The Descent Part 22

He found the head-and-shoulders section. It was like a bust in alabaster. The lids were half shut, exposing bleached blue irises. The mouth was slightly open. Working from the neck upward, the machine's pendulum was still at throat level.

'You've probably seen a lot like her,' Dr. Yamamoto spoke at his shoulder. Her voice was severe.

Branch c.o.c.ked his head and looked closer, almost affectionately. 'They're all different,' he said. 'Kind of like us.'

He could tell she'd expected something coa.r.s.e or stormy from him. Most people took one look at him and a.s.sumed he couldn't get enough of Haddie's blood.

The physician's voice softened. 'Judging by her teeth and the immaturity of her pelvic girdle,' she said, 'Dawn was probably twelve or thirteen years old. We could be way off on that, of course. We have nothing to compare her with, so we're simply guessing. Specimens have been very hard to get. You'd think after so much contact, so many killings, we'd be swimming in bodies.'

'That is odd,' said Vera. 'Do they decompose faster than normal mammal remains?'

'Depending on the exposure to direct sunlight. But the scarcity of good specimens has more to do with desecration.' Branch noticed that she did not look at him.

'You mean mutilation?'

'It's more than that.'

'Desecration, then,' said Thomas. 'That's a strong term.'

Yamamoto went over to the storage drawers and pulled out a long tray on rollers. 'I don't know, what do you call it?' A hideous animal lay on the metal, scorched black, teeth bared, dismembered, mutilated. It could have been eight thousand years old.

'Caught and burned one week ago,' she said.

'Soldiers?' asked Vera.

'Actually, no. This came from Orlando, Florida. A regular neighborhood. People are scared. Maybe it's a form of racial catharsis. There's this revulsion or anger or terror. People seem to feel they have to lay waste to these things, even after they've killed them. Maybe they think they're destroying evil.'

'Do you?' asked Thomas.

Her almond eyes were sad. Then disciplined. Either way, compa.s.sion or science, she did not.

'We offer rewards for undamaged specimens,' she told them. 'But this is about the best that comes in. This guy, for instance. He was captured alive by a group of middle-aged accountants and software engineers playing touch football at a suburban soccer field. By the time they got finished with him, he was a piece of charcoal.'

Branch had seen far worse.

'All around the country. All around the world,' she said. 'We know they're coming up into our midst. There are sightings and killings every hour, somewhere in metro and rural America. Try to get a whole, undamaged cadaver in the lab, though. It's a real problem. It makes research very slow.'

'Why do you think they're coming up, Doctor? Seems like everyone has a theory.'

'None of us here has a clue,' Yamamoto said. 'Frankly, I'm not convinced the hadals are coming up in any greater numbers than they have historically. But it's safe to say that humans are more sensitized to the hadals' presence these days, and so we're seeing them more clearly. The majority of sightings are false, as with UFOs. A great number have been sightings of transients and freight riders and animals, even tree branches scratching at the window, not hadals.'

'Ah,' said Vera, 'it's all in our imagination?'

'Not at all. They're definitely here, hiding in our landfills, our suburban bas.e.m.e.nts, our zoos, warehouses, national parks. In our underbelly. But nowhere near the numbers the politicians and journalists want us to believe. As far as invading us, come on. Who's invading who here? We're the ones sinking shafts and colonizing caves.'

'Dangerous talk,' said Foley.

'At a certain point, our hate and fear change us,' the young woman said. 'I mean, what kind of world do we want to raise our children in? That's important, too.'

'But if they're not appearing in any greater numbers than before,' argued Thomas, 'doesn't that throw out all the catastrophe theories we keep hearing, that a great famine or plague or environmental disaster is to blame for their coming among us?'

'That's one more thing our research may help answer. A people's history speaks through their bones and tissue,' said Yamamoto. 'But until we collect more specimens and expand our database, I can't tell you anything more than what the bodies of Dawn and a few of her brothers and sisters have told us.'

'Then we know almost nothing about their motivation?'

'Scientifically speaking, no. Not yet. But sometimes we - the staff and I - sit around and invent life stories for them.' The young doctor indicated her stainless-steel mausoleum. 'We give them names and a past. We try to understand how it must have been to be them.'

She touched the side of the cutting table with the hadal female's head. 'Dawn is easily our group's favorite.'

'This?' said Vera. But clearly she was charmed by the staff's humanity.

'Her youth, I guess. And the hard life she led.'

'Tell us her story, if you don't mind,' said Thomas. Branch looked at the Jesuit. Like Branch, he had a raw exterior that people misjudged. But Thomas felt an affinity for the creatures that was unfashionable at the moment. Branch thought it perfectly in character. Weren't all Jesuits liberation theologists?

The young woman looked uncomfortable. 'It's not really my place,' she said. 'The specialists haven't gone over the data yet, and anything we've made up is pure conjecture.'

'Just the same,' Vera said, 'we want to hear.'

'All right, then. She came from very deep, from an atmosphere rich in oxygen, judging by the relatively small rib cage. Her DNA shows a relevant difference from samples sent to us from other regions around the world. The consensus is that these hadals all evolved from h.o.m.o erectus, our own ancestor. It's common knowledge that we shared a mother and father long ago. But then the same can be said about us and orangutans, or lemurs, or even frogs. At some point we all share genesis.

'One surprise is how alike the hadals are to us. Another is how unalike they are to one another. Have you ever heard of Donald Spurrier?'

'The primatologist?' said Thomas. 'He was here?'

'Now I'm really embarra.s.sed,' Yamamoto said. 'I'd never heard of him, but people told me later he's world-famous. Anyway, he stopped up to see our little girl one afternoon and essentially conducted an impromptu seminar for us. He told us that h.o.m.o erectus spun off more variations than any other hominid group. We're one of the spin-offs. Hadals may be another. Erectus apparently migrated from Africa to Asia hundreds of thousands of years ago, and the splinter groups possibly evolved into different forms around the world, before going into the interior. Again, I'm not an expert on such things.'

To Branch, Yamamoto's modesty was engaging, but a distraction. They were here today on business, to glean every possible clue that she and her colleagues had harvested from this hadal corpse. 'In great part,' Thomas said, 'you have just stated our purpose, to understand why we turn out the way we do. What more can you tell us?'

'There's a high concentration of radioisotopes in her tissue, but that's to be expected, coming from the subplanet, a stone cavity bombarded by mineral radiation from all directions. My own hunch is that radiation may help explain the mutations in their population. But please don't quote me on that. Who really knows why any of us turn out the way we do?'

Yamamoto pa.s.sed a hand over the block of blue gel, as if stroking the monstrous face. 'To our eye, Dawn looks so primitive. Some of our visitors have remarked on what a throwback she is. They think she's so much closer to erectus and the Australopithecenes than we are. In fact, she is every bit as evolved as we are, just in a different direction.'

That had been one surprise for Branch. You expected stereotypes and racism and prejudices from the ordinary ma.s.ses. But it was turning out that the sciences were just as rife with it. Indeed, intellectual biases - academic arrogance - helped explain why h.e.l.l had gone undiscovered for so long.

'Dawn's dental formula is identical to yours and mine - and to hominid fossils three million years old: two incisors, one canine, two premolars, three molars.' Yamamoto turned to another table. 'The lower limbs are similar to ours, though hadal joints have more sponge in the bone, which suggests Dawn might have been even more efficient at walking than h.o.m.o sapiens. And she did a lot of that, walking. It's tough to see through the gel, but if you look hard, she put a lot of miles on those feet. The calluses are thicker than my thumbnail. Her arches have fallen. Somebody measured her: size eleven, quadruple wide.'

She moved to the next table, the thorax and upper arms. 'So far, few surprises here, either. The cardiovascular system is robust, if not perfectly healthy. The heart's enlarged, meaning she probably came up rapidly from minus four or five miles. Her lungs show chemical scarring, probably from breathing gases vented from the deeper earth. That's an old animal bite there.'

Yamamoto turned to the final table. It held the abdomen and lower arms. One hand was clenched, the other graceful. 'Again, it's hard to get a clear view. But the finger bones have a significant crook, midway between ape and human digits. That helps explain the stories we hear about hadals scaling walls and pulling themselves through underground nooks and crannies.'

Yamamoto gestured at the abdominal chunk. The blade had begun at the top and was shaving back and forth toward the pelvic area. The pubis had scant black hair, the start of womanhood.

'We did nail down part of her short, savage history. Before mounting her in gel and starting the cuts, we reviewed the MRI and CT images. Something about the pelvic saddle didn't look right, and I got the head of our Ob/Gyn department up for a look. He recognized the trauma right away. Rape. Gang rape.'

'What's this you're saying?' Foley asked.

'Twelve years old,' said Vera. 'Can you imagine? That explains why she came up, though.'

'How do you mean?' asked Yamamoto.

'The poor thing must have fled from the creatures that did this to her.'

'I didn't mean to suggest it was hadals who did this to her. We typed the sperm. It was all human. The injuries were very recent. We contacted the sheriff's department in Bartlesville, and they suggested we talk to the male attendants at the nursing home. The attendants denied it. We could take samples from them, but it wouldn't change anything. This kind of thing's not a crime. One group or another helped themselves to her. They had her locked in a refrigerated meat locker for several days.'

Again, Branch had seen worse.

'What a remarkable conceit civilization is,' said Thomas. His face looked neither angry nor sad, but seasoned. 'This child's suffering is ended. Yet, even as we speak, similar evil plays out in a hundred different places, ours upon them, theirs upon us. Until we can bring some sense of order to bear, the evil will continue to have a hiding place.'

He was speaking to the child's body, it seemed, perhaps reminding himself.

'What else?' Yamamoto asked herself aloud. She looked around at the body parts. They were at the abdominal quadrant. 'Her stool,' Yamamoto started again, 'was hard and dark and rank-smelling. A typical carnivore's stool.'

'What was her diet then?'

'In the last month before death?' said Yamamoto.

'I would have thought oat-bran m.u.f.fins and fruit juices and whatever else one might scavenge in a geriatric kitchen. Foods with fiber and roughage, easy to digest,' suggested Vera.

'Not this gal. She was a meat-eater, no two ways about it. The police report was clear. The stool sample only confirmed it. Exclusively meat.'

'But where -'

'Mostly from the feet and calves,' said Yamamoto. 'That's how she went undetected for so long. The staff thought it was rats or a feral cat, and just applied ointments and bandages. Then Dawn would come back the next night and feed some more.'

Vera was silent. Yamamoto's little 'gal' had not exactly lent herself to cuddling.

'Not pretty, I know,' Yamamoto continued. 'But then she didn't have a pretty life.'

The blade hissed, the block moved imperceptibly.'

'Don't get me wrong. I'm not justifying predation. I'm just not condemning it. Some people call it cannibalism. But if we're going to insist they're not sapiens, then technically it's no different from what mountain lions do to us. But these incidents do help explain why people are so scared. Which makes good, undamaged specimens that much harder to obtain. And deadlines impossible to meet. We're way behind.'

'Way behind whom?' asked Vera.

'Ourselves,' said Yamamoto. 'We've been handed deadlines. And we haven't made one yet.'

'Who's setting your deadlines?'

'That's the grand mystery. At first we thought it was the military. We kept getting raw computer models for developing new weapons. We were supposed to fill in the blanks - you know, tissue density, positions of organs. Generally provide distinctions between our species and theirs. Then we started getting memos from corporations. But the corporations keep changing. Now we're not even sure about them. For our purposes, it really doesn't matter. The light bill's getting paid.'

'I have a question,' Thomas said. 'You sound a little uncertain about whether Dawn and her kind are really a separate species. What did Spurrier have to say?'

'He was adamant that hadals are a different species, some kind of primate. Taxonomy's a sensitive subject. Right now Dawn is cla.s.sified as h.o.m.o erectus hadalis. He got upset when I mentioned the move to rename them h.o.m.o sapiens hadalis. In other words, an evolutionary branch of us. He said the erectus taxon is wastebasket science. Like I said, there's a lot of fear out there.'

'Fear of what?'

'It runs against the current orthodoxy. You could get your funding cut. Lose your tenure. Not get hired or published. It's subtle. Everyone's playing it very safe for now.'

'What about you?' Thomas asked. 'You've handled this girl. Followed her dissection. What do you think?'

'That's not fair,' Vera scolded Thomas. 'She just got through saying how dangerous the times are.'

'It's okay,' Yamamoto said to Vera. She looked at Thomas. 'Erectusor sapiens? Let me put it this way. If this were a live subject, if this were a vivisection, I wouldn't do it.'

'So you're saying she's human?' asked Foley.

'No. I'm saying she's similar enough, perhaps, not to beerectus.'

'Call me a devil's advocate, certainly a layman,' Foley said. 'But she doesn't look similar to me.'

Yamamoto went over to her wall of drawers and pulled a lower tray out. It held a carca.s.s even more grotesque than the ones they'd seen. The skin was wildly scarified. Body hair had grown rampant. The face was all but hooded with a cabbage-like dome of fleshy calcium deposits. Something close to a ram's horn had grown from the middle of the forehead.

She rested one gloved hand on the creature's rib cage. 'As I said, the idea was to find differences between our two species. We know there are differences. Those are obvious to the naked eye. Or seem to be. But so far all we've found are physiological similarities.'

'How can you say he's similar?' asked Foley.

'That's exactly the point. We were sent this specimen by our lab chief. Sort of a double-blind test to see what we'd come up with. Ten of us worked on the autopsy for a week. We compiled a list of almost forty distinctions from the average h.o.m.o sapiens. Everything from blood gases to bone structure to ophthalmic deformities to diet. We found traces of rare minerals in his stomach. He'd been eating clay and various fluorescents. His intestines glowed in the dark. Only then did the lab chief tell us.'

'Tell you what?'

'That this was a German soldier from one of the NATO task forces.'

Branch had known it was human from the start, but he let Yamamoto make her point.

'That can't be.' Vera began lifting and opening surgical cavities and pressing at the bony helmet. 'What about this?' she said. 'And this?'

'All residuals from his tour of duty. Side effects from the drugs he was told to take or from the geochemical environment in which he was serving.'

Foley was shocked. 'I've heard of some amount of modification. But never anything like this disfigurement.' Suddenly remembering Branch, he stopped himself.

'He does look demonic,' Branch commented.

'All in all, it was an instructive anatomy lesson,' Yamamoto said. 'Very humbling. I came away with one abiding thought. It doesn't matter if Dawn stems from erectus or sapiens. Go back far enough and sapiens is erectus.'

'Are there no differences, then?' Thomas asked.

'Many. Many. But now we've seen how many incongruities there are between one human and another. It's become an epistemological issue. How to know what we think we know.' She slid the drawer shut.

'You sound demoralized.'

'No. Distracted, perhaps. Derailed. Off track. But I'm convinced we'll start hitting real discrepancy in three to five months.'

'Oh?' said Thomas.

She went back to the table where Dawn's head and shoulders were slowly, very slowly feeding into the pendulum. 'That's when we'll begin entering the brain.'