by
(
Don't kid yourself about human ingenuity or a softhearted Titan named Prometheus. Brent did it. Brent was the one who taught the last handful of those blundering ape-men how to make a fire. For a long time all the ape-men knew was rock-tossing and dying young. But Brent had to interfere. Brent was always interfering. He had his fingers in everything, long before Homo erectus was scorching his pork chops, before vertebrates could fly, before there were vertebrates, even before the lovely Miss Applebee came to us from wherever it was she came from.
When we were very young and there were only volcanoes and rain, our days were pretty much spent sitting down, because the rocks were either very slippery or very hot and neither is good for running around. We swam. We slept. I slept quite a bit.
Our first argument was over algae. I couldn't understand why anyone would get worked up over algae. "Look at the green stuff on this rock," Brent said one morning.
"I saw it a couple of years ago. It's boring."
"Boring? You think everything is boring. This stuff is fantastic. It reproduces! It collects energy from the sun! I'm going to check out the sea floor and look for more. You want to join me?"
See what I mean? Who gets excited over algae? Who walks around on the bottom of the ocean?
A couple hundred million years later, the algae had turned into worms and sponges and barnacles and slugs, and, of course, trilobites - repulsive, armored louts that crawled in mud all day. There were millions of them. Brent tried to teach them to swim; he hoped they would learn to paddle about the oceans and hunt. For millions of years, Brent wandered the sea floor, snatching trilobites from the mud and flinging them into the upper reaches of the sea. They would flail their legs a bit, then sink.
"Just you wait, Brent," I told him one day. "These damn things are going to go extinct. They're so boring and clunky."
Brent launched into his tired sales pitch about the supremacy of trilobites. If he could show them how to use their marvelous two-part eyes to catch the nimble but tasty velvet worms, if he could just teach a few to swim, or to breathe on land, or to speak, he would say, there would be no stopping them.
I had heard it all before.
Thankfully, the trilobite dynasty ended soon enough. Brent's best students never learned to do better than heave up from the ooze and flail heavily before sinking. Fish took over the seas, nimble, fast, shiny, and waves deposited heaps of trilobite skeletons at the feet of trees along the shore.
Then Miss Applebee showed up. I have no idea where she came from; she was not there for a long time, and then one day I woke from a nap and she was there. Her presence was awfully agitating, primarily because of her stunning beauty, but also because she took no interest in us at all. She had huge eyes and spent virtually all of her time focusing them directly at the sun.
We soon discovered she was mute, and, as far as I could tell, as dumb as a trilobite. Determined to impress her, Brent dove into his hobby of evolutionary interference with a vengeance. He spent thirty thousand years trying to teach a species of fish to leap out of the water because he was convinced Miss Applebee would find it impressive. Decade after decade he was in the sea, drilling and coaching. When he had trained them to his satisfaction, he grabbed Miss Applebee by the wrist and led her to a white beach. I followed, because I was awake and bored, not because of any jealousy on my part.
"Wait here," Brent said, and dove into the green water. I watched him move out among a shoal of small fish. Then, at some cue from Brent, little silver fish started bounding free of the water, one after another, gliding along for a substantial distance before splashing down. I must admit that it was a magnificent thing to see, Brent's vaulting fish, shots of glitter cavorting above the sea.
"Not bad, huh, Miss Applebee?" I said, turning to her. She was not there. She had wandered back into the forest. Brent splashed ashore, gleaming and triumphant.
"She didn't see it, Brent," I told him. "Any of it."
And so it went for a fairly long time: Brent meddled, I took naps, Miss Applebee stared at the sun. The only emotion she ever showed was a periodic flicker of satisfaction in her eyes when the sun emerged from behind a cloud, or pushed up over the horizon. Maybe she came from there or maybe she was drawn to it. Maybe both. Maybe it offered her a brilliance against which all else paled. Who am I to speculate?
Evolution progressed at its capricious but exponential pace; nearly all of the evolutionary mishaps disappeared as quickly as they appeared. Eventually several species of reptiles mutated into hyper-efficient predators, and the dinosaurs built their degenerate dynasty.
The dinosaurs were boring. Their daily schedule consisted of chasing smaller creatures and running from bigger creatures. Sometimes, for variety, one might blunder into a pit of bubbling tar.
Brent, of course, was convinced that evolution had achieved its objective. "The dinosaurs are rulers of the land, sea and sky," he said. "Everything is afraid of them."
"Brent," I told him, "they're stupid."
"You're stupid," he said. "The dinosaurs rule the world, in case you haven't noticed. If I could just teach them to avoid these damned sticky pools."
I retired to my deck chair to get some shut-eye and I didn't get up until it became so hot that I had a hard time sleeping. The land cracked and the seas boiled and dust blew into Miss Applebee's wide eyes. It took about ten thousand years to cool down, and when it did, there was a new kind of animal scurrying about: puny and hairy and versatile.
Unfortunately, there still wasn't a whole lot to do. The hairy creatures grew quickly, ate anything, chattered to each other, even grew to mammoth proportions. The plains swarmed with creatures. There were cattle-sized tusked pigs, halitotic mammoths, miniature tigers, carnivorous zebra. And birds! Giant eagles with four-meter wingspans that could spot a pygmy marmoset from a mile up. So many species and Brent became enamored with the least likely to succeed of all of them: mutant primates that had lost the ability to stand on all four feet.
"Brent," I asked him one day, "why waste your time with those ape-men? You've been trailing that group for a thousand years and they never once noticed you. I think Miss Applebee might have better hearing than they do." Miss Applebee was watching the sun track steadily across the sky; she took no notice.
"Why, Brent? Why these feeble ape-men? They leave the protection of the trees to stand above the grass in plain view. It's almost as if they have given up all hope of survival. Their life span is shorter than a turtle's. They can't see a hundred meters. At night they're completely blind. Any amphibian can process sounds thirty times faster than they can. They're more susceptible to cold than mosquitoes. Worst of all, they're the slowest of all mammals. They have hardly any chance of surviving another thousand years."
"Yes," Brent said, "but you forget one thing. They have me."
For almost three million years the ape-men survived, but in tiny numbers. They hurled rocks at other upright apes called Neanderthals and died as soon as their teeth rotted out of their skulls. Brent kept his distance.
"How are your ape-men doing, Brent?" I asked him one winter.
"Not good, as if you cared. Winters have been very hard on them. They're filthy and cold and starving."
"Hey, it's only natural. These ape-men are a genetic casualty. If ever a species wasn't fit for survival, this is it."
Brent sat in the grass and groaned. "If only there was something I could do," he said. "I've thought and thought."
"Face it, Brent. Creatures that can't survive don't. It's the way this place works. If anybody should have learned that by now, it's you."
Brent scowled and moved off across the plain.
I must have dozed off because when I woke it was summer. Several fingers of smoke twisted into the sky from behind a stand of acacia. Brent sat next to me, beaming; he was so thoroughly pleased he actually radiated light. It didn't take long to put it together.
"It was the perfect solution," he said. "Now they'll be able to herd prey and ward off predators. They can cook meat. They'll be able to settle down instead of running from winter like songbirds. You thought it couldn't be done, but I did it - I saved them!"
"Now you've done it," I snapped. "You had to do it! You always have to tamper. These thick-skulled simpletons will start living longer. They'll reproduce like mad. They'll probably learn to cage up animals so they'll have more meat to roast. They'll have enough time on their hands to develop agriculture. Agriculture! Now that they're not afraid of fire, will they be afraid of anything? They'll develop science, blenders, electric blankets, deconstructionism. They'll question the unquestionable, overrun the earth!"
"Yes!" shouted Brent. "They needed me! Isn't it wonderful, Miss Applebee? After six hundred million years, I've finally done something worthwhile!"
And the inscrutable Miss Applebee, standing with one leg bent, like a truly wild horse, glanced over at the thin towers of smoke. She looked at Brent, and blinked her eyelids once, slowly. Then she turned back to the sun.
I put my head between my hands.
No longer did events proceed as they should have. The half-bent, graceless ape-men killed off the Neanderthal; they built great towers to monument their ignorance; they microwaved pasta and ate sugar substitutes; they learned to paddle about the oceans, to avoid bubbling tar pits, to marvel at flying fish.
So now you know. I have not once slept soundly these past 200 millennia. The last time I saw Brent was in Tenochitlan, a sparkling city whose population chose Miss Applebee as one of their gods. This choice, incidentally, was not unusual; most human populations fashioned idols of her in some likeness or another, thinking she was the mother of the earth or the bride of God or the virgin queen of Los Angeles. In Tenochitlan, they believed she was responsible for the daily rising and setting of the sun. I have no idea how they came to such conclusions. As far as I could tell she was responsible for nothing.
The night I saw Brent last that beautiful city was being cindered by a deranged Spaniard called Cortés. They had several aviaries in Tenochitlan, clear acres among crowded towers where thousands of wild birds nested: cockatoos and cassowaries, swifts and swallows, parrots and plovers, hawks and warblers.
I watched this Spaniard torch the aviaries. Across the ecstasy of flames, across the stink of burnt feathers, across the dry grass cracking and roaring, across the flaming loop of a swallow caught fire skittering through the smoke, across all this, I saw Brent.
"See what you have done?" I shouted.
"What did I do?" he yelled back. "This? This is necessary. We've seen evolution commit worse crimes. We've seen a lightning stroke burn a continent."
"You think this is natural?"
"It's strength over weakness. It's necessary. It's beautiful. And without me none of this would have been possible. None of it - this aviary, this city, this population, this war. Whatever abilities and talents we have, old friend, we are bound to exert them. The punishment for trying and failing is punishment enough. But to lounge curled over tree branches and sleep away whole chapters of eternity, that is . . . well, that is not what I choose to do."
"But, Brent, can't you see? You've only postponed their extinction. Surely you can see how addicted they are to destruction; they're no different than dinosaurs. Soon they'll build a fire that will burn them all. You will have accomplished nothing."
But Brent had already turned his back on the heaving flames and moved off towards the mountains. I watched a green parakeet catch fire and, for the first time in my short life, I yearned for the peace that the grave surely offers all creatures.
I am vaguely comforted by my certainty that evolution will circumambulate its present obstacle as it has every other. Soon all the trappings of the ape-men - tape recorders, semi trucks, stringed instruments, bean-filled toys - all of it will be buried under the sea. Then, God help me, I might be able to get some rest.
Anthony Doerr is a writer and teacher in the M.F.A. program at Bowling Green State University. As a boy he had a knack for finding fossilized brachiopods in the backyard.
Caleb Brown is an illustrator and biologist living in Montana. By day he drives a delivery van, and by night he draws pictures with his computer.
Trilobites.com - EXTINCTIONS Fossil Company's online collection of over 280 images of trilobite fossils.
Evolutionary and Geological Timelines - covers major events from 4.6 billion years ago. Part of the extensive Talk.Origins Archive.
Related HMS Beagle articles:
