But things were not as they had been the last time the ice retreated.

In Australia, since Ejan's first footsteps, it had taken a mere five thousand years to achieve the grand erasing of the megafauna, the great kangaroos, reptiles, and birds. Now, everywhere people went, similar patterns unfolded.

In North America there had been ground sloths the size of rhinos, giant camels, bison with sharp-tipped horns that measured more than a man's arm span from tip to tip. These massive creatures were the prey of muscular jaguars, saber-toothed tigers, dire wolves with teeth able to crunch bone, and the terrible short-faced bears. The American prairies might have looked like Africa's Serengeti Plain in later times.

When the first humans marched from Asia into Alaska, this fantastic assemblage imploded. Seven in ten of the large animal species were lost within centuries. Even the native horses were destroyed. Many of the creatures that did survive- like the musk oxen, bison, moose, and elk- were, like the humans, immigrants from Asia, with a long history of learning how to survive in a world owned by people.

Similarly, in South America, once humans walked across the Panama land bridge, eight in ten of the large animal species would be destroyed. It happened across the great plains of Eurasia too. Even the mammoths were lost. All the large animals vanished like mist.

The damage was not always proportionate to the size of the territory occupied. In New Zealand, where there had been no mammals but bats, evolution had playfully filled the roles of mammals with other creatures, especially birds. There were flightless geese instead of rabbits, little songbirds instead of mice, gigantic eagles instead of leopards, and seventeen different species of moa, giant flightless birds, eerie avian parallels to deer. This unique fauna, like that of an alien planet, was wiped out within a few hundred years of human settlement- not always by humans themselves, but by the creatures they brought with them, especially the rats, which devastated the nests of the ground-dwelling birds.

All these animals had been under pressure from the fast-changing climate at the end of the glaciation. But most of these ancient lines had survived many similar changes before. The difference this time was the presence of humans. It was no great blitzkrieg. People were often pretty inept as hunters, and big game contributed only a fraction of their diet. Many communities, like Jahna's folk, actually believed they were touching the animals lightly. But by pressuring the animals at a time when they were most vulnerable, by selectively killing off the young, by disrupting habitats, by taking out key components of the food webs that sustained communities of creatures, they did immense damage. It was only in Africa, where the animals had evolved alongside humans and had had time to adapt to their ways, that something like the old Pleistocene diversity was maintained.

Rood's chill Eden had long gone. There had been a hideous shriveling, leaving an empty, echoing world, through which people walked as if bewildered, quickly forgetting that the great exotic beasts and different kinds of people had even existed.

People still lived by hunting and gathering, of course. But it turned out to be much harder to hunt deer and boar in the forests than it had been to ambush reindeer crossing rivers on the open steppe. After the extinctions, life was impoverished compared to what it had been in the past, with poorer quality food and less leisure time. Worldwide, people's culture actually devolved, becoming simpler.

Always, deep down, they would know that there was something wrong. And now they faced a new pressure.

Juna had been traveling only half a day when she caught up with Cahl. He had sprawled in the shade of a worn sandstone bluff, and he was eating a root. The meat and artifacts of shell and bone he had taken from the people had been dumped in the dirt at his side.

He watched her as she approached, his eyes bright in the shade. "Well," he said silkily. "Little gold gold head." head."

She didn't understand that word, "gold." She slowed as she approached, dismayed by his hard stare.

He got to his feet clumsily. His belly strained at his skin shirt. "What a frightened rabbit!" he said. "Look, you you came all this way to find came all this way to find me, me, not the other way around. And I notice that no matter how repulsive I am, you aren't yet running off. So, why are you here?" not the other way around. And I notice that no matter how repulsive I am, you aren't yet running off. So, why are you here?"

She stood frozen, staring at him. Her mind seemed flattened, as if a great rock had fallen on her, pinning her to the dirt. Although she had rehearsed this encounter- imagining herself taking control, making demands- this wasn't going remotely as she had planned.

He said, "No reply? Here's why. You want something from me. You want something from me." He approached her, his gaze raking over her body. "That's how I make my living. Everybody wants something. And if I can figure out what that one thing is, then I can make anybody do whatever I like."

She forced herself to speak. "As Acta wants beer."

He grinned. "You follow. Good. So, just like Acta, you want something from me. But you're not going to get it, little girl, until you figure out what I might want from you." He walked around her, and let his fingertips slide over her buttocks. "You're skinny for my taste. Lean. All that chasing after wild goats, I suppose." He yawned, stretching, and looked off into the distance. "Frankly, child, I wore out my cock humping that fat mother of yours."

Impulsively she pulled up her shirt, exposing her belly.

Startled, he ran his hand over her skin, feeling the bump there. The flesh of his palm was oddly soft, without calluses. "Well," he said, breathing harder. "I knew there was something different about you. I must have good instincts. And as for you, you're getting the idea. My strange lust for pregnant sows; my one weakness-" He stroked his chin. "But I still don't know what you you want. I can't believe it's the alluring thought of my fat belly on your back-" want. I can't believe it's the alluring thought of my fat belly on your back-"

"The baby," she blurted. "They killed it."

"What baby? Ah. Your mother's. They wouldn't let her keep her calf, eh? I know that's what you animals do, kill your young. Some say you feast on the tender little corpses." He continued to study her, calculating. "I think I see. If you have your baby, they'll take it away too. So that's why you came running after a greedy wretch like me- to save your unborn baby." Briefly his expression dissolved, and she thought she glimpsed sympathy.

She murmured, "They say-"

"Yes?"

"They say that in your place no babies are killed."

He shrugged. "We have a lot of food. We don't have to spend all of every day running after rabbits, as you people do. That's That's why we don't have to murder our children." why we don't have to murder our children."

She wondered how this miracle could come about: Cahl's people must have a powerful shaman indeed.

But that brief lightening of Cahl's face had already dissipated, to be replaced by a kind of desperate greed. He approached her and grabbed her breast, pinching hard; she forced herself not to cry out. "If you come with me it will be hard for you. The way we live is-" he waved a hand at the open plain "-different from all this. More than you can imagine. And you will have to do as I say. That is our way." from all this. More than you can imagine. And you will have to do as I say. That is our way."

She could smell his breath. She closed her eyes, shutting out his moonlike, pockmarked face. This was the decision point, she knew. She could still turn away, still run home. But her baby would be doomed. When Acta and Pepule found out they might even try to beat it out of her belly.

"I'll do what you say," she said hastily. What could be worse than that?

"Good," he said, his breath coming in short, hot gasps. "Now, let's get down to business. Kneel down. Kneel down."

So it began, there in the dirt. She was grateful that nobody she cared about could see her.

II.

He made her carry his load of meat, his bag of half-chewed roots, and his empty beer sack. He said it was the way, in his home. It wasn't heavy- the meat was nothing more than the spindly catch of small game brought back by the men the day before- but it seemed very strange to Juna to have to walk behind Cahl with meat piled on her shoulder while he strutted ahead, inexpertly brandishing her her spear. spear.

Soon they had walked far from her familiar range. It was deeply frightening to think that she was entering land where, probably, none of her ancestors had set a foot, not once; deep taboos, inspired by her well-founded fear of death at the hands of strangers, warred against her impulse to continue. But continue she did, for she had no choice.

They had to spend one night in the open. He brought her to the shelter of a bluff, a half cave he had evidently used before, for she saw more signs of his unpleasant spoor. He would not let her eat any of the meat, nor even hunt for more. Evidently he didn't trust her that far. But he gave her some of the thin, ill-tasting roots he had carried.

As darkness fell he used her again. The brutal coupling made her juvenile fumbling with Tori seem full of tenderness. But to her relief Cahl finished quickly- he had already spent himself that day- and when he rolled off her he quickly fell asleep.

She massaged her bruised thighs, alone with her thoughts.

In the morning they began to descend from the high, dry plateau into a broad valley. This was a greener land; grass grew thickly, and she could see the blue thread of a sluggish river, with trees clustered in a green ribbon along its bank. This would be a good place to live, she thought- better than the arid upper lands. There must be plenty of game here. But as they descended further she caught only fleeting glimpses of rabbits and mice and birds. There was no sign of the spoor of large animals, none of their characteristic tracks.

At last she made out a broad brown scar close to the bank of the river. Smoke rose from a dozen places, and she made out movement, a pale wriggling, like maggots in a wound. But the maggots were people, crowded, diminished by distance.

Gradually she understood. It was a town: a huge, sprawling settlement. She was astonished. She had never seen a human gathering on such a scale. Deepening dread settled in her stomach as they moved on.

Even before they got to the settlement they began to encounter people.

They all seemed short, dark, and bent, and they wore filthy clothes. And men, women, and children alike worked at patches of ground. Juna had never seen anything like it. In one place they were bent over, scratching roughly at the bare soil with stone tools mounted in wood. A little further on there was a meadow full of grass- nothing but grass- and the people here were pulling at the grass stems, plucking seeds to collect in baskets and bowls. Some of them peered up as she passed, showing a dull curiosity.

Cahl saw her staring. "These are fields, fields," he said. "This is how we feed our children. See? You clear clear the ground. You the ground. You plant plant the seed. You kill the the seed. You kill the weeds weeds while the while the crops crops grow. You take your grow. You take your harvest. harvest."

She struggled to make sense of this; there were too many unfamiliar words. "Where is your shaman?"

He laughed. "We are all shamans, perhaps."

They passed another open area- another "field," as Cahl called it- where goats were penned by a fence of wooden stakes and bramble. When they saw Cahl and Juna approaching, the goats ran bleating to the fence, their heads lunging forward. They were hungry, Juna saw immediately. They had eaten all the grass in their enclosure, and they longed to be free, to go find food in the valley and the hills. She had no idea why the people kept them shut up like this.

They reached the valley bottom. The grass petered out, giving way to churned-up mud that was thick with shit and piss- human waste, just dumped here. It must be like living on a huge midden, she thought.

At last they reached the settlement itself. The huts were very solid and permanent, built on frames of tree trunks rammed into the muddy ground, and plastered over with mud and straw. They had holes in their roofs, from many of which smoke curled, even now in the middle of the day. Huts were huts. But there were many, many of them, so many she couldn't even count them.

And there were people everywhere.

They wore the strange, tightly sewn, all-covering clothes that Cahl favored. They were all smaller than she was, men and women alike, and their dark skin was pocked and scarred. Many of the women carried huge burdens. Here was one small woman bent over under a great sack; the sack was tied to her forehead, and it looked like it must weigh more than she did. By contrast the men seemed to carry little beyond what they could hold in their hands.

She had never seen so many people in her life, still less all crammed together in such a small space. Despite what she had glimpsed of the fields she still had no idea how such a dense knot of people could feed themselves; surely they must soon drive off all the game, devour all the edible vegetation in the area. And yet she saw butchered carcasses stacked outside one hut, grain baskets outside another.

And there were many children here. Several trailed after Juna, plucking at her shift and gazing at her shining hair. Then that much at least was true: There really were more children here than her own community could ever afford to support. But many of the children had bent bones and pocked skin and browned teeth. Some of them were scrawny, even displaying the ominous potbellies of malnutrition.

The men crowded around Cahl and Juna, jabbering in an incomprehensible language. They seemed to be congratulating Cahl, as if he were a hunter home with game. When the men leered at her she saw their teeth were bad, as bad as Cahl's.

Suddenly her nerve gave out. Too many people. Too many people. She shrank back, but they followed her, pressing closer, and children plucked at her yellow hair, yelling. She found herself panicking, breathless. She longed for a glimpse of green, but there was no green, nothing but the shit brown of this dung heap of a place. The world spun around her. She fell, helplessly dumping Cahl's meat in the dirt. She was aware of Cahl's angry yell. But still children and adults clamored around her, prying, laughing. She shrank back, but they followed her, pressing closer, and children plucked at her yellow hair, yelling. She found herself panicking, breathless. She longed for a glimpse of green, but there was no green, nothing but the shit brown of this dung heap of a place. The world spun around her. She fell, helplessly dumping Cahl's meat in the dirt. She was aware of Cahl's angry yell. But still children and adults clamored around her, prying, laughing.

She came to herself slowly, reluctantly.

She had been taken inside one of the huts. She was on her back, on the floor. She could see daylight poking through cracks and seams in the roof above her.

And Cahl was on her again, thrusting, heavy. She could smell nothing but the beer on his breath.

There were other people in the hut, moving in the dim dark, jabbering a language she couldn't understand. There were many children, of various ages. She wondered if they were all Cahl's. A woman came close. She was short, like the rest, scrawny, her face slack and lined, her black hair lying flat beside her face. She was carrying a bowl containing some liquid. She looked older than Juna- Cahl's meaty hand clamped painfully around her jaw. "Watch me, you sow. Watch me, not her." And he continued his thrusting, harder than before.

At dawn the black-haired woman- whose name turned out to be Gwerei- came to rouse Juna with a kick to her backside. Juna climbed off the rough, filthy pallet she had been given, trying not to gag on air dense and laden with the stink of sweat and farts.

The woman jabbered at Juna, pointing at the hearth. Then, irritated at Juna's incomprehension, she stamped out of the hut. She returned with a fat day log that she threw on the fire. Pushing children out of the way, she uncovered a pit in the ground, which contained a mass of billowy white shapes. At first Juna thought they were fungi, perhaps mushrooms. But the woman bit into one of the masses, and broke up others, throwing handfuls to the clamoring children.

She threw a chunk of the white stuff to Juna. Juna tried it cautiously. It was bland, tasteless; it was like biting into wood. And it was gritty, with hard bits inside that ground against her teeth. But she had eaten nothing since her last stop with Cahl on the high plain, and hunger gnawed. So she devoured the food as readily as the children did.

It was her first mouthful of bread, though it would be many days before she learned its name.

While they ate, Cahl snored on in his pallet. It seemed strange to Juna that he should choose to stay with the women, but there seemed to be no men's hut here.

When they had eaten, Gwerei took her out of the town, up the valley, and to the open spaces on the far side. They walked in silence, since they shared not a word of common language: Juna was trapped in a bubble of incomprehension. But she was relieved just to get out of the great anthill of people that was the town.

Soon they were joined by more women, older children, a few men. They followed ruts worn into the ground by innumerable feet. Some of the women gazed at Juna curiously- and the men speculatively- but they seemed exhausted before their day had even started. She wondered where they were all going. Nobody was carrying any weapons, any spears or snares or traps. They weren't even looking for spoor, tracks or dung, any signifiers that animals had been here. They didn't even look around at the land they inhabited.

At last she came to the open spaces she had glimpsed yesterday, the fields. fields. Gwerei led her into one of these fields, where people were already at work. Gwerei handed her a tool, and began to jabber at her, miming, holding her fists together and scratching imaginary gouges in the air. Gwerei led her into one of these fields, where people were already at work. Gwerei handed her a tool, and began to jabber at her, miming, holding her fists together and scratching imaginary gouges in the air.

Juna inspected the tool. It was like an ax, with a stone head fixed to a wooden handle by a binding of sinew and resin. But it was big, surely too heavy to use as an ax, yet the curved stone blade made it impractical to use even as a thrusting spear. As Gwerei yelled at her with increasing frustration, she just stared back.

At last Gwerei had to show her. She bent over the dirt, clasping the tool, and stuck the blade deep into the ground. Then she began to walk backward, legs stiff, bent over, dragging the blade through the earth. She had made a furrow a hand's length deep in the ground.

Juna saw that other people were doing just as Gwerei had, dragging their curved axes through the ground. She remembered seeing people do this yesterday. It was so simple a task a child could have done it, with enough strength. But it was hard work. After engraving furrows just a few paces long they were all grunting, their faces slick with sweat and dirt.

Still Juna had no idea why they were doing this. But she took the tool from Gwerei and rammed the blade into the ground. Then she bent as Gwerei had done and hauled the handle backward, until she had scraped a furrow just like Gwerei's. One woman clapped ironically.

Juna handed the tool back to Gwerei. "I've done that," she said in her own language. "Now what?"

The answer turned out to be simple. She had to do the same thing again, a little further on. And again after that. She, and the rest of the people here, had nothing to do but scrape these marks in the ground.

All day.

Where was the skill in this muck-scraping compared to even the simplest hunt, the setting of a rabbit snare? Did these people have no minds, no spirits? But perhaps this was part of the magic that the shamans here used to make their heaps of food, the abundance that allowed them to gather in great maggoty swarms and litter the ground with children. And besides, she reminded herself, she was a stranger here, and she must learn Gwerei's ways, not the other way around.

So she bent to her dull, repetitive work. But before the sun had risen much higher, she longed to get away from this tedium, to be running on the high plain. And after a day of forcing her body- a machine exquisitely designed for walking, running, throwing- to endure this repetitive hard labor, the aches became so overwhelming that all she wanted was for it to stop.

The next day, she was taken to another field, and put to the same dull plowing. And the next day was the same.

And the day after that.

It was agriculture: primitive, but agriculture. This new way of living had never been planned. It just emerged, step by step.

As far back as Pebble's time, even before true humans had emerged, people had been gathering the wild plants they favored and eliminating others that competed for resources. The domestication of animals had also begun accidentally. Dogs had learned to hunt with humans, and been rewarded for it. Goats had learned to follow human bands for the garbage they left behind- and the humans in turn learned to use the goats not just for their meat, but for their milk. For hundreds of thousands of years, there had been an unconscious selection of those plant and animal kinds most useful to humans. Now it had become conscious.

It had begun in a valley not far from here. For centuries the people there had enjoyed a steadily warming climate, and a rich diet of fruit, nuts, wild grains, and wild game. But then there had been a sudden drier, colder spell. The forests had shrunk back. The sources of wild food had begun to vanish.

So the people had focused their efforts on the grains they favored- the ones with big seeds that were easy to remove from the seed coats, and with nonshattering stalks that held all the seeds together- trying to ensure their growth at the expense of the less desirable plants around them.

Peas were another early success. The pods of wild peas would explode, scattering the peas on the ground to germinate. People preferred the occasional mutants whose pods failed to pop because they were easier to gather. In the wild such peas would fail to germinate, but they flourished under human attention. Similar nonpopping varieties of lentils, flax, and poppies were also favorites.

And so, by spreading the seeds of their preferred plants and eliminating those they did not favor, the people had begun to select. Very quickly the plants began to adapt. Within just a century, fatter-grained cereals, like rye, had begun to emerge. Some plants were favored for the large size of their seeds, like sunflowers, and others for the smallness of their seeds, like bananas, which became all fruit and no seed. Some genes that would once even have been lethal were now favored, like those for the nonpopping pea pods.

The first rye growers had not settled down immediately. For a time they had still collected their wild staples alongside their thin harvests. The new fields had served as dependable larders, a hedge against starvation in difficult times: As with all innovations, farming had grown out of the practices that had preceded it.

But the new cultivation had proved so effective that soon they devoted their lives to it. Most of what grew wild was inedible; nine-tenths nine-tenths of what a farmer could grow could be eaten. That was how these people were able to afford so many babies; of what a farmer could grow could be eaten. That was how these people were able to afford so many babies; that that was what fed the great anthill heaping of the town. was what fed the great anthill heaping of the town.

It was the most profound revolution in hominid living since Homo erectus Homo erectus had left the forest and committed themselves to the savannah. Compared to this phase shift, the advances of the future- even genetic engineering- were details. There would never be so significant a change again, not until humans themselves disappeared from the planet. had left the forest and committed themselves to the savannah. Compared to this phase shift, the advances of the future- even genetic engineering- were details. There would never be so significant a change again, not until humans themselves disappeared from the planet.

But the farming revolution did not make Earth a paradise.

Farming meant work work: endless, bone-cracking drudgery every day. As the ground was cleared of everything except what people wanted to grow, humans had to do all the work that nature had once done for them: aerating the soil, fighting pests, fertilizing, weeding. Farming meant the sacrifice of your whole life- your skills, the joy of running, the freedom to choose what you would do- to the toil of the fields.

It was not even that the food they so laboriously scraped from the ground was rich. While the old hunter-gatherers had enjoyed a varied diet with adequate amounts of minerals, proteins, and vitamins, the farmers took most of their sustenance from starchy crops: It was as if they had exchanged expensive, high-quality food for nutrition that was plentiful but poor in quality. As a result- and because of the relentless hard work- they had become significantly less healthy than their ancestors. They had worse teeth, and were plagued by anemia. Women's elbows were wrecked by the constant work of grinding. Men suffered vastly increased social stress, resulting in frequent beatings and murders.

Compared to their tall, healthy ancestors, people were actually shrinking.

And then there were the deaths.

It was true that the mothers here did not have to sacrifice their babies. Indeed, the women were encouraged to have children as rapidly as possible, for children fulfilled the endless demand for more laborers for the fields: By the age of thirty, many of the women were exhausted by the endless drain of nursing and caring for weaned infants.

But where many were born, so did many more die. It did not take long for Juna to see it. Disease was rare among Juna's folk, but it was not rare here, in this crowded, filthy place. You could almost see it spreading, as people sneezed and coughed, as they scratched weeping sores, as their diarrhea poisoned the water supply of their neighbors. And the myriad afflictions targeted the weakest, the oldest and youngest. Many, many children died, far more than among Juna's folk.

And there was barely a handful of people her grandmother's age. Juna wondered what happened to all the wisdom when the old died so cheaply and so early.

The days wore by, identical, meaningless. The work was routine. But then everything here was a routine, the same thing, day after day.

Cahl continued to use her, most nights. He seemed to lack vigor, though. Sometimes he would come at her hard, pushing her down and ripping aside her shift, or pushing her on her face to take her from behind. It was as if he had to work himself up, to excite himself. But if he had taken too much beer, his pisser would not rise at all.

He was a weak man, she realized. He had power over her, but she did not fear him. In the end even his taking of her had become routine, just part of the background to her life. She was relieved, though, that she couldn't become pregnant with his brat- not while Tori's child continued to grow inside her.