Orphan of Creation Read online

  “Diagnostics? What does that mean, you can tell what it died of?”

  “Huh? Oh, no. To a paleoanthropologist, a diagnostic is a set of tests you can run to see if a given specimen is a member of a given species. One diagnostic might be, say, the angle between the point where the spinal cord enters the skull and a given feature on the cranium. That sort of thing.”

  “So you can just look at one little tooth and say what kind of— of australopithecine it’s from?”

  “Nope,” Rupert said cheerfully. “Can’t be done. Sometimes we can’t even tell for sure if it’s australopithecine or Homo. Remember our jockey and our basketball player? The sizes and proportions between those two extremes will contain most, though not all, of the range of human variance. Now suppose we had just dug up, say, this.” He carefully picked up one of Ambrose’s leg bones and turned it over in his hands. “A little odd in some respects, but this bone falls well within that human range. But one look at Ambrose’s head and you know he ain’t human. There can be ambiguities if you only have part of the skeleton.

  “But what makes it even worse is that we have never found a complete australopithecine skeleton until now, and rarely have we found much more than a partially complete cranium and mandible—that is the main part of the skull and the jaw—and it’s rarer still that we’ve found a complete and undamaged skull. Some of the ones that have been found we dug up were shattered into a hundred pieces. They were put together all right, but you can’t ever be exactly sure that the angles between the pieces were right, or that you’ve guessed the size of the missing pieces correctly.

  “The point is that our sample base of data for the entire genus Australopithecus is so scrappy that it’s almost impossible to get any hard comparative figures out of it. There are guesses piled on guesses piled on estimates based on probable reconstructions based on what might as well be tossing a coin. Which in turn means my proof that these australopithecines aren’t the same as one of the known species will be shot down by someone who interprets the figures differently, and we’ll all be arguing about it for years to come. That’s the thing about paleo—you’re never quite sure about anything.”

  Aunt Jo frowned. “I thought you scientists were supposed to be dedicated to truth or something. But this is what you do all day, what you do with your life? Stare at piles of bones and measure them and argue over them even though it won’t prove anything? That’s being a scientist?”

  Rupert smiled. “Next you’ll be telling me that I should be out in the fresh air and sunshine instead of playing inside. Seriously, though, this”—he gestured to the piles of bones—”this isn’t what I do with my life—it’s what I have to do to get to my real work. I’m not in this racket because I like bones. What I’m really interested in is hands. Motor dexterity. How did we and our hands come to be able to make things—and when? We’ve never gotten a decent set of australopithecine hand bones until now.

  “I’ve always wondered just what it was that set off the first wave of hominid toolmaking. After all, tools are one of the things that make a human human. Try to imagine getting through a day without using an artifact, a made thing. We aren’t the only tool-making and tool-using creatures on this earth, but we are the only ones who need tools, who use them for all the jobs of staying alive all the time. You could say tools define us, make us us.

  “We know you don’t have to be smart to use tools.

  Sea otters and those ditzy little birds in the Galapagos use tools, and they aren’t all that bright. Chimps not only use natural tools, but make tools. And there is some evidence for non-primate toolmaking. It might be as crude as snapping off a twig to get it the right length, but it is toolmaking. And if some damn little idiot tweetie-bird can do it, why not Ambrose and company? He had to be at least as smart as a chimp.

  “Besides, the australopithecines had better hands than chimps. Chimp hands don’t have as good a precision grip, and the thumb doesn’t oppose as nicely. It’s clumsy. Ambrose, though—very nice hands. If he were smart enough to spell, he would have been a pretty fair typist.

  “Ambrose and company should have been perfectly capable of toolmaking. But we’ve never found any incontrovertible tools that were unambiguously associated with australopithecines. There are some chipped pebbles that might be tools that might have been made by an australopithecine—except they might belong to Homo habilus. Except a ways back White and Johanson dug up a largely complete habilus skeleton—and the postcranial bones are more apelike and much less human-like than Ambrose’s. Go figure.”

  Aunt Jo was definitely getting confused. “But if there aren’t any tools, doesn’t that proves the australopithecines didn’t make tools?”

  “It’s awfully tough to prove a negative. Besides which,” Rupert picked a wooden ruler off his workbench and gestured with it, “you have to ask, will this be around in a million years? Three million? Would the tools the chimps make—twigs stripped of leaves, and leaves mashed up into a water-sponge—would they last? It’s very fashionable to think that Homo is the only toolmaking hominid genus, but I think it’s possible that the australopithecines did it too. I think it even more possible since I’ve seen these hand bones. But before this, I didn’t have any tools, and I didn’t have any hands, so I started examining endocranial casts for clues.”

  “Endo—wait a minute, casts of the inside of the cranium—inside the head?” Aunt Jo knit her brow in some alarm. This boy could talk about the most ghoulish things in the most matter-of-fact way.

  “Right. All you do, more or less, is pour latex into the hole in the base of the cranium that the spinal cord comes through. Slosh it around until it covers the interior, let it dry, and very carefully pull the mold back out the hole. Tricky, but it can be done. See, the brain leaves traces on the inside of the skull. You can see the folds and lumps and bumps of the brain that used to be there. So I got a bunch of casts together, and looked for signs of pronounced development of the areas responsible for motor dexterity. Got a lot of good measurements and shot ‘em through a lot of statistical programs, compared ‘em to human and chimp endocasts so see which the australopithecine motor-dexterity regions resembled more closely.”

  “And?”

  Rupert shrugged. “And I got a big maybe—but at least an intriguing maybe. No proof, no definite conclusions. There almost never are such things in this business. You just try and pin down one microscopic corner of the big picture.”

  He paused, and a strange, thoughtful look came over him. “The studies we make almost seem trivial, but the weird thing is that paleontologists start out asking the biggest questions of all—where did mankind come from, how did we get to the point where we could turn back and look the other way? How are we so like the other primates, all other animals, and yet so weirdly, wildly different?” He held up two fingers very close together and showed them to Aunt Jo. “There’s that much difference between a chimp’s DNA and mine, less than the distance between a horse’s genes and a donkey’s—and I’d bet the farm that Ambrose’s genes were even more like mine. We start out asking how that could possibly be, where the change came and what it was—and we end up in tiny corners of inquiry, measuring old teeth and waiting for skullfuls of latex to dry. We learn more all the time, and yet the big answers seem farther off than ever.”

  He picked up the ruler again and slapped it thoughtfully against his other hand. “And at times, I have to admit that digging up bones is never going to answer the real question, because we’ll never dig up the fossil of the first soul, and know who had it and how they got it. We’ll never know, exactly, what made us human and Ambrose something else, something less.”

  Aunt Jo looked hard at Rupert and frowned. “Young man, I have understood every word you’ve said—but the whole thing put together confuses the life out of me.”

  Rupert raised an eyebrow, tilted his head to one side. “Join the club,” he said wistfully.

  <>

  The wizened old face looked as if it had not
faced the sun for a generation, and the wispy stubble on the old man’s cheeks was grey, dismal, half-hearted, as if it could not grow properly for lack of light. The air itself was cloudy grey in the editor’s private office of the Gowrie Gazette. Smoke tendrils slithered up from the cigar wedged into Joe Teems’s hand. The gloom and dust wrapped around the office like a web, as if the old man were a greyish spider sitting in the trap he weaved, waiting for a victim.

  The color had long since gone from Teems’s hair, his face, his clothes. The only hints of something beyond grey were in the rheumy yellow of his eyes, and the unhealthy redness of his wound-like mouth, which hung half-open in an evil-looking grin, a moist, dark cavern full of teeth as ragged as a row of old tombstones.

  “What you want here, boy?” Joe Teems demanded of Livingston, and eased his damp cigar back into his mouth.

  Livingston swallowed hard and clenched his fists, resisting the urge to swat down this nasty, ugly, hateful old man, resisting the urge to run away from this horrifying ruin of the tyrant who had terrorized Liv that whole long, miserable summer. Liv focused on the word “boy” in his mind, concentrated on what it meant, and got angry. Suddenly he felt no fear, no anger, no anxiety, but only cold contempt for this shambling wreck, this smelly old man who treated Livingston as an inferior.

  “I need to look at some back issues of the Gazette, Mr. Teems,” Livingston said, his voice level, calm, controlled. “Some issues are missing from the library collection.”

  “Is that so? Is that a certifiable fact?” Teems stood up from behind his desk, his rumpled suit a sea of cigar ash and faded stains. “And just who the hell might you be, to come barging in here like this,” he demanded, his husky voice suddenly angry and sharp. “Why should a busy man like myself let some stranger—some uppity colored boy who talks real pretty—snoop around in the newspaper’s archives?” He stretched the last words out grandly, and made a broad, sweeping gesture with his hand, as if indicating some palatial storehouse full of back issues. “Who the hell do you think you are?”

  Livingston kept his voice steady, but he could feel his heart pounding as he struggled to keep in his anger. “It’s Livingston Jones, Mr. Teems. Josephine Jones’s nephew. I delivered papers for you one summer, when I was a kid.”

  “Delivered papers? Years ago? For me?” Teems asked as he touched his hand to his chest theatrically, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “Well, then, sir, I must be eternally in your debt. Just because your family has been a thorn in my side my whole life, just because I am even now recalling just how useless a paperboy you were, that’s no reason for me to say no. I’ll say no just because I don’t like you.” He took a long drag on his cigar and glared at Livingston. “Now get out of here.”

  “But—”

  “Go away. Now. I got work to do.”

  Teems sat back down at his desk and shuffled idly through a stack of papers he didn’t really care about, pointedly ignoring Livingston.

  Liv stood there for a moment trying to think of something to say, and finally spun on his heels, opened the door leading to the tiny newsroom, stomped out of the dismal office, and slammed the door behind him. The missing newspapers were a wild goose chase anyway—nothing more than the last and most unlikely place he might find some sort of mention in print of the creatures. Not worth getting upset about, not worth begging a sour old cracker like Teems for help.

  Liv found himself standing in the well-lit, slightly scruffy but clean and tidy, perfectly ordinary newsroom of the Gazette—a room so different from Teems’s gloomy sanctum sanctorum that Liv felt disoriented for a moment, as if he had stepped out of his bedroom door and found himself in an airline terminal. All the people in the room—the two or three reporters, the receptionist, even the guy who had come in to drop off a classified ad—looked up and stared at Livingston.

  The Gazette building was a low, single-story structure, a converted glass-front store on Main Street, with the newsroom at the front of the place, Teems’s office tucked in one rear corner, and the entrance to the print shop in the other. Livingston had to parade down the very public aisles of the newsroom, very obviously having been kicked out. He shrugged and walked across the room toward the outside door and the street, staring straight ahead so he wouldn’t have to look anyone in the eye.

  “No luck, huh?”

  Livingston glanced down involuntarily as he passed the last of the desks to see an improbably cheerful-looking young white man grinning up at him. Liv stopped. “Nope.”

  “Not surprised. Old Man Teems hasn’t said yes to anyone for years.” The young man offered his hand. “Pete Ardley. One of the Gazette’s tame reporters. You’re not from around here, are you?”

  Liv shook his hand. “Livingston Jones. No, I’m visiting out at my Aunt’s Jo’s place.”

  “Right. Well, what can we do for you?” Ardley swiveled his chair around to face Livingston.

  “But what about—” Liv cocked his head toward the editor’s office.

  “Him? Just because he said no? Relax. He doesn’t care about what people do. He just likes being mean, especially to blacks. Besides, he never comes in here—not even to go in and out of his office. He has his own rear entrance. So what do you need?”

  Liv shrugged. “I just wanted to get a look at some back issues, old ones the library didn’t have. Pre-Civil —ah, Pre-War Between the States.” Liv almost forgot to use the term preferred in the South.

  “Piece of cake. C’mon back here.” Ardley stood up and led Livingston through the newsroom to a door marked Library. Ardley opened it and they stepped into a small, windowless room hidden in darkness. Ardley flicked a wall switch and the overhead fluorescent flickered on with a quiet hum, throwing a flat, shadowless light over shelves of bound volumes that went from floor to ceiling. A single table with a couple of chairs sat in the middle, taking up most of the floor space in the tiny room. “This goes from about 1920 on back. The more current issues are in the next room, but I guess this should cover you. Keep the door shut and Teems will never know you’re here. See you later.”

  Ardley stepped out of the room and closed the door behind him. Liv looked up at the wall of shelves, the books that contained the raw materials of a small town’s history. He sighed, pulled his notebook out of his pocket, and started looking for the volumes the library didn’t have. This looked to be one wild goose chase he couldn’t get out of.

  <>

  Two hours later, Liv had lost the last shred of enthusiasm for the project. It was a struggle to force himself to turn over every sheet. His eyes were tired and strained from reading the tiny lines of type, the crude efforts of a half-amateur typesetter one hundred and thirty-plus years before. Each time he turned over a page to confront a new sea of type, it felt not as if he were closer to the end of his task, but as if he were pushing farther out into the tractless depth of a job that had no end.

  He did not know what, exactly, he was looking for, and so felt compelled to read every word of every four-page edition of the ancient paper. Time and again, he found himself paying no attention whatever to what he was reading, the words seemingly drifting in his eyes and fading away to nothing before his brain comprehended them. He would shake his head, force himself to concentrate, and with infinite reluctance backtrack and reread the parts he had tuned out on. It all made him long for the good old days of cramming for exams.

  But then, finally, he found it. Found It, and felt again the way he had when his trowel had first poked into Ambrose’s rotting canvas shroud, knew what Barbara must have felt like when she had read over old Zebulon’s diary two weeks and a lifetime ago, and found the words that had started this adventure. This was it. Paydirt. One hundred percent unadulterated paydirt. He flipped hurriedly through the rest of that issue, and the next, and the one after that. Nothing. No further mention. But that didn’t matter. This was enough. Livingston got up and headed for the door.

  <>

  Pete Ardley heard the door to the morgue open and turned around
in time to see the big guy, Livingston Jones, waving his arm to get his attention. Ardley stood up and went over.

  “I’ve got it!” Jones said excitedly. “Listen, is there any way I could run off a set of Xeroxes?”

  Ardley immediately noticed that Jones still had not told him what he was looking for, or what he had found—which suggested (a) Liv wouldn’t tell even if Ardley asked straight out and (b) it might be worth finding out. “Sure,” he said, thinking quickly. So how to find out? “But maybe it’d be smarter if I did it for you. They’re kind of persnickety about who uses the Xerox machine.”

  “Great!” Jones said. He stepped back into the room and handed Ardley the bound volume for 1851. “The June 13 issue, okay?”

  “The whole thing?” Ardley asked.

  “All four pages,” Liv said cheerfully. “I want to sort of have the background, the context.”

  “Okay, wait in here,” Ardley said. He took the book and went across the newsroom to the copier while Jones went back inside the morgue room and gathered up his notes. Five minutes later, Ardley watched Jones step out of the newspaper office and into the street, carrying photocopies of the old newspaper’s pages. He climbed into an old Dodge, gunned the engine, and took off.