So it was now. Joan Useb’s intuition, long ago, had been right: One way or another, the future for mankind had been cooperation, with one another and the creatures around them. But she could never have foreseen this, the final expression of that cooperation.

The Tree, a remote descendant of the borametz of Remembrance’s time, had taken the principle of cooperation and sharing to its extremes. Now the Tree could not survive without the termites and other insects that brought nutrients to its deep roots, and the furry, bright-eyed mammals who brought it water, food, and salt, and planted its seeds. Even its leaves, strictly speaking, belonged to another plant that lived on its surface and fed on its sap.

But likewise the symbiotes, including the posthumans, could not have survived without the succor of the Tree. Its tough leaves sheltered them from predators, from the harsh heat of the climate, even from the once-in-a-century rainstorms. Sap was delivered through the belly-roots, just as the Tree took back its nutrients by the same conduits: infants were not breast-fed but were swaddled by the Tree, nurtured by these vegetable umbilicals. The sap, drawing on the deepest groundwater, sustained them through the mightiest supercontinental droughts — and, laden with beneficent chemicals, the sap healed their injuries and illnesses.

The Tree was even involved in human reproduction.

There was still sex — but only homosexual sex, for there was only one gender now. Sex served only for social bonding, pleasure, comfort. People didn’t need sex for breeding anymore, not even for the mixing of genetic material. The Tree did it all. It took body fluid from one “parent” in its sap and, circulating it through its mighty bulk, mixed it and delivered it to another.

People still gave birth, though. Ultimate herself had given birth to the infant that now lay in its leafy cradle. That heritage, the bond between mother and child, had proved too central to give up. But you no longer fed your child, by breast or otherwise. All you had to give your child was attention, and love. You no longer raised it. The Tree did all that, with the organic mechanisms in its leafy cocoons.

Of course there was still selection, of a sort. Only those individuals who worked well with the Tree and with each other were enfolded and allowed to contribute to the circulating stream of germ material. The ill, the weak, the deformed, were expelled with vegetable pitilessness.

Such a close convergence of the biologies of plant and animal might have seemed unlikely. But given enough time, adaptation and selection could turn a wheezing, four-finned lungfish into a dinosaur, or a human or a horse or an elephant or a bat — and even back into a whale, a fishlike creature, once again. By comparison hooking up people and trees with an umbilical connection was a trivial piece of re-engineering.

In the myths of vanished humanity there had been a kind of foreshadowing of this new arrangement. The Middle Ages’ legends of the Lamb of Tartary had spoken of the Borametz, a tree whose fruit was supposed to contain tiny lambs. All of mankind’s legends were forgotten now, but the tale of the Borametz, with its twining of animal and plant, found strange echoes in these latter days.

But there were costs, as always. Their complex symbiosis with the Tree had imposed a kind of stasis on the postpeople. Over time the bodies of Ultimate and her kind had specialized for the heat and aridity, and had simplified and become more efficient. Once the crucial linking was made, Tree and people became so well adapted to each other that it was no longer possible for either of them to change quickly.

Since the snaking umbilicals had started to worm their way into posthuman bellies, since people had first huddled in the protective enclosure of borametz leaves, two hundred million years had worn away unmarked.

But even now, even after all this time, the symbiotic ties were weak compared to more ancient forces.

In its slow vegetable way, the Tree had concluded that for now the people could not afford another baby. Ultimate’s infant was being reabsorbed, her substance returning to the Tree.

It was an ancient calculation: in hard times it paid to sacrifice the vulnerable young, and to keep alive mature individuals who might breed again in an upturn.

But the infant was almost old enough to feed herself. Just a little longer and she would have survived to independence. And this was Ultimate’s baby: the first she had had, perhaps the only one she would ever be permitted to have. Ancient drives warred. It was a failure of adaptation, this battling of one instinct against another.

It was a primordial calculus, an ancient story told over and over again, in Purga’s time, in Juna’s, for uncounted grandmothers lost and unimaginable in the dark. But for Ultimate, here at the end of time, the dilemma hurt as much as if it had just been minted in the fires of hell.

It took heartbeats to resolve. But in the end the tie of mother to child defeated the bonds between symbiotes. She dug her hands into the cottony stuff and dragged her baby from the cocoon. She pulled the belly-root from the infant’s gut, and bits of white fiber from her mouth and nose. The child opened her mouth with a popping sound, and turned her head this way and that.

Cactus watched, astonished. Ultimate stood there panting, her mouth open.

Now what? Standing there holding the baby — in defiance of the Tree that had given her life — Ultimate was out on her own, beyond instinct or experience. But the Tree had tried to kill her baby. She had had no choice.

She took a step away from the Tree. Then another step. And another.

Until she was running, running past the place where she had dug the salt — the sphere was gone now, faded from her memory — and she kept running, her baby clutched in her arms, until she came to the walls of the quarry, up which she scrambled in a flash.

She looked back into the great pit, its floor studded with the lowering, silent forms of the borametz trees. And here came Cactus, running after her with a defiant grin.

II

The land was bare. There were a few stubby trees, and shrubs with bark like rock and leaves like needles, and cacti, small and hard as pebbles and equipped with long toxin-laden spines. Protecting their water, these plants were little balls of aggression, and Ultimate and Cactus knew better than to tackle such risky fare until it was essential to do so.

You had to watch where you put your feet and hands.

There were pits in the desert’s crimson floor. They were bright red, a little like flowers, barely visible against the red soil, but with knots of darkness at their centers. Foolish lizards and amphibians, and even the occasional mammal, would tumble unwarily into these waiting traps — and they would not emerge, for these pits were mouths.

These deadly maws belonged to creatures that lived in narrow burrows under the ground. Hairless, eyeless, their legs reduced to scrabbling finlike stubs with sand-digging claws, they were rodents, among the last remnants of the great lineages that had once ruled the planet.

This time of openness and lack of cover did not favor large predators, and the survivors had been forced to find new strategies. The frantic activity and sociability of their ancestors long abandoned, these burrowing rat-mouths spent their lives in holes in the ground, waiting for something to fall into their mouths. Shielded from the excesses of the climate, moving from their burrows only when driven to mate, the rat-mouths had slow metabolisms and very small brains. They made few demands of life, and in their way were content.

But for creatures as smart as Ultimate and Cactus, the rat-mouths weren’t hard to avoid. Side by side, the companions moved on.