Cale’s mother, Lia, splashed through the water to him. Her teeth shone white in her dark face. ‘You will never be a man if you are so timid as this.’ And she grabbed him, threw him over her shoulder, ran through the shallow water to the beach, and dumped him in the sand. ‘There!’ she cried. ‘You are the first to set foot here, the first of all!’
Everybody laughed, and Cale, winded, resentful, blushed helplessly.
For some time Cale’s drifting family had been aware of the land, the line on the horizon. They had prepared their gifts of sea fruit and carved coral, and rehearsed the songs they would sing, and carved their weapons, and here they were. They thought this was an island full of people. They were wrong. This was no island, but a continent.
Since the recovery of the world from Urlu’s great Burning, there had been time enough for the continents’ slow tectonic dance to play out. Africa had collided softly with Europe, Australia had kissed Asia, and Antarctica had come spinning up from the south pole. It was these great geographical changes – together with a slow, relentless heating-up of the sun – which had given the world its long summer.
While the rafts had dreamed over fecund seas, seventy million years had worn away. But even over such a tremendous interval people were much the same as they had always been.
And now here they were, on the shore of Antarctica – and Cale was indeed the first of all to step ashore.
Unsteadily he got to his feet. For a moment the world seemed to tip and rock beneath him. But it was not the world that tipped, he understood, but his own imagination, shaped by a life on the rafts.
The beach stretched around him, sloping up to a line of tall vegetation. He had never seen anything like it. His fear and resentment quickly subsided, to be replaced by curiosity.
The landing party had forgotten him already. They were gathering driftwood for a fire and unloading coils of meat – snake meat, from the fat, stupid, domesticated descendants of one of the few animals to survive the firestorm of Urlu’s day. They would have a feast, and they would get drunk, and they would sleep; only tomorrow would they begin to explore.
Cale discovered he didn’t want to wait that long. He turned away from the sea, and walked up the shallow slope of the beach.
A line of hard trunks towered above his head, smooth-hulled. These ‘trees’, as his father had called them, were in fact a kind of grass, something like bamboo. Cale came from a world of endless flatness; to him these trees were mighty constructs indeed. And sunlight shone through the trees, from an open area beyond.
A few paces away a freshwater stream decanted onto the beach and trickled to the sea. Cale could see that it came from a small gully that cut through the bank of trees. It was a way through, irresistible.
The broken stones of the gully’s bed stung his feet, and sharp branches scraped at his skin. The rocks stuck in the gully walls were a strange mix: big boulders set in a greyish clay, down to pebbles small enough to have fit in Cale’s hand, all jammed together. Even the bedrock was scratched and grooved, as if some immense, spiky fish had swum this way.
Here in this tropical rainforest, Cale was surrounded by the evidence of ice.
He soon reached the open area behind the trees. It was just a glade a few paces across, opened up by the fall of one mighty tree. Cale stepped forward, making for a patch of green. But iridescent wings beat, and a fat, segmented body soared up from the green, and Cale stumbled to a halt. The insect was huge, its body longer than he was tall. Now more vast dragonflies rose up, startled, huddling for protection. A sleeker form, its body yellow-banded, came buzzing out of the trees. It was a remote descendant of a wasp, a solitary predator. It assaulted the swarming dragonflies, ripping through shimmering wings. All this took place over Cale’s head in a cloud of flapping and buzzing. It was too strange to be frightening.
He was distracted by a strange squirming at his feet. The patch of green from which he had disturbed the first dragonfly was itself moving, flowing over the landscape as if liquid. It was actually a crowd of creatures, a mass of wriggling worms. From the tops of tottering piles of small bodies, things like eyes blinked.
Such sights were unique to Antarctica. There was no other place like this, anywhere on Earth.
When its ice melted away, the bare ground of Antarctica became an arena for life. The first colonists had been blown on the wind from over the sea: vegetation, insects, birds. But this was not an age for birds, or indeed mammals. As the world’s systems compensated for the slow heating of the sun, carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, was drawn down into the sea and the rocks, and the air became oxygen-rich. The insects used this heady fuel to grow huge, and predatory wasps and cockroaches as bold as rats made short work of Antarctica’s flightless birds.
And there had been time for much more dramatic evolutionary shifts, time for whole phyla to be remodelled. The squirming multiple organism that fled from Cale’s approach was a descendant of the siphonophores, colonial creatures of the sea like Portuguese men o’ war. Endlessly adaptable, hugely ecologically inventive, since colonising the land these compound creatures had occupied fresh water, the ground, the branches of the grass-trees, even the air.
Cale sensed something of the transient strangeness of what he saw. Antarctica, empty of humans, had been the stage for Earth’s final gesture of evolutionary inventiveness. But relentless tectonic drift had at last brought Antarctica within reach of the ocean-going communities who sailed over the flooded remnants of India, and the great experiment was about to end. Cale gazed around, eyes wide, longing to discover more.
A coral-tipped spear shot past his head, and he heard a roar. He staggered back, shocked.
A patch of green ahead of him split and swarmed away, and a huge form emerged. Grey-skinned, supported on two narrow forelegs and a powerful articulated tail, this monster seemed to be all head. A spear stuck out from its neck. The product of another transformed phylum, this was a chondrichthyan, a distant relation of a shark. The beast opened a mouth like a cavern, and blood-soaked breath blasted over Cale.
Lia was at Cale’s side. ‘Come on.’ She hooked an arm under his shoulders and dragged him away.
Back on the beach, munching on snake meat, Cale soon got over his shock. Everybody made a fuss of him as he told his tales of giant wasps and the huge land-shark. At that moment he could not imagine ever returning to the nightmares of the forest.
But of course he would. And in little more than a thousand years his descendants, having burned their way across Antarctica, accompanied by their hunting snakes and their newly domesticated attack-wasps, would hunt down the very last of the land-sharks, and string its teeth around their necks.
IV
Tura and Bel, sister and brother, grew up in a world of flatness, on a shoreline between an endless ocean and a land like a tabletop. But in the distance there were mountains, pale cones turned purple by the ruddy mist. As long as she could remember Tura had been fascinated by the mountains. She longed to walk to them – even, she fantasised, to climb them.
But how could she ever reach them? Her people lived at the coast, feeding on the soft-fleshed descendants of neotenous crabs. The land was a plain of red sand, littered with gleaming salt flats, where nothing could live. The mountains were forever out of reach.
Then, in Tura’s eleventh year, the land turned unexpectedly green.
The ageing world was still capable of volcanic tantrums. One such episode, the eruption of a vast basaltic flood, had pumped carbon dioxide into the air. As flowers in the desert had once waited decades for the rains, so their remote descendants waited for such brief volcanic summers to make them bloom.