Evolution by Stephen Baxter Page B

consensus among the hunters.

    • • •
    The great diplo cow was now 120 years old. Her hide bore the scars of failed predator attacks, and many of the bony spines on her back had snapped off. Still she was growing, now massing a remarkable twenty-three tons. But the degeneration of her bones, after their heroic lifetime of load-bearing, had slowed her cruelly.
    On the day her strength finally ran out, it took only a few minutes of the herd’s steady, ground-covering trot for her to become separated from the pack.
    The orniths were waiting. They had been waiting for days. They reacted immediately.
    Three males moved in first, all of them sons of Listener. They stalked around the matriarch, cracking their whips, flimsy bits of treated leather that emulated the supersonic crackle of the diplos’ tails.
    Some of the diplo herd looked back dimly. They made out the matriarch, and her tiny predators. Even now the million-year programming of the diplos’ small brains could not accept that these skinny carnivores presented any threat. The diplos turned away, and continued their relentless feeding.
    The matriarch could see the capering, diminutive figures before her. She rumbled her irritation, the great boulders grinding in her stomach. She tried to lift her head, to bring her own tail to bear, but too many joints had fused to painful immobility.
    Now the second wave of hunters moved in. Armed with poison-tipped spears, and using the claws of their hands and feet, they attacked the matriarch as allosaurs once had, striking and retreating.
    But the matriarch had not survived more than a century by chance. Summoning up the last of her energy, ignoring the hot aches that spread from the pinpricks in her side, she reared up on her hind feet. Like a falling building, she towered over the band of carnivores, and they fled before her. She crashed back to the earth with an impact like a sharp earthquake, her slamming forefeet sending waves of pain through every major joint in her body.
    If she had fled then, if she had hurried after her herd, she might have survived, even thrown off the effects of the spears. But that last monumental effort had briefly exhausted her. And she was not given time to recover. Again the hunters closed in, striking at her with their spears and claws and teeth.
    And here came Listener.
    Listener had stripped naked, discarding even the whip around her waist. Now she flew at the diplo’s flank, which quivered mountainously. The hide itself was like thick leather, resistant even to her powerful claws, and it was crisscrossed by gullies, the scars of ancient wounds, within which parasitic growths blossomed, lurid red and green. The stink of rotten flesh was almost overwhelming. But she clung there, digging in her claws. She climbed until she had reached the spines that lined the matriarch’s back. Here, Listener bit into the diplo’s flesh and began to rip away at the horny plates embedded beneath.
    Perhaps in some dark corner of her antique mind the diplo remembered the day she had ruined this little ornith’s life. Now, aware of new pains on her back, she tried to turn her neck, if not to swipe away the irritation, at least to see the perpetrator. But she could not turn.
    Listener did not stop her frantic, gruesome excavation until she had dug down to the spinal cord itself, which she severed with a harsh bite.

    • • •
    For long days the mountain of meat served to sustain the nation of hunters, even as the young played in the cavernous hall of the matriarch’s great ribs.
    But Listener was criticized, in angry head bobs, dances, and gestures. This is a mistake. She was the matriarch. We should have spared her until another emerged. See how the herd is becoming scattered, ill-disciplined, its numbers falling further. For now we eat. Soon we may starve. You were blinded by your rage. We were foolish to follow you. And so on.
    Listener kept her own counsel. For she knew the damage the loss of the