The others seemed to sense his mood. They avoided him, not coming to groom, not even looking at him. His gruesome defeat had been postponed by the death of Finger, but its sad process was still under way. Capo’s day was done, his life nearly over. All his swagger was gone.

But now Leaf came to him. She clambered into his nest alongside him, and, gently, began to groom him, as she had when they were both young and the world was bright and rich and full of possibility.

Frond wasn’t interested in Capo, one way or the other. He had something else on his mind.

He knuckle-walked a few paces out into the sunlit green. There he got to his hind legs once more. As always he was unsteady on his feet. But the elevation of his head gave him a platform from which to view the land, check on any predators or other dangers around.

Frond ducked back into the grass, and made his way cautiously to the gomphothere corpse. As he approached, carrion birds screeched their protest but flapped away. The scavengers had done their work well: The body looked as if it had exploded, with limbs and ribs lying scattered on the ground, bloody bone gleaming, and an eyeless, fleshless head peering back at him accusingly, spadelike tusks lying broken and gnawed. He rooted through the scraps of skin and bits of hyena-chewed flesh, but there was little to be had; the scavenging machinery of the savannah had worked thoroughly to consume the proboscidean’s flesh. The hyenas had even destroyed the soft ribs. But he found a thigh bone, long, thick, terminating at either end in huge, bulging lumps. It was unbroken. He tapped it experimentally against another bone; it sounded hollow.

He found a cobble in the dirt, the right size to fit into his fist. He raised the cobble and smashed it into the bone. The bone split, and rich, delicious marrow began to leak out. It was a resource that had been beyond the reach of the dogs and carrion birds, beyond their teeth and beaks. But now it was not beyond Frond. He raised the bone and began to suck down the marrow greedily.

The others who had driven Capo and his troop out of the forest would stay there, clinging to what they had. Such groups would eventually give rise to the chimpanzees, who would differ little from this ancestral stock. They would survive, even prosper: As the desert spread and the forests retreated to their last redoubts around the equator, the great rivers would provide corridors for the chimps to use to migrate into Africa’s interior.

But the descendants of Capo’s troop were now marching toward a very different destiny. This unremarkable troop of apes, stranded by the disappearance of their forest, would find there was a way to make a living out here. But leaving an ecology to which they had been adapting for millions of years was hard: As long as the apes couldn’t walk or run over long distances, while they couldn’t sweat, while they couldn’t even digest meat, many, many would die. But some would survive: just a few, but that was enough.

Frond had finished the marrow. But there were plenty more bones to be broken. He stood up again. He looked back to his troop, hooting to call them over.

Then he turned back to the savannah. He was bipedal, tool wielding, meat eating, xenophobic, hierarchical, combative, competitive — all of which he had brought from the forest — and yet he was imbued with the best qualities of his ancestors, with Purga’s doggedness, Noth’s exuberance, Roamer’s courage, even Capo’s vision. Full of the possibilities of the future, laden with the relics of the past, the young male, standing upright, gazed at the open plain.

Alyce and Joan shuffled with the crowd of passengers toward the airport terminal. They had been out in the dense, smoky air for only a few minutes, and Joan was supported by the arm of Alyce Sigurdardottir. Still, she felt as if she were melting.

And when she had stepped off the plane the first thing Joan had felt was an earthquake. It was an extraordinary sensation, a dreamlike shifting, over almost before it had begun.

The quake had been caused by Rabaul, of course.

Beneath the island of Papua New Guinea, magma was stirring; molten rock, a thousand cubic kilometers of it. This great bleeding had been moving up through faults in the Earth’s thin outer crust, up toward the huge, ancient caldera called Rabaul, at a rate of ten meters every month. It was an astounding pace for a geological event, a testament to the mighty energies. The rising mass had pushed up the overlying rock, putting the land under immense stress.

Rabaul had erupted cataclysmically many times before. Two such eruptions had been identified by human scientists, one some fifteen hundred years ago, the other around two thousand years before that. It would surely happen again sometime.

The other passengers, trooping through the smoky air to the airport’s small terminal, seemed oblivious to the quake. Bex Scott had rejoined her mother, Alison, and her sister, who had golden eyes and green hair. Beneath a sky stained by remote fires, as the land shuddered beneath them unnoticed, the beautiful genriched children chattered brightly with their elegant mother. They had their silver earplugs still nestling in their small ears, Joan noticed. It was as if they walked around in a neon fog.

Joan remembered guiltily her bland assurance that Bex would have to be desperately unlucky for Rabaul to go pop just when she was in the vicinity. Out here, on this shuddering ground, such certainty seemed foolish. But she might still be right. The mountain might go back to sleep. One way or another, most people didn’t think about it. It was a crowded world, with plenty of problems to worry about even more immediate than a grumbling volcano.

The walk to the terminal seemed endless. The airport apron was a dismal place despite the corporate logos plastered on every surface. The intermittent shuddering of the ground was a primeval disturbance, and the huge whining of the jet engines sounded like the groan of disappointed animals.

And now Joan heard a distant popping, like damp logs thrown on a fire. “Shit. Was that gunfire?”

“There are protesters at the airport fence,” said Alyce Sigurdardottir. “I glimpsed them as we came in. A great ragged band of them, like a shantytown.”

“Just for us?”

Alyce smiled. “You can’t mount a respectable conference on globalization without the protesters jetting in. Come on, it’s a tradition; they’ve been trashing these conferences so long the veterans have reunions. You should be flattered they’re taking you seriously.”

Joan said grimly, “Then we’ll just have to work harder to persuade them that we have something new to offer. I sense you don’t like Alison Scott.”

“Scott’s whole life, her work, is show business. Even her children have been co-opted — no, created — to be part of the performance. Look at them.”

Joan shrugged. “But you can’t blame her for genriching her children.” She stroked her belly. “I don’t think I would want it for Junior here. But people have always wanted to give their children the best chance: the best school, the best stone-tipped spear, the best branch in the fig tree.”

That forced a smile from Alyce. But she went on, “Some genriching would be desirable, if all could afford it. There is nothing physiologically inevitable about our bodies’ limited repair capabilities, for instance. Why can’t we regrow amputated limbs like a starfish? Why can’t we have several sets of teeth, instead of just two? Why don’t we replace worn out and arthritic joints?

“But do you really think that’s where Alison Scott has made her money? Look at her kids, their hair, teeth, skin. Innards are invisible. What’s the point of spending money if you can’t show off what you’ve got? Ninety percent of money currently spent on genriching goes on externals, on the visible. Those wretched kids of Scott’s are nothing but walking billboards for her wealth and power. They didn’t put the rich in genrich for nothing. I’ve never seen anything so decadent.”