Waiting (18 page)
Authors: Frank M. Robinson
“Come on, Artie, you already know—we’re the meek who were supposed to inherit the earth. Until your species came along. And that’s not quite accurate, either. Did you know we managed to coexist for thousands of years?” She grimaced. “Then thirty-five thousand years ago nature gave you too many talents all at once. It was like giving an ape an arsenal of assault rifles and teaching him how to use them. Maybe it was a mutation, maybe it was a gene for violence—that’s something your scientists ought to look into. But the problem isn’t who
we
are, the problem is who
you
are.” She shook her head in mock dismay. “You always want to know how other species differ from you, not how you might differ from them, unless all the differences are on the plus side.”
we
are, the problem is who
you
are.” She shook her head in mock dismay. “You always want to know how other species differ from you, not how you might differ from them, unless all the differences are on the plus side.”
“One of you killed Dr. Hall,” Artie accused.
She took another sip from the glass and studied him, her eyes a crystalline blue in a remarkably unlined face.
“All I know about it is what I read in the papers, Artie. You apparently went to Hall and showed him Shea’s research. Not very kind of you in the long run. You’re as responsible for what happened to him as the Hound, whoever he is.”
“And Pascheike?”
“Same thing.”
She seemed friendly enough on the surface, but beneath it Mary struck him as being as alien as somebody from another planet. Artie kept trying to think of common ground, of points of rapport. She was willing to talk but he didn’t know where to start asking questions. In ’Nam he’d sat in on interrogations with Mitch where the languages differed, but here it was the mind-set itself—and something more. Different species, he thought uneasily. How the hell
would
they talk to each other?
would
they talk to each other?
“You said that we’re different from you.”
She looked disapproving.
“Oh, you’re different all right, in a way you don’t suspect. Most of your anthropologists know it but they’ll never tell you. You’re a fluke of nature, a flawed species, Artie. Only a part of you is rational. The other part is mad as a hatter—as a species, you’re committable.”
Artie felt uncomfortable.
“That’s a pretty harsh judgment.”
“Is it? For starters, you breed uncontrollably, you war constantly, and you’ve made the world into a pigpen. Worst of all, you take no responsibility—you excuse yourselves by saying that somehow it’s all part of God’s grand design. I’ve got news for you, Artie. God sometimes makes mistakes, and you’re one of them.” Artie remembered balancing on the railing of his balcony and the subtle urgings that had bubbled up in his head. He hadn’t known what to call it then; he didn’t now.
“You can read minds?”
She cocked her head, frowning.
“Don’t be silly—nobody can read minds. We can’t press a button on your mental computer and watch the words scroll up on a screen. We can see images in each other’s minds and we can project them if you’re receptive, that’s all. It’s like the Rhine experiments: The subjects weren’t asked to identify words, they were asked to identify images. Many of your own children can do it when they’re two years old. They mostly lose the ability as they grow older.” She pointed to her glass. “You want something to drink?”
He might think about getting roaring drunk later on. But if Mitch was right, he knew he could never afford to lose control of his mind again.
“I’m fine. I didn’t know that about kids.”
“You should. When you’re growing up, what’s the one ability you always wished you had? To know what somebody else is thinking, right? When you’re a teenager, it’s ‘will she or won’t she’ and how much you’d give if only you knew. To be able to glimpse an image of you and her together, to know that that’s what she’s thinking about. Wouldn’t you have liked to be able to do that, Artie? You lose that ability early, but you never get over wishing you had it back.”
“That must have given you a big advantage over your enemies.”
For a fleeting moment she looked sad. “We could see pictures in other people’s minds. It was useful on the hunt. And racial memories were our history books. A simple talent, but you more than made up for your lack of it.”
Artie couldn’t understand why she was telling him as much as she was. She had to be doing it for a reason, but he didn’t have a clue what it might be.
“How?”
She put down the knitting and took another sip from her glass.
“Didn’t your professor Hall explain the possibilities? Your species could make a far wider variety of sounds than we could, and eventually it led to language. We didn’t need to describe what we saw in words. For much the same reason, we didn’t need art. You needed both and you ran with them. And then you were clever enough to substitute paintings for mental images, the one talent we had that you envied.”
She twisted her head to glance at the wall of CDs and books behind her.
“Nature not only made you handsome, it gave you language and music and art and you did wonders with all of them. From a personal viewpoint, I’m very glad that you did. I can’t carry a tune—few of us can—and I couldn’t draw a recognizable stick figure if you paid me. But it was a Faustian bargain, Banks. Nature also made you the most homicidal species the planet has ever seen.”
She suddenly turned accusing.
“Your species learned to lie with language, Artie. Lying was a concept that was foreign to us; you can’t lie very well with images. We believed you during truces, in battles, in negotiations—and by the time we understood you were lying, we were almost gone.”
Artie tried in vain to see in her face the Mary Robards he’d once known, but that Mary had vanished for good. They had been lovers briefly and then friends for how long? Twenty years? Now she’d taken off the mask she had worn for so long and beneath it was the face of a stranger. It was like a death in the family.
“Language—that was your key to winning the world, Artie. Then you trumped it and organized the sounds you made into words you could carve in stone or print on paper. Remarkable! You could do with print the same things you could do with your voice. You didn’t need racial memories; you could leave printed books behind. And you could lie with them just as easily as you could with the spoken word.”
“You’re afraid of us,” Artie accused.
She looked surprised. “If you were us, wouldn’t you be? What do you think would happen if everybody knew about us? How soon would it take your governments to launch the greatest pogrom the world has ever seen?”
He already knew the answer to that one; once again the memory of the Tribe was fresh in his mind.
“You’re experts at genocide,” she continued, her voice now heavy with anger. “It’s in your blood. The genocides of the Second World War—”
“Committed by the Nazis—”
“Oh? And since then it’s been the Hutus trying to exterminate the Tutsis, all those loser tribes in the Sudan killing each other off, the Serbs slaughtering the Muslims—That was another genocide where the murderers did their jobs with enthusiasm, an evening’s entertainment! And remember ’Nam, remember My Lai?”
“Thousands died on both sides,” Artie said angrily.
Mary’s smile was sardonic.
“So what’s your point, Artie? You want to go back to Tasmania a hundred and fifty years ago when the early settlers shot the natives for sport and exterminated an entire race?”
She resumed knitting, the needles flashing savagely.
“Or try your eden of Tahiti where warring tribes nailed children to their captive mothers with spears and drilled holes in the heads of other prisoners so they could be strung together like beads on a string. Consider the Turks and the Armenians or the Mayans, whose population dropped ninety-five percent in fifty years because of wars of extermination. Better yet, read your own Bible—”
“That’s the dark side,” Artie interrupted, desperate.
She sounded exasperated.
“My God, Artie, you think there’s a bright side? Look at your history books. They’re nothing but a recital of battles won and battles lost with the victors sitting atop a mound of skulls at the end! And the generals who engineered the slaughters become your heroes! What was it your General Grant said? That he could walk across the battlefield at Shiloh stepping on the bodies of the dead without his feet ever touching the ground?”
She drained what was left in her glass, hesitated, then refilled it from a bottle beneath the table.
“You should read your morning paper more often, Artie. Your species is monstrous when it comes to hypocrisy: you keep telling yourselves how much you prize human life when it’s obvious there’s nothing you value less. You love violence, you adore it. Three hundred years ago you even treated guns like works of art, decorating them with intricate carvings and inlaying them with mother-of-pearl. It’s a wonder you’re not doing the same thing with the stocks of AK-47s today. For all I know, maybe you are.”
Mary turned colder now, her face masking her emotions. “History is a two-way street, Artie. You want to know what you were like in the distant past, look at what you are today. You’re the same murderous species now that you were thirty-five thousand years ago. You exterminated the Neanderthals and then you went after us. You wanted our hunting grounds and our foraging areas, and the simplest way to get them was to kill us—men, women, children, babes in arms. And it was so easy! We looked different from you, so you could identify and kill us on sight. We were the ‘other’ and because we were, you didn’t need an excuse.”
Artie remembered the slaughter on the riverbank and turned away, sick. “You’re still here, Mary,” he said in a low voice.
“There were two groups of us. Those of us who lived in northern Europe were big nosed, heavy browed, stumpy people who had adapted to the cold. We were tribal, we tended to stay in the same areas, so we didn’t get any images about what was happening until it was too late. We became the ogres of fairy tales, the hairy, ugly people who lived in the woods. It was open season on us and within a few thousand years we were gone.”
Artie could see no trace of the primitive in her.
“You look no different from us.”
Mary turned back to her knitting, her voice sad.
“I said there were two groups of us. The tribes who lived in southern Europe, around the Mediterranean, looked more like
Homo sapiens.
It was survival of the fittest, Artie, and the fittest were those of us who looked and spoke the most like you. Children who were throwbacks were killed by their parents for fear they would cast suspicion on their families. We were selected out by our environment and you were that environment, as selective as the glaciers or the veldt. We ended up breeding according to your specifications. We adapted to
you;
we had to.”
Homo sapiens.
It was survival of the fittest, Artie, and the fittest were those of us who looked and spoke the most like you. Children who were throwbacks were killed by their parents for fear they would cast suspicion on their families. We were selected out by our environment and you were that environment, as selective as the glaciers or the veldt. We ended up breeding according to your specifications. We adapted to
you;
we had to.”
“You interbred—”
“God, yes, we interbred, Artie—there was mating and there were offspring. But we were a different species, it was like donkeys mating with horses, where the offspring are mules, sterile. Since lives were short, there were few grandparents around to become suspicious. As a species, we survived through arranged marriages. It’s an honorable practice; it just goes back much farther than you think.”
Artie remembered the few times he had watched her in court. She was as passionate then as she was now. Except then it was a calculated passion and now it was spontaneous.
“Why are you telling me all this, Mary?”
This time her smile made his skin crawl.
“We
were the species in a direct line of succession from ancient man. You came out of nowhere, a quantum leap in potential, and you looked like nothing that had gone before. You were flat-faced, relatively lightly built, comparatively hairless with well-shaped heads … an elegant species. And thirty-five thousand years ago you stole our world.” She held the scarf up to check her stitches, the mismatched colors jittering in the light. “We want it back, Artie.”
were the species in a direct line of succession from ancient man. You came out of nowhere, a quantum leap in potential, and you looked like nothing that had gone before. You were flat-faced, relatively lightly built, comparatively hairless with well-shaped heads … an elegant species. And thirty-five thousand years ago you stole our world.” She held the scarf up to check her stitches, the mismatched colors jittering in the light. “We want it back, Artie.”
Once again, Artie wasn’t sure what to say.
“What are you going to do?”
“That’s the second question. The first is what are
you
going to do.”
you
going to do.”
She wasn’t making sense. “I don’t understand.”
Her voice was very calm, deliberate.
“You’re going to exterminate yourselves, Artie. You don’t stand a prayer of lasting another hundred years. For a while we thought all we had to do was wait.”
Artie stood up. The feel of the small gun in his pocket was comforting.
“Larry and Dr. Paschelke and Richard Hall aren’t examples of waiting.”
Her expression was somber.
“Our original plan was simple: Stay hidden until all of you died in wars or starved to death in a habitat you had ruined beyond saving. Unfortunately, it’s our habitat as well. In the meantime our chances of being discovered have grown immeasurably. Medicine has become more. sophisticated, there are physicals for work and for the military—you’re only a few years away from having DNA data included on everybody’s birth certificate. You’d be shocked when you came to us. And we can’t foresee accidents and autopsies like Talbot’s. Shea was a curious doctor. There’ll be others. We can’t afford to wait any longer, Artie—we want you gone. Now.”
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