Morning Shows the Day

The cave was a murky half-world of wry shapes, itinerant shadows, and non-colours that did little to lighten the gloom. The silence approached universality; it was denied only by water splashes, skittering unseen creatures, and almost-human voices. An embery fire burnt itself away in the makeshift hearth.

Outside, the inimical drabness was punctuated by rock formations, hillocks, and autumn-stripped trees. A clammy mist filled the hollows, then began to seep over the dead and left-for-dead hominids that lay haphazardly upon the higher ground. Male and female. Young and old. The hirsute bodies were mainly unmarked, but each skull had been cracked open with terrific force.

Many ill-defined figures huddled closer about the carefully rekindled central fireplace. They bore certain family resemblances to the grisly-folk hominids lying outside. But the differences - greater height, slimmer bodies, flatter brow ridges, less body hair - were more striking than the vague similarities.

The almost-human voices became much more excitable, echoing and re-echoing from the ambient stone. They were not being used for the interchange of abstract concepts. If a 'word' was repeated it came by accident rather than design. Any meaningful communication took place on an emotional level, with the omnipresent danger of sudden and all-out violence.

Then a deeper, more resonant almost-voice cut through the disharmony and brought it to an end. As one, the silenced hominids looked towards the unusually tall male who had just detached himself from the back-cave darkness. He gazed calmly back at them. His lithe, fine-haired body was limned by the firelight.

"Olac! Olac!" rose the ragged chant. All eyes turned in the same direction. Arms waved a hectic greeting. "OLAC! OLAC!"

The male hominid called something like 'Olac' did not 'speak' again for several minutes. There was a thoughtful look in his brown eyes that set him mentally apart from the volatile huddlers after heat. He encouraged well-nigh complete silence by mere example; an exceptional thing to happen in this long-ago morning of mankind.

Olac finally resumed almost-speaking. His voice was arresting, but far from melodious. As non-word followed non-word, he grew more and more animated. The guttural tonalities could not begin to transmit the thought-forms that roiled, sketchily, in his brain. A near-sapient brain, trapped within a near-animal body.

He was mentally alone. Every being fought for itself and against every other being in its own circumscribed little world. No viable connections or integration. But his thought-forms may be translated as:

"We have beaten our enemies. They are dead. All of them are dead. Men. Women. Children. Out there - in the Big Dark - the land is drinking their blood. The land that now belongs to us."

Blank stares.

The more Olac tried to render the elusive thought-forms into adequate speech patterns, the more frustrated he became. Meanwhile, the initially rapt audience was getting restless. Shuffling feet, open-mouthed yawns, and a gamut of unpremeditated noises. He was forced to stake his metaphysical all upon body language augmented by pure animal magnetism.

"We have fought the last battle." But the half-understood idea could not be expressed in non-words. Olac continued, stubbornly: "The enemy is dead. Only the animals remain. To be hunted, to be killed. No more hunger. No more thirst. No more fear."

It was a literally impossible task. Olac 'sensed' the thought-forms melting away. All that abnormal energy began to drain out of him. Through eyes misted over with to-him inexplicable tears, he saw that everybody had lost interest in his speech. No, performance. One last try …

"Watch! The weapon that makes us strong for ever." Olac waved a leather sling above his head. "The ultimate weapon."

"Olac! the inventor was hailed. "OLAC!"

Mind over matter. Olac's superhominid will-power should have sent those hormonal messengers called pheromones flitting molecule-to-molecule through the air. And his fellows did become gradually less agitated, more taciturn. They looked at each other with a brute-force calculation that was the nearest thing to intelligence then extant upon the Earth.

Moments later, both male and female hominids went into see-do slinging mode. Some particularly aggressive types ricocheted pebbles off the cave walls. The inevitable minor and not-so-minor injuries brought forth cries of pain, followed by equally inevitable counter-violence.

Other, even more radical, thought-forms meanwhile vied for Olac's tired attention. He gave almost-voice to them, using his familiar 'speech' network of non-words, muscle interplay, and posture.

"Victory is ours. Let us live together in peace. Food enough for all. Share and share alike." Then came his most daring conceptual breakthrough: "No more enemies. But if any return, we can be…" The idea of mercy, however, eluded even him.

Anyway, the cave had been turned into a stone cockpit. Flames showed hominid combat hominid over scraps of meat, hides, weaponry, tools, or nothing at all. Fang and claw. Blood and pain. The strong prevailed; the weakest had their brains dashed out against the wall.

Olac took hard blows from several kill-mad males. He hit back at them with might and main. His conciliatory words were supplanted by almost-human voices, glorifying war.

Bio text

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