Isle of Woman (Geodyssey)

by Piers Anthony

  Ember lifted her pistol, sighted carefully between Carver and Crystal, who remained still after their actions, and fired at the front man’s face. His nose disappeared; the club slipped from his hand; he fell forward onto Daisy, who had remained down and still after her attempt. Because when weapon #3 came into play, they could not afford to risk getting in the way. Ember could hit what she aimed at, but had to have a clear target.

  “Move!” she snapped. Now the others in the boat stirred, looking around, knowing that she was not about to fire again. There was the fourth man, not far from Ember herself, staring. This easy slaughter had suddenly reversed, and he had not yet taken in the change.

  Ember turned and aimed the gun at him. “D-d-don’t waste a bullet on me!” he cried. “I’m gone!”

  It was a fair deal. Bullets were just as precious to them as to the enemy, and they had only six. The man turned and slogged away through the water, and Ember let him go.

  Daisy was meanwhile extricating herself from the body of the front man, who had fallen partway across her. She was about to shove the corpse into the water, but Ember stopped her. “Leave it strewn there, where others can see,” she said. “Move on out.”

  Baffled and repelled, Daisy obeyed. She hauled the body around so that its head was in the water on one side of the boat, and its legs on the other. That way it didn’t bleed into the boat, though it did weigh down the front end. Carver and Crystal rinsed their knives in the water and put them away. Then they took up their poles again. Ember kept her eye on the river, both banks, in case any other men should appear. The sound of the shot might attract others.

  But no one else sought to molest them. Surely others saw, peering from the cover of derelict buildings and piles of rubble, but elected to stay clear. That made sense, because now it was known that the family on the boat had an operative gun, and that it had already killed an attacker. As long as it proceeded straight down the channel, not seeking to land, others would let it be. This was not courtesy but common sense.

  In the evening, clear of the metropolis, they did come to land, at an algae-covered broken-down pleasure pier. Huge roaches scuttled away as they stepped onto it. Beyond was the ruin of a once-elegant estate house. They verified that it was empty, and located a chamber whose roof remained reasonably intact. Here they would spend the night. They found a suitable gully for natural functions, and took turns using it, the other three standing guard.

  “Now we must make a fire,” Ember said. “There’s plenty of wood-wreckage here.”

  “But won’t that attract people?” Crystal asked.

  “It may, but it must be risked. One of us will tend the fire, two will stand guard, and one will cook and smoke the meat.”

  “We don’t have any meat,” Daisy protested.

  “We do now,” Ember said grimly.

  The others stared at her. “Oh, no,” Crystal breathed.

  “They were going to do it to us,” Ember said. “We took them in fair combat. Now we must survive by their rules. We are in cannibal country.”

  Daisy’s mouth worked. “I—I couldn’t!” She looked as if about to vomit.

  “Then you stand guard. I will do the necessary. Each will eat as he chooses.”

  Crystal and Carver exchanged a long glance. Both were lean and hungry. Both had killed on this day. They knew that it was foolish to throw away enough meat to feed them for a long time. Especially when they needed their health to fight off others who wanted to eat them. The body was already there.

  They went to fetch it from the boat.

  “And so we carved it into major segments and roasted it over the fire,” Ember finished. “All of us gagged at first, but our hunger drove us. We wrapped the leg roasts in bits of canvas and took them with us in the boat. We reroasted them every few days, as long as they lasted. We were survivors in the new order.”

  “We were in El Paso when we learned how others were surviving,” Blaze agreed. “We soon realized, as you did, that we would not survive if we were starving. It wasn’t enough to scrape by on old cans of beans we dug out of the wrecks. We had to be in fit condition to fight, because our enemies were. We could only be that by eating well. That meant long pig meat. But we also protected ourselves by moving along. We followed the Rio Grande on down to the coast, using a boat as you did. We had some bad times, but we too were survivors.”

  “We continued down the Mississippi to the delta,” Ember said. “But we weren’t comfortable on the river. We wanted to find a place where we could settle down and live, instead of constantly fearing floating into an ambush.” She shook her head. “How do you think the cannibalism got started? We certainly didn’t seek it; we were driven to it.”

  “I have thought about that too. I think it started in the big cities, where there simply wasn’t any food coming in. Maybe nine often people were willing to quietly starve to death, but one of ten wasn’t. That minority was what survived, by eating the others. It wouldn’t be long before cannibals were the only survivors, by natural selection.”

  She sighed. “I suppose so. Given a fair choice, we would have taken almost any other way, and for a long time we did. We learned to like grubs. But human meat was so relatively easy, and there was so much of it”

  “And it was coming after you,” he said. “But we kept looking for an alternative. For one thing, we knew that man-eat-man could not be the wave of the future. At some point the next to last man would be eaten by the last man, who would thereafter starve. So finally we came here to what used to be Houston, and realized that there was an alternative. We saw that the mutant bugs and roaches were prospering amidst the ruins. We realized that they could be eaten, as they have been in other cultures. So we started roach farming.”

  “We came here two years ago from the other direction,” Ember said. “We started our algae farm.”

  “And we’ve been trading ever since,” he agreed. “You provided tubs of fresh algae for our roaches to feed on, and we provided packages of roasted roaches for you to eat. Yet we never actually met, because we could never be sure of each other. We survived by trusting no one but kin, and we continued to kill those who came hunting us for meat. This was the way it had to be.”

  “Our contact officers met under special truce,” she said. “And it seems they got along well enough.”

  “Yes. Now we know why. It must have been instant love for Oak and Daisy, and not just because he was a handsome eighteen-year-old boy and she a pretty eighteen-year-old girl. They were destined for each other throughout.”

  “As you and I were,” Ember agreed. “For three million years.”

  “For three million years,” Blaze echoed. “Now at last we are kin, and need not hunt each other.”

  “Now at last we can love.”

  They moved back into a close embrace. Cobblestone banged her little hands together with applause. They knew that the horrors of the past five years were about to give way to a better future.

  The future was not very much like the past, but all over the world surviving human beings emerged from the horror of the cannibal years with a new appreciation for the remaining health of the environment. Most of the other creatures and plants of the world had been rendered extinct by the combined effects of predation, habitat destruction, and climate, and the globe was forever impoverished thereby. But a number of species of algae, which could grow well in the marshy remains of once great rivers, and insects, which could eat that algae, survived and prospered. When the diminished remnant of mankind farmed these, he developed an excellent continuing source of food, and no longer had to eat his own kind. It was the dawn of a new era.

  Yet perhaps it would have been better if man had not allowed the world to come to such a pass before he got the message.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  * * *

  This is the first volume of a projected series titled GEODYSSEY. That’s GEO as in Geography, Geology, etc., meaning the earth, combined with ODYSSEY, as in a long adventurous wandering jour
ney. That is what you have seen here—a three-and-a-half-million-year excursion through global history. But there is more to it than this, of course. Much more.

  The genesis of this project is lost in the archaeology of my thoughts; my first actual notes date from 1966. I’ve always been fascinated by history and paleontology—that is, the study of former life-forms, such as dinosaurs. I just didn’t realize it in school, because school is where even sex can be rendered boring, and history both natural and human is made as dull as the pedants can manage. It seems that if they can’t tag it with endless dates and names of kings and wars, they don’t teach it. But once I was free of school I was able to pursue what was meaningful, and history has been a common aspect of my writing. Archaeology turned out to be the region between man and the animals—the study of people by their artifacts. A potsherd may seem dull, but not when it evokes a fascinating culture. My collection of reference books on such subjects grew, and in the course of a quarter century my notion for the project expanded similarly. My notion was to employ one of the basic arts that define the nature of man, storytelling, to do what it has always done, defining the nature of man.

  Some of the books I found most interesting or useful were The Aquatic Ape by Elaine Morgan, describing the aquatic hypothesis that I modified for Chapter 4. For general information there was The Field Guide to Early Man by David Lambert. Excellent, readable books on the nature of mankind are Our Kind by Marvin Harris and The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond. The Ape That Spoke by John McCrone describes the essence of man’s brain and language. Man’s spread across the world is described by The Journey from Eden by Brian M. Fagan. Many of the creatures the world has already lost are shown in Extinct Species of the World by Jean-Christophe Balouet and Eric Alibert. The cave sequence of Chapter 8 is beautifully shown in The Cave of Lascaux—The Final Photographs by Mario Ruspoli. One of my favorite cities, shown in Chapter 11, is denned in Catal Huyuk—A Neolithic Town in Anatolia by James Mellaart. One of a number of historical atlases I used—I have a collection of eighteen of them—was Hammond Past Worlds—The Times Atlas of Archaeology. And two excellent books on the present problem are The End of Nature by Bill McKibben and Earth in the Balance by Al Gore, who as I write this is running for vice president of the United States. This list is just a sampling, by no means comprehensive, and is dwarfed by the number of texts my research assistant read. Many were borrowed from the library of the University of South Florida, where my personal papers are currently being collected. The research for a project like this is a big job, as you might imagine, and access to good and specific references is essential.

  At first I had thought it could be a single novel. But as I appreciated the ramifications, the size of this projected novel grew until it was half a million words long. So I decided to split it into three volumes. Then I realized that if I started with the apes and finished in the near future, the first volume would be all pre-man, the second would be all ancient history, and the third medieval to modern history. Three different types of story, appealing to different types of readers. That probably wouldn’t wash, as a series. I thought of focusing on one continent at a time, such as America, Europe, Asia, Australia or Africa. But America’s and Australia’s history is mostly recent—that is, the past 20,000 or 40.000 years—while Africa’s is mostly ancient, the first three million years. It would also tend to make a racial thing of it, perhaps fragmenting my audience. I wanted to show mankind as a unified species. Finally I thought of making it a single, unified story, but slicing it into volumes vertically. That is, each volume would range from the start to the finish, and across all the continents, but be only a portion of the whole. Picture a layer cake, with each cut piece showing its layers from the icing down to the plate and extending from the edge to the center. No single slice contains the whole cake, but each slice samples every part of it.

  This volume is like that piece of cake. I once wrote a novel with that title, A Piece of Cake, but that had no relation to this; it was future space adventure, and the publisher changed the title to Triple Detente, and so it remains. This present volume is conceived as perhaps a third of the whole, the sequels being Shame of Man and Hope of Earth. Three volumes this size would represent the half million words envisioned. But naturally it isn’t that simple. Now that I have written the first volume, I am uncertain whether I can complete the story in three, so it might be a series. I am also uncertain whether there will be another volume, because there’s an enormous amount of research and my time is always pressed. My research assistant, Alan Riggs, did a wonderful job. He was the one who did basic research on history and cultures after I set the settings, and who had to find out obscure things, such as whether daisies grow in Africa. Yes, the African Daisy is the Gerbera, a beautifully decorative import to America; we have a number in our own garden. He also checked for errors; could Ember have green eyes when she was a Black African? I wrote this novel in about six months, which is twice as long as I take on ordinary ones; it would have taken a year without Alan, or the quality would have suffered. My deadlines on other projects don’t allow more time. There is also the question of market: if there aren’t enough readers, it won’t fly. I once wrote a historical novel couched as future space adventure, Steppe, ready to write others of that type if the market was there. I received many positive comments, but the sales were no better than my ordinary novels, while the research was much greater. So I did not continue that series; I became a best-seller in light fantasy instead. To put it in garden-variety terms: if you had a choice of two good jobs, and one paid twice as well while the other required twice as much work, which would you take? Fortunately I am now well enough off so that I can afford to go the route I prefer—but that choice, too, is not all that simple, because I like the fantasy very well also, and have many dedicated readers there.

  So Isle of Woman may be a single volume, or the first of a trilogy, or of a longer series. Time will tell. At least you know its nature. Other volumes, if they come to be, will go more deeply into the relation between climate and history, the connection between important resources such as wood and the welfare of mankind, the impact of disease, and special aspects of the species and its history. They will also show other ways in which mankind may destroy itself, or manage to save itself. Overpopulation is hardly the only threat to mankind’s continued existence. Nuclear war is perhaps the most dramatic of a number of ugly alternatives. There were also less devastating things I really wanted to cover here, but I had to stay within my guidelines. I wanted to get into the reason why man’s penis and woman’s breasts are just about the largest, in proportion, in the animal kingdom, and why we need to get vitamin C from our diet when most other animals don’t, and just what did happen to the ancient culture of northern India that left the ruins of Harappa. This volume never touched on the prehistory of South America, but there is significance there too. Mankind is endlessly fascinating, in general and detail, and I want to learn it all and share it all. Perhaps I shall accomplish some of that. There are major areas this volume never addressed, such as mankind’s darker nature, and it is really a simplified sanitized introductory narrative with well-meaning people in relatively normal situations. There is really little evil. That is apt to change.

  The general framework of each volume will be similar to this one, covering anywhere up to four million years, touching down at human points along the way. Perhaps there will be one larger family, instead of two “male” and “female” lines of descent, and just one generation. Some readers may have noticed that the three generations age at different rates, with Blaze and Ember gaining four years per chapter, Stone and Crystal three years, and Tree and Flower two. This is to maintain the proportion as the average length of human life extends. Others may have noted the artistic echoing of elements in different chapters, such as the affair between Blaze and Seed, the emphasis diminishing as their lives across the world progress. Specific themes may be more evident in the sequels; this first volume is more of a generalized
sampling, as it were introducing mankind to the reader. Assuming that we solve the population crisis by appropriately limiting our rate of reproduction, there will remain other problems almost as formidable. All of them have to be addressed, in reality if not in this series, or it will be like saving the patient from cancer only to have him die the following day from a heart attack. For this volume I assumed that nothing would be done, and traced the likely consequence in Chapter 20.

  What, then, is the point of this volume? As is usually the case with my more serious projects, there are several. I did want to explore history, showing it the way I see it, satisfying my readers that what schools and ordinary texts do is not the only way to address this vastest of all subjects. But I also wanted to help cry warning, to show in a way that the average person can understand that mankind is headed for a crisis that can not be ignored. Mankind evolved to address the challenges of a situation in Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago, and then learned to cope with the rest of the world 40,000 years ago. The traits and abilities that enabled him to survive and prosper then are now about to drive him into disaster. Because we are crafted to respond to something immediate and dramatic, such as the pounce of a saber-toothed tiger, rather than to something dull that will happen in another generation, like running out of space for our garbage, we deal with the acute problems while allowing the chronic problems to grow. But those chronic problems, though slow, can be extremely serious. We are in the process of making the most extensive series of extinctions of animals and plants ever to occur on Earth, dwarfing the disaster of the dinosaurs, because we are not only hunting animals mercilessly, we are destroying their habitats and those of many plants. We are cutting down the last great forests. Every new house we build squeezes the natural realm a bit more tightly, and we don’t even notice. We are polluting air, earth, and sea, making them turn gradually hostile to life. Yet powerful elements in our society are campaigning to continue these processes, in the name of convenience, jobs, or wealth. This is absolute folly—and we seem hardly to care.