by John Darnton
Long, thin leaves were tossed into the fire and the hominids danced past, inhaling the smoke. Matt and Susan inhaled it too, and within seconds a giddiness overtook them, then a numbness. The world began to spin and everything shimmered. An aura surrounded the moving figures and it became hard to see. Dark-Eye retrieved the shell from the fire and was led to the bier where he poured out a stream of warm oil, which fell glistening upon Long-face’s body. The beating of the logs quickened, a sharp staccato sound that made everyone dance faster until some collapsed. They fell to the ground and others danced over them. Matt and Susan danced too, at first awkwardly but soon losing all inhibitions and giving themselves over to the smoke and pounding rhythm.
This went on throughout the evening. Finally, long vine leaves were laid out on the ground like a quilt and Longface’s body, stiff now and easier to carry, was placed in the center and then wrapped. The leaves stuck to the oil, and the bundle was made secure by tying vines around it until the pale skin was entirely hidden and he was mummified. The drummers sped up their pounding—Matt had not thought it possible that they could go any faster—until there was a single steady earsplitting din. At that moment the dancing stopped, and out of the dark stepped six men, their faces and bodies smeared in white—the grave tenders. They placed themselves around the bier, lifted it easily, and carried it off, all so quickly that it was as if Longface had simply been swallowed up by the growing darkness.
Later that night, as Susan lay sleeping next to him in the bower, Matt heard a distant crack resounding from somewhere on the mountain. It seemed too sharp for thunder. As a faint echo faded out across the valley, he contemplated it with growing alarm. It almost sounded like a gunshot.
Kellicut followed Dark-Eye up the rocky path. The shaman moved quickly for an old man with a single eye; his bare feet deftly avoided the ruts and stones because he knew the route by heart. Ahead of them, against a background of clouds, Kellicut could already see their destination, a rounded peak strangely shaped like a fist.
The funeral had been five days ago and the village had settled down to normal as if it had never happened. Longface’s son was getting better by the day; he was already sitting up and eating. Susan called him Hurt-Knee. Kellicut didn’t approve of her naming them and had told her so, but she persisted. She doted on the boy.
Dark-Eye had been spending a lot of time with Hurt-Knee. Kellicut wondered if the shaman wanted to make sure that the young hominid had not been tainted by his time in the caves and was still pure enough to rejoin the village—or perhaps he was eager to learn as much as possible about the powerful renegades. It seemed to Kellicut that this wizened elder now single-handedly shouldered the burden of thinking about the future of the whole tribe.
Luckily the shaman still seemed to trust the humans. Kellicut knew that if he had any hope of penetrating the mysteries of communal telepathic perception and mastering the power himself, he needed instruction from Dark-Eye. Already he had been receiving images from time to time. What he had to do—what the hominids could do—was learn to control the process so he could dictate whose eyes he was looking through. Otherwise all would be chaos, a maddening barrage of images over which he had no control. For his part, the shaman seemed to view Kellicut as a colleague in the realm of spiritual matters.
At the pinnacle the shaman stopped and motioned Kellicut up next to him. Kellicut realized that he was being entreated to look out far beyond the sloping wall of the shelf they were standing on, so he did, gazing across the green treetops, the sunken spaces that were meadows, and the canyon walls, all the way to the white spires of the distant mountains. Kellicut felt that sense of another presence in his mind, like a room flooding with water, and understood why the old hominid wanted him there. He was indeed going blind, and he wanted once more to experience the beauty.
The cave at the top of the pinnacle had its usual pungent, musky smell. There were boulders for them to sit on and piles of bones over in a corner, whether human or animal Kellicut had never bothered to determine. The shaman reached into his pouch and pulled out a package the size of his fist, leaves coated with mud, which he unwrapped to reveal a glowing ember. From a corner he picked up a long pipe, filled it with brown shavings, lit it, took a long drag, and handed the pipe to Kellicut, who did the same. Visions leaped into his brain. His mind filled with shapes and color and movement, compacted by the tiny space inside the cave, and he sat back against the rock and let the parade of sensations pass through him. The shaman began singing, a haunting sound that was calming, like a Gregorian chant. When Kellicut closed his eyes, his mind focused; he saw a whitish blur, the fuzzy outline of rocks, a protuberance of stone on the cave wall. Opening his eyes, he looked at the old hominid, whose one good eye was trained on the rocks behind his head. Kellicut turned and looked behind him; there was the protuberance he had just seen in his mind’s eye.
That evening Kellicut found Matt and Susan sitting by the river and joined them on the bank. Susan could always tell when he had been “communing,” as she called it, with the shaman because he came back subdued and vague. Like someone returning from electric-shock therapy, she thought. This time he was even quieter than usual, and she knew he had something to tell them.
“Prepare yourself for a shock,” he said. “It comes from Long-face’s son—who incidentally did not run off to join the renegades but was abducted from a path on this side of the mountain. He was in the cave when you raced through it. It caused quite a stir, apparently.”
“Go on,” Matt said.
“Well, it seems that of the three of you, one was captured. He’s still being held there.”
“Jesus Christ! Van.”
“Yes, and there’s something worse. It took quite a while for the image to come through, hut I worked it out in the end. The renegades have taken the ‘stick that thunders.’ Congratulations. You have introduced murderous twentieth-century technology into the Stone Age.”
20
When he was a boy, Van had passed one summer on Lake Michigan. He spent hours walking along the beach under the cliffs, looking for tiny funnels in the sand. They were miniature traps; buried out of sight beneath them were ant lions. He relished finding an ant and dropping it in, watching it struggle upward, dislodging grains of sand and tumbling backward, until finally it fell exhausted to the bottom and was sucked under by a pair of pincers.
Now Van, at the bottom of a pit, was like one of those ants. He could scramble three quarters of the way up the sides, only to fall back again. There was one spot where he could almost make it to the top, but when he tried to climb to the edge, his guards lumbered over and pushed him backward. Once he was clubbed. Of course they had an advantage; they could see what he was doing without even looking at him. Escape was impossible, and he soon gave up trying.
He was in a bad way, exhausted, broken, emaciated. He rarely slept for long stretches; he had nightmares, and when he awoke he wished he was back in the nightmare. His body was covered with bruises, sores, and rashes. How much better, he thought, if he had died in the cave-in; instead, he had regained consciousness in this pit, his body racked in agony. His head ached all the time, a ring of pain that seemed to encircle it, continuously squeezing, like the medieval torture bands that were tightened around the temples until the brains squeezed through the eye sockets. He prayed for deliverance.
He knew where the pain came from; it was from that bloodthirsty leader who had killed Rudy and from his followers. Of course there was more to the hominids’ power than remote viewing; he knew that from Operation Achilles and the headaches he got there. But then he was dealing with only one hominid; now he was subjected to the probings of dozens of them at once and to the strongest of them, their leader and dictator, the one whose presence elicited high-pitched frightened noises. The Institute should have realized that the hominids’ faculty could scramble mental processes and stir atavistic recesses of the human mind.
Sometimes he felt that the pressure building inside hi
s skull was driving him insane. There was relief only when the creatures slept; he assumed this was at night, but he couldn’t be certain. And when that big one was around, Van felt the power burning into his brain like a laser. Sometimes he fainted and afterward he awakened as if from an epileptic fit, with the pain lessened; in those moments he felt a crystal clearness enter his boiling brain, like a cool drink of mountain water. But the temporary relief only made the pain that much worse when it resumed.
On the far side of the pit, along the wall, was a ledge. Van could reach it, and by hauling himself up he could stand on it and observe what was going on in the mammoth cavern. But he didn’t like to do this because it was frightening to watch these savages going about their lives, stripping skins, drying hides, cooking meat over open fires, and fornicating at will. They looked like beasts in the smoke and the reflected firelight, their thick black hair matted like strands of fur, their bodies glistening with sweat and giving off that repugnant smell.
It had been from the ledge that he witnessed the sacrifice. He had known he was not the first prisoner in the pit because he had found writing etched into a rock. It was in Cyrillic, unfortunately, so he could not read it. The letters seemed to be recent and hurriedly scrawled. There were also bones in the pit, smells of urine, and bits of dried feces in one corner. He assumed the bones were from food that was tossed down, the way the odd bone with bits of meat and gristle was thrown to him. Every so often a bowl filled with stagnant water was lowered. It was made from the inside dome of a skull.
Still, Van had no idea that there was another prisoner alive in the cavern until that horrible day when he heard drums beating, a loud insistent pounding that echoed up and down the tunnels. He climbed to the ledge and watched the creatures assemble, spreading out in concentric semicircles in front of the huge god shaped like a bear’s head. The big one, wearing a black bearskin flowing backward from his brow ridge, his upper torso naked and smeared in red and black paint, and with feathers as bands around his wrists, advanced from one side. The others fell back to give him room. As the creature leaned forward to seat himself on a carved wooden stool at the base of the godhead, Van saw a dark object swing out from his chest. It was his own gun, still in the holster, which was belted around the neck. The drums picked up the beat and from the other side of the cavern a human man was dragged in, struggling and screaming. He wore only uniform pants, and he shouted in Russian as he was propelled toward a thick log upended into the ground. Seconds before he was forced to bend, he spotted Van a hundred feet away, hugging the ledge. He had stopped screaming by now, and as their stares locked briefly, Van thought he could read a message in the man’s terrified eyes: Avenge me.
Then the big one looked directly at the man, as did all the others, and the Russian fell to the ground, writhing in agony, his fists pressed against his temples like a vise. For a moment, he seemed to pass out; then he was pulled to his knees and tied face down to the log with a thick leather thong holding down his head, exposing the line of vertebrae along his upper spine. Empty bowls were placed around the log. The leader stood and waved his arms as if he were conducting an unseen orchestra, and the drums played and a creature stepped forward with a long chisel-shaped flint in one hand and a rock in the other. As he placed the flint at the base of the man’s skull, Van yelled and they all looked at him, and suddenly Van felt unbearable pain enter his own head. But for some reason he kept looking. There was no scream from the Russian as the sharp rock was hammered into the base of his skull. His head fell limply forward and Van watched as the gray matter of his brain was scooped out into the bowls. When the creatures began to eat it, Van fell off the ledge face forward into the pit. He lay there not moving, listening to the loud beating of the drums, which went on for hours.
Later he was able to surmise, based upon how long he himself had been captive, that the sacrifice had been made at a full moon. But this was largely speculation since he had no way of knowing how long he had been unconscious after the cave-in. Now that his mind was so undependable, he could not be certain that he had not lost the ability to measure time. Pain and fear did that.
Resnick found it easier to venture into the underground corridor, and even to stand outside the cell, now that the prisoner was in such bad shape. He knew that it was wrong to think of it as a “prisoner,” especially since he was a scientist. But he had to face facts: He was terrified of the creature and was glad it was behind bars. Even then it was frightening to be in its presence, so he usually left most of the direct experimentation to others. Who knew what mental powers it possessed? Or what happened to your mind when it was stirred up? The optic nerve ran perilously close to the pain center, he knew, but Grady and the rest certainly didn’t. They had no trepidation because they were not cursed with knowledge and imagination the way he was. Therefore part of him was gratified when its condition sank so low that it was no longer a threat.
These days it rarely moved, just lay curled up on the mattress, sleeping for long periods. Restraints were no longer necessary but intravenous feeding was. The bottle on its stanchion stood next to the bed, and the drip line ended in a needle taped to the inside of its elbow. Sometimes when it moved the needle pulled out, and then whoever was at the monitor rang a buzzer and Grady or Allen cursed, opened the cell, and stuck it back in. There was no longer any point in even trying the experiments, so Resnick had little to do; it was like the old days back in the psych lab when Van was designing the experiments and Resnick sat around drinking coffee and doing crossword puzzles. This had turned into a death watch, but he could handle that, and when it was all over the pathologists would come in for the autopsy. Then perhaps they would learn something by cutting the brain into tens of thousands of paper-thin slices. Right now they didn’t have much of anything, merely rows and rows of numbers, vague theories, and half-baked conclusions.
Once the Irishman, Scanlon, who had grown so close to it and had been transferred as a result, came by for a visit. Resnick had been at the monitors and so saw the reaction when Scanlon walked up to the bars: The creature lifted its head and extended a weak arm, palm up and fingers outstretched. But Scanlon couldn’t reach it. When he left he poked his head into the control room and yelled something about Resnick rotting in hell. Strange guy. Too sensitive. He wasn’t cut out for science.
As soon as they heard that Van was still alive, Matt knew they had to rescue him. He didn’t feel they owed him anything; more than anyone else, Van was responsible for luring them up here and never once had he played straight with them. It was simply that the thought of anyone at the mercy of those hideous beasts was unbearable. The image of Sharafidin’s decaying skull kept flashing through his mind.
And there was a second reason: the gun. If somehow they could get it and find Van’s stash of ammunition, that could help them in their own escape. And Kellicut was right—left up there, it was a corrupting influence that would upset the natural balance.
But how could they do it without getting caught themselves? No matter how hard he schemed he couldn’t come up with anything other than a vague plan to penetrate the tunnels through the back cave and search for him—hardly a sophisticated strategy.
Susan wasn’t so sure they should try to save Van. She was reluctant to undertake something that seemed so patently impossible and that could bring such dire consequences.
“We could take Hurt-Knee with us as a guide,” Matt suggested as they lay together in the bower.
“You’d need a whole team. Otherwise you wouldn’t last five minutes.”
“What do you mean you?”
“Matt, I’m not certain I agree with you. Assuming for a minute we’re right to try, how could we do it? Who could we take?”
“We’d have to train them to fight.”
“That means training them to inflict harm, maybe even to kill.”
“I know.”
“It would change them forever, transform everything. This would no longer be Eden.”
�
�Susan, Eden is ending anyway. You heard what Kellicut said. They’re being picked off. It’s just a matter of time until the renegades destroy them. And I think some of them want to fight back. Things have changed since Longface died. If they fight back, at least they have a chance.”
“And what do you think Kellicut would say about our encouraging that? Everything he drummed into us from our first year was about the responsibility of social scientists to observe without meddling.”
“You’re putting Kellicut’s professional credo ahead of basic human morality. We can’t let Van die.”
“I know. I feel that too, but one of the things Kellicut taught us was that scientists shouldn’t just think of one individual.”
“Susan, forget science. Think of religion. If it teaches us anything, it’s the sanctity of life—any life, anywhere.”
Susan was quiet, which Matt took as stubborn resistance. He lashed out. “Kellicut. Sometimes I wonder about him. Why is he trying so hard to learn their ability?”
“It’s mystical.”
“Bullshit. It’s power. And you would know that if you weren’t under his thumb. Is it because you’re still his student or still his lover?”
She was too stunned to answer.
Susan walked into the forest, seething with anger. Isn’t that typical? she said to herself. I think we’re talking about science and morality, and all he can think about is whether or not I’m sleeping with Kellicut. Nothing but stupid male rivalry.
