Orphan of Creation

by Roger MacBride Allen

  She hit the trigger, and with a rattling sigh, the cranium gave up a big cloud of compacted dirt. She lifted the cranium up, poured the loosened dirt out, and decided to work on the teeth. She re-arranged the soft cloth she was using to support the skull and set the cranium back down right-side up.

  Once again she stared into the expressionless grin of the skull, and felt a warm, happy feeling inside. The search for a good specimen can take a lifetime, and luck is a tremendously important part of the job. A few shards of bone can be the only concrete results of a career, the sole source of a reputation, the single reward of a life of work wandering the world in search of our ancestors. Diggers develop an emotional attachment to their finds, and at times become rather sentimental about them.

  There was a long tradition of nicknaming famous fossils. The Leakeys and his “Dear Boy” and “Mrs. Ples,” Johansen with “Lucy,” so named because someone in camp played a tape of the Beatles’ “Lucy In the Sky with Diamonds” the night she was found, all the way back to the first australopithecine ever found, Dart’s “Taung Baby.” It struck Barbara that this fellow needed a name. Her first impulse was “Zebulon,” but she realized that her family would take a dim view of naming some monkey after their ancestor. Then she thought of the perfect name: Ambrose. After Ambrose Gowrie, the slavemaster who had bought the poor creature. She could make a monkey out of Ambrose safely enough. That settled, she happily went on with her work.

  She switched back and forth, between the compressed-air gun and a soft, worn toothbrush, as she cleaned all the convoluted surfaces of the teeth. It was her first real chance to get a look at the teeth of her new friend here, and for a paleoanthropologist, it was a breathtaking view. Because the teeth are the hardest part of the body, they are generally the best preserved—often they are all that a scientist has to work with.

  Since they are frequently all that Mother Nature will surrender up, the teeth are the most commonly and thoroughly studied hominid remains. At times, a canine or a molar or two is all that has been known of a hominid species. Because teeth are scratched and worn as their owner lives his or her life, a scientist can read a large part of the owner’s biography off the pits and grooves worn into the enamel of a single tooth. Roughly how old the specimen was at death, what sort of diet it had, patterns of chewing, the power of the jaws that moved the teeth, whether chewing was side-to-side or up-and-down; all that and more can be divined from a single tooth.

  All too often, those are the only clues available at all, for the rest of the creature—fur, skin, muscle, small bones, long bones, skull—is usually washed away in the currents of time, leaving but a few bits of enamel, a few grams of worn, grimy bone, as the only proof that any such animal ever lived.

  And Barbara, working with her worn-out toothbrush, was face to face with the crown jewels of australopithecine teeth. By the size of the canines, their owner had probably been a male; by the notable degree of wear on the massive wisdom teeth, indicating they had erupted sometime well before death, a male of about, say, twenty-two, twenty-six years old. That much she knew at a glance. She longed to get these teeth under a microscope and examine the wear-marks, literally read the menu of Ambrose’s diet there.

  It was a quiet, special, warm moment, in its own odd little way, a time of intimacy between Barbara and Ambrose the empty skull, the dead shards of bone whispering their secrets to the live person. It was such moments that made diggers say the bones could talk to them, as if some remnant of life, some fragment of spirit, clung to the fossils to converse with the stifled romantics who freed the fossils from their imprisonment in the earth.

  It was slowly dawning on Barbara that Ambrose would take her into the history books. She stared at the relic of the past and saw the promise of a bright future. The naked bones and teeth seemed to take on a welcoming, benevolent expression. She touched that massive brow ridge again, and it was almost the sensation she had often felt as a child in church; of a kindly presence close but unseen, near at hand but unspeaking.

  But then, suddenly, the door at her back bounced open, slammed shut, and the moment was shattered. “Good morning, Doctor!” a loud voice boomed out from behind her.

  Barbara almost visibly drew into herself, winced, her stomach muscles tightening. She took a moment to compose her face before she spun around on her stool to face Rupert Maxwell, Ph.D., P.I.T.A. That was how she had thought of him when he had first arrived a few months before—as such a massive Pain In The Ass he must have studied, earned a degree in it. The more winning aspects of his personality had taken a long time to shine through, and his usual booming entrance was enough to make her forget everything nice she had ever thought about him. She forced herself to calmness, determined not to let his brashness destroy her good mood.

  She put a smile on and turned to face him, keeping her body between the skull and Rupert. “Hello, Rupert. How was your Thanksgiving?”

  He grinned from behind his mirrored sunglasses and laughed. He was a big, tall, birdlike man, with a surfer’s tan and short-cropped blond hair that stood up from his head bottle-brush straight. He was dressed in a white sport coat, a dark blue shirt and a microscopically thin red tie, black slacks, and cowboy boots. Barbara often wondered if his outfits were the result of careful thought in the art of clashing, or simply random selection from his closet. “Great Thanksgiving,” he said as he threaded his way toward her through the labyrinth of desks, “except for three leftover turkey TV dinners. Ended up eating Chinese with some friends instead. Only people in the restaurant.”

  He always dressed that way, in fragmented outfits—and always seemed to talk that way, in partial sentences and telegraphed syntax. He was the sort of person who unfairly made other people hate Californians. His years at UCLA may have rubbed off, but Rupert was from Nebraska.

  Rupert Maxwell got away with a lot because of his reputation. Still in his early thirties, he was the author of a number of flawlessly scholarly papers whose learned prose seemed to have nothing to do with the language their author spoke. All those around him, from Grossington on down, agreed he was apparently good at his work— “apparently” because it was very rare to catch him actually doing any. The studies, the reports, the data, seemed to appear magically, effortlessly. It was as if he had a secret supplier who hid by the coffee maker he seemed always to be at, or perhaps the waiters where he took his long lunches delivered information with the check. “Anyway, a fun weekend. Played some touch, went canoeing on the C. & O. Canal, caught the ball games. Nothing too special.” He flashed his grin again and started to shrug off his coat. “But never mind that stuff. What’s the news from the Gowrie excavation?”

  All at once it was no effort for Barbara to smile. “I made a new friend. Rupert Maxwell, say hello to Ambrose.” She stepped off the stool and let her office mate see the cranium.

  But he was looking at her instead. His eyebrows shot up from behind the mirrored shades and he cocked his head to one side. “Who . . . ?” he began to ask, as if he thought she was trying to introduce him to some imaginary friend hovering over her shoulder. Then his eye caught the skull.

  His mouth knotted into a frown, he pulled off his shades, whistled low, and leaned in close to the unbelievable sight. There was a long silence, a longer silence than Barbara had ever heard from Rupert. At last he spoke. “Hello, Ambrose,” he said, addressing the half-cleaned cranium. “Nice to meet you. Where’ve you been all my life?”

  <>

  Jeffery Grossington was a wanderer, a fidgeter. It was as if his brain were attached to his feet and his fingers. He had to be fiddling with something, or walking, or neatening his desk, or doing something, anything, while his brain worked. He had to get rid of the nervous energy churned up by the adrenaline of thinking about a grand idea.

  He was rarely aware of events outside the limits of his own skull at such times. He would often come to himself with a start and find himself with his fingers tangled up changing a typewriter ribbon that did not need changing, or
down in the public cafeteria sitting over a cup of tea that had been empty for an hour. Mostly, however, he walked.

  The worst of it was that his secretary Harriet likewise had a tendency to concentrate too much. She would sit in his outer office, absorbed in whatever report she was coaxing out of the computer, or preparing a summary of events paleontologic around the world, and she would not notice the stocky figure quietly easing out of the inner door and into the corridor. A call would come, or a visitor, or Harriet herself would have a question—and Dr. Grossington would have vanished altogether, perhaps not to reappear for hours.

  At least this time Grossington told Harriet he was going for a walk, so even if she didn’t know where he was, she at least knew she didn’t know. Grossington made his way downstairs to the public areas of the museum, into the grand, musty, sweeping vault of the rotunda, with the bull elephant in its center, his trunk raised forever, trumpeting a silent salute to the massed herds of a long-passed era.

  The crowds and the hordes of schoolchildren surged about, talking, laughing, rushing to see the dinosaurs, calling to one another. Grossington navigated his way through them, through the main entrance of the museum, down the wide granite stairs, and onto the wide expanses of the National Mall. The red brick of the original Smithsonian Castle stood directly across the Mall, flags waving jauntily from its cheerful parapet.

  Grossington crossed to the middle of the Mall, out from under the line of massive trees that bordered it. He breathed in the crisp late-November air and looked about him. The Capitol Building sat in majesty, a lord of creation, at the east end of the great space, and the Washington Monument speared skyward in the west, pointing upward toward all aspiration. Lining both sides of the wide tract of greensward between the two were the buildings of the Smithsonian Institution, proud monuments to learning and knowledge. It was an inspiring place to be on a perfect fall day, a place of great ambition and beauty built by generations of men and women who were not afraid to dare or dream.

  The trouble was, at the moment, Grossington was afraid to dare. If that excitable Dr. Barbara Marchando had burst into his office with, say, a Mayan headdress pulled from the Mississippi ooze, or a stone tablet covered with Viking runes she had excavated in California, he could have accepted it. It would have been incredible, startling, but not something that threatened to turn the world upside down. Certainly Barbara did not, could not, realize how much turmoil her discovery would create—how much turmoil the possibility of finding that mankind had “company,” as she put it, could raise.

  And yet, how could he blame her for her excitement, when he shared it himself? He thought again of that impossible skull, and it was as if a light had gone on inside him. He grinned, his pace increased, and he rubbed his hands together in pleasure. It was gold—a gleaming fragment of scientific gold chipped out of the wall of the past, pointing the way to a rich vein of discoveries.

  But—his pace slowed, and he looked up to realize that he was nearly at the Capitol. On impulse, he turned toward the greenhouses of the Botanical Gardens, tucked incongruously into a corner of the Mall. He always enjoyed a stroll through the hothouse plants, always delighted in the eccentricity of the place. He found the entrance and went inside, the humid, peaty warmth of the hothouse air wrapping itself around him.

  But—was this a Piltdown or a Coelacanth? There. That was what it came down to. That was the focus of his uncertainty. He grunted to himself, pleased that he had spotted the trouble.

  Was this skull Barbara had dug up a second Piltdown, a brilliantly manufactured fake, a hoax? He liked and trusted the impetuous Barbara, but he had to consider the possibility that either she was duping him, or someone was duping her. Suppose the skull and the allegedly related remains had been “salted”—craftily buried by a hoaxer in anticipation of their later discovery?

  The original Piltdown Man had survived undiscovered as a fraud for forty years, and the perpetrator had never been identified with any certainty. All that was really known for sure was that a few bits of human and ape bones had been doctored and presented as parts of the same individual. The resultant forgery had made fools out of the greatest names in paleontology—Keith, Woodward, Smith and—wrecked reputations. Far more seriously, it had skewed, warped every study of the human past for two generations.

  Or was Barbara’s skull a Coelacanth? That strange, bone-headed genus of fishes had been confidently marked down as extinct for millions of years—until a specimen of a Coelacanth was pulled up, spluttering, flopping, and very much alive, from the waters off Africa.

  Whether or not Barbara’s skull was authentic, it was certain to set off a tidal wave of controversy. It upset too many theories, rocked too many boats for too many people. Real or fake, it would inevitably be challenged. Grossington knew he had to expect that, be prepared for it from square one. Barbara had done a good job of preparing for challenge already, if her careful site notes and photocopies of the journal that had offered the first clues were any indication. The film she had shot would be back from the lab in a day or so, delayed a bit by the holiday rush, more than likely, and it should provide more convincing documentation. It would back up a superb paper trail.

  Of course, a good hoaxer would have to leave just as superb a paper trail.

  Grossington found a bench and thought for a moment, and decided that Barbara had not perpetrated a hoax. It was not in her character. Yet he knew perfectly well that if she had salted that skull, a key part of the plan would be to convince him that she was not capable of any such thing. But be that as it may—he could not and would not operate on the assumption that his people were lying to him. If they called you a fool for trusting people, he preferred to be a fool.

  That didn’t solve his problem, however, for it made no less likely the chance that Barbara was being hoaxed. Still, she was no fool. It would be hard to trick her, and the trap that had been laid here would have required some enormous efforts.

  How could it possibly be a fraud? He had seen that skull, had touched it, smelled it, seen on it the endless minute details that shouted out its authenticity, its unhuman-ness.

  Grossington knew he was an expert, that he could not be fooled in such things. Which was no doubt exactly the same sort of thing Keith, Woodward, Smith, et. al., had said about Piltdown.

  Even so, he simply could not believe that skull was a fake. He would know if it were. Just as he was forced to have faith in his people, he was forced to have faith in himself.

  In a scientist, faith was supposed to be a rare commodity. Ideally, it did not exist. All opinion, all thought, all judgment and theory, were supposed to rest on the evidence. Did he have enough faith in Barbara’s skill and skepticism tucked away to commit his department to an enterprise that would certainly expose it to controversy, and quite possibly (if his faith was indeed misplaced) destroy it in scandal and fraud?

  Well, the only concrete evidence was what his senses told him about the skull—and his senses said it was real.

  Was that enough to commit on? Or should he tell Barbara to forget it, go back to her current research, and risk losing history’s greatest discovery in the hunt for the human past?

  He knew, deep inside, that he could safely say no without stifling the discovery, especially with Barbara Marchando involved. She would go across the figurative street to the competition—the American Museum of History in New York, or that team in Cleveland. Word would get out, the site would be excavated, the lead followed up without Grossington putting himself at any risk. It was too big to squelch forever.

  It came down to whether he, Jeffery Grossington, was willing to take the chance, risk his career and his reputation, on this incredible find. All it took to be safe was to say no, let Barbara go elsewhere and drag the coming storm clouds of controversy off with her and leave his quiet life alone. A very simple, easy thing...

  A loud, bright noise made him look up. A child, a little girl in pigtails and pinafore, raced past his bench, down the hallways of the Garde
ns, laughing and shouting at the joy of being alive. Then Grossington heard a muttering grunt from quite close at hand. He turned and discovered for the first time that he was sharing his bench with a sour-faced old man who was clearly annoyed at the child’s happiness, displeased with the gardens, fed up with the same world that so delighted the child. It was as clear a symbol—and a warning—as Grossington could want. It would be sinfully criminal to throw away the gifts Gowrie and Barbara were offering up.

  He got up and walked out of the building back toward the museum, moving with a much faster, brisker gait. Once he had made up his mind, he walked fast, in a straight line, directly toward his goal.

  Interlude

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  Come. Go. Pull weeds. Carry. Bring. Stop. Follow. Out. In.

  She knew those hand signs, and all the dozen or so more, the ritualized pantomimes the men used to command her kind. So far as she was concerned, all the words in the world were commands, orders, countermands, and things the commands might be about—the crops, food, water. She signed them to herself, taking an inventory of her tiny collection of words. But now, today, for the first time, she had found a new way of telling, or thought she had: the noises the men made, the shouting, the calling. She had always taken the man-noises as just one more sort of noise, meaning no more or less than her own calls, hoots, cries, and snuffles.

  Her own cries could signal distress, or pleasure, or warning, or welcome; they were just one part of the great soundings of the forest, where one animal recognized the calls of its fellows, and could understand and take warning from the meaning of the barks, the yips, the growls of many other animals.

  She had always taken the sounds of the men to be such, just noises to urge on and emphasize the hand-commands. The meanings, the commands, were all in the hand signals, not in sound. The man signed them to her kind, and far more rarely, her kind used them among themselves—a skill she was most proficient at.