They watched a little longer, as the hairy, naked folk tore the limbs off the fallen deer and, cooperating and squabbling in turns, hauled the haunches back to the shelter of the forest.

Then they returned to their base camp.

Where they found that Bonner was ripping up the place because Moon had disappeared.

"Where the fuck is she?"

Moon had set up her own little lean-to, more solidly built and private than the others. Snowy had always thought that if she could have put on a door with a padlock she would have. Now everything was gone- the backpack Moon had made from a spare flight suit, her tools and clothes, her homemade wooden comb, her precious store of washable tampons.

Bonner was rampaging through what was left, smashing apart the walls of the lean-to. Naked save for now-disintegrating shorts, with his bulked-up muscles and mud smeared over his face and chest and in his spiky hair, Snowy thought there was very little left of the timid young pilot he remembered looking after when they had first met, on assignment to a carrier in the Adriatic.

Ahmed came out of his own lean-to, wrapped in a silvered survival blanket. "What's going on?"

"She's gone. She's fucking gone!" Bonner raged.

Sidewise stepped forward. "We can all see she's gone, you moron-"

Bonner hit at him with a slashing blow. Sidewise managed to duck out of the path of the young pilot's fist, but he was caught on the temple and knocked flat.

Snowy ran forward and grabbed Bonner's arms from behind. "For Christ's sake, Bon, take it easy."

"That two-brained bastard has been fucking her. All the time he was fucking her."

Ahmed seemed utterly dismayed- as well he might, thought Snowy, for if Moon was gone, taking their only hope of procreation with her, all his grandiose plans were ruined before they had started. "But why would she go?" he moaned. "Why be alone? What would be the point point?"

Snowy said, "What's the point of any of it? We're all going to die here. It was never going to work, splot. All the bog iron in the world wouldn't have made any difference to that."

Sidewise managed a grin. "I don't think Bonner is worried about the destiny of mankind right now. Are you, Bon? All he cares about is that the only pussy in the world has vanished, without him getting any of it-"

Bonner roared and swung again, but this time Snowy managed to hold him back.

Ahmed sloped back to his shelter, coughing.

When relative calm was restored, Snowy went to the rack where they had hung a row of skinned rabbits, and started preparing a meal.

Before the first rabbit kebab was cooked over the fire, Bonner had made up a pack. He stood there, in the gathering twilight, facing Sidewise and Snowy. "I'm pissing off," he said.

Sidewise nodded. "You going after Moon?"

"What do you think, shithead?"

"I think she has good land craft. She'll be hard to track."

"I'll manage," Bonner snarled.

"Wait until morning," Snowy said reasonably. "Have some food. You're asking for trouble, going off in the dark."

But the reasoning part of Bonner's head seemed to have switched off for good. He glared at them out of his mask of mud, every muscle tense. Then, his clumsy pack bumping on his back, he stalked away.

Sidewise put another bit of rabbit on the fire. "That's the last we'll see of him."

"You think he'll find Moon?"

"Not if she sees him coming." Sidewise looked reflective. "And if he tries to force her, she'll kill him. She's tough that way."

The rabbit was nearly done. Snowy pulled it off the fire, and began to push bits of it off the spit and onto their crude wooden plates. Every night he had divided up their food into five portions. Now, with Bonner and Moon gone, he divided it into three.

He and Sidewise just looked at the three portions for a while. Ahmed was back in his shelter. Out of sight, out of mind. Snowy picked up the third plate and, with the blade of his knife, scraped off the meat onto the other two plates. "If Ahmed gets better, he can look after himself. If not, there's nothing we can do for him."

For a time they chewed on their rabbit.

"I'll leave tomorrow," Snowy said eventually.

Sidewise didn't reply to that.

"What about you? Where will you go?"

"I think I'd like to explore," Sidewise said. "Go see the cities. London. Paris, if I can get across the Channel. Find out more about what's happened. A lot of it must have gone already. But some of it must be like the ruins of the Roman Empire."

"Nobody else will ever see such sights," Snowy said.

"That's true."

Hesitantly, Snowy said, "What about after that? I mean, when we get older. Less strong."

"I don't think that is going to be a problem," Sidewise said laconically. "The challenge will be to pick how you want to go. To make sure you control at least that."

"When you've seen all you want to see."

"Whatever." He smiled. "Maybe in Paris there will be a few windows left to smash. Thousand-year-old brandy to drink. I'd enjoy that."

"But," Snowy said carefully, "there will be nobody to tell about it."

"We've always known that," Sidewise said sharply. "From the moment we clambered out of the Pit into that ancient oak forest. It was obvious even then."

"Maybe to you," Snowy said.

Sidewise tapped his temple, where a healthy bruise was developing from Bonner's punch. "That's my big brain working. Churning out one useless conclusion after another. And all of it making no damn difference, none at all. Listen. Let's make a pact. We'll pick a meeting place. We'll aim to rendezvous, every year. We may not make it every time, but you can always leave a message, something."

They picked a site- Stonehenge, on the high ground of Salisbury Plain, surely still unmistakable- and a time, the summer solstice, easy to track with the timekeeping discipline Ahmed had instilled in them. It was a good idea. Somehow it was comforting to Snowy, even now, to think that his future would have a little structure.

When they had done eating, the dark was closing in. It wasn't cold, but Snowy fetched himself a blanket of crudely woven bark and wrapped it around his shoulders. "Hey, Side. Was he right?"

"Who?"

"Bonner. Did you pork Moon?"

"Too right I porked her."

"You fucking dark horse. I never knew. Why you?"

"Atavistic urges, mate. I think she was responding to my smarter than the average brain."

Snowy mulled over that. "So our big brains are good for one thing, then."

"Oh, yes. They were always good for that. Probably what they were for in the first place. All the rest was bullshit."

"You fucking dark horse."

IV.

Snowy followed the ape people.

He didn't live as they did. He used his snares to trap game up to the size of pigs and small deer, and used knives and fires and lean-tos for protection and butchery. But he walked where they walked.

They wandered impressively widely, through the great forests that blanketed southern England, forests that concealed the ruins of cities and cathedrals, palaces and parks. He became concerned if he lost sight of Weena, reassured when he found her again. He grew to know all the individuals in the little group- he gave them names, like Grandpa and Shorty and Doc- and he followed their lives, their triumphs and tragedies, as if he were watching a small soap opera.

They were frightened of the rats- the big ones, the rat-wolves that seemed to hunt in packs. He found that out quickly.

He wondered how he must seem to them. They were clearly aware of him, but he didn't interfere with them or the food they gathered. So they let him be, unremarked. He was like a ghost, he thought, a ghost from a vanished past, haunting these new people.

After a few months, with the long, long summer of these late times at last drawing to a close, they came to a beach. Snowy thought he was somewhere on the Sussex shore, on Britain's south coast.

The hairies did a little foraging at the fringe of the forest, ignoring Snowy as usual.

Snowy wandered along the beach. The forest washed right down to the shore, as if this were a Robinson Crusoe tropical island, not England at all. He found a place to sit, facing the crashing waves.

He picked up a handful of sand. It was fine and golden, and ran easily through his fingers. But there were black grains in there, he saw, and some bits of orange and green and blue. The multicolored stuff must be plastic. And the black stuff looked like soot- soot from Rabaul, the killer volcano, or from the fires that had swept the world as everything went to shit.

It's all gone, he thought wonderingly. It really has. The sand was a kind of proof. Moon rock and cathedrals and football stadiums, libraries and museums and paintings, highways and cities and shanties, Shakespeare and Mozart and Einstein, Buddha and Mohammed and Jesus, lions and elephants and horses and gorillas and the rest of the menagerie of extinction- all worn away and scattered and ground down, mixed into this sooty sand he trickled through his fingers.

The hairies were leaving. He could see their slim forms sliding silently into the deeper forest.

He stood up, brushed the sand off his palms, shifted the pack on his back, and followed them.

CHAPTER 18.

The Kingdom of the Rats East Africa. Circa 30 million years after present.

I.

The asteroid had once been called Eros.

Eros had its own miniature geography. Its ground was covered by impact craters, scattered rubble and debris, and strange pools of very fine, bluish dust, electrically charged by the relentless sunlight. Some three times as long as it was wide, it was like Manhattan Island hurled into space.

Eros was as old as the Devil's Tail. Like the Chicxulub comet it was a relic of the formation of the solar system itself. But unlike the comet the asteroid had coalesced well within the clockwork of the inner system- inside the orbit of Jupiter, in fact. In the early days there had been mass destruction as the young asteroids, following their careening orbits, had smashed helplessly into each other. Most were shattered into clouds of dust, or thrown into the great maw of Jupiter, or into the crowded and dangerous inner system. The survivors, in their depleted swarms, followed orderly orbits around the brightening sun.

But even now gravity's ghostly tug caused the asteroids' orbits to resonate like plucked strings.

She surfaced reluctantly into the daylight.

She had had another bad dream. Her head felt muzzy, her limbs stiff. Through the crude roof of her treetop nest she saw the rustling green of the higher canopy, and slivers of bright blue tropical sky. Like the pallet under her body, the roof was just a pulled-together mass of twigs and leaves and slim branches, hastily constructed in the last hour before darkness, soon to be abandoned.

She lay on her back, her right arm pillowed under her head, her legs tucked up against her belly. Her naked body was covered with fine golden hair. At fifteen years of age she was in the prime of her life. Stretch marks on her belly and her small dugs showed that she had already given birth. Her eyes, crusted with sleep, were large, black, watchful: the mark of a slow readaptation to nocturnal living. Behind them a shallow brow led to a small, neat brainpan, its modest outline obscured by a thatch of curly dark hair.

A part of her never slept soundly, no matter how well she constructed her nests. Her dreams were always troubled by the huge spaces beneath her, into which she might fall. Since the treetops were the only safe place for her people to live, this didn't make sense, but there it was. It was going to take more time yet for people to get used to their return to the trees.

It didn't help, of course, that her only child so far had been taken by those spaces beneath her, his grip loosened from her fur by rain, his little body tumbling into the green depths.

She had never discussed this with anyone. In fact nobody discussed anything anymore. The days of endless talking were long gone, the larynxes and cognitive capacities of a loquacious folk put aside, irrelevant to life in the trees.

She didn't even have a name. But perhaps something in her retained a deep memory of vanished, different days. Call her Remembrance.

She heard a rustling in the layers of vegetation beneath her, a trickle of discarded fruit husks falling through the leaves, the first tentative hooting pants of the males.

She rolled on to her belly and pressed her face into her bed of twigs. She could just make out the colony itself, a dark, pendulous mass in the deeper layers of the canopy, like a wooden submarine somehow lodged high in the green. All around the colony slim figures were moving, working, bickering. The business of the day was starting. And it didn't pay to be a late arrival.

Remembrance stood upright and broke open her nest, like a bird bursting from its egg. With her small head raised to her full meter-tall height above the branch, she peered around at her world.

Everywhere the forest lapped in great green layers of life. The highest canopy was a roof far above her own elevation. To north, west, and east, beyond the trees, Remembrance could make out a blue, sparkling glimmer. The light off the ocean had always intrigued her. And though she could not make out the southern shore, she had a correct intuition that the ocean continued even there, making a great belt around the land: she knew that she lived on a vast island. But the ocean was another irrelevance, too far away for her to be troubled with.

This particularly dense pocket of forest had sprouted from a gorge cut deep into the bedrock. Sheltered by walls of hard rock, fed by streams that ran along the base of the gorge, this was a crowded, vibrant place, full of life- though here and there were bare patches cleared by borametz trees and their servants, a new kind of life.

But the gorge itself wasn't natural. Long ago blasted out of ancient bedrock, it was the result of human road building. Erosion had taken its toll: When the drainage ditches and culverts were no longer maintained, the cutting slopes had collapsed. But nevertheless a patient geologist could have detected a fine dark layer in the sandstone that had slowly gathered at the bottom of the gorge. The dark layer was metamorphosing bitumen, a stratum still sprinkled here and there with fragments of the vehicles that had once come this way.

Even now the passing of humans left its mark.

A shadow flickered over the leaves that rustled around her, fast-moving, silent, cast by the low sun. Hastily she ducked down, seeking the safety of the green's cover. It had been a bird, of course. The predators of the upper canopy had already started their day, and it did not do to be too visible.

With a last glance at the remains of her nest- littered by bits of shit and discarded hair, stained by her urine, soon to be forgotten- she began to clamber down.

As the tropical day brightened, the people had already spread out through the trees, lithe and graceful, beginning the day's relentless search for fruit, bark-burrowing insects, and leaf-cupped water.

Remembrance, still listless, hung back, watching.