by Wil McCarthy
“Ba!” said another woman, whose name was Cheek-click. She was holding some yams.
“Mmm!” said a young boy named Popping-sound.
And suddenly the whole tribe was converging out of the bushes and weeds, many people. An older man named Guh was among them, swaggering and pushing, carrying over his shoulders the gutted carcass of a young gazelle he had somehow managed to kill.
“Naah!” Guh boasted, tossing the carcass on the ground in front of Mar as though she were supposed to deal with it. He then grabbed Cheek-click around the waist and pulled her in for a not-quite-consensual kiss. Guh was big and strong, and enjoyed being an asshole about it. He never did any work, other than hunting, and he sure didn’t know how to build a raft or start a fire. Why bother, when smarter, more responsible people could be counted on to do it for him?
Cheek-click squirmed in his grasp, trying (though not very hard) to get away. Guh would mate with all of the women all the time, usually right in front of everybody. Ah, but when Guh was out throwing rocks at things, whom did the women turn to? Ba wasn’t every woman’s favorite, but he did all right, and he was certainly Mar’s favorite and Cheek-click’s favorite, and that was more than enough for him. How many women did one man need?
“Niiih,” he said to Guh, a bit mockingly. He pointed to his three big fish, which together probably had nearly as much meat as that gazelle.
“Mmm?” Guh demanded, then released Cheek-click and pushed Ba lightly on the chest. Not enough to really start something, but enough to let Ba know there could be a beat-down at any time. Then, to compound it, he picked up one of Ba’s raft fragments—the forward underside crosspiece—and snapped it over his knee, tossing the two pieces into the fire contemptuously. See?
Then, in a move that was one hundred percent classic Guh, he spread his arms wide, offering Ba the opportunity to hug him. Sighing, Ba stepped in and did so. He wasn’t proud of it, but hell, it was just easier than fighting and losing all the time. He’d get back at Guh later, by fucking Cheek-click or something. Guh’s smell—like sweat and blood and sex and hair—turned Ba’s stomach. But even he had to admit there was something vaguely reassuring about Guh’s strong arms. Asshole or no, Guh was a good provider and defender, and all the predators were scared of humans—even of the little children—because Guh had taught them over and over again what a hard-thrown rock could do to their bones and guts. Humans were dangerous!
“Mmm?” Guh asked him. Do you surrender to my awesomeness?
“Mmm,” Ba agreed, reluctantly.
Satisfied, Guh released him.
“Rrr,” Ba said then, pointing to the fragments of his raft.
Guh just smiled and shrugged at that (hey, these things happen) and plopped his ass down beside the fire pit.
With that out of the way, Ba set about gathering wood, while Mar cleaned the fish and Cheek-click smashed her yams between two rocks, so they would cook faster. Other men and women and even children set about various tasks, so that the camp felt full of homey bustling. Lo’s baby—the only baby in the tribe at the moment—cried briefly and was silenced when she began to nurse him.
All was right with the world.
All except for Ba’s lost hand axe, and his daydreams about ocean travel. Was that a crazy/stupid thought? Would he simply get himself killed, or disappear like Kaa had done? As he built up the fire and helped the women cook and then tried to wolf down his dinner without burning his fingers or his throat, as he watched the twinkling stars come out and felt the first cool breeze of evening slither across the land, as he poked at the fire with a stick and watched people—singly and in pairs—slinking away from the heat of the fire to sleep or mate… Ba wondered. Was it really possible? Was that land across the water something he could really get to? What would he find there?
One of Ba’s unofficial jobs was to bury the fire for the night, to protect its embers while the people slept, and as he did this he started really thinking about the kinds of things he would need to make such a journey, and although he was unaware of it, this was actually the hardest anyone on Earth had ever thought about anything. At some point he nodded off, without noticing, and dreamed he was fishing again, with those cool green hills looming larger and closer every time he looked up.
* * *
In the morning he lounged around for a while, and then when people started to filter out of the camp on their assorted jobs and hobbies, he mated with Cheek-click, as he’d promised himself he would. And then, because Mar looked a bit jealous, he mated with her as well, and then lounged for a while longer, until the morning sun cleared the tops of the bushes, leaving shadows nowhere to hide. Then he got to work.
First and foremost, he needed a new hand axe, which for Ba’s people was the equivalent of a whole garage full of tools. In hills behind the camp there was a good deposit of the kind of flint he liked, so he went there, and selected a nice spar that jutted out from the rock face. Picking up a hunk of heavier stone, he smashed the spar a few times until it broke free and landed at his feet. Then, with a mixture of tedium and craftsmanly pride, he gathered up some appropriate stones from the ground, sat down, set up a little work area around him, and began knapping the stone.
Ba’s people were well adapted to the sunshine; through his body hair and leathery brown skin it neither burned nor overheated him, and while he did sweat a bit, and slowly grow thirsty, he did not attach any great urgency to this. Ba often went all day without a drink, allowing his mouth and throat to dry out without feeling any particular distress. He knew where to find the water when he really needed it, but right now he was busy.
But before he’d really gotten very far in shaping the new axe, something strange happened: the stone fractured along a face, peeling away a large flake and revealing…
A seashell?
No, not a seashell. It was stone—it was flint, specifically—but it had the shape of a little spiral, just exactly like a sea snail or a nautilus or any of a myriad other mollusks he had caught and cooked and eaten in his day. It seemed, improbably, as if some sea creature escaping danger had crawled all the way out of the water and then, unsatisfied, crawled up into the hills and then right into solid rock to find its safety. Was such a thing possible? Ba had certainly never seen anything like that, but here it was.
For a moment he was unsure what to do. Throw the stone away? Keep it as a decoration? (This concept was very hazy in his mind, for his people did not live in houses or wear jewelry, so what was there to decorate?) He sniffed it, and detected no fishy odor or whiff of salt water. Whatever this thing was, it had died a long time ago. Finally, shrugging, he decided to go ahead and make a hand axe out of the stone around it.
The work went quickly—this was good stone, and he was motivated not to waste any time. He would need the axe to chop down trees and shape logs and cut jute plants, and green branches to make a wicker nest. Nests weren’t used for much, as Ba’s world lacked anything to store or anyplace to store it, but if a wicker nest were weighed down with stones in a salt marsh, it could hold jute plants for a few days—long enough to dissolve away the stems and leave behind the fibers, which he could roll and braid into twine. Making a fishing raft was the work of many days, and making an oversized voyaging raft would be the work of many more.
When he was finished, he had arguably created one of the very first works of art. The little spiral sat just below the handgrip and just above the blade, so it would be clearly visible while the hand axe was in use. And it was also a good axe! Kaa had taught him well, and this one fit just perfectly into his hand, with sharp blades and a sharp but sturdy point. He could not have been more proud.
When he was done admiring, he returned to camp, drank his fill from the stream there, relieved himself in the nearby bushes, and waited for people to return.
“Mmm?” he said to them one by one as they arrived, trying to show them the axe, trying to point out, specifically, the little seashell in its handgrip. “Mmm? Mmm?”
One by o
ne they looked at it with confused expressions and shrugged. So? So? They either didn’t understand what they were looking at, or didn’t know what to make of it, or really actually didn’t have the sense to appreciate its symmetry and form. Or they understood it but just didn’t care.
When Mar finally arrived, he showed it to her and she oohed and aahed over it. Well, that was why she was his favorite: she knew how to do things, and how to appreciate the things others did. She was fully present in a way that even Cheek-click was not.
But then Guh arrived, and saw Mar and Ba looking at the hand axe, and he immediately needed to make it all about him. So he stepped up, forced his way between them, and peered down at the hand axe.
“Rrr,” Ba said, pulling it away, fearing what Guh might do. Break it? Throw it in the ocean? Claim it for himself? But Guh grabbed his arm, and when Ba tried to pull away, Guh grabbed harder and twisted. “Ah!” cried Bah. “Ah! Ah!”
He managed to free himself, and then, before he quite knew what he was doing, he brandished the axe at Guh, as if threatening to chop him with it. This startled Guh, and Mar, and several other nearby people; it was a major breach of social protocol.
“Mmm?” Guh said, genuinely confused. Here now, brother, what’s all this? I’m just trying to look.
Ashamed, but also worried, Ba opened his hand and held out the axe for Guh to examine. Guh peered down at it, squinting, and to his credit he actually did seem to understand that there was something special—something quite out of the ordinary—about this hand axe with its impossible seashell in the hilt.
“Mmm,” he said, still confused.
Not knowing what else to do, Ba, dropped the axe in the dust and spread his arms, offering Guh a hug. Guh accepted, stepping forward into Ba’s embrace, smelling like every gross thing that had ever happened to him.
4.3
Ba’s people lived on a northward-projecting peninsula, and so the sun both rose and set over the water, and to the extent that Ba thought about this at all, he believed the sun was an enormous bonfire, and that the ocean was needed to quench it so that night could fall. Or something like that. Anyway, some sixteen days after the destruction of his fishing raft (not that Ba could count, or would care very much if he could), the tip of the sun blazed to life over the waves of what he thought must surely be the Straits of Gibraltar, on the western edge of the Mediterranean Sea.
“Ba?” Mar called out. She was leading Guh by the hand, dragging him down the beach toward where Ba was loading supplies onto his brand new voyaging raft.
In a little wicker nest lashed down to the center of the deck, Ba was piling melons, which would be both his food and his water supply. In the nest he also stored his wonderful hand axe, to handle his chopping and hacking and smashing needs, and a couple of stone flakes, for finer slicing and scraping work. Across the top of the basket he’d tied a crisscross of twine, like a spiderweb, in hopes of keeping things from falling out. Beside the basket, secured through loops of twine, were a pair of fishing gaffs, and two extra logs about two-thirds the size of the raft beams, each with its own length of twine spindled around it that was much longer than the span of Ba’s arms. Rafts had an unfortunate tendency to come apart when you least expected it, and it seemed prudent to have some extra materials on hand to effect repairs.
“Ba?” Guh echoed, looking with some alarm at what Ba was doing. Nobody had ever done anything like this before, and Guh didn’t know what to make of it.
“Mar,” Bah said, nodding to his favorite. “Guh,” he said, nodding to his least favorite. Then he shrugged. What can I do for you?
“Mmm?” Guh said. He was holding a sharpened stick, and with it he pointed at the raft and raised his eyebrows at Ba. “Mmm? Mmm?” Explain yourself.
Guh had grown increasingly contemptuous of Ba these past two weeks, as Ba’s fishing yield dwindled to almost nothing and Ba’s time was increasingly spent on this sort of inexplicable business. Wicker nests? Giant rafts? Long spindles of twine that could not be used to fish or hunt? But now that it was all together in a purposeful assembly, Guh’s contempt had given way to confusion and a sort of vague, unfocused fear.
“Iiiih,” Guh said, voicing his displeasure.
“Ba?” Mar repeated. “Ba? Mmm?”
Feeling some need to, yes, explain himself, Ba pointed to himself and said his name. Then he pointed toward the distant hills across the water and said, “Uungh. Uungh.” Then, to further explain, he pointed to himself, and then to the raft, and then to the distant hills. He made a ripply gesture with his hands, like ocean waves.
“Uuungh.”
Mar understood right away, and looked horrified. She began shaking her head. “Ba, iiiih.”
Ba actually wondered if he were observing, right here at this moment, the birth of some primitive form of language. Perhaps people had never had anything this complex to talk about before, but with certain tones and gestures apparently already coded into the DNA, it was not so great a step to string them together: No, Ba, I don’t like it.
But Ba just shrugged, nodded, and pointed to the hills again. What do you want me to say? Yes, I’m going.
Not liking that answer, Mar turned to Guh and said, “Mmm? Guh, mmm?” She grabbed his hand and started pulling him toward Ba.
But Guh just looked confused and afraid. He seemed to have figured out the what of Ba’s plan, but was baffled by the why, and he wanted no part of any of it. He pulled his hand away from Mar and, with a look that combined all the best aspects of a sneer and a grimace and a plea, he backed away, pointing his stick at the raft and saying, “Iiiih.” Then he turned and, with a dismissive wave of his other hand, walked away. Whatever. Go ahead and leave. Go ahead and get yourself killed. I’m not going to watch.
Now Mar had no one but herself, and so she grabbed Ba’s hand and said, “Ba. Ba. Ba.”
She, too, understood what he was about to attempt, but she did not seem to understand that he intended to come back. Ba tried to convey this to her with gestures, but here he fell short. He could not seem to make her understand.
(Ba knew somehow that the hands and bodies and emotions and facial expressions and body language of his people were very nearly human, with brains were larger and more complex than those of the gorillas and chimpanzees and orangutans who had learned to use sign language in the modern era. He’d never seen any of these animals, but he could picture them in his mind. And yet, that was a sign language invented and taught by Homo sapiens—by weird, hairless, childlike people with high, flat foreheads and tiny lower jaws and, very often, skin the color of fishmeat and eyes the color of sky or sea or leaves. Ba’s brain was even capable of representing something like words, in a sort of “mentalese” he used for thinking, but it simply lacked the wiring to connect these mental symbols with the noises and gestures he made, in any sort of systematic way. He was not capable of spontaneously inventing complex words or signs that Mar could understand, and for a moment, this pained him.)
Gently, Ba pulled his hand away from Mar, and then set about triple-checking the knots that held his raft together. They looked pretty good.
Then there was nothing left to do but launch, which he did. Getting down on his knees, setting his hands between the chopped and rounded ends of the logs, he puuuuushed the raft down the beach, over pointy shell fragments and smooth sea gravel, past clumps of seaweed and driftwood, and down to the waterline. Protected by brown body hair—nearly within the range of what you might find on a modern human, but still quite thick—his knees felt the scraping and abrasive sensations, but weren’t bothered by them.
Just before it was in far enough to start floating, he stopped, pulled it back slightly, and got to his feet. Brushing the sand off his knees, he approached a heartbroken Mar and hugged her, and brushed his lips lightly against hers in a gesture of reconciliation.
“Ba—” she tried to say, but before she could get her own arms fully around him and probably try to restrain him, he spun her around and bent her over, br
ushing his flaccid genitals against her rump in a moment of symbolic mating—his people’s equivalent of a romantic kiss. It was all he could do. It was all he could say.
And then he was off, pushing the raft into the water until it was up to his knees, then his waist, and then his navel. Then he was lifting his torso up onto the raft, again letting body hair protect his skin against the roughness of the chopped log ends, and using his legs to kick furiously through the surf zone. An experienced belly-surfer in a culture that valued the ocean, Ba timed it well, so that one wave broke in front of him rather than on him, and all he had to do was kick through the churning mess it left behind, and the next wave broke behind him, and then he was through the surf and out into the open sea.
And a daring ocean voyage—every bit as consequential as a powered airplane flight or a trip to the moon—had begun.
* * *
Ba had been more or less ready to go for two and a half days, but he’d waited until the conditions were right: an early morning with few clouds, with the surf low and the tide going out and a gentle wind at his back—though not enough wind to kick up any serious waves. He had no names for any of these concepts, and they were more intuitive than analytical. Today just felt right.
The raft creaked and popped beneath him, settling into itself, but the knots held firm, and the structure moved like a single object. He kicked and kicked, occasionally looking over his shoulder at the shore where Mar stood looking forlornly after him. Already he was farther from shore than he’d ever been (truthfully, than anyone had ever been), and while he’d expected to have to deal with some problems (even Homo erectus were acquainted with entropy), he was nevertheless surprised to find that as he kicked farther out, the water became colder, and the raft was suddenly moving east as well as north. The effect was subtle at first, but Mar was definitely dwindling faster than she should have, and in not quite the right direction. He compensated by cutting a diagonal, heading more directly toward the hills on the other shore, because he could see that if he didn’t hit the right area, the water got a lot wider on both sides, and his journey could become very long indeed.