Suddenly a slim head swooped down from the washed-out sky. Remembrance chattered and flinched back against the tree trunk. She saw black round eyes, wide with surprise, set in a slender, fur-covered face, and two long ears that swept back against an elegant neck. It was a rabbit’s head — but it was large, as large as a gazelle’s.
The rabbit-gazelle evidently decided that the cowering hominid was no particular threat to her. She proceeded to crop at the grass that grew thinly in the shade of the tree.
Cautiously Remembrance crept forward.
Her visitor was one of a herd, she saw now, scattered over the plain and grazing patiently on the grass. They were tall, some twice as tall as she was. Slim, graceful, they looked like gazelles — but they were indeed descended from rabbits, as their long ears and small white tails clearly demonstrated.
The legs of these animals were like gazelles’, too. Their forelegs were straight, and could be locked into position to support the animal with little effort. But halfway down their hind legs these rabbits had backward-bending joints that were in fact ankles. The lower leg was like an extended foot — balanced on two hooflike toes — and the knee was up near the torso, hidden in fur. Their back legs held in a permanent sprinter’s crouch, the rabbit-gazelles were constantly ready for flight, the most critical task in their lives. As they grazed, the youngest scuttling at the feet of their elders, the herd remained compact, and there was never a time when at least one of the adults was not scanning the grass.
The reason for all of this soon became apparent. One of the bigger bucks startled, went rigid, fled. The rest of the herd followed immediately, in a blur of speed and dust.
From the cover of a bluff of rocks a slim black form darted forward. It was another rat, this one shaped to run with the low-slung power of a cheetah. The rat-cheetah disappeared into the dust, pursuing the rabbit herd.
Stillness resumed. For a time, nothing moved over the grass-covered plain, nothing but the shimmer of the air. The sun slid away from its height. But the heat did not lessen, and thirst clawed at Remembrance’s throat.
She crept out of her hiding place. Her very human face, with straight nose, small mouth and chin, wrinkled in the bright afternoon light. She raised herself to her full height and sniffed. She heard a lowing, a clattering of tusks that sounded as if it were coming from the east, away from the sun. And she smelled the tang of water.
She began to run that way. She moved in scurries, hurrying from one patch of covering shade to the next, with frequent drops to an all-fours lope. This daughter of mankind ran like a chimp.
At last she crested a shallow bluff of eroded sandstone. She found herself facing a broad lake. It was fed by streams that snaked from more distant hills, but she could see that it was choked with reeds and fringed by a broad mud pan. She found an acacia to shelter under, and peered out, trying to find a way to get to the water.
Here, just as they always had, the herbivores had gathered to drink.
She saw more rabbits. There were skittish gazellelike creatures of the kind she had seen before. But there were also heavier-built, bisonlike powerhouses — and, running around their feet, smaller creatures that hopped and jumped. The rabbits, widespread and fast breeding, had, after the fall of man, radiated and adapted quickly. But not all of the new species had abandoned the ancient ways. There were still smaller browsers, especially in the forests where small beasts kicked and leapt and hopped as their ancestors always had.
Meanwhile warthogs snuffled and snorted in the muddy fringe of the lake, left all but unchanged by time. If there was no need to adapt, nature was conservative. And Remembrance made out huge, slow-moving creatures, marching serenely through the shallow water. They were related to the goats she had encountered in the forest, but these were giants, with tree trunk legs and horns that curled like mammoth tusks. They lacked trunks — none of these ruminants had evolved that particular anatomical trick — but, giraffelike, they had long necks that let them reach the succulent leaves growing on low-hanging tree branches, or the water of the lake.
A herd of different goat descendants stood knee-deep in the water. They had webbed feet that kept them from sinking in soft mud and sand. Each had a broad bill-like mask before its face. Sculpted from horns, these bills were used for browsing on the soft weeds found at the edge of the lakes. Sucking peacefully at the lakeside vegetation, these goats were like nothing so much as the hadrosaurs, the long-vanished duck-billed dinosaurs.
And, just as the hadrosaurs had been the most diverse group of dinosaurs before the comet fell, so this rediscovery of an ancient strategy was enabling a new radiation. Already many species of the duck-billed goats, subtly distinguished by differences in horn design, size, and diet preferences, were to be found at many of the water courses of the world’s tropical regions and elsewhere.
Meanwhile, all around this scene of relatively peaceful herbivorous thirst-quenching — just as there had always been — intent predatory eyes watched the herbivores at work.
Watching this scene with half-closed eyes it would not have been impossible to imagine that the animals obliterated by human action had been restored. But on this new African savannah the familiar roles had been taken up by new actors, descended from creatures that had best survived the human extinction event. These were those that had resisted all of mankind’s attempts at extirpation: the vermin, especially the generalists — starlings, finches, rabbits, squirrels — and rodents like rats and mice. Thus there were rabbits morphed into gazelles, rats become cheetahs. Only subtleties were changed — a nervous twitchiness about the rabbits, a hard-running intensity about the rats that had replaced the cats’ languid grace.
There was a sudden flurry of activity, a great clash like a bone breaking. Two of the great goat-elephants, males, had begun a dispute. Their heads bobbed and swayed atop long giraffelike necks, and their horns, elaborately curling before their faces, clashed like baroque swords.
Remembrance cowered deep into the shade of her acacia. As the great herbivores began to mill around her, disturbed by the battle, she wasn’t so safe. This tree, trunk and all, could be smashed up and devoured in a few heartbeats.
And now the watchful predators took advantage of the confusion.
A pack of them erupted from cover. Lean and vulpine, with long, powerful shanks and thickly padded feet, they were more rats. Working closely together, they moved wedgelike to separate one older goat-elephant from the rest of the herd. His huge horn-tusks chipped and scarred by a lifetime of battles, this big male bellowed his rage and fear and began to run. The rats settled into the pursuit, running closely together.
These rat derivatives were like dogs, yet they were not dogs. Their characteristic rodents’ incisors had been subtly modified from teeth designed for processing seeds and insects into blades with stabbing points. Their rear molars were like shears, well equipped for shredding meat. And they moved more closely than any dog pack had ever run, with a liquid, slithering power. But, like a dog pack, their basic strategy was to chase the goat-elephant until he was exhausted.
Soon the prey and his pursuers had passed out of sight.
The goat-elephants settled down once more to their drinking and fighting — though some of them turned their great heads to the place where the old one had stood, remembering his absence.
Remembrance took the opportunity to creep forward.
The water was scum laden. But she scooped it up in her hands and let it trickle into her mouth, leaving her palms and fingers coated with fine green slime.
From the water, two yellow eyes watched her with abstract instinct. It was a crocodile, of course. These ancient survivors had ridden out the human apocalypse as they had survived so many before: by living off the gruesome brown food chain of the dying lands, by burrowing into the welcoming mud in drought. And even now no animal, no pig or rabbit or primate, no fish or bird, reptile or amphibian — not even the rodents — had managed to dislodge the crocodiles from their watery kingdom.