Human (30 page)

Liam!
Orrin’s knees faltered with relief. Ivy’s rally partner was standing on the blackened steps heading the insurgence. It was his laboratory that was meant to house Kyah. Orrin elbowed his way forward until he was only metres from the man. Sweat escaped Liam's mop of curls and ran in rivulets down his face and neck. He was yelling to the crowd into a cordless microphone, inciting revolution and punching his fist in the air.

“Is this how we treat our brothers?” Liam said. “We murder them and steal their land and livelihood for the sake of consumerism? We strip mine their jungles for profit and then mass produce palm oil on the ruined soil?” Liam's face was red and angry. Concern gnawed in Orrin's gut at the sight of him. Ivy had said Liam could control a crowd, but there was an edge to his voice that seemed raw and unpredictable.

“Hobbits are rounded up like cattle and sold off to the highest bidder,” Liam continued. He gestured to the blackened shell of a building behind him. “Death traps like Cosmitech! Tortured for the sake of cosmetics and medical research! Sold to circuses for brutal entertainment.” Liam screamed above the frenzied crowd and the air grew thick with hostility. “They are not possessions! They are
human
!” Placards waved and fists came up as the mass cheered a deafening roar.

“Where does it end? How close to our own DNA deserves dignity? Who's next? Who else is 'different' enough to deserve this kind of treatment? Minorities? Indigenous groups? Religious groups? You or I? The hobbits have no rights - as a human or an animal. Who the hell are we to determine their value?” Liam’s eyes wheeled frantically as he struggled to reach the deepest layers of the rebellion with his message.

“
We
are allowing this! Consumers!
We
are the pinnacle of this monster.
We
must choose our path.
We
must force our governments’ hand!
We
must take control and bring civil rights to our brothers. I work with these hobbits - these
people
everyday. They
KNOW
, they
THINK
, they
FEEL
our abuse and neglect, they are
SCARED
! Even now – today – I’m fighting to keep them from being sold off as lab rats. In my own lab I can’t keep them safe! So who will be their voice? Who will stand up and make a difference?” Liam’s chest heaved with effort.

The crowd roared in support. They surged into the ruins of Cosmitech like a living wave, throwing the twisted metal into the streets behind them and disembodying the brick corpse bit by bit. Police wove through the people with batons and shields, pulling the more violent offenders away with impatient force. Orrin heard the smash of car windows smothered under a blanket of yells. He pushed frantically through the protesters and bolted for the concrete steps where Liam was still standing screaming encouragement to the wild abandon of his followers.

“Liam! Liam, man! Where's Ivy?” Orrin yelled over the noise. He grabbed Liam's jumper roughly and jerked him around to meet his own eyes. “Ivy!” Orrin yelled again. “Where is Ivy? What in hell are these hobbit things?” Liam's face was thunderous.

“Bugger off or help!” Liam yelled back.

“But I don't understand what’s going on!” Orrin shouted. “Where’s Ivy? Is she here?”

“I don’t have time for this,” Liam yelled back. He turned away, focussed on a policeman dragging a particularly violent green shirted protester out of the crowd. Liam ran towards them.

“Liam! Stop!” Orrin called. “You know me, from uni, I'm Orrin! Ivy's friend. Liam - Ivy, I just want to know where she is!” he yelled. “Where’s Ivy? Liam, where is she?”

Liam rounded on him. “I don't know you! I don't know any Ivy. Now back off!”

Orrin stopped still.
He doesn’t know Ivy? It was a lie.
Of course he knew her; they’d shared Kyah's care for years. Liam and Ivy were friends, maybe even best friends. They rallied together; she the voice and he the fist.
He’s lying.

Orrin rushed at Liam again, spinning him around. The deafening crowd was nothing to the blood rushing through his own ears. Both hands clenched Liam's shirt as Orrin shook him hard.

“You’re lying!” Orrin yelled. “This entire damned thing is insane! You must think I’m mental to believe that load of bollocks!

“Get off!” Liam spat, pushing Orrin roughly away. He fell backwards and felt the slam of concrete steps into the back of his head as Liam turned back to the crowd, yelling again with fervour. Warm, sticky blood trickled down the back of his neck. Orrin struggled to his feet in time to see Liam rushing toward a police officer who was pinning a protestor to the ground. Liam grabbed a placard and held it high above his head, as if ready to strike. Orrin raced forward, wrenching the placard out of Liam's hands and pulling him down backwards, away from the officer.

“You
know
Ivy!” Orrin yelled, struggling under Liam’s weight. “So
where-the-hell-is-she
, you bastard!?”

Enraged, Liam lashed out, rolling off him and punching Orrin square in the face. Orrin tasted blood in his mouth and his ears rung. He found his feet but Liam had already bolted out of reach.

The protestor on the ground was fighting against batons and both sides threw themselves into the fray. Liam ran past them this time, ducking uniformed guards. A blazing fire seemed to erupt from Liam's hands. A green placard at his feet twisted black and orange in flames before Liam leapt into the rubble, reigniting the arson site. Liam held the burning placard high above his head and threw it toward the building. A dozen police pushed forward, grabbing Liam. He kicked and punched blindly against them.

Orrin struggled against the flow of bodies and flames to get away. Aching and gasping, he turned back around one last time. Liam had disappeared under a barrage of boots and batons.

“Won't they get lost?” Ivy worried her bottom lip between her teeth as she walked.

“Why should they?” Gihn glanced in the direction that Trahg and his dusty haired cousin Turi had disappeared, into the branches ahead with Kyah. A half dozen adults trailed on foot but Shahn and Turi's mother, Floni, were chatting and seemed entirely unconcerned by the missing boys.

“Well,” Ivy considered, “they're just so little.”

Gihn chuckled, “Compared to you, we all are.”

Ivy couldn’t help but laugh too. “No, I mean they’re so young. They’re just children.”

Turi was even smaller than Trahg and Ivy guessed he was about three years old. An unsettling memory began to surface and Ivy instantly disengaged her hand from Gihn's, breaking their connection.
We have found the remains of a three-year-old that is half a meter tall,
the Liang Bua excavation director had written.
You could put its leg along an American one-dollar bill.
Ivy suppressed a shudder. The line between life and death was blurring. Fossils had become faces.
There are tens of thousands of years of stratigraphic record in that cave
, she reminded herself.
It isn’t him.
Ivy was fond of Turi; his mischievous personality far outweighed his size.

She offered the amulet to Gihn again, who took it with a sigh.

“You are keeping knowledge from me Hiranah.”

Ivy ignored his accusation and continued her previous question. “Do the children already know the hunting trails? I mean, if they stray too far ahead they could get lost, or hurt.” Ivy recalled the ferocity of the Komodo dragon. A full grown hobbit would constitute an easy meal, let alone a boy half a meter tall.

“They’ll stay up in the branches. The shirakan can’t reach them there,” Gihn said. “Besides, they don’t need to know the hunting trails; they only need to know their way home.”

“And they do?” asked Ivy. It seemed unlikely for such young children.

“Of course they do. Does a bird forget its nest?”

Ivy frowned, hesitating. “Well, no, but a bird is different. They
feel
direction.” Once again, there was no way of explaining a complicated scientific process to a hominid that wasn't prepared, intellectually or evolutionarily, to understand it.

From her zoology studies, Ivy knew that the instinctual pull of a bird's navigation was vastly different to a human's capacity to learn.

Although humans still retained elements of the protein cryptochrome, it seemed to be a predominantly vestigial trait. Like the appendix, wisdom teeth and the tailbone, its function was lost, but its physical form still remained. For humans, cryptochrome only remained to control body clocks and daily rhythms. There were versions of the ancient protein in all branches of life but for many other mammals, fish, birds and insects, the protein doubled as an internal compass. Cryptochrome was sensitive to the magnetic fields of the Earth. It drove the migration patterns of animals across continents and allowed them to keep their bearing even when no other landmarks were available to guide their way. Somewhere in the branches of evolution, that ability had disappeared from the human line.

“I feel direction,” Gihn said simply.

“Humans don't feel it the way other animals do, Gihn.” Ivy clarified. “We can't, you or I.”

While the protein had remained in humans, the apparatus needed to detect changes in the molecule had been long lost. People could no longer sense magnetic fields effectively and communicate that information to the brain. There was a missing link. The other human senses were catered for by an opening in the bone structure they were housed in - eye sockets for eyes, ear canals for hearing, the jaw for taste, nasal cavity for smell - but direction? Magnetic fields were capable of penetrating the human body, leaving no external clue as to where they were processed. It may have once been in the eyes, the brain, the nerves…

“I am a human and I can feel it,” Gihn countered.

“You mean you have learnt it, you understand and recognise the land. You teach your children to judge distance and see landmarks,” Ivy corrected.

“No.” Gihn shook his head. “I
feel
it. I just
know
where I am, wherever I am. So I know how to get home.” He pointed slightly south-east, over his shoulder. “Our cave is this way.” He pointed further south, “and the home of our ancestors was this way. We face and honour them, with our dusk song each night.” Gihn turned back to the invisible path they travelled. “But we will find the firewater in this direction, I feel it.” He looked up at Ivy once more. “And tonight after dark” Gihn took a deep breath, nodding skyward, “a lightning storm will break. I can feel that too, here.” He touched the skin between his eyes.

Ivy stopped walking abruptly, stunned by the implications of what he was saying. The other hobbits continued around them, slowing to look back. She’d been stripping fronds of hanging leaflets through her fingers as she walked and was now left with confetti of green in her hand and several stunning red seeds with a single black spot on one end. They were vaguely familiar,
like an inverted black widow spider…
she mused distractedly.
Life imitating life.
It never failed to impress her when one species evolved to imitate another for its own protection. The hidden dangers of the rainforest suddenly felt close. Ivy quickly brushed the seeds and thoughts of deadly spiders away.

She scrutinised the man next to her, then resumed walking. A hypothesis formed slowly in Ivy’s mind. Frustratingly, there was no way to test it. Beneath the skin and bone of Gihn’s tiny skull, like on any other human, would be his prefrontal cortex. It was the part of the brain responsible for self awareness, higher reasoning skills and intelligence. But in one peculiar way, Ivy knew Gihn's was different to her own. Endocasts had been moulded of the inside of fossilised skulls, revealing the shape and size of the Homo floresiensis brain. Compared to Homo sapiens, the prefrontal cortex of a hobbit was proportionately bigger than the rest. It had seemed odd to Ivy, when the findings were published, considering the remainder of their bodies and brains had otherwise evolved to be so small.
Could that highly developed area account for magnetoception? Can hobbits
feel
the magnetic energy field waves from the earth around them?
If so, what a magnificent evolutionary re-development.
Perhaps the cryptochrome mechanism had been recovered as an adaptation to their environment,
Ivy mused.
But why on earth would a human need sensitivity to magnetic fields?

Phlunk!
A little body dropped to the ground in front of her, followed by another. Both boys were panting with exertion. With a much heavier landing, Kyah joined them screeching.

“Shirakan!” yelled Trahg. “Shirakan by the firewater!” The small boy grabbed Gihn's free hand and began pulling him in the direction the other adults had gone. Ivy followed, quickly gathering up little Turi and carrying him on her hip.

Within a few minutes, the forest opened into a small clearing. The others were already gathered around the biggest Komodo dragon Ivy had ever seen. She panicked, preparing to hoist Turi back up into the branches. Gihn pulled her back. “It is already dead, Hiranah.”

He was right. The dragon was dead, crushing the long grass beneath its carcass, easily three times longer than a hobbit at full height. Its jaw was flopped to the side and a white frothy paste coated the tiled skin around its mouth. Thick red saliva hung in strings on the grass and its glassy eye stared to the sky.