The other anthros were panicking. The two crowders were squalling like tiny birds, running and leaping this way and that. Only the potbelly sat placidly on its branch, munching another handful of leaves.

Scrap, separated from her mother, didn't react.

Patch was terrified. She had expected her infant to follow her to the far side of the raft. But the infant hadn't seen the approaching peril. A human mother would have been able to visualize her child's point of view, understand that the child might not be able to see everything she saw. That transference of understanding was beyond Patch; in that respect, just like Noth, she was like a very young human child herself, imagining that every creature in the world saw what she saw, had the same beliefs she did.

The shark rammed its blunt nose up through the loose foliage. To Roamer this eruption of a gaping mouth from under the world was a nightmarish vision. She hooted and ran helplessly, unable to escape the raft's confines.

The infant was lucky. As the raft shuddered under the shark's assault she lodged in an angle of branch and trunk. Her mother lurched across the spinning raft, leaping over the gaping hole the shark had ripped, and snatched up the child.

But the shark came again. This time it drove its wedge-shaped nose between two of the great trunks that formed the raft's crude structure. The trunks separated, a great lane of leaf-strewn water opening up between them. One of the crowders fell, squeaking, into the widening gap.

The shark's mouth was like a cavern opening up before it. The crowder's pinprick mind was snuffed out in a second. The shark was barely aware of taking the tiny warm morsel. Its work was barely begun.

The anthros screamed and ran to the edge of the raft, getting as far from the rift as they could- but they cowered back from the desolate ocean beyond.

Whiteblood saw that the fat, complacent potbelly sat where she had always sat, on her leafy branch, that ridiculous red swelling blazoned across her chest- even though the shark's vandalism had opened up the ocean right before her. In this instant of ultimate stress, new circuits closed in Whiteblood's inventive mind. It was a chain of logic beyond all but the brightest of his kind. But then, on average, every generation of anthros was just a little brighter than the last.

Whiteblood took a flying leap. Both his feet rammed into the potbelly's back. She was pitched precipitately into the sea.

This fat struggling creature was what the shark had been waiting for. It bit into its prey, in the middle of its torso. The shark's whole body flexed as it shook the potbelly, and its jagged-edged teeth tore a lump out of the hapless creature. Then, closing through a cloud of diffusing blood, it waited for its victim to bleed to death.

The potbelly was utterly bewildered, suddenly immersed in water, overwhelmed by stunning pain. But her brain flooded with chemicals, and the centers of her functional mind closed down, granting her a sort of peace in this bloody darkness.

Whiteblood sat panting over the scene of his assault, where nothing remained of the potbelly but a pile of thin, ill-smelling shit, and handfuls of crushed leaves. Gradually the gap in the raft closed, as if it were healing itself. The anthros cowered, too stressed even to groom.

And the sun climbed down into the western sky, in the direction they helplessly sailed.

III.

Days and nights, nights and days. There was no noise save the creaking of the branches, the soft lapping of the wavelets.

The nights revealed a crushing sky from which Roamer wanted to cower.

But the light of day, under the glaring sun or gray lids of cloud, showed nothing but the elemental sea. There was no forest, no land, no hills. She could smell nothing but salt, and her ears brought her no calls of birds or primates, no herbivorous lowing. The river's outflow had dispersed now into the greater ocean, and even the other fragments of debris washed down by that torrential storm had dispersed, sailing over the horizon to their own mindless destinies.

The raft itself was diminished.

The anthracothere corpses stuck in the branches of the mango tree had long since slithered away. The last crowder had gone too. Perhaps it had fallen into the sea. The great indricothere had swollen as the bacteria of its huge gut ate their way out toward the light. But the invisible mouths of the sea had been at work on the indricothere, eating into it from beneath. As its meat was steadily stripped away, the huge corpse had imploded, at last sliding beneath the sea.

The anthros had long since eaten all the fruit.

They tried to eat the tree's leaves, and at first they would be rewarded at least by a mouthful of pleasing moisture that would, for a few heartbeats, ease their thirst. But the tree, uprooted, was dead, and its remaining leaves were shriveling. And, unlike the wretched potbelly, the anthros could not digest such coarse fare, and they lost still more fluid in the watery shit that erupted from their backsides.

Roamer was a small animal built for a life in the nourishing embrace of the forest, where food and water were always plentiful. Unlike a human, whose body was adapted to survive long periods in the open, her body carried very little fat, a human's main fuel reserve. Things got bad quickly. Soon Roamer's saliva became thick and tasted foul. Her tongue clung to the roof of her mouth. Her head and neck were very painful, for her skin was shrinking as it dried. Her voice was cracked, and she seemed to have a hard, painful lump in her throat that wouldn't dislodge no matter how many times she tried to swallow. She and the other anthros would have suffered even more, in fact, if not for the overcast skies that mostly spared them from the glare of the sun.

Sometimes Roamer dreamed. The dead mango would suddenly sprout, its roots reaching out like primate fingers to bury themselves in the unforgiving ocean-soil, the leaves would grow green and wave like grooming hands, and fruit would bloom, huge clusters of it. She would reach for the fruit, even crack it and bury her face in the clear water that mysteriously filled each husk. And here would come her mother and her sisters, fat and full of vigor, ready to groom her.

But then the water would evaporate, as if drying in the harsh sun, and she would find she was gnawing nothing more than a bit of bark or a handful of dead leaves.

Patch came into estrus.

Whiteblood, as the top male of this little lost community, was quick to claim his rights. With nothing else to do and nowhere to go, Whiteblood and Patch coupled frequently- sometimes too often, and the bout would be a perfunctory matter of a few dry thrusts.

In normal times subordinates like the brothers would probably have been able to mate Patch in these early days of her estrus. Whiteblood, with plenty of potential mates to choose from, would have excluded them only when Patch's peak of fertility approached and the best chance of impregnating her arrived.

This would have been in Patch's interests too. Her swelling was there to advertise Patch's fertility to as many males as possible. For one thing, the resulting competition kept the quality of her suitors high without requiring any effort from her. And if all the males in the group mated with her at some time, none of them could be sure who exactly was the father of an infant- so any male tempted to murder an infant to speed up a female's fertility cycle ran the risk of killing his own offspring. The swellings, her very public estrus, were thus a way for Patch to control the males around her at minimal cost to herself, and to reduce the risk of infanticide.

But on this tiny raft there was only one adult female, and Whiteblood wasn't about to share. Crest and Left looked on, sitting side by side, chewing on leaves, their comical erections sticking out of their fur. They could stare all they liked at Patch's refulgent swelling. But every time either of them approached Patch, let alone touched her for the most tentative grooming, Whiteblood would fly into a fury, displaying and attacking the perpetrator.

As for Roamer, she would always be subordinate to Patch, always a stranger. But in these stripped-down conditions she had quickly grown as close to Patch as to one of her own sisters.

While Whiteblood and Patch were coupling, Roamer would often take Scrap. After the first few days Scrap had accepted Roamer as an honorary aunt. The infant's tiny face was bald and her fur was olive-colored, quite different from her mother's; it was a color that triggered protective feelings in Roamer, and even in the males. Sometimes Scrap would play alone, clambering clumsily over the matted branches, but more often she wanted to cling to Roamer's chest or back, or to be held in Roamer's arms.

Sharing the load of child rearing was common among anthros- although it was usually only kin who would be allowed to serve as child minders.

Anthro infants grew much more slowly than had the pups of Noth's era because of the time it took their larger brains to develop. Though they were well developed at birth compared to human infants, with open eyes and the ability to cling to their mothers' fur, anthro pups were uncoordinated, weak, and utterly dependent on their mothers for food. It was as if Scrap had been born prematurely and was completing her growth outside her mother's womb.

This put a lot of pressure on Patch. For eighteen months an anthro mother had to juggle the daily demands of survival with the need to care for her infant- and and she had to keep up grooming time with her sisters, peers, and potential mates. Even before her stranding on this raft, all these pressures had left Patch exhausted. But the society of females around her provided her with a ready supply of would-be aunts and nannies to take the infant away and give her a break. Roamer's amateur aunting was helpful to Patch, and besides it gave Roamer a lot of pleasure. It was a kind of training for her own future as a mother. But also it let her indulge in a lot of grooming. she had to keep up grooming time with her sisters, peers, and potential mates. Even before her stranding on this raft, all these pressures had left Patch exhausted. But the society of females around her provided her with a ready supply of would-be aunts and nannies to take the infant away and give her a break. Roamer's amateur aunting was helpful to Patch, and besides it gave Roamer a lot of pleasure. It was a kind of training for her own future as a mother. But also it let her indulge in a lot of grooming.

They all missed grooming. It was the most difficult thing about this oceanic imprisonment. Even now Whiteblood was showing signs of overgrooming by his two acolytes; parts of his head and neck had been rubbed raw. So Roamer was happy to indulge the infant with long hours of gentle fur pulling, finger combing, and tickling.

But as the days went by the infant, perpetually hungry and thirsty, became increasingly unhappy. Scrap would wander around the raft, and even pester the males. Sometimes she would throw tantrums, tearing at the leaves or her mother's fur or racing precariously around the raft in her tiny fury.

All of which served to wear out Patch further, and irritate everybody else.

So it went, day after long day. The anthros, trapped together on this sliver of dryness in an immense ocean, were continually, intensely aware of one another. If there had been more space, they could have gotten away from the infant's annoying scampering. If there had been more of them, the younger males' jealousy of Whiteblood would not have mattered; they could have easily found more receptive females, and relieved their tension with furtive matings out of Whiteblood's sight.

But there was no larger group to soak up their tensions, no forest into which to escape- and no food but dry leaves, no water but the ocean's brine.

One featureless day it all came to a head.

Scrap threw yet another tantrum. She hurled herself around the raft, coming perilously close to the patiently waiting ocean, ripping at leaves and bark, making throaty cries. She had grown skinny, the flesh hanging off her tiny belly, her fur bedraggled.

This time, the males did not slap her away. Instead they watched her, all three of them, with a kind of calculation.

At last Patch retrieved Scrap. She clutched the infant to her chest and let her suckle, though there was no milk to be had.

Whiteblood moved toward Patch. Generally he approached her alone- but this time the bigger of the brothers, Crest, followed him, the spray of fur over his eyes gleaming in the harsh sun. With Whiteblood sitting alongside him, Crest began to groom Patch. Gradually his fingers worked their way toward her belly and genitals. It was a clear precursor to an attempt at mating.

Patch looked startled and pulled away, Scrap clinging to her belly. But Whiteblood stroked her back, soothing her, until she settled and let Crest approach her again. Though Crest continually cast nervous glances at him, Whiteblood did not intervene.

Slumped against the crook of a branch, Roamer stared at the males, baffled by their behavior in a way Noth could never have been. As the minds of the primates became steadily more elaborate, it was as if a sense of self was diffusing outward, from the solitary Purga to her increasingly social descendants. All this enabled the anthros to develop new, complex, subtle alliances and hierarchies- and to practice new deceptions. Noth had had a firm understanding of his own place in the hierarchies and alliances of his society. The anthros could go one step beyond this: Roamer understood her own rank as junior to Patch, but she also understood the relative ranking of others. She knew that a senior like Whiteblood should not be allowing Crest to behave like this, as if encouraging him to mate with "his" female.

At last Crest moved behind Patch and placed his hands on her hips. Patch gave in to the inevitable. Presenting her pink rump to Crest, she pulled the sleepy pup from her chest and held her out to Roamer.

But Whiteblood leapt forward. With the precision of the tree-dwelling primate he was, Whiteblood grabbed the infant from Patch's hands. Then he scampered over to Left, carrying the infant by her scruff, quickly followed by a nervous Crest.

Patch seemed baffled by what had happened. She stared at Whiteblood, her rump still raised to her vanished suitor.

The males had formed a tight huddle, their furry backs making a wall. Roamer saw how Whiteblood cradled Scrap, almost as if nursing her. The infant kicked her tiny legs and gurgled, gazing up at Whiteblood. Then Whiteblood put his hand over her scalp.

Suddenly Patch understood. She howled and hurled herself forward.

But the brothers turned to meet her. Both of these immature males outsized Patch. Though they were nervous about showing hostility to a senior female, they easily kept her at bay with slaps and hoots.

Whiteblood closed his hand. Roamer heard the crunch of bone- a sound like a potbelly biting into a crisp leaf. The infant kicked convulsively, and then was limp. Whiteblood looked down on the little body for a heartbeat, his expression complex as he stared at the olive-colored face, now twisted in final pain. And then the males fell on the tiny body. A bite at the neck and the head was soon severed; Whiteblood pulled the limbs this way and that until cartilage snapped and bones cracked. But it was not meat the males wanted most but blood, the blood that poured from the child's severed neck. They drank greedily of the warm liquid, until their mouths and teeth were stained bright red.

Patch howled, displayed, rampaged around the raft tearing at branches and dying leaves, and beat at the males' stolid backs. The raft shuddered and rocked, and Roamer clung to her branch nervously. But it made no difference.

Whiteblood had not lied, not really. Like Noth before him, he was unable to imagine what others were thinking, and therefore couldn't plant false beliefs in their heads- not quite. But anthros were very smart socially, and they had a good problem-solving faculty when facing new challenges. Whiteblood, a kind of genius, had managed to put these facets of his intelligence together to come up with the ploy that had succeeded in stealing Scrap from her mother.

With a final hoarse cry, Patch threw herself against the mango trunk and pulled broken foliage around her in a kind of nest. And still the males fed, to the sound of slurping tongues and bones crunching between teeth.

Her head full of the stink of blood, Roamer made her way to the edge of the raft, where dead branches trailed in the water like fingers.

The murky ocean water was like a thin soup, full of life. The upper sunlit layers were thick with a rich algal plankton, a crowded microscopic ecology. The plankton was like a forest in the ocean, but a forest stripped of the superstructure of leaves, twigs, branches, and trunks, leaving only the tiny green chlorophyll-bearing cells of the forest canopy floating in their nutrient-rich bath. Though the ecological structure of the plankton had remained unchanged for half a billion years, the species within it had come and gone, falling prey to variation and extinction like any other; just as on land this ocean-spanning domain was like a long-running play whose actors changed repeatedly.

A jellyfish wafted by. A plankton-grazer itself, it was a translucent sac, pulsing with a slow, languid dilation and contraction. It was strewn with silvery fronds, tentacles that contained the stinging cells with which it would paralyze its planktonic food.

Compared to most animals the jellyfish was a crude creature. It had a simple radial symmetry, and lacked substance and tissue organization. It didn't even have blood. But its form was very ancient. Once the ocean had been full of creatures more or less like the jellyfish. They had anchored themselves to the seafloor, turning the ocean into a forest of stinging tentacles. They did not need to be more active; they were untroubled by predators or grazers, as there had not been enough oxygen in the environment to fuel such dangerous monsters.

Roamer was baffled by the sea. To her water was something that came in ponds and rivers and cupped leaves, a fresh, salt-free stuff that you drank whenever you were safe enough to do so. Nothing in her experience or her innate neural programming had prepared her for suspension over a great inverted sky through which drifted such bizarre creatures as the jellyfish.

And she was thirsty, terribly thirsty. Her hand reached down, dipped into that murky soup, and lifted a palmful of water to her mouth. She had forgotten that she had done this not an hour ago, forgotten the bitterness of the brine.

The males had done feeding, she saw. They had fallen into a kind of stupor in the day's continuing heat. Of Patch, all that could be seen was a single foot, toes curled, that protruded from her lonely nest.

Cautiously, Roamer made her way to the place where the infant had been slaughtered. Blood stained the branches, smeared by the licking of anthro tongues. Roamer picked through the leaves carefully. She found nothing of the infant save a scattering of thin fur- and one perfect little hand, severed at the wrist. She grabbed the hand and retreated to a corner of the raft, as far from the others as she could get.

The hand was limp, relaxed, as if it belonged to a sleeping infant. Briefly Roamer ran it over her chest and remembered how Scrap would pull at her fur.

But Scrap was gone.

Roamer bit into the flesh of the forefinger, close to the knuckle. The meat was soft, irritating her dry palate. With a fast, jerking pull she stripped the flesh off the bone. She repeated that with the other fingers, then munched on the bare flesh of the palm. When the hand had been reduced to little more than skeletal, with a few scraps of cartilage and flesh still hanging off it, she bit through the tiny clattering bones, but there was only a dribble of marrow.

She dumped the bone fragments into the endless ocean. She glimpsed tiny silvery fish quickly clustering, before the bones sank out of sight into the greater deep.

Patch stayed in her nest of leaves for two days, barely moving. The males lay immobile in an untidy heap, occasionally picking at each other's increasingly sparse fur.

Roamer moved listlessly around the tree, seeking relief. Her mouth no longer generated saliva. Her tongue had hardened into a lump without sensation or mobility, like a stone in her mouth. She couldn't cry out or call; all she could make was a formless groaning. She even found herself picking at the dried shit left behind by the potbelly, seeking moisture, maybe a few nut kernels embedded in the waste. But the leaf eater's dung was thin and dry. She sank into misery, exhausted, drifting between sleep and wakefulness.

On the third day after Scrap's death, Patch stirred. Roamer watched listlessly.

Patch scrambled up to all fours. Dizzy, her fluid balance ruined by her long inactivity, she stumbled- and Roamer saw her grab at her belly. She was pregnant by Whiteblood, a pregnancy that was draining still more reserves from her depleted body. But she raised herself up and, doggedly, approached the males.

Crest sat upright as Patch approached, nervous, as if expecting an attack. Roamer could see his blackened tongue protruding from his mouth. His facial fur was still stained brown by Scrap's blood.

But Patch settled beside him and began running her fingers through his fur. The grooming was only a partial success. All their bodies had lost fur, and their skin was broken by ulcers and lesions that would not heal; as she worked she broke open scabs and probed at bruises. But he submitted, welcoming the attention despite the pain.

And then she moved away a little, turned her back, and presented her rump to him. She was hardly looking her best. Her fur was ragged, her skin broken, and her swelling had all but vanished, days earlier than it should have. But still, as she pressed her rump into his chest, Crest responded; a spindly erection soon poked out from his matted belly fur.

Now, at last, Whiteblood took notice of this violation of the hierarchy. This was not like his own deception; this was not acceptable. He lurched upright, uttering an incoherent roar around his ruined tongue. Crest backed away.

But Patch immediately attacked Whiteblood, ramming her head into his chest and beating him about the temples with her fists. He fell back, startled. Patch hurried back to the other males and made perfunctory presentations of her rump to them, uttering rasping hoots. And then she threw herself back on Whiteblood.

Subtly, alliances shifted, dominance dissolved. Without even looking at each other the brothers came to a quick decision. They joined in Patch's attack on Whiteblood. Whiteblood began to fight back, snapping and warding off the blows that rained down on him.

It was a grotesque battle, waged by four badly depleted creatures. The blows and kicks were soft and delivered in an eerie slow motion. And it was waged in a silence broken only by gasps of weariness or pain: There was none of the screeching and hooting that would normally have accompanied an attack by two juniors on a dominant male.

And yet it was deadly. For, under Patch's leadership, the brothers herded Whiteblood step by step toward the lip of the raft.

It was Patch who delivered the final blow: another ram to Whiteblood's belly, made with a hoarse, wrenching roar. Whiteblood toppled backward and fell through the raft's loose fringe of branches and into the water. He bobbed, splashed, and spluttered, his fur immediately becoming soaked and impeding his movements. He looked back at the raft, mewling like an infant around his blackened tongue.

Crest and Left were confused. They had not meant to kill Whiteblood; few dominance battles among the anthros ended lethally.

Roamer felt an odd pang of regret. There had been few enough of them already. Her instincts warned her that too small a pool of potential mates was a bad thing. But it was too late for that.

Whiteblood weakened rapidly. Soon the effort of keeping his mouth and nostrils above the water proved too much for him, and his struggling stopped. The shark, attracted by the blood that leaked from Whiteblood's stale wounds, took his body in a single bite.

After that, the suffering got worse. As the softly creaking raft drifted over the great unforgiving shield of the ocean, as these small creatures rapidly depleted their reserves, it could only get worse.

Roamer's limbs had swollen. The stretched skin ached continually and cracked easily. Her tongue squeezed past her jaws, as if her mouth were crammed with a great lump of dry dung. Her eyelids had cracked, and it felt as if she were weeping, but when she touched her fur she found blood leaking from her eyeballs.

She was undergoing a living mummification.

At last, one morning, she heard a cry, high and feeble, like a bird's.

She pushed away her covering of leaves and sat upright. The world turned yellow, and there was an odd ringing in her ears. It was hard to see anything; her vision was a blur, and when she tried to blink her eyes she got no relief, for her body could spare no moisture.

Still, she made out two anthros- Patch, Crest- sitting side by side over a dark, huddled form. Perhaps it was food. Painfully she pushed her way forward to join them.

It was Left, lying flat, his limbs splayed.

The sucking heat of the sun had done its work well. There was barely any of his white fur left on his head or neck. His flesh had shrunk on his bones. Roamer could see the shape of his skull, of the fine bones of his hands and feet and pelvis. His naked skin had turned purple and gray, and it was covered with huge blotches and streaks. His lips had shriveled to thin strips of blackened tissue, exposing teeth and cracked gums. The rest of his face was black and dry, as if burned. The flesh around his nose had withered, so his two small sideways-pointing nostrils were stretched, exposing the black lining of his nostrils. His eyelids had shriveled too, exposing his eyes in an unblinking, sightless stare at the sun. The conjunctiva that surrounded his eyes, exposed, had turned black as charcoal. He had been scrabbling at the bark, helplessly seeking food, and had cut his hands and feet. But there was no trace of blood; the cuts were like scratches in cured leather.

But he was still conscious, emitting dry, wistful cries. He moved his head gently and spread the fingers of his stronger left hand.

In the end, starved of input, striving to keep its vital systems running as long as possible, Left's body had consumed itself. Once its fat was gone, muscle had begun to be absorbed, a process that soon resulted in damage to the internal organs- which, badly deteriorated, were beginning to close down.

But in these last moments, Left was in no pain. Even the sensations of hunger and thirst had ceased.