Orphan of Creation Read online

  Her heart was racing, and she felt as if all her senses were working in overdrive, amplifying all the messages that went to her brain, making her vision clearer, her finger more nimble, her ears alert to the sound of every grain of dirt as it moved. To her, the damp, dismal odor of the excavation was bracing, an invigorating wind to a sailor too long apart from the sea. The moment filled her with the gladness of coming home to her own world. She felt more alive than she had in years.

  It was again a distinct effort to stick to the job, to use approved procedure, to remember that rushing could still ruin this dig, that there were very good reasons for the dull, relentless routine of standard digging. She forced herself to be calm.

  Livingston, watching her, was plainly astonished that she wasn’t digging the find out, but simply clearing the overburden from over and around it as far down as the base of the current horizon. She finished quickly, and then, even more incredibly, turned her back on the find and started clearing the rest of the horizon.

  “Aren’t you going to dig it out, after all that fuss, darling?” Barbara’s mother demanded as she leaned in over the hole.

  “Not yet, Momma. If we just go straight down, we might miss something, or stab a trowel through it. We have to dig around it on all sides, make sure we’ve got the whole find cleared before we go any farther.”

  Livingston set down the camera and silently shook his head. He could see how excited she was, how much this meant to her. How could she be so controlled? Well, if she could . . .

  He picked up his trowel and knelt down beside her again, and the two of them carefully cleared the last of the existing horizon.

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  A half-hour later, there was at least the satisfaction of knowing the careful procedure was worthwhile. The excavation was rather small, two meters by two meters, about twice the area of a good-sized dining room table. It did not entirely encompass the find. Once the horizon was completely cleared, they could see that the hump of canvas extended well past the grids they had been digging out, and seemed to be pitched downward a bit as well, as if it were a submarine diving down into the E3 grid. The top of the canvas was a mass of knotted wrinkles. To Barbara, who had seen such things before, it looked as if they had dropped the body onto the tarp, then used the tarp as a sling to lift the body and drop it into the coffin. Once the body was in the coffin, the remaining canvas had simply been shoved down on top of the body any which way and the lid nailed down.

  Barbara sent some of the younger kids for an old bed sheet, and they came racing back in record time. Barbara and Livingston gently laid the sheet down over the grimy hump of canvas, and Livingston set to work opening the E3 and E4 grids. Working as fast and as carefully as he could, he dug it out, doing his best not to dump too much dirt onto the grimy treasure he had found. He even took a perverse pleasure in keeping a professional-looking side and corner on the new dig. In short order he had brought the new digging nearly down to the level of the old.

  They pulled the sheet and its dusting of dirt off Livingston’s discovery and set to work again, first with trowels and then with the brushes again, clearing the dirt around the pathetic little mound. Finally, they had a two-meter by three-meter grid cleared, with the find lying more or less at its center.

  The canvas was not as well preserved over the parts of the body that had sunk into the ground a bit, mostly in the E3 grid. As Barbara brushed the dirt from one patch, it crumbled away, and the dirt that had seeped under it generations before collapsed.

  There, exposed to her eyes for the first time, was a bit of leg bone, the lower end of a femur.

  She looked at it, cried out—and her heart worse than broke. It felt as if she had been flying and had suddenly crashed into a brick wall.

  It was a human femur, not a gorilla’s. It was all for nothing, nothing in the world.

  She had dug up some perfectly ordinary human burial, one of millions, billions in the world, an old grave some poor bastard had been thrown in, under the crossroads where they buried murderers and thieves, and a story had grown up about it. That one glimpse of bone meant all her work, all her planning—all her Christmas money spent on hardware and on paying Liv—had gone toward making a fool of herself in front of her family, a wild goose chase after a fable some old man had scribbled down a hundred years before.

  She dropped her brush, squatted down, leaned against the wall of the excavation, and fought back the tears.

  “Barbara!” her mother cried. “What’s the matter, baby?” The old woman, unmindful of the dirt getting on her good clothes, let herself down into the excavation and reached for her child. “Baby, what’s happened? What’s wrong?”

  “Oh, Momma, it’s a human. Look at that bone. Human as you or I are. It’s not old Zebulon’s goddamned imported gorilla, just some regular person they put in the ground here. I’ve wasted the whole weekend, and spent all that money, and torn up Aunt Josephine’s garden, and it’s all for nothing.”

  “How can you tell from that little bit of ugly bone sticking out?”

  “Momma, I went to school for six years learning how to tell the difference! Damn, damn, damn.” By now the family members standing along the edge of the dig were shifting around uncertainly, not quite sure how to respond.

  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

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  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. B
ut 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.