Antediluvian

by Wil McCarthy

  Too, Harv had never described being out of place in any of his visions. He wasn’t a “Cro-Magnon” in Vedic India, nor a swarthy Indian in Scotland. The myth of racial phenotypes had been pretty thoroughly discredited at the genetic level, but even so, these movements would put quite a strain Harv’s family’s evolution and, more importantly, their cross-breeding with whatever locals they encountered.

  She tried not to think about what this meant for her personally, because yes, trying not to think about something was so easy. So easy. Was she just one more in a long line of genetically compelled, xenophilic conquests? Would it matter if she were?

  When Harv’s account started to fizzle out, she said to him, “That’s quite a narrative. Do you have any idea where it took place?”

  “No,” he admitted. “Or when. Somewhere in Africa, a long time ago. Or maybe the Middle East. Did ostriches ever live there?”

  She sighed. “You know, it would be nice if you could’ve filled in some of these gaps. How about stepping backward a thousand years at a time? Or ten thousand? Give me some waypoints to follow.”

  “Sorry,” he said. Then, “I don’t think my brain could handle that.”

  “Yeah,” she agreed, slumping. “We’re not even sure it can handle this.”

  “There are a hundred things we could have done better,” he admitted.

  She both squeezed his hand and looked away.

  “I was right there with you, Harv.”

  “Mmm,” he murmured, apparently not sure what to say to that.

  They sat in silence for a little while, until she asked him, “What do you think this means?”

  “There were no cave people,” he answered immediately, as if he’d been waiting for the question. As if he were already rehearsing all the perfect answers. “Not the way people think. Not ever.”

  “No, no, what does it mean for us?”

  He shrugged. “Nothing changes for you and me. Not unless you want it to.”

  “Not that us,” she said. “You and me and Patel.”

  “Oh. Well, yeah, we’re going to be busy. Really busy, and not always in a good way.”

  “We’ll need a lawyer,” she said.

  “We’ll need a lot of things. It’s going to get crazy.”

  “It’s already crazy,” she said, now feeling tears on her cheeks again. She turned off the voice recorder. “We took a lot of risks. That’s going to come out, too.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s going to reflect on all of us.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m furious with myself for helping you do this so…sloppily. I know progress is messy sometimes, but this just looks bad.”

  “I know that, too. I’m sorry for all the ways this affects you.”

  They sat together for a while in the dim light, without speaking, with the beeps and voices and clatters of the emergency room wafting over them. The air smelled of bleach and floor wax, of polymer bags and tubes and basins and fixtures slowly outgassing. Like new car smell, she thought vaguely.

  In the absence of conversation, Tara felt her anger turn inward. Harv was only four centimeters taller than she was, and his white skin, black hair, and dark brown eyes were nondescript at best. He wore sneakers and T-shirts to work, and carried a backpack over one shoulder, like a man less than half his age. The only truly remarkable thing about his appearance was the silly pink lenses he wore in his glasses. How exactly had she fallen so completely into his orbit? How could she explain that to other people, in a way they’d understand?

  And yet, when her head was on his shoulder, she felt as relaxed as she ever had. In his company she felt cool, and that was a strange thing, because even when he was boozing and vaping and driving too fast, he was quite visibly a dork. But that was the thing about very smart people: what you saw on the surface was all ripples and reflection, giving no information about the depths below, the rays of sunlight shimmering on treasure.

  After a while, Patel stuck his head back into the curtained area around the bed. “Boss, I’m going to talk with the police. Is that okay?”

  “Yep. When you’re done, you can send them in here. If I’m awake.”

  Tara sighed. “If you’re awake? Jesus, Harv.” Then: “How are you feeling?”

  “I have a headache,” he said.

  And somehow they both laughed at that.

  “I think I have one too,” she said.

  “I’ll buy you a really nice dinner when this is over,” he said. “Anywhere you like. That Thai place, or whatever.”

  That sounded fine for a second, but then she thought about it and said, “It still isn’t over?”

  He paused for a few moments, as if listening, and then shook his head.

  Well, that was demoralizing. She asked: “Is another seizure coming?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  And that raised all kinds of questions: how did he know? What sensations were flowing through him? Why was any of this happening, and why wouldn’t it stop?

  “Have we killed you, Harv?”

  The question seemed to rock him back for a moment. Had they? Would he? All he could do was shrug and say, “I dunno. I certainly hope not.”

  And the girlfriend part of her didn’t know what to do with that, so she let the scientist in her ask, “What’s the sensation like?”

  “It’s like a pressure, building behind my eyes.”

  “The headache is increasing?”

  “No,” he said, “it’s separate from the headache. It’s more like a push. Or a pull. It’s like gravity. It’s a big sine wave rolling in and out, and right now it’s trending stronger again. But it’s building more slowly this time.”

  His hand felt suddenly clammy in hers. Sweat had begun to bead up on his forehead. She tried to imagine what was happening inside him, and came up with nothing except a vision of cartoon lightning bolts crackling through the inside of his head, louder and brighter.

  “Oh, gods, Harv,” she muttered, squeezing. “Stay with me.”

  “It feels different.” His voice sounded woozy. “Maybe it’s the drugs. Something different is happening.”

  The alarms stared up again.

  “This is going to be bad,” he noted calmly. “I feel like I’m falling.”

  * * *

  The memories of the Talking People, none too clear even while they were happening, fell way from Harv’s mind, and he felt himself skidding farther and farther back in time. But now history had a slick, yielding quality that was difficult to anchor against. He caught glimpses—a million glimpses!—of life on the beach, life in the forest, life on the open grasslands. People active in the daylight, or in the moonlight, or in the twilight between. Human history was definitely not some linear progression, but a restless fucking around from one place to another, an endless adaptation to new problems and circumstances.

  And yet, without language, Harv’s mind seemed to have nothing to attach to. Feelings of love and lust and joy and fear washed through him but didn’t take, and it began to feel like he was falling through time, with nothing to arrest him. And now Harv felt his own fear, because none of this was supposed to be happening. Nothing at all was known about this process, or what it might be doing to his brain, or to his soul (if such a thing could be said to exist), or to the delicate quantum states that defined his own natural memories. These had become entangled with equally complex states from other times and places, but what if that entangling mechanism had ceased, or saturated, or decohered?

  The images flickered by, faster and faster. And other sensations: heat and cold. Rain and wind. Pain of a thousand different types. Exactly like a falling man, he felt a need to scream. He thought perhaps he did scream, but was there air enough in his lungs for another thirty thousand years? Another million?

  His sight began to fade into a gray tunnel that blackened and shrunk around the edges, withering down to a single spot of light, and then winking out entirely. If he’d been screaming, he stopped then, believing himse
lf dead or worse, and in any case beyond hope of rescue.

  And then, suddenly, his memories found something to latch onto—something big—and with a kind of buzzing-scraping-thudding sensation, he felt himself collapsing into something so far back that his mind—his mind, the mind of a chrononaut-scientist!—could not conceive of the distance. And then he opened his eyes.

  PART FOUR

  The Voyage

  4.1

  Light glinted off the water and into the eyes of a creature called Ba. Ba blinked and grunted, feeling a spike of pain and pressure and dizziness through his head, quickly subsiding to a dull ache. Closing his eyes, Ba kicked his feet, twisting around in the water to face away from the setting sun. Then he opened his eyes again, and felt better.

  For a moment, Ba thought he’d hit something, or that a wave was flipping over the raft on which he lay, stomach down, with his head and arms dangling off the front. But no, the water was calm, and the raft beneath him was sturdy. In fact, with the light now behind him he could see there was a beautiful fish almost within arm’s reach. Collecting his wits, he raised his right arm and, with the forked wooden gaff in his hand, stabbed the fish right through the middle, despite the optical illusion that the gaff was bent at the water’s surface.

  And that’s how we do that! he thought to himself. Ba was good at what he did, and could be a bit of a smug prick about it at times.

  He sat up on the raft, hauling in the wriggling fish, then jabbed it down on the timbers in front of him, scooped up a raindrop-shaped hand axe, and smashed the space between the fish’s head and body. Its struggles eased after that, and soon it was dead.

  Ba sometimes felt sorry for the fishes he caught; they obviously didn’t want to be stabbed or axed or eaten. But neither did most things, and his tribe did have to survive. Of course, this was his third big fish for the afternoon, and the sun would be down soon, and the other man and woman who’d been out here fishing today had each caught a single big fish of their own and then gone home. There would be plenty to eat, so perhaps Ba would go home now, too, and let the rest of the fish continue living their little fishy lives for another day.

  Looking toward the beach, he tried to gauge the surf he’d have to paddle through as he landed his raft. The height and strength of the waves wasn’t always easy to judge from out here past the surf line, but right now it didn’t look too bad, or sound too bad. Still, he tied his three fish together with a length of jute twine, and then tied them to one of the timbers of the raft. He’d lost more than one meal to the breaking surf, and wasn’t prepared to lose this one. When he was ready, he stowed the gaff and axe under his body, paddled around with his arms until he was facing the land, and then began kicking toward shore.

  His raft was a miniature version of something Huckleberry Finn might recognize: eight tree trunks lashed together, each as wide as Ba’s upper arm, and chopped at the ends to about two-thirds of his height, with a pair of stabilizing bars lashed crosswise underneath. Of course, Ba could neither speak nor count (not higher than three, anyway), and had no cultural reference points for his engineering marvel. But his father-figure, Kaa, had taught him well, and so the tribe continued to eat its fill of fish even after Kaa had disappeared one day on a fishing trip, leaving not so much as a washed-up body.

  Everything was food for someone.

  Ba kicked and paddled and kicked some more, until he felt the surf-line waves begin to lift and push him. Then he gripped the edges of the raft firmly, and kicked a couple more times until a wave lifted up beneath him, catching him on its front and heaving him forward.

  And for just a flickering moment, Ba was reminded of Manuah on his reed boat, as the wave lifted higher beneath him, tilting his face down toward the water and his feet up toward the sky. He loved this part—the fear and joy and power of it. And the speed! As fast as a man could run, and faster! He was good at this, but it was not easy, and wipeouts happened all the time. And then, yes, the fear began to win out, as he realized this wave was going to be bigger than he’d thought. Soon it was as tall as the raft was long, and then it was as tall as Ba himself, and then it was a blue-green tube through which the red sunlight shone, and Ba’s feet were getting sucked up into it.

  And then it was breaking on top of him, and underneath him, and he’d neglected to steer with his legs, so the raft spun sideways and tumbled in a pounding confusion of water and foam, wet beach sand and smooth rocks and seashells as sharp as hand axes. And then the water was retreating, leaving Ba sitting on his wet ass amidst a yard sale of fish and twine and tools and expertly chopped logs.

  Ba was nude and covered in wiry black hair, less like a chimpanzee than like some hirsute movie stars he could think of. The hair on his shoulders and upper back was as thick as the hair on his head, but he had the rounded, naked buttocks of a human being, and so the water tickled his nether regions as it pulled back into the sea. He had only a moment to appreciate the sensation before he saw another wave about to curl and crash. This one was higher than the last—a problem wave—and so he gathered up as many of his things as he could, got to his feet, and trotted up the beach, laughing like a drunken sailor.

  Well, he thought, that was fun.

  He was lucky not to have impaled himself on the fishing gaff, but all life was luck, yes? Until it wasn’t. At least he’d saved the gaff, and the three fish, and about half of the raft. The rest he could gather up once he’d caught his breath. The waves were coming in, not out, so the sea would not suck away the timbers. Unfortunately, he had lost the hand axe, which kind of blew ass. Now he was going to have to spend the next day or two making another one.

  But rather than moving, he instead looked up at the fiery spectacle of the setting sun. The air was clear today after an afternoon rain, and the rays of the sun shone brightly through clouds that looked like goats and snakes and bushes. And to the right of the sunset, across the water, he saw a distant land.

  Ah!

  It certainly wasn’t the first time he’d seen those hills and beaches, but he never got tired of the sense of wonder they inspired. What was over there? Were there animals? Vegetables? From the color of the hills, he was pretty sure that some of them were made of bare stone, and others were covered in trees, but that was all he knew. And it struck him, not for the first time, that the distant land wasn’t all that distant. If the ocean were solid, he could walk there in a fraction of a morning. Ba knew how to swim, but he had a general idea that this was a slower mode of transportation than walking, and a lot more tiring, and it carried a significant risk of drowning if he tried to do it for too long. Swimming short distances was tiring; long distances were out of the question.

  So yes, when he was out on the water he preferred to use a fishing raft, even though this was slower still. The purpose of a raft was not to go anywhere; it was to not go anywhere. Just to float out past the surf line where the big fish were. And to hold your stuff while you did it.

  But he wondered suddenly: could a raft go somewhere? It might need to be a bigger raft, that could hold his entire body. Sometimes Ba would get surprised by really big fish that tried to eat him, raft and all. He’d always successfully fended them off—sometimes by kicking them really hard, if they were behind him. Sometimes by jabbing their faces with his gaff, or stabbing them in the back with a hand axe. They did not like that! But anyway, he was no fool; if he was in the water and saw big fins, he headed straight for shore. If he was on the shore and saw fins, he skipped fishing for the day, and went hunting for eggs or birds or honey instead. But out in the middle of the ocean, these choices would not be available to him.

  Wouldn’t he be safer on a larger raft? Couldn’t he just pull his arms and legs out of the water and wait around until the danger had passed? He could even sleep on the raft, if the journey lasted that long. He could bring food with him. Thirst might be a problem, though; ocean water was not drinkable, for some reason. He got sick every time he tried, and every time he accidentally swallowed a wave. But if he
brought melons or berries, then perhaps he could go without drinking for a day.

  I’d be like Christopher Columbus, he thought. Wait, what?

  The thoughts dissipated. Perhaps Ba had spent too much time out in the sun today, but in any case it was time to get home and feed his tribe. Shaking his head, he dropped his pile of things well up above the high water line along the beach, and then went back down to the water to gather up the remaining pieces of his raft.

  The hand axe was an annoying loss he’d have to deal with in the morning. He couldn’t do much of anything without that.

  4.2

  As sunlight faded and twilight gathered, Ba returned to camp and dropped his fish next to the fire. His favorite woman, Mar, hugged and kissed him as he tossed his other things aside in a rough pile.

  “Mmm?” she asked.

  “Mmm,” he replied, sharing with her the annoyance of his lost hand axe.

  “Mmm?” she inquired again, seeking clarification.

  He mimed the act of chopping, then looked at his empty hand in feigned surprise. Putting a hand over his eyebrows as if to shield against the sun, he looked this way and that way, then gave up and shrugged.

  Mar laughed.

  “Har har,” he mimicked back to her.

  She hugged him again, as if to say, it’ll be okay, darling. Then she sat herself down by the fire pit, scooped up the little blade she kept there, and commenced scaling and gutting the fish.

  “Mmm?” she asked, pointing to the fire.

  “Mmm,” he said. Yes, I’ll get some more wood. Unlike many of the tribe, Ba and Mar both knew how to make new fire. It was one of many, many things Kaa had taught. But it was time-consuming and very tiring; one had to build a fire nest out of dried grass, and then fill it with kindling, and then find smooth sticks of just the right size, and then rub them together vigorously inside the nest, without slipping and smashing it apart. If you did it just right, then eventually the nest would burst into flame, and you could start feeding it sticks and soon you’d have a decent fire going. But it was a lot easier to keep the fire going all the time, and so that was what the tribe nearly always did. Right now it was a low smolder of coals barely larger than the palm of Ba’s hand, but with a little love it could be brought back to life.