One thing he knew the lady entomologist was wrong about though — humans could detect whatever was affecting the insects. He felt it in his soles and in prickled hairs at the back of his neck. And Shig walked across the savannah enclosure as if each crackling grass stem gave off sparks. Finally, Nelson had to carry the youngster so Nell could get some rest.
There was a dusty odor in the air, even after they entered the rain forest biosphere. A glance through the windows showed desert hazes carried by the dry north wind. “Close all external air ducts,” he commanded the ever-listening computers, and his ears popped as the system went over to full recirculation. That was what an enclosed ecosystem was all about anyway. Nelson thought it almost cheating to let ark four purge some of its wastes outside and take in occasional doses of water and air.
“Increase hourly mist ten percent, upper canopy level,” he added, rubbing some leaves. He felt more comfortable using his “knack,” now that book learning was taking some of the edge off his ignorance. From a catwalk he looked across the branches of the miniforest, smelling rank aromas of fecundity and death. Heavy, interlaced branches bore rich humus layers on top, where whole communities of epiphytes lived out cycle after cycle, never touching the ground. Tangled vines sheltered crawling, slithering things whose nocturnal habits made Nelson their only regular human contact.
Most probably preferred it that way. This habitat recreated a bit of the long-lost jungles of Madagascar, where whole orders of primates had once dwelled in splendid isolation, until canoes from the distant east only a few scant centuries ago brought the first human invasion. In that brief time those forests vanished, along with so many of man’s strange cousins — the lemurs and other prosimians. Some “lost” species still lived, barely, in enclaves like this one, sheltered in care by the descendants of ax wielders, forest slashers, and road builders.
The contrast seemed so great, one might think two distinct species had invented the chain saw and the survival ark. But then. Nelson thought, even in ancient times, there was Noah.
A pair of eyes much too large for daylight blinked at Nelson as he wandered by. History is so strange. Once you start really feeling for people long ago, it’s like a drug. You can’t stop thinking about it.
He remembered his epiphany on that fateful day in the baboon enclosure — eons ago — when he first realized that a life without others to care for wasn’t worth living. That same afternoon he had also glimpsed something else… what the struggle for survival must have been like for men and women during most of the ages of humankind.
Nelson stopped where the catwalk neared a bank of sloping glass-crystal. Beyond the ark’s perimeter, the haze-shrouded Kuwenezi foothills shone under an opal moon. It was a beautiful night, in a sere, parched sort of way. His modern mind could look across the expanse with little emotion but aesthetic appreciation… or maybe sadness over the land’s unstoppable deterioration.
But for most of the lifespan of his race, the night must have been more intense — a time of lurking shadows and unseen, mortal dangers — even with the companionship of fire and long after Neolithic hunters had become the most fearsome creatures around. Nelson thought he understood why.
Poor Homo sapiens, doomed to die.
That much people shared with other beasts. But with mortality early humans acquired the added burden of a wild, untamed, magnificent new brain, an organ offering skill and planning by day, but also capable of crafting demons just beyond the flickering firelight, enabling you to imagine in detail tomorrow’s hunt or the next day’s injury or your neighbor’s secret deceit. A mind capable of knowing death… of helplessly watching its conquest over a comrade’s courage, over a wife’s withered youth, over a babe’s never-to-be-known passion… and seeing in those moments the spoor of a foe worse than any lion. The last implacable, undefeated enemy.
What do you get when you mix utter ignorance and a mind able to ask, “Why”? Early human societies grasped at so many superstitions, pagan hierarchies, and countless bizarre notions about the world. Some folkways were harmless, even pragmatic and wise. Others were passed on as fierce “truth”… because not to believe fiercely opened the way to something far worse than error… uncertainty.
Nelson felt a poignant sadness for his ancestors — generation after generation of women and men, each filled with a sense of self-importance as great as his own. Thinking about them made his life seem as ephemeral as the rippling savannah grass, or the moonbeams illuminating both the wheat fields and his mind.
Back when humans roamed in small bands, when the forest seemed endless and night all-powerful, the common belief was that other creatures were thinkers too, whose spirits could be bribed with song and dance. But eventually, the scary woods were pushed back a little. Mud-brick temples glistened, and bibles began saying, “No, the world was made for man to use.” Soulless, animals were for his disposal.
Later still came a time when farmland and city surpassed the forest’s span. Moreover, nature’s laws were at last unfolding before curious minds. Principles like momentum kept the planets on course, and sages perceived the universe as a great clockwork. Humans, like other creatures, were mere gears, thrall to insuperable physics.
The pace of change sped. Forests grew rare and a fourth attitude was born. As Earth groaned under cities and plows, guilt became the newest theme. Instead of peer, or master, or cog in the cosmic machine, Homo sapiens’ best thinkers came to view their own species as a blight. The vilest thing that ever happened to a planet.
Nelson saw these unfolding worldviews the way his teacher had shown them to him, as a series of steps taken by a strange, adaptable animal. One gradually — even reluctantly — taking on powers it once thought reserved for gods.
Each Zeitgeist seemed appropriate to men and women of its time, and all of them were obsolete today. Now humanity was trying to save what it could, not because of guilt, but to survive.
Moonlight brought to mind the pretty young entomologist, who had smiled so provocatively while talking about termites and who then, before saying goodnight, had asked shyly to see his scars.
He recalled how his chest had expanded, how the blood in his veins warmed noticeably as he rolled up his sleeves to show her that the stories she had heard were true. That he, unlike other youths she knew, had actually fought for his life “in the wild” and won a victory, in honor.
Nelson remembered hoping, wanting. He wanted her, and in ways that over millions of years had fundamentally to do with procreation. Oh, sure, today that part of it was optional. It had better be, if humans were to control their numbers. But in the end, love and sex still had to do with the continuance of life, even if just in pretend.
The ancient game. Within him burned a desire to hold her, to lie down with her, to have her welcome his seed and choose him, above all other males, to share her investment in immortality.
And so it goes, on and on:
competition—
cooperation—
It was of some solace to Nelson that every one of his ancestors had wrestled with adolescence and gone on to find, however briefly, union with another. Presumably, if he had descendants, they too would do likewise.