Evolution

"Well," Joan said brightly, "if we are all going to get crisped in a volcanic caldera, we ought to get to know each other first. My name’s Joan Useb. I’m a paleontologist."

Bex said brightly, "A fossil hunter?"

"Near enough. And this lady—"

"My name’s Alyce Sigurdardottir." Alyce extended a slim hand. "I’m pleased to meet you, Bex."

"Sorry, but your names are kind of strange," Bex said, staring.

Joan shrugged. "Useb is a San name — or an anglicized version; the real thing is pretty much unpronounceable. My family has deep roots in Africa, very deep roots."

"And I," said Alyce, "had an American father and an Icelandic mother. A military romance. Long story."

Joan said, "We live in a mixed-up world. Humans have always been a wandering species. Names and genes scattered all over the place."

Bex frowned at Alyce. "I know your name, I think. Chimpanzees?"

Alyce nodded. "I took over some of Jane Goodall’s work."

Joan said, "Alyce is one of a long line of prominent female primatologists. I always wondered why women did so well in the field."

Alyce smiled. "Isn’t that stereotyping, Joan? But, well, primate behavioral studies in the wild take — took — decades of observation, because that’s how long the animals themselves take to live out their lives. So you need patience, and an ability to observe without interfering. Maybe those are female traits. Or maybe it was just nice to get away from all the usual male hierarchies in academia. The forest is a lot more civilized."

"Still," Joan said, "it’s a powerful tradition. Goodall, Birute Galdikas, Dian Fossey."

"I’m the last of a dying breed."

"Like your chimps," said Bex, with surprising brutality. She smiled at their silence. "They’re all gone from the forests now, aren’t they? Wiped out by climate change."

Alyce shook her head. "No, actually. It was the bushmeat trade." Briefly she told Bex how, toward the end, she had worked in Cameroon, as the loggers had worked their way out into the virgin rain forest, and the hunters had followed.

"Wasn’t it illegal?" Bex asked. "I thought all those old species were protected."

"Of course it was illegal. But bushmeat was money. Oh, the locals had always taken apes. A gorilla was prestige meat; if your father-in-law visited, you couldn’t give him chicken. But when the European loggers arrived, it got much worse. Bushmeat actually became a faddish food."

The black hole theory of extinction, Joan thought: all life, everything, ultimately disappears into the black holes in the centers of human faces. But what next? Will we keep on eating our way out through the great tree of life until there’s nothing left but us and the blue-green algae?

"But," said Bex reasonably, "there are still chimps and gorillas in the zoos, right?"

"Not all the species made it," Alyce said. "Even the populations we did save, like the common chimps, don’t breed well in captivity. Too smart for that. Look: The chimps are our closest surviving relatives. In the wild they lived in families. They used tools. They mounted wars. Kanzi, the chimp who learned a little sign language, was a bonobo chimp. Did you ever hear of her? And now the bonobos are extinct. Extinct. That means gone forever. How can we understand ourselves if we never understood them?"

Bex was listening politely, but she looked distant. She has grown up with such earnest lectures, Joan thought. It must all mean little or nothing to her, echoes of a world vanished before she was even born.

Alyce subsided, the old frustration showing in her face. And meanwhile the plane continued to limp through the smoky sky.

To break the slight tension — she hadn’t meant to lecture this girl, only to distract her — Joan changed the subject. "Alyce studies creatures that are alive today. But I study creatures from the past."

Bex seemed interested, and in response to her questions Joan told her how she had followed the example of her own mother, and about her work, mostly out in the desert heartlands of Kenya. "People don’t leave many fossils, Bex. It took me years before I learned to pick them out, tiny specks against the soil. It’s a tough place to work, dry as a bone, a place where all the bushes have thorns on them to keep you from stealing their water. After that you return to the lab and spend the next few years analyzing the fragments, trying to learn more of how this million-year-dead hom lived, how she died, who she was."

"Hom?"

"Sorry. Hominid. Fieldwork slang. A hominid is any creature closer to Homo sap than the chimps — the pithecines, Homo erectus, the Neandertals."

"All from bits of bone."