And she looked down on strangeness.
Two indricotheres were lurking under the tree. These great creatures were a kind of hornless rhino. Looking like meaty giraffes, they had long legs, supple necks, and hides like those of elephants. They were oddly graceful in a slow-moving way, even if they did mass as much as three times as an African elephant — and so huge they were unused to being threatened by anything. Even now they reached up their thick necks and horselike faces to crop at the tree’s soaking foliage.
But they were in danger. Muddy water flowed over the ground, washing around the indricotheres’ legs, as if the tree and the indricotheres alike stood in the river itself.
At last a great sheet of muddy soil broke away from the riverbank, right next to the tree’s shallow roots, and slid without ceremony into the river. One mighty indricothere lowed, its great flat elephantine feet scrabbling at a ground suddenly turned into a slippery, treacherous slope — and then it fell, fifteen tons of meat flying, its neck twisting and long tail working. It hit the water with a tremendous splash, and in an instant it was gone, swept away into the voracious river.
The second indricothere lowed its loss. But it too was in peril as the ground continued to dissolve under the water’s relentless probing, and the bereft animal lumbered backward to safety.
But the tree itself was in trouble. Its roots had been exposed by the sudden erosion of the flash flood, and further undermined by the river’s assault on its bank. The trunk creaked once, and shuddered.
And then, with a series of explosive cracks, the roots gave way. The tree began to topple toward the water. Like fruit from a shaken branch, primates of all sizes tumbled out of the tree and fell screaming into the turbulent water.
Roamer howled and clung to her branch as the tree tipped nightmarishly, all the way into the river.
The first few minutes were the worst.
Close to the riverbank the water was at its most turbulent, torn between the fast-flowing current and friction with the land. In this mighty torrent even the great mango tree was like a twig tossed in a brook. It bucked and creaked and twisted. First its foliage slammed into the water, then its roots, clogged with mud and rocks, would claw toward the sky. Roamer was rolled and dunked, plunged into cloudy brown water that forced its way into her mouth and nose, then carried into the air again.
At last the tree slid away from the turbulence near the bank and drifted into the center of the river, where its rocking and twisting quickly damped out.
Roamer found herself stuck underwater. She looked up through muddy murk at a glimmering surface littered with leaves and twigs. Already her mouth and throat were filling up, and panic overwhelmed her. With a bubbling scream she scrambled up through the tangled, broken foliage, clambering toward the light.
She broke through the surface. Light, noise, and the battering rain assaulted her senses. She hauled herself out of the water and lay flat on a branch.
The tree was floating branches first down the river. Its tangled, ripped roots reached up toward the lowering, lightning-strewn sky. Roamer raised her head, peering around for other anthros. It was not easy to recognize them through the thick rain-filled air, so battered and sodden were they, but she made out Whiteblood, the burly male who had abducted her, a couple of other males — and a female with an infant that had somehow hung onto her back, a little bundle of soaked, miserable fur.
Even though she was just as battered and half drowned as before, Roamer felt suddenly better. If she had been left alone it would have been the most unbearable thing of all; the presence of others was comforting. But still, these others were not her family, not her troop.
More displaced vegetation coursed over the surface of the river, clustering along its spine where the water ran deepest. There were more trees and bushes, some of them washed by this precursor of the Congo thousands of kilometers downstream from the very different lands in the center of the continent. There were animals here too. Some of them clung to the floating foliage, like the anthros. She saw the flitting, nervous forms of a couple of crowders, and even a potbelly, sitting squat on the trunk of a walnut. The potbelly, a female, had found a stable place to sit, and the rain didn’t bother her. She had already resumed her usual habit of feeding on leaves conveniently delivered to her clutching hands and feet.
But not all the animals in this gruesome assemblage had made it here alive. There was a whole family of fat, piglike anthracotheres, all of them drowned, stuck in the branches of a broken palm like meaty fruit. And the huge indricothere that had been washed into the river just before the fall of the mango was here too, a great carcass drifting in the water, long neck lolling back and powerful legs splayed, just another bit of floating detritus jammed in with the rest.
Gradually, as the river broadened, the subtle currents shoved these fragments together, foliage and roots tangling, and a makeshift raft assembled itself. The animals stared at one another, and at the churning river, as their crude vessel drifted on.
Roamer could see the forest, growing thick and green on shallow riverbank slopes of eroded sandstone. The trees were mangos, palms, a kind of primitive banana. Branches hung low over the water, and lianas and vines looped over the tangled terraces. Her arms ached for a branch to swing from, a way she could climb from here to there. But the forest was separated from her by churning water — and as the vegetable raft continued to sail downstream, those tempting banks receded further, and the familiar forest gave way to the mangroves that dominated the coastal areas.
The rain wasn’t done yet. It actually fell harder. Fat droplets hurled themselves out of the leaden sky. The water was stippled with craters that disappeared as soon as they were formed. A white-noise harshness flooded her ears, so that it was as if she were lost in a kind of huge bubble of water, water below and around her, with only this broken mango to cling to. Moaning, chilled to the bone, Roamer burrowed into the branches of the mango and huddled, alone, waiting for everything to go away, and for her to be returned to the world she knew, of trees and fruit and anthros.
That, however, was never going to happen.
The storm, heavy as it was, blew itself out quickly. Roamer saw finger-thin shafts of light pushing into her shelter of foliage. The rain noise had gone, to be replaced by the eerily soft lapping of water.
She struggled out of the branches and clambered on top of the tree. The sun was strong, as if the air had been cleared, and she felt its warmth sink deep into her fur, drying it quickly. For a heartbeat she luxuriated in the warmth and dryness.
But there was no forest here: only this fallen tree and its cluster of broken companions, drifting over a gray-brown sheet of water. There weren’t even any riverbanks. On three sides of the tree, all she could see was water, all the way to a knife-sharp horizon. But when she looked back the way the raft had drifted, she spotted land: a line of crowded green and brown, striped over the eastern horizon.
A line that was receding.
The raft of debris had been washed out to sea, out into the widening Atlantic, anthros, potbelly, crowders, and all.
II
After the days of Noth the geometry of the restless world had continued to evolve, and it continued to shape the destinies of the hapless creatures who rode the continental rafts.