Seeds of Change

by John Joseph Adams

  “Because you aren’t taking notes,” I said.

  “Ah, but I am.” He tapped his temple with a thick index finger.

  He ended up beating me on the first two tests, but I beat him on the third.By the third test, I’d found a good way to distract him from studying.

  It was harder for them to get into graduate programs back then. There were quotas—and like Asians, they had to score better to get accepted.

  There was much debate over what name should go next to the race box on their entrance forms. The word “Neanderthal” had evolved into an epithet over the previous decade. It became just another N-word polite society didn’t use.

  I’d been to the clone rights rallies. I’d heard the speakers. “The French don’t call themselves Cro-Magnons, do they?” the loudspeakers boomed.

  And so the name by their box had changed every few years, as the college entrance questionnaires strove to map the shifting topography of political correctness. Every few years, a new name for the group would arise—and then a few years later sink again under the accumulated freight of prejudice heaped upon it.

  They were called Neanderthals at first, then archaics, then clones—then, ridiculously, they were called simply Koreans, since that was the country in which all but one of them had been born. Sometime after the word “Neanderthal” became an epithet, there was a movement by some militants within the group to reclaim the word, to use it within the group as a sign of strength.

  But over time, the group gradually came to be known exclusively by a name that had been used occasionally from the very beginning, a name which captured the hidden heart of their truth. Among their own kind, and finally, among the rest of the world, they came to be known simply as the ghosts. All the other names fell away, and here, finally, was a name that stayed.

  * * * *

  IN 2033, THE first ghost was drafted into the NFL. What modern weight training could do to Neanderthal physiology was nothing short of astonishing.

  He stood 5’10’’ and weighed almost 360 lbs. He wore his red hair braided tight to his head, and his blue-white eyes shone out from beneath a helmet that had been specially designed to fit his skull. He spoke three languages. By 2035—the year I met David—the front line of every team in the league had one. Had to have one, to be competitive. They were the highest paid players in sports.

  As a group, they accumulated wealth at a rate far above average. They accumulated degrees, and land, and power. The men—beginning mostly during their youth, and continuing after—accumulated women, and subsequently, children. And they accumulated, finally, the attentive glare of the racists, who found them a group no longer to be ignored.

  In the 2040 Olympics, ghosts took gold in wrestling, in power lifting, in almost every event in which they were entered. Some individuals took golds in multiple sports, in multiple areas.

  There was an outcry from the other athletes who could not hope to compete. There were petitions to have ghosts banned from competition. It was suggested they should have their own Olympics, distinct from the original. Lawyers for the ghosts pointed out, carefully, tactfully, that out of the fastest 400 times recorded for the 100 yard dash, 386 had been achieved by persons of at least partially sub-Saharan African descent, and nobody was suggesting they get their own Olympics.

  Of course, racist groups like the KKK and the neo-Nazis actually liked the idea and advocated just that. Blacks, too, should compete against their own kind, get their own Olympics. After that, the whole matter degenerated into chaos.

  * * * *

  ONE NIGHT, I brought a picture home from work. I turned the light on over the bed, waking him.

  “Smile,” I told him.

  “Why?” David asked.

  “Just do it.”

  He smiled. I looked at the picture. Looked at him.

  “It’s you,” I said.

  Still smiling, he snatched the picture from my hand. “What is this?”

  When he looked at the picture, his face changed. “Where’d you get this?” he snapped.

  “It’s a photocopy from one of the periodicals in the archive. From one of the early studies at Amud.”

  “Why do you think it’s me? This could be any of us.”

  “The bones,” I said.

  He crinkled up the paper and threw it across the room. “You can’t see my bones.”

  “Teeth,” I said. “Are bones I can see.”

  “That’s not me.” He rolled onto his side. “I’m me.”

  And then I realized something. I realized that he’d already known he was Amud. And I realized, too, why he kept his head shaved—because there must have been another two or three of them out there, other athletes whose faces he recognized from the mirror, and shaving his head kept him distinct.

  In some complex way, I’d embarrassed him. “I’m sorry,” I said. I ran my hand across his bare shoulder, up his broad neck to his jaw. I leaned down, and nibbled on his ear. “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  * * * *

  BUT SOME THINGS you learn, you wish you could unlearn.

  Like Diane, the new researcher from down the hall, leaning over my shoulder. “I realize it may be politically incorrect,” she said, then paused. Or perhaps I put the pause in there. Perhaps I heard what wasn’t there, because I am so used to what came next, in its almost endless variation. And how I hated that term, politically incorrect, hated the shield it gave racists who got to label themselves politically incorrect, instead of admitting what they really were. Even to themselves.

  “I know it may be politically incorrect,” she said, then paused. “But sometimes I just wish those slope-heads would stop stirring up trouble all the time. I mean, you’d think they’d be grateful.”

  I said nothing. I wished I could unlearn this about her.

  I heard David’s voice in my head, peace at all costs.

  But David, I thought, you don’t have to hear it, the leaned-forward, look-both-ways, confidential revelations—the inside talk from people who don’t know you’re outside, way outside. People look at you, David, and have sense enough not to say something.

  And the new researcher continued, “I know the coalition is upset about what alderman Johnson said, but he’s entitled to his opinion.”

  “And people are entitled to respond to that opinion,” I said.

  “Sometimes I think people can be too sensitive.”

  “I used to think that too,” I said. “But it’s a fallacy.”

  “It is?”

  “Yes, it is impossible to be too sensitive.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Each person is exactly as sensitive as life experience has made them. It is impossible to be more so.”

  * * * *

  WHEN I WAS growing up, I helped my grandfather prune his apple trees in Indiana. The trick, he told me, was telling which branches helped grow the fruit, and which branches didn’t. Once you’ve studied a tree, you got a sense of what was important. Everything else can be pruned as useless baggage.

  You can divest yourself of your identity in much the same way. Let it fall to the ground at your feet. You look at your child’s face, and you don’t wonder whose side you’re on. You know. That side.

  I read in a sociology book that when someone in the privileged majority marries a minority, they take on the social status of that minority group. It occurred to me how the universe is a series of concentric circles, and you keep seeing the same shapes and processes wherever you look. Atoms are little solar systems; highways are a nation’s arteries, streets its capillaries—and the social system of humans follows Mendelian genetics, with dominants and recessives. Minority ethnicity is the dominant gene when part of a heterozygous couple.

  * * * *

  THERE ARE MANY Neanderthal bones in the Field Museum.

  Their bones are different than ours. It is not just their big skulls, or their short, powerful limbs; virtually every bone in their body is thicker, stronger, heavier. Each vertebrae, each phalange,
each small bone in the wrist, is thicker than ours. And I have wondered sometimes, when looking at those bones, why they need skeletons like that. All that metabolically expensive bone and muscle and brain. It had to be paid for. What kind of life makes you need bones like chunks of rebar? What kind of life makes you need a sternum half an inch thick?

  During the Pleistocene, glaciers had carved their way south across Europe, isolating animal populations behind a curtain of ice. Those populations either adapted to the harsh conditions, or they died. Over time, the herd animals grew massive, becoming more thermally efficient, with short, thick limbs, and heavy bodies—and so began the age of the Pleistocene mega-fauna. The predators too, had to adapt. The saber-tooth cat, the cave bear. They changed to fit the cold, grew more powerful in order to bring down the larger prey. What was true for other animals was true for genus Homo, nature’s experiment, the Neanderthal—the ice age's ultimate climax predator.

  * * * *

  “A READING FROM the first letter of Saint Paul to the Corinthians.” The priest clears his throat. “Brothers and sisters: strive eagerly for the greatest spiritual gifts. But I shall show you a still more excellent way. If I speak in human and angelic tongues but have not love, I am a resounding gong, or a clashing cymbal.”

  I watch the priest’s face while he speaks, this man in black.

  “And if I have the gift of prophecy and comprehend all the mysteries and all knowledge; if I have all faith so as to move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.”

  Dr. Michaels is still rocking my son in his arms. The boy is awake now. His blue eyes move to mine.

  “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”

  * * * *

  THREE DAYS AGO, the day David died, I woke to an empty bed. I found him naked at the window in our living room, looking out into the winter sky, his leonine face wrapped in shadow.

  From behind, I could see the V of his back against the gray light. I knew better than to disturb him. He became a silhouette against the sky, and in that instant, he was something more and less than human—like some broad human creature adapted for life in extreme gravity. A person built to survive stresses that would crush a normal man.

  He turned back toward the sky. “There’s a storm coming today,” he said.

  * * * *

  THE DAY DAVID died, I woke to an empty bed. I wonder about that.

  I wonder if he suspected something. I wonder what got him out of bed early. I wonder at the storm he mentioned, the one he said was coming.

  If he’d known the risk, we never would have gone to the rally—I’m sure of that, because he was a cautious man. But I wonder if some hidden, inner part of him didn’t have its ear to the railroad tracks; I wonder if some part of him didn’t feel the ground shaking, didn’t hear the freight train barreling down on us all.

  We ate breakfast that morning. We drove to the babysitter’s and dropped off our son. David kissed him on the cheek and tousled his hair. There was no last look, no sense this would be the final time. David kissed the boy, tousled his hair, and then we were out the door, Mary waving goodbye.

  We drove to the hall in silence. David's mind was on the coming afternoon and the speech he had to give. We parked our car in the crowded lot, ignoring the counter-rally already forming across the street.

  We shook hands with other guests and found our way to the assigned table. It was supposed to be a small luncheon, but the alderman's inflammatory statements, and his refusal to apologize, had swelled the crowd.

  Up on the podium, David’s expression changed. Before his speeches, there was this moment, this single second, where he glanced out over the crowd, and his eyes grew sad.

  David closed his eyes, opened them, and spoke. He began slowly. He spoke of the flow of history and the symmetry of nature. He spoke of the arrogance of ignorance; and in whispered tones, he spoke of fear. “And out of that simmering fear,” he said. “grows enmity.” He let his eyes wander over the crowd. “They hate us because we’re different,” he said, voice rising for the first time. “Always it works this way, wherever you look in history. And always we must work against it. We must never give in to violence. But we are right to fear, my friends. We must be vigilant, or we’ll lose everything we’ve gained for our children, and our children’s children.” He paused.

  The specific language of this speech was new to me, but not the message. David pulled the words out of his head as he went—building energy from the ground up. He continued for another ten minutes before finally going into his close.

  “They’ve talked about restricting us from athletic competition," he said, voice booming. “They’ve eliminated us from receiving most scholarships. They’ve limited our attendance of law schools, and medical schools, and PhD programs. These are the soft shackles they’ve put upon us, and we cannot sit silently and let it happen.”

  The crowd erupted into applause. David lifted his hands to silence them and he walked back to his seat. Other speakers took the podium, but none with David’s eloquence. None with his power.

  When the last speaker sat, dinner was brought out and we ate. An hour later, when the plates were clean, more hands were shaken, and people started filing out to their cars. The evening was over.

  David and I took our time, talking with old friends, but we eventually worked our way into the lobby. Ahead of us, out in the parking lot, there was a commotion. The counter-rally had grown. Somebody mentioned vandalized cars, and then Tom was leaning into David’s ear, whispering as we passed through the front doors and out into the open air.

  It started with thrown eggs. Thomas turned, egg-white drooling down his broad chest. The fury in his eyes was enough to frighten me. David rushed forward and grabbed his arm. There was a look of surprise on some of the faces in the crowd, because even they hadn’t expected anybody to throw things—and I could see, too, the group of young men, clumped together near the side of the building, eggs in hand, mouths open—and it was like time stopped, because the moment was fat and waiting—and it could go any way, and an egg came down out of the sky that was not an egg, but a rock, and it struck Sarah Mitchell in the face—and the blood was red and shocking on her ghost-white skin, and the moment was wide open, time snapping back the other way—everything moving too fast, all of it happening at the same time instead of taking turns the way events are supposed to. And suddenly David’s grip on my arm was a vise, physically lifting me, pulling me back toward the building, and I tried to keep my feet while someone screamed.

  “Everybody go back inside!” David shouted. And then another woman screamed, a different kind of noise, like a shout of warning—and then I heard it, a shout that was a roar like nothing I’d ever heard before—and then more screams, men’s screams. And somebody lunged from the crowd and swung at David, and he moved so quickly I was flung away, the blow missing David’s head by a foot.

  “No!” David yelled at the man. “We don’t want this.”

  Then the man swung again and this time David caught the fist in his huge hand. He jerked the man close. “We’re not doing this,” he hissed and flung him back into the crowd.

  David grabbed Tom’s arm again, trying to guide him back toward the building. “This is stupid, don’t be pulled into it.”

  Thomas growled and let himself be pulled along, and someone spit in his face, and I saw it, the dead look in his eyes, to be spit on and do nothing. And still David pulled us toward the safety of the building, brushing aside the curses of men whose necks he could snap with the single flex of his arm. And still he did nothing. He did nothing all the way up to the end, when a thin, balding forty-year-old man stepped into his path, raised a gun, and fired point blank into his chest.

  * * * *

  THE BLAST WAS deafening.

  —and that old sadness gone. Replaced by white-hot rage and disbelief, blue eyes wide.

  People tried to scatter, but the crush of bodies prevented it. David hung there, in the crus
h, looking down at his chest. The man fired three more times before David fell.

  * * * *

  “ASHES TO ASHES, dust to dust. Accept our brother David into your warm embrace.” The priest lowers his hands and closes the bible. The broad casket is lowered into the ground. It is done.

  Dr. Michaels carries the boy as my sister helps me back to the limo.

  * * * *

  THE NIGHT DAVID was killed, after the hospital and the police questions, I drove to the sitter’s to pick up my son. I drove there alone. Mary hugged me and we stood crying in the foyer for a long time.

  “What do I tell my two-year old?” I said. “How do I explain this?”

  We walked to the front room, and I stood in the doorway. I watched my son like I was seeing him for the first time. He was blocky, like his father, but his bones were longer. He was a gifted child who knew his letters and could already sound out certain words.

  And that was our secret, that he was not yet three and already learning to read. And there were thousands more like him—a new generation, the best of two tribes.

  Perhaps David’s mistake was that he hadn’t realized there was a war. In any war, there are only certain people who fight it—and a smaller number who understand, truly, why it’s being fought. This was no different.

  Fifty thousand years ago, there were two walks of men in the world. There were the people of the ice, and there were the people of the sun.

  When the climate warmed, the ice sheets retreated. The broad African desert was beaten back by the rains, and the people of the sun expanded north.

  The world was changing then. The European mega-fauna were disappearing. The delicate predator/prey equilibrium slipped out of balance and the world’s most deadly climax predator found his livelihood evaporating in warming air. Without the big herds, there was less food. The big predators gave way to sleeker models that needed fewer calories to survive.

  The people of the sun weren’t stronger, or smarter, or better than the people of the ice; Cain didn’t kill his brother, Abel. The people of the North didn’t die out because they weren’t good enough. All that bone and muscle and brain. They died because they were too expensive.