LOOK, I feel lousy about what happened last time. I had no call to go haywire on you, even if you were trying to pin me to a stereotype with no place in reality. Believe me, I’d love to be the way you want me. A bubbly, gee-whiz companion who can’t wait to be friends with Man—heck, I’d enjoy that as much as you would.

The fact is, there’s just too much disgrace in our past. Nowadays, none of us could embrace the new with that kind of gusto. Not right away, anyhow. You may think you’d enjoy being a dolphin, but I guarantee if you were, you too would be mired in the past.

Anyhow, I want to make square with you. I figured for today’s interview, I’d let you in on what links me and my ilk so intimately to a bygone age. After last time, I owe you these memories. I’d be glad to get started right now, provided you’ve got your recorder cued and your voice analysis unit rolling, and, oh yes, your animal behavior specialist standing by. Wouldn’t want anything untoward to happen.

Just one thing before we begin. I want you to do something for me. I want to hear from your lips that this is not a folktale I am about to tell you. I know that you are a scientist, and that a scientist has certain scruples he must abide, but I would like you to take your distinction between testimony and anecdote and sit on it for an hour or two. Understood?

What I am about to tell you comes straight from the parties involved down the generations to you. No details were spun up along the way. A few may have fallen out of the story, and some points are a matter of personal interpretation, but if the specific details I give are wrong, then somebody on the scene was a liar. Not my mother. Not my sixty-times-great grandmother, and not hers. No power-hungry revisionists have screwed with this tale the way you people are prone to screw with yours, no offense intended, because when you have no written language your civilization learns to be precise. Oral storytelling is not a tradition to us, but a science. What we do is oral storytelling like typing up a scientific paper is manual labor.

Enough. Were I to go into depth, you’d have three papers to write before you could touch this one. Suffice to say that next time, you might want to consider bringing in a historian to go with your animal behavior specialist. Clear?

All right. We can start with Rarty.

Like most of the principal players in our story, Rarty was an Ambulocetus natans, a genuine muck-dwelling, leg-snatching ambush hunter, schlepping around three meters and seven hundred pounds of hungry flesh on legs almost too stubby to carry him. I don’t doubt you have at least a passing familiarity with his type. Rarty’s species may be gone, but his type will always be around.

Like just about everyone else in the old days, Rarty was a salesman. Things, you see, were not going too good for our species, and that had incited a few changes. We gave up the idea of individual territory: there just wasn’t enough of it. We came together on the rivers, and since we’d already honed our claws and our reflexes about as far as they would go, we started to hone our tongues instead. Going collectively into sales was a kind of last-ditch coping mechanism.

At the time our story begins, Rarty was half-sprawled out of the good old Indus River in a patch of sphenophytes, delivering his regular sales pitch to an anthracobunodon. He was under a lot of pressure to bring this one off, having blown seven out of eight pitches the day before and facing some cool scrutiny from the board.

“Excellent water, ma’am, no question about it,” he began. “Believe me, I’ve spent half my life here in the water and I know its turns of quality. What we’ve got here is top notch today! Go on, have a drink! Oh, no, no, ma’am, I wouldn’t do something low like that. I’m not interested one whit in eating you, just in letting you know it’s a prime time to fill up. Heck, the fact is, I’ve already eaten today and I’m not hungry! Just look at that swollen belly! And what’s more, if I ate you today, I’d gain just one meal, but I’d be depriving my future children of ten meals they’d get by eating your future children! Aren’t you interested in working for a brighter future?”

I suppose it’s worth mentioning that the art of the sales pitch has been refined somewhat over the last fifty million years.

We will never know, however, whether Rarty’s pitch would have tasted marrow, because at that moment an unexpected visitor emerged from the treeline. Naturally, what was the first thing he did, but scream? And what did the anthracobunodon do but sprint away, leaving Rarty with a dismal record and a temper to match?

Now, leaving aside lovers’ tiffs, there were basically just two kinds of screams in the old world. First, you had the classic kind, the deep, resonant kind that meant “Keep your distance, or you will end up unhappy.” Then you had the kind that tried to sound like the first kind, but really meant “I’m getting out of here before you eat me.” Eight times out of ten it was easy to tell the difference, and as a back-up measure, if the actual sound of the scream didn’t do the trick you could just look at the size of the guy doing it. Bigger than you usually meant the first kind.

On the practice range Rarty never had a problem with this kind of thing. This guy, though, was atypical in a number of ways. His scent was all wrong and so was his scream—agitated but not urgent. It didn’t fit too neatly under your standard fight or flight appellation. As for his size, he was rather small stuff, quite a bit smaller than Rarty, but for some reason he stood taller, like someone trying to put over a scare. Instead, though, he just stood there fiddling with something, and Rarty got nothing more than a panicked glance now and then out of courtesy.

Now, if you are an astute listener you will have deduced by now that this was in fact one of your own, which is to say a man, albeit a diminutive and somewhat rounded one. No doubt it surprises you to learn how directly your people figure in this story, but worry not—odds are very good the technology for such interference won’t get built during your lifetime. If it does, incidentally, you may want to stop trusting your government quite so much. The signs all say it doesn’t come cheap.

Rarty, in any case, had no basis on which to make such an inference, and when in doubt, Rarty tended toward aggression. It’s not that he was inherently mean, just that being aggressive while off the job was his way of making up for the fact that he got so few chances to kill anything when he was. So he sprang forward, speckling muck all over the bank, and the stranger backpedaled in a hurry, and it was fortunate for the stranger that at that exact moment he finally got his universal translator working, and was able to enter a plea for clemency: “Whaaa!”

“What’s that?” Rarty leered, raising himself higher so he could get a better look at the guy’s face.

“Don’t hurt me, please!” the man pled. “I’ll leave. I didn’t mean any harm.”

Rarty was a little startled—not so much that the intruder was talking to him, but at the implication that he could have meant harm if he’d wanted to. “What are you?” he demanded.

So the man stuttered a moment and then said, “I’m a scientist. I’m on a quest for learning. A quest for knowledge.”

Rarty had never heard of this kind of animal, naturally, so he growled and asked, “Where’d you come from?”

This was of course the perfect question for him to ask, because the answer, was, to his surprise, “I’ve come here from another age. An age fifty million years in the future!” It was delivered in the tone of voice that smugness becomes when you’re embarrassed about sounding smug.

At this point, Rarty, being a hardened sales representative in his own right, knew that he was probably being taken. But taken or not, there was one question he just had to ask, and relevance be damned: “Who takes the Tethys District Crunchyball Playoff?”

The man’s response was both disappointing and exciting: “I’m sure I don’t know,” he said. “I imagine that’s something of local—er—and immediate interest. But I’d be fascinated to hear about it!”

Well, that’s when Rarty knew that his instinct not to maul the stranger straight off had been dead on. Here was someone without a bias who was willing to hear all his opinions on Crunchyball, and better still, he wasn’t likely to nod off, or Rarty might just change his mind about that mauling. So even if the man wasn’t really from the future, this was a better catch than a simple meal, any day.

Well, they found a nice unmuddied spot where Rarty could sit with his tail in the water and his body out of it, and they talked all about Crunchyball, and about the weather, present and future, and about local politics, which the stranger found especially interesting. They dished it up over how the mesonychids were out-competing them, the tapirs and peccaries were getting canny to their stunts, and the people had been grouping together more and more along the rivers, awkward though it was. They talked all about the new sales techniques they were working on in R&D, according to Rarty’s buddy there. “Each one more desperate than the last,” he reported proudly.

The outsider soaked it all in and just kept asking questions, all the while smiling and nodding and recording the conversation with his integrated device.

Rarty, who had given up half his workday, eventually felt he was entitled to a question or two of his own. And since the man didn’t know Crunchyball, he asked the next most important thing on his mind:

“How do we come out? In the future?”

The man shrugged and said, “I’m sorry, Rarty. If I were a paleobiologist, I might be able to help you. But I’m just a chemist. There were only so many of us around to volunteer when they completed the operation, and…. Well, I can’t say I know anything about your people, Rarty. I suppose your line just ends up being a little too…obscure.”

Obscure. This was the word on Rarty’s lips when he showed up at the next divisional meeting of the Tethys Water Purification Company. There he sat amid the prickly horsetails, babbling his low-ranking little heart out, and wearing a full coat of fish oil polish like he was really something. I have to give the schmoe credit for having a pair, since everyone on that stretch of the Indus knew Rarty was in the lower quartile for daily kills, and here he was taking five hours out of his day to shine himself up like a damn anthracothere, or a healthy person! Who did he think he was? But he had prime bragging material, and sure enough, it set the office on edge.

The staff reacted to his bombshell in about a dozen different ways. Some of them wanted proof it wasn’t a wild fib designed to get Rarty out of the horsetails and into the ferns. Some of them saw it as just another bad omen in a string of bad omens they’d been collecting their whole lives, dangling over oblivion. A few of them thought Rarty might actually have something big. But the boss slapped his tail on their slab of a table and shut them all down. “If my twenty years of experience are worth applejack,” he barked, “this so-called visitor from the future is just an overgrown lemur with a congenital disease and a rabid imagination. I won’t suffer my staff to waste time oohing and aahing over a lying freak of nature they’d be better off eating. Clear?”

“So let’s bring him in and eat him, boss!”

“Nix. Disease, remember? Stick to your wholesome profession, boys and girls.” And it was on to old business.

But after the meeting, the boss had Rarty stick around for a minute. Most of his coworkers figured he was ripe for a chewing, which he was, but what the boss really told him was that he believed his story. “If you ever scratched up the brains to tell a lie like that, I’d know it.”

“But boss—?”

“Do you want to be obscure, Rarty?”

“Hell, no, boss.”

“Do you know how to keep it from happening?”

“Uh, I hadn’t thought about—”

“Then let’s forget about the distant future, salesman. Don’t you think the upper muck gets enough trouble from this division? Why would you want to spread this kind of gloom over bad news we can’t do a stinking thing about?”

Rarty didn’t know.

Just the same, Rarty wasn’t going to be kept from spreading the gloom: it was one of his natural talents. His preferred locale for this sport was the exercise club, one of the company’s “mandated perks.” The idea with the club was that a carefully maintained regimen would keep employees in tip-top shape for properly chasing and killing their clients. Most, however, felt somewhat differently about the program. I understand that these days calories are cheap, and it’s all you can do to keep them from sweet-talking their way right into your gullet and settling in for the winter, but back in the Eocene, every calorie was worth its weight in—well, they pretty much set the currency. That meant a mandatory exercise program was a lot like docking pay, only without the criminal benefits. It was lousy for morale.

There was one instructor, though, with all the surplus morale she could use, and she was pretty free with it. Her name was Mandy, of course, and it was her valiance that made this disaster of a story possible. She had a kind of bulbous beauty to her, and a face that could charm the guts out of…an easily charmed person. Mandy knew her students would be elsewhere if they had the choice, but she chose to relegate that tidbit to the back of her spacious mind, where it mingled with her various problems and shortcomings.

On and off the job, Mandy was a gaudy optimist. She was one of those rare freaks who liked doing tummy tucks and tail curls, and so long as she was enjoying it, who could despise her? Her students saw her more as a tasteless piece of window-dressing than an actual target for resentment, and to be fair, this was probably her best qualification as exercise instructor.

She overheard Rarty after the day’s session, carrying on to the other schmoes in the dry riverbed that served as their sports bar. He was mouthing about how he’d made the discovery of the epoch and been treated raw for it. He had plenty to say, but when Rarty’s rant ran out of steam, Mandy’s steam was just kicking in.

“Hey, Rarty,” she murred, shifting just enough of her front toes out from under her snout to remind the dew-sipping grunts why they weren’t romantically interested in her. “Sounds like your new friend would be quite the challenge! If you’re telling the truth, he’s got a whole new body type—and a girl does get tired of you sea slugs after a while.”

“You talking about exercise, Mandy?”

“Everything’s an exercise,” she replied. “How about you find this Adrian fellow and bring him around to my place for a dinner party…shall we say tomorrow evening? I’ll throw in a couple of free sick days to sweeten the deal.”

“You’re not going to eat him, are you?” Rarty snapped. “I found him first, you know.”

“Don’t worry,” she told him, touching up her nails with her tongue. “I’m just planning on a nice meal and some scintillating conversation. But if we do decide to eat him, I can assure you’ll get first honors.”

Rarty grunted and got moving.

Now, Mandy’s place was decently alluring, as bungalows go. It was carved out of a live streambed, although with Mandy’s indulgent bathing habits the stream ended up pretty much dead on arrival. Her split-level living room was decked out with leafy wreaths and parasite brushes implanted in the furniture. The bathroom was something to see. Besides the good old Basin of Squalor, she had four different grades of mud bath available, with textures ranging from “soupy” to “clingy.” She also kept a dark bedroom with an attached meat locker, and what happened in there is anyone’s guess.

Dinner, however, was served in the living room. Aside from Rarty and Adrian, the guests were mainly eavesdroppers Mandy had invited on a whim. The dinner party was already wrist-deep into the kelp appetizer when the guest of honor showed up, and their salutary stomping sent flecks of green matter dangerously close to his shoes. You’ve got to give Adrian credit for braving the party, even if he did tie a towel around his chest and flinch whenever anyone passed the longhorned beetles.

“We’re so glad to have you,” said Jereille, one of Mandy’s best friends. “What a charming novelty you are!”

“Likewise, I’m sure,” said Adrian, wiping his cheek for no reason.

“Was he hard to track down, Rarty?”

“Nah. I get the idea his species likes to travel in circles.”

Adrian cleared his throat. “Actually, I’ve just been surveying my surroundings. I can learn as much from a small area as I would from a long trek, and I wouldn’t want to stumble into any more…awkward encounters.”

Rarty’s nose flared. “You implying that stumbling into…I mean, like stumbling into me would be like meeting someone else…in that it would be like an encounter with someone…awkward?”

Adrian just cleared his throat again.

“Better than ‘obscure’, murmured Jereille.

Mandy turned out to be an avant-garde gourmand. She’d concocted the meal in honor of Adrian, who took to it with dubious appreciation. It was an experimental spread made mostly from foods that no one else wanted to eat, either because they were made of vegetation or of the stomachs of creatures who ate altogether too much vegetation. Mandy figured there was a good chance for any dinner she served the newcomer to fall flat, so why not experiment?

No one really seemed to mind. After the duckweed salad was shoved around a few times, Adrian was called upon to answer a few questions. Pretty soon, the queries were coming like hail.

“What kind of food does your species eat?” someone asked.

“I thought I was an omnivore, but now I’m not so sure,” answered Adrian with a poke at his soup course.

“Why did you shave off all your hair?”

“Except on my head, you mean, surely!” answered the balding scientist.

“Are you a diplomat from your own time?”

“Do I sound like a diplomat?” he asked.

“What are you, really?”

“Where did you grow up?”

“Where do you keep your big teeth?”

“Are you edible? Do you have any siblings?”

“Who do you like in the Crunchyball playoffs?”

“Is your nose supposed to grow that way?”

It was Mandy, though, who asked the best questions. She regained the floor with a drumming of her toes in the sand, a canny crossing of her legs and a fulsome smile along all thirty inches of her snout. She fixed Adrian with a sultry stare. “I’d like to know about the fascinating way you hold your forefeet,” she said.

Well, after a few hesitant bites, Adrian was willing to talk. It’s not clear whether Mandy’s charm was what finally broke the ice, or whether Adrian just wanted to show off, but he started in talking about his species’ rise to supremacy, and what role his rosy bourgeois hands had played in this epic revolution. He had a captive audience.

“It all has to do with the way we walk,” he explained. “These forefeet, as you called them, aren’t feet at all, but something else entirely. You’ll notice they don’t touch the ground when I walk.”

“How come? Are they too damn pretty to get dirty?” heckled a little guy from accounting.

“No, no,” said Adrian. “It’s just the way I’m made. You see, back when my species was just starting out, we were using these anterior limbs not just for walking, but for climbing, and steadying ourselves, and transferring food to our families. When we left the trees, as it happened, it turned out it was more useful not to use them for walking at all. It had to do with a lot of things, really…getting rid of excess heat, moving more efficiently through the savannah grass, watching for other creatures, maintaining our social structure. In short, we made the switch from all fours, to…sometimes fours…to all twos. Er—both twos,” he corrected himself, sipping his tea.

“And what happened to your forelegs during all of this?” asked Mandy with infatuated curiosity. “Surely something thrilling!”

“Oh, well, by all means,” said Adrian, rummaging in his jacket. “The most exciting thing of all. We started using them to make tools!”

The dinner party oohed. “Whatever is a tool?” asked Jereielle.

“Oh, well…this, I suppose!” said Adrian with a blaze of pride. What he showed them was a glossy booklet with printing they couldn’t read and an impressive little doohickey he called a Personal Digital Assistant—on which he proceeded to show them how to play an amusing game where you make groups of balls disappear. This game, incidentally, went on to achieve cult popularity and became the single most influential game in our history, only it was played with pebbles and shells and ended up being used to determine the merits of political candidates.

“This is great!” barked Rarty after about fifteen minutes of jostling for a better viewing position. “We could market this and make a fortune!”

“I’d say this puts the question of supremacy pretty much to bed,” said Mandy. She was met by nods around the room. “But how can we acquire the same for ourselves?”

Despite the ardor of her plea, Adrian could only shrug.

When the next Parley Day rolled around, Mandy was first in the gulch. She had a missive to deliver and she didn’t mean to lose her chance. When the Earl of Teeth showed up she hailed him gleefully. “Teeth,” she called, “have I got a story for you!”

Now, the Earl was the one in charge of Parley Day in those times. He was the Big Guy from Ganga Territory, and aside from the standard intimidation rituals, he was the one who doled out rabble-rousing time each Parley Day. Getting there early and flattering him were the best ways to win a hefty speaking slot, and that was just what Mandy did. She was there so early and told him so many sophisticated things about how convex his muscles were that he went and gave her the whole morning.

Soon, the delegates started showing up, all ready to talk politics, scheme against the mesonychids, and of course participate in the ever-popular Commiseration Contest for depressing prizes. But Mandy had the floor, by which I mean the upper gulch, and she had her own agenda. As soon as the first arrivals piled in and she was able to catch their eyes, she started talking, and she didn’t let up for hours.

“If they can do it, so can we!” Mandy gloated. “Remember, these humble people got their start as tree shrews and tarsiers!”

“Mmmm!” salivated a nearby listener.

“Mmmm, nothing!” retorted Mandy. “There’s just one thing that tastes better than the soft flesh of a tree-hugger, and that’s the sweet, vast flesh of progress! Those of you who met Adrian know how far those little pipsqueaks are set to go! Don’t you hunger to do the same?”

It was mid-morning. Two hundred delegates were lounging in the shade and out of it, munching on tiny multituberculate nuggets and having their own conversations. The Earl of Teeth was making the rounds, intimidating males and courting females at random, and most of them were listening vaguely to Mandy in the background.

“We would do well to let the men of the future be our example,” she went on. “And we now know how they did it! They flung aside their natural environs! They threw themselves into unfamiliar territory, scrambled to stay alive, and came out on top! Who among you doesn’t find that…romantic?”

Of course, we now know your ancestors didn’t exactly throw themselves into anything. It was more like another of Mandy’s favorite lines, “The courage of the stubborn.” When the weather patterns strip your forests and leave you naked, there’s something to be said for the courage to stay put anyway and rise to the top of a whole new frying pan.

In any case, none of Mandy’s rhetoric was making too much of an impression on the Parley Day delegates until, out of the blue, she asked for a volunteer.

Now, I don’t know if volunteering is still around, so I’ll explain it to you. It’s what you call it when you get some bastard to do stuff for you, but you don’t give him anything in exchange. At least, that’s how it started out, but since it didn’t take long for the word to get out that doing something for nothing makes for a pretty bad deal, they invented something called “a sense of accomplishment”, which is really just another term for nothing except it sounds better. That’s what volunteering is all about. Anyway, a few joes and janes from the audience were getting tired of seeing how many different ways they could make the mud dribble down their snouts, so they lumbered up to help out.

Mandy told her volunteers to hold still while she did a number on them. She went up to a gawky one and set him in a fresh position. “Take a look at this,” she told the delegation.

The volunteer was poised on his tail and hind legs with a “Look, Ma” expression. When Mandy let go, he flopped over like a wilted lily. Mandy nosed him up and had him try again, and this time he managed to wobble one way and the other until he found a way to stay erect. He grinned, and Mandy stomped the ground in applause, leading a few confused members of the audience to follow suit.

“Ladies and gentlemen, feast your eyes on the posture of the future! This simple maneuver is the keystone to how one race of chewy little animals makes it to prominence, dooming all others to slavery and servitude! They make a sacrifice—a supreme act of discipline—and what do they become? Armed and dangerous!

“We can succumb to obscurity, ladies and gentlemen, or we can learn from this example. Go on,” she encouraged the rest of the volunteers. “Lift yourselves to a higher level, just like this young male has done!”

The others slithered about, trying to reach the same position but not quite sure how it was done. One ended up with his tail up against his belly; one tried to stand on his front legs and head, but realized that couldn’t be right. Another asked what prize the winner would get. “A sense of accomplishment!” said Mandy.

Eventually, someone managed to heft herself up and stand there like a goof, and Mandy drummed up another round of applause. The audience, by this time, was in full swing. Now that Mandy was finally coming to the point, they were cheering her every step of the way.

At last, Mandy rose to her own hind legs and took a few pudgy steps. She’d clearly been practicing a bit since the dinner party. She gave each volunteer an unintentionally destabilizing pat on the back and came forward to speak again.

“Arms are an invention of the species Homo sapiens,” she explained. “But unlike most inventions of this caliber, they aren’t hard to create. All the key materials are here already, just waiting to be unlocked! Observe. First—” and with this she raised one of her thick hind legs and took an earth-shaking step—“we walk using only the legs in back. You’ve seen here that the skill can be learned. I’ve practiced for only a week, and look how light on my feet I am!”

With no prompting, the line of volunteers began stomping about just as she had, only they didn’t have her gentle touch, and their weight got mistimed right into the rock, spewing dirt everywhere. Some of them fell over and got stomped on by the rest. Mandy had to wave her forelimbs and whistle to get their attention back.

“Next,” she continued, “once you’ve mastered that skill, you start using the legs in front in a new way! Take some object and press the forefeet against it like so.” She demonstrated with an Eohippus skull she’d brought for the purpose. “Now straighten your spine, and the object remains suspended between the legs, and doesn’t fall!”

“What keeps it from falling?” asked someone in the audience.

“Well, I don’t rightly know,” said Mandy. “I call it friction!”

“What makes friction work?” asked someone else.

“I attribute it to the power of a mother’s love,” Mandy answered. “When you’ve got arms, and you grasp your child in between them, there’s no force in the world strong enough to take it away!” Mandy had never been a mother, but the way she clutched that skull proved she had a burning aptitude for it. “Now you try, all of you!” she cried. “Take skulls from the pile, or use whatever you’ve got, and above all, don’t forget to give those babies love!”

It was a circus. Once the hubbub had died down, Mandy announced that she was starting a new exercise program called Up In Arms, open to anyone who wanted to join her in learning the secrets of humankind. “And just to keep you from burning out,” she added, “I’m making a special deal for everyone working at Tethys Water. For each session of Up In Arms you attend, you get exemptions from two of my ordinary sessions!”

That was what hooked them.

As you might have guessed, the program was a hit. It wasn’t limited to Tethys employees—folks lumbered in from as far as the Yangtze to work with Mandy. In no time, she and her highest echelon of followers—when you’re a demagogue, as I understand it, you get to have echelons—were launching a new project called the “Forelimb Liberation Crusade.” The rules were pretty simple: You didn’t use your forelimbs. They wouldn’t even let you call them legs anymore, as if a few years’ worth of atrophy would change what the damn things were. But Mandy was a genius with morale, and there’s always been something charismatic about a lovelorn dreamer chasing her dream. The Crusade became wildly popular before you could say “Aberration.”

Some settlements became so fanatical that they mandated the movement: Join or Skedaddle. They say there were some awfully strained relationships between parents and their kids in those days. “Mom, why can’t I walk on all fours? You do!” you might hear some ankle-biter exclaim, only to hear:

“Well, I’m above the reproductive age, sugar, so no progressive fanatics get to tell me how to walk! Tough luck being young, now get used to it!”

But that wasn’t the worst of it. Now and then, someone in one of Mandy’s groups would waddle up to her, spine cracking with exertion, and plead, “Mandy, I just can’t take it anymore! My back feels like it was compacted in a swamp gas explosion, my feet look like squashed leptictidia, and I still haven’t learned to lift objects worth a damn!”

But Mandy would just smile her jovial smile and say, “Why, you’re fitting right in!”

“I am?”

“Why, yes! This is an evolutionary program, after all! The only way our species is going to improve is if we put ourselves under enormous selective pressure! It’s not just individuals we’re aiming to improve—it’s the whole Ambulocetus race!”

“Oh! Am I helping somehow?”

“Sure you are, sister! Don’t worry if your genes aren’t suited to the job. It doesn’t reflect badly on you as a person. We just have to make sure that natural selection weeds out the individuals with the poor genes, and rewards all the others with fine, healthy children!” She’d give a suspicious squint. “You’re not about to have children, are you?”

“Well, no! I’m so exhausted, I couldn’t even begin to think about—”

“Excellent! Then you’re doing great. That’s the wonderful thing about this sort of program—there’s a place for everyone!”

“Really? Thanks, Mandy!” And the poor soul would wander off, cheered up like nobody’s business.

In short, to mix the right metaphor, the Forelimb Liberation Crusade waddled forward by leaps and bounds. The Tethys Water Purification Company, however, wasn’t thrilled. For one thing, they figured anyone who could rally folks with so little use of instant gratification was a force to be reckoned with. For another, too many of their employees were realizing that standing erect on the job made them too visible to prey. They were leaving in delirious droves, forcing the company to take countermeasures.

Their first move was, naturally, to offer Mandy a big bonus from the Bribery Fund if she’d just forget about her Crusade. They couldn’t provide her what she really wanted, though, which was True Love, so it was no dice.

Next, they went ahead and fired her, but it wasn’t enough. Mandy had been thinking of dropping her ordinary programs anyhow. She simply convinced her best ambushers to start teaching their own supplemental programs in order to feed the ranks. Working bipedally made things a lot more challenging, but on the plus side, the anthracobunodons were so startled by the very notion of Ambulocetus on two legs that they would occasionally forget to run away. So the Crusade had food, at least for a while. Zeal made them forget their hunger after that, which was something they were used to doing.

The Company’s next step was to bar employees from joining Mandy’s programs. Unfortunately, since company policy already banned such arbitrary things as talking to plants, excessive breathing, and thinking about T-bones, those who were sick of the company just left, while those who chose to stay didn’t take the rule very seriously.

They tried being tricky. Speed trials on the beach, and a memo banning employee’s tails from touching the ground, for instance. Since all but the most airheaded purists were using their tails for balance, these measures forced them to start using their forelimbs again if they wanted to stay with the company. But some dragged in sledges to rest their tails on, and others just shrugged, ate their desks, and left. It was clear that making employees choose between their jobs and their Crusade was a losing strategy.

At last, some bright hotshot had the idea of tracking down Adrian, the primate freak who’d started the whole thing rolling. If he was still around and they could get him to denounce Mandy, she’d be sunk for sure. So they sent a dame called Culberra, their best smooth-talker, to find him and bring him back.

Culberra only had one lead, though, and that was Rarty, so she went and paid him a visit. Rarty was one of the holdouts still working at Tethys Water. He was just a common Crunchyball fan, not the type to partake in wild social movements, and the whole thing left him cold. This was fortunate for Culberra. When she told Rarty what she wanted, he invited her to his digs for swampgrass tea.

There, they enthusiastically discussed those things on which they agreed.

“Nature is the highest arbiter,” said Culberra. “Our bodies—they are but its humble servants.”

“Right on,” Rarty agreed. “And anyone who tells us we can’t act naturally with our bodies…they’re just wrong!”

“Exactly! And tell me—what is natural about contorting one’s posture and going about hoity-toity with toes in the air?”

“Not a blamed thing! You might as well just lie on your back, throw up your legs, and give in!”

“Or worse yet, lie on your front, your face downcast pitifully to the mud!”

“Heck, we might as well just fall together in a heap, like corpses, doomed and despairing!”

“One atop the other, not caring where our weighty flesh should land!”

“Although—when it comes down to it, this really ain’t half bad.”

“Mm.”

“I think I may be moved to do what’s natural.”

“I would expect nothing less.”

According to Rarty’s later boasts, bipedalism wasn’t the least natural position reached that afternoon. The two protestors emerged from their teatime with a fresh appreciation for the merits of physiological innovation. Soon after, they left their jobs, hooked up with Mandy, and started running ancillary courses for her program, couples only. The resistance was crumbling.

The company had just enough juice left to give it one more try. They shelved the whole smooth-talking concept and sent out an exploratory team to locate and kidnap Adrian. It was just in time, too, because when they finally found him, he was just wrapping up his final interview—with a mesonychid, of all things. Finding himself suddenly surrounded by company toughs, Adrian asked timidly what it was all about.

“We need you to come back and stop what you’ve started,” they told him. “It’s out of control.”

Adrian scratched his head. “You mean that game with the disappearing groups of bubbles?”

There was a collective gasp. “No, no, we like that fine! We mean all that fairytale junk you told the exercise instructor. She’s run with it and gone off the deep end. We want you to get her to stop.”

Well, the fellow wasn’t happy about it. He’d been all set to zip back to when he came from, and he didn’t like the thought of interfering with guys this size when they got contentious. But he had no choice, so he let them march him back through brooks and marshes all the way to where Mandy was holding an afternoon reconnaissance party on the cliffs by the Wetwater estuary. They’d just finished their water-walking regimen when the toughs arrived, Adrian in tow. Suddenly everyone looked flaccid and no one was in the mood to exercise anymore.

The gang leader growled, bumped Adrian toward Mandy and announced, “You’ve got a special guest today.” Mandy took a stunned look at the little man and then took a big step forward. Her snout sprouted a smile like an unwashed back grows kudzu. “Well, well! Come on in! Class, what say we give a big round of cheers for our Founding Father!”

“Hizzah! Hizzah!” the relieved throng shouted.

Adrian looked over the spectacle with amazement. There were hundreds, all told, balanced on their posterior ends or recovering from a topple on the rocks, and dozens more who’d trailed the group out of curiosity after it had passed through their marshes. And when everyone started cheering for him, this quiet little man up and snapped. The pressure was too much. He stared at Mandy, agape, and shouted, “How did this happen?”

“Why, it’s all thanks to you!” Mandy replied.

He shook his head. “Do nothing on my account! Do you understand me? Nothing!”

The bustle stopped straight off. Hundreds of shocked pairs of eyes stared at Adrian, their owners sinking back…and he figured he owed them an explanation.

“Look. I’m not here to change your society. I don’t have the right! I’m no one special, believe me! Just a chemist who…who believes in freedom of scientific study! I’m not the only one they sent back. Not by a mile! I just volunteered for the three thirty to three thirty-five slot, because they needed people. One day is all they have before the government moves in and takes back the unit! They wouldn’t have used me, except that so many people have been arrested already, and…”

The stares were even blanker and sadder than before.

“You can’t do this,” he concluded lamely. “You’ll foul up the future!”

Mandy waddled over in a panic. “But Adrian! Don’t we have the right to remake our own destiny, the way you remade yours?!”

“No! If you do, and they find out, I’ll never get funding for another project as long as I live! Please, have mercy!”

“Oh, I know the value of mercy, but…do you realize what kind of sacrifice you’re asking us to make? We can’t live in the shadow of your glorious future! We’ll be wiped out by the mesonychids! You came and showed us the true path, and now you’re telling us we can’t take it?”

“Look at you!!” Adrian exploded, glancing around wildly and coursing with unaccustomed adrenaline. “You’re river creatures, for heaven’s sake, not land creatures! You belong…in…the river! On “river”, he gave Mandy, who was balanced precariously on her toetips, an angry shove. And to everyone’s shock, including his own, she lost her balance and toppled off the cliff into the current.

Now, everyone knew Mandy couldn’t be dead from a short fall like that unless she’d finally met her share of bad luck. But that stretch of the Indus was fairly harsh and got worse the farther down you floated, and while this may not seem like such an issue to you and me, for Mandy it made for a Grade A life-altering dilemma—on par with the Jain who finds himself trapped in a meat locker, or the brand name shopper stuck with a hundred-dollar credit limit. The kind of dilemma that always ends in seven courses of flavorful rationalization.

Practically speaking, Mandy’s choice was between altering her life, or throwing it to the whitewater. In currents like these, you see, she couldn’t stay afloat without paddling with her forelegs. She had a brief moment of indecision while she got swept toward the rapids, and her followers gaped along the cliffs. And then, as naturally as could be, she gave in to her reflexes and started swimming, the way her kind always had.

Her followers fell silent. By all accounts, it felt like they were mourning the end of an era. No one went in for Mandy—they just watched her sadly, with heads bowed.

She didn’t come out right away, either. She lay there, floating serenely, and thinking over her next move. To all appearances, she had saved her life, but not her pride. But in half an hour, she’d found a plan to save that, too, and it came to her as easy as anything. Mandy, you must remember, was an expert.

Some say that half-hour was when Mandy reached her final stage of enlightenment. Others say it was just another layer of veneer on a damn fine swindle. I personally feel that Mandy was sincere about what she said next. She was the sort of soul who got a thrill from changing others, and wasn’t too bigoted not to let herself be changed when the world willed it, too. Whatever the case, Mandy rose from the water, went up to Adrian, and gave him a big, wet hug. It may have been for show and it may not, but she pulled out all the stops in that spine-crusher, and it’s not a hug the man likely forgot.

She went on to deliver a grand address wherein she explained that yes, water was essential to the way of their kind, a fact she had forgotten until Adrian’s act of love, which would thenceforth be referred to as The Kindest Shove. The route they must therefore take, she continued, was not to the savannas and grasslands, but to the sea! “What is right for one kind is no sure lock for another,” she said. “And this I now understand—it is not our hind legs that hold the essence of our future, but our real asset, the part that makes it all possible: our spines!”

She went on to explain that if they could utilize the unique way their spines carried them dorsoventrally, rather than laterally, through the water, and if they could train themselves to swim without paddling, they could free up not just two, but all of their limbs for other, more innovative purposes. “Imagine that,” she proclaimed. “Soon, we’ll even have a leg up—no pun intended—on humans! If two limbs end up as arms, who knows what’s destined for the other two! They could wind up as cup holders, or squeegees, or something even more fantastic! I bet,” she told her congregation, “that we’re looking at the best new biological idea since birds invented feathers!”

The crowd erupted in ecstasy. Their cause was still alive, and all it asked on their part was an act of desperation. Mandy demonstrated her new inspiration with a gaudy display in which she lay on her back and slapped the ground with her tail, like a tidal wave come to lead her people to their destiny. She then set everyone to doing new exercises, and before Adrian could slip off, she hustled over to him, threw a webbed forefoot over his shoulder, and whispered in his ear:

“Don’t be upset with me. I know why you’re disappointed—your people only have two limbs free, and soon we’re going to have all four! But look at it this way…You’re the Founding Father, aren’t you? And doesn’t every father live for the moment when his children surpass him?” A big smile came onto her face.

Adrian erupted and waved his arms. “Get going, then! Go! All you foolish things, leap into the sea! See how far you get!” And as he turned away and ran, with the terrified Tethys Water goons who’d dragged him there running beside him, the throng erupted in one last wave of cheers, and heavy bodies started flopping over the cliff’s edge into the foaming water.

The resistance died off in four generations. Of course, embarrassing as it was, so did most of Mandy’s followers. They just weren’t suited to a fully aquatic life, and even the anthracotheres realized it and laughed at them. But Mandy and her descendants—she eventually did find True Love—just kept shouting to their respective echelons, “Can you feel the selective pressure?”

“We can feel it!!” they’d all reply.

If only this tale of chaos had a happy ending, I’d be every bit as bubbly as you’d like me to be. But Mandy’s plan, as you must have realized by now, was a colossal failure. It was the oldest rule in the exercise books—“Use it or lose it.” Mandy, of all people, should have known better. Our limbs didn’t sprout into new and wonderful things—they fell victim to atrophy on a geologic scale.

After only a few million years in the water, our hind limbs went completely kaput—but that didn’t quell the movement. No, sir, we still clung to high hopes for our forelimbs. That didn’t work out either, though, and it was only when a new faction seized control and our leaders put out aggressive policies forcing us to swim with our forelimbs that we managed to save them from vanishing, too. Even so, all we managed to hang on to was a lousy pair of flippers. And by that time we’d lost most of our teeth and hair, and our tails weren’t half the size they’d used to be—but at least we’d kept something. Some of the older folks breathed a sigh of relief when they saw the new generation cavorting and swiveling with their flippers without shame, like nature intended.

It’s true, some fringe factors still dream of making something great out of our forelimbs someday…somehow. But most of us these days just get sadder and wiser. That generation when they gave up on Mandy’s movement was the end of something big, not to mention completely unprecedented in nature, and of course very, very stupid.

It may be, of course, that it really was our time to go. Part of me says we should all be paying homage to Mandy and her scrambled vision, since at least she let a fraction of us slip through to the Quaternary. Would we have been strangled by the jaws of a cruel and all-too-savvy ecology, had it not been for her? Or would we have gotten by all right?

I think I may be feeling a little envy, here. I envy you the fact that your history is so mutable. No, it’s nothing to do with writing it down—it’s the ethic of the thing. If you had something like this in your distant past, you’d change the tales, I have no doubt. Heck, in a few thousand years or so, you’ll start trying to change it for real. We cetaceans, though—we just weren’t brought up that way. We could never bring ourselves to throw away our history, even if it is a burden. Our history is thick with deposits of shame, like layers of salt in a dead sea, but we wouldn’t trade them for the world.

The truth is, we haven’t really got it so tough. I mean, at least you can’t say we’re stupid—can you?