by Greg Bear
Dust billowed around them until a stray draft between narrow rills spirited it away.
“I give up,” Mitch said, walking back to stare into Eileen's window. “What am I supposed to be looking for?”
“Let's say there's a river here.”
“Hasn't been one for a few centuries, by the looks of things.”
“Three thousand years, actually. Let's go back even further—say, more than ten thousand years.”
“How much more?”
Eileen shrugged and made an “I'm not telling” face.
Mitch groaned, remembering all the troubles that came with ancient graves.
Eileen watched his reaction with a weary sadness that he could not riddle. “Where would you set up some sort of long-term fishing camp, say, during the fall salmon run? A camp you could come back to, year after year?”
“On hard ground above the river, not too far.”
“And what do you see around here?” Eileen asked.
Mitch scanned the territory again. “Mostly mudstone and weak terraces. Some lava.”
“Ash fall?”
“Yeah. Looks solid. I wouldn't want to dig it out.”
“Exactly,” Eileen said. “Imagine an ash fall big enough to cover everything for hundreds of miles.”
“Broken flats of ash. That would have to be above this bed, of course. The river would have worn through.”
“Now, how would an archaeologist find something interesting in all that confusion?”
He frowned at her. “Something trapped by ash?”
Eileen nodded encouragement.
“Animals? People?”
“What do you think?” Eileen peered through the dusty windshield of the Tahoe. She looked sadder and sadder, as if reliving an ancient tragedy.
“People, of course,” Mitch said. “A camp. A fishing camp. Covered by ash.” He shook his head, then mockingly smacked his forehead, Such a dummy.
“I'm practically giving it away,” Eileen said.
Mitch turned east. He could see the dark gray-and-white layers of the old ash fall, buried under ten feet of sediments and now topped by a broken wall of pines. The ash layer looked at least four feet thick, mottled and striated. He imagined walking over to the cut and fingering the ash. Compacted by many seasons of rain, held in place by a cap of dirt and silt, it would be rock hard at first, but ultimately frangible, turning to powder if he hit it vigorously with a pick.
Big fall, a long time ago. Ten thousand and more years.
He looked north again, up a wash and away from the broad mud and gravel bed of the long-dead river, spotted with hardy brush and trees, a course now cut off even from snow melt and flash floods. Undisturbed by heavy erosion for a couple of thousand years.
“This used to be a pretty good oxbow, I'd say. Even in the Spent River heyday, there'd have been shallows where you could walk across and spear fish. You could have set up a weir in that hollow, under that boulder.” He pointed to a big boulder mostly buried in old silt and ash.
Eileen smiled and nodded. “Keep going.”
Mitch tapped his lips with his finger. He circled the Tahoe, waving his arms, making swooshing sounds, kicking the dirt, sniffing the air.
Eileen laughed and slapped her knees. “I needed that,” she said.
“Well, shucks,” Mitch said humbly. “If I'm tapping into mystic spirits, I got to act the part.” He fixed his gaze on a gap that led to higher ground, above the ash. His head leaned to one side and he shook out his bad arm, which was starting to ache. He got the look of a hound on the scent. Eyes sweeping the rough ground, he walked up the wash and climbed around the boulder.
Eileen yelled, “Wait up!”
“No way,” Mitch called back. “I'm on it.”
And he was.
He spotted the camp ten minutes later. Eileen came up beside him, breathless. On a level plateau only thinly forested, marked by patches of gray where the deep ash layer had been exposed by erosion, he saw twelve low-slung, light-weather tents covered with netting, dead branches, and bushes uprooted from around the site. A pair of old Land Rovers had been parked together and disguised as a large boulder.
Mitch had taken a seat on a rock, staring glumly at the tents and vehicles. “Why the camouflage?” he asked.
“Satellites or remoters doing searches for the BLM and Army Corps, protecting Indian rights under NAGPRA,” Eileen said. Federal interpretation of the complaints of certain Indian groups, citing NAGPRA—the Native American Graves Protection Act—had been the nemesis of American archaeologists for almost twenty years.
“Oh,” Mitch said. “Why take the chance? Do we need that now? Having the feds cover your dig with concrete?” That was how the Army Corps of Engineers had protected Mitch's dig against further intrusion, more than a lifetime ago, it seemed now. He waved his hand at the site and made a face. “Not very smart, staying hidden like this, hoping to avoid the Big Boys.”
“Isn't that what you did?” Eileen asked.
Mitch snorted with little humor. “It's a fair cop,” he admitted.
“These are not rational times,” Eileen said. “You'll understand soon enough. Don't we all need to know what it means to be human? Now more than ever? How we got to where we are, and what's going to come later?”
“What are a few old Indian bones going to tell us that we don't already know?” Mitch asked, feeling his sense of discovery start to sputter and stall.
“Would I have called you out here if that was all we had at stake?” Eileen said. “You know me better than that, Mitch Rafelson. I hope you do.”
Mitch wiped his hand on his pants leg and looked over his shoulder at the long fan of the wash. They had climbed about twenty feet, but he could still see evidence of ancient bank erosion. “Big river, way back when,” he said.
“It was smaller at the time of our site,” Eileen said. “Just a broad, shallow stream filled with salmon. Bears used to come down and fish. One of my students found an old male on the other side. Killed by an early phase of the ash fall, stage one of the eruption.”
“How long ago?” Mitch asked.
“Twenty thousand years, we're estimating. Ash gives a good potassium-argon result. We're still refining with carbon dating.”
“Something more than just a dead grizzly?”
Eileen nodded like a little girl confirming that there were, indeed, more dolls in her room. “The bear was female. She was missing her skull. It had been cut off, the bones hacked through with stone axes.”
“Twenty thousand years ago?”
“Yeah. So my student crossed the Spent River and started looking at other reveals. Just killing time until the Land Rover came to pick her up. She found an eroded layer of high-silica ash, right down there, about fifty meters from where the camp is now.” Eileen pointed. “She almost stepped on a human toe bone mixed with some gravel. Nothing spectacular, really. But she tracked down where it had weathered out, and she found more.”
“Twenty thousand years,” Mitch said, still incredulous.
“That isn't the half of it,” Eileen said.
Mitch took a huge leap of supposition and bent backwards, then did a little dip of disbelief. “You are not suggesting . . .”
Eileen stared at him keenly.
“You found Neandertals?”
Eileen shook her head, a strong no, then rewarded him with a teary-eyed smile that gave some hint of the distress she had gone through, at night, lying awake and thinking things over.
Mitch let out his breath. “What, then?”
“I don't want to be coy,” she said primly, and took his hand. “But you're not nearly crazy enough. Come on, Mitch. Let's go meet the girls.”
21
BALTIMORE
Morgenstern's questions were spot on and difficult to answer. Kaye had done her best, but she felt she had goofed a few of her responses rather badly. She felt like a mouse in a room full of cats. Jackson appeared more and more confident.
“The fertil
ity group concludes that Kaye Rafelson is not the proper individual to continue research in ERV knock outs,” Morgenstern concluded. “She has obvious bias. Her work is suspect.”
A moment of silence. The accusation was not rebutted; everyone was considering their options and the map of the political minefield around them.
“All right,” Cross said, her face as serene as a baby's. “I still don't know where we stand. Should we continue to fund vaccines? Should we continue to look for ways to create organisms without any viral load?” Nobody answered. “Lars?” Cross inquired.
Nilson shook his head. “I am perplexed by Dr. Morgenstern's statements. Dr. Rafelson's work looks impressive to me.” He shrugged. “I know for a fact that human embryos implant in their mothers' wombs with the aid of old viral genes. Dr. Morgenstern is undoubtedly familiar with this, probably more than I.”
“Very familiar,” Morgenstern said confidently. “Utilization of endogenous viral syncytin genes in simian development is interesting, but I can quote dozens of papers proving there is no rhyme or reason to this random occurrence. There are even more remarkable coincidences in the long history of evolution.”
“And the Temin model of viral contributions to the genome?”
“Brilliant, old, long since disproved.”
Nilson pushed his scattered notes and papers into a stack, squared them, and thumped them lightly on the table top. “All my life,” he said, “I have come to regard the basic principles of biology as tantamount to an act of faith. Credo, this I believe: that the chain of instruction arising from DNA to RNA to proteins never reverses. The Central Dogma. McClintock and Temin and Baltimore, among many others, proved the Central Dogma to be wrong, demonstrating that genes can produce products that insert copies of themselves, that retroviruses can write themselves to DNA as proviruses and stay there for many millions of years.”
Kaye saw Jackson regarding her with his sharp gray eyes. He tapped his pencil silently. They both knew Nilson was grandstanding and that this would not impress Cross.
“Forty years ago, we missed the boat,” Nilson continued. “I was one of those who opposed Temin's ideas. It took us years to recognize the potential of retroviruses to wreak havoc, and when HIV arrived, we were unprepared. We did not have a crazy, creative bouquet of theories to choose from; we had killed them all, or ignored them, much the same. Tens of millions of our patients suffered for our own stubborn pride. Howard Temin was right; I was wrong.”
“I would not call it faith, I'd call it process and reason,” Jackson interrupted, tapping his pencil harder. “It's kept us from making even more horrible blunders, like Lysenko.”
Nilson was having none of this. “Ah, get thee behind me, Lysenko! Faith, reason, dogma, all add up to stubborn ignorance. Thirty years before that, we had missed the boat with Barbara McClintock and her jumping genes. And how many others? How many discouraged postdocs and interns and researchers? It was prideful, I see now, to hide our weaknesses and spite our fundamentalist enemies. We asserted our infallibility before school boards, politicians, corporations, investors, patients, whomever we thought might challenge us. We were arrogant. We were men, Ms. Cross. Biology was an incredible and archaic patriarchy with many of the aspects of an old boy network: secret signs, passwords, rituals of indoctrination. We held down, for a time at least, some of our best and brightest. No excuses. And once again we failed to see the coming juggernaut. HIV rolled over us, and then SHEVA rolled over us. It turned out we knew nothing whatsoever about sex and evolutionary variation, nothing. Yet some of us still act as if we know it all. We attempt to assess blame and escape our failures. Well, we have failed. We have failed to see the truth. These reports sum up our failure.”
Cross seemed bemused. “Thank you, Lars. Heartfelt, I'm sure. But I still want to know, where do we go from here?” She hammered her fist on the table with each emphatic word.
Still stuck in his chair in the far corner, pushed back from the table, wearing his trademark gray jacket and yarmulke, Maurie Herskovitz raised his hand. “I think we have a clear-cut problem in epistemology,” he said.
Cross squeezed her eyes shut and pressed the bridge of her nose. “Oh, please, Maurie, anything but that.”
“Hear me out, Marge. Dr. Jackson tried to create a positive, a vaccine against SHEVA and other ERV. He failed. If, as Dr. Morgenstern accuses, Dr. Rafelson came to Americol to demonstrate that no babies would be born if we suppressed their genomic viruses, she has made her point. None have been born. Regardless of her motivations, her work is thorough. It is scientific. Dr. Jackson continues to put forth an hypothesis that the results of his labors seem to have disproved.”
“Maurie, where do we go from here?” Cross repeated, her cheeks pinking.
Herskovitz lifted his hands. “If I could, I would put Dr. Rafelson in charge of viral research at Americol. But that would only be to curse her with more managerial duties and less time in the laboratory. So, I would give her what she needs to conduct her research on her own terms, and let Dr. Jackson focus on what he is best suited for.” He peered happily at Jackson. “Administration. Marge, you and I can make sure he does it right.” Herskovitz then looked at everyone around the room, trying hard to appear serious.
The faces at the table were stony.
Jackson's skin had turned a bluish shade of ivory. Kaye worried for a second that he might be on the verge of a heart attack. He ticked his pen in a brisk shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits. “I welcome, as always, Dr. Nilson's and Dr. Herskovitz's opinions. But I don't think Americol wants a woman who may be losing her mind in charge of this particular area of research.”
Cross leaned back as if caught in a cold wind. Morgenstern's watery gaze finally settled on Jackson with an attitude of dread expectancy.
“Dr. Rafelson, last night you spent some hours with our chief radiologist in the imaging lab. I noticed the billing request when I was picking up results from radiology this morning. I asked what the billing was for, and I was told that you were looking for God.”
Kaye managed to hold on to her pencil and not let it drop to the floor. Slowly, she brought her hands up to the tabletop. “I was having an unusual experience,” she said. “I wanted to find out what the cause might be.”
“You told the radiologist you felt God was inside your head. You had been having these experiences for some time, ever since the removal of your daughter by Emergency Action.”
“Yes,” Kaye said.
“Seeing God?”
“I've been experiencing certain psychological states,” Kaye said.
“Oh, come on, we've just been lectured by Dr. Nilson about truth and honesty. Will you deny your God three times, Dr. Rafelson?”
“What happened was private and has no influence on my work. I am appalled that it should be brought up at this meeting.”
“None of this is relevant? Other than the expense, some seven thousand dollars of unauthorized tests?”
Liz seemed thunderstruck.
“I'm willing to pay for that,” Kaye said.
Jackson lifted a paper-clipped set of invoices and rippled it in the air. “I see no evidence of your picking up the bill.”
Cross's calm look was replaced by indignant irritation—but at whom, Kaye could not tell. “Is this true?”
Kaye stammered, “It is a personal state of mind, of scientific interest. Almost half—”
“Where will you find God next, Kaye?” Jackson asked. “In your cunning viruses, shuffling around like holy ratchets, obeying rules only you can understand, explaining everything you can't? If God was my mentor, I'd be thrilled, it would all be so easy, but I am less fortunate. I have to rely on reason. Still, it is an honor to work with someone who can simply ask a higher authority where truth waits to be discovered.”
“Astonishing,” Nilson said. In the corner, Herskovitz sat up. His smile appeared cut in plaster.
“It is not like that,” Kaye said.
“That's enough, Robert,” Cross said.
/>
Jackson had not moved since beginning his accusation. He sat half-slumped in his chair. “None of us can afford to give up our scientific principles,” he said. “Especially not now.”
Cross stood abruptly. Nilson and Morgenstern looked at Jackson, then at Cross, and got to their feet, pushing back their chairs.
“I have what I need,” Cross said.
“Dr. Rafelson, is God behind evolution?” Jackson called out. “Does he hold all the answers, does he jerk us around like puppets on a string?”
“No,” Kaye said, eyes unfocused.
“Are you really sure, now, in a way none of the rest of us can be, with your special knowledge?”
“Robert, that is enough!” Cross roared. Seldom had any of them heard Cross when she was angry, and her voice was painful in its crackling intensity. She let the stack of papers in her hands slip back to the table and spill onto the floor. She glared at Jackson, then shook her fists at the ceiling. “Absolutely unbelievable!”
“Astonishing,” Nilson repeated, much quieter.
“I apologize,” Jackson said, not at all chastened. His color had returned. He looked vigorous and healthy.
“This is over,” Cross declared. “Everyone go home. Now.”
Liz helped Kaye from the room. Jackson did not deign to look at them as they left.
“What in hell is going on?” Liz asked Kaye in an undertone as they walked toward the elevator.
“I'm fine,” Kaye said.
“What in hell was La Robert on about?”
Kaye did not know where to begin.
22
OREGON
Eileen escorted Mitch down the slope on a crude stairway made of boards hammered into the dirt. As they walked through a copse of pines and up a short embankment, gaining a closer view of the camp, Mitch saw that a large excavation of about ten thousand square feet, L-shaped and covered by two joined Quonset huts, had been hidden by brush arranged over netting. From the air, the entire site would be little more than a smudge in the landscape.
