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.
Ahmed came out of his own lean-to, wrapped in a silvered survival blanket. “What’s going on?”
“She’s gone. She’s fucking gone!” Bonner raged.
Sidewise stepped forward. “We can all see she’s gone, you moron—”
Bonner hit at him with a slashing blow. Sidewise managed to duck out of the path of the young pilot’s fist, but he was caught on the temple and knocked flat.
Snowy ran forward and grabbed Bonner’s arms from behind. “For Christ’s sake, Bon, take it easy.”
“That two-brained bastard has been fucking her. All the time he was fucking her.”
Ahmed seemed utterly dismayed — as well he might, thought Snowy, for if Moon was gone, taking their only hope of procreation with her, all his grandiose plans were ruined before they had started. “But why would she go?” he moaned. “Why be alone? What would be the point?”
Snowy said, “What’s the point of any of it? We’re all going to die here. It was never going to work, splot. All the bog iron in the world wouldn’t have made any difference to that.”
Sidewise managed a grin. “I don’t think Bonner is worried about the destiny of mankind right now. Are you, Bon? All he cares about is that the only pussy in the world has vanished, without him getting any of it—”
Bonner roared and swung again, but this time Snowy managed to hold him back.
Ahmed sloped back to his shelter, coughing.
When relative calm was restored, Snowy went to the rack where they had hung a row of skinned rabbits, and started preparing a meal.
Before the first rabbit kebab was cooked over the fire, Bonner had made up a pack. He stood there, in the gathering twilight, facing Sidewise and Snowy. “I’m pissing off,” he said.
Sidewise nodded. “You going after Moon?”
“What do you think, shithead?”
“I think she has good land craft. She’ll be hard to track.”
“I’ll manage,” Bonner snarled.
“Wait until morning,” Snowy said reasonably. “Have some food. You’re asking for trouble, going off in the dark.”
But the reasoning part of Bonner’s head seemed to have switched off for good. He glared at them out of his mask of mud, every muscle tense. Then, his clumsy pack bumping on his back, he stalked away.
Sidewise put another bit of rabbit on the fire. “That’s the last we’ll see of him.”
“You think he’ll find Moon?”
“Not if she sees him coming.” Sidewise looked reflective. “And if he tries to force her, she’ll kill him. She’s tough that way.”
The rabbit was nearly done. Snowy pulled it off the fire, and began to push bits of it off the spit and onto their crude wooden plates. Every night he had divided up their food into five portions. Now, with Bonner and Moon gone, he divided it into three.
He and Sidewise just looked at the three portions for a while. Ahmed was back in his shelter. Out of sight, out of mind. Snowy picked up the third plate and, with the blade of his knife, scraped off the meat onto the other two plates. “If Ahmed gets better, he can look after himself. If not, there’s nothing we can do for him.”
For a time they chewed on their rabbit.
“I’ll leave tomorrow,” Snowy said eventually.
Sidewise didn’t reply to that.
“What about you? Where will you go?”
“I think I’d like to explore,” Sidewise said. “Go see the cities. London. Paris, if I can get across the Channel. Find out more about what’s happened. A lot of it must have gone already. But some of it must be like the ruins of the Roman Empire.”
“Nobody else will ever see such sights,” Snowy said.
“That’s true.”
Hesitantly, Snowy said, “What about after that? I mean, when we get older. Less strong.”
“I don’t think that is going to be a problem,” Sidewise said laconically. “The challenge will be to pick how you want to go. To make sure you control at least that.”
“When you’ve seen all you want to see.”
“Whatever.” He smiled. “Maybe in Paris there will be a few windows left to smash. Thousand-year-old brandy to drink. I’d enjoy that.”
“But,” Snowy said carefully, “there will be nobody to tell about it.”
“We’ve always known that,” Sidewise said sharply. “From the moment we clambered out of the Pit into that ancient oak forest. It was obvious even then.”
“Maybe to you,” Snowy said.
Sidewise tapped his temple, where a healthy bruise was developing from Bonner’s punch. “That’s my big brain working. Churning out one useless conclusion after another. And all of it making no damn difference, none at all. Listen. Let’s make a pact. We’ll pick a meeting place. We’ll aim to rendezvous, every year. We may not make it every time, but you can always leave a message, something.”
They picked a site — Stonehenge, on the high ground of Salisbury Plain, surely still unmistakable — and a time, the summer solstice, easy to track with the timekeeping discipline Ahmed had instilled in them. It was a good idea. Somehow it was comforting to Snowy, even now, to think that his future would have a little structure.
When they had done eating, the dark was closing in. It wasn’t cold, but Snowy fetched himself a blanket of crudely woven bark and wrapped it around his shoulders. “Hey, Side. Was he right?”
“Who?”
“Bonner. Did you pork Moon?”
“Too right I porked her.”
“You fucking dark horse. I never knew. Why you?”