They all stared.
Ahmed said, “You get iron oxide forming in bogs and marshes. When iron-rich groundwater comes into contact with the air, well, it rusts. Right, Sidewise? The Vikings used to exploit that stuff. Why don’t we?”
As the bickering went on, Snowy’s gaze was drawn to the nearby woods, the shadowed green. Sidewise is right, he thought. We are here by accident, just a kind of echo. We are just going to fall apart, and get pulled down by the green like all the ruined buildings, and just disappear, adding our bones to the billions already heaped in the ground. And it won’t matter a damn. If he hadn’t known it before, known it in his gut, he was convinced of it now, having encountered the ape-girl. She is the future, he thought; she, with her bright lion’s gaze, her naked little body, her nimbleness and strength — her wordless silence.
As they dispersed, Snowy took Sidewise to one side, and told him about the feral woman.
Sidewise asked immediately, “Did you fuck her?”
Snowy frowned his disgust. “No. I felt like it — I got a hell of a rod — but when I saw what she was really like, I couldn’t have.”
Sidewise clapped him on the shoulder. “No reflection on your manhood, pal. Weena is probably the wrong species, that’s all.”
“Weena?”
“An old literary reference. Never mind. Listen. No matter what El Presidente over there says, we ought to find out more about these critters. That’s a hell of a lot more important than digging peat. We need to figure out how they are surviving here. Because that’s the way we are going to have to live too. Go find your girlfriend, Snowy. And ask her if she’d like a double date.”
A couple of days after that, before Ahmed could implement his plans for rebuilding civilization, he fell ill. He had to retreat to his lean-to, dependent on the food and water the others brought him.
Sidewise thought it was mercury poisoning, from the spoil heap by the camp. Mercury had been used for centuries in the making of everything from hats to mirrors to bug-control potions to treatments for syphilis. The ground was probably saturated with it, relatively speaking, and even now, a thousand years later, it was still leaching by various slow-dispersal routes into the lake, where it worked its way up the food chain to maximum concentration in the bodies of fish, and the mouths of the people who ate them.
Sidewise seemed to think all of this was funny: that Ahmed, the great planner — the one who, among them all, had clung the longest and hardest to the expansionist dreams of the long-gone twenty-first century — had succumbed to a dose of poison, a lingering legacy of that destructive age.
Snowy didn’t much care. There were far more interesting things in the world than anything Ahmed said or did.
Like Weena, and her hairy folk of the forest.
Snowy and Sidewise built a kind of blind, a lean-to liberally sprinkled with grass and green leaves, not far from where Snowy had first encountered the ape-girl Sidewise had christened Weena.
Snowy glanced at Sidewise, stretched out in the blind’s shade. In the dense heat of this un-English summer, both of them had taken to going naked save for shorts, an equipment belt, and boots. Sidewise’s skin, brown and smeared liberally with dirt, was as good a camouflage as anything invented by the hand of man. Only five or six weeks out of the Pit he was unrecognizable.
“There,” hissed Sidewise.
Slim gray-brown figures — two, three, four of them — coalesced out of the shadows at the edge of the forest. They took a few cautious steps out onto the open ground. They were naked, but they were slim and upright, and they carried something in their hands, probably their usual crude stone hammers and knives. Standing in a loose circle, their backs to each other, they peered around with sharp jerks of their heads.
Sidewise being Sidewise, he had developed a story about where these diminutive hairy folk had come from. “Sewer kids,” he had said. “When the cities fell, who was going to last the longest? The scrubby little kids who were already in the drains and the sewers and living off the garbage. It might have been years before some of them even noticed anything had changed—”
Now the hairies ran across the grassy meadow toward a slumped, fallen form. It was a deer, a big buck, that Snowy and Sidewise had brought down with a slingshot and dumped here in the hope of attracting the hairies out of their forest cover. The hairies converged on the carcass. They began to hack away at the joints where the hind legs were attached to the lower body. And as they worked in their intent silence, one of them was always on her feet, peering around, keeping guard.
“That’s their way of working,” murmured Snowy. “Taking the legs — see?”
“Quick and easy,” said Sidewise. “About the easiest bit of butchery you can do. Hack off a leg, then beat it back to the forest cover before something with bigger teeth than you comes along to make a contest of it. They are coordinated, even if they don’t speak. See the way they are taking turns to be look-out? They are pack hunters. Or scavengers anyhow.”
Snowy wondered how come they were so cautious if Sidewise was right about there being no big predators around.
“They look human but they don’t act it,” Snowy whispered. “You see what I mean? They aren’t like a patrol. They’re looking around like cats, or birds.”
Sidewise grunted. “Those sewer kids must have had no culture, no learning. All they would have known was the sewers. Maybe that was why they stopped talking. In the sewers, maybe the cover of silence was more important than language.”
“They lost language?”
“Why not? Birds lose their flight all the time. To be smart costs. Even a brain the size of yours, Snow, is expensive; it eats a lot of energy from your body’s supply. Maybe this isn’t a world where being smart pays off as much as, say, being able to run fast or see sharply. It probably didn’t take much rewiring for language, even consciousness, to be shut down. And now the brains are free to shrink. Give them a hundred thousand years and they’ll look like australopithecines.”
Snowy shook his head. “I always thought men from the future would have big bubble heads and no dicks.”
Sidewise looked at him in the dark of the blind. “Being smart didn’t exactly do us a lot of good, did it?” he said sourly. He peered out at the hairies, rubbing his face. “Makes you think, looking at them, how brief it all was. There was a moment when there were minds there to understand: to change things, to build. Now it’s gone, evaporated, and we’re back to this: living as animals, just another beast in the ecology. Just raw, unmediated existence.”
They watched a little longer, as the hairy, naked folk tore the limbs off the fallen deer and, cooperating and squabbling in turns, hauled the haunches back to the shelter of the forest.
Then they returned to their base camp.
Where they found that Bonner was ripping up the place because Moon had disappeared.
“Where the fuck is she?”
Moon had set up her own little lean-to, more solidly built and private than the others. Snowy had always thought that if she could have put on a door with a padlock she would have. Now everything was gone — the backpack Moon had made from a spare flight suit, her tools and clothes, her homemade wooden comb, her precious store of washable tampons.
Bonner was rampaging through what was left, smashing apart the walls of the lean-to. Naked save for now-disintegrating shorts, with his bulked-up muscles and mud smeared over his face and chest and in his spiky hair, Snowy thought there was very little left of the timid young pilot he remembered looking after when they had first met, on assignment to a carrier in the Adriatic.