by John Darnton
There he held his breath and watched it on the path some thirty yards away. Suddenly, as if struck by something, it stopped, paused a moment, and then turned into the woods at a sharp angle, coming straight toward him until Matt could see the hideous misshapen skull, the huge hairy chest, the stump of wood held balanced across its shoulder by a drooping hand. He spun around, pushed aside the branches on the other side, squeezed through, and ran for his life.
He ran and ran. Gasping for breath, he recognized the bower, and as he ran toward it he saw through the trees a flash of movement, a shape. It was Susan. Susan! She was standing in the center. But before her, moving toward her, was another shape, large and hairy. Matt summoned his last reserve of strength, ran toward them, and burst into the bower. He felt himself leaping high into the air, leaving the ground with the driving momentum of his full weight, to land square on the creature’s back. He felt the impact of his blow, heard the painful grunt of expelled breath, and caught a glimpse of alarm on Susan’s face. Then he felt himself sailing on and falling downward toward a tree trunk. He smashed his head on it and heard more sounds, vague and indistinguishable, as he sank down once again toward the dark and peaceful depths of unconsciousness.
“Matt, Matt.” Susan called to him softly and brushed his forehead with her hand. He opened his eyes. She was kneeling next to him, looking down. She took his head, cradled it in her arms, and then placed it on her lap and caressed his face with her fingertips. “I have to admit you’re brave,” she said. “But what was your plan exactly? Were you trying to ride him to death?”
“Susan, for Christ’s sake, I was trying to stop him. He was coming at you.” He tried to get up.
“Not at me, to me. He’s my friend. Calm down.” She pushed him back down. “There’s so much to tell you.”
Matt sat upright and looked around quickly. The Neanderthal was standing off in the distance near a tree.
She laughed despite herself and said, “You frightened him as much as he frightened you. Don’t worry, he’s harmless. His name is Longface—at least that’s what I call him.”
14
“How long was I out?”
“A full day. Of course it seemed longer to me than it did to you.”
“No doubt,” Matt replied, rubbing a bump on his head.
“Before anything else, eat something.”
She busied herself preparing some food. She put some nuts and berries on a tin plate from her rucksack. Out of a bottle—Matt could see it was Rudy’s vodka bottle—she poured water into a carved wooden bowl, mixing up a kind of gruel. “This isn’t as bad as it looks,” she said consolingly. “Think of it as something Swedes would have for breakfast.”
“What about that creature?”
“Shush. All in good time.”
Finally, having satisfied his hunger for food if not for answers, she patted his knee. “Stay right there,” she commanded. “Are you ready for the experience of a lifetime?” She disappeared behind some bushes and returned a few minutes later, proudly walking arm in arm with the same hominid that Matt had jumped.
“Matt meet Longface. Longface meet Matt. Don’t worry,” she added, smiling. “He doesn’t bear a grudge.”
Matt gaped incredulously, instinctively shrinking back at the sight of the naked primate. He stared at its stocky physique, short legs, barrel chest, and bulging biceps and then up at its huge projecting face with the flattened skull, disappearing chin, deep-set wide eyes, and the unmistakable bar of bone. He looked so almost human—almost but not quite. Susan chuckled at Matt’s confusion.
“You can say whatever you want,” she said, warming to her role as the expert. “He can’t understand you. They don’t have language.”
The hominid approached and squatted on its haunches, looking at Matt with interest but not profound curiosity. It seemed neither frightened nor frightening. Matt looked it up and down; its back was long, its legs were short. It had more hair than a human but was not completely hirsute. Everything about it seemed a little bit off, and yet it was humanoid enough to—to what? Matt leaned close and stared at its face. He saw intelligence in the eyes, perhaps even intelligence to rival his own, but he did not see wonder.
Longface touched the sleeve of Matt’s shirt, and fingered the material. Matt looked down at the rotund fingers, rough nails, and large knuckles. The line creases across the palm were not at all like a human’s. On impulse, he reached across and took the hand in his own, and as soon as he felt the powerful grip, a wave of emotion swept through him, a pulsating thrill so strong it seemed a throwback to some earlier age, as if his genetic core was ignited by that spark of contact. He felt exhilarated.
“Amazing, isn’t it?” said Susan. “To think that touch goes back thirty thousand years.”
“Listen!” Matt exclaimed. “He’s talking.” Sounds were gurgling up from the thick chest.
“I’m afraid not. They make noises at certain moments. And from what I can tell, the noises seem to register reactions in a crude sort of way—alarm, surprise, joy. But they definitely don’t talk. They do something else.”
“They think.”
“What do you mean?”
“They convey thoughts—or images—something.”
“You mean telepathy?”
“Sort of. You’ll see what I mean. You can feel it when it’s happening. And then they seem to know what you’re looking at, almost as if they’re looking at it too.”
“How do you know this?”
“Try hiding and you’ll see what I’m talking about. It’s almost as if ...”
“As if what?”
“As if they’re in you.”
“Incredible.”
“I know. I can’t explain it. It’s some kind of extrasensory communication.”
Abruptly Longface lost interest and walked off. Something about the stately way he carried himself, the tilt of his head as he walked with a rolling sway to his stride, was oddly revealing.
“My God, he’s old,” Matt blurted out.
“That’s right. You tried to mug one of the tribe’s elders.”
“Tribe. Are there a lot of them?”
“You wouldn’t believe how many.”
“But how could this be the same species that we ran into before? They look roughly the same, but the others were so ruthless. These seem much more human.”
“I don’t know which is more human, but you’re right—the two are completely different.”
“Van is dead—killed in the cave-in,” said Matt.
“I guessed as much. There was nothing we could do. Now sit back and rest. That was one helluva bump you got. You’ve got another surprise ahead. But that’s for later.”
Susan led Matt along the path toward what she called the village. She was chattering, glad that Matt was all right and happy also for the human companionship, for someone to share observations about the implausible world they had fallen into.
“I’ll teach you their names,” she said, “beginning with the three who rescued us: Genesis, Exodus, and Leviticus. You can tell I was in a biblical frame of mind. They’re still my favorites. You can always recognize Leviticus; he’s got a slender build and a scar across his cheek, though God knows what he got it from. Actually, they’re all getting easier to tell apart.”
Matt looked at her bemused. “You like playing Eve, don’t you?—naming all the creatures.”
“I guess maybe I do.”
“It’s a form of control. You always liked that.”
She smiled.
“But I don’t like it,” Matt said. “I need to know some things— like how we got here—before you tell me their names.”
Stung, Susan hastened to fill him in. She had regained consciousness coming down the mountain slope, and she told Matt what she remembered. Her first sensation was the iron strength of the arms that cradled her the hard bulge of the biceps. When she opened her eyes she saw the white fleshy underside of the tiny beardless chin and caught a peek insi
de the mouth: His teeth were brown. Her first impulse was to panic, since she assumed that these were the same ones who had killed Rudy. But oddly, as the hours wore on and she feigned unconsciousness, she found something indescribably reassuring about them; she didn’t know whether it was the gentleness of their demeanor, the arms embracing her, or the glimpses of Matt being carried next to her.
By nightfall they were at the village in the valley. After they put her down near the fire, she continued to try to spy on them unseen, but they appeared to discern the ruse and brought her some food, which they left. She ate it and slept. When she awoke the next morning, she found herself in the bower with Matt and surrounded by scores of them: males, females, and children. Her fear gradually dissipated, replaced by a sense of marvel. The scientist in her asserted itself.
“Can you imagine,” she exclaimed, “we have the opportunity to study another species by actually living among them! No more theories, no more conjecture, no more speculation. Just observation, straight old-fashioned cultural research—except that it’s prehistoric.”
Matt was amazed at how quickly Susan seemed to feel at home. She was taking everything in, sifting it over, and trying to make sense of it as if she were on some fantastic anthropological field trip. How quickly we humans adapt to the unexpected and to adversity, he thought. Is that quality the secret of our survival?
He himself was still feeling shaky. On some primitive level he had decided that danger was receding; the archaic part of his brain that pumped out chemicals in response to aggression was beginning to quiet. But all his senses were stretched taut, and when they passed a hominid on the path, he thought he would jump out of his skin.
There was something else, beyond fear, that Matt noticed. At first he dismissed it, but now he was certain. Matt stared at them and they looked back. But they didn’t always look at him and he experienced a heaviness in his brain, almost an intrusion, as if something else were moving through it. And when the hominid passed, the sensation passed, like the sun appearing from behind the clouds.
The village was built around a river. It was not much to look at, a collection of makeshift shelters that dotted the hillside and multiplied as the land flattened out in the bowl of the valley.
What caught Matt’s eye were the hominids themselves, the blur of activity as they went about their everyday lives, carrying logs and baskets, sitting on their haunches, eating, tending a fire that sent a lazy curlicue of smoke into the sky. And children—of course there would be children!—who looked like miniature versions of the adults, only with brow ridges that seemed more pronounced on their smaller faces.
Everyone was naked. None of them wore animal skins, as the others had—in fact, there seemed to be no animals about at all— and none carried clubs or other weapons. The women were a few inches shorter than the men and their female shapes struck Matt as exaggerated, with extremely wide hips, low-slung buttocks, and pendulous breasts. The penises of the men, hanging freely, did not seem to be particularly large and were unobtrusive in the bushy nests of genital hair.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Susan said. “And the answer is: I don’t know. I haven’t been here long enough to see them copulate.
“As far as that goes, there doesn’t seem to be a great difference between the sexes. Certainly not in the roles. Both of them tend fires and pound grain with a mortar and pestle—those seem to be the two main activities, as far as I can tell.
“Yes, they have grain. They plant crops but they don’t kill animals and they don’t eat meat. The fire is used to clear the land, not to cook. So we were certainly wrong about that. Settled agriculture before hunting—fascinating, isn’t it?”
Matt was in fact thinking about something else. “Susan, we’ve been standing here a few minutes but nobody’s paying us any attention.”
“But they know we’re here; you can feel them reading you— that’s what I call it. So they know we’re not a threat. But their curiosity isn’t what you would call well developed. Yesterday when I first came, I created a little stir, especially among the children. But by now they pretty much regard me as old hat.”
Matt stepped inside a hut. It was built in a cone shape around the base of a tree; the lower branches had been snapped close to the trunk and hung onto the ground. Dead branches had been piled on top to form a kind of tepee and set into the ground to keep away predators. It looked something like the thorn fence of a Masai kraal in Kenya, he thought. There was not much inside: some gourds filled with water, half a dozen flaked tools, several carved wooden baskets filled with grain.
Susan was keeping up her guide’s patter. “I can’t figure out the social organization, if there is any. They don’t seem to live in families. It looks like people and kids move about a lot from one hut to another. The women seem to shrink into the background. But I haven’t been here long enough to tell for sure.”
Matt still could not reconcile these hominids with the bloodthirsty monsters that had killed Rudy. The others looked cruel— not just because they carried weapons but because of something in their posture, a way of thrusting the head forward on the elongated neck, a cruel glint to the eyes sunken beneath that sheltering flap of bone. These appeared altogether benign. They had an openness and calmness, sitting on their haunches and chewing berries and fruit as if nothing in this earthly domain concerned them.
“I’ll tell you what puzzles me,” he said. “It’s only a first impression, but from everything I’ve seen so far they’re much more primitive than I expected—or than I would have expected if I ever dared to even imagine such a thing.”
“Yes.”
“Compared to that bunch we ran into on the mountain, they seem eons behind. That group—I hate to say it, but they were organized. They had a leader; they acted together in a coordinated, planned way. They carried weapons. And you saw their cave. They were curing hides, for God’s sake!”
“What are you saying?” she asked.
“I’m saying that despite the outward resemblances they’re just too different—like two different species.”
“C’mon. They look alike. They’re separated by a single day’s walk. And you say they’re two different species?”
“I know it sounds incredible,” Matt said. “I’m just saying they act like two different species.”
“You’ve been up some six hours and you’re already an expert.”
“Now take it easy. You’ve never appreciated regional variation anyway.”
“What does that mean?” she fumed.
“It means you always go for the easy explanation—violent replacement, one group conquering another. Maybe there’s another explanation.”
“Such as?”
“I don’t know.”
“Next you’ll be telling me that these two groups evolved separately because one’s in a valley and the other’s on a mountain. There’s such a thing as carrying multiregional development too far.”
They were silent a moment. Then Susan spoke. “Anyway, you’re forgetting something.”
“The Khodzant Enigma.”
“Okay, wise guy, what’s it mean?”
“I don’t know. But I know it has something to do with war, and it’s the key to this whole thing. I intend to figure it out.”
“Good luck.”
The path dwindled to a narrow walkway. Susan seemed confident of the way and went first. Soon they left the village and penetrated deep into the forest. They could hear birds, the buzzing of insects, a thousand tiny scurrying creatures.
“Where are we going?” Matt asked.
“The surprise. Remember?”
Susan leaped across a stream and took long graceful strides. Her luxuriant black hair looked at home in the forest. Matt’s side still ached slightly but it felt better than before. They walked for a good hour until Susan turned and said with a smile, “We’re almost there. You okay?”
Matt put on a fake grimace. “Certainly.”
They climbed a
n incline and came to a bluff where most of the valley spread out before them. In the distance sheer walls rose up to the mountains above.
“I’ll be damned,” said Matt. “We’re in a crater. I’ll bet it’s still active. That must be why it’s so temperate.”
Susan put her arm through his. “You know, a day is a long time to be unconscious. I was worried. Don’t let it go to your head, but you just may be worming your way back into my affections.”
“Well, being stranded all alone with several hundred cavemen may have something to do with it.”
She laughed and led on. Before long they heard a steady roar through the trees ahead: a waterfall. In another ten minutes they were facing a ten-foot-wide chute of water that plummeted down a cliffside. Matt smelled sulfur and realized it was a huge geyser sending up a hot spray. That explains the climate, he thought:
geothermal springs giving off heated vapors that collide with a warm air stream from the valley.
Below them, at the foot of the waterfall, was a wide basin in the rock formed by the pounding water. Matt looked down and saw that stone steps descended to the basin near the foot of the waterfall. Then he heard another sound penetrating above the roar intermittently, almost drowned out but occasionally distinct. It seemed to be a voice chanting or singing, impossible as that was, but it was so elusive that he began to doubt his senses.
Then Susan cupped her hands close to his ears and yelled something, again indistinct, and pointed to the foot of the waterfall. Out of the mists came a shape recognizable as human in form and then familiar. It drew closer and ascended the steps, but not until it reached the top could Matt be certain. There, approaching with a solemn air, wrapped in a toga like a classical Greek god but with a full beard that made him look like an Old Testament prophet, was Kellicut.
Eagleton was nothing if not a fanatic. When he took on a subject, he immersed himself in it and for hours on end thought about nothing else. His ruminations started at a central point, then expanded in ever-widening circles, like a dog searching for a passage home.
