In Order to Write

Cassandra West - The Cave of Charles Darwin

December 19th, 2007 | by smokingpen |

Cassandra sat in the dirt in front of a large cave opening, as instructed. She could hear water running that sounded like a river just to the other side of the entrance, even though she knew there was no way a river could flow from one side of that cave to the other. Every once in a while she dug around in the dirt with her hands, found a small stone, and threw it side shot into the cave. The stone would bounce off the back wall, ricochet up to the ceiling, and then shoot straight down into the water. She’d done the same thing with several sticks, a few larger rocks, and a squirrel that was stupid enough to get close to her.

“I hate waiting,” she said. “Why would she send me to a cave anyway?” She addressed her comments to a painted horse standing just north of the opening to the cave.

“I don’t know,” Thomas said. He stopped eating the grass that surrounded the semi-circle of dirt Cassandra was sitting in. “I wasn’t invited into the witches lair with you.”

Cassandra turned and gave Thomas a blank stare. “We both know you’re important to whatever it is that I’m supposed to be doing here. That doesn’t mean, though, that I don’t have to go places without you, at least occasionally.”

“Besides,” Thomas continued as if he hadn’t even heard her, “I am not allowed into buildings. I’m never there to hear you listen to oracles or witches or mages or wizards.”

Instead of answering, Cassandra dug for another rock and pitched it into the cave, watched it hit the wall, ricochet to the ceiling, and then fly straight down to the water where it thunked into something wooden instead of plinked into the water as she’d expected.

“Oy,” a man that was clearly sitting in a dingy said. “What’s that?”

“Oh, sorry,” Cassandra said, she blushed when the man looked at her. Thomas snickered into his grass and then turned and wandered off.

Cassandra shot him a glare and then watched as the man in the boat rowed it to the edge of the cave and onto the shore. “Who are you?”

“Oh, yes, quite a good question. I am Charles Darwin,” he said. Charles took his hat off of his head, removed the waist coat he wore, and placed both, gently, in the dingy. He bowed at Cassandra. All she could do was stare at him.

“Right then,” he said in a decidedly English accent. “I don’t suppose you know why I am here?”

“Not particularly,” Cassandra said. “I was told to come here and wait.”

“Oh, well. Doesn’t that place us in a predicament?”

“Who are you Charles Darwin?” Cassandra asked. Her hands had moved away from her guns as Charles stood there next to his boat.

“I wrote a book, once… or soon, I don’t know…it all gets kind of muddly, anyway. What year is it? Nevermind, doesn’t matter. The book, my dear, was on a theory I had while sailing around South America on a boat called The Beagle. The Origin of Species. Actually, the title is much longer than that. It’s about evolution. Yes, well, you know, the process whereby a population changes over time in adapting to its environment,” he said then suddenly stepped forward. The movement surprised Cassandra.

He pulled from a vest pocket a quill and held it in ink stained fingers.

“Don’t worry,” he said adjusting himself as if to get ready for something, “I think I know why I am here.”

He lifted the quill into the air and started drawing. In front of Cassandra was now the basic outline of a human man and woman. “This is human-kind.”

“What kind of tom-foolery is this?” Cassandra asked. She wanted to reach for her guns, but couldn’t figure out how to use them against drawings in thin air.

“In the future, people will discuss how man,” he pointed at the drawing of a man,” and chimpanzees,” he quickly drew a chimp standing in between the man and woman, “are related. In essence, many people will assume that man and chimpanzees are related.”

Cassandra looked at the man and then looked at the monkey, “They don’t look like they are related to me.”

“Right-o,” Charles said, “they’re not. Well, the species man or homo sapien and the species chimpanzee or Pan troglodytes are related, cousins if you will.” Charles waved his quill and sent the drawing of the woman straight at Cassandra. She didn’t have time to react as it came into contact with her. At that moment, Cassandra felt herself getting shorter, her head hurt, her throat seemed to move of its own accord, and as she looked down at her arms, they were now covered with fur and she was hunched over, using the backs of her knuckles to help keep her standing.

Cassandra started to say something and noticed that all she could do was make noises, chirps and growls, rather than words. She tried to grab her guns, but her arms, longer now, would not work in the same way.

“Now I’m getting it all confused. Let me be clear, chimpanzees and humans are related,” Charles continued, “but man is not a direct ancestor of the chimp.” Charles waved his quill at Cassandra she was almost immediately back to her normal self, “and chimp,” he said as a chimp appeared next to Cassandra, “is not the forebear of man.”

“Don’t do that…”

“Rather, if you take the chimpanzee, which is not the closest relative in the Pan genus, and follow a different route, you can find that man and chimp had similar ancestors.” He waved his quill in the air again and suddenly there was the image of a series of heads without bodies. The one closest to Cassandra looked like a normal human head and then changed slightly in appearance from human looking all the way down the line until it was closer in appearance to the chimpanzee standing next to her.

“It would be foolish to assume that if you de-evolved man,” Charles pointed at the drawing of man that was standing in the air in front of him again, “you would get chimpanzee. Nor could you take chimpanzee,” he pointed at the drawing of the chimp, “and evolve him to man.”

He waved the quill again making all of the pictures disappear. However, this time, he pointed it at Cassandra, and she felt an odd tingling go throughout her entire body. Odd, but not entirely unpleasant. “There are many ancestors to modern man. At each stage of evolution they are different from what preceded them.”

Cassandra found herself changing, again, though it was slower and seemed to combine cranial ridge changes, the separation of her eyes, where her voice box was located, her chin, her mouth seemed to project more giving her a muzzle until she was presented with a shimmer in the air and she stood there looking at the creature staring back at her.

“If you were to de-evolve a human,” Charles said, “our best guess is that you would get to something that looks very simian, but resembles neither human nor chimpanzee. Though, at present,” his eyes ran up and down her reformed body, “you are closer to the chimpanzee than you are to your human self.”

He looked at Cassandra. She looked up at him. “Yes, a very good rendering of homo erectus, if I do say so myself.” He looked at her with a sense of satisfaction in his eyes: “You now have the ability to stand on your own two feet.”

“I had that before, thank you very much” Cassandra replied as she clumsily tried to make use of her de-volutionized legs, and found she was, again, not speaking.

Once again, Charles made some swipes with the quill. The shimmer in the air disappeared and Cassandra found herself looking at Charles from her normal eyes. He took a couple of steps away from the boat so that he was outside of the cave and laid the quill down on a flat stone.

“I believe that is meant for you,” he said. “It was a pleasure to meet you, Cassandra West.”

Charles turned, put his coat and hat back on, pushed the dingy back into the river before jumping inside, and then rowed back into the cave before disappearing.

Cassandra turned to look at Thomas and noticed the chimpanzee was still standing next to her. The chimp looked up at her, skreetched loudly, and then ran off into the forest.

“What was that all about?”

“I don’t know,” Thomas said, “but I would gather that feather before it blows away.”

Cassandra walked over, picked up the quill, and looked at it. “That was interesting,” she said. “Fascinating really. Man is an evolved form of ape.”

“Not quite,” Thomas said. “Man and ape are both evolved beings with a common ancestor, but they are not directly related.”

“Right, different paths,” Cassandra said. “Wonder what was up with that money?”

“Chimpanzee,” Thomas said.