They dispersed. The crescent moon was already rising, a bonelike sliver in the blue sky.

"So," Sidewise said to Snowy as they moved off, "how are you finding life in the future?"

"Like doing time, mate," Snowy said bitterly. "Like doing fucking time."

III.

Maybe five kilometers from the base camp, Snowy was trying to build a fire.

He was in what must once have been a field. There were still traces of a dry stone wall that marked out a broad rectangle. But after a thousand years it was pretty much like any patch of land hereabouts, choked by perennial herbs and grasses, shrubs and deciduous seedlings.

He had made a fire board about the length of his forearm, with a dish cut into its flat side. He had a spindle, a stick with a pointed end; a socket, a bit of rock that fit neatly into his hand; and a bow, more sapling with a bit of plastic shoelace tied tight across it. A bit of bark under the notch served as a tray to catch the embers he would make. Nearby he had made a little nest of dry bark, leaves, and dead grass, ready to feed the flames. He knelt on his right knee, and put the ball of his left foot on the fire board. He looped the bow string and slid the spindle through it. He lubricated the notch with a bit of earwax, and put the rounded end of the spindle into the dish of his fire board, and held the pointed end in the hand socket. Then, pressing lightly on the socket, he drew the bow back and forth, rotating the spindle with increasing pressure and speed, waiting for smoke and embers.

Snowy knew he looked older. He wore his hair long now, tied back in a ponytail by a bit of wire. His beard was growing too, though he hacked it back with a knife every couple of days. His skin was like tough leather, wrinkled around the eyes, the mouth. Well, I am older, he thought. A thousand years older. I should look the part.

It was hard to believe that it was only a bit more than a month since they had come out of the Pit.

They didn't need to do this kind of thing yet, this fire building from scratch. They still had plenty of boxes of waterproof matches, and a supply of trioxane packs- a light chemical heat source much used by the military. But Snowy was looking ahead to the day when they wouldn't be able to rely on what had come out of the Pit. In some ways he was "cheating," of course. He had used his thousand-year-old finely manufactured Swiss Army knife to make the bow and the fire board; later he would have to try out stone knives. But one step at a time.

This ancient field was close to an arm of the vast oak forest which, as far as they had scouted, dominated the landscape of this posthuman England. It was on a slight rise. To the west, further down the hill, a lake had gathered. Snowy could see traces of stone walls disappearing under the placid water. But the lake was choked with reeds and lilies and weeds, and on its surface he could see the sickly gray-green sheen of an algal bloom. Eutrophication, said Sidewise: Even now, artificial nutrients- notably phosphorus- were leaching out of the land into the lake and overstimulating the miniature ecology. It seemed incredible to Snowy that the shit long-dead farmers had pumped into their land could still be poisoning the environment around him, but it seemed to be true.

It was a strangely empty landscape. Silence surrounded him. There wasn't even birdsong.

Some creatures had probably bounced back quickly once human hunting, pest control, and land use had ceased- hares, rabbits, grouse. Larger mammals reproduced so slowly that recovery must have taken longer. But there seemed to be various species of deer, and Snowy had glimpsed pigs in the forests. They'd seen no large predators. Even foxes seemed rare. There were no birds of prey either- apart from a few aggressive-looking starlings. Sidewise said that as their food chains had collapsed, the specialized top predators would have died out. In Africa there were probably no lions or cheetahs either, he said, even if they had escaped being eaten by the last starving human refugees.

Maybe, Snowy thought. He wondered about the rats, though.

Balance would return in the long run, of course. Variation, adaptation, and natural selection would see to that; the old roles would be filled one way or another. But it might not be anything like the community that had gone before. And, said Sidewise, since the average mammalian species lasted only a few million years, it would correspondingly be millions of years- ten, twenty maybe, twenty million years twenty million years- before there would again be assembled a world of the richness it had enjoyed. So even if humans recovered and lasted, say, five million years, they wouldn't see anything like the world Snowy had known as a kid.

Snowy was not a tree hugger, definitely. But there was something deeply disturbing about these thoughts. How strange it was to have lived to see it come about.

Still no smoke, still the damn embers hadn't caught. He continued to work the bow.

The main problem with fire making was that it gave him too much time to think. He missed his friends, the camaraderie of navy life. He missed his work, even the routine bits- maybe the routine most of all, since it had given his life a definition it lacked now.

He missed the noise, noise, he found, though that was harder to pin down: TV and the web and music, movies and ads, the logos and jingles and news. The one thing about the new world that would drive him crazy in the end, he suspected, was the he found, though that was harder to pin down: TV and the web and music, movies and ads, the logos and jingles and news. The one thing about the new world that would drive him crazy in the end, he suspected, was the silence, silence, the huge, inhuman, vegetable silence. It gave him the shivers to imagine how it must have been in the last days, when all the machines had died, the winking logos and neon tubes and screens flickering and dying, one by one. the huge, inhuman, vegetable silence. It gave him the shivers to imagine how it must have been in the last days, when all the machines had died, the winking logos and neon tubes and screens flickering and dying, one by one.

And he missed Clara. Of course he did. He had never known his kid, never even seen him, or her.

At the beginning he had been plagued by spasms of guilt: guilt that he was still alive where so many had gone into the dark, guilt that there was nothing he could do for Clara, guilt that he was eating and breathing and pissing and taking shits and covertly studying Moon's butt while everybody he had ever known was dead. dead. But that, mercifully, was fading. He had always been blessed, as Sidewise had once told him, by a lack of imagination. But that, mercifully, was fading. He had always been blessed, as Sidewise had once told him, by a lack of imagination.

Or maybe it was more than that.

In the clear light of this new time it seemed like it was his old life, in the crowded, murky England of the twenty-first century, which was the dream. As if he were dissolving into the green.

There was a rustle in the waist-high foliage, a dozen paces away. He turned that way, still and silent. A single grass stem, laden with seeds, nodded gracefully. He had set a snare over there. Was there something in the foliage- a curve of shoulder, a bright, staring eye?

He put down the bow and spindle. He stood, stretched, and casually walked toward the place he had seen the rustle. He slid his bow from his back, scooped an arrow from his rabbit-skin quiver, notched it carefully.

There was no movement in the foliage- not until he was almost on it- and then there was a sudden blur, a lunge away from his approach. He glimpsed pale skin flecked with brown, long limbs. A fox? But it was big, big, bigger than anything he'd seen here so far. bigger than anything he'd seen here so far.

Without hesitating further he ran up to the thing, lodged his boot in the small of its back, and raised his arrow toward its head. The creature squirmed onto its back. It yowled like a cat, put its hands over its face.

He lowered the bow. Hands. Hands. It had hands, like a human, or an ape. It had hands, like a human, or an ape.

His heart thumping, he dropped the bow. He knelt over the creature, trapping its torso, and got hold of its wrists. It was spindly, lithe, but very strong; it took all of his power to force those hands away from the face. Still the creature spat and hissed at him.

But its face- no, her her face- was no chimp's, no ape's. It was unmistakably human. face- was no chimp's, no ape's. It was unmistakably human.

For long seconds Snowy sat there, astounded, astride the girl.

She was naked, and though her pale skin showed through, she was covered by a loose fur of straggling orange-brown hairs. The hair on her head was darker, a tangle of filthy curls that looked as if they had never been cut. She was not tall, but she had breasts, sagging little sacks with hard nipples protruding from the hair, and beneath the triangle of darker fur at her crotch there was a smear of what might be menstrual blood. And she had stretch marks. stretch marks.

Not only that, she stank like a monkey cage.

But that face was no ape's. Her nose was small but protruding. Her mouth was small, her chin V-shaped with a distinct notch. Over blue eyes, her brow was smooth. Was it a little lower than his?

She looked human, despite her hairy belly. But her eyes were- cloudy. Frightened. Bewildered.

His throat tight, he spoke to her. "Do you speak English?"

She screeched and thrashed.

And suddenly Snowy had an erection like an iron rod. Holy shit, he thought. Quickly he rolled off the girl, reaching for his bow and his knife.

The girl couldn't get up. Her right foot was trapped by his snare. She scrabbled over the moist ground until she was hunched over her foot. She rocked back and forth, crooning, obviously scared out of whatever wits she had.

Snowy's spasm of lust faded. Now she looked like a chimp in her gestures, in her mindless misery, even though her body had felt like a woman's under his. (Clara, forgive me, it's been a long time.... ) The scrapings of shit on her legs, the puddles of droppings where she had been lying, put him off even more.

He rummaged in a pocket of his flight suit, and pulled out the remains of a ration pack. It still contained a handful of nuts, a bit of beef jerky, some dried banana. He pulled out the banana and held it out, a handful of curling flakes, toward the girl.

She shied back, pulling as far as she could on the wire.

He tried miming, putting a flake or two into his own mouth and exaggeratedly devouring it with every expression of enjoyment. "Yum, yum. Delicious."

But still she wouldn't take the food from his hand. Then again, neither would a deer or a rabbit, he thought. So he put the flakes on the ground between them and backed away.

She grabbed a couple of the flakes and crammed them into her mouth. She chewed and chewed at the bits of banana, as if extracting every bit of flavor from them, before finally swallowing them. She must never have tasted anything so sweet, he thought.

Or maybe it was just that she was starving. He had set the trap a couple of days before; she might have been here for forty-eight hours already. All the shit and piss, the way the fur on her legs was matted and stained, indicated that too.

As she ate he got a good look at the foot that had been caught in the snare. It was a simple loop snare, meant for the heads of rabbits and hares. In her efforts to get free she had pulled the snare tighter- it had worked just as it had been designed- and it had cut so deeply into her leg that it had made a grisly, bloody mess of her flesh, and he thought he could see the white of bone in the wound.

What now? He could slug her and take her back to the base camp. But this wasn't a prey animal, a rabbit or a hare; it wasn't some interesting specimen, like the huge half-way-flightless parakeet Sidewise had caught stalking the fringe of a stagnant pond. This was a person, person, no matter what she looked like. And, he reminded himself, those stretch marks told him she had at least one kid out there waiting for her. no matter what she looked like. And, he reminded himself, those stretch marks told him she had at least one kid out there waiting for her.

"Did I come all this way, across a thousand fucking years, to make the same mess of your life as I've made of mine? I don't bloody think so," he muttered. "Pardon me." And without hesitating he leapt on her.

It was another wrestling match. He got her pinned to the ground, face down, her arms under her, his buttocks in the small of her back. He used his Swiss Army knife to cut the snare wire, and prized the loop out of the bloody gouge it had dug. Then he used up more of his precious supplies to clean away the dirt and dried blood and pus with antiseptic fluid- he had to pick strands of brown hair out of the scabs- and to apply sealant and cream to the wound. Maybe she would leave the stuff on long enough for the wound to get itself disinfected.

The moment he released her she was gone. He glimpsed a figure, upright and lithe, shimmering through the long grass toward the trees, limping but moving fast even so.

It was already late afternoon. They weren't supposed to be alone in the dark, away from base: Ahmed's standing orders. He longed to follow the girl into the green mysteries of the denser forest. But he knew he must not. Regretfully he gathered up his gear and set off back to the base camp.

Snowy was the last to join the group that evening.

They had decided to settle close to a lake a few kilometers from the ruined town. The site was in the lee of a compact, cone-shaped hill- apparently artificial, maybe an Iron Age barrow, or maybe just a spoil heap of some kind.

Ahmed made them gather round the stump of a fallen tree, where he sat, a bit grandly. Snowy wanted to tell the others of his encounter, of what he had found. But the mood wasn't right. So he just sat down.

Moon had grown increasingly withdrawn as the weeks had worn away; now she just sat cross-legged before Ahmed, her eyes averted. But she was the center of everything, as always, all the wordless maneuvering. Sidewise had his usual detached dreaminess, but he was sitting facing Moon, and Snowy saw how his gaze strayed over the curve of her hip, the centimeters of calf she showed above her boot. Ahmed himself sat beside the girl, raised up on his tree stump, as if he owned her.

Bonner was the one whose lust for Moon showed most nakedly. He sat awkwardly, muscles tensed, with a great stripe of mud splashed across his face, a hunter's camouflage marking. He looked like an animal himself, Snowy thought, as if the last bits of his training were barely holding him together.

They were breaking up, Snowy saw, drifting apart, with great fault lines running through their intense little set of relationships. There was hardly anything left of the timid group of Navy fliers who had huddled in the ruined church that first night, chomping on their rations. They might kill each other over Moon, if Moon didn't kill them first.

And Ahmed, their leader, was aware of none of this. Ahmed, in fact, was smiling. "I've been thinking about the future," he said.

Sidewise gave a muffled groan.

"I mean, the further future," Ahmed said. "Beyond the next few months, even the next few years. However we get through the next winter, times are going to be hard for our children."

At the talk of children, Snowy cast a glance at Moon. She was glaring at her hands, her nested fingers.

Ahmed said that during the industrialized period- and especially during the last few insane decades- mankind had used up all its accessible supplies of fossil fuels: coal, gas, oil. "The fossil fuels are probably forming again even now. We know that. But incredibly slowly. The stuff we burned up in a few centuries took around four hundred and fifty million million years to form. But there will always be fuel for our descendants," he said. " years to form. But there will always be fuel for our descendants," he said. "Peat. Peat is what you get when bog mosses, sedges, and other vegetation decompose in oxygen-starved wetlands. Right? And in some parts of the world peat-cutting for fuel continued right until the middle of the twentieth century." Peat is what you get when bog mosses, sedges, and other vegetation decompose in oxygen-starved wetlands. Right? And in some parts of the world peat-cutting for fuel continued right until the middle of the twentieth century."

"In Ireland," Sidewise said. "In Scandinavia. Not here. here."

"Then we go to Ireland, or Scandinavia. Or maybe we'll find it here. Conditions have changed a lot since we went into the cold sleep. Anyhow, if we don't find peat we'll find something else. We've inherited a burned-out world." He tapped his temple. "But we still have our minds, our ingenuity."

"Oh, for God's sake," Sidewise said explosively. "Ahmed, don't you get it? We're just a bunch of castaways- that's it- castaways in time. For Christ's sake, man, we only have one womb between us."

"My womb," said Moon now, without looking up. "My womb. You insufferable prick." womb. You insufferable prick."

"Bog iron," Ahmed said smoothly.

They all stared.

Ahmed said, "You get iron oxide forming in bogs and marshes. When iron-rich groundwater comes into contact with the air, well, it rusts. Right, Sidewise? The Vikings used to exploit that stuff. Why don't we?"

As the bickering went on, Snowy's gaze was drawn to the nearby woods, the shadowed green. Sidewise is right, he thought. We are here by accident, just a kind of echo. We are just going to fall apart, and get pulled down by the green like all the ruined buildings, and just disappear, adding our bones to the billions already heaped in the ground. And it won't matter a damn. If he hadn't known it before, known it in his gut, he was convinced of it now, having encountered the ape-girl. She She is the future, he thought; she, with her bright lion's gaze, her naked little body, her nimbleness and strength- her wordless silence. is the future, he thought; she, with her bright lion's gaze, her naked little body, her nimbleness and strength- her wordless silence.

As they dispersed, Snowy took Sidewise to one side, and told him about the feral woman.

Sidewise asked immediately, "Did you fuck her?"

Snowy frowned his disgust. "No. I felt like it- I got a hell of a rod- but when I saw what she was really like, I couldn't have."

Sidewise clapped him on the shoulder. "No reflection on your manhood, pal. Weena is probably the wrong species, that's all."

"Weena?"

"An old literary reference. Never mind. Listen. No matter what El Presidente over there says, we ought to find out more about these critters. That's a hell of a lot more important than digging peat. We need to figure out how they are surviving here. Because that's the way we are going to have to live too. Go find your girlfriend, Snowy. And ask her if she'd like a double date."

A couple of days after that, before Ahmed could implement his plans for rebuilding civilization, he fell ill. He had to retreat to his lean-to, dependent on the food and water the others brought him.

Sidewise thought it was mercury poisoning, from the spoil heap by the camp. Mercury had been used for centuries in the making of everything from hats to mirrors to bug-control potions to treatments for syphilis. The ground was probably saturated with it, relatively speaking, and even now, a thousand years later, it was still leaching by various slow-dispersal routes into the lake, where it worked its way up the food chain to maximum concentration in the bodies of fish, and the mouths of the people who ate them.

Sidewise seemed to think all of this was funny: that Ahmed, the great planner- the one who, among them all, had clung the longest and hardest to the expansionist dreams of the long-gone twenty-first century- had succumbed to a dose of poison, a lingering legacy of that destructive age.

Snowy didn't much care. There were far more interesting things in the world than anything Ahmed said or did.

Like Weena, and her hairy folk of the forest.

Snowy and Sidewise built a kind of blind, a lean-to liberally sprinkled with grass and green leaves, not far from where Snowy had first encountered the ape-girl Sidewise had christened Weena.

Snowy glanced at Sidewise, stretched out in the blind's shade. In the dense heat of this un-English summer, both of them had taken to going naked save for shorts, an equipment belt, and boots. Sidewise's skin, brown and smeared liberally with dirt, was as good a camouflage as anything invented by the hand of man. Only five or six weeks out of the Pit he was unrecognizable.

"There," hissed Sidewise.

Slim gray-brown figures- two, three, four of them- coalesced out of the shadows at the edge of the forest. They took a few cautious steps out onto the open ground. They were naked, but they were slim and upright, and they carried something in their hands, probably their usual crude stone hammers and knives. Standing in a loose circle, their backs to each other, they peered around with sharp jerks of their heads.

Sidewise being Sidewise, he had developed a story about where these diminutive hairy folk had come from. "Sewer kids," he had said. "When the cities fell, who was going to last the longest? The scrubby little kids who were already in the drains and the sewers and living off the garbage. It might have been years before some of them even noticed anything had changed-"

Now the hairies ran across the grassy meadow toward a slumped, fallen form. It was a deer, a big buck, that Snowy and Sidewise had brought down with a slingshot and dumped here in the hope of attracting the hairies out of their forest cover. The hairies converged on the carcass. They began to hack away at the joints where the hind legs were attached to the lower body. And as they worked in their intent silence, one of them was always on her feet, peering around, keeping guard.

"That's their way of working," murmured Snowy. "Taking the legs- see?"

"Quick and easy," said Sidewise. "About the easiest bit of butchery you can do. Hack off a leg, then beat it back to the forest cover before something with bigger teeth than you comes along to make a contest of it. They are coordinated, even if they don't speak. See the way they are taking turns to be look-out? They are pack hunters. Or scavengers anyhow."

Snowy wondered how come they were so cautious if Sidewise was right about there being no big predators around.

"They look human but they don't act it," Snowy whispered. "You see what I mean? They aren't like a patrol. They're looking around like cats, or birds."

Sidewise grunted. "Those sewer kids must have had no culture, no learning. All they would have known was the sewers. Maybe that was why they stopped talking. In the sewers, maybe the cover of silence was more important than language."

"They lost language language?"

"Why not? Birds lose their flight all the time. To be smart costs. costs. Even a brain the size of yours, Snow, is expensive; it eats a lot of energy from your body's supply. Maybe this isn't a world where being smart pays off as much as, say, being able to run fast or see sharply. It probably didn't take much rewiring for language, even consciousness, to be shut down. And now the brains are free to shrink. Give them a hundred thousand years and they'll look like australopithecines." Even a brain the size of yours, Snow, is expensive; it eats a lot of energy from your body's supply. Maybe this isn't a world where being smart pays off as much as, say, being able to run fast or see sharply. It probably didn't take much rewiring for language, even consciousness, to be shut down. And now the brains are free to shrink. Give them a hundred thousand years and they'll look like australopithecines."

Snowy shook his head. "I always thought men from the future would have big bubble heads and no dicks."

Sidewise looked at him in the dark of the blind. "Being smart didn't exactly do us a lot of good, did it?" he said sourly. He peered out at the hairies, rubbing his face. "Makes you think, looking at them, how brief it all was. There was a moment when there were minds there to understand: to change things, to build. Now it's gone, evaporated, and we're back to this this: living as animals, just another beast in the ecology. Just raw, unmediated existence."