-from Defiled with Blood, due out later this year.
The story welled up out of Rebecca as life had once welled up here, eons ago, first as submerged aquatic life in the ancient inland sea that had long covered this portion of the continent. Then plants had sprung from the mud of the receded waters, and the microorganisms that lived in endless symbiosis with them.
She spoke of that life. She spoke of the trees. Magnificent trees, as if she had seen them herself, seen their boughs laden with leaves, needles, nuts, fruit. In the primordial forest, darkness had ruled, long before man was even possible, before the dinosaurs roamed the surface of the planet, seemingly invincible and enthroned for hundreds of millions of years. That far back, the forest had obscured the Earth, claimed it, owned it, brooded over it, even the rays of the god-like Sun reflected by its high canopy, leaving all below to survive in the dim glow permitted by the occasional opening amid the branches above.
Eventually, though, the dinosaurs had come and they had reigned long and ploddingly. Chewing up the forests no faster than they could regrow, the long-toothed predators among them chewing up their herbivorous fellows no faster than they could reproduce. And so the rule of plants had been replaced by a rule of flesh: immense hulks of meat, eating, defecating, breathing, copulating, birthing more flesh to repeat these processes for eternity.
In all their long reign, never had they developed what men might call consciousness. They differed from the great trees of the early darkness only in that they could move and fuck and kill and eat.
Perhaps, in a universe still young and rife with ballistic dangers, their end was inevitable. Instead of registering surprise when learning of their sudden and cataclysmic end, we who survive might better wonder at their endurance, at the immense window of time in which their dynasties continued without interruption.
From the ashes of their destruction, measly creatures, unworthy even of the meager light that dripped through the clouded aftermath of Armageddon, crawled out to assert a new claim to the planet.
This was a new era, an era of light. Though great forests remained, the darkness beneath their branches was but an echo, a step-child of that primeval gloom which remained now only in the deepest caves beneath the surface, into which its black remains had sunk, much as the dinosaurs bones, subsumed by the Earth, had been drawn down into the depths beneath the dark forest.
Furry creatures now vied with reptiles, fish and birds for dominion. This contest lasted millions of years. There must have been countless watershed moments, strategic victories and crushing defeats, but they are all lost to time, as will be everything that ever happens.
Among the mammals, curious creatures came to be. Primates spread across the globe, clambering among the trees or roaming the forest floors. The apes arose from their ranks, and from them came Man.
A broad definition of Man encounters him not just in Africa among the earliest Homo sapiens, but everywhere around the planet, in forms and emanations that defy the classifications that rise only from the fragments of bone that survived to be disinterred by descendants historical if not biological, eons later.
And here, in the region of the American Southwest now home to the old mining town of San Martin, some of these men gathered. These first men came here so long ago that there is no counting the years. To count them, to enumerate them, provides no significance, adds no energy to the concept of long ago. They came long before anthropologists imagined that such sapient hominids existed.
These men, and others like them, had roamed over this terrain many times before. Their women grubbed for nuts and seeds, while they themselves chased game both big and small. Their savage children scurried behind them and among them. They carved tools from wood, bone and stone, digging holes for shelter or sleeping under trees.
And always they carried fire.
-from Defiled with Blood, the next upcoming novel from Robert Paxton.
