Shame of Man by Piers Anthony
And there was Lee, carving out portions of hippo for the others with her uninjured arm and hand. She worked beside Vik, and there was something about the way the two related to each other that suggested that another couple was forming.
The rain continued intermittently for several more days, gradually easing. But the lake continued to rise even when the sun was shining. The island grew smaller, but the center was high enough so that it could not be overwhelmed. Hue realized that Bil had required the people to build shelters high for this reason, so that rising water would not wash them out either. The island had become their shelter base, and if the water rose enough, they would be as before, with only the tops of the domes showing above the surface.
The neighboring enemy tribes did not attack. In fact there was little sign of them anywhere in the area. This was suspicious, and finally Bil decided to investigate it. Bil always anticipated problems, and tried to prepare for them in advance. Thus he had known where the tribe could be safe, if the waters rose; there had been no hesitation when he took them to the new island. Now he was concerned.
So Joe, Bil, and Hue left their women behind and went to where the nearest enemy tribe lived. It was a sunny day, so they were able to use the water when they got close, silently wading or swimming. They had reeds to breathe through, in case they needed to submerge. Hue knew that their pace was slower because of him, but Bil wanted him along because he knew more about the hairy folk, being one himself. He might recognize some aspect that the full water folk would not.
The region was strangely quiet. No raiders were out foraging near the shore. Of course they normally foraged away from the water; still, it was odd that there were none by the lake. But there was a fire some distance back from the shore. That would mark their camp.
The three moved quietly toward that fire, alert for enemies, for this was approaching the heart of raider territory. It was extremely unusual to have so little activity here. There did not even seem to be guard patrols.
Finally they came to the fire itself, peering cautiously out of the shelter of thick brush. And were amazed.
The fire was in a glade, and the glade was filled with hairy raiders. Most of them were lying on the ground. A few were afoot, but even those ones did not look lively. What were they doing?
“Sick,” Hue whispered.
The other two nodded. That was why there had been no raids since the flood. Some terrible illness had come upon the raiders, and was wiping them out.
They retreated as quietly as they had come. But once they were away from the camp, they used land trails to return to the island. It was obvious that there would be no pursuit, no ambush party. The raiders had trouble of their own.
But Hue was worried. “Sickness—sometimes,” he said, straining to remember what he had heard about it. “People die. Some live. Many no. All tribes.” He had no idea why this happened, just that it did, every so often.
Joe shook his head. “Water folk sickness no,” he said, and Bil agreed. Mass dyings were unknown among them.
None of them could fathom why this should be so. But it was. No sickness came to the water folk.
The water continued to rise, until the island was small. Itt had to supervise changes in their activity to keep their supplies secure. But they were safe there—and on the shore too, for there were now too few raiders to raid. They made their traps by the new shoreline, but never needed to use them. They began to expand their hunting and foraging territory beyond the lake, because the protection of the water was no longer critical. They accepted the new and better order.
Perhaps only Bil and Hue wondered why the lake had grown, and why the illness had so weakened the raiders. The others simply accepted it as the destiny of their kind, which was obviously the best fitted to survive and prosper.
And prosper they did, expanding in the course of thousands of years out from the fringe of Lake Victoria until they had taken over all of Africa, and then the rest of the world. But why did fate take such a turn, so that one of the seemingly weakest subgroups of mankind came to dominate and replace all the others?
Some questions are readily answered, in retrospect. The lake expanded because one of the frequent earthquakes caused a landslide that blocked the lake's northern drainage—today known as the river Nile. When heavy rains came, the lake filled, and this continued when the rains stopped because of the drainage into the lake from the entire area. Thus the territory of the land dwellers was flooded and diminished, while that of the water dwellers was increased. In time the river cut a new channel, and the lake drained and dwindled, but by then the balance had shifted, and the water folk were numerous and powerful, while the land folk were less populous and not well organized.
What happened to the Home erectus tribes? Perhaps fleas. Erect man was thickly furred, which meant he had fleas, impossible to obliterate. On occasion the fleas carried disease, and thus spread plague. The only people free of this liability were those who did not have fleas: the hairless ones. Modern man. Of course we Moderns do have body hair, but it is relatively slight, so that we do look bare, and fleas cannot survive on us. Hairlessness was originally an adaptation for the water, but it turned out to have survival value on the land too. On occasion Modern man did live in such dense communities, using clothing never changed or cleaned, and associated so closely with animals, that fleas could attack him, and so the pattern of plagues returned. The plagues of medieval times suggest what Erect man suffered in earlier millennia. But that later time there was no variant species waiting to take over, and mankind survived, pretty much by chance. The original change probably did not happen in just one siege; it may have taken tens of thousands of years for repeated sieges to weaken Erect man so that Modern man was able to displace him. The flooding of the Lake Victoria basin could have caused disruption as tribes were driven back, crowding them into smaller territories and making them more vulnerable to flea infestations and disease. Some survivors might have mated with the increasingly numerous water folk, as Hue did with Ann, but most furred tribes would have become slowly extinct. First in Africa, then in Eurasia, as the Moderns became overwhelmingly numerous.
There was another aspect of the change in woman's body. Her great amount of time in the water made odor a poor sexual signal, so the emphasis became visual instead of olfactory. Her breasts became high and full, to be seen and used when she was chest deep in the water. With mankind's increasing intelligence came his awareness of the connection between sex and babies, and neither man nor woman always wishes to have babies. Thus nature conspired to conceal the woman's key time, so that it was never possible to be sure when she could conceive. The fact that a woman's breasts no longer shrank when she was fertile meant that she was continuously alluring and, as far as vision went, continuously impregnable. The risk of conception could not be avoided, if there were sexual activity. This led to chronic population pressure, and the evidence is that the Moderns did outbreed Erect man.
Breasts seem to be modified sweat glands, and sweating is something that only mankind and horses do for cooling—a dangerous mechanism, unless replacement water is freely available. But effective, enabling mankind to handle hotter climate, and to exercise longer without overheating. This was another powerful mechanism for survival, thanks to water.
The retention of pubic hair is more difficult to explain. Why did all the rest of the body go bare except parts of the head and the pubic region? The head needed hair to protect the valuable brain, and the hair on the face differentiated the males from the females. But both sexes grow pubic hair at maturity, and it really isn't needed to differentiate that section of the body. Hair can help spread odor, and this may be the case with genital hair, but could hardly have done so when women spent much of their time waist deep in water. Yet nature does not do things without reason. There had to be a survival advantage for genital hair. Perhaps it serves as additional protection of that region when the male's sperm cells are activated and possibly vulnerable to mutation or damage by
Modern mankind's head had modified. As his mouth and jaws got smaller and more nearly square, structural strength was lost, and some additional buttress was needed. Thus extra bone at the chin helped survival. The skull, too, changed shape. Modem man did not necessarily have more brain tissue than Erect man, but its distribution differed. This may have been because mankind's adaptation to life in the water, while not entirely leaving the land, required additional mental processes. People had to learn how to use the knowledge and reflexes developed for survival on the land to survive in water. This dual ability may seem elementary to us—but we represent the end result. It surely was not at first simple for mankind, who had evolved almost entirely away from the water. So some of the prior brain tissue at the rear of the brain faded in importance, and new tissue was added at the front. This is surely an oversimplification, but it may be that comprehensive memory gave way to better analytical ability. That turned out, later, to be a critical shift. Modern mankind not only looked different, he thought differently.
And, lest there be any confusion: though Ann may have looked odd to Erect Man, because of her swollen breasts, small waist, broad pelvis, thick thighs, furlessness, and even to her own tribes-people because of her bony chin, she represents physically the final human form. Today we appreciate breasted women, and males too have chin braces. For our tastes, she would appear to be absolutely lovely. She just might be the species template, Eve of Eden, the ancestor of all mankind today.
CHAPTER 7
* * *
DREAM
Mankind was physically modern when he emerged from the water to reconquer the land, but not yet mentally modern. One of the greatest mysteries of human evolution is what happened about 40,000 years ago. During the prior hundred thousand years or so mankind shared the world with other variants of Erect man, such as Archaic man in Asia and Neandertal man in Europe, and his life-style seemed similar. Then abruptly he made dramatic advances in organization, technology, language, and all the arts, and took over the world. The prior Geodyssey volume, Isle of Woman, assumes that when a group of children were raised together, instead of individually by their mothers, they learned a new way of organizing their vocabulary, using superior syntax, and actually changed the organization of their brains in the process. Thus the origin of mankind's modern mind may have been in the Levant. That may be so, but this sequel volume assumes that it was more complicated than that, and developed more slowly in another region: Eden, or the Lake Victoria basin. That the intellectual breakthrough derives from the same place as the physical one, and followed naturally from it. That we owe our minds as well as our bodies to man's one-time adaptation to life in the water. And to our dreams. But to clarify this, we need to examine the nature of modern thinking and dreaming and memory. Much is not what it seems.
The setting this time is not Eden, however. It is near the confluence of the Mountain Nile and the White Nile rivers in modern-day Sudan, about 600 miles north of Lake Victoria. The time is about 60,000 years ago. Because if this supposition is correct, the delay in the advance of modern mankind across Eurasia was not because of the resistance of Archaic man or Neandertal man, but because the giant Sahara Desert of Africa prevented the new thinking from reaching the fringe. Only very slowly could modern-minded man penetrate that vast hostile barrier, following the thin avenue of the great river where hunting and foraging remained good. It was slow because of the hostile primitive-mind modern-body tribes settled along that avenue; they would not let strangers by without trouble, and the terrain did not allow large-scale migration or invasion. The advantage that would enable mankind to explosively conquer the world may not have been enough for very small groups to prevail against set, conservative primitive cultures. Intruders had to accommodate themselves in whatever way they could, and most may have died. But some may have been lucky, and achieved a foothold. Only when their numbers increased in the world beyond the Sahara so that they could form complete communities, did the apparent transformation occur.
HUGH walked beside the river, reflecting on his situation as he watched for suitable prey to hunt. He realized now that Bub had done it. Bub had wanted Hugh to join his tribe, and take Bub's sister Sis as a mate, but Hugh had declined and married Anne instead. So Bub had bided his time, then struck. He had been maliciously cunning, waiting until a bad storm had destroyed much of the encampment and killed several people. Then he had told Chief Joe that this was the punishment of the spirits, because the tribe harbored one who was not properly a man. One who was a reverse man.
Joe would not have accepted the word of an outsider whose tribe was at times hostile, but it was a time of stress, and Bub offered to bring his tribe to join in a larger hunt that would bring in enough meat to support both tribes until the situation recovered. Bil had not liked it, but had recognized that a joint hunt would indeed be mutually profitable; it made sense. So he and Joe considered it, while the privation continued and the people grew leaner. Bub refused to hunt with Hue, because of that bad hand. Bub's well-formed sister circulated, having private liaisons with men, and in her wake the hostility to wrong-sidedness grew. Hue came to understand, belatedly, that he had angered Sis by his refusal to marry her, and though men governed the tribes, the mischief of a woman disdained could be formidable.
No one before had remarked upon Hugh's preferred use of his left hand to wield his axe. Now the attention of the tribe focused on it, and others were too ready to believe that this was indeed the malice of the spirits. Hugh was one of the leaders of the tribe, but his position eroded, and soon he was unwelcome. Anne supported him, refusing to desert him for another man, though she used her right hand. Thus she too became suspect. Indeed, she had suffered a difficult childbearing, almost dying; now this too was brought forth as evidence of the mischief of bearing the baby of a cursed man. She had recovered and was now fully healthy, but the shadow remained.
“It isn't that we think you are bad,” Joe explained, embarrassed. “But we dare not go against the spirits. If they strike again . . .”
That hardly mattered now. Hugh and Anne had had to leave with their baby son Chip, exiled. Anne had been devastated by the thought of leaving her tribe, but then had rallied and realized that she no longer needed the tribe, now that she had a family. They had fled down the great river, because that was the only direction that offered some hope of forage. There were always fish in the river, and if there were also more formidable creatures, these could be avoided. The plants by the riverside were lush, and of course there was always good water to drink. And there were inevitably people, eventually, for others also appreciated the advantages of water.
Unfortunately people represented one of the greatest dangers, because many tribes simply killed any strangers who intruded on their territories. So Hugh looked as carefully for signs of people as for animals and plants. He wanted to spy before being spied on. His life could depend on it.
The vegetation became tangled, and the water crossed rapids, which would be dangerous to enter, so he moved out somewhat, rounding the curve of a hilly slope. Then he stopped, because he heard something ahead. He remained quite still for a moment, holding his breath, orienting on the sound. Then he moved quietly behind a tree: one that would be easy to climb if necessary.
The sound seemed to be retreating. Whatever it was was moving away. Therefore it represented no immediate threat. It was probably some kind of antelope, a beest, too big and fast for a man alone to hunt. Hugh relaxed. There were many such false alarms in the course of an exploration or hunt, and each had to be taken seriously, because any one of them just might turn out to be lethally true.
By the time he skirted the thicket crowding the river he was in a ravine leading away from both the river and his camp. He picked his way to the clearest avenue to get back on course, climbing a steep slope. It was as if the animal had led him astray, or perhaps
He crested the rim of the ravine, and spied a rabbit perched near, its ears alert. He hefted his axe, conscious now as not before that it was his left hand that held it. But as he drew back his arm to throw, the rabbit bounded away. He followed it, mildly annoyed that he had not been alert for this. He should have crested the rim with his weapon ready to throw, and knocked off the rabbit the instant he saw it. But this was new terrain to him, and he didn't yet know the rabbit trails. One thing the episode demonstrated: rabbits in this region were not used to being hunted by man. That suggested that this would be a good place to remain for a while.
He pursued the rabbit, carefully, also watching for other creatures. How many men had been led to their deaths by focusing too narrowly on a hunt when in strange terrain? He could not afford to come to mischief, because Anne depended on him. She was more than competent, but she had their baby to care for, and needed his support.
Then the rabbit paused again, thinking it was out of sight. Hugh heaved his axe. The rabbit heard it coming and tried to jump out of the way, but the blade caught it flatside and knocked it unconscious. He closed on it immediately, picked it up, and checked: it was dead. Good enough. Now he could return to camp.
He put the rabbit in his game pouch, wiped off his axe, and angled for the river, whose voice he could hear not far distant. But as he crested another ridge he saw a distant plume of smoke. He stopped again, orienting on it much as he had on the animal sound. How far was it, and how big? Was it a distant volcano, or a near camp fire? Or an intermediate brush fire? All three were dangerous in their own ways. But as a general rule, the farther away it was, the safer it was.