(2018)
(Part of A Matter of Time)
50,000 years hence
The rain was clean once more. Late in the night it left behind a sky of ink, full of drifting stars; though the sight of the sky scarcely mattered to the small creature rooting among the dead leaves, still glowing with a faint yellow-green light.
Rivulets of water flowed down the scarped walls of an ancient quarry, snaking between bushes and exposed roots, dragging to its bottom dirt ripped from the forest above. The floor, almost always in the shadow, was covered in ferns and pale-leaved saplings. Thousands of generations earlier, the drops of rain fell heavy, milky, dark, and left behind a bitter crust. But now nobody could remember it, except maybe the millenary oaks that bore in their trunks the thin rings of a strained growth.
The community of mice survived decently on the acorns and hazelnuts that gathered in the quarry, provided by running water. It was a good place to live, and only a very strong impulse could push a young mouse to leave it for the ruined walls, where only a few hardy bushes covered the stone's nakedness, and outward in the surrounding forest. Danger was everywhere.
An almost imperceptible rustle reached the mouse's ears. He froze, trying to detect the origin of that sound, increasing in intensity. A snake was crawling through the underbrush, a coluber large enough to swallow him whole. The rodent knew well the forest floor, and could exploit it better than any of its dim inhabitants; he sought shelter in a mound of broken glass, where he knew the snake could not follow him without injuring itself.
His ancestors had been, in different times, experiments, toys for children, objects of worship, and clever survivors. The patriarch of his species had received from a jellyfish the gene for a protein that absorbed energy from sunlight and released it in the darkness as a pale halo of light. The reasons for this transformation now lay buried with its makers.
Unsurprisingly, the emission of light did not help him to move unseen in the underbrush. For many millennia, predators had kept away from the fires and the stone chambers, whence whispers had come of incomprehensible secrets; but now the hearths were cold, the walls were broken and shrouded in vines, and predators were flooding regions once safe.
The snake slithered away, in search of a more accessible prey. After several minutes – as long as days in the feverish mind of an anxious rodent – the mouse burst out of the glass mound toward a wider space. Night ravens certainly waited on the hazel branches, ghastly creatures with bare heads to better gut carrions, but that would not reject living preys.
Surviving in the quarry was easy. Too easy. If natural selection had loosened its grasp, sexual selection had taken over. Courtship was a chaotic and crowded affair, and over thousands of murine generations evolutionary processes had devised a strategy to select the worthier males. They had but to leave their perennial sanctuary, brave the multitude of predators of the outer world, and bring back to the quarry an object that proved their ability. The best place was a clearing littered with debris, and that was the most dangerous place as well.
All his senses aflame, the mouse crawled across the damp grass, at the feet of a stone idol with many faces disfigured by moss. The moon shone sideways through the surrounding canopy, painting on the grass patches of silver in which his biological light was less visible. Pieces of aluminum and colored plastic lay everywhere, mingled with roots and earth clods. He only had to pick one - and reach it.
He darted from a patch of light to another, careful to never stop in the shade. Predators were invisible among the branches, but they must be there. A small white fragment lay among the dead leaves, not far from him.
A rustle of leaves. A rabbit slid out of the underbrush, sniffing the grass, and slowly advanced in the clearing. Then two black shapes appeared suddenly over it, digging their talons in the light fur; the two ravens exchanged savage pecks above the squeaking prey. The mouse took those few seconds of opportunity to run to the fragment, grab it in his teeth, and disappear again in a tangle of thorns.
He walked around the clearing, clutching the undefinable object. He was doubtlessly smarter than the lab mice trafficked between the laboratories that now lay blasted below the humus and pine needles, first exalted by their experiments, and then by generations of mad race among the predators in search of prizes. Yet the icons of the lost masters of Earth still stood all around him, half-sunk in the bushes, piled along the ravines, mixed with the dirt, never to be recognized.
The woodland opened into a grassy slope, with hazel trunks rising at various angles before straightening up; the quarry opened in the front, overflowing with night mist. He launched himself toward its eroded rim, along the blackberry and holly bushes at the feet of the oaks, his mind filled by the desire to return in a familiar place, where the scent of his kin soaked moss and stone, and the reek of predators could be felt only in frantic dreams.
And there another figure hit the ground from a forked trunk, opal eyes reflecting the moonlight. The cats of this forest were much larger, much fiercer than they once were. With his tiny heart convulsed by ten beats per second, the rodent swerved into the blackberry and cowered against the oak's bark, trusting the protection of thorns. He had had to move farther from the quarry, but the spiny embrace was now almost as reassuring. The cat searched an opening in the bush, mute as a shadow, pushed a clawed paw below the branches, but could scratch nothing but dirt.
A flutter of wings resounded from the treetop. A competent predator knows that a prey is only worth so much effort; the cat had just lost any interest for the mouse in the thorns. As it climbed the trunk toward a less painful capture, the mouse returned on his path.
A few minutes later, he finally descended the ruined wall of the quarry, glistening with waterfalls that reflected the phosphorescence below. The scent of the colony, and in particular of awaiting females, was becoming overwhelming. He ran with something much like pride toward the yellow-green mound, the white fragment still fast in his mouth. Dozens of muzzles bristling with whiskers crowded around him, reading in his fur the smells of the forest, judging the quality of the shapeless thing.
The hunt was over. Now remained only to be seen who would be most impressed by his finding, and more than one female watched him approvingly. Having won their evolutionary reward, the prizes of the mice would be abandoned in the hollow at the quarry's center, where rainwater dragged them into underground crevices and unknown caves, never to be seen again by mammalian eyes.
Out of the quarry, beyond the hills, mountains took the shape of titanic statues, formed by the chisel of a million slaves. Now the stern faces and the imperious poses were invisible, hidden by a dark thicket of fir trees, standing against the dawning sky. Whoever had ordered their features recreated in the earth no longer had a name. They too, perhaps, sought to impress some observer with their proud works, and their glory hadn't proven much more lasting.
The mice carried on their brief lives in the shadow of the sphinxes and monoliths, completely unaware of the time before and after themselves. The small seeker had before himself a few years of quests, and a discrete success in the transmission of his genes. After that, his minute bones would rest in the same hollows of the ground with the tokens plundered from above, under layers of dirt and fungal tangles pressed by the steps of a vast and well-earned descendance.