Neanderthal

by John Darnton

  They came to a large tunnel that seemed familiar. It appeared to be the large central passageway, lit by torches in niches, that they had run through a few weeks ago. After five minutes, just when they were hoping to slow down, the hominids suddenly put on an extra spurt, as if they had clicked into a higher gear. With a sickening feeling in his gut, Matt realized why. “We’re being chased,” he said breathlessly to Susan, gesturing with his head to Hurt-Knee and the others. “They’ve just picked it up”—he gestured to the hominids—“that the renegades are on to us and know where we are.” He thought back to the four creatures he had seen running out of the sacred cavern, certain that they were the pursuers.

  At that moment, Hurt-Knee turned off into a smaller side tunnel which, after a hundred yards, split into two similar-looking passages. They paused for a moment, then took the one to the left, all but Leviticus, who came to a halt. He stood his ground, purposefully.

  “What’s he doing?” gasped Susan.

  “I don’t know, but we can’t stop,” Matt answered. “Just keep going.”

  They ran on, Hurt-Knee now taking Leviticus’s place on one side of Van and, with Lancelot, dragging him along like a heavy gunnysack. Susan led, and felt a surge of strength in her legs. The adrenal gland kicking in its last resources, she thought, until she realized it was an altogether different sensation, that familiar flooding up again, and she knew where it was coming from— Leviticus. He’s the decoy, she thought. He’s sacrificing himself for us. As she ran on, she felt as if a powerful underground wind was sweeping her onward, a warm flow of energy that spread from the core of her brain through her muscles and her bones. She was no longer fleeing through a tunnel, she was flying through a meadow. Her feet barely touched the ground; she felt as light as a thistle seed rising in air currents.

  Then, abruptly, the sensation departed and she felt a void just as they saw a shimmering wall of light ahead of them and staggered to it, finally emerging into daylight. The sun blinded them. Standing at the cave entrance with the valley before them, Matt took in great gulps of air. Van was in a daze, and Hurt-Knee and Lancelot were distraught.

  “Where’s Leviticus?” Matt asked.

  “Dead,” said Susan, surprising even herself by the monotone of her voice. She felt stricken, hollow.

  “We’ll all be dead soon,” said Van, speaking for the first time. “We haven’t a chance.”

  Susan whirled around and gave him a look that silenced him.

  The light was tricky. It was already late in the day and the sun was beginning to recede behind the crest of the mountains. It seemed chillier than when they had entered the cave, and deadly quiet. Their pursuers were still coming through the tunnels.

  284 a JOHN DARNTON

  This time the hominids had no choice but to cross the forbidden burial ground. As they set foot over an invisible line, their fear could be read in every reluctant step. Overhead, the vultures still circled. No grave keepers were in sight, but their absence was as forbidding as their presence had been before. Despite the late-afternoon chill, the hominids were sweating and kept their eyes averted from the bundles in the trees and the bones scattered on the ground. Van was wide-eyed; it was impossible to know how much he was taking in.

  Halfway across the burial ground, Matt looked back and saw the creatures emerging from the cave, brandishing their weapons. Even from a distance their rage was visible. The rage was a good sign; it meant they would not break the taboo and cross the sacred ground. Somewhere among the barren trees he heard a steady breathing but he could not tell whether it was from the grave tenders or from animals.

  In the gathering twilight, the village was uncharacteristically quiet. At first it seemed to be deserted, but then they realized that most of the hominids were in their huts. No one came out to greet them, and Kellicut was nowhere in sight. Van was acting strangely; when he spoke, he often did not make sense. A place to sleep was found for him and he quickly dropped off into a stupor.

  As darkness descended, Hurt-Knee and Lancelot fell ill. They collapsed in their bowers, at first listless and then delirious with fever. Matt thought they were reacting in some way to their transgression in trespassing upon the burial ground, but he could not be sure. Others in the tribe also seemed spiritless.

  Later that night as he and Susan lay in each other’s arms, they talked about Leviticus. She was inconsolable. “I’m sorry about him,” said Matt. “I know how you felt about him. What he did was heroic. It has to make us question our ideas about how primitive these hominids are.”

  “That kind of heroism has to rank higher on the scale of evolution than killing animals and curing hides.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe altruism is more basic than we realize. Do you remember those studies of wolves hunting caribou? The leader of the wolf pack communicated in some way with the weakest caribou, actually sent a message so that the caribou fell back and accepted its fate, sacrificing himself for the herd.”

  “Perhaps. But that doesn’t take away from individual heroism. It makes the whole species more heroic. Maybe we still have some of that in us too, even without the telepathic power.”

  They heard the sound of drums from up on the mountain. This had not happened before. As they listened, they imagined the ferocious creatures pounding with bones on tightly drawn skins. The sound throbbed and echoed, which meant that the drums were being played inside the tunnels. Then from somewhere else, deep inside the bowels of the earth, they could detect another rumble, and then a trembling. In an instant they realized it was an earthquake.

  Eagleton knew he was needed. It was one of those rare situations where his presence on the scene was required; it was time to take charge. There was simply too much at stake, and too much had gone wrong already. First Van was missing, then the NOMAD transponder blanked out, then the damned creature died in captiv­ity and zapped that worker, whatever his name was—Scanlon; it took him days to recover. Who would have supposed that it had such power? There was more to this Remote Viewing than met the eye, he mused, pleased with his pun.

  The DNA report was in; the creature had twenty-three pairs of chromosomes, just like a human. Ninety-eight percent of his DNA was identical to ours. Of course that’s true of chimpanzees too, he thought; it’s the remaining two percent that counts. The report came back with a scribbled note from the lab technician: I give up. What the hell is it?

  So Eagleton decided to go himself to the base camp Kane had set up at the foot of the mountain. The problem was, he hadn’t been off the campus in years. In fact, with his small apartment linked by an underground passage and an elevator for his wheelchair, he hadn’t even been out of the building, so all sorts of arrangements were required to make the trip with a minimum of psychological stress: a van with darkened windows and a hydraulic lift for his chair a private jet with the seats cleared and straps to hold his chair in place, diplomatic clearance so the aircraft could set down for refueling and then be on its way again. He had never been to Tajikistan and had to admit he didn’t like the sound of the place. Too many foreigners, too many flies, too many germs.

  III THE BATTLE

  23

  The tremors continued through the night and into the next morning but finally tapered off by noon. A chill wind was blowing through the valley, making the leaves shiver and turning up their green-silver undersides as if a storm was brewing. Matt and Susan walked through the village to survey the destruction. Four or five huts had collapsed when the branches that served as beams had snapped, twisting into a splay of yellow fibers, and rocks and de­bris littered the paths. But the village survived largely intact. Few hominids ventured outside; only children could be seen here and there, fetching water in gourds from the stream or running from one hut to another.

  An earthquake was even more terrifying in the high wilderness of the mountains. It was like some primal turbulence between the peaks and the stars, with trees swaying, rocks shifting, and a sickening sense that there was only you and the earth, and that the ea
rth could open at any moment and send you plummeting into a fiery chasm. No wonder humans invent gods, Matt thought.

  They looked in on Hurt-Knee and Lancelot. They were being tended by other hominids, who brought them apples, nuts, and water. They were better than they’d been the night before—their fevers seemed to have broken—but they were still lying down and ap­peared weak and shaken. Susan did not know what had caused their collapse, whether it was attacking Van’s guard, abandoning Leviticus to a cruel death, crossing the burial ground, or a combination of everything. She looked for signs that the hominids regarded her and Matt differently, perhaps blaming them on some level, but saw none.

  Kellicut was a different matter. He was not in the village, so they went to look for him, taking the path that led to the sulfurous lake and geyser. They went down the wet steps toward the basin and found themselves on a wide ledge that cut deep into the rock face. In the center, sitting with his legs crossed, was Kellicut.

  “We need to talk,” said Susan.

  “It’s a little late for that.”

  She walked over and sat down next to him, with Matt on her other side, and remained for a moment in an awkward silence. None of us have secrets anymore, Matt thought.

  Susan broke the silence. “We got Van out.”

  “And now what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Kellicut sighed wearily. “That’s the whole point. You don’t know, do you?” As he turned to look at her his features seemed more sorrowful than angry. Suddenly he appeared old.

  “It seemed like the right thing to do,” said Susan. “We couldn’t just leave him there.”

  “I suppose not—not if you felt about it as strongly as you obviously did. I’m sorry you ever came here.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Why not? It’s true.”

  “Are you trying to hurt us?”

  “No, though I don’t care if I hurt you or not. I’m simply stating a matter of fact. If you hadn’t come, none of this would have happened. You wouldn’t have disrupted everything.”

  “Disrupted everything,” interjected Matt. “You always talk as if there were some grand plan.”

  Kellicut looked at him for the first time. “You haven’t understood from the beginning.”

  “Understood what?”

  “The whole design, the historical sweep, the extraordinary privilege of being here and being able to witness it. It was like going back fifty thousand years.”

  “I think we understand that,” said Susan.

  “No, because if you had, you wouldn’t have interfered. That was the cardinal rule: Don’t get involved, don’t take sides. But you took the side of the pacific hominids. I can see the temptation, of course. They’re wonderful souls—truly innocent, truly good, no­bler by far than Rousseau’s noble savage—but they weren’t meant to prevail. If nature had wanted them to come out on top, she would have given them the wherewithal to do so.”

  “How can you be so sure?” asked Matt. “Who are you to interpret nature’s intentions?”

  “I’m not interpreting. I’m merely watching. If you open your eyes and look around, you’ll see that nature has already made her choice, and, as always, she sided with the strong.”

  “Maybe the strong shouldn’t always survive,” Susan argued.

  “Shouldn’t doesn’t have anything to do with it. They’re strong because they’re supposed to be strong. If the renegades pick the others off one at a time, it’s because they’re destined to. If they attack them and wipe them out all at once, they’re meant to. Every­thing is unfolding according to nature’s plan. Don’t you see that? You’ve blundered into this world at a critical moment, a hidden world that has stood suspended for thousands of years, and now in a split second it’s about to transform itself. A species is going to reinvent itself, shed its old self like a used skin and become some­thing greater, something more advanced, and you’re here to wit­ness it. But you’re here at that world’s sufferance and the ground rule is simple: Stay out of it. It’s a precarious equilibrium, so don’t mess with it. And you did.”

  In their mutual anger they fell silent. Then, calmly, Matt asked, “What happens now?”

  Kellicut shrugged. “Who knows? If I had to bet, I’d say that you have provoked a war that’s going to bring disaster down upon us all. You’ve gone into their lair and attacked them, so now they will attack you and the ones who have befriended you. Then, of course, you’ll try to defend your friends, which will only make everything worse.”

  “Let me ask you something,” said Matt. “What if we are part of the design? What if nature intended us to rectify the balance?”

  Kellicut stood up, livid with anger. “That’s the most preposterous, arrogant idea I’ve ever heard.” As he strode in a circle around Matt he looked as if he were about to take a swing at him. “Who the hell do you think you are?” He stood directly over him and glowered down. “Do you remember our first conversation here? That day you met me, right over there?” He pointed outside. “I told you then that you had found Eden, and I warned you to beware of the snake. You asked me what the snake was. Well, now you know, and if you want to see it, I suggest you take a good long look in the lake on your way out.” He turned on his heel, stalked over the rock, hoisted himself up, and disappeared in the direction of the waterfall.

  Kellicut’s injunction started Susan thinking, though not in the way he had intended. She did stop to see her reflection in the lake, and as she looked she was disturbed by his accusation, because on one level he was right, of course. They were interlopers, and they had disturbed the equilibrium of this primordial world, setting off repercussions difficult to foretell, as surely as a rock dropped at this end of the lake would send ripples to the farthest shore. But what else could they have done? Let Van die a grisly death to uphold some abstract scientific principle? And now that they were in it up to their necks, how could they possibly withdraw and leave the hominids here at the mercy of the renegades?

  Susan knelt down on one knee and sifted through the sand on the shore of the lake. It’s morality that sets us apart from the beasts of the jungle, she reflected, that and the certain knowledge of our own deaths. Morality and mortality, the twin pillars of civilization. Doesn’t it all count for anything—language, learning, inventive­ness, scientific discoveries, medicine, Ptolemy, Galileo, Newton, Pasteur, Einstein? She thought about the wheel, mankind’s first advance, then looked down at the sand; it was strange to find sand here. The Egyptians, she recalled, were the ones who discovered that the unlikely mixture of sand and ash makes glass. The stained-glass windows of Chartres. Paint the back in silver and you have a mirror. Narcissism. And now we are looking into our innermost selves—DNA, our genes. She remembered that she had a pocket mirror in her rucksack. Serpent or no serpent, she thought, the tree of knowledge must be worth something.

  The hut where they had left Van was empty, but they found him not far away on the banks of the stream. He was drinking with his head half submerged, and when they approached he started like an animal at a water hole, then lowered his head again the way a whipped dog does. Far from being grateful for being rescued, he seemed resentful, as if it were their fault that he had been captured in the first place.

  “Did you run out on me?” he demanded, not looking either of them in the eye.

  “Run out? Hell, no,” replied Matt. “We were lucky to get away at all.”

  “You’re right about that. A lot luckier than me.”

  “We thought you were dead.”

  “Oh, yeah? If you thought I was dead, why did you finally decide to come get me?”

  “We learned that you weren’t.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  Upset by Van’s truculence, Susan left. Matt took him for a walk in the woods, and as they followed a path—Van with a limp that gave him a loping gait like one of the creatures—Matt realized that Van had not asked any questions about the hominids, Kellicut, or the valley. He was obsessed only
by his captivity.

  They came to a grove with a fallen tree. Sitting down on it, Matt looked intently at him and put the question that had been on his mind for some time. “Tell me, back before the cave-in, when we were running through the tunnel, do you remember when we were hiding?” Van nodded. “Why did you tell us to close our eyes?”

  Van cackled. “There’s so much you don’t know. You don’t have a clue, do you? You think you’re so smart, but you don’t know a damn thing.”

  Matt held himself in check. He needed answers more than the ego gratification of lashing out at this pathetic man. “So why don’t you enlighten me?”

  “Why don’t you figure it out for yourself?”

  “I have, for the most part.”

  “And?”

  “And it’s clear that from the beginning you were lying to us and using us. You knew all about the Neanderthals. You knew they re­ally existed. You and Eagleton were playing a little charade with that skull. You didn’t need it as confirmation of their continued survival because you already had some kind of proof. Hell, you were probably already experimenting on them.”

  Van remained mute.

  “Which means you already knew about their special mental powers,” Matt said. “Why else close your eyes when you’re being pursued? What I don’t get is, if you already had some, why did you need more?”

  “Simple: We only had one, and one’s not enough. Operation Achilles, it was called. You can’t understand RV unless you have two of them: one to send and one to receive. Otherwise, it’s hopeless, the old one-hand-clapping.”

  “RV?”

  “Remote Viewing. That’s a scientific term you should become acquainted with.”

  “I’ve seen it in action. I can imagine all kinds of reasons why types like you would want to acquire it.”