Perry didn’t want to let himself believe that he truly was one of a kind. He hadn’t dwelled on this, and did not now.

“I assume I’m related to these blue humans. But we’re so different.”

“Very different,” Karante agreed. “You know, we Good fight with the Orsines, while we seldom do with the humans; but the Orsines, ironically, are more like us. It’s hard to say why the humans are the way they are.”

*

As if to emphasize their idiosyncratic nature – that was the kindest spin that Perry could put on their behavior – a group of the blue humans approached a group of the The Good, coincidentally very soon after this talk he had had with Karante, and left him what was apparently an odd gift, or invitation.

He, Karante, and four other adult Good had walked an hour to a small lake around which grew what Perry knew as wild rice from his first life. Several Good children scampered along with them, helping gather the grass seed with varying degrees of usefulness once they had reached the shore of the lake.

It was one of those children who noticed a knot of the blue humans approaching them from across the largest stretch of the open field that surrounded that side of the lake. She called to Karante, and then Perry and the others stopped to watch the little procession.

The blue people walked straight toward them. Once they came within a reasonable crossbow shot distance, the one who led the way lifted up both of his hands to display something white.

“It’s a figure,” Karante told Perry. Her eyesight, like that of all the Good, was better than his.

She waited, and then added:

“It looks like a figure of a human. But no blue shading to it.”

As the human group came nearer, still sticking together, the Good began calling in their children, and shouldering their half-full grass seed bags. They prepared to flee.

But the humans suddenly stopped. The lead one lifted the figure even higher in the air, and then apparently set it down in the grass. The group then bowed, all together, and turned and walked off. They disappeared into the woods.

“What on earth was that,” Perry said.

“They were intentionally peaceful,” Karante said. “They didn’t want to alarm us. Had they wanted to ambush us, they could have left those woods much closer to us, on either side of that field. Over there, or over there.”

After waiting some time after the humans had filtered back into the woods, Perry eventually said:

“Well, I want to go see what they left. If they left it there. It looks like they did. You all can stay here.”

“I’ll go with you,” Karante said, and two other of the adults went along too.

The offering, if that’s what it was, turned out to be a human figure, carved out of wood and then painted white. It was about a foot and a half high. It had black hair. It had no clothing.

“It must be intended to be me,” Perry said.

“Must be,” Karante agreed.

“This is good quality coloring,” he added, rubbing the paint. “I wonder how they make it.”

“Some sort of chalk wash,” Karante guessed.

“Why would they do this?” Perry asked. “I find this very, very odd. If they are trying to – reach out to me, this is a strange way to do it. Although I suppose I don’t know how they would try, if they wanted to. After they left me out as bait for the Orsines, I’m not inclined to trust them. This – ” he turned the doll around – “I mean, back in my day, this could have been interpreted as a sign of – witchcraft. Dark arts. Not a friendly message.”

“It could mean that today, too,” Karante answered.

Perry and the group gathered some more wild rice and then returned home. He left the white wood figure where he had found it.

*

Perry went for walks away from the kangaroo settlement, longer and longer ones as they explained to him how to avoid the bears and the humans. After a time he began to take along a hide tent and spend nights out away from the town. He covered miles, and looked around river junctions and other spots that seemed likely to him to have been population centers in his world, but he saw no ruins for months.

Until, on one walk, of several days’ duration, he came out of woods to an expanse of rubble. It was flat, and weathered, but clearly not natural stone; it was fallen concrete. Blocks of it, piled waist-high in places.

He stopped at one of these piles and pulled away the blocks. Some of them were stained with rust where iron must have deteriorated.

He pushed them away. He felt he had a professional obligation to note down each one’s original position, but pressed ahead.

In a wreck of an Eighteenth Century sailing ship which he had helped dig up from a beach in North Carolina, it had been coins and shards of pottery that helped his colleagues determine its age. But now he did not imagine that he would find any convenient nickels from 2030, nor desk calendars, nor discarded office papers, et cetera, in this pile to help him out.

But it had been at least an organized stack of concrete at one time. Perhaps in his first life. And he found a few others, in months to come. Plus a very battered plastic handle to . . . something, once. But nothing that told him about the demise of his people.

Eventually he stopped looking for more ruins. But the very weathered chunks of concrete convinced him that he was indeed in the future, not any alternate universe. The white case must have held him in a sort of coma for some centuries.

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*

Alone outside his cabin, by a fire, upon his return from that walkabout, he talked to himself.

He had constructed a single cabin for himself, smaller than everyone else’s, all of which held families. He’d built it near Karante’s. Karante and her partner, Durol, had three children, the smallest of which, a female, had still been spending time in her pouch off and on when Perry had arrived the previous year. Now she hopped around all day and would come visit Perry to have him watch her jump very high.

Past Karante’s family’s cabin lived an older couple with a sprawling main cabin and several lean-tos which held an extended family. Karante’s cabin had a lean-to, also, which housed just one male cousin of hers, whom Perry took to be a family ne’er-do-well; he didn’t have the eye contact or industriousness of the other Good Perry observed, and would apparently spend entire days either asleep in the shelter or wandering in the woods. His name was Rarakan.

Now Perry sat outside his own house by the fire and spoke aloud. These occasional talks he had with himself were in lieu of writing a journal. The Good were not literate. He had thought about teaching them all to write their language, but making papyrus or vellum would have been difficult and was just not something he had gotten around to.

Ink would have been easy enough; there were black walnut trees around with their dark ink in their husks. But the papyrus, or prepared skins . . . and there just didn’t seem to be much occasion to write, anyway. This surprised Perry, after spending so much time writing in his first life. But he realized that population size was related to the usefulness of literacy, and the population of The Good was small. There were some other groups of them around, other tribes, and his settlement did some trading with them, but there didn’t seem to be much need to send messages to them. What else would he show them how to write down? Their folktales? Those were oral. Their history? Also oral. Land records, trade agreements, contracts? They didn’t have nor need any of those.

He had drawn in the dirt in front of his cabin, one day:

“Marooned in the future. My story. Chapter One.”

“What are you drawing?” Rarakan had asked. Perry had jolted; he hadn’t been aware that his neighbor had been looming behind him, watching.

“Just some symbols of ours. From my time. I'll show you what they mean someday, if you like.”

The young male hadn’t responded.

“I could still do it,” he said now. “The boar hides would be easier than figuring out how to weave papyrus.”

But for now in front of his fire, he just spoke, to himself, what he would have written down in a journal.

Karante and her family were used to him doing this, and he got the impression they didn’t mind hearing the incomprehensible murmur of his English if they were outside themselves.

“I believe this must be a future earth,” he said, “and not some other dimension or reality, because of the ruins I found.

“Also, The Good and the Orsines seem to have been manipulated genetically by humans; by my people. They are not races that arose independently in some other reality. Because all the changes they exhibit, compared to the kangaroos and bears I knew, are human traits. The kangaroos have more human-like eyes, and ears. The bears walk upright. These are deviations toward a human norm. Humans must have caused them.

“And the blue people must have descended from people as I knew them. I just can’t believe that a race so like me would have evolved independently. Despite their differences, I think they are clearly just changed humans.

“So. What happened to humans.

“Maybe we created the Orsines, who then killed us off? (The Good don’t seem like a genocidal people, so I doubt it was them.) Or they killed off all of us who weren’t blue, at least? Or maybe it was coincidence that after we engineered the Orsines and The Good, some sort of virus wiped us out? Except those of us who were blue? Maybe the blue humans were some sort of hybrid made to be immune?”

*

Eventually his second winter of his second life was coming to its end. The climate was not particularly cold – he guessed that he was living somewhere well to the south of Virginia – but the nights had been chill enough that he had been glad to sleep in his cabin rather than out of doors in a tent. But now any threat of snow seemed over, and the nights were milder.

“Karante, I need to leave you. To travel.”

This time they spoke as they built a fire outside their cabins.

“I thought you were done looking for ruins.”

“It’s not ruins,” Perry said. “I know you’ve said you’ve never seen any other humans like me – but I need to look around more. I’m still curious.”

Also, he thought, you said you had never seen ruins before, either, but you didn’t know about the fields of rubble I found.

Karante nodded.

“If you want to be sure, you must look, I know,” she said. “And also, of course we didn’t know about those fields of rubble you found, either. So obviously there is more out there than what we Good have seen. Or have noticed, at least.”

“I – suppose,” he said. “Well, I want to travel for some time. I think as far as the ocean. And up or down its coast for some time.”

Karante nodded.

“That will be a long time. A season, or two.”

“I know.”

“You have to come back.”

“I will.”

“When will you leave?”

“Soon, I think. I’ve been gathering things over the winter. A bag. I have that new bow.”

“I’ve seen.”

“And that good spear. And I’ve dried a lot of grain, and some fruit. I made spare boots.”

“You’ve been busy in your cabin.”

“All winter.”

“Do you think you want to just go alone?”

“Well, I assume so. I don’t think any of you really want to look for different humans. I wouldn’t ask any of you to.”

“Someone might want to see the ocean, though. No one here alive has been.”

“You think so? Who would want to do that?”

“Rarakan. He’s always interested in what you’re doing.”

“Really?”

Karante nodded.

“He’s young,” Perry said.

“Not too young,” she said. “And this would be a memory to hold for a lifetime. He could then be the elder who walked as far as he could.”

“Well. It would be good to have a companion. You think he can – take care of himself?”

“We certainly don’t take care of him. You know he disappears for days at a time, so he can fend for himself. If you can wait a day or two, I’m sure he’ll go. We can help him gather supplies.”

“I can wait.”

“I feel it will be a worthwhile journey, Perry. And we knew you wouldn’t just stay around here for the rest of your life. You need to see more.”

“I do.”