Evolution (37 page)

A short, potbellied man in what might once have been called a Hawaiian shirt approached Joan shyly. Bald, perspiring heavily, with an apparently habitual grin on his face, he wore a button-badge that cycled images of Mars, the new NASA robot lander, an orange sky. Joan, as a small child, might have called him a nerd. But he was no older than thirty-five. A second-generation nerd, then. He held out his hand. “Ms. Useb? My name is Ian Maughan. I’m from JPL. Uh—”

“The Jet Propulsion Laboratory. NASA. I remember your name, of course.” Joan struggled to her feet and shook his hand. “I’m delighted you agreed to come. Especially at such a time in your mission.”

“It is going well, thank the great Ju-Ju,” he said. He tipped up his button-badge. “These are live images, live net of the time delay from Mars, of course. Johnnie has already set up his fuel plant and is working on metal extraction.”

“Iron, from that rusty Mars rock.”

“You got it.”

“Johnnie,” the Mars lander, was officially named for John von Neumann, the twentieth-century American thinker credited with coming up with the notion of universal replicators, machines that, given the right raw materials, could manufacture anything— including copies of themselves. “Johnnie” was a technological trial, a prototype replicator. Its ultimate goal was, in fact, to make a copy of itself from the raw materials of the planet itself.

“He’s proving an incredible hit with the public,” Maughan said with a shy smile. “People just like to watch. I think it’s the sense of purpose, of achievement as he completes one component after another.”

“Reality TV from Mars.”

“Like that, yeah. I can’t say we planned for the ratings we’re getting. Even after seventy years, NASA still doesn’t think PR very well. But the attention’s sure welcome.”

“When do you think Johnnie will have, umm, given birth? Before my own attempt at replication?”

Maughan forced a laugh, unsurprisingly embarrassed at Joan’s mention of her human biology. “Well, it’s possible. But he’s proceeding at his own pace. That’s the beauty of this project, of course. Johnnie is autonomous. Now that he’s up there, he doesn’t need anything from the ground. Since he and his sons won’t cost us another dime, this is actually a low-budget project.”

Joan thought,
Sons
?

“But Johnnie is more an engineering stunt than science,” said Alyce Sigurdardottir. She had returned with plastic cups of cola for herself and Joan. “Isn’t that true?”

Maughan smiled, easily enough. Joan realized belatedly that despite his appearance he must actually be one of JPL’s more PR-literate employees; otherwise he wouldn’t be here. “I can’t deny that,” he said. “But that’s our way. At NASA, the engineering and the science have always had to proceed hand in hand.” He turned back to Joan. “I’m honored you asked me here, though I’m still not sure why. My grasp of biology is kind of flaky. I’m basically a computer scientist. And Johnnie is just another space probe, a hunk of silicon and aluminum.”

Joan said, “This conference isn’t just about biology. I wanted the best and brightest minds in many fields to come here and get in touch with each other. We’ve got to learn to think in a new way.”

Alyce shook her head. “And for all my skepticism about this specific project, I think you underestimate yourself, Dr. Maughan. Think about it. You come into the world naked. You take what the Earth gives you— metal, oil— and you mold it, make it smart, and hurl it across space to
another world.
NASA’s image has always been dismally poor. But what you actually do is so— romantic.”

Maughan hid behind a weak joke. “Gee, ma’am, I’ll have to invite you along to my next career review.”

The lounge was continuing to fill up with passengers. Joan said, “Does anybody know what’s happening?”

“It’s the protesters,” Ian Maughan said. “They are lobbing rocks into the airport compound. The police are pushing them back, but it’s a mess. They let us land, but it’s not safe for our baggage to be retrieved right now, or for us to leave the airport.”

“Terrific,” Joan said. “So we’re going to be under siege all through the conference.”

Alyce asked, “Who’s involved?”

“Mostly the Fourth World.” An umbrella group, based on a splinter Christian sect, that claimed to represent the interests of the global underclass: the so-called
Fourth World,
people with less visibility even than the nations and groupings that made up the Third World— the poorest and most excluded, beneath the radar of the rich northern and western nations. “They think Pickersgill himself is in Australia.”

Joan felt a flickering of unease. British-born Gregory Pickersgill was the charismatic leader of the central cult; the worst kind of trouble— sometimes lethal— followed him around. Deliberately she put the worry aside. “Let’s leave it to the police. We have a conference to run.”

“And a planet to save,” said Ian Maughan, smiling.

“Damn right.”

In one corner of the terminal, there was a commotion as a large white box was wheeled in. It was like an immense refrigerator. Light flared, and cameras were thrust into Alison Scott’s face.

“One piece of luggage that evidently couldn’t wait,” murmured Alyce.

“I think it’s live cargo,” Maughan said. “I heard them talking about it.”

Now little Bex Scott came running up to Joan. Joan noticed Ian Maughan goggling at her blue hair and red eyes; maybe folk were a little backward in Pasadena. “Oh, Dr. Useb.” Bex took Joan’s hand. “I want you to see what my mother has brought. You, too, Dr. Sigurdardottir. Please come. Uh, you were kind to me on the plane. I really was frightened by all the smoke and the lurching.”

“You weren’t in any real danger.”

“I know. But I was frightened even so. You saw that and you were kind. Come on, I’d love you to see.”

So Joan, with Alyce and Maughan in tow, let herself be led across the lounge.

Alison Scott was talking to the camera. She was a tall, imposing woman. “. . . My field is in the evolution of development. Evo-devo, in tabloid-speak. The goal is to understand how to regrow a lost finger, say. You do that by studying ancestral genes. Put together a bird and a crocodile, and you can glimpse the genome of their common ancestor, a predinosaur reptile from around two hundred and fifty million years ago. Even before the end of the twentieth century one group of experimenters was able to ‘turn on’ the growth of teeth in a hen’s beak. The ancient circuits are still there, subverted to other purposes; all you have to do is look for the right molecular switch . . .”

Joan raised her eyebrows. “Good grief. You’d think it was her event.”

“The woman’s work is show business,” Alyce said with cold disapproval. “Nothing more, nothing less.”

With a flourish, Alison Scott tapped the box beside her. One wall turned transparent. There was a gasp from the pressing crowd— and, beyond that, a subdued hooting. Scott said, “Please bear in mind that what you see is a generic reconstruction, no more. Details such as skin color and behavior have essentially had to be invented.”

“My God,” said Alyce.

The creature in the box looked like a chimp, to a first approximation. No more than a meter tall, she was female; her breasts and genitalia were prominent. But she could walk upright. Joan could tell that immediately from the peculiar sideways-on geometry of her hips. However, right now she wasn’t walking anywhere. She was cowering in a corner, her long legs jammed up against her chest.

Bex said, “I told you, Dr. Useb. You don’t have to go scraping for bones in the dust. Now you can
meet
your ancestors.”

Despite herself, Joan was fascinated. Yes, she thought:
to meet my ancestors,
all those hairy grandmothers, that is what my life’s work has really been all about. Alison Scott evidently understands the impulse. But can this poor chimera ever be real? And if not, what were they
really
like?

Bex impulsively grasped Alyce’s hand. “And, you see?” Her crimson eyes were shining. “I did say you didn’t have to be upset about the loss of the bonobos.”

Alyce sighed. “But, child, if we have no room for the chimps, where will we find room for
her
?”

The mock australopithecine, terrified, bared her teeth in a panic grin.

Central Kenya, East Africa. Circa 1.5 million years before present.

She loved to run, more than anything else in her life. It was what her body was made for.

When she sprinted, she covered a hundred meters in six or seven seconds. At a more steady pace, she could finish a mile in three minutes. She could
run.
As she ran, her breath scorched in her lungs, and the muscles of her long legs and pumping arms seemed to glow. She loved to feel the sting of the dust where it clung to her bare, sweat-slick skin, and to smell the scorched, electric scent of the land’s hot dryness.

It was late in the dry season. The day’s most powerful heat lay heavy on the savannah, and the overhead sun skewered the scene with bright symmetry. Between the pillowlike volcanic hills the grass was sparse and yellow, everywhere browsed and trampled by the vast herds of herbivores. Their pathways, across which she ran, were like roads linking pastures and water courses. In this era the great grass eaters shaped the landscape; none of the many kinds of people in the world had yet usurped that role.

In the noon heat the grass eaters clustered in the shade, or simply lay in the dust. She glimpsed great static herds of elephant types, many species of them, like gray clouds in the distance. Clumsy, high-stepping ostriches pecked listlessly at the ground. Sleek predators slept lazily with their cubs. Even the scavengers, the wheeling birds and the scuttling feeders, were resting from their grisly chores. Nothing stirred but the dust that she kicked up, nothing moved but her own fleeting shadow, shrunk to a patch of darkness beneath her.

Fully immersed in her body, her world, she ran without calculation or analysis, ran with a fluency and freedom no primate kind had known before.

She was not thinking as a human would. She was conscious of nothing but her breath, the pleasurable ache in her muscles, her belly, the land that seemed to fly beneath her feet. But, running naked, she looked human.

She was tall— more than a hundred and fifty centimeters. Her kind were taller than any earlier people. She was lithe, lanky, and didn’t weigh more than forty-five kilograms; her limbs were lean, her muscles hard, her belly and back flat. She was just nine years old. But she was at the cusp of adulthood, her hips broadening and her breasts small, firm, already rounded. And she was not done with growing yet. Though she would keep her slim body proportions, she could expect to grow to around two meters. Her sweat-flecked skin was bare, save for a curly black thatch on her head, and dark scraps at her crotch and armpits. In fact, she had as many body hairs as any other ape, but they were pale and tiny. Her face was round, small, and she had a fleshy, rounded nose, protruding like a human’s, not lying flat like an ape’s.

Perhaps her chest was a little high, a little conical; perhaps in the proportion of her long limbs she might have looked unusual. But her body was within the boundaries of human variation; she might have looked like a denizen of a desert country, like the Dinka of the Sudan, or the Turkana, or the Masai, who would one day walk the land she now crossed.

She looked human. Her head was different, though. Above her eyes ran a broad ridge of bone, which led back to a long, back-sloping forehead. From there, the bone ran with almost no rise to the back of her skull. The shape of her head was masked by her thick mass of hair, but it would have been impossible to mistake its flatness, the smallness of her cranium.

She had the body of a human, the skull of an ape. But her eyes were clear, sharp, curious. Nine years old, suffused with the joy of her body in this brief moment of life and light and freedom, she was as happy as it was possible for her to be. To human eyes, she would have been beautiful.

Her people were hominids— closer to humans than chimps or gorillas— and were related to the species one day tentatively labeled
Homo ergaster
and
Homo erectus.
But all across the Old World there were many, many variants, many subspecies based on the same overall body plan. They were a successful and diverse kind, and there would never be enough bones and bits of skull to tell their whole story.

Something darted out at her feet. She pulled up, startled, panting. It was a cane rat, a rodent; disturbed from its slow foraging it scuttled away, indignant.

And she heard a cry. “Far! Far!”

She looked back. Her people, a remote blur, had gathered on the rocky outcrop where they intended to stay for the night. One of them— her mother or grandmother— had clambered to the rock’s highest point, and was calling to her through cupped hands. “Far!” It was a cry no ape could have made, not even Capo. This was a word.

The sun had begun to slide away from the zenith, and already the shadow at her feet had lengthened. Soon the animals would begin to stir; she would no longer be safe, no longer be shielded by the noon world’s somnolence.