The site had its advantages. There was a stream, the local rock was good for toolmaking, and there was a clump of forest nearby, a source of wood for fires, and bark, leaves, liana, and vines for cloth, netting, and other tools and artifacts. And the site was a good place to ambush animals that came wandering foolishly toward the gorge. But the produce of the area here had not been good. The camp was poor, the undernourished people listless. They would probably move on soon.
Mother stumbled home, three waterfowl slung on bits of leather rope over her shoulder. The pain in her head had grown sharp now, and every surface seemed overbright and tinged with strange colors. The ballooning of the human brain, in the millennia before the birth of Mother’s distant ancestor Harpoon, had been spectacular. This hasty rewiring brought unexpected benefits— like Mother’s pattern-making ability— but costs, like her plaguing migraine.
“Hey, hey! Spear danger spear!”
She looked around dimly.
Two of the younger men were staring at her. They wore wraparound hides tied in place with bits of sinew. They both held wooden spears, crudely finished, their tips hardened by charring. They had been hurling their spears at an ox hide they had draped over the branches of a tree. Mother, distracted by the pain and the strange lights, had almost blundered into their path.
She had to wait while the spear throwers completed their contest. Neither of the two young men was particularly skillful, and their hide wraps were shabby. Only one of their spears had pierced the hide to embed itself in the tree; the rest lay scattered in the dirt.
But one of the hunters was at least hurling his spears with more power, she saw. This boy held the spear unusually far back along its shaft, and used the length of his bony arms to get a little more leverage. Tall for his age, whip thin, she thought of him as a sapling, drawn up by the sunlight. When Sapling threw the spear, it hissed through the air, oscillating slightly. The spear’s movement was intriguing. But as her eyes tracked it, her head hurt even more.
When the spear throwers were done she blundered on, seeking the dark of the hide she shared with her son.
Inside Mother’s hut was a stocky woman of thirty-five. She had ragged, graying hair and a habitually pinched, sour face. This woman, Sour, was using a pestle to grind a piece of root. She glared at Mother, her expression as hostile as usual. “Food, food?”
Mother waved a hand vaguely, caring nothing about Sour. “Birds,” she said.
Sour put down her pestle and root, and went outside to see the birds Mother had hung up.
Sour was Mother’s aunt. She had become embittered when she had lost her second child to some unknown illness a couple of days after childbirth. She would probably steal the birds, giving Mother and Silent a fraction of what Mother had brought home. But Mother, her head full of pain, felt too weary to care.
She tried to focus on her son. He sat with his back to the slanting woven roof, his knees tucked up to his chest. A sickly boy of eight, short and bony, he was using one bit of twig to push another around the dirt floor. Mother sat beside him and ruffled his hair. He looked up at her with heavy, sleepy eyes. He spent a lot of his time like this— silent, withdrawn from the rest, waiting for her. He took after his father, a short, unsuccessful hunter who had lovelessly coupled with Mother just once— and in that one coupling had succeeded in impregnating her.
Her experience of sex had been sporadic and not very pleasurable. She had met no man strong enough, or kind enough, to withstand the intensity of her gaze, her obsessiveness, her quickness to anger, and her frequent pain-driven withdrawals into herself. It was her great misfortune that the man who finally made her pregnant had quickly moved on to another— and that he had soon fallen to the ax blow of a rival.
The child was Silent, for that was his defining characteristic. And likewise, since it sometimes seemed that she had no identity in the eyes of other people here— no identity for anybody except the boy— she was Mother. She had little to give him. But at least he was spared the swollen-belly hunger that was already afflicting some of the other little ones in this time of drought.
At length the boy lay on his side and curled up, thumb in his mouth. She lay down herself on her pallet of bundled-together straw. She knew better than to try to fight the pain.
She had always been isolated, even as a child. She could not throw herself into the games of chase and wrestling and chattering that the other youngsters had indulged in, or their adolescent sexual experiments. It was always as if the others knew how to behave, what to do, how to laugh and cry— how to
fit in,
a mystery she could never share. Her restless inventiveness in such a conservative culture— and her habit of trying to figure out
why
things happened,
how
they worked— didn’t make her any more popular.
As time had gone on she had come to suspect that other people were talking about her when she wasn’t there, that they were plotting against her— planning to make her unhappy in ways she couldn’t even understand. None of which helped her get along with her fellows.
But she had her comforts.
The headache would not go away. But it was during the headaches that she saw the shapes. The simplest were stars— but they were not stars, for they flared, bright and evanescent, before fading away. She would try to turn her head to follow them, hoping to see where the next came from. But the stars would move with her eyes, drifting like reeds in a lake. Then would come more shapes: zigzags, spirals, lattices, nested curves, parallel lines. Even in the deepest darkness, even when the pain blinded her, she could see the shapes. And when the pain faded, the memory of the strange, brilliant shapes stayed with her.
But even as she willed her body to relax, she thought of long-armed Sapling and his spear throwing, and little Silent pushing his bits of twig back and forth, back and forth . . . Connections.
Sapling tried again.
A look of irritability on his face, he hooked the spear in the notch on the stick Mother had given him. Then, holding the stick in his right hand, he used his left hand to support the spear over his shoulder, point facing forward. He took a couple of hesitant steps forward, whipped his right arm forward— and the spear tipped up, its charred point gazing at the sky, before falling back to the dirt.
Sapling dropped the shaped stick and stamped on it. “Stupid, stupid!”
Mother, frustrated herself, slapped the back of his head. “Stupid! You!” Why couldn’t he see what she wanted? She picked up the spear and the stick and thrust them into Sapling’s hands, closing his fingers around the artifacts to make him try again.
She had been working at this all morning.
After that ferocious migraine Mother had woken with a new vision in her head, a peculiar mélange of Silent’s indirect stick poking and Sapling’s long, leverage-rich throwing arm. Ignoring her son, she had rushed to the clump of woods nearby.
Soon she had made what she wanted. It was a short, massy stick with a notch cut into one end. When she put the spear in the notch and tried to thrust the spear forward— yes, it was as she had thought; the stick was like an extension of her arm, making it longer even than Sapling’s, and the notch was like a finger that grasped her spear.
There were very few people on the planet who could have thought this way, drawing an analogy between a stick and a hand, a natural object and a part of the body. But Mother could.
As always, when she had latched on to some project like this, she had become completely immersed in it, resenting the time she spent away from it to eat, drink, sleep, gather food— even to be with her son.
In her more lucid moments she was aware of her neglect of Silent. But Sour, her aunt, was around to take care of him. That was what aging female relatives were for, to share the burden of child rearing. Deep down, though, Mother was suspicious of Sour. Something had indeed soured inside her when she lost her second child; even though she had a daughter of her own, she took an interest in Silent that wasn’t healthy. But Mother had no time to think about that, not while the spear throwing obsessed her.
She kept trying with Sapling, over and over, as the sun arced over the sky and the young man grew restive, hot, thirsty, his day’s chores not even started. But every time he failed.
At length Mother started to see what the problem was. It wasn’t a question of clumsy technique. Sapling didn’t understand the principle of what she was trying to show him: that it was not his
hand
that would do the throwing, but the
stick.
And until he got that, he could never get the spear-thrower to work.
There were rigid compartment walls in Sapling’s mind, almost as rigid as in Pebble’s, his remote grandfather’s. He was supremely intelligent socially; in his maneuverings, coalition-building, wooings and betrayals, he could rival Machiavelli. But he didn’t apply that intelligence to other activities, like toolmaking. It was as if a different mind were switched on at such times, a mind no more advanced than Far’s.
But it wasn’t
quite
like that for Mother— and that was the source of her strangeness, and her genius.
She took the thrower from him, set the spear in its notch, and made as if to throw. “Hand, throw, no,” she said. Now she mimed the stick pushing the spear. “Stick, throw. Yes, yes. Stick. Throw. Spear. Stick throw spear. Stick throw spear . . .”
Stick throw spear.
It wasn’t much of a sentence. But it had a rudimentary structure— subject, verb, object— and the honor of being one of the first sentences spoken in any human language, anywhere in the world.
As she repeated her message over and over, it gradually sank in.
Sapling grinned and grabbed the spear and thrower from her. “Stick throw spear! Stick throw spear!” Quickly he fitted the spear into its notch, reached back, set the spear over his shoulder— and hurled with all his might.
It was a lousy throw, that first time. The spear ended up skidding in the dirt far short of the palm she had identified as a nominal target. But he had gotten the idea. Excited, jabbering, he ran after the spear. With an obsession that briefly matched Mother’s own he tried over and over.
She had come up with this idea thanks to her peculiar ability to think about the throwing stick in more than one way. It was a tool, yes— but it was also like her fingers in the way it held the spear— and was even like a person in that it could
do
things, it could throw the spear for you. If you were capable of thinking of an object from more than one point of view, you could imagine it doing all sorts of things. For Mother, consciousness was becoming more than just a tool for lying.
Sapling probably would never have come up with this insight by himself. But once she had gotten through to him he had grasped the concept quickly; after all his mind wasn’t so much different from hers. As Sapling hauled the throwing stick forward, the great force it applied to the spear made it bend: the spear, flexing, actually seemed to leap away, like a gazelle escaping a trap. Mother’s mind spun with satisfaction and speculation.
“Sick.”
The flat, ugly word cut through her euphoria. Sour, her aunt, was standing outside the shelter they shared. She pointed inside.
Mother ran across the trampled dirt to the shelter. As soon as she stepped inside she could smell the harsh stink of vomit. Silent was doubled over, clutching his distended belly. He was shivering, his face sleek with sweat, and his skin was pale. Vomit and shit lay smeared around him.
Standing in the bright light outside the shelter, Sour was grinning, her face hard.
It took Silent a month to die.
It nearly destroyed Mother.
Her instinctive understanding of causality betrayed her. In this ultimate emergency,
nothing worked.
There were some illnesses you could treat. If you took a broken limb, pulled it back into shape and bound it up, very often it would set as good as before. If you rubbed dock leaves on insect bites, the poison could be drawn. But there was nothing she could do for this strange wasting away for which there wasn’t even a
word.
She brought him things he had loved— a tangled chunk of wood, bright bits of pyrite, even a strange spiral stone. In fact it was a fossilized ammonite, three hundred million years old. But he would just finger the toys, his eyes sliding, or he would ignore them completely.
There came a day when he didn’t stir from his pallet. She cradled him and crooned wordlessly, as she had when he was an infant. But his head lolled. She tried to cram food into his mouth, but his lips were blue, his mouth
cold.
She even pressed those cold lips to her breast, but she had no milk.
At last the others came.
She fought them, convinced that if she only tried a little longer, wanted it a little more, then he would grin, reach for his bits of fool’s gold, and get up and run into the light. But she had let herself grow weak during his illness, and they took him away easily.
The men dug a pit in the ground, outside the encampment. The boy’s stiffening body was bundled inside, and the debris from the pit was hastily kicked back in, leaving a discolored patch of dirt.
It was functional— but it was a ceremony, of sorts. People had been sticking bodies in the ground for three hundred thousand years. Once it had been an essential way of disposing of waste: When you could expect to grow old and die in the same place you were born, you had to keep it clean. But now people were nomadic. Mother’s folk would be gone from here soon. They could have just dumped the boy’s body and let the scavengers take it, the dogs and birds and insects; what difference would it have made? And yet they still buried, as they always had. It had come to seem the right thing to do.
But no words were spoken, no marker was left, and the others dispersed quickly. Death was as absolute as it had always been, deep back down the lineages of hominids and primates: death was a termination, an end of existence, and those who had gone were as meaningless as evaporated dew, their very identities lost after a generation.