"With all the implied instabilities. Even if he creates beauty at breakfast - and he's not exactly expert at simple feeding yet - you can never be sure he won't murder before sundown."

But Barion heard the siren song of possibility. "At least I can help him with the nuts. Before that other specimen grabs them away."

A smaller male, foraging himself, had wandered close. The first male chattered a warning. When the newcomer made a snatch at the nuts, he scooped up the broken stone -

- the difference was subtle but apparent to Coyul: a little more control in the grip, better aim as the cutting edge slammed down on the marauder's skull. With a shrill scream the smaller male rolled in the grass, clutching its furry head. Reclaiming the prize, the victor laid the nuts on the rock that had shattered and shaped his own missile and pounded at them with the cutting stone.

"Barion, quit messing around!"

"I didn't," Barion whispered, jubilant. "Well, not much."

Just a nudge here, a hint there in the small proto-brain, turning it precocious just a little ahead of evolutionary schedule. "Show-off. At least give the loser the same break."

"What, him?" Barion started away toward the hilltop. "Controlled experiment; always a loser. Smart eats, stupid starves. I have some thinking to do."

Coyul sat alone, brooding on the grave and very possible consequences of Barion's impulse, staring morosely at the relative genius picking edible morsels from the mashed shells.

"Congratulations. Try not to get eaten yourself before the day's out. Now get out of here. Move!"

The sudden thunder of Coyul's voice sent the ape fleeing away across the savanna. Safe for the moment, the smaller male brandished a stick after him, achieving moral victory at low cost and healthy distance, then rummaged among the nutshells for bits of meat.

Coyul watched him, thinking on balances of power, his brother's arrogance, the wounded monkey. Blood from its lacerated scalp spattered over the stone missile. The creature hefted the stone in one hand, picked up its stick in the other, looking off after the departed enemy.

"Just this once," Coyul decided. "Only fair."

He made no major intrusion in the small brain, just enough to push one fact toward another to make a working combination. Still intent on his distant assailant, the ape's bright eyes gleamed with new tactical purpose. It remembered dimly making a few tentative swipes at soft wood with harder stone . . . something stone could do to wood.

The nimble fingers with their unique opposable thumbs began to work - clumsily at first, then more surely through a hundred tries until the ape learned how to strike most effectively with the tool. Until there was a formidable point.

With a scream of triumph, the little creature plunged its weapon again and again into yielding earth, brandished vengeance high overhead, then darted away on a direct course after the enemy who hurt it.

Coyul lingered a moment to wonder which would survive, then put his figurative money on the spear maker. The other ape might be bigger, but this one was vindictive and mean.

3 - The serpent's gift

The spear maker became head of his family group by the logical expedient of skewering his larger rival. Barion was peeved at his brother's interference -

"Keep your hands off, Coyul."

- but on reflection found aspects of the victor too tempting to pass up. Perfect serendipity: this backwater world would never matter to anyone. Sorlij or someone would pick them up soon enough; meanwhile he could experiment toward results that would surely win him a science prize for seeding in one of the more important galaxies. Barion was young. The urgent right-ness of his theories spurred him like a pebble in his shoe.

Suppose . . .

Ninety-five percent of hominid species never went anywhere. Another three percent did somewhat better but coasted eventually down evolutionary dead ends. The viable two percent were no end of trouble, but only - Barion theorized - because no one was allowed to work them to Cultural Threshold until they'd attained 1050 cc of cranial capacity. At that tardy point, the primal tendencies were too deep-rooted a part of them, the memory of the dark in which their nocturnal ancestors foraged while the great reptiles slept.

"No one has ever tried CT at the level of these subjects."

"An unencouraging and totally illegal 900 cc," Coyul reminded him.

But the prospect caught fire in Barion's imagination. "An expendable world not even on the charts at home. An expendable species that won't . . . Look, you know this kind of planet always tends to radical polar tilt sooner or later. They won't make it through the ice. We'll be gone by then, but at least I'll know I'm right."

Coyul shook his head, resigned to sad truth. "You won't breed the darkness out of them no matter when you start. It's part of them."

"Isn't."

"It is when you're a mind capable of conceiving eternity trapped inside a body that dies. I didn't sleep through all the lectures, you know."

"Yes, yes." Barion waved the objections aside with his usual know-it-all gesture. "Religion, dualism. Predictable stages."

"Not stages, you idiot! Propensities!"

"Hush, be still. My subject's coming."

The ape moved cautiously to the water hole to drink, wary of the two still figures a little distance away, hissing a challenge out of a mouth and throat still limited in the sounds they could produce. Were she of an empirical bent, Charity Stovall might have been edified to know her direct ancestor was the smartest ape on its metaphorical block. Relative to body mass, the brain was already huge. Other survival traits would have sent Charity gibbering back to Genesis for reassurance.

Above all, the ape was marvelously adaptable. Omnivorous as a rodent, thriving on any food available. Three and a half feet tall: the most acquisitive, curious, aggressive, inventively vicious hominid Barion had ever found, and quite the hardiest on this violent world next to the cockroach and the rat. Long after this day's work the ape would produce Christ, Beethoven, Auschwitz, thumbscrews and philosophy, Magna Carta and White Supremacy, poetry, poison gas, nuclear fission and romantic love. For the moment it crouched by the water hole, munching a succulent grub discovered under a stone, warning off the large creatures that somehow would not be frightened away. They were unclassifiable, therefore a threat. The ape made the brave noises of its kind.

"Good morning," Barion said softly. "Welcome to evolution."

The ape jumped at the sound, afraid but curious.

"I may be wrong about you. You and I have a great deal to learn."

The ape made a clicking sound of puzzlement.

"You won't understand any of this. Even when your mind is clear enough to send your little cutting stone to the moon and beyond, you'll still wonder about this moment but never quite forget the truth of it. Wrap it in religion, a hundred flattering myths, in music, painting and exaltation of pure spirit - "

"Why all the lyrics?" Coyul wondered sourly. "You're only giving it a boot in the evolutionary butt."

"Can't you see it? The implications, the greatest of all dramas, when life stands erect to contemplate itself - "

"My brother, the scientific lemming, headlong over the edge of folly. Don't do it."

"Shut up. This is his triumph: this one moment of knowing, when the atom contemplates an electron navel and finds worlds within worlds, will stay in that small brain forever. Your nature will always be to believe," he prophesied to his quivering subject, "but your destiny always to question. I can't make that any easier for you."

Barion began to dissolve, flowing toward the creature. Coyul pleaded one last time. "Barion, don't! It's - "

Too late. His brother became a brief sparkle in sunlight before pouring into the little ape's brain.

" - madness."

Under the beetling brow, it - he - blinked. A great light had flashed somewhere behind his eyes. Blood pounded in his ears. He was alone by the muddy water hole and still thirsty, but now, as he bent to drink, there was a difference. Always before, he'd seen the other creature come up to meet him out of the water, then vanish somehow in the small ripples caused by his drinking. The image had always frightened him; now he knew it was his own. He snarled at it, knowing he existed and would end, rejecting that horrible truth for all time with a howl of terror and rage and a primal loss he would labor through countless eons and creeds to rationalize and define. With all the terrible weight of consciousness, knowing he was. The beginnings of expression in the eyes, a dawn-sense of the tragedy Barion had taxed him with. As for the lost thing never to be found again, even his far-distant daughter Charity would call it the Fall.

Stunned by sentience, the miserable human did what came naturally - growled as Barion reappeared beside Coyul.

"Now you've done it," Coyul reproached him with a full measure of disgust. "I don't care if you are my brother. You're a rotten kid."

"We'll see." Barion inspected his handiwork like a critical painter gauging perspective on a canvas. Abruptly he swung away, covering the ground in great strides.