come into their

lifestyle at all, but if they did they would realize that the 200 square

kilometres of the island are just able to support the 20 individuals of the

clan. The leader thinks of it in another way. He can walk right across the

island in half a day. This walk takes him through bushes with fruit and

undergrowth with tubers, and between the trunks of trees with nuts. Everywhere there are birds and small animals that can be caught. Walking

around the coast takes three days of daylight, and takes him across beaches

with burrowing creatures, over rocks with attached shellfish, and through

saltmarshes full of birds. A clan the size of his is well supplied, for the

moment. There were times when food was short, and they all went onto the

mainland; but that has always been dangerous. Other clans live there, and

they do not take to strangers. Now they will have to deal with any shortages

in some other way. Certainly it will be best if the clan does not grow any more. More

mouths to feed will be a disaster. If they can all eat less as well, it will help. The leader cannot anticipate any of this. His whole attention is taken up in

ensuring that all his people have enough food. He has noticed, however, that

one of his daughters, a very big-boned and heavy female, becomes hungry

and ill more often these days. At the same time another of his daughters,

this one very much smaller and more lightly-built than her sisters and

brothers, has a small appetite and is the healthiest of the whole clan. She

will certainly reach maturity and breed. DISAPPEARANCE OF THE PLAINS

Rain falls. It now falls for long periods and the grasslands are losing their

character. Instead of one short rainy season in the year followed by long

periods of dryness, there is now more rain all year round. The grasses thrived under the old conditions. Their tops were shrivelled

off by the sun, grazed away by animals and burned by periodic bush fires,

but they survived because of their protected underground stems, and grew

again from ground level. Few trees or bushes flourished under these

conditions, but the plains dwellers also did well here. Their exclusive diet

of grass meant that they could live here where no other large creature lived. They could spend the dry seasons in the thorn thickets that bordered the

grasslands and separated them from the humid tropical forests of the

equator, and they migrated out over the grasslands proper during the wet season, feeding as they went. Other large creatures could not cope with this

existence. Now, with the more frequent rains, the thorn forest is spreading over the

plains, and trees are growing where once there was only grass. With the

new conditions different creatures, ones that hunt meat for food, are

creeping out of the tropical forests. More and more often the plains dwellers

have to take themselves off out of danger. With their immensely long legs

they can quickly outpace any enemy, but this is becoming more and more

frequent. It is wasting a great deal of energy and eroding valuable eating

time. Over the past few thousand years the plains-dwellers have faced

problems like this, many times. Sometimes, when it seemed as if the

grasslands were going to disappear, herds of them went through the thorn

thickets and into the depths of the great rainforests, in the hope of finding

new pasture. None ever returned. Few went the other way, where the

grasses became shorter and sparser, where food became harder and harder

to find, and where even small creatures became rarer and more difficult to

see. The grasses in this direction eventually gave way to rocky and sandy

wastes, where the rainy season was even shorter and less reliable than it

was on the plains. In these previous times of crisis, however, the problem

was never long-lived: the grasslands established themselves once more. Now, with the increased rainfall, the grasses as the plains-dwellers knew

them are becoming obliterated by thorn forest. The only reliable expanses

of grass seem now to be found in the once-desert areas, and even these

unbeckoning wastes are changing because of the increased moisture. Grasses and low plants are finding purchase in the harsh rocky soil that

once they found uninhabitable. Perhaps in this direction lies the future

home of the lanky plains-dwellers. CAVE-DWELLERS

It has been, after all, just another temporary respite. The cold weather

returns. Winter becomes long and bitter, while summer dwindles into the

briefest of seasons, unable to melt the snows deposited the winter before. The southward movement of glaciers is again faster than the northward melting of their snouts, and the icesheets spread into the plains and

lowlands of much of the northern hemisphere. He seems to retire into his hibernation earlier and earlier each year, and

his sleep lasts longer and longer. At least the fish have still been coming to

the stream outside his sleeping cave. There was always food available for

him in the narrow valley. This year, however, it is different. After he awakes, he can hardly

approach the entrance of the cave, so bright is the glare of the snow outside. He waits for night to fall, so that the outside light will not hurt his eyes after

his long slumber. In his hunger he chews the moss from the cave walls and

the fungus from the floor. After a while the light fades, and he prepares to

face the outer cold. Suddenly, there is a strange screeching noise from deep

within the cave behind him. It becomes louder and, with a flurry of wings, a

black flock of bats hurtles upwards from the depths and out through the

cave mouth. In a reflex, stiff from long hibernation but still good enough for

the purpose, he shoots out his arm and grabs one of the furry creatures from

the air. It squeals once as it dies, and he eats it whole, chopping up the body

with his sharp front teeth and grinding up the little bones with the massive

molars at the back. The warm blood and juices warm his inside, and

presently he begins to feel fully awake. The torrent of bats is still blasting

out of the cave mouth, and he grabs another to eat. There is now no need to go outside. The humble plants at the cave

entrance and the unending supply of bats could keep him alive here for

ever. Then he remembers that there are birds that nest here, too, high up in

the cracks and gullies of the cavern walls, and small shrimps and insects in

the running waters deep down. These will be good for eating as well. He

does not need to go outside in the cold, at least not tonight. He turns his

back on the grey entrance and begins to grope his way back down the

tunnels into the comfortable depths. Dimly he wonders if any others of his type realize how much food there

is to be had down here. Sometime he will go out into the chill and find

some of them and bring them down. Another time. Tonight he has food to find. 50,000 YEARS HENCE

FAMILIES OF PLAINS-DWELLERS

The harsh hot wind hums over the wispy grass and redhard soil of the semi-

desert, drying out the skin of any creature exposed to it. Climates are

changing again and the whole of the world is feeling the effect. Here, the

grassland that had once been desert is turning back to desert again. After

40,000 years in which the climate has been relatively settled, in which

seasonal rains have been enough to sustain sufficient vegetation for the

herds of plain-dwellers, the food chain is becoming unstable once more. Over the years the plains-dwellers have changed. They still subsist

largely on the tough grasses, but now they have begun to vary their diet and

lifestyle in a number of ways. They have given up their wandering life and

now stay in the few places where they know there is water. Their broad

hands, with the blade-like callouses along the edge, have proved to be ideal

for digging in the ground, something that was first discovered when they

had to dig for water in the cracked and sun-baked hollows that in the rainy

season form the muddy water-holes. Soon it was realized that food, as well

as water, exists below the surface. Now they dig frequently for the moist

tubers and underground stems that keep many of the desert plants alive

during the dryness. Occasionally they will also chew and swallow a large

insect, or a burrowing mammal or lizard, but these are invariably thrown up

and spat out in disgust. The plant-eating digestive system with its bacterial

vats is far removed from the omnivorous stomach and intestines of the

plains-dweller’s far ancestors. Turning his back on the scorching wind, the plains-dweller heads back

towards the oasis with his load of tubers. Intermeshing his long fingers

makes a kind of basket of his hands, and this can hold a large quantity of

food. Now he must guard them against any enemies, for there are other

groups of plains-dwellers around, and they would stop at nothing to get at

somebody else’s food store. It is not just the dry wind and harsh sunlight

that are enemies to the plains-dwellers – they must fear members of their own kind. Not their own family, however; the tough conditions ensure that

every family is tightly bound and co-operative. There is trouble back at the oasis – he can feel it as soon as he crosses

the rocky ridge and descends into the hollow. Home is there, as safe and

impregnable as usual, its red baked-clay walls rising like cliffs, with its

entrances guarded by his young brothers and sisters; but there is an air of

strife about the place. It does not feel as secure and homelike as it normally

does. He passes through the entrance with no trouble – his brothers and

sisters recognize him instantly, and he enters the shaded courtyard within. Over by the well there seems to be some kind of dispute. He ignores it for

the time being. His first duty is to store the food that he has brought, and he

does this in one of the cool storage cells dug into the hard clay soil. Then he

emerges and goes to the well to see what is happening. It is the usual trouble. One of the younger females, his older sister, has

been caught mating. Their mother is understandably enraged, as she is the

one who gives birth in this family. The turn will come for the other females

when she has become barren, or is dead and gone, but that will not be for a

long time yet. Meanwhile the sons and daughters must concentrate on what

they have to do to keep the family alive, and not waste their precious time

in irrelevant mating. Conditions are too harsh for this. Everyone must do his

or her duty, continually, if the family is to survive. There can only be one

female giving birth at one time, and she must have the whole-hearted

support of everyone. Otherwise the birth-rate will run away, bringing the

family number beyond the present viable level of 20, and the family will

collapse through lack of resources. His sister seems abashed. She knows what she has done. It appears that

when she was confronted with her crime she turned on their mother and

attacked her, evidently in some kind of half-hearted bid to oust her from her

breeding position; but the mother is not yet old enough or frail enough for

anything like that. Now his sister, bleeding from cuts to the face and

shoulders inflicted by their mother’s handblades, scuttles through the crowd

to the entrance of Home. She will never be welcome here again. Already

her brothers and sisters are picking up stones to see her on her way. They

will be sad to lose her. Her duties as a wet-nurse will be missed, but not for

long since some of the younger sisters are almost old enough. It is better, on

the whole, for the family to lose an unreliable member. Outside the entrance she stops and looks back. The first stone is cast,

and misses. The second hits, but she does not go. Outside she will die,

unless the older brother who mated with her comes out to join her. Then

they may go far away and possibly found another family, if any of the other

families will let them. The brother is not coming. He has realized his error and will stay, doing

his duty to his mother. The sister eventually realizes this and, still bleeding

from cuts and bruised by the stones, walks off into the barrenness to die. The family will survive. THE ADVANCING DESERT

Without some water, no species can survive. The descendant of woodland-dwellers, Homo vates has retreated north before the advancing desert. Now he can retreat no more. He must find water or die. THE ADVANCING DESERT

He was no plains-dweller adapted to the searing heat of the desert. He was

in no way prepared for the dryness that had killed his tribe and was now

killing him. His dark skin was protecting him from the worst of the sun’s

blast, but without water he was going to perish. They could not move northwards any more, his tribe and he, despite the

fact that the arid lands were moving northwards year by year. They had

tried to stay ahead of it, keeping abreast of the zone where there were still

enough trees to supply their fruit and seeds, and still enough small animals

for their protein; but now the people of the lush north barred their path. They were not moving away from their homelands just because the people

from the marginal lands needed to survive. After a particularly fierce battle

the southerners had to retreat and find their own way of life in the desert. It has not worked. They are all dead but one, and he has not much longer

to go. The sun in his eyes dazzles him, the singing of the sands dulls his

hearing, the dust in his nostrils clogs his sense of smell and taste. He is

wandering lost and without the help of any of his senses. Hallucinations

about his tribe force themselves upon him – waking nightmares that chide

him for surviving while the rest perished. No matter, he is about to join

them. Then comes the other hallucination; the one about the water. Over there,

about 500 paces away, if he has the strength, and just below the soil surface

beneath the rocky ledge of a gully, lies enough water to save him. It is only

a dream and not worth any attention. Yet it is not like a dream, but more of a conviction that has been put into

mind pictures. Over there lies enough water to save his life. He does not

imagine it, he knows it. He finds the strength to pull himself in that direction, slowly, on hands

and knees against the abrasive sand and rock, until eventually he sees ahead

of him the rocky outcrop and gully of his hallucination. With a final burst of

energy he pulls himself into the hollow, and begins to dig the loose soil. After a while the fine powdery sand becomes coarser, cooler and more

cohesive. It is coming out as lumps, stuck together by moisture. He crams a handful into his mouth and sucks the water from it. Then he

digs further and finds the sand becoming wetter and wetter. After a long time he is finally refreshed. He must now look for food,

which is another difficulty; but there will be plants and small burrowing

animals around. Somehow he has solved the main problem of living in the

desert. He can see water. ISLANDERS

Isolated from mainland evolution, island-dwellers have developed a high-protein diet and reduced in size. Now, as a new species Homo nanus, the islanders return to the mainland, where the tundra-dwellers have adapted as a leaf-eating forest people. ISLANDERS

The icecaps and glaciers are in full retreat now, melting away to the poles

and withdrawing up the mountains. The climate is becoming warmer,

changing the conditions not only in the arid tropics but over every climatic

and vegetation zone of every continent. The retreat of the ice changes not

only the climate but the geography as well. Meltwater, gushing from the

rounded ice-tunnels and widening crevasses, floods into intertwined rivers

that wash across the gravel plains and empty into the ocean, causing sea

levels to rise over the whole world. In some places, however, once the

unimaginable weight of ice is removed, the land surface rebounds like a

slow spring, lifting it above its former level, and causing the sea level to fall

back. Then there is the volcanic activity, mostly at the edges of continents

and in strings of islands arcing across the oceans, producing new lands and

destroying others. All in all, it is a time of appearing and disappearing islands, of

continents joined by land bridges which then submerge, and of lowlands

engulfed by the seas and shallow seas that become plains bounded by the

banked shingle and sand of former beaches. The islanders have always found it easy to move from island to island,

floating upon the trunks of trees wrenched from their forest stands, or on

rafts built from the stems of smaller trees lashed together by vines and

creepers. They have used vessels like this to support them while they dived

for fish in the straits of the archipelagos. Now, however, this activity is

dangerous. The changing weather patterns are producing unfamiliar winds

and frequent storms, and changing the sea currents between the islands. More than one raft of island voyagers has disappeared in recent memory. One has found itself on the beach of the mainland – a region the

existence of which was only guessed at by the island people. After the

rigours of the accidental voyage the new country may be either an unending

source of plenty to the small hungry group of five islanders or deceptively

barren. The islanders’ original digestive systems allowed them to eat almost

anything, but millennia of island-dwelling on crags and slopes that

supported few nutritious plants have changed all that. Now they can only

subsist on the high-protein diet that they gained from birds and their eggs, and the fish and shellfish of the sea. No birds seem to nest on accessible

crags here, and the shingle beach gives little purchase for shellfish. There may also be enemies. Some huge figures are moving about down

the beach. In build, they are somewhat like the islanders, but they are more

than twice their size, and very slow-moving. There are about ten of them. The islanders do not know these creatures for descendants of the tundra-

dwellers. The tundra is dwindling away now, but for many thousands of

years groups of its inhabitants have been spreading southwards, changing

their diet and adapting their lifestyle as they went, through the coniferous

forests and into the zone of deciduous woodlands. Because they have been

forced to change all the time they have a better chance of survival than the

groups of their relatives who remain static on the tundra. Now they are

massive leaf-eating forest-dwellers – dim of wit but quite adaptable to

changing conditions. However, they do retain the thick deposits of fat that

are now superfluous to their purposes, and indeed could be disadvantageous

to them in the hot times that may come. Nor do the islanders realize that the

difference in size between them comes from the fact that the tundra-

dwellers were created large by the ancient genetic engineers as a precaution

against heat loss in the cold north, and the islanders have become small

over the past few thousand years as an evolutionary adaptation to their

limited resources. The islanders have no fear of the great creatures. They see them, as they

see all living things that are not their own kind, as food. Nimbly they sprint

down the beach towards them. Alerted by the crunching and rattling of the

shingle under the tiny feet, the big tundra-dwellers see the little figures

coming, and dimly perceive that there is some kind of danger. They turn to

lope back into the forest, but they are too slow. Two of them are caught by the legs and brought down with a crash. One

is knocked senseless by the impact, the other is killed by quick bites to the

neck and face. The killing is not easy. The hide is thick and covered with a

woolly pelt, and there are deep layers of fat beneath. It is the blood that the islanders want, and they gorge themselves on that

of the slain tundra-dweller, balancing their feast with the carbohydrates

from the fatty deposits. The corpse carries more food than the group of

islanders can eat at one time, and having satisfied themselves they leave the remains to the white seabirds that have gathered on the shingle to watch the

feast. This seems to the islanders to be a waste of food. Together they pull the corpse of the second tundra-dweller up the shingle

and into the shade of the forest, before it begins to decay in the sun or is

eaten by scavengers. If only there were some way of keeping such a big

creature alive while feeding from it. Then there would not be so much

waste. The massive form stirs; it is not dead at all, merely stunned. The

islanders seize it by the limbs and pin it to the ground. They are not letting

this one get away, nor are they going to let it die and rot before they need

the food again. 50,000 YEARS HENCE

AQUATICS

Piscanthmpus submarinus

As millennia pass, the aquatics become even more perfectly adapted to their seagoing existence. They become less bulky and more streamlined, with more efficient paddles and swimming organs. They begin to resemble the extinct seals and, like them, subsist on a diet of fish. However, they do not need to breath at the surface of the water. Their gills can extract all the oxygen they need from the sea. With the retreat of the pack-ice, aquatics move into unknown waters. This is essential if they are to survive a steady increase in population. Water carries sound long distances, so the aquatics have been able to develop a complex system of communication. This keeps the school in contact when on the move, but allows sufficient space to feed. SCHOOLS OF AQUATICS

In the green depths the school of aquatics works its way along the ocean

bed. Spread out over a large area, each individual invisible to the next, the

school keeps in tight contact by wails, clicks and twitterings – distinct but

comprehensible sounds that form a language. The body of creatures moves northwards, along the lines of magnetic

force which are becoming more powerful again as the centuries go by. The

direction they take is north, as geography goes, but the magnetic influence

that they follow is towards the south. Since the time when the magnetic

field disappeared, producing the fatal effects on the technological

civilizations of the time, a great change has taken place deep within the

globe. The magnetic field has re-established itself, but now there is a south

pole where the north pole once was, and a north pole where the south pole once was. This reversal has little relevance to any of the creatures that now

inhabit the world. The water temperatures and currents are also changing, and this is

leading to different patterns of fish movement around the globe. It may be

that shoals of fish are gathering in areas unexplored by the aquatics, areas

now free of pack-ice. If that proves to be the case, then it will make sense to

move into those areas. The tropics are becoming overfished. The ocean never was particularly productive of food, considering that it

covers more than two-thirds of the surface of the Earth. Back in the days of

technological man, the living resources of the water were seized, exploited

and lost in a short period of time. Since then nature has restocked, but the

aquatics have always been there. Like the technological man that created

them, the population of the aquatics has grown and grown. As they come to

understand more about their own bodies, about diseases and injury and

about reproduction, the birth-rate has exceeded the deathrate. Also, the life

span of the individual has increased enormously and has been doing so for

tens of thousands of years. Around the coral reefs of the tropics the fish are vanishing, and the other

valuable sea creatures are dying off. Undesirable and inedible species are

moving in to replace them. The once beautiful and colourful fringing reefs,

barrier reefs and atolls are now rapidly becoming dead skeletons of their

former glory. It is not just the fault of the aquatics. The sea level is rising

everywhere as well, and the tops of the reefs cannot grow quickly enough to

keep pace with this. As the water becomes deeper and darker, the algae that

grow with the corals and help them to feed are dying off, and the corals

themselves are perishing. Although the aquatics cannot see colour (the rod

cells in their eyes were developed at the expense of the cone cells in order

to increase their low-light vision) they can see enough to know that their

preferred environment is slowly dying. The aquatic colonies are everywhere

in the shallows that surround the small tropical islands, becoming more and

more crowded and more and more desperate for new resources, new food,

new spaces. That is why schools of them are moving northwards into the cooler

waters; and others are turning their attention to a hostile environment – that

above the surface of the ocean. MELTING ICE

She will be able to remember her way home, she keeps telling herself. No

matter how far the drifting mat of vegetation takes her or her family, she

will remember her way back. She, and the rest of her tribe, have been blessed in this. They have a

knowledge that enables them to navigate to any place they want to go. The

area where they live has been occupied by their ancestors since before the

coming of the ice. Because of this they can actually remember the coming

of the ice, and the places to which the different generations moved. It has all

changed now that the ice is going back, leaving the landscape different from

how it was before. Nevertheless they have always been able to travel to

whatever place their ancestors knew would be good for food or shelter. Now the ability had let them down. They wanted to go to a great river

that their ancestors remembered from the dim past. Plenty of the fish were

to be had in that river, and good shelters in the gorges through which it ran. However, when they arrived, the gorges had been gouged out by ice into a

broad U-shaped valley with little shelter anywhere. What is more, the river was in spate. The ice, away up at the head of the

valley, must have been melting much more quickly than usual, and the

water was hurtling down the valley floor in brown and white torrents,

tearing at the river’s bed and banks. The floor of the lower valley seemed to

have been clear of ice for many years, because a coniferous forest had

begun to grow in the soggy peaty soil. It was in this forest that the small

group were resting when a sudden surge of the river wrenched away that

part of the bank, trees and all. The intertwined roots and the solid trunks of

the trees had bound the soil together and kept the whole chunk afloat as a

kind of a raft, and the unfortunate group was carried away downstream. Then night had fallen. The roaring of the river became quieter as it

widened and slowed. There was no moon and the banks became invisible in

the darkness. She had panicked. With no visual landmarks her memory was not

functioning. Another sense deep within her, a sense that should help her to

find direction, was still working but it was very weak. She knew from

experience that when she relied on this other sense and thought that a

certain place was in one direction, it always turned out to be in the completely opposite direction. Something big must have changed

completely since the days before the ice. She had had to resign herself to

the possibility that she would never see her tribe again. Now it is dawn, a cold grey dawn that brings nothing to warm the

huddled and shivering figures on the floating island. The land has gone now

and there is nothing to be seen but grey choppy sea. The drifting island

consists of little more than a few trees and some trapped soil. There is no

cover or shelter anywhere, let alone food. The food will be irrelevant. They will all die of cold and exposure before

they starve to death; unless they can remember something that their

ancestors used to do under these circumstances. There was something, she remembers vaguely. It was something to do with rubbing sticks. 500,000 YEARS HENCE

500,000 YEARS HENCE

SOCIALS

Alvearanthropus desertus

Strictly-regulated and disciplined, social living produces a stable and efficient society essential for surviving in the more inhospitable places on the Earth’s surface. However, genetic aberration occasionally produces individuals whose responses are not standard, and these introduce an element of chaos into the tightly-structured existence of such communities. Within the society, responses to danger are consistent and predictable – as are responses to any other stimuli. Functions are hierarchical and rigidly defined. The hand-blades, originally developed to cut down thick grasses, have evolved as weapons making Alvearanthropus desertus a dangerous foe. When socials fight, it is to defend territory. The socials evolved from the earlier plains-dwellers, the adult males are warriors and hunters. The juveniles of Alvearanthropus desertus do most of the food-gathering. The females are confined to the community, looking after the young and the breeding mother. Only one female breeds at a time. The rest of the community revolves around her breeding cycle. STRINGS OF SOCIALS

A string of figures winds rapidly through the arid scrub, kicking up clouds

of dust from the red powdery soil. The sun is rising to the height of its heat,

and soon the open semi-desert will be no place for any living thing. Despite

their dark skins, and the protective covering of hair over their heads and

backs, the socials would not be able to tolerate the shrivelling temperatures of mid-day. That is no problem, since at their speed the string will reach the

Home before the conditions become too bad. The spine of the string consists of about 30 youngsters, each carrying his

or her allocated load of roots and tubers in woven bags. Moving parallel to

them on both sides are about a dozen mature males, their sensitive eyes and

ears scanning the red and grey landscape for potential enemies, their elbows

bent and their huge bladed hands dangling in front of them ready for the

defence of the string. At the tail of the string two of the young gatherers are carrying a living

creature between them. It is somewhat like one of the socials but smaller,

and it does not have the long legs that allow the string to move so quickly. The two socials that carry it have interlocked their arms to form a kind of

seat, and on this the creature perches with its arms around the necks of its

supports. They treat this creature with care: it is their seeker. Without a seeker the semi-desert would not yield up its tubers and roots,

and its water deposits would remain hidden. Socials would use up their

energy and time roaming the vast wastes in random attempts to find new

food supplies. The seekers, although they are not part of the socials’ family

and lead their own lives within the Home, are a valuable part of the

community. The stringmaster pauses. There is something not quite right about the

landscape ahead of them. He barks a single word and the whole string stops

instinctively. They all drop down behind the scrubby bushes, to become

invisible, but the cloud of their dust remains over their heads like a flag. It is another gathering string, one from another community, encroaching

on neighbouring gathering land. With a few quietly grunted words, the stringmaster commands the young

gatherers into a tight huddle, surrounded by about half of the fighting

males, while the rest of the males spread out in a defensive arc facing the

interlopers. They need not have troubled with the stealth. The interlopers know they

are there and are approaching in a determined advance, eschewing any

cover. The stringmaster views the approach in dismay. This is no gathering

string that has lost its way. It is a band of warrior males, without a juvenile

gatherer or a seeker amongst them. No further need for camouflage. The stringmaster barks orders that jab

his own warriors into action. Up they leap from their cover and flail into the

oncoming party. Instantly the stringmaster sees that his own fighters are

outnumbered by about three to one, and so he calls forward those that are

guarding the gatherers and their burdens. As for himself, he steps back out

of the way of the fighting. He is too valuable to be wasted in the thick of the

bloodshed. They are still outnumbered but they fight on, kicking out with their

elongated legs and feet, hacking downwards and sideways with the cutting

blades of their hands, poking and gouging with their long fingers. The

gristly handblades, originally designed to cut grass, can now shear through

flesh and smash bone, and these are the main weapons of both sides. Severed limbs and heads lie in the dust, still pumping blood, as the

defenders are forced back to the knot of helpless gatherers. The last warrior to fall is the stringmaster himself. He is happy to give

his life for the defence of the string; less happy that it has been in vain and

the string is lost. His last regret is that he will now never have the chance to

mate with the mother. After the defending warriors, the gatherers are easily slaughtered. Soon

there is nothing left of the original string but the seeker, who stands

unmoved by the carnage. The interloper’s stringmaster addresses it and it

agrees to lead them to its own Home. After all, it is a seeker. Seekers obey

socials, whatever their Home. The attacking stringmaster dispatches two of his warriors back to their

own Home to summon young gatherers to take back the booty – warriors do

not carry. He assigns about a third of his men to guard it where it lies. Then

he organizes the remainder into a raiding string and has the seeker lead

them towards the Home of their enemies. This string must move slowly,

since the seeker cannot run as fast as the socials, and it cannot now be

carried. Warriors do not carry. Towards the blaze of noon, the bulk of the Home appears on the horizon. From a distance it would be unnoticeable. All that can be seen is a pair of

ventilation chimneys that look just like the solid pointed towers of the

beautiful and sacred insects that inhabit the entire region. The Home itself is

in a hollow, an impenetrable fortress. Smooth walls, with no hand- or

footholds, red and hard as bone, curve upwards enclosing the entire colony in an impregnable dome, the shape of a tuber. Only the two tall chimneys at

the top break the symmetry. Near the top a crack in the structure is being

repaired by a small group of gatherers, moist red clay being kneaded and

pressed into the damaged area. In this vast structure are the mother, the

infants, the juvenile gatherers, the female nurses, an unknown number of

male warriors, old male drones, a ghetto of seekers and, most important for

the raiders, the foodstores that would sustain them all. The raiding stringmaster, having hidden his warriors and crept as close

as he dares, peers over the rise of the land not far from the Home. It is as

well guarded as his own. Each of the ground-level entrances is guarded by

several warriors, and most likely many more warriors are housed in

chambers close to the entrances. Breaking in is going to be difficult. The vague stirrings of an idea occur to him. He often has ideas. Even

when he was a mere gatherer he did, but it was difficult to work on them

then, when everything that he did was prescribed, regimented and expected

of him. Likewise, when he had grown to a warrior and his female siblings

had gone to be nurses those ideas came to him. Only in the heat of battle,

when an individual could act on his own initiative for the good of the

Home, could any of them come to fruition. Most of the time events showed

that his ideas had been justified. That is why he is now a stringmaster. This

idea, however, is something quite novel – disturbingly so. Stealthily he makes his way back to his warriors and the captured seeker. With much difficulty, through the few words they possess, he gives the

seeker his instructions. The seeker is puzzled. It takes a long time to

convince him of what is required, as this is something new to him as well. Eventually he seems to understand and goes off towards the Home. The guardian warriors at one of the entrances start into attentiveness as

they see the lone seeker scrambling down the dusty slope towards them. They demand to know what he is doing. Dutifully the seeker states that the

string is under attack, not far away, in the direction from which he has

come. When he is asked for more details, however, he is blocked. He was

not told to report anything more. As these warriors ask him questions he

becomes more and more confused. The answers he should give are in

conflict with the statement he was told to make. He was given orders by

socials. Now he is asked questions by socials that would confuse the first orders. He throws his arms over his head and collapses to the ground. He

cannot understand what is happening. Nor can the defending warriors. What they have understood is the report

that one of their strings is under attack. They rouse the other warriors of the

Home and form themselves into a fighting string, running out in the

direction indicated by the gibbering seeker. Once they have gone and things are quiet, the raiding stringmaster brings

his warriors stealthily from the other direction to the abandoned entrance. He picks up the cowering seeker and shakes him back into attention. Then,

preceded by the seeker, the raiding party enters the Home. There are still warriors in the chamber behind the entrance, but these are

soon silenced, and the raiders make their way into the interior. Pushing the

unhappy seeker before him, the stringmaster and his warriors penetrate

deeper and deeper into the Home. The air becomes heavier and stuffier. This is to be expected. As the females grow to be nurses and, in a few

instances, mothers, they spend their time deep in the airless tunnels and

chambers. Their metabolism slows, allowing them to consume less air and

less food, and devote their lives to feeding mother and infants. The seeker dodges out of the passage and into a side chamber,

illuminated by a dusty shaft of light slanting through a hole in the outside

wall. A great commotion arises. This is part of the seekers’ own quarters, a

rambling disorganized muddle of chambers and passages within the walls of

the Home, a place of chaos and random life where these low creatures mate

and play at will, fed and cleaned constantly by the Home’s nurses. The

seekers, despite their disgusting habits and lifestyles, are essential to the life

of the Home. The dark bobbing shapes of his companions welcome him back but are

then thrown into consternation by the appearance of strange warriors behind

him. A nurse, bringing the seekers their daily ration of food, is shocked into

immobility and stares stupidly at the raiders. A bowl of chewed roots and

flattened insects falls from her long hands. They kill her immediately but

leave the seekers alone. The captured seeker has now collapsed in terror and

confusion amongst his companions and will obviously be of no further use. The stringmaster and his men push onwards and downwards, feeling their

way in the darkness now. Occasionally they come across the soft slow body

of a nurse, or the active one of a juvenile, and these they kill without hesitation. Those that are nimble enough to escape are ignored. The raiders

are after more important prey. Eventually, in the dimly-lit chamber beneath one of the ventilation

chimneys, they find her: enormous and reclining, fat with obesity and

pregnancy, her hairless skin over folds of fat glistening dimly in the gloom

– the mother. Around her move a dozen pale nurses carrying in food and taking away

waste. Slow drones, their weapon hands hanging long unused by their sides,

stare stupidly at the intrusion. All cluster around the mother in a vain

attempt at protection. The raiders move in. The nurses put up no fight at all, but the drones,

remembering their glorious days as warriors, make a token struggle – and

perish. At last the prize is won. In the dimness the mother pathetically tries

to pull her great bulk away, on her stunted legs and wizened arms. She lets

out a plaintive wail as the raiders fall upon her, and she dies under their

hacking hands. Not long afterwards, the mother’s body hangs head-down from the

partly-repaired crack on the outer wall of the Home. The stringmaster

stands in triumph above it. All the fighting is done now. The returning

strings of defending warriors, those that had been lured from the Home by

false information, are totally demoralized by the sight. Their tightly co-

ordinated groups break up and scatter, and the individuals wander off into

the arid landscape, inevitably to die. The Home is the stringmaster’s now. Normally he would send

messengers to their own Home, and they would return with gatherers who

would strip the captured place bare and carry all the food and the seekers

back to their own, thus expanding their hunting territory. This time, though, he is going to do something different. This whole

incident has been different so far. There has never been a Home won over

by using deceit, a totally alien concept amongst the socials. Their language

is simple, but it has always allowed for individuals to express themselves,

for stringmasters to communicate orders to warriors and seekers, and for

gatherers to describe the whereabouts of food supplies and their

dimensions. This is the first time that their language has been used in a

deliberate way to deceive. It is indeed a new and useful development,

showing great promise for the future. The other difference in this campaign is that this Home is not going to be

destroyed. There will still be young nurses cowering in the tunnels and

warrens below, one of which he will make the new mother. The other nurses

and the few juvenile gatherers that are left will naturally be loyal to her, and

his warriors will remain loyal to him, or he hopes that they will until he can

raise new ones of his own. He will send deceitful word to his former Home

that his own string has been wiped out, so he will not be missed. For the first time a new Home will be established, not by a mating pair

cast out of a single Home, but by uniting two strong Homes, drawing on the

strengths of each. 500,000 YEARS HENCE

BOAT PEOPLE

Homo mensproavodorum

The inherited skills that began with the making of fire threw up the memory of boat building. With the forbidden memory came an instinctive drive to use it. Descendents of the memory people, the boatbuilders can now travel freely to colonize habitats not their own. Sharp teeth and hooked claws are their narural weapons, but with the discovery of metal comes the blade. The aquatics have devised a mthod of returning briefly to the land, carrying their own saltwater environment within a tough sphere of gel. Faced with enemies, they are slow and vulnerable. BOATBUILDERS

The working of metals had been a forgotten art; but then it was remembered

– and forbidden. The making of boats had likewise been forgotten and then

remembered and had likewise been forbidden. Now those who have dared to practise these skills are dispossessed. The

boats they made carry them to safety, away from the anger of the remainder

of their people. The boats are sturdily-built, of planks cut by metal tools and pinned

together with wooden pegs. Someday they will be able to build them of

metal – if this is permitted. For now the five boats are carrying the 43

individuals who represent the only group of beings in the world with the courage to use the remembered knowledge of their ancestors. The woven

sails bulge with the wind that they know will carry them to the islands in

the warmer regions of the globe. It is not that they lack the conscience and moral terror of the rest of their

people, just that they feel strong enough to overcome any danger. They

know, deep inside them, that the knowledge their ancestors gained,

generation by generation, eventually destroyed them. They know that their

ancestors made things, that they took power from the sun and the sea, from

the ancient concentrated remains of life, from the breakdown of the very

forces that held matter together. With this power they took metals, food and

other materials from the solid Earth and from the living creatures that

existed on it. They were able to increase their life spans, eradicate the

diseases and accidents that held populations in check, and spread over the

whole surface of the Earth. Eventually the Earth had become too crowded

and burdened to carry them, and they perished under the weight of their

own technical cleverness. All this they remembered, although they hardly

understood it; but the inherited memory of the loss of everything that their

ancestors had achieved was enough to forbid the use of the inherited

memory of the means of achieving it. All abided by this, except for the boatbuilders, who continually flouted

their people’s taboo on using their ancestors’ knowledge, and were

persecuted for it. They fought back with blades, but the overwhelming

hostility had driven them away from their fertile homeland. Now they are

on the run, but it may not be for long. Many of their boats have been left

behind, and it seems likely that the more zealous of their enemies will come

in pursuit. Although boatbuilding is forbidden, sailing them may not be –

and everybody shares the memory of how to sail. What is more, their choice of destination has been made on the basis of

inherited memory. Their pursuers, using the same mix of ideas, inspiration

and basic knowledge that the inherited memory entails, will come to the

same conclusions. There is no such thing as secrecy now. After many days of steady winds, the fugitives see the first of the

islands. It is as they expect. The first sign is a cloud on the horizon; blue

hills appear next, then the green of lowland vegetation, and finally the white

streak of beach. All is as predicted – except for the bubbles. Several shining bouncing globes are moving up the beach. The

puzzlement that they produce in the boatbuilders is short-lived, however, as

the boats are caught in the rising swell of the shallowing sea. The waves

that have pulsed unnoticed across the open ocean are now funnelled and

magnified as the seabed shallows, building up into steep walls of green

water that curl over and crash into an oblivion of sparkling white spray and

surge, hissing up the hot sandy beach. In this turmoil the boats heave

upwards, dive into the hollows and are flung towards the land. As the prows

crunch into the beach, the boatbuilders jump out, splashing ankle-deep in

foam and sand, and drag their vessels to safety. Then, when all are safely

ashore, they collapse onto the beach in joy and exhaustion. Although the

voyage was completely predictable, because of their common memory, they

have been very uneasy during their days at sea. That was not their

environment at all. One of their females notices it first: the huge translucent sphere beneath

a sagging palm tree at the head of the beach. They had all seen the bubbles

from the sea, but had ignored and then forgotten them. It was always the

way that the inherited memory was more powerful than that developed by

the individual. In size, the sphere could probably be encompassed by the

outstretched arms of three people. It is shiny with a greenish tinge, and its

base is spread and flattened by its own weight. Its outer covering seems

flexible and the whole thing wobbles as it rolls slowly down the beach

towards them. Sand adheres to its outside as it moves, but dries and drops

away very quickly. The female who first saw it stands and watches it roll right up to her. All

watch, to see what happens next. Inherited memory cannot guide them now. Before there is time for reaction, a silvery arm shoots out of the side of the

sphere, seizes her hand and tugs it inside. Then it starts rolling towards the

water’s edge, dragging the surprised female with it. When she realizes what

is happening she begins to scream, but she and the sphere disappear beneath

the surf before anyone can do anything about it. The travellers stare after her, stupidly. Then several more of the spheres

appear at the head of the beach. They do not seem intent on attack – they

roll towards the sea, avoiding the party. Anger, an emotion not often felt by

the boatbuilders, surges to the surface, like one of the bursting waves, and

as one they launch themselves in a revenge attack at the nearest sphere. Surrounded, the sphere cannot move, but it seems to waver, this way and

that, to try to break free. Its surface is yielding but too tough to be

penetrable. Blows and punches are absorbed and bounce right back. Then

one of the boatbuilders brings a blade from the boat and plunges it into the

glistening surface. The sphere bursts, and a rush of salty water gushes over the attackers

and sinks into the dry sand. The punctured surface has collapsed into slimy

gel, releasing seawater. In the middle of the stain lies a strange creature,

gasping. Like them it has a black skin, but the skin is completely smooth and

hairless. The head is like that of a fish, with big eyes that do not seem to be

functioning in air. The mouth is huge and gaping. No neck separates the

bulbous head from the streamlined body. Gills on the chest flap

ineffectively, and the body narrows to a paddled tail. It is the arms,

however, that are most remarkable: they are human arms, complete with

hands and fingers. The thing flaps about on the beach pathetically as it

slowly dies of suffocation. The sea creature has devised some means of coming onto land and

bringing its own environment with it. If these islands are now the domain of

these creatures it is going to be difficult to settle here, for they have proved

to be undeniably hostile. Moreover, what will happen when the boatbuilders’ pursuers arrive?

1 MILLION YEARS HENCE

ONE MILLION YEARS HENCE

HUNTER SYMBIONT

Moderator baiuli

Communication between hunter and carrier has been simplified to a telepathic link – the huge slow-moving tundra-dwellers controlled directly by the weaker but agile-minded hunters. Fights, when they happen, are usually ritual. Death is unexpected. As the icecaps retreated, the symbiont tundra-dwellers – Baiulus moderatorum – retreated, living at high altitudes and near the poles. Nowhere else is there a suitable environment. HUNTERS AND CARRIERS

The leader starts from his sleep because his carrier is uttering grunts of

alarm. Dawn is almost here, and the sun is already shining on the highest

snow-clad peaks of the range, although the valleys are still in deep purple

shadow. The mountain birds have set up their calling and the short grass

beneath him is damp with dew, but his fine pelt keeps him from the chill. What has disturbed his carrier?

He unwinds his long limbs from around his female and rises to his

spindly legs in the cold half-light. Most of the rest of his clan, hunters and

carriers, are asleep. He can see the hunters, huddling in pairs or with their

children on the slope. The huge white shaggy forms of the carriers are more

visible, forming a loose defensive circle around the group. His own carrier,

whom he thinks of as Oyo, is awake and alert, disturbed by something that

he cannot see. Could it be one of the distant creatures from the far lowlands?

It is not

really likely, since they rarely come this far up the mountains, particularly at

this time of year. Nor is it likely to be one of the big birds. They do not

attack so early in the morning. On all fours (his usual posture) the leader trots around the group to

check that all is well, and realizes that he is not the only one awake. At the

far side of the circle two hunters are mating, with gentle noises. He looks

around and, true enough, their carriers are mating too – a rougher exercise

accompanied by hoarse grunts. Certainly nothing is amiss here. He scrambles over to where his carrier stands, a white silent dutiful

column. Without a word he scrambles up the fur and onto its back, resting

his narrow chin upon its usual spot on the broad cranium. The massive

shaggy arms come up and clutch him firmly. Now he can communicate by

thought, without clumsy language. With thought he commands the great Oyo to turn slowly so that he can

scan the lightening landscape. He does not realize it, but this is far from the

landscape of his ancestors. The hunters and the tundra-dwellers first came

together on the chill wastelands bordering the retreating northern icecap. The tundra-dwellers were well adapted to the cold, and their great bodies

could generate enough heat to keep the slim-limbed hunters warm. The

hunters for their part were nimble enough to catch the most evasive of food,

and to catch enough to feed both of them. Together they made up more than

the sum of each. There is no icecap left now and no tundra, and nowhere in the lowlands are there any environments that suit them; the forests and

woodlands are more suited to different humanoid creatures altogether. Only

in a few places, on chilly peaks and in cool mountain valleys, are conditions

still right. In these isolated places the symbionts linger, marooned as the

colder conditions withdrew up the mountains, and towards the pole where

they disappeared. Nevertheless there is still a good living in the mountains: plenty of small

mammals and birds for the hunters to hunt for themselves and to share with

their carriers, and plenty of grasses, mosses and lichens for the carriers to

scrape up and share with their hunters. Hunters and carriers mate at the

same time – the mating of a pair of hunters inducing mating in their

respective carriers, and vice versa. This usually results in the birth of a

hunter baby at the same time as a carrier baby. Both babies are carried by

the parent carriers for about six years, at the end of which the young

Hunters choose their own carrier of the same age and same sex. The family groups move with the seasons, from the grassy slopes of the

valleys in the winter and spring to the flower-strewn bluffs and crags of the

peaks in the summer and autumn. The habitable areas, although productive,

are few and scattered, and the tribes of symbionts have their own ranges. Down the brightening slope, with the grey mist of the valley behind it,

stands a stranger. That is what had disturbed Oyo: the massive shape of a

carrier, with the squat hummock of a hunter lying over its shoulders and

head. With a burst of thought the leader asks Oyo if it recognizes the

newcomer, but the dim-witted reply is inconclusive (direct questions like

this between hunter and carrier rarely yield anything useful).

The stranger

strides purposefully up the hill towards them. It is a challenge. Evidently this is a rogue male, thrown out of a clan,

possibly even thrown out of the leader’s own clan some time in the past. Wherever it came from its intentions are now clear. With thin yells and

reedy shouts – strange noises to be coming from the huge bulk of a

symbiont – the newcomer utters its threats and challenges. The leader

replies in like voice. The result is ritual. The hunters pull themselves back from the great

heads of their carriers, and hang on tightly with their own hands to the long

fur of the shoulders and back. This frees the carriers’ arms for the combat. Then, spurred on by the hunter’s thoughts, the great carriers that bear them

wade into each other, striking, slapping and pushing with the flats of their

vast hands. Most of the blows land harmlessly on the great areas of muscle and fur

on the chest and forearms. An occasional blow that lands on the face brings

blood from the nose or the lip, but does no serious damage. This sparring

will continue until one of the combatants, usually the attacker, tires and

turns away, or else falls over separating hunter from carrier. On this occasion the combat is quite predictable. Although the attacker’s

carrier is big (bigger than Oyo, in fact) the hunter does not have the mental

skill to guide its blows and punches to best effect. If, by chance, he did

become the leader of the clan, its future would not look good. Mental skill

is needed by a leader in order to judge the timing of the fruiting of food

plants, and to plan the routes of migration. This time, however, the leader’s mental agility is not proving to be

enough to counteract the strength of the attack. Oyo is cringing in pain from

the bruises and cuts from the blows which the opponent’s carrier is

hammering down with particular ferocity. The sharpness of the pain and

fear is picked up by the leader, through the same nerves and ganglions

along which he gives Oyo his orders. It is no good!

He is going to have to step down. Oyo will die if this

continues, so after all these years he must relinquish the leadership of the

clan. He had not anticipated anything like this. Yesterday he was at the

height of his powers and virility; now he must give way to a younger

symbiont. He will live out his days as an old and revered clan member,

nothing else. He steps back and turns round, presenting his naked back to his

opponent: the age-old sign of surrender. The clan now belongs to the

attacker. What happens then is totally unexpected, and quite against any tradition. The opponent’s carrier seizes him by the exposed neck and shoulder with its

huge hands. Strange thoughts and emotions burst through him from the

contact with his enemy – thoughts of rage and hate and uncontrolled

violence from the carrier, unchecked by the feeble commands of the

controlling hunter. The leader is torn free from Oyo’s fur and flung onto the ground. The

flood of alien thoughts ceases, as do the sensations of pain and panic from

Oyo. It is just as well. The attacking carrier brings down its great hands on

Oyo’s back and shoulders, flinging the dear creature to the ground, and

wrenches back its head, breaking its neck. The silence that follows is not just the silence of the horrified clan, who

have been roused from their sleep and are watching the fight earnestly. Nor

is it the silence of the hillside, produced when the birds are quietened by the

violence of alarming events. It is the aching silence of loneliness. Oyo is gone. Half of the leader’s being is dead, and the other half must

follow soon. He can no longer be a part of the clan, but must seek out a life

of his own and exist as best he can. This is always a failure. A hunter without a carrier, like a carrier without

a hunter, is always dead within a few days. Yet cutting through the searing grief is an even more troubling thought. The clan – his clan – is now in the charge of a symbiont that consists of a

powerful violent carrier that cannot be controlled by its hunter. The hunter,

as well as being weak, does not have the mental versatility to lead a clan. That much was evident during the fight. It is not just his own death and that

of Oyo he mourns, but the death of his entire clan and family. ONE MILLION YEARS HENCE

AQUATICS

Piscanthropus submarinus

As the aquatics spend more time on land, their tough protective bubbles refine and become more efficient. Eventually the gel becomes form-fitting, holding the thinnest layer of life-giving seawater against the aquatic’s body. This covering is enough to keep the skin moist, and to absorb oxygen from the air which is then absorbed through the gills. A steady increase in population among the aquatics has led to food shortages and famine. With the sea stripped bare, the aquatics face a hostile environment. The flexible envelope is made of gelatinous algae filaments and filled with seawater. Its close fit allows more freedom of movement than the earlier bubble. With food in short supply competition between species becomes, literally, a matter of life and death. Once out of the water, aquatics labour under their own weight. AQUATIC HARVESTERS

There is no more food growing here; it has all heen cleared out. The

ravaged soil has scraggy shoots sticking out of it, but it will be a long time

before these grow and bear anything worth eating. Dead tree trunks stand

gaunt and stripped, harsh splintery wood, killed by greed – no, not by greed,

by necessity. The leaves had to be taken to feed the aquatics, but now the

trek from the sea to the food is becoming longer and longer. Ghloob peers through the watery film and the gelatinous envelope over

his eyes. This work is dangerous and unpleasant, but the days of easy and

pleasant life disappeared long before his birth. It is said that once the sea,

their home, supplied all their needs, but then their numbers became too many, and all the food was gone. Famine raged. Whole populations

perished and sank into the dark deeps. Sometimes after famine, the fish,

krill and plankton would return, but this food source was never enough. As

soon as it came back it was exploited and destroyed once more. Nothing

can be done about it: if they want to survive they haye to eat; if they eat

they lose what they have and die. It is as if there can never be a balance. They live there but they intrude

on the natural system of things; and nothing that they do will make it any

better. Now they are exploiting the land as well, thanks to to the algal mats that

they have developed. Filamentous algae forming a fine mesh, impervious to

water but permeable to air, can be induced to make shapes that will hold

water. An aquatic can ascend from the ocean into the harsh sunlight and

thin air above, still immersed in seawater, but contained in a flexible

gelatinous envelope of algae filaments. Air passing through the envelope

keeps the water aerated, and the aquatic neither desiccates nor suffocates, as

long as the envelope holds. Progress has heen considerable. When the technique was first developed

the envelope had to he spherical, holding a vast quantity of water. The

adventurous aquatic moved along in this, rolling the squashy sphere around

him, a cumbersome process. Now, and Ghloob cannot rememher when it

was otherwise, the envelope is form-fitting. Only the thinnest of water

layers surrounds him and protects him from the harsh world of the outside. Movement is still difficult, though, and always will be. He feels his own

weight – an unknown sensation in his natural home – and he must pull his

elongated body along the ground with his arms. If he is carrying something,

he must wriggle along as best he can. Then he has to take care that the

jagged denuded ground does not rip the envelope. No, this is not natural. It has been good enough, though, to allow the aquatics to exploit all the

lands that border the ocean. They sweep them clean of any growing or

living thing, and do not give anything time to regrow. The teeming

populations below the waves cannot wait. In the distance, glimpsed hazily through the algal membrane, loom

shapes that could be trees, or they could just as well be naked rocks. Aquatics had no colour vision built into them when they were engineered,

and none has evolved since. He cannot communicate with his companions, but he hopes that his

actions will be clear. He humps his long body, in its glistening envelope, in

the direction of the shapes. The three others that are like him turn and

follow. The fourth, the one encased in the spherical bubble that looks like

one of the originals, is guided along by them. It is he who will enfold and

carry home any food that they find. They are travelling up a slope, which is not good. Distance from the sea

is one thing, but height above its surface is another matter altogether. The

aquatics live happily with the pressures experienced in the top layers of the

ocean, but they are under considerable strain when exposed to the reduced

pressures above the surface. To go any higher would produce all sorts of

unwelcome effects in their tissues. An abrupt contour line, above which

vegetation grows freely in many parts of the world, marks the limit of

aquatic exploitation. Beyond this contour line live the land people – strange beings who

neither understand nor tolerate the aquatics. There are the tree-dwellers, of whom the aquatics know little. They keep

themselves in the branches away above. Aquatics rarely look upwards (it is

difficult for them to do so), and so these beings are rarely seen. Then there are the ground-dwellers. Savage and hostile, they feed in the

undergrowth and the long-growing vegetation – the very materials that the

aquatics harvest. Gangs of them have been known to burst out of hiding and

set themselves upon harvesting groups, tearing at their protective

membranes with claws and teeth, and sometimes inflicting some damage. There is also the massive compound being, a huge basic creature,

bloated and misshapen, lumbering through the forests with four or five

spindly little figures attached to it, embedded in it, seeming to live off its

flesh. These beings cause no trouble; in fact, they sometimes blunder out

into harvesting parties where they are particularly vulnerable. In the open

they are easily brought down and the moving reef of flesh can be killed by

blows from an agile aquatic or drowned by being dragged within a

membrane. The small attached creatures – tiny wizened bodies with spindly

crablike legs and enormous mouths – become strangely pathetic without

their mount and scuttle clumsily for cover. There is good eating on the fat

creature and it is always borne back to the sea as a prize. Finally there are the fighters, which are a menace, because they seem

quite at home on the devastated areas left behind after harvesting. Their

home is in the drier parts of the landmasses, where little grows anyway. They are organized, and many dozen can attack at once, moving as a single

entity as if controlled by a single mind. Their forelimbs are cruel cutting

weapons that can slice through a living membrane with a blow and kill the

aquatic inside, so this time it is the aquatics who are the prey and their wet

dead bodies are dragged away to the fighters’ citadels. Of late, the attacks

have been so organized that it is evident that the skirmishes are no longer

defensive. Parties sally out with the firm intention of capturing and killing

the harvesting aquatics. These beings must be left alone, and their domains

avoided at any cost. The shapes prove to be trees after all, but the undergrowth beneath them

is patchy, curled and dead. Since the area down to the ocean has been

devastated and left open to the sky, the air moving off the sea has swept in

through the branches and between the trunks, drying up and battering the

fragile stems and shrivelling up the leaves. Loose sand and dust from the

bare lands has gusted in, suffocating the more delicate types. There is little

to be harvested here, but what there is must be taken. Ghloob and his companions reach out their hands through the

membranes and snatch up whatever is growing. Anything that is organic,

and contains proteins and carbohydrates, can be used as the basis for food,

however tough, however unpalatable. Bundles of leaves, stems, sticks,

insects, slugs – anything – are caught up and passed into the sphere of the

gathering aquatic. Small punctures in the membranes, like those caused

when hands pass through, seal up immediately and there is little or no

moisture loss. Before long the cache within the spherical bubble has become quite

large; large enough to take back. The five of them turn to make their

laborious way back to their ocean home, glistening welcomingly away on

the horizon. No sooner have they left the shade of the dying trees, and begun their

long slow descent, than Ghloob sees something at the periphery of his

vision, something moving. Slowly he turns his head. Ground-dwellers!

A whole pack of them!

They

are running towards the aquatics, waving sticks of some kind. His companions see the danger at the same time, and try to move more quickly. However, their laborious humping motion is not conducive to haste, and

anyway they cannot move faster than the spherical bubble containing their

harvest – the only reason they are here in this hostile environment in the

first place. The ground-dwellers quickly surround them, and as their hazy

shapes appear before him Ghloob notices something different about them. They are each carrying something: something like a blade at the end of a

stick. Ghloob has not much time to notice anything else, as he ducks out of the

way to avoid them, but after heaving himself along the ground for some

distance he turns to look back. The ground-dwellers have all set upon one

of his companions. They have plunged their weapons into his membrane

and are pulling it apart. With two creatures pulling in different directions

this turns out to be very easy, and the membrane collapses in a gush of

water leaving the stranded aquatic gasping in the circle of wet mud. Ghloob and the others crawl frantically away, towards the tempting but

distant sea, panic rising within them; with good reason, for the party of

ground-dwellers leave the dying aquatic and come running after the

straggler of the group and fling themselves upon him. Ghloob does not stay

to watch this time, but keeps wriggling. With every jump and jerk he expects to be attacked from behind, and his

membrane torn away from him. The waves of the ocean come closer and

closer, but agonizingly slowly. Will he make it before they catch him?

He

tries not to think about it, and keeps going. With an intense feeling of joy he feels the pressure of the first wave

close around him. He is safe, and at last he can look around. The bubble

with one of his companions and the gathered food has reached the sea. The

food is also safe, but at what cost?

Three companions are lost – punctured,

dehydrated and slaughtered on the distant dusty dryness. The ground-dwellers have never fought like this before. Perhaps the

aquatic harvesting has had such an effect on their lifestyle that they have

had to adopt these extreme measures to fight back. Maybe the conflict and

strife have forced them to find new ways of living and organizing

themselves just to survive. Ghloob’s algal envelope dissipates now that he is fully submerged, and

with graceful movements he descends the sloping seabed until he is below the push and pull of the waves, and home. Now he has time to ponder. Is

this organization and use of weapons by the ground-dwellers to be a feature

of all such attacks in the future?

Has the aquatics’ exploitation of the land

made even that more hazardous?

Is there nothing that they can do to feed

their people without making things worse and worse and worse, and

destroying everything that they have?

Is this to be the continuing fate of

intelligent life above and below the water?

2 MILLION YEARS HENCE

TRAVELLERS

The food will be there, and can be taken, as the travellers know. Every year

the enclosures ripen, the planters awake, feed, repair the enclosures if

necessary, plant the new seed and return to their slumbers once more. The

secret is for the travellers to time the journey so as to arrive before the

planters rouse from their long sleep. The planters are supposed to be a very

ancient race, and each one lives for many hundreds of years – if ‘live’ is the

right word. How can you be living if more than nine-tenths of your time is

spent asleep?

How did this come about?

It probably goes back to the time when the

differences between the cold times and the warm times were much greater

than they are now. There have always been animals that have hibernated –

slowed down their systems and gone to sleep during the coldest time of the

year. These creatures usually gather their food and store it, waking up and

eating from time to time; or else they eat so much when they are awake that

they build up stores of fat that nourish them while they sleep. The planters

were once normal, like the travellers, but probably not so intelligent. Back

when the ice had just shrivelled up from the continents and the ‘winters’

were still cold, they developed the ability to sleep away the harshest of

conditions, and they stored up food as well. Some of the seeds and grains

that they stored would have germinated by the time the stores were opened;

if the hibernation time were long enough they may even have fruited again. As the centuries and millennia passed, the planters developed the ability to

remain suspended until harvest time, when they would come out and eat,

plant the next crop and retire again. The travellers knew that it was possible for such things to happen. Vaguely they remembered the knowledge that their ancestors had

possessed, knowledge about changing conditions and changing life. There must never be any dealings with the planters. The planters build

their enclosures, and use the growing vegetation not just for food. They

gather their food from where it grows, but also plant it in places that will be more convenient for them to collect it from. They build walls and roofs of

stone and wood to protect what they have done, just as their remote

ancestors did. It was the beginning of the changes that eventually destroyed

everything – the land, the living things, themselves. Now nothing must be

altered, nothing must be built, nothing must be changed from its natural

state; that is the credo of the travellers. It is a sign of their strength that they know how to make their life easier,

but ignore the knowledge. Any one of them has enough inherited

knowledge to dig the burning stones or the naturally-distilled organic fluid

from the ground (if indeed there are any deposits of these left) and use their

heat to melt down the metal minerals. They could all break down the

substances from the rocks and use them for many varied purposes. They

know that it is possible to fly to the moon and stars, and they know how to

do it; but they will not. They will not call down the destruction once more. It is not just their memories that impress this credo upon them. Wherever

they travel, through the lush forests and woodlands or across the open

plains and deserts, they see the dismal results. In a forested valley, where

they remember once stood a city, the rocks that outcrop in the slopes of the

stream gullies are not natural. They are man-made, sometimes with

unnatural angles and faces that have miraculously survived 2 million years

of burial. The soil here is stained and streaked with red and green where the

vast volumes of metal that went into the artefacts have oxidized away to

dust. The area is disgustingly unnatural, and avoided. Elsewhere lie similar remains that are lethal to any creature that passes

close by. Even now, 2 million years later, the technological overproduction

of their ancestors has the power to kill. Nothing appears at the surface here,

but not far down lies the disintegrated ruin of some vast structure. So great

have been the natural forces of erosion and decay that nothing recognizable

of the original structure remains even underground, but some of the raw

materials still lie there, emitting a deadly force. Anyone crossing this area

sickens and dies. The travellers remember that it was something to do with

the generation of energy. This is why the travellers despise the dark-minded creatures, their distant

relatives, with whom they share the planet but who do not have the

remembered knowledge. These beings, such as the planters, constantly use

their minds and their hands to devise and construct artefacts. They are intelligent enough to think out anew the ways of doing things, although they

do not remember that these things have been done before. It is as if the

whole disease were starting all over again. Dig a shelter today. Build a house tomorrow. Clear a forest for a city the

day after. Choke the landscape with the waste materials the next. Plant a seed today. Cut down a clearing for many seeds tomorrow. Deforest and irrigate a valley the day after. Change the global climate the

next. Make a spade today. Make a spear tomorrow. Make an explosive

machine the day after. Engulf a plain with instantaneous fire and leave it a

poisonous ruin the next. Although the travellers make it their work to frustrate any of this activity

wherever they find it, they also use its results. In the far north where they go

when times are warm they eat the food grown in the enclosures by the

planters. In the far south, when they have travelled there along the spines

and ridges of high ground between the foul low-lying slimelands, they eat

the roots and tubers stored in the cooled chambers of the hivers. It is a

paradox that they do not even try to solve – they are, after all, human

beings. Things are set to change, however. It was not just the making of things

and the deliberate changing of the planet that killed their ancestors. The

planet itself undergoes changes from time to time, and these changes were

such that their ancestors could not withstand them. A force within the Earth

that allowed them to tell which was north and which was south died away

and then reversed: that was one of the factors. That same force is used by the travellers themselves; something, some

sense inside them, allows them to detect and follow it. Over the past few

generations, however, it has been fading away again, and now travel

between feeding grounds is going to become increasingly difficult. The travelling party of 15 contemplate this, as they sit in the cave mouth,

watching the rain hurtling down, stirring up the smells of the forest. This

cave, in fact this whole hillside, is unfamiliar to the party. They have never

passed it in previous years, so they must have gone well off course. It

should not be too much of a problem: once the skies clear they can take

their direction from the sun and the stars. If the skies clear. Night is falling, and the wet greyness is becoming darker. They are

going to have to spend the night here, but at least they have the shelter of

the rocky overhang. When morning comes there are only 12 of them. During the night

something has come out of the cave and taken away the other three –

something that their communal memory has not anticipated, something with

small humanlike feet that have left damp prints on the rock. The survivors move on. The skies are not clear, but they would rather

make a guess about which way to go than stay in this place. 2 MILLION YEARS HENCE

HIVERS

Alvearanthropus desertus

A harsh and arid habitat has forced the socials to evolve into hivers – all individuality curtailed by the group’s need to locate water and food. A hump of fat across the shoulders still provides sustenance in the barren season, while heavy lids now protect their eyes against sand. Longer legs allow the hivers to travel great disrances. The body and limbs of Homo vates, the seeker, have atrophied from lack of use. Telepathic powers have weakened its other senses and removed its need for eyes and ears. The hivers now feed, protect and carry their guides. 2 MILLION YEARS HENCE

THE HIVE

Alvearanthropus desertus/Homo vates

The hive itself is a massive rock-like structure, with breathing chimneys and thick vented walls similar to those of a giant termites’ nest. Flat sloping roofs jut out to provide shade in the heat of the day. Tunnels and shafts beneath the hive reach down deep into the water-table where food is kept cool by constant evaporation from the moist walls. Damp air from the lower levels is driven through the hive by wind movement across external vents. The queen is protected and provided for in caverns deep below the hive. Food is gathered for her by the young hivers. Warriors guard the ancient hive and her person. Nurses feed her young. 2 MILLION YEARS HENCE

HOST/PARASITE

Penarius pinguis/Nananthropus parasitus

The islanders have evolved parasitic feeding habits that rely on the tundra-dweller’s metabolic need to produce surplus fat. In this way, the obese tundra-dwellers have found an ecological niche that allows them to exist now that the tundra plains have disappeared and the mountain tribes failed. Gone is the tundra-dweller’s thick fur and winter colouring, the need to lose heat means that Penarius pinguis requires direct air to skin contact. Nananthropus parasitus have developed small blood-letting front teeth. The only function of the long fingers and toes is to allow the parasites to grip folds of fat. HIVERS

The seeker is a tiny, wizened object – a degenerate fragment of its ancestor. It has no need of legs, since it is carried everywhere, and so it has none. It

has no need of arms, since everything is done for it, and so its arms and

hands are atrophied. It needs neither eyes nor ears, since the only sense it

uses is deep down within its head, and has no external organ; so its eyes and

ears are sunken and shrivelled. It is merely a head with a nose and mouth,

and a little body. It nestles within the huge hands of the bearer – a sterile adult female that

has been turned away from life as a nurse and potential queen deep within the hive and kept at the surface as part of the foraging bands. The adult males, the warriors, have changed little in outward appearance

since the hive communities first evolved. If anything, their legs have

become longer, enabling them to cross open spaces more quickly and to

forage over large areas. Their bodies have become smaller, and have lost

their pot-bellied appearance, since the warriors hardly ever eat grass now

and have little need of the voluminous intestinal bacteria vats of their

ancestors. The cellulose-cracking enzyme produced by the engineered

pancreatic gland is still being produced, but not in such quantities as

previously. The eye-coverings are dark, shielded from the harsh glare of the

sun, and protected against the stinging sand by heavy lids. The nose is

bulbous, the internal passages winding between bony panels covered with a

damp membrane that moistens and cools the harsh desert air long before it

reaches the lungs. A bushy moustache around the nostrils and across the

upper lip filters the grit and dust from the breathed air. A smooth hump of

fat over the shoulders and neck is established in the wet and abundant

season, but this tends to shrivel away when the climates become dry. It is mostly in their behaviour that they differ from their ancestors. Now

they have no individuality at all, listening for the few grunts of command

from their leader and obeying blindly. It is not in the interest of the hive as a

whole for anyone to show an individuality, and so it was lost generations

upon generations ago. Now and again, however, it surfaces once more, and

under the influence of these throwbacks hives begin to experiment with new

and different ways of living, which nearly always end in failure. The

progressive hive dies, turns to dust, and the neighbouring hives absorb its

territory. As always, the youngsters, male and female, make up the gathering

parties, using their big hands to dig in the soil and carry the food that they

find. When they come of age, the males develop into warriors, and

eventually may become breeders. The females become nurses, with the

possibility of becoming queens some day; or else they become bearers,

entrusted with the task of satisfying every need of the all-important seekers. This day is much like any other. The party of gatherers, guided by the

seeker and guarded by the warriors, sets out from the hive in the pre-dawn,

the coolest time of the day and the best for travel. Behind them, a silhouette

against the lightening sky, lies the bulk of the hive; its flat roofs jut out like natural rock formations to produce the shade in the heat of the day, the

vertical walls beneath the overhangs form banks of variously-sized

openings for access and ventilation, and its many chimneys and breathing

funnels point up like fingers and arches against the sky. Deep below is the maze of passages and chambers dedicated to the

housing and comfort of the queen and her young offspring. Here lie the

food storage units cooled by the constant circulation and evaporation of

water from moist walls. The dampened air is then carried around the hive

through the living quarters by an ingenious network of finely-fashioned

holes and tunnels, driven by the natural movement of the wind across the

external vents. The vapour is eventually recondensed to liquid before the

stale air is lost to the outer atmosphere. The water for all this is brought up

from the deep wells and waterpits by capillary action through the rocks. The party, 100 strong, takes its usual route along the undulating foothills,

skirting the dreadful slimelands on the right, and the barren rocky uplands

on the left. Beyond, the slope widens out into a valley in which water flows

for much of the year, and where plants can grow and there are usually

tubers or thick roots to be had. Before their narrow path widens the leader of the party grunts an order

to halt. The seeker is agitated, but is not telling them that there is food close

by: it is telling them that others approach. With another grunt the leader calls the warriors together in a protective

wall; but they need not have worried. Those who approach pose no threat. It is full day now, and the party can see five or six shambling creatures

moving down the rocky slope towards the slimelands. The bodies are bulky

(very bulky for the size of their legs) with thick hummocks and rolls of fat

seeming to engulf them. Dull faces look out from the folds of pale flesh. In

the dim light, however, the parasites are just visible: tiny and spider-like,

four or five of them are embedded in the deep fat of each figure, their faces

buried and unseen, feeding continually from the creature’s surplus. No threat to the hive, and so of no interest to the party; but the leader

does recollect that more and more of them are seen nowadays wandering

over their domain. They seem to be spreading from the forest areas that are

their home. Dimly the leader wonders what they find to eat here, and how

they protect themselves from the harsh sun. He does not wonder for long,

however. With a backhanded gesture, he brushes the first of the day’s sand out of his moustache and signals for the party to move onwards. Soon he

has the party on the move once more and the strangers have been

completely forgotten. Had the party stayed to watch, they would have observed the lumbering

creatures scramble down into the flats of the slimelands and wade out

amongst the disgusting blue-green sogginess. Dumbly they scoop up

handfuls of the slime, exposing the yellow stench beneath, and begin to

feed on it. The parasites embedded in their fat ignore all this. The food, be it

nuts, leaves or slime, will be converted into huge deposits of fat and tissue

that will sustain them. The parasites and their hosts are not the first communal creature to arise

since the days of the engineers, but they are the only surviving type. The

symbionts, in which the hunters teamed up with the tundra-dwellers, to live

on the cold plains, are extinct now. They took to the mountains after the

cold plains faded away, and there they existed for some time; but they were

never really developed as mountain creatures, and all kinds of

maladaptations began to show themselves. Eventually the populations

dwindled and the whole race died out. That is not the case amongst the parasites and their hosts. The hosts, too,

are descended from the tundra-dwellers, but unlike the carriers of the

symbionts they changed as the conditions changed. Gone are the woolly

coats and the resistance to extreme cold, but they still retain the thick

deposits of fat. Indeed their metabolism generates more fat than they could

possibly need, and that is what sustains the parasites. The energy and raw

materials for all this production comes from the constant consumption of

plants – any kind of plants, including the blue-green algal cultures that the

aquatics developed as their own food source and spread over the lowland

areas of the globe, turning them into the foul slimelands so despised by

most of the land-living creatures. It is not only the hivers that ignore the parasites and their hosts as they

wade into the featureless slippery mat. Also ignoring them are the aquatics,

not far away, looping and slithering about in the moist yellow depths below

the slime crust. They are grazing their way through the algal culture that

their ancestors established aeons ago on the lowlands above the surface of

the ocean. There is plenty of food for them now, not like in the days of

want. They know very well that some creatures from the land come and steal from the edges, but the losses are small. The only trouble is

dehydration. If the algal covering is breached there may be a considerable

water loss before it has a chance to grow again; but with all the world’s

lowlands covered in the self-sustaining food-generator there is little to

worry about. 3 MILLION YEARS HENCE

3 MILLION YEARS HENCE

FISH-EATER

Piscator longidigitus

Three million years have passed and the result of constant natural selection and evolution are apparent. The temperate woodland-dwellers have diversified, and developed specialized body forms to fit different environments. Living by upland lakes and beside rivers, the fish-eater is equally at home on land and

in the water. His pelt is smooth and glossy, his shape streamlined. Ears are small and close to the head, the neck is short and feet are broader than usual. The eyes of Piscator longidigitus polarize light, removing the bright reflections that normally prevent animals seeing below the surface of the water. His brain automatically compensates for the refraction. The fish-eaters have evolved by natural selection the streamlined shape earlier engineered into the aquatics. FISH-EATERS

The brook burbles down the slope, bouncing off the exposed rocks and

rubble in the gully, washing soil from the banks beneath the hanging

tangled roots of the great deciduous trees. Newly-hatched flies weave and

gyrate in the cool sunlight above the little pools and backwaters that gather

beneath and behind the waterfalls. The exposed rocks are pocked by smooth

circular potholes, worn by the swirling stones caught up in the infrequent

floods. At present, though, the stream is flowing with gentle splashes and

gurgles. through the V-shaped cleft in the soil, and downwards through the

wooded hillside towards the distant plains. The air is cool, almost as cool as it was during the ice ages of ancient

times. There can be no more now for a yery long while. The continent at the

south pole is covered with ice, but there is no permanent icecap in the north. The gradual movements of the continents has opened the oceans to such an

extent that warm currents from the equator now sweep up to the polar sea

and keep it permanently free of ice. There is less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than there has been for a

long time, and this is the reason for the cooling. Sunlight shining down onto

the Earth’s surface is re-radiated away into space, with little of it being

trapped in the layers of air. The algae that were induced to grow on the

lowlands by the aquatics have absorbed much of the atmospheric carbon

dioxide, and now it lies trapped in vast deposits of peat and lignite below

the roots of the forests of the coastal plains. The aquatics themselves have

long ago abandoned that wasteful exercise, and now grow more

concentrated food out at sea. In the shadow beneath an overhang, screened by the interwoven arches

formed from the sturdy roots of a great tree and by the more delicate soil-

dogged roots of the grasses and undergrowth plants, there sits a figure. If he

had the wit to interpret them, the rocks in the bank behind him would tell

him of an important part of his history. They are normal strata of dark

finely-bedded shale, except for one thin layer which is quite unusual. Shale

is formed from compacted mud that was once deposited layer upon layer in quiet waters, but this one particular bed of the sequence seems to consist of

a different material altogether. It looks as if all kinds of foreign matter

spread in and were deposited on top of the mud at one particular time. It is a

very thin bed, and so the deposition could only have taken place in a period

of a few thousand years at the most. The top boundary of this layer is as

abrupt as the bottom, and above this the normal sequence of shale

continues, showing the continuing deposition of clean mud. Evidently the

continuous deposition of mud in the area had been disrupted for a short

period while great changes took place in the world at that time, and the

resulting bed of foreign matter had eventually been turned to rock along

with the mud above and below. The figure has never noticed this. It is not part of his life and he is

looking the other way. Sunlight, sparkling from the pool below him, casts

ripples of light on his face and arms. He has the long limbs and the long

face of one of the hunting people, but there is something a little different

about him. His neck is shorter, his ears smaller, his fingers longer, and his

feet broader than usual. Also, his eyes are strange – not in their appearance

but in their function. The lenses smooth out the bright reflections from the

water’s surface enabling him to see directly into the depths. His brain

compensates for the refraction and distortion caused by the different

densities of the water and the air. He uses these faculties to watch the

bottom of the pool for his prey, for this creature feeds on fish. In the temperate regions of the world, where the forests and woodlands

still exist on the upland slopes, the hunting people still pursue their age-old

lifestyle, just as they have done since they were engineered. However, as

there are so many different food sources in the habitat, many of them have

begun to specialize, and to develop bodily forms that are appropriate to

their particular way of life. Most lie in wait for birds, or dig in the ground

after burrowing mammals. Some even feed on nothing but insects that they

remove from the layers of their wooden homes. One group has developed as an almost exclusive fish-eater. Living

mostly by the hilly lakes and rivers, these creatures spend most of their time

on dry land, but enter the water to chase their prey. Their broad feet help

them to swim, and their long fingers can spear their slippery prey with ease. Their pelt has become particularly smooth and glossy, and they are

beginning to adopt a streamlined shape to their bodies, with a bulbous head tapering into the smooth shoulders without much of a neck. Their eyes work

best above the water, but their focus can be adjusted to allow their use

beneath the surface as well. The individual beneath the overhang – so still that he appears to be

asleep – suddenly focuses his eyes on a movement not far below the surface

of the pool. A long fish swims in from the more turbulent area near the

current, its deep tail whisking back and forth, moving its body lazily along

with an ease that would make the watcher feel jealous if he had the capacity

to feel such emotions. Taking his time, he watches the creature come closer

and closer. His hand cleaves the water so expertly that it hardly makes a splash. The

pointed claws on the long fingers close around the scaly body, and pin it

before the slippery shape can wriggle free. Then, with an almost reflex jerk,

he yanks it from the water and onto the bank beneath the overhang. With a

swift blow he kills it. Then he eases himself from his hiding place, straightening out the slight

cramp in his muscles, and gathers up his catch to take it back to his mate

and family. No, he is not a fully-adapted water creature. There are other derived

humans in the world who are more perfectly built for the water

environment. Nevertheless he is good enough to survive and to continue his

line. 3 MILLION YEARS HENCE

TREE-DWELLER

Arbranthropus lentus

The long hooked fingers evolved to cling to the jungle canopy, but they can also break open insect nests under the bark. Small but slow, the tree-dweller moves with deliberation through the humid rainforest, clinging tightly to the underside of the great spread of branches. Fruit is plentiful and insects abound. With no enemies and abundant food there is no need for speed, aggression or change. Without the need to adapt or develop, the sloth-like tree-dweller will remain in a state of statis, able to breed but unchallenged. The hand has evolved two strong fingers that allow the tree-dweller to hang from the underside of branches. TREE-DWELLERS

Far away, on another continent, a much smaller creature moves slowly,

upside down, through the dripping branches of the tall trees. Her fingers

and toes are permanently curved, and allow her to hang on the underside of

the stoutest branches. Slowly she turns her little head and looks about, seeking out the next

piece of food growing in the humid air. There, on the next tree, is a bunch

of fruit. Carefully she crawls along beneath the branch back to the trunk,

where she can climb out amongst the branches closer to it. Dimly she sees

that there is another creature, a male of her own kind, already on that tree,

well above the branch with the fruit. He is moving slowly downwards. Whoever reaches the fruit first will claim it. Her long fingers reach for the next hand-hold, and splinter through a

weak thin layer of bark. The air is suddenly full of noise and aggression. A

cloud of insects has burst from the hole and is thudding into her, jabbing

through her pelt with pointed tail weapons. She feels the prick of the

attacks, but there is no pain, as her line became immune to the poisons

generations ago. She knows that there is good eating here, so ignoring the

insects that are swarming and clustering around her hands she breaks up the

bark covering the nest that she has disturbed. Combs of honey and grubs are

stacked in there, vertically in neat rows. With her usual deliberate actions

she breaks them from their hollow and chews contentedly. Afterwards, with the nest empty, and the insects spent, exhausted or fled,

she remembers the fruit on the next tree. With painfully slow movements

she unwinds from her feeding position and begins to crawl along the branch

once more. Eventually she comes in sight of it, but she is too late. The male has

already reached it and is eating. No worry. She has fed, and there is plenty

of other sustenance around. She turns to crawl away again; but then she

stops because the male has noticed her and is crawling along the underside

of the thin branches towards her. He obviously wants to mate. Does she want to let him?

Yes, this is a

good time since they have both eaten and will have the energy. It is also a

long time since she gave birth, and her child has now matured and left, so

she can take on the responsibility once more. Meekly she awaits the male’s

approach. The rainforests that still clothe the windward mountains of the moister

parts of the globe and the great river basins along the equator still have tree-

dwellers, which in most places have changed little over the millennia. The

long arms and long-fingered hands that grasp branches allow them to hang

firmly onto their high perches. The long legs with the prehensile toes allow

trunks and boughs to be negotiated. The weak intellect that knows only

about food and mating, and about those only enough to satisfy the basic

drive for existence, allows the creature to survive. Food has always existed

here, and, seemingly, will do so for ever; therefore the tree-dwellers have no

need to change, unlike the creatures indigenous to the other habitats of the

world. The only change has occurred in the pace of their lives. With no

enemies, the tree-dwellers in many areas have become slow and ponderous,

moving sluggishly from one meal to the next, from one mate to another. There is no strife, either with one another or with different types of creature. Perhaps someday, when something unforeseen comes and takes away the

forest, then perhaps the tree-dwellers will alter. That is, if they still have the

genetic capacity for adaptation, if they have not lost the inherent ability

through a long period of stasis and inbreeding. Any change to the environment, however, will not take place for a long

time yet. 3 MILLION YEARS HENCE

ANTMEN

Formifossor angustus

Some diets are so specialized that the entire body form evolves to accommodate them. The slow-moving and solitary antman has claws for tearing open anthills, a long middle finger for reaching into the tunnels, and a startling coloration to warn enemies that its flesh is not good to eat. Extreme adaptation has lost Formifossor angustus the sharp teeth and nails of his woodland-dwelling ancestors. Instead the antman’s defence is his vivid coloration and his specialized diet. The antman is immune to formic acid, the poison carried in an ant’s sting. But his body does not break down the poison, it redeposits the acid in his tissue, making the antman unpalatable to his potential enemies. Eyes and nostrils can be closed off against ants. The tiny mouth scrapes swarming ants from the long middle finger. The blade-like nails can cut open anthills. The bony fingers lack nerves that carry pain. ANTMEN

A long finger probes and gropes down the tiny tunnel into the nest. The

loose soil and twigs are forced apart by the blade-like fingernail and the

finger slides in, deeper and deeper. Ants, enraged by the intrusion, swarm

out of side-chambers and tunnels, and mass against the attacker. Stings and

jaws sink into the tough skin, but make little impression. Courageous

fighters hang onto the invading flesh as their blind instincts dictate, while

others climb over them to find other spots to attack. Soon the whole finger

is a clump of swarming defenders. Up above, the antman has gauged that enough time has elapsed, and

pulls his hand with its long finger from the nest. It is a black mass of ants. He has judged the timing correctly – just enough time for the ants to attack

his finger in sufficient numbers, but not enough for them to abandon the

defence as useless. He did not feel the assault on his finger, since it has no

nerves that would detect pain. The whole finger, with its attached ants, goes

into his mouth and is then withdrawn slowly, his tiny teeth scraping the

insects from the skin. He swallows the ants, a number of which saw the

danger in time and abandoned the finger, and are now crawling over his

face. They do not trouble him: he can close off his nostrils and his eyes as

they come close, and when his mouth is empty he wipes them from his face

with the back of his hand and his long tongue. He turns back slowly to the nest. With the huge claws on two of his

fingers (those that were once called the thumb and index finger) he rips the

covering off another part of the nest. Patiently he waits for the defenders to

swarm up once more, and inserts his long middle finger again into one of

the passages. He is rather a solitary creature. The ants that he eats are highly

nutritious, but it takes a great deal of them to make a meal so a single anthill

could hardly sustain two antmen. His movements are also very slow and

deliberate. He has no natural enemies, although he evolved at the same time

as many of his cousins developed into hunting, flesh-eating types. His

defence is in the food that he eats. He is immune to the poisons of the

formic acid in the ants’ stings, but his body does not break them down;

instead it redeposits them in his tissues, making his flesh unpalatable to any

meat-eater. His fine black fur has a glaring white stripe across the back and

down the legs. Any meat-eater that sees this striking pattern realizes that its

owner is not good to eat. Once upon a time, millions of years ago, there were other animals that

pursued this very way of life. They inhabited all the continents, but each

place had its own unrelated species. The anteaters of old South America

were no kin to the aardvarks of Africa, and they only looked like one

another because they pursued the same lifestyle. They possessed similar

bodily features that had the same functions – long sticky tongues, narrow

mouths, heavy claws – but evolved independently. Likewise neither of these

animals was related to the marsupial numbat of Australia, an anteating

animal of similar appearance. The whole concept of the same shapes

cropping up in unrelated animals that lived in the same way was what the

zoologists once termed ‘convergent evolution’.

Now all the anteaters, the aardvarks and the numbats have been extinct

for 3 million years, yet their food has remained: there are still ants and

termites all over the world. It is the way of nature that if a food supply

exists then a creature will evolve to exploit it, usually emerging from a

group of fairly unspecialized animals. In this case, the most unspecialized

animals around were the humans genetically engineered to live on the wide

range of food of the temperate woodlands. Consequently, over the last few

million years these omnivores have developed, under the natural influences

of selection, to become specialized feeders in the various different

environments present. One group has developed into the anteaters. 3 MILLION YEARS HENCE

DESERT-RUNNER

Harcnanthropus longipis

The fatty deposit across his shoulders is depleted but not yet exhausted. Bat-like ears radiate waste heat. Although similar in appearance to a hiver, the desert-runner’s ancestors originated in the temperate woodland. Through convergent evolution, the desert-runners are beginning to adopt the shape that was designed into the plains-dwellers all those millions of years before. However, the runners are carnivorous, unlike the hivers. The runner’s long strides take him swiftly across the scorching wadi and into the sharp blackness of a rock shadow. There he rests, looking out at the dazzling sand with his polarized dark-lensed eyes. DESERT-RUNNERS

The sun burns blisteringly down, baking all the landscape and beating up

from the sharp naked rocks and the pockets of dry dust that lie between. All

is yellow and grey, and no plants are to be seen anywhere. In a wadi (a

gushing torrent in the distant rainy season but now a parched gully) the sand

lies deep and barren. The only sound is the distant hum of the wind, and the

constant hiss of sand as it is blasted against the rocks and swirled about in

the hollows. The monotony is broken by a faint scrabbling sound as a

brown lizard scuttles amongst the loose stones and vanishes into their

shadows, then all is stillness again. Few things venture out in the killing

heat and dryness of the desert noon. Yet in the distance something large is moving, and moving quite swiftly

too. Its legs and arms are long and thin, and its head seems inordinately

large, covered in white hair and surmounted by a pair of huge ears. It looks

like one of the hivers, but it is travelling and hunting alone. It is, in fact, one

of the hunters that has evolved and adapted to the harsh conditions of the

desert – a desert-runner. His long strides take him swiftly across the scorching wadi and into the

sharp blackness of the rock shadow at the other side. There he rests, looking

out at the dazzling sand with his polarized dark-lensed eyes. He sees things

only in black and white, as the rod cells of his eye have developed at the

expense of the cones, increasing his distant and night vision. He has just

travelled many miles over the rocks and dust and will now rest a while to

cool his body. Despite his adaptations to life in the desert he must still guard

against the killing heat of the sun and the dryness of the wind. The fatty

hump behind his neck is almost depleted, the store of fat having been turned

into energy. Nevertheless, he knows that he will soon reach a fertile spot

where his stores can be replenished. The hump is only one adaptation to the dry heat of the desert. Greatly-

enhanced kidneys distill and use every drop of water that enters the body. Waste heat is radiated from the body by means of the great bat-like ears,

acting as heat-exchangers, and the long thin legs that give a very large

surface area for the mass of the body. These are necessary, since no sweat

exudes from the skin – all water is saved. The ears, eyes and nostrils have thick folds of skin that can close them off and keep out sand and dust when

the winds get too high. The sun has now passed its zenith, and the black desert shadows are

lengthening. Rested now, the desert-runner creeps out to continue his

journey. The first part of his travel was over sand, where he used his long

legs, with their light elongated foot bones powered by the concentration of

muscles in the thigh. Now his way takes him over naked rock, so his

passage is slower, using his long toes and gripping fingers to find purchase

in the cracks and joints of the hot crumbly stone. As the sun descends into

the dusty haze of evening, his goal is in sight. The hive looks like one of the rocky hills that surround it. Its vast roof

slabs look just like the horizontal strata of the surrounding rocks, and the

black entrances just like the wind-blasted caves of the dusty crags. Just as

desert-living humans evolved along the lines of the desert animals, the

desert cities of the hivers developed along the lines of their habitats. The

vast thick roofs paralleled the flat stones that absorbed the heat of the sun

and protected the creatures that existed underneath. The tunnels burrowed

deep into the Earth, cool by day and insulated from the bitter cold of the

night. Water was gathered by vast dew-traps in the surrounding sands, and

food was gathered from wide areas and brought swiftly to the cities by the

foraging teams. The desert-runner will spend some time here. The hivers eat only plants,

while he eats only animals, so they will not conflict with each other. The

moisture that is generated in and around a hive and the food stored within

attract all kinds of insects, reptiles and small mammals which the desert-

runner will hunt, while the hivers, with completely different nutritional

requirements, will tolerate his presence. 3 MILLION YEARS HENCE

THE SPIKETOOTH

Acudens ferox

Large plant-eating animals inspire the evolution of meat-eating creatures to feed on them. Acudens ferox is heavier than other hunting species. It can afford to be, needing neither speed nor stealth to hunt the slothmen. It has slashing front teeth able to penetrate the thick fur and tough skin of its prey. In carnivores it is normally the pointed canines that develop as killing teeth. The spiketooth, however, has a jaw that drops down to allow the teeth to be used efficiently,

and it is the upper incisors that have become the weapon. The slashing teeth of Acudens ferox have evolved from the incisors of his original ancestor, Homo sapiens. 3 MILLION YEARS HENCE

SLOTHMEN

Giganthropus arbrofagus

Temperate climates encourage the evolution of large creatures, bulk retains body heat and large leaf-eaters can find enough nourishment to support their mass. By a process of convergent evolution the slothman is now similar to the giant ground sloth of South America from pre-human times. But two factors were needed to allow the tundra-dwellers to evolve into slothmen – plentiful food and no enemies. Sustenance is still there but now they face a newly-evolving predator. Although much larger than the tundra-dweller, the slothman retains the proportions of the species from which it evolved. The fat layers are still in place and heavy claws are needed to pull the huge body upright. Tree sloth form, parasite host with parasite and spiketooth. All come from the same basic stock. SLOTHMEN AND SPIKETOOTHS

A huge mound of fur-covered flesh, an indistinct lump in the luxuriant

undergrowth, pushes its way through the bracken and brambles. It makes

contented burbling noises to itself as it goes. Insects, small mammals and

birds burst from cover to get out of the path of the great creature as it

crunches slowly through the greenery. It is quite harmless, but its immense

weight causes a great deal of damage as it passes. It stops by a tree and looks slowly upwards. There are appetizing fresh

green leaves up there. Using its forelimbs against the trunk, it slowly pulls

itself upright. Now it begins to look more like a human being, to be precise

the tundra-dwelling human being, that was its distant ancestor. From the bushes beyond, a number of other creatures stop feeding and

move out of the way. They are also descendants of the tundra dwellers and

have grown large, but not nearly as big as this great creature. Nor have they

changed much in the last million years or so: they still produce the huge quantities of superfluous fat, and are still infested by the tiny parasites that

live on the excess. The tundra-dwellers that adapted to woodland life did so very

successfully. Their heavy bodies were well supplied by the voluminous

plant life of the habitat. Evolution had produced the right shapes by trial

and error; man copied them, and then evolution took the copies and

modified them further. If these big creatures have a parallel – a convergence

– with any creature from the fossil past it would be with the giant ground

sloths of ancient South America. Like these, firstly, they developed

successfully, even with their great bulk and sluggish habits, because there

was the food supply to sustain them and they had no natural enemies;

secondly, they spend most of their time on all fours, so that their bulk can

be well supported, but they can also rise to their hind legs to feed from tall

trees; and, thirdly, they have become about three times as tall, and so about

ten times as heavy, as their ancient ancestors. Like the giant ground sloths, too, they are succumbing to a newly-

evolving predator. The hunters have been evolving into many specialized types, each one

hunting a specific type of prey: some hunt birds, some hunt small

mammals, some hunt fish. One, however, has evolved to hunt the

descendants of the big tundra-dwellers. The spiketooth is larger and heavier

than the other hunters, not needing stealth or speed for its hunting since its

prey is large and slow-moving. What it does need, however, is a specialized

killing weapon, and this it possesses in the shape of its front teeth. Amongst the traditional carnivorous mammals, of which there are only a

few small species left, the killing teeth were normally the pointed canines. In extreme types, like the sabre-toothed cats, they developed into long

slashing blades that were able to penetrate the thick hides of very large

animals. In the spiketooth the weapons have developed instead in the

incisor teeth at the front, rather like the only remaining teeth of the parasites

that also feed on the flesh of the descendants of the tundra-dwellers. The

spiketooth’s mouth is very large, allowing its jaw to drop clear of the upper

teeth so that they can be wielded efficiently. The hands are large and

powerful, with strong fingernails that allow the spike tooth to hang onto the

fur of the slothman while it stabs at the neck, or onto the fatty rolls of the

parasitehost while it slashes its way through the blubber. This may seem like cannibalism, since both predator and prey are

descended from human beings; but their common ancestor existed so far

back in time that the creatures involved now comprise entirely different

species. The preying of one upon the other is merely the natural result of the

development of a stable ecological system. The slothman munches placidly at the leaves and twigs, unaware of the

approaching danger. A way below him in the undergrowth the parasitehosts

have already left, their dim wits sensing the approach of a pair of

spiketooths. If the distant crashing caused by their lumbering flight through

the thickets causes any concern to the slothman, he does not react to it. He

does not react at all until the familiar form of a spiketooth steps out from

the shade of the forest and he suddenly recognizes the shape and the smell. Slowly he turns away from the tree, turning his back on his enemy, and

begins to descend to all fours. The first spiketooth, less experienced than the other, leaps for the broad

back, hooks onto the long fur, throws up his head and drops his jaw ready

for the strike. This is a mistake, as it enables the slothman to use his only

weapon – his weight. He slowly topples backwards, while the attacking

spiketooth tries frantically to untangle his claws from the fur. Remorselessly

the attacker is pressed back down into the bracken and the soil of the forest

floor, and the slothman lands spread-eagled on his back with his enemy

crushed to death beneath him. However, this makes him vulnerable to the

spiketooth’s mate. She now leaps upon the unprotected chest and plunges

her long killing incisors into the slothman’s neck. The kill is a success, which is all she knows. There is no grief for her

dead mate. The spiketooth has evolved so far from the original human state

that she feels no emotion at all. 5 MILLION YEARS HENCE

MOVING STARS

Strange stars move in the frosty sparkle of the night sky. The eternal star

patterns themselves have moved little in 5 million years, but now there are

new stars superimposed upon them; and these stars are in gentle continual

motion. They are ignored by the creatures below, who do not appreciate

what profound changes are about to be inflicted upon their world. The sluggish beings in the trees of the forests can comprehend nothing

higher than the tops of the trees that they inhabit. Nor do they need to, all

their food existing to hand in their own environment. Nothing outside can

have any effect on them. Out in the vast deserts, the members of the few huge hives that are left

continue their lives in the familiar mechanical way. Permanently-manned

foraging and gathering routes reach out, tentacle-like, from the massive

hubs that consist of labyrinthine subterranean bunkers, all swarming with

ordered and predestined life. Amongst these millions of individuals there is

not one mind that can comprehend the heavens, let alone the significance of

new moving stars. The decadent parasites, embedded in the fat layers of their grotesquely

misshapen hosts, care nothing beyond their hosts’ continuing survival; and

their hosts are mere feeding machines, dumbly eating, eating, eating. The swift hunters, specialized for catching birds, small mammals, fish –

or even the parasites’ hosts – may wonder about the movements in the night

skies above them; but they have not the wit to imagine that these events

could possibly have any effect on them. Out in the oceans, the teeming aquatics know little of what happens

above their watery ceiling. They can hardly comprehend the existence of

life on land, let alone the nature of the stars in the sky. Only the possessors of the hereditary memory could have understood,

but these have been extinct for millennia. Their religious refusal to use the

knowledge that they all possessed meant that they could do nothing to help

themselves to improve their situation. When natural conditions changed they refused to change as well. The Earth’s magnetic field reversed,

continents moved, and changing sea levels cut off migration routes. Rivers

changed their courses, volcanoes threw up new barriers, and climates

altered from year to year. Creatures of lesser wit and no knowledge of the

past survived these upheavals, which constituted disasters on a local scale,

but merely inconveniences on a global one. However, amongst those with

the memory, the changing conditions took their local environment further

and further away from what they knew or remembered, and eventually,

rather than change with it, they perished. The coniferous forest is black and silent in the night. Hunters lie

huddled, asleep. The trees jut up black spikes into the sparkling sky – the

sky in which there are now, for the first time in 5 million years, slowly-

moving particles of light. Overhead a star, one of the new moving ones, is

glowing brighter than the rest. It expands and descends in a gentle arc

across the sky, stringing behind it a fading trail of glowing mist. A shock of

thunder eventually sweeps across the surface of the land beneath its path,

rousing the birds from their trees, and shaking awake the startled hunters on

the ground. The glowing descent is now accompanied by blasts of fire as its

course is altered, and through the dazzling incandescence can be seen the

vague shape of some kind of vessel. It slows, and directly beneath it a

descending waft of hot air becomes a searing blast that incinerates trees and

undergrowth in a spreading circle. The vessel sinks into the boil of smoke

and flame that is produced, and very gently it touches the ground. The Earth’s long period of innocence is over. 5 MILLION YEARS HENCE

ENGINEERED PACK-ANIMAL

The second phase of biological engineering is exploitation. When applied to a planet this is known as ‘terraforming’.

Change and adaptation become secondary to whatever purpose the genetic engineers find important. Earth has not been exploited for 5 million years. When resources are abundant, methods of collecting and refining need not be sophisticated. The function of most of these altered creatures is as simple beasts of burden, able to operate within environments intolerable to their masters. The atmosphere is being changed. With oxygen no longer present in quantities

sufficient to keep Homo sapiens-based species alive, air-tanks and purification systems are essential. Control is by telepathic input direct to the central nervous system. 5 MILLION YEARS HENCE

ENGINEERED FOOD-CREATURE

Developing animals so that they produce food more efficiently has always been one of the basic drives behind genetic engineering. A food species may look grotesque – but then the natural forces of evolution often drive in a different direction to the consuming forces of science and civilization. Penarius pinguis, the parasite host, has been reduced to a mound of fat and flesh, fed by chemical nutrients. Harvesting devices remove meat as it is grown. 5 MILLION YEARS HENCE

JIMEZ SMOOT’S DESCENDANT

Descendant of Homo sapiens sapiens and the product of millions of years of genetic engineering and elective surgery, the newcomer is not yet at home in his new environment. The composition of the air can be changed but the unfamiliar atmospheric

pressure presents greater problems. If the newcomer decides to stay, then further engineering will be essential. It was the constant need to withstand different gravities and breathe other atmospheres that led to one change being put on top of another; until genetically, psychologically and intellectually, the newcomer bears no resemblance to his ancestor, Homo sapiens sapiens. Encased in a pressurized suit, Man’s descendant sits astride a creature engineered from Homo virgultis fabricatus, the temperate woodland-dweller. Direct telepathic control is exercised over the central nervous system of its mount. Even smaller forms are developed from Homo virgultis fabricatus, to work intricate machinery in confined spaces. They are closest Homo sapiens comes to being a computer-aided soft machine. BUILDERS

Decades later the moving stars look down upon an altered countryside. At

night the landscape glows. Buildings, the likes of which have not been seen

on Earth for 5 million years, have appeared everywhere, but they are not

like the structures of old. They are more like compact domes, or sealed

cylinders and boxes, under pressure so that nothing of the natural planet can

get in, or their contents get out. What has happened?

For 5 million years, since the extinction of

technological man, the Earth has remained a reasonably natural place. Granted it has changed, with the enlarging and shrinking of icecaps, the

rising and falling of sea levels, the reversal of the magnetic field, the

creation of new mountain and volcanic island chains, the miniscule

movements of continents, the replacement of forest by grassland, or

grassland by desert, or desert by forest – but these changes have taken place

with the incomprehensible slowness of the creep of natural processes. The

only unnatural large-scale change has been the covering of the lowlands with algal mats for a time, but this also took many thousands of years to

establish, and many thousands of years to disappear once more. This is something different!

In less than 100 years, since the coming of

the lights in the sky, the world has been altered out of all recognition. It would now be difficult to find a place on Earth that still had its natural

vegetation. Everywhere is covered by the buildings. The first were brought

down from above, but later they were made from the materials of the Earth

itself. The carbon of the buried and fossilized algal mats was ripped up and

used as fuel for all this change; and the minerals were gouged from the

mountains and rendered down to make the great structures. Even the oceans are partially covered. Huge rafts of floating cities,

totally enclosed against the water and the air alike, mass on the surface of

the waters. Yet the builders, the occupants, the new masters, are never seen. They

are so intolerant of conditions on the Earth’s surface that they cannot

expose themselves to it, so they remain in their sealed boxes. When they do

venture forth, it is only in pressurized suits that disguise their true forms,

confusing even the basic shapes of their suits by instruments and

appendages that enable them to carry out some function. It is difficult to realize that these beings have merely come home. Their

ancestors left 5 million years ago in the great starships to seek out and

colonize new worlds in other star systems. In order to build their ships, they

drew upon the newly-developed science of genetic engineering, creating

beings that could live and work in space, for the construction, and beings

that could live and work in the oceans, for their provisioning. They took the

knowledge of genetic engineering with them on their journey. Far away from the Earth they found new planets, ones that could support

life. However, the life that these planets could support was not the life of

Earth, so from the offspring of the space-travellers new beings were

engineered, ones that were able to breathe unfamiliar gas mixtures, subsist

on the novel products of the new planetary surfaces, withstand the new

forces of gravity and function under widely different atmospheric pressures

than those to which their parents were accustomed. Eventually these new creatures created their own civilizations on the far

planets; but so great were the distances between them that they could never

communicate with one another, and the development of each of the colonies proceeded independently. Most found conditions too harsh and perished. Some, however, established themselves and flourished. Eventually a vastly different civilization, consisting of totally different

creatures, and therefore based on unimaginable social and moral

considerations, resumed exploration of the galaxy. On their travels, they

met up with the other successful colonies, so completely changed that

neither recognized the other as a cousin. Now they have returned to Earth. Whether or not they recognize it as the

planet from which their ancestors came is doubtful. If their bodies have

changed totally, then so much more have their minds. It would be

impossible for a mere Earth-bound imagination to understand the motives

for their exploration, their attitudes to the life-forms they have found, or

their long-term intentions. However, the results of their exploration are easy to see. The planet’s

land surface has been changed beyond repair. Everywhere are the pressure-

shelled settlements, the natural vegetation has been stripped away, to be

used as raw materials for some process, and new gas mixtures are being

generated and emitted from the factories to produce an altered atmosphere. A different people, using a different tongue, would call the process

‘terraforming’.

The animal life has suffered terribly at their hands as well. With the

spread of the new buildings and the destruction of the natural forests and

vegetation, and the alteration of the atmosphere, most animals have

perished. A few of the larger ones have been taken and used. The science of

genetic engineering has been brought into play once more and any likely-

looking animal has been altered to suit the newcomers’ purposes. Food is the main consideration. Many of the larger animals have been

seen as excellent sources of protein for the newcomers. Some of the larger

buildings now contain rows and rows of them, genetically refined, bloated,

misshapen and unrecognizable. Huge mounds of fat and flesh grow in

sturdy racks, fed by chemical nutrients pulsing through pumps and tubes

connected directly into the tissues. Harvesting devices scour through the

flesh, removing the meat and fat as it is grown. Only the presence of a few

identifiable organs – shrivelled pulsing limbs and blind, gaping faces –

show that these food-generators have been transformed from something that

was once more noble. Elsewhere other members of the local fauna have been engineered as

work machines. These mostly retain their original shapes – two arms with

prehensile hands, two legs with strong feet – but their heads are encased in

metal and plastic boxes. Radio or telepathic receivers analyse their masters’

wishes and stimulate the appropriate centres of the workcreatures’ brains. Containers of their natural air keep them alive in the changing atmosphere. They have been developed in many sizes. Giants, larger than the extinct

slothmen, carry heavy loads and put together the prefabricated parts of the

buildings. Midgets, smaller than the parasite part of the extinct

parasitehosts, manipulate the fine structures and operate in confined spaces. All sizes in between do the various other jobs. All work outside the domes

and sealed cylinders is done by these beings. When one of the newcomers ventures out, it does so encased in an

anonymous armoured suit, and usually astride an engineered creature. The

vaguely human limbs of this creature are now long and spindly, but still

able to take its own weight and that of the being seated upon it. As with the

workcreatures the top of its head is encased in a mechanical device that

controls its brain directly. These are all that remain of the creatures that once roamed the landscape

of this planet. EMPTINESS

Centuries later, all has changed again. The moving stars in the sky have

gone. The newcomers have gone. All living things on the surface of the Earth have also gone, leaving

nothing but a harsh barren landscape littered with decaying and collapsing

buildings. The sky is an unfamiliar colour, with the sunlight filtering

through a foreign mix of gases and drifting pollutants. The rocks and

exposed mountains are crumbling to sand and dust, as the new atmosphere

– completely alien and incompatible with the physics of the Earth and the

chemistry of its surface – slowly tries to find some kind of stability now

that it has been deprived of the artificial systems and technologies that

generated it and sustained it for such a short period of time. The newcomers came, took what they wanted and departed once more,

presumably to other planets that they could use for their purposes. What they left behind in the way of artefacts will slowly crumble away and

disappear. The havoc that they wreaked in the atmosphere and surface of

the land will take considerably longer to resolve itself. IN THE END IS THE BEGINNING...

Throughout the oceans of the world there is a network of volcanic ridges. New crust is constantly being generated here, built up from hot material

welling up from below the Earth’s surface. The newly-formed crust is

continually moving away from the ridge axes as even newer molten rock

constantly forces its way up. This is the mechanism that moves the

continents and alters the geography of the Earth. The seawater along these ridges seeps into the newly-formed crust, is

heated by the volcanic activity, dissolves many of the minerals that it finds

there, and erupts once more as hot springs on the ridges. The instant cooling

brings the minerals out of solution forming dense smokelike clouds of

suspended chemicals in the water around the vents. The chemical energy present around these ‘smokers’ is immense, and

bacteria thrive on it. Traditionally, organisms have relied on the energy of

the sun to produce their food energy. Plants have used their chlorophyll to

harness the sun’s energy and use it to make their own food from the gases

of the air and the minerals of the land. Animals have also eaten the food

produced by the plants, and other animals have eaten the plant-eaters. All

animals die and decay into the gases of the air and the minerals of the land,

which are turned back into food by the plants. The sun’s energy turns this

wheel. Around the smokers, well away from any light of the sun, the chemical

energy is used by the bacteria to produce their own food. Simple, single-

celled animals feed on the bacteria. More complex multi-celled animals

feed on these, and so on. Gigantic worms and blind crabs thrive in these hot

oases in the cold dark depths of the barren ocean – descended from remote

ancestors that were once part of the sun-driven ecosystem far, far above

them. There is also another creature, only come to the smoky oases in the last

few million years, and unnoticed by anything on the surface. This creature

has a fish-like body that allows it to swim, and prehensile hands that help it to feel its way about and find its food. Its total blindness is no disadvantage

in the solid blackness, but it has a sensitive organ on the top of the head,

developed from an organ that its remote ancestors had forgotten, that is

sensitive to heat and can give a temperature-based picture of the

surroundings. More importantly, this creature has a brain that is complex

enough to give it an intellect. This intellect tells it that something strange

has taken place far above it. Maybe someday it will be possible for its descendants to travel upwards,

and even possible for them to live in conditions that are totally alien to it, if

they can change enough. Maybe someday....