She hoped she would not be switched.
With a laugh, Butterfly turned about and, stepping over Hamilton, left her.
Angrily Hamilton got to her feet. She was relieved, however, that she had not been beaten.
The animosity, she suddenly realized, which the group felt for the ugly girl, doubtless in part a function of repulsion and fear, they did not feel for her. She, slave though she might be, was, if not of their group, of their kind. The ugly girl was not. Hamilton was pleased that there was one less than she in the camp. Hamilton was pleased that she was better than the ugly girl, for she, at least, was human. The ugly girl, it was clear, was not.
From where she stood, Brenda Hamilton could see the deer roasting on a long spit. It made her hungry. She was angry at the young blond girl who had tripped her.
Then, looking about, she approached the hut from which the short blond woman, Cloud, had emerged.
She looked within.
Inside, he was sleeping.
He had not taken her with the rest of the men, on the hide between the huts.
“You beast,” she said, “I hate you.”
It was he who had captured her. It was he who had brought her, slave, to this camp. It was he who had taken her virginity, she recalled angrily, and within moments of seizing and binding her. And, too, she recalled, how he had tied her down at the wrists, and had spread her legs, securing them, and had, at his leisure, taken her, again and again during the night, and again at dawn. She was furious. How casually, bow arrogantly, he had used her for his pleasure.
Then he had brought her to the camp as a slave.
On the hide she had learned that she belonged to all the men, as, too she suspected, so did the women.
But she thought of one as more her master than any other, and she now looked upon him, sleeping, lying on his side, his head on his arm.
“I hate you,” she said, “you beast.”
Then she turned about and looked up at the clouds, and the sky. She drew a deep breath. She inhaled the odors of the camp, the smoke, the smell of fat and the meat.
She looked about the camp, and at its inhabitants.
They were people, clearly, of her race, and of her kind. Yet here they were clearly savages as much or more so as any isolated, deprived or benighted group in any jungle or mountain remoteness of her own time, and these people were not remnants of competitively unsuccessful groups, driven to, or fleeing to, wildernesses, unable to withstand the onslaughts of harsher, stronger groups. These men, she understood, were as strong, or stronger, as formidable, or more formidable, than any other human groups of their time. Indeed, their hunting terrain, she suspected, might be extensive and rich in game. It was probably no accident that they hunted the forests they did. She regarded them. They were larger and stronger, and better looking, generally, than modern men, and, too, she suspected they were, human by human, more natively profound, more quickly witted, more intelligent than their later counterparts, the results of large, indiscriminately mated gene pools, and an environment in which the harsh strictures of nature, due to an advanced technology, were largely inoperative. In these times she realized that foolish or stupid men might not live; in her times she realized that such might thrive, and be encouraged to multiply themselves, providing useful and exploitable populations for their more clever brethren. Here there was little place for the foolish, the ignorant, the gullible and the weak; there were no votes to be cast, no products to buy, no institutions to support no uniforms to wear, no rifles to bear; if these men fought, or killed, they would do so because it was their own will, and they saw the reason; they would decide themselves if they would trek, or fight, or kill. They did not thrash in traps constructed by ambitious men; they did not salivate on signal, at the will of psychologists, the employees of invisible potentates.
They were people clearly, of her race, and of her kind, but they were very different.
Their technology was one of stone.
“They are at the beginning,” said Brenda Hamilton to herself.
In a way, this was true, but the Men, whose property she was, stood not at the beginning, but far along an ancient journey, a trek of life forms. There had been manlike things for thousands of years before them, and before such things, other successions and journeys, and even the tarsiers, and the tiny shrews, whose viciousnesses and tempers are so like our own, lay late along this journey. It was a journey that extended back to distant, turbulent seas, whose saline ratios we carry still in our blood, and to growths and movements scarcely to be distinguished from simple chemical exchanges, the rhythms and affinities of oxygen, and nitrogen and hydrogen, and, crucially, the instabilities and complexities of carbons. It was a journey that had seen worlds and climates wax and wane, which had witnessed stones boiling like mud and the endless, falling rains; it had witnessed the first stirrings in the slime; it had noted the track of the trilobite; it would remember the grandeur of the fern forest and would not forget the tread of the stegosaurus; and sometime, somewhere along this journey, a hominid creature had discovered what a noise might mean; and what a frightening illumination that might have been for a small, dark brain; and it may have lifted its teeth and eyes to the stars, for the first time, snarling, challenging, but frightened, wondering at the reality, the mystery, which had spawned it; and in that tiny, dark brain the reality, the mystery, itself, may first have wondered at its own nature; in that snarling hominid, frightened, reality may have first asked itself, “What am I?”
And so the Men were not truly at the beginning, but were, truly, only yesterday. The beginning which was theirs, for they were a beginning, however, was the human beginning, the truly human beginning, for the Men, and other groups like them, were among the first of the truly human groups.
Brenda Hamilton, a woman of our time, the slave girl of savages, naked, her ankles linked by a rawhide thong, stood erect in the primeval camp. She looked up at the sky, and then again at the huts, and at the men and women. She smelled the fragrant air, the meat roasting on its spit. Incredibly, and she did not understand the emotion, she felt a surge of joy. Although she did not comprehend how it might be true, she knew that she was happy to be where she was, that she did not wish it otherwise. “I am at the beginning,” she told herself. “I am at the beginning of human beings.”
Herjellsen had told her, she recalled, “Turn their eyes to the stars.”
She laughed. She was only a slave. She knew that she would be expected to work, and work hard, and serve the pleasures of her masters.
But, incomprehensibly, she was not unhappy. She did not wish to be other than where she was.
“I am at the beginning,” she told herself. “I am at the beginning of human beings.”
“Turn their eyes to the stars,” Herjellsen had said.
She laughed.
She could not turn their eyes to the stars.
She was only a slave.
Hamilton cried out with humiliation and pain as the switch struck her, unexpectedly, below the small of the back. And then another switch, too, struck her.
She fell to her knees, her head down, covering her head with her hands, as she had seen the ugly girl do, earlier in the day.
Again and again the switches fell, two of them.
Hamilton tried to crawl away, but she was held by the hair. Then the switches stopped.
She looked up, through tears, to see the two women, the dark-haired woman, and the shorter blond woman, who had accompanied her captor earlier in the day.
They stood between her and the entrance of the hut in which he who had captured her slept. They were angry, and raised their switches. They motioned her away.
She had been caught dallying in the vicinity of the hut. of the handsome hunter.