Again, Dangerous Visions Part 53

Morrisot and Denise shook the sweat from their eyes and chattered like children, excitedly swapping deductions.

"One or two of the caves may only be a storehouse or stable."

"There doesn't seem to be any sign of cultivation, Pierre."

"No. I suppose it's possible they used to live largely on fishing, but they've been forced to hunt only at night in recent years, because of all these launches and fishing boats wandering about the coast."

"That would explain the attacks on the farms. This country's impossible to cultivate, apart from a few p.r.i.c.kly pears and brambles. The poor creatures must be half-starving."

"I think maybe the regular shape to the right of the caves is some form of storage tank for water."

"The Fiume Zente must be full of water in the winter."

Piron mentioned that the sun was getting low, so they stopped talking and took some photographs before leaving. When they had finished, Piron led them back.

That evening Professor Morrisot recorded a brief talk for Provencal television news: "If our conclusions are correct about their eating habits it all adds up to a picture of a very simple, crude, small society of gatherers and hunters. We needn't pay too much attention to the fact that they live in caves. There are still plenty of peasants living in caves in Europe: in Spain, Portugal, Greece, Sardinia, even here in Corsica." (Denise had insisted on the poor; peasants' plug.) "All the same, it's a very strange phenomenon, especially with tourists flocking the beaches so near. If the tribe is at a fairly primitive stage it would fit in with Giussepe Gavino's eyewitness account, allowing for narrative exaggeration. What we cannot a.s.sess until we have actually confronted the tribe, is the linguistic and cultural level of the group. It may well be that years of isolation and inbreeding have had deleterious physiological and psychological effects on the development of the phylum..."

Reporters tried to interview Morrisot, but he stayed in hiding with Denise in his hotel room.

"I managed to get permission for troops to patrol the road from St. Florent to He Rousse to prevent reporters from doing their own field-work."

Denise was silent; she felt afraid for the innocent group of savages they were about to intrude on.

"Will you sleep with me tonight?" Morrisot asked.

"No. I'm going to my own room. Touch of the Electras tonight. Feel I'd shrivel and get sucked up into your b.a.l.l.s to start again. I'd be too negative."

"Too frigid."

"Please yourself."

It was still dark by the time they reached the desert. They walked for a while under moonlight, then rested, waiting for the dawn, listening to the crickets in silence. Denise thought about the chubby brown businessmen sleeping on their launches nearby with their lovely, stupid, brown mistresses. She thought about the workers and their families in caravans despoiling the Corsican coastline, duped into affluence and the pursuit of brainless pleasure. She remembered black-robed beggar women, hunched on the pavements of Tehran, suckling their babies and clutching at the trouser legs of pa.s.sersby. She felt disgust at all mankind, mushrooming demographically and technologically, reaching for the moon, but spiritually degenerate, and a wave of tenderness filled her for the tribe of poor creatures who'd survived here in ignorance of the dialectic to destruction going on around them. Then she laughed aloud at her own pomposity and said: "It's Decarte's fault."

Morrisot laughed too and said, "Not Rousseau?"

He was with her, but she still loathed him, intellectual sugardaddy.

As the dawn started to break Piron led them off towards Monte Robbia.

They heard a regular tapping noise long before they saw anything. Even Piron was excited; their mouths felt dry, their legs shivery as they approached the caves. At last they sweated over the top of an escarpment and stumbled 50,000 years into the past.

In the middle of the blazing desert they felt suddenly cold and frightened.

Just as Giussepe Gavino had described, a hairy terrifying beast of a man sat hunched on the ground, chipping a stone axe-head.

"Quite unbelievable," Morrisot whispered.

"Look at the foramen magnum."

"It must be."

It was Neanderthal man, identical to the models in the Natural History Museum of Chicago, only living and moving. At the dozenth look through the binoculars they knew it wasn't a heat-fantasy. Like a crazed audience stepping through the screen into the film, they started to walk closer.

The Neanderthaloid heard them and looked up. He jumped up in the air and rushed back to the central cave and chattered. Another younger savage dashed out. They both started to throw rocks and pebbles with vicious force and accuracy. Piron, Morrisot and Denise took cover behind a rock.

A pebble had hit Piron on the knee but he was unhurt. He fingered his holster nervously.

"Mme. Blondel," he said, "you ought not to look. He's naked. I should arrest him; it's against the law."

The shower of pebbles stopped. Denise peeped over the top of the rock. The two Neanderthaloids were a lot closer.

Without warning the others Denise undid her shirt, took off her bra, stood up and walked out from the cover of the rock. Morrisot told her to come back. She walked slowly up the scree, body erect, eyes fixed on the savages. They made no movement, but allowed her to approach. She stood about a yard away from the older savage and they looked at each other for about two minutes, without a gesture or noise. The savage at last raised his long, powerful arm and touched one of the girl's white b.r.e.a.s.t.s momentarily, then lowered his arm. Denise turned round and walked back to the rock. She b.u.t.toned up her shirt and told Morrisot and Piron to go with her down to the gorge. The three of them descended slowly, in terror.

"What other way was there of proving I was a mammal? Our clothes must be quite scaring."

"Fellow mammal! I'd sooner trust you with an ape. It's too dangerous. We should wait till we've built up a team."

"We're too short of time, Pierre. Piron obviously can't keep his mouth shut. He wanted to arrest them for indecent exposure. There'll be photographers and doctors and G.o.d knows who else there soon. Anyway, a big team, full of petty interdisciplinary strife, it would only put them off. You know I could make contact on my own. That...creature trusts me."

"I don't."

"Field-work's my strong point. Remember Persia-Taboos and Authority in Tribes of the Arajon River. Brilliant you said."

"I remember you nearly stirred up another Kurdish war."

"We must find out everything. What happened to the incest taboo? Levi-Strauss would s.h.i.t a brick. What's their linguistic level? What's their system of socialization?"

"I know, I know. Has there been any physiological evolution at all? Did the nicks on the Krapina fragment really suggest cannibalism? Was Leroi-Gourham's burial-rights theory correct? Religions. Mythology. Everything. I go mad thinking about it."

"You must let me have a try."

"I wish I knew what was best."

That evening Morrisot gave an even longer talk on television: "What Mme. Blondel, Chief-Constable Piron and myself saw today on Monte Robbia is of staggering importance to the entire world. It will change the whole of man's knowledge and conception of himself. I myself can still scarcely credit it. If our observation is correct these creatures are identical with Neanderthal man, a separate species of 'h.o.m.o sapiens' which became extinct about 40,000 years ago. 40,000! That was during the last Ice Age, the Wurm Glaciation, when Sardinia and Corsica were still joined to the mainland. Their skulls have been found all over Europe-Italy, France, Turkey, Gibraltar. And somehow, how we don't know yet, this tiny splinter has managed to survive in the Desert des Agriates, apparently without evolving. Such freaks have been known to occur in the world of reptiles and fishes-but never with mammals, let alone primates..."

Meanwhile the whole desert was being cordoned off by the army and navy, with some emergency help from the Foreign Legion.

As the news spread, charter flights brought biologists, zoologists, ecologists, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, journalists, and hopeful voyeurs from all over the world.

Denise refused to talk further with Morrisot that night. He wished she would let him touch her. Her eyes were fanatical and kept him at a distance; Was it the air-conditioned hotel room or the cave entrance in the desert which was the dream?

The early morning freshness had already evaporated. A detachment of troops under Major Sauvage faced the caves from an escarpment on the flank of the mountain. Dr. Morrisot, Professor Marmoutier, a zoologist, and other privileged intellectuals stood close to the troops, scanning the face of the mountain with binoculars. Two cameramen from French television were attaching their cameras to tripods, and a sound engineer fiddled with his tape recorder.

Denise made a final adjustment to her walkie-talkie, and without looking at Morrisot or the packed onlookers, started a solitary walk toward the caves. Lizards flicked their tails at her and the sunlight shattered itself on the bare white rocks. She felt inhuman, like a mad priestess. The Neanderthaloids had torn the belly out of man's complacency-lord of creation, superman, smasher of atoms-man wasn't G.o.d. These creatures were more than a cul-de-sac, cornered here, they'd survived, fishing, stealing sheep and hens, pa.s.sionate, incestuous, underground men, a living alternative to h.o.m.o Technologicus.

Sweat began to drip down her neck, the rocks were hard through her gym-shoes, and she felt guilty at being human.

Morrisot watched her dejectedly through binoculars. His pa.s.sion had carried her around in a little moral lecture theatre. She was on her own now. She had become separate, reified through the binoculars. It was finished; she no longer needed him-pseudo-radical, inhibited egghead.

Denise broke radio silence with dramatic intensity: "I may now be walking to my death and I want the world to hear my thoughts about the discovery of this family, while I make my attempt to contact them.

"The creatures are ugly, hairy and ferocious. I am beautiful and intelligent. They are free. I am enslaved to civilization.

"The contact that we make will be an epiphany of the history of the world. Angel and beast shall be one.

"Already the creatures are losing their freedom. The Desert des Agnates has become a zoo; the reporters, and cranks, and intellectuals, and tourists are flocking to see the show. In a few weeks' time, my creatures will be clothed for decency's sake, examined by physicians, psychiatrists, linguists, X-rayed, inoculated, measurements made of their teeth and occipital protuberances. They'll die of boredom and confusion. They are doomed already. Like Cuvier prodding the b.u.t.tocks of the Hottentot Venus and measuring her l.a.b.i.a minora, we'll annihilate the Neanderthaloids with our insatiable curiosity. Like the Yamana tribesmen, decimated by English diseases in the wake of puritan missionary zeal, my creatures will be slaves to the imperialism of modern progress, hygiene, enlightenment, civilization and repression.

"To propitiate for the sins of mankind, and to make symbolic contact with the life we have rejected, I intend to let the ugly monster I met yesterday f.u.c.k me in full view of the eyes of the world. May the G.o.ds of darkness be with me."

"What the h.e.l.l's she talking about?" Major Sauvage shouted to Morrisot. "Can't we stop her? She's mad."

"No, leave her." Morrisot's mouth felt bitter and dehydrated. He had been here before in some nightmare.

Denise stopped walking and switched off the radio. There was a darker shape against the darkness of the cave. The shadow leapt out and stood facing her in the sunlight. It was the Neanderthaloid who had touched her the previous day. He stood still, grinding his bared teeth.

Denise carefully placed the radio on the ground, took off her clothes with deliberation, wrapped them in her jeans and placed them on a rock.

Morrisot could hardly look at her white skin exposed to the full morning sunlight. He was sweating profusely. He accepted a cigarette off Marmoutier. The cameras whirred impa.s.sively.

The Neanderthaloid flicked into life. He was upon her in three gigantic cat-leaps. He picked her up, hoisted her over his shoulder fireman-style, and started running up to the summit of Monte Robbia by the easy slope.

He smelled of urine and his body felt like coconut matting, but Denise made no resistance. She was in a trance, anesthetized-a pa.s.sive sacrifice.

"We must go and rescue her," Major Sauvage burst out at last, half-embarra.s.sed.

"No, he might kill her," said Morrisot, unsure of his motives. Major Sauvage swore and told his men to be ready to fire. Morrisot and Marmoutier begged the Major not to shoot. The Major refused to listen.

The grunting savage, salivating slightly, placed Denise on the topmost rock, an altarlike slab, and mounted her quickly and brutally. Denise, her back pressed into the sharp rock shouted out in pain and ecstasy.

The cry echoed over the valley. Morrisot dropped the gla.s.ses to his chest and felt a warm, involuntary spurt of diarrhea trickle down his leg.

Major Sauvage told the troops to take aim. Marmoutier murmured a feeble protest, his eyes fixed on the mountain. The cameras continued whirring.

Within seconds it was over, but Denise's legs still clung to the Neanderthaloid. He raised the rest of her body up by the hair, freed himself of her legs, and lifted her high above his s.h.a.ggy head, where she lolled, naked and unconscious. He held her there for about half a minute, then let out a deep-throated scream and hurled her over the cliff to the rocks two hundred feet below.