"Evolution" - читать интересную книгу автора (Baxter Stephen)
IV
The sun's rays, almost horizontal, shone like searchlights into the forest. Above the slowly melting ponds a chill mist hovered, shining in elaborate pink-gray swirls, pointlessly beautiful. From the gaunt tree trunks immense black shadows stretched north. But the first leaves were budding on the bare branches, tiny green plates hanging almost vertically to catch the sun's light. The leaves were already at work: The days of spring and summer were so short that these hardy vegetable servants had to gather every droplet of light they could.
It was just a glimpse, a dawn that would last no more than a few minutes. But it was the first time for several months that the disk of the sun had shown.
The forest was quiet. The great herbivorous migrants were still hundreds of kilometers to the south; it was weeks yet before they would come back, seeking their summer feeding grounds, and even the birds had yet to arrive. But Noth was already awake, already out, working.
Fresh from his burrow he was gaunt, his tail flaccid and drained of fat. His fur, ragged and stained yellow by urine, hung around him in a cloud, lit up by the sun, making him look twice his true size. There was still little fodder to be had in the trees, so he had to scurry over the littered, frosty ground. After the winter's chill, it was as if nobody had ever lived here, and everywhere he moved he marked rocks and tree trunks with his musk.
All around him, in grim competition, the males of the troop were foraging. They were all adults: Even those born less than a year ago were approaching their full size, while relative veterans like the Emperor himself, approaching his third birthday, moved more stiffly than last year. After their winter of starving sleep, all of them looked sick, and the lingering cold bit hard through their loose fur and into their fat-deprived bodies.
There were risks in moving around so early. In the burrows, the females still slept, consuming the last of their winter stores. The predators were already active- and as food was still scarce, early-bird primates made a tempting target. If one of the males did find an unexpected cache of food he was quickly surrounded by snapping, jealous rivals, making the empty forest echo to their hoots and yips.
But Noth had no choice but to risk the cold. The days of breeding were approaching, a time of ferocious competition for the males. Noth's body knew that the sooner it laid down a store of strength and energy for the battles to come, the better chance he would have of finding a mate. He had to accept the risks.
Navigating with a blurred recollection of the landscape map he had built up last season, Noth made his way to the largest of the nearby lakes.
The lake was still mostly frozen, covered by a lid of gray ice littered with loose, hard-grained snow. A pair of ducklike birds, early immigrants, padded over the ice, pecking hopefully at its surface. Beneath the gray Noth could see the chill blue of older ice, a lens of deep-frozen material that had failed to melt through last summer, and would likewise fail to melt this year.
Close to the water's edge he passed a gray-white bundle. It was a mesonychid. Like the Arctic fox of later times, it endured the winter above ground. But in a sudden cold spell during the winter this meso had become lost in a blizzard, and, succumbing to exposure, had died, here at the shore of the lake. Its body had quickly frozen, and for now appeared perfectly preserved. But as it thawed the bacteria and insects had begun feasting: Noth could detect the sweet stench of decay. Saliva spurted into his mouth. The half-frozen meat would be good, and maggots were a salty treat. But his thirst outweighed his hunger.
Near the lake's shallow, muddy shore the ice was thin and cracked, and Noth could smell dank open water. The water was greenish, already full of life, and littered by grayish chunks of old ice cover. Noth dipped his muzzle into the water and drank, straining out the worst of the mucous slime between his teeth.
He could see that the open water bulged with clusters of small clear gray spheres: the spawn of the lake's amphibian inhabitants, laid down as early as possible. And closer by, in the shallows at his feet, Noth made out tiny wriggling black forms: the first tadpoles. He ran his hands through the water, letting the slime cling to his palms, and crammed the slippery harvest into his mouth.
With a flexing strain his bowels moved, and watery shit pooled beneath him.
But now the surface of the water broke, the ice cracking with sharp reports. Something huge was coming out of the lake. Noth scurried back to the cover of the nearest trees, eyes wide.
Like Noth, the crocodile had woken early, disturbed from its slumber by the brightness of the day. As it rose from the lake, bits of ice tumbled from its back. With a single graceful motion it clamped its jaws on the frozen meso: frost crackled, bones crunched. Then the croc slid backward into the water, dragging the carcass effortlessly, making barely a sound.
The crocodile was hungry.
Before the comet the largest animals in each of the world's ecologies had been reptilian: the plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs in the oceans, the dinosaurs on land, and the crocodilians in fresh water. The disaster had wiped away these great families, and in their empty realms they would soon be replaced by functionally equivalent mammals- all save the crocodiles.
The freshwater environment had always been a difficult place to live. While the supply of plant material on land and in the sea was pretty reliable in space and time, freshwater environments were very variable. Erosion, abrasion, silting, flood, drought, and extremes of water quality were all hazards.
But the crocodiles- and other enduring freshwater species like turtles- were resilient. Some learned to walk overland in search of water. Others could take to the sea. Or they would just bury themselves eight or ten meters deep in the mud, and wait for the next cloudburst. And as for food, even during the worst of the killings on land and in the sea, they would subsist off the nutrients that continued to leach off the corpse-littered land, a "brown" food chain that persisted long after the green, growing things and the creatures that browsed them had died.
In this way the crocodiles had survived across a hundred and fifty million years, through extraterrestrial impacts, glaciation pulses, sea level changes, tectonic upheavals, and competition from successive dynasties of animals.
After all this time they were still capable of evolutionary novelty. Briefly, after the comet impact, the top predators around the water courses had been crocodile cousins with long legs and hooflike claws. They had been a nightmare, running predatory crocodiles capable of chasing down animals as large as small horses. Crocodiles had even adapted to survive here at the pole, where the sun didn't shine for months on end; they would simply wait out the winter months in deep hibernation.
Unlike the dinosaurs, unlike the plesiosaurs, the crocodiles would not be forced out of their freshwater niches by upstart mammals: not now, not ever.
Noth had lost the meso carcass, but some scraps of flesh and crushed maggots were smeared over the ground where it had lain. Hungrily he licked at the frozen ground.
At last the days of breeding arrived.
The females of the troop gathered in the branches of one tall conifer. They were feeding on ripe young fruit, cramming their bodies with the resources they would need to survive the drain of motherhood to come. The females were loosely marshaled by the more senior among them, including Big and Biggest. Right was among them. She had survived her first winter. She was filling out quickly, and when her scrappy winter fur had blown away she had emerged as a small but elegantly built adult, ready to mate.
The Emperor himself was among his female subjects. He moved from one to the other, heroically humping. Already he had been accepted by Biggest twice, and had deflowered an unprotesting Right. Now he was taking Big. She was bent over, clinging to a low branch, her head tucked between her knees, her tail uplifted. The Emperor was behind her, arms wrapped around her waist, hips thrusting with a rapidity born of exhaustion and urgency.
This was the day toward which the Emperor had worked all year, and now was the time for him to spend all of his authority and energy by covering as many of the females as possible.
But the Emperor was already tiring. And this female troop was only one of several in the wider territory he commanded.
In this ferociously seasonal place, baby rearing had to be squeezed into a drastically short period, so that offspring were produced when food was abundant and their new mothers could eat enough to produce plenty of milk. Any female who mated outside the breeding season was unlikely to see her offspring survive to adulthood. And any male who missed the chance to mate with a fertile female would have to endure a whole year of hardship, danger, and privation before getting another chance.
For the notharctus, the breeding season was just
Today, the start of the females' simultaneous estrus, the air was full of an invisible pheromone cloud, and there were males everywhere, helplessly drawn, erections poking out of their fur. Every male had prepared since the return of the sun, feeding to build up his strength, practicing spectacular tree swings and engaging in mock battles: They had been like athletes preparing for a contest. It was impossible for the Emperor to keep them all away, and there was intense competition. Today the hierarchy of males was stressed to the point of collapse.
The stress on the females would come later, during pregnancy and nursing, when the fast-growing fetus or newborn pup demanded the mother find a stream of high-energy food- and she must eat well at a time when almost every other adult female was nursing too. It was the heavy cost of reproduction that had led to the general dominance of females over males, and it was the reason why the females always got the best of the food.
It was the same all over the forest. Every notharctus troop was hitting its brief mating season simultaneously, the timing dictated by the invisible chemical scents that permeated the air for kilometers around. For today and tomorrow, the forest was filled with primate lust: a tremendous clamor of battling males, pheromone-laden females, and frantically thrusting hips.
Noth, pursuing another young male he thought of as Rival, hurled himself through a loose stand of conifers. He swung one-armed on spindly branches. On each dip the earth tipped up like a vast bowl, dead leaves and new green ferns and the dull forms of snuffling ground feeders fleeing under him.
He approached a gap between two tall trees. On the far side he saw Rival, standing upright, genitals pinkly visible, rubbing his scent markers on the bark. Rival barked a contemptuous challenge.
Without hesitating, Noth took a final huge swing. The branch flexed and hurled him on a smooth parabola high into the air. For a few heartbeats he flew, tail held high, hands and feet held out before him ready to grasp.
His head was filled with the stink of estrus. He had had an erection since he had woken this morning. Even now, as he sailed from tree to tree, his penis stuck out before him, pink and solid. He had yet to succeed in battling his way through the crowding males to get to a receptive female, and he felt as if his belly would burst if he didn't succeed soon. But even as he was consumed with inchoate lust, still he relished the power of his lithe body as he hurled it through the forest domain for which it was exquisitely adapted.
Noth had never felt so alive.
Noth landed in Rival's tree, just where he had aimed. He grasped the branches with faultless positioning of his hands and feet. But immediately Rival was on him.
Facing each other they stood upright, their spindly erections poking out. Noth, tail held erect, stalked toward Rival, vigorously rubbing his groin against the tree bark, chattering and barking. Rival responded in kind. It was a ritualized encounter, each of them responding to the other's movements in a kind of dance: tail waft followed by groin rub, wrist spread provoking a spitting glare.
Soon the air was filled with their angry stink. They came close enough for Noth to feel the tips of the other's bristling fur, and Rival's spittle sprayed his face.
Rival was about the same age as Noth, about the same size. He had joined the troop a little earlier than Noth and his sister. To him, Noth had invaded a troop that he had come to regard as "his." Noth and Rival were too similar, like brothers, too close to be anything but enemies.
Rival was marginally bigger and heavier than Noth, and if anything he had done better in the early-season feeding. But Noth's difficult year had forged an inner toughness, and he stood his ground.
Psychology won out. Rival subsided suddenly, his display collapsing. He turned his back on Noth and, briefly, symbolically, displayed his pink backside in a curt gesture of submission.
Noth hooted, relishing his moment. Briskly he rubbed his wrists over Rival's back, marking his victory with his scent, and released a stream of urine. Then he let Rival slink away along the branch toward a cluster of berries.
Rival would come to no harm. He would skulk alone in his tree for a time, perhaps feeding, withdrawing for a while from the fray. But his chances of mating were for a few hours reduced. Noth's urine would make him briefly sterile; it would even reduce his ability to make the special trilling calls used by the males to attract females.
For Noth it was a valid strategy. Today it was impossible for any male, however heroically he tried, to cover all the females. But he could reduce the number of competing males with such sensory intimidation.
With Rival defeated, Noth's penis throbbed anew; soon he would at last attain the satisfaction he craved. With fast, vigorous swings he hurled himself through the branches, across the forest toward the place the females clustered.
But he was not aware of the grim battle taking place there.
Still immersed in his females, the Emperor finished yet another mating. His penis raw and dangling, he stalked among the females, cuffing and snapping at any male he could reach.
And suddenly he found himself facing Solo.
The aging Emperor hauled himself upright, bared his teeth, and let his glands pump out still more of his potent musk. Hair bristling, muzzle working, he was a magnificent sight, enough to intimidate any other male.
Any but Solo.
Solo had spent a comfortable winter in a burrow with a female band not far from here. As soon as the light had returned he had joined in the early feeding, rapidly building his body to the peak of strength and power he had enjoyed last year.
And he had begun his roaming. Already today he had planted offspring in half a dozen females throughout the forest. Now he had come to take more- once he had eliminated the opposition.
Solo lunged at the Emperor, ramming his scarred muzzle into his belly.
The Emperor was knocked flat on his back on the branch, winded, and might have fallen from the tree if his quick-working primate hands had not scrabbled at the bark. He was as much shocked by the sudden physical assault as hurt. Save for cuffs and slaps by food-monopolizing females, and occasional inadvertent blows from other males, nobody had ever deliberately hurt him in his life.
But it was not over.
With a bound, almost graceful for a creature his size, Solo jumped on the Emperor. He sat on the older male's chest, compressing the Emperor's fragile ribs. The Emperor screamed. He chuffed and panted, and he beat at Solo's back. If he had used all his strength he might yet have driven the other off. But to injure another went against his instincts, and his punches were weak, his blows ineffective.
He had missed his chance.
Solo bent forward and pushed his muzzle into the Emperor's crotch. He teased aside fur that was stiff with semen and the vaginal fluids of several females. With a brisk, practiced lunge, he bit into the Emperor's scrotal sac, severing one testicle.
The Emperor howled, thrashing. Blood gushed, mingling with the mating fluids on his fur.
Solo climbed easily away. With a single firm motion of his foot, he pushed the Emperor off the branch. The older male's body went crashing through the foliage beneath, plummeting toward the ground. Then Solo spat out the bloody testicle, letting it fall into the green below.
Solo advanced on Right, Noth's sister, one of the youngest of the females. He fingered his rapidly swelling penis, preparing to take her.
But now here was Noth, young, eager, horny, plummeting out of the air to land at Solo's feet. Solo turned like a tank turret to face this new challenger.
Noth hadn't known Solo was here. But he remembered him.
Noth was a creature of the here and now. He had no real conception of yesterday or tomorrow, and his memory was not arranged in an orderly narrative; it was more like a corridor of vivid images, rendered in sight and scent. But the powerful stink of Solo brought images flooding back, shards and glimpses of that dreadful day in another part of the forest, his mother's despairing howl as she fell into the pit of teeth.
Conflicting impulses surged through him. He should display, stink-fight- or else he should show his submission to this powerful creature, just as Rival had submitted to him.
But
And here was Right, Noth's only kin, cowering in the foliage at Solo's feet. Here were the females with whom he had lived for half a year, and whose swelling pudenda had filled him with anticipatory lust for days, weeks- and here was this monster, Solo, who had destroyed everything he had grown up with.
He stood upright and howled.
Solo, startled, hesitated.
Noth's wrists and crotch itched with musk. He performed a frantic, one-second display, an accelerated demonstration of his power and youth. Then, blindly, not understanding what he was doing, he lowered his head and barged at Solo's midriff. With a gasping hoot, Solo was knocked backward, finishing on his back in a clump of foliage.
If he had followed up, Noth could have capitalized on his surprise attack. But he had never fought a physical fight in his life. And Solo, with the instincts of an experienced fighter, twisted and slammed his knee against Noth's temple. Noth went down face first and instinctively scrabbled for a hold. An immense mass crashed into his back, crushing him against the bark. And now Noth felt Solo's incisors sink into the soft flesh of his neck. He screamed at the sharp pain. He twisted and thrashed. He could not shake off Solo- but the vigor of his movements tipped them both off the narrow branch.
Hooting, with Solo's teeth ripping at his flesh, Noth found himself plummeting through layers of foliage and twigs.
They crashed to the ground, their fall scarcely cushioned by the rotting leaf cover. But Solo was shaken free, his clenched jaw giving one last rip at Noth's shoulder. Solo made his own display of aggression. He roared, an ugly, unstructured noise. He stood upright and hammered his small fists into the detritus at his feet; bits of leaf flew everywhere, surrounding him in a loose, sunlit cloud.
It was a battle of two small creatures. But much larger animals, watching timidly, backed away from Solo's ferocity.
It was a one-sided contest. Solo advanced on Noth, stalking out of the settling leaf fragments. Noth watched, not even displaying, as if hypnotized. He looked down in horror at his shoulder, where a flap of skin hung loose and blood soaked into his fur.
But now a burly mass came flying at Solo. It was the Emperor. Even as the blood continued to gush from his ragged scrotum, the big notharctus slammed feetfirst into Solo's back, knocking him flat, facedown in the debris.
This time Noth did not hesitate. He threw himself at Solo and began to pummel his back and shoulders with feet, hands, and muzzle. The Emperor joined in- and so did more of the males, until Solo was immersed beneath a blanket of hooting, jostling, inexperienced assailants. Any one of them Solo would have defeated- but not all of them together. Under the rain of inexpertly aimed blows, it was impossible even for him to rise.
At last he burrowed like a taeniodont through the forest floor detritus, out from under the clamoring pack. By the time the ragged army had noticed he was gone, that their punches and kicks were either landing in the dirt or on each other, Solo was limping away.
Aching, battered, Noth clambered back into the tree. When he got there he found the females grooming each other calmly, picking bits of dried semen out of their crotch hair, as if the combat beneath had never taken place. The Emperor was sitting quietly with the female Biggest. His flow of blood had stilled- but his copulatory campaign was suspended forever.
And here was Rival, vigorously covering Right. Noth saw his sister's face buried in her own chest hair, low squeaks of pleasure emanating from her throat. Noth felt an oddly warm glow. He was not driven by jealousy of other males over his sister- even of this male whom he had bested, and who had apparently recovered very quickly. A deeper biochemical part of him recognized that with his sister pregnant, the line would go on: the shining unbroken molecular thread that stretched from Purga, through this moment lit by the low polar sun, on into unimaginable futures.
He heard a remote lowing. It was the call of a moeritherium, the matriarch of a migrant herd, walking slowly up from the south. With the return of the herds, summer had truly come again. And from all over the forest came a high keening: It was the song of the notharctus, a song of loneliness and wonder.
In just a few years Noth's life would be over. Soon his kind would be gone too, their descendants transmuted into new forms; and soon, as Earth cooled from this midsummer peak, even the polar forest would shrivel and die. But for now- bloodied, panting, his fur covered with leaf mold- this was Noth's moment, his day in the light.
The huge female Big approached him. He trilled gently. With a glance into his eyes, she turned her back and presented to him. Noth entered her quickly, and his world dissolved into unthinking pleasure.
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