Orphan of Creation Read online

  Orphan of Creation

  Contact with the Human Past

  a novel by

  Roger MacBride Allen

  Orphan of Creation

  copyright 1988, 2000, 2010 © by Roger MacBride Allen

  all rights reserved

  ISBN 0-9671783-3-9

  Publishing History:

  First published by Baen Books in February, 1988

  German-Language Edition, Heyne, 1998

  FoxAcre Press Edition December 2000

  FoxAcre Press E-book Edition 2010

  visit the author's website at

  www.rogermacbrideallen.com

  Cover art by Tibor Szendrei

  szendreiart.com

  FoxAcre Press

  401 Ethan Allen Avenue

  Takoma Park, Maryland 20912

  www.FoxAcre.com

  Books by Roger MacBride Allen

  Novels

  The Torch of Honor

  Rogue Powers

  (above reissued in combined volume as Allies & Aliens)

  Orphan of Creation

  The Modular Man

  Farside Cannon

  The Ring of Charon

  The Shattered Sphere

  The Game of Worlds

  Supernova (with Eric Kotoni)

  The War Machine (with David Drake)

  A trilogy of Asimovian Robot Novels:

  Caliban

  Inferno

  Utopia

  The Corellian Trilogy of Star Wars Novels:

  Ambush at Corellia

  Assault at Selonia

  Showdown at Centerpoint

  The Chronicles of Solace:

  The Depths of Time

  The Ocean of Years

  The Shores of Tomorrow

  Starside: BSI

  The Cause of Death

  Death Sentence

  Final Inquiries

  How-To Books

  A Quick Guide to Book-on-Demand Printing

  The First Book of Hazel: A Quick Guide to the Hazel Internet Merchandizing System

  Non-Fiction

  Mr. Lincoln's High-Tech War (with Thomas B. Allen)

  Dedication

  To Harry Turtledove

  fellow victim of incitement to fiction

  Epigraph

  Suppose... that one or several species of our ancestral genus Australopithecus had survived—a perfectly reasonable scenario in theory.... We—that is, Homo sapiens—would then have faced all the moral dilemmas involved in treating a human species of distinctly inferior mental capacity. What would we have done with them—slavery? extirpation? coexistence? menial labor? reservations? zoos?

  —Stephen Jay Gould

  The Mismeasure of Man

  Prelude

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  She walked along the rows of the burned-over field, her bare feet crunching on the rain-soaked clumps of charcoal. The fire had been here; the men had brought it here deliberately to clear the jungle back and make a field for growing crops. The planting had been done, and the rains had come, and now the field was a raw sea of churned-up mud and dissolving charcoal. The sullen earth fairly steamed in the cloying humidity of the hot day, turning the field into a grim place of lurking mists beneath the steel-gray sky. Not all was harshness: the ugly browns and blacks of the field were set off here and there with the delicate, hopeful, transparent greens of the next crop.

  But she saw none of that, and only looked straight down at the ground as she walked, pausing to stoop over and yank out the robust weeds that constantly threatened to overwhelm the tiny, fragile shoots of the food crop. If she had been set instead to pulling out the crop seedlings, leaving the weeds behind, she would not have known or cared.

  She worked quickly, her stubby-fingered hands surprisingly graceful at their task. Most of the weeds she shoved into a bag that hung on a strap around her neck, but, now and then, she would pop one of the choicer stalks into her mouth and crunch it down to a digestible size before swallowing it.

  The field was large, wide and long, but at last she came to the end of the row. She stopped, brought her head up, and stared, straight ahead, at the solid wall of trees and undergrowth that leaped up from the very edge of the field. She listened to the sounds, and smelled the scents, of the jungle and the wild places.

  She stood there, a few leaves of a bamboo shoot quivering at the side of her mouth as she chewed, peering out into the jungle, as if she was searching for something in the forest. Then, suddenly, the overseer shouted. She jerked around, startled, and turned back to the field, obeying the sound of the man's voice rather than the words.

  As the day wore on, the endless cloud of insects seemed to thicken about her. Most of them she managed to keep off by waving her arms, but a few got through. A mosquito landed on her flat nose, and she brushed it away. Another tried to land on her chest for a meal, but instead got entangled in the hairy thatch of fur between her teats. She swatted it without looking down and went on with her weeding, leaving the tiny corpse squashed flat on her skin.

  There was another weed. She stooped, pulled it out and examined the roots hopefully. She spotted a pinkish grub between the root tendrils. Making a low, happy noise, she caught it between her fingers, popped it into her mouth, and crushed it between her massive jaws. Today was like every other.

  Her world was very small.

  November

  Chapter One

  The house was old. Seven generations had trod its floors—through plantation times, Rebellion and Reconstruction, through carpetbaggers and cross burnings, through two world wars, through segregation and civil rights marches. Gowrie House had stood since the days of King Cotton, its lands shrinking from square miles down to a few acres as the generations of owners sold off what was no longer wanted, and its dominion of fields that stretched halfway to the horizon had retreated to a few garden plots of solemn, decorative flowers.

  Dr. Barbara Marchando sat perched at the edge of a dusty chair in the attic of Gowrie House, surrounded by things that were heavy with that eventful past, things that felt old.

  That the ages hovered here, no one could deny. But still somehow it was strange for her to think of this place, of any human place, as old. Barbara was a paleoanthropologist, a student of the past who worked in millennia, in millions of years, spans of time so great that the century and a half this house had existed were meaningless; flickering moments so small they could not be recorded in the scales of geologic time.

  Still, time and history could be felt, hanging heavy, in this place. Innumerable events and memories were entangled in the web of the so-brief decades that measured this house. Barbara’s family had owned this house for a long time, in the human scale. Twelve decades before, the house had owned her family, until the Slave had taken the Master’s place, and started legends in doing so.

  Now, it was Thanksgiving again, and for the hundredth time since she was a little girl, Barbara was seeking refuge from a loud and festive gathering downstairs by sneaking up to the attic. She loved to sift through the mysterious amalgamation of family treasures and debris there, to breathe in the fragrance of faded linens and the dry, somber scent of wooden rafters cooked by the attic heat of so many summers past. Perhaps it was in searching through its secrets that she had found her vocation. Certainly she had always loved this place.

  Always, when she came up here, she dreamed of finding the prize, the jewel beyond price, that has to be hidden in this place. Now, with the last of the Thanksgiving dinner plates being clattered back into the cupboards downstairs, she decided to search in the one place she had never dared look as a child: the locked steamer trunk that had waited for her so long. She knew to whom it had belonged: the initials Z. J. were painted over the hasp and picked ou
t with dusty gold leaf paint.

  This trunk had belonged to Zebulon Jones himself, her great-great-grandfather, the legend-maker of her family, the bold defier of slave owners and rebels, carpetbaggers and the Klan.

  As a skinny young man, he had escaped Colonel Gowrie’s plantation in 1850, at the age of 25. He went North, earned his way however he could, taught himself to read while staying alive as a stable boy in upstate New York, finally owning his own stable and tavern, proudly gaining himself the franchise in 1860, just in time to vote for Abraham Lincoln. Denied a chance to join the Union army, he instead earned his fortune during the War by breeding, brokering, and selling horses for the Union Cavalry.

  He returned home to Mississippi a wealthy man, in the headiest days of Reconstruction. Some crafty Northerners had meantime succeeded in forcing the bankruptcy of the Gowrie homestead, and had sought to bamboozle Zebulon and relieve him of his money in a complex phony land deal, but they found the tables turned when they learned how much law their mark knew.

  Zeb bought his old master’s plantation out from under them, and nailed the deal down tight in court. He settled in to plant new crops, and establish his own family. He twice shot Klansmen dead from the portico when they came to lynch the uppity colored boy and burn the place down.

  He stood for Congress, and won, and served two years in the early 1870s, before the white man stole the ballot box and the promises of Reconstruction away from the supposedly enfranchised blacks.

  Zebulon Jones. The family jealously preserved the heritage of his character: Every child and grandchild, unto the latest generation, knew the stories and legends of Zebulon, and all had a fair share of his gumption and pride, his courage and determination.

  Knowing the trunk had belonged to her great-great grandfather made its secrets all the more alluring to Barbara. Her whole life long, even long before she was born, the trunk had sat in the attic, keeping its treasures locked away. Throughout her childhood, every time her parents had visited the family homestead, she had come up here to stare at it, endlessly. Each time she would try the sturdy lock, to see if it had yet given way to rust and decay—but she had never dared try to force it open, and always the lock was solid still.

  The key undoubtedly was lost long ago, forgotten in the keepsake chest of some aunt or another. As a child, Barbara had imagined the secrets that might be locked in the trunk, and thought of the archaeologists and grave robbers from her picture books, opening Pharaoh’s tomb. She had never dared try and force it open.

  But now, today, finally, it was too much for her. She could not say why, precisely, but today the temptation to look inside was too great, and the pressure to stay away much weakened.

  Maybe it was that she was still angry with her husband Michael, and could take it out on a poor helpless antique steamer trunk. They had separated not long before, and Michael blamed the separation wholly on Barbara—another of his endless denials of responsibility, a big part of what had driven her away in the first place. He was back home in Washington, stuck working the Emergency Room for most of the holiday weekend.

  Maybe it was that she had opened tombs a hundred times as old, and her professional detachment had finally driven the sin out of broaching the old trunk.

  Maybe she was silently rebelling against the relatives downstairs who still insisted on treating a 32-year-old Ph.D. like a clever 15-year-old.

  Even as she invented all the rationalizations, she knew none of them mattered. Plain and simple, her curiosity had at long last gotten the better of her, and she was no longer able to resist the mystery and challenge of this forgotten family relic.

  She got up off her chair, raising a cloud of dust as she moved. Sighing, she carefully brushed every speck of the dust off her green sheath dress. She was a tall, slender, dark-skinned black woman, her oval face graceful and expressive, her startlingly honey-brown eyes wide and lovely. Her sleeveless dress showed her arms to be surprisingly well-muscled, thanks to endless hours working a shovel on innumerable digs, her hands strong and firmly callused. She patted at her carefully coifed shoulder-length hair, worrying about having to shampoo the dust out of it.

  But that was for later. She prowled around until she found an old fireplace poker that had probably been retired to the attic well before World War II. She jammed the pointed end of the heavy iron bar between the hasp of the lock and the frame of the trunk, gave one good pull on the poker, and was rewarded with a loud crack and a clanking thud as the hasp fell clean off the trunk. Apparently, the wooden trunk was less well-preserved than the lock had been.

  She set down the poker and knelt before the trunk, took hold of the lid, and pulled up on it gently. It resisted for a moment, and then popped silently open, puffing out a faint cloud of the dust that had lain undisturbed for generations. The hinges squeaked slightly, feebly resisting their unaccustomed movement.

  As the lid swung open, she felt a half-dozen emotions flutter through her heart, like a flock of birds chasing each other through a narrow byway, one after the other.

  She had felt that way many times before—on a dig when the tomb was opened, when the fossil was uncovered, when she opened the envelope holding the lab report that would confirm or collapse her theory. Excitement, anticipation, a dream of the wonderful things about to be discovered, a faint disappointment when the mundane reality was not as marvelous as the possibilities, a gentle self-rebuke for forgetting her scientific detachment, a hopeful reminder to herself that wonders might still be hidden if she looked a bit further.

  For there was nothing in the trunk but the sort of things she should have expected—personal items and old clothes for an old man, possessions stored away with great reverence, memories redolent with the smell of old mothballs and attic-baked air, things no one could bear to throw out when the family patriarch died. A silk shirt, a pair of gold wire-rimmed bifocals in a worn case, a lacquered wooden hatbox with a browning straw boater in it, a grey woolen suit that must have been hot and scratchy in a Mississippi summer. A wizened corncob pipe, and with it a gnarled and much-smoked briar, still bright and gleaming from its last polishing sometime in the previous century.

  Carefully, gently, she lifted each item from the trunk. Under the hatbox was a stack of elderly books. She picked them up one by one and riffled through the pages. A bible—not a big family bible, but a small pocket volume that a man might keep by him when he traveled. A Tale of Two Cities—a handsome book with a hand-tooled leather binding and illustrated with color plates, printed in 1887. History of the Negro Race in America by George Washington Williams, 1886. Narrative of Sojourner Truth, no printing date given. All the volumes were well-thumbed, much read. These had to be the books Zebulon Jones had kept by his bedside; the best-loved books—old friends he had visited often. Barbara felt it a shame that they had been packed away with the other relics, stifled in the darkness instead of being put in a place of honor in the library. Books, especially such favorites of Zebulon’s, should have been put where they could live, where the family could see and touch and read the words their much-honored ancestor had loved. She set down the Sojourner Truth and looked back in the trunk.

  There was one more book there, smaller and more worn than the others. She took it out, examined the spine and binding. There was no title anywhere. Barely daring to think what she had found, she opened it, turned a page or two, and her heart skipped a beat.

  The carefully scripted legend on the first page read:

  ZEBULON JONES

  A JOURNAL, DIARY, AND MEMORY BOOK

  of Current Occasions

  and

  Times Past

  1891

  Barbara smiled excitedly as she read the words. This was the prize, the jewel beyond price. No one still living had known that Zebulon had even kept a journal. This would have stories to tell. She touched the book to her face, breathed in its fragrance, opened it to the first page of narrative, and marveled at what she had in her hands.

  Beyond any question of how one m
easured time, the book was old, and rich with experience. The pages were limp, worn, darkened by time. Precise, angular handwriting marched across the unlined pages with the same certainty and confidence with which it had been set down, nearly a century ago, but now the once jet-black ink was faintly brownish in places. The leather binding, softened by much handling and long years, exhaled the scents of the decades it had survived—the musk of sweaty hands, the faint hint of tobacco after being jammed in the same pocket with a much-smoked pipe, the flavor of mothballs and old wool, testimony that the book had spent many years in the old trunk with the stored-away clothes.

  “Barbara? Child, you up there again?” A deep, resonant voice echoed up from the stairwell, breaking the spell of the moment. It was Barbara’s mother, Georgina Jones, a solid, no-nonsense, matronly woman.

  “It’s me, Mama. What is it?”

  “I knew you couldn’t stay out of that dusty attic when the aunts started gabbing. Come on down here. The touch football game is over and they’re setting out the desserts. Better hurry, or you won’t get any of Cousin Rose’s apple pie.”

  Barbara smiled in spite of herself. “Coming, Mama.” She put everything but the journal back in the trunk, closed the lid, balanced the hasp back in place, and put the fireplace poker back where she had found it.

  She went down the stairs, carrying Zebulon’s journal book, back toward the family gathering below. She stopped off at the little corner bedroom Great-aunt Josephine had put her up in, and hid the journal away in the top drawer of the wardrobe. Sooner or later, she’d have to admit to her crime of trunk-cracking. On the other hand, the discovery of the journal would serve as a great defense against sharp tongues—but she wanted a chance to read Grandfather’s Zeb’s words before anyone else could. She had always liked finding secrets—and liked knowing them when no one else did.

  <>

  But Rose’s apple pie first, and Clare’s brownies, and George’s pecan pie, and three kinds of pumpkin pie and two of shoo-fly, and the little children racing around. The oldsters were settled into their overstuffed chairs, comfortably close to each other—and to the buffet table laid out specially for the occasion in the living room (which the Southern branch of the family insisted on calling the parlor), with their grown children bringing them their desserts and coffee. It was not just the food, of course. It was the family, the closeness, the love, the constant recollection of a proud past, a confident eye toward the future—and a real Thanksgiving celebration of a contented and comfortable present.