Darwin's Children Part 39

As the image swung around and around, he began to discern facial features, a closed eye, a blob of ear, hair matted and curled, a hint of cooked and distorted flesh slumped from the back of the skull.

"Pretty awful," Merton said.

"They suffocated before the heat got to them," Eileen said. "I hope they did, anyway."

"Early-stage Tierra del Fuegan?" Mitch asked.

"That's what most of us think. From the Australian migration out of South and Central America."

Such migrations had been charted more and more often in the last fifteen years; Australian skeletons and a.s.sociated artifacts found near the tip of South America had been dated to older than thirty thousand years BP, before the present.

The two other women walked around them to reach the exit, as serious and unsocial as porcupines. A plump, red-faced woman a few years younger than Eileen held the flap open for them then stepped in and stood before Mitch. "Is this the famous Mitch Rafelson?" she asked Eileen.

"Mitch, meet Connie Fitz. I told her I'd bring you here."

"Delighted to meet you, after all these years." Fitz wiped her hands on a dusty towel hanging from her belt before shaking hands. "Have you showed him the good stuff?"

"We're getting there."

"Best picture of Gertie is on sweep 21," Fitz advised.

"I know," Eileen said testily. "It's my show."

"Sorry. I'm the mother hen," Fitz said. "The others are still arguing."

"Spare me," Eileen said. Another image cast their faces in a pale greenish light.

"Say h.e.l.lo to Gertie," Merton said. He glanced up at Mitch, waiting to see his reaction.

Mitch poked the surface of the screen, making the light pool under his finger. He looked up, on the edge of anger. "You're kidding me. This is a joke."

"No joke," Merton said.

Eileen magnified the image. Then, clearing his throat, Mitch asked, "Fraud?"

"What do you think?" Eileen asked.

"They're in close a.s.sociation? Not in different layers?"

Eileen nodded. "They were buddies, probably traveling together. No infants, but as you can see, Gertie was maybe fifteen or sixteen, and she was probably gravid when the ash covered her."

"Either that or she ate babies," Merton said. Another twitch of the lip from Eileen.

"Oliver's on borrowed time," Fitz said.

"Matriarchy," Merton accused, deadpan.

The tent suddenly seemed very stuffy. Mitch would have sat down had there been a convenient chair. "She looks early. Different from Charlene. Is she a hybrid?" he asked.

"No one's willing to say," Eileen replied. "You'll like our late-night debates. A few weeks back, when I wanted you to join us, everyone shouted me down. Now, we're all at each other's throats, and Oliver, I'm told, convinced Daney it was time."

"I did," Merton said.

"Personally, I'm glad you're here," Eileen added.

"I'm not," Fitz said. "If the feds find out about you, if there's any publicity at all, we're NAGPRA toast."

"Tell me more, Mitch," Eileen suggested.

Mitch ma.s.saged the back of his neck and for the ninth time watched the image of the skull grow and rotate. "Skull seems compressed. She's long-headed, more even than the Australian. There's a flint implement near her hand, and she's carrying some sort of gra.s.s bag over her shoulder, if I'm not mistaken."

"You're not."

"Filled with what looks like bush or small tree roots."

"Desperation diet," Fitz said.

"Maybe that was just her a.s.signment, gathering roots for the stone soup."

Merton looked puzzled. Eileen explained stone soup.

"How colonial," Merton said.

"Ever the B-movie Brit, aren't you?" Fitz said.

"Please, children," Eileen warned.

"Relatively tall, taller than Charlene, maybe, and pretty robust, heavy boned," Mitch continued, trying to talk himself out of what he was seeing. "Sloping forehead, mid-sized to small brain case, but the face is fairly flat. Impressive supraorbital torus. A bit of a sagittal keel, even an occipital torus. I'd love to get a better look at the incisors."

"Shovel-shaped," Eileen said.

Mitch rubbed his limp hand to still the tingling and looked at the others as if all of them might be crazy. "Gertie is much too early. She looks like Broken Hill 1. She's h.o.m.o erectus h.o.m.o erectus."

"Obviously," Fitz said with a sniff.

"They've been extinct for more than three hundred thousand years," Mitch said.

"Apparently not," Eileen said.

Mitch laughed and stood back with a snap as if he had been leaning over a wasp that had suddenly taken flight. "Jesus."

"Is that it?" Eileen asked. "Is that the most you can say?" She was kidding, but her tone had an edge.

"You've had longer to get used to it," Mitch said.

"Who says we're used to it?" Eileen asked.

"What about the fetus?"

"Too early and too little detail," Fitz said. "It's probably a lost cause."

"I'm thinking we should drive a tube, take a thin core sample, and PCR mitochondrial DNA from the remaining integuments," Merton said.

"Dreamer," Fitz said. "They're twenty thousand years old. Besides, the lahar cooked them."

"Not to mush," Merton countered.

"Think like a scientist, not a journalist."

"Shh," Eileen said in deference to Mitch, who was still staring at the rolled-out screen, mesmerized. "Here's what we have on the central group," she said, and paged through another set of ghostly images. "Gertie and Charlene are outliers. These four are Hildegard, Natasha, Sonya, and Penelope. Hildegard was probably the oldest, in her late thirties and already racked with arthritis."

Hildegard, Natasha, and Sonya were clearly h.o.m.o sapiens h.o.m.o sapiens. Penelope was another h.o.m.o erectus h.o.m.o erectus. They lay entwined as if they had died hugging each other, a mandala of bones, elegant in their sad way.

"Some of the hardliners are calling this a flood deposition of una.s.sociated remains," Fitz said.

"How would you you answer them?" Eileen challenged Mitch, reverting to his teacher of old. answer them?" Eileen challenged Mitch, reverting to his teacher of old.

Mitch was still trying to remember to breathe. "They're fully articulated," he said. "They have their arms around each other. They don't lie at odd angles, tossed together. This is in no way a flood deposit."

Mitch was startled to watch Fitz and Eileen hug each other. "These women knew knew each other," Eileen agreed, tears of relief dripping down her cheeks. "They worked together, traveled together. A nomadic band, caught in camp by a burp from Mount Hood. I can feel it." each other," Eileen agreed, tears of relief dripping down her cheeks. "They worked together, traveled together. A nomadic band, caught in camp by a burp from Mount Hood. I can feel it."

"Are you with us?" Fitz asked, her eyes bright and suspicious.

"h.o.m.o erectus. North America. Twenty thousand years ago," Mitch said. Then, frowning, he asked, "Where are the males?"

"To h.e.l.l with that," Fitz fumed. "Are you with us?"

"Yeah," Mitch said, sensing the tension and Eileen's discomfort at his hesitation. "I'm with you." Mitch put his good arm around Eileen's shoulders, sharing the emotion.

Oliver Merton clasped his hands like a boy antic.i.p.ating Christmas. "You realize that this could be a political bombsh.e.l.l," he said.

"For the Indians?" Fitz asked.

"For us all."

"How so?"

Merton grinned like a fiend. "Two different species, living together. It's as if someone's teaching us a lesson."

23.

NEW MEXICO.

d.i.c.ken showed his pa.s.s at the Pathogenics main gate. The three young, burly guards there-machine pistols slung over their shoulders-waved him through. He drove the cart to the valet area and presented the pa.s.s for his car.

"Going for a drink," he told the serious-faced middle-aged woman as she inspected his release.

"Did I ask?" She gave him a seasoned, challenging smile.

"No," he admitted.

"Don't tell us anything," she advised. "We have to report every little thing. Vodka, white wine, or local beer?"

d.i.c.ken must have looked fl.u.s.tered.

"I'm joking," she said. "I'll be back in a few minutes."

She returned driving his leased Malibu, adapted for handicapped drivers.

"Nice setup, all the stuff on the wheel," she said. "Took me a bit to figure it out."

He accepted the inspection pa.s.s, made sure it was completely filled out-there had been some trouble with such things yesterday-and slipped it into a special holder in the visor. The sun was lingering over the rocky gray-and-brown hills beyond the main Pathogenics complex. "Thanks," he said.

"Enjoy," the valet said.

He took the main road out of the complex and drove through rush hour traffic, following the familiar track into Albuquerque, then pulled into the parking lot of the Marriott. Crickets were starting up and the air was tolerable. The hotel rose over the parking lot in one graceless pillar, tan and white against the dark blue night sky, proudly illuminated by big floodlights set around stretches of deep green lawn. d.i.c.ken walked into a low-slung restaurant wing, visited the men's room, then came out and turned left to enter the bar.

The bar was just starting to crowd. Two regulars sat at the bar-a woman in her late thirties, looking as if life and her partners had ridden her hard, and a sympathetic elderly man with a long nose and close-set eyes. The worn-down woman was laughing at something the long-nosed man had just said.

d.i.c.ken sat on a tall stool by a high, tiny table beside a fake plant in an adobe pot. He ordered a Michelob when the waitress got around to him, then sat watching the people come and go, nursing his beer and feeling miserably out of place. n.o.body was smoking, but the air smelled cold and stale, with a tang of beer and liquor.

d.i.c.ken reached into his pocket and withdrew his hand, then, under the table, unfolded a red serviette. He palmed the serviette over the damp napkin on the table, also red, and left it there.

At eight, after an hour and a half, his beer almost gone and the waitress starting to look predatory, he pushed off the stool, disgusted.

Someone touched his shoulder and d.i.c.ken jumped.

"How does James Bond do it?" asked a jovial fellow in a green sport jacket and beige slacks. With his balding pate, round, red Santa nose, lime green golf shirt bulging at the belly, and belt tightened severely to reclaim some girth, the middle-aged man looked like a tourist with a snootful. He smelled like one, too.

"Do what?" d.i.c.ken asked.

"Get the babes when they all know they're just going to die." The balding man surveyed d.i.c.ken with a jaundiced, watery eye. "I can't figure it."

"Do I know you?" d.i.c.ken asked gravely.

"I've got friends watching every porthole. We know the local spooks, and this place is not as haunted as some."

d.i.c.ken put down his beer. "I don't know what you're talking about," he said.

"Is Dr. Jurie your peer?" the man asked softly, pulling up another stool.

d.i.c.ken knocked his stool over in his haste to get up. He left the bar quickly, on the lookout for anyone too clean-cut, too vigilant.