Orphan of Creation (11 page)

Livingston looked at her for a long moment. “Come on, Barb,” he said. “Let’s get back to it.” He went back to work. Barbara watched him for a long moment. How could he just shrug off the failure and keep going as if nothing was wrong? She shook her head, tried to clear her mind. He could do it because he was right. She rose and picked up her own tools again. He was right because there was nothing else to do but finish the job, follow the same careful procedure, stick to the precise rituals that had gotten them this far. They had to behave like the sort of soulless automata people thought scientists were supposed to be.

Maybe that was what the utterly false stereotype of the emotionless scientist moving coolly about in his lab coat was all about—a shell to slip into, a shield when failure hit.

Working with the brush was soothing work, she tried to tell herself when the tears threatened to well up again. Gracefully, almost tenderly wiping the dust of ages off the corpse, she managed to find her composure in anger—silent, unrevealed anger at the robot-scientist tradition. How had it gotten started? How, when real scientists were so emotional, so mercurial, so impassioned about their work and the competition from their colleagues? Who, without the backing of strong passion, without the goad of the desperate need to know, would mix chemicals that could explode, would tickle the dragon of nuclear fire with bare hands to find the point where a critical mass was formed, would dive in a fragile bubble of iron into places in the ocean where the pressure rivaled Jupiter’s atmosphere, just to look around?

Who, without that burning monkey-curiosity, without incredible self-confidence and self-doubt in the face of million-to-one odds, without the thrill of the chase and dreams of glory of the misty past, would be a paleontologist, a digger? Who would roam all the barren and desert places of the earth, scrabbling in the dust and the muck and dirt to find such tiny scraps of bone, scraps the hyenas had passed over a million years before?

Barbara shook her head, thought again of all her own crazy dreams, and forced back the tears. Why weren’t scientists allowed to be people?

Never mind. She kept on with the blissfully mind-numbing work of unearthing a worthless skeleton. At least the relatives had the good taste to wander off.

God bless Liv. He stuck to it, never saying a word, just doing the grunt work.

Finally, the rotten canvas shroud was completely cleared, and they had their reward for their work—a flaccid, rotted-out bag full of bones lying at the bottom of a hole.

Livingston grabbed the Nikon and photographed their find, and not a halfhearted job either, but a thorough documentation.

Barbara did her best to match his brave front. It was easier that way. She knelt down beside the shroud. “This stuff is just rotting away anyway,” she said, careful to keep control of her voice. “I think we can just sort of peel it away in strips.” She pulled her Swiss Army knife out of her pocket, opened up the scissors blade, and began to cut away the worm-eaten canvas, one delicate snip at a time.

The old fabric parted easily, or collapsed altogether when the blade even got near it. She worked from the bottom to the top along the right side, opening a cut. She crouched down by the body and signaled for Livingston to kneel beside her. The two of them slid their hands into the slit and pulled about a handbreadth of cloth back before it collapsed into broken thread and dust. They stepped around to the other side, reached across, pulled back the cloth from that side, and cleared off the bits and pieces of canvas that had fallen back.

Over the decades, the soil had sifted down through the fabric of the canvas, trickling down onto the decaying corpse inside. With the canvas stripped away, they had a mound of packed-in dirt, with a few bones poking out here and there.

The dull hurt of failure still in her heart, Barbara sighed and reached for her brush again, began sweeping the dust away. Livingston started at the foot of grave, and Barbara began at the head, where the dirt seemed to have packed in deeper and harder.

Livingston worked up toward her end quickly. The small foot and ankle bones had of course disarticulated completely. A professional would have stopped the basic clear-off long enough to make sure all of these were uncovered, but Livingston continued up the legs, rapidly and incompletely uncovering the pelvis and torso. The corpse had obviously been buried lying on its back, and Livingston decided to clear the arms. He found the right shoulder, and worked from there down, moving toward the elbow joint, dusting them off. Barbara glanced idly over at his work as she uncovered the first bit of the skeleton’s head.

Suddenly it registered that there was something odd about the elbow joint—in fact about the whole arm. The upper arm was too long, the forearm too short, the joint itself not quite normal. For that matter, the leg bones weren’t altogether right, now that she could see them in their entirety, though there was nothing she could put her fingers on precisely.

She thought for a second, a new and wild idea flickering through her mind as she realized the difference between what she had assumed and what Zebulon had written. A sudden sense of numb shock grabbed at her stomach, and the emotional roller coaster she was riding took a hard, swooping turn up. A strange, exciting thought; a terrifying suspicion; a wild-eyed idea suddenly dawned on her. What if he
hadn’t
meant gorillas? What if he had never seen such a beast in his life? The idea led directly into another impossible question—and the answer was literally beneath her very hands. Back, forth, back, forth went her brush, and the last layers of dust melted away.

The eyeless face from the past hove into view, clearing the foggy horizons of the sea of time, a lost vessel arriving safely, sailing majestically into home waters, long after the last hopes for her had been given up.

The massive, jutting teeth grinned blindly up at her; the heavy brow of bone over the eyes shadowed the deep sockets into blackness. She knew what this was, and knew it could not be. Her heart suddenly gone cold, Barbara reached out a trembling finger to touch the one-hundred-thirty-seven-year-old skull of a hominid that she
knew
had been extinct for a million years.

Interlude

<>

One of them died in the fields the next day. She did not know it at first; she was too far away to pay any mind to the cries and howls, and the sting of the punishment lashes she still felt was too great. Her attempt at escape had failed, of course.

It was only when the man overseeing her turned and looked toward its source that she became aware of the noise at all. The overseer looked concerned and trotted toward the outburst, and she followed behind, unbidden and unnoticed.

It was on the far end of the farthest field, there, a knot of keening, gesticulating, furry figures, crouched low in a circle, anxious men standing uncertainly about the mourners.

She cried out, the fur on the back of her neck bristling, and ran forward, forcing her way into the ranks of the death-criers. She shoved her body forward to see, jostling her way through the wall of bodies. Then she saw the corpse, and she too cried out, her own anguished voice altogether lost in the wild pandemonium of those surrounding the body.

It was an old, silver-backed female, the thin fur along her shoulders and spine long since gone grey. She was lying on her side, twisted up as if in great pain, her face a frozen, manic mask of agony, her eyes already glazed and filming, a line of spittle hanging from her lips. It was the shocked and painful face of one whose body has died, stopped, collapsed in the flicker of a heartbeat. The corpse's arms and legs sprawled out in unnatural directions, limp and horribly motionless. Death seemed to have stolen not only movement, but also substance; the whole body appeared thin and useless, as if it were far more fragile in death than in life. The corpse seemed shrunken, child-sized, far smaller than the living being.

She turned, twisted her head to look at the face, and then bared her fangs and shrieked anew, louder, more fiercely. It was her mother, the one who had held her, carried her, fed her, groomed her, protected her, loved her.

Hysterical, desolated, she cried out again and lunged for the too-still body, dove down onto her knees and hugged the unbreathing chest in her arms. She gathered her mother's body to her and rocked it back and forth, keening and moaning.

The others backed away, and their cries faded away as all eyes drank in her sorrow, and shared it, and would not intrude upon it.

After a time, hands, furry hands with callused pads on their palms and nails like chipped, broken claws, hands of her own kind, reached out to pet her back, touch her arm, smooth the bristled fur along the back of her neck.

At first she pushed away the hands and snapped at them, but at last she allowed the contact, the reassurance, the silent condolences.

The men finally acted, moved in, prodded their charges to move, to get back to their work. With a muted symphony of growls and grunts, the crowd around her allowed itself to be led away. The men and their beasts drifted back to their work, all save the dead one and her mourning daughter. The men had learned long ago, at the cost of not a few fights, escapes, injuries, and deaths, not to interfere at such times. The miserable creatures owned nothing but their grief, and that was the only thing the men would not, could not, take from them.

They left her there, and she lost herself in attendance on the dead, stroking the too-cold flesh, straightening the limbs into more natural positions, closing the eyes, trying in vain to wipe the hideous pain from the face.

For a day and a night, she stayed there in the furrowed field with the corpse. She hugged the body, feeling it stiffen into rigor as if her dead mother was drawing back, retreating from her touch. She slept there, for the first time in memory without thought of escape, though she could sense a man nearby, keeping watch lest she take advantage of her grief-freedom. She woke next morning, huddled by the body.

At last, on the second day, when the criers called them to the evening feeding, hunger and thirst drew her away, and she went to the feeding cages to eat and drink her fill, and she suffered herself to be locked up for the night with the others.

The next morning, she broke away from her overseer to the place where her mother had died, but the men, or the jackals, had dragged the body away.

Chapter Seven

Dr. Jeffery Grossington, Associate Secretary for Anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History and Man, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., was a man well-suited to a position with such a long and ponderous title. He had the character traits a man engaged in the study of the long-dead past needed: slow, deliberate, careful thought processes; the patient willingness to sift through the minute bits of evidence and fragile shards of bone for the one tiny fragment of meaning; the capacity to build knowledge out of mystery; the imagination and vision to understand what the rare, tiny clues scrabbled out of the earth could tell of human ancestry. But of all his skills, virtues, and talents, Jeffery Grossington was certain that the greatest was patience.

Students of other scientific disciplines might feel compelled to compete in a race against time, against constrained budgets, against colleagues who might be hot on the trail of the same discovery, but not Grossington. Though many of his colleagues in the field would have disagreed, he felt quite strongly that such nonsense had no place in paleoanthropology. After all, the persons of interest to Grossington’s studies had all died thousands or millions of years ago; their bones could wait a day or a year or a decade more before revealing their secrets. Rush made for errors; cautious deliberation and painstaking care were the hallmarks of his work. There was simply no
need
for a good paleoanthropologist to scurry maniacally toward conclusions.

Indeed, he strongly disapproved of rush, or commotion, or
any
sort of urgency—and suspected that hurry was not only mostly unneeded, but quite often detrimental. Outright frantic activity infuriated him.

Fortunately, he was also slow to anger, or else when Barbara burst into his office at eight A.M. on the Monday after Thanksgiving, there would have been hell to pay.

She all but bounded into the room, grinning ear to ear, and charged straight toward his desk. He should have immediately given her a good tongue-lashing, ordered her out of the office, but she had the element of surprise working for her. No one in the history of Grossington’s tenure had ever dreamed of barging into his office like that. Dr. Grossington opened his mouth to offer an infuriated rebuke, but he never got the chance. Before he could react to the intrusion, Barbara compounded her offense by scooping up his coffee tray and placing it none-too-carefully on a side table, sweeping all the papers from the center of his desk, and vanishing back out into the hall, only to return a moment later carrying, of all things, an old-fashioned wooden hatbox.

Suddenly moving with great care and deliberation, she set down the box, most gently, on the exact center of his desk blotter, and stepped back to stand in front of his desk, like a student waiting for the teacher to examine her science project.

“Dr. Marchando, what the devil is the—” But Dr. Jeffery Grossington stopped himself in mid-outburst and finally took a good hard look at Barbara. She was flushed, excited, and her dark brown face was alight, exhilarated. Her eyes gleamed, her hair was disheveled, her makeup was blurred and smeared. Her clothes, which she normally kept up so carefully, were wrinkled, mussed-up, and looked as if they had been slept in for a day or two. All of which was totally out of character for the prim, careful Dr. Marchando.

“Well, open it, Dr. Grossington,” she said. “Aren’t you going to
open
it?” she asked breathlessly. “I’ve been travelling all last night and the whole day before—bus, train, plane, taxi—to get it to you.
Open
it!”

He looked at her curiously, and his big, callused, well-manicured hands moved involuntarily toward the cord that held the lid of the box on. He hesitated, much unnerved, and looked hard at the hatbox, as if he feared it might contain a bomb. He looked again to Barbara. He had a nasty feeling things in his world were about to turn upside down. “Barbara, what’s
in
here?”

She grinned, almost wild-eyed, and leaned over the desk, her whole face shining with enthusiasm. “The end, Jeffery, the goal,” she said, daring to use his first name. “The end of so many searches.
That’s
what’s in there. Maybe the collapse of every existing theory of human evolution.
Open
it.”

Grossington swallowed hard and undid the cord. He lifted the worn black-lacquer top off the octagonal box and set it aside. There was a layer of shredded bits of foam rubber hiding the contents proper. Grossington removed the bits of padding carefully, one by one. Years of field work had made slow and careful work a matter of reflex action for him. He wanted to make sure there was no danger of his damaging the whatever-it-was by moving too fast.

Just as Barbara had done two days before, he gradually uncovered the prize. As he dug it out from under the bits of padding, he saw more and more details of what it was, and his years of practice told him what the whole was before it was fully uncovered, before he had really seen it: a skull, a human skull, a fully intact cranium with a complete upper dental arcade, all the teeth intact, every detail fully present and preserved.

And then he removed the last of the padding, and looked again, and saw what was truly there, not what was expected. His eyes widened in shock: hominid, yes—but it was not human.

Grossington could feel his heart starting to pound, the sweat coming out on his forehead as he carefully, oh so carefully, removed the prize from the hatbox.

The prominent sagittal crest, the huge, flat molars, the large but human-like canine teeth, the box-shaped dental arcade, the obvious positioning of the skull’s balance point to allow for an erect, bipedal gait. The prominent, exaggerated brow ridges—a dozen, a hundred things that spoke, even shouted, the impossible. This was an australopithecine, a member of a hominid species that had died out a million years ago.

But this was no fossil
. This was
bone
, not the mineralized shadow of bone; none of the once-living material of this skull had leached away to be replaced by other matter. What he held in his hands was the actual, true, once-living matter, browned and stained and weakened by time, but still bone—and of recent vintage. Not so long ago, these bone had been as alive as Grossington himself was.

Like Hamlet with Yorick’s skull, Grossington held the cranium in his hand and stared into its empty eyes, fascinated, for a long time.

<>

Barbara stood there, in front of Grossington’s desk, for what could have been a minute, or could have been an hour, watching him examine the impossible find. Finally the old man spoke. “When and where, Dr. Marchando?” he managed to ask at last, very quietly. “How old is this, and where in heaven’s name does it come from?”

“Sir, that cranium—and the well-preserved
complete
skeleton found with it—were buried—deliberately, ritualistically buried—about one hundred forty years ago. In Gowrie, Mississippi, U.S.A. My home town.”

Grossington sat there, stunned. “How? How could that possibly
be
?”

“I don’t know, sir. I honestly don’t know. But I have a very strong hunch that our friend here might have some living relatives still around, if we knew where to look.”

That
much she had realized on the endless bus ride through the Mississippi darkness, rushing for the Jackson airport. It was plain bad luck that she had had to hustle for the fastest route she could manage in the overbooked chaos of Thanksgiving Sunday, when all America was headed home. At least the endless delays had given Barbara the chance to think, to consider, to contemplate—to let her imagination run away with her.

“If these creatures survived up to the 1850s, why couldn’t they still be around?” she asked in as nearly a conversational tone as she could manage. Then, for the first time, the excitement went out of Barbara’s voice, to be replaced by something else, something mixed of awe, and fear, and wonder. She reached out and touched the face of the musty skull that Grossington still held. “I think we’ve got some company. Out there. Somewhere.”

Grossington set down the cranium, bafflement plainly overwhelming him. This was as incredible to him as a dawn in the west would be to an astronomer. His face was blank, expressionless, the face of a man who had no adequate reaction.

For a terrible moment, Barbara thought he had suffered a stroke or a heart attack, but then he seemed to come back to himself a bit, at least enough to replace the precious cranium in its nest of foam rubber. But still he said nothing, and Barbara found herself talking on, the words rushing out for the sake of something to say, something to fill the silence. “I left my cousin down there to watch over the rest of the skeleton. The rest of it is still
in situ
. Once I realized what I had, I didn’t dare try and work the area without professional help and equipment. I just removed the cranium and headed back here as fast as I could. We’ve got the dig roped-off and tarped over, but we still need to get back down there and recover the rest of the specimen. It looked as if there was still some skin, even fur, left on parts of it. It’ll be very delicate work, and we’ll need the best diggers in the house for it.” She paused for a moment, looked down at her boss again, reached out and touched his hand. “Dr. Grossington?”

He jerked away, startled, and looked back at her from whatever place his mind had been. “Hmmm? Diggers? Field workers? Yes, yes, in due time, Dr. Marchando, in due time. This—this requires a great deal of thought.” His eyes drifted back toward the timeworn skull, and he seemed to forget her once again. “I simply cannot believe this.”

Barbara winced inside. She should have thought of this, should have taken Grossington’s personality into account. She had imagined him pushing the buttons on his phone, pulling all his people in, issuing crisp orders that would set the needed work in motion. That was the way she would have responded—but instead, she was dealing with a man who seemed suddenly lost. His life was no longer the well-ordered place it had been ten minutes before. He had to be prodded into action, and there was no time to guide him into his course gently. She knew Grossington hated knee-jerk reactions to the press of events, but now he had no choice. It was time to bully the old man a bit.

“Dr. Grossington, you
must
believe it—and you must act quickly! The rest of this skeleton is lying, partially excavated, under a tarp. It’s more or less protected, but it’s at least potentially exposed to weather and extremes of temperature. One good rain, one good cold snap that embrittles the bones, and we could lose it all. We
have
to get a team down there to recover and catalog all the bones. There are very likely other sets of remains buried nearby that must be uncovered . . .” Her voice trailed off as she watched him. Her boss was acting most strangely.

“Yes, yes,” Grossington said, nodding vaguely, barely aware that she had stopped talking. He reached down into the hatbox and softly stroked the weathered brow of bone over the blank eye sockets. “Yes, of course,” he said to no one at all. A strange eagerness seemed to steal slowly over him. His face lost its customary reserve, and he pulled the horn-rimmed glasses off his nose. He massaged his own forehead with his right hand as the left caressed the mysterious skull. “This is—is quite incredible, Dr. Marchando. I have not felt this way in years.” He looked up at her abruptly. His breath seemed short, and his eyes gleamed with excitement and pleasure. “I cannot recall feeling this
alive
.”

He stared down at the dead, grinning enigma that challenged him, and quite uncharacteristically grinned back at it. “I cannot recall feeling this
young
.”

And Barbara chided herself for underestimating Jeffery Grossington.

<>

Livingston Jones sat at a table on the back porch and stared out at the crude canvas top staked down over the excavation. He knew himself to be a man with a mission, though he did not exactly know what that mission was. Clearly, someone had to stay here and keep an eye on things, just in case—but just in case what? Until Barbara called with news, or unless it rained, or animals started prowling around the tarp, or some nosy neighbor started poking around the dig, there was very little to do.

The last of the Thanksgiving guests had left that morning, and Great-aunt Josephine had the huge old place to herself again, except for Livingston, of course. She was busily at work, cleaning up after her relations, tidying up and setting to rights what was already neat as a pin. She had chased Liv out of the way more than once, convinced that neither he nor any other male could possibly get anything polished or straight or ironed or clean or put away well enough to suit her.

Livingston sighed and picked up Zebulon’s journal book again. It was not the focus of reverence to him that it was to the older relations, but it was something to read. It would have been interesting enough even it hadn’t led to a shocking discovery in the backyard. At first he had thought there might be more in the old book about the creatures or their burial, but there didn’t seem to be any further mention. He opened it again at random, and found himself in the days when Zebulon had first returned home, after the War, and was struggling to buy out the bankrupt shell that was Gowrie Plantation.