Orphan of Creation

by Roger MacBride Allen

  But that second set of prints—they had been worth it. He had dragged himself up to one of the brightly lit, well-cleaned cellar windows—and found himself a few feet away from not just one, but a whole row of misshapen, grinning skulls. They were just lying there, leering up at him. Creepy was scarcely the word. But he shook that off, set up his pint-size table-top tripod, and took a whole set of long exposures, two or three seconds each, then switched lenses and got close-ups of each skull through his telephoto. Once he had what he wanted, he didn’t try to be subtle. He just stood up and ran like hell away from the house back toward the burial ground—and nearly broke his ankle in a chuck hole. But no alarm was raised, and he had the pics. Two hours and a pot of black coffee later he had been steady enough to process the film and print the photos in the newspaper’s lab.

  He was justifiably proud of the final products. The photos were just a trifle grainy, but all of them were sharp and clear, well exposed and perfectly focused.

  That satisfaction had been short-lived—for then he had been faced with the question of what to do with the things. The photos by themselves were weird, but were not enough by themselves to print in any paper except the tabs, the papers Pete mentally filed under the generic term The National Perspirer. He had to know what they were pictures of. It had seemed a simple enough question.

  He looked again at his perfect, perfect pictures, and then sorrowfully at his stack of library books on evolution. He had thought it would be a simple matter to match up the obviously non-human skulls with their pictures in the books and go on from there. Easy.

  Instead, he had been reminded of his first attempt as a birder. He had been completely lost then, unable to tell the nuthatches from the finches in the book, never mind comparing the little pictures with a ball of fluff seen for a few seconds at a hundred yards.

  Skulls were—skulls, one very like another. He had no idea what he was looking at. The books he had weren’t much help, either. It was slowly dawning on him that the libraries and bookstores of rural, Baptist, evangelical, born-again Mississippi were not the best place to find good books on what most of the locals pronounced ‘evil-otion.’ There weren’t that many librarians and booksellers in the area to start with, and what few there were tread softly around issues on which the church had strong feelings. Pete shook his head. It was frightening what a book-banning, or even the threat of a book-banning—a protest, a letter to the editor—could do to the sources of knowledge. And he needed help. He was a newsman, wholly innocent of paleoanthropology, not even entirely sure what the term meant until he had looked it up.

  The few books on the subject he did find were years or even decades out of date, and the illustrations consisted mostly of artistic and contradictory reconstructions of what the authors were pleased to call ape-men, shambling about the landscape. What few illustrations of bones and skulls there were seemed to be little more than crude line drawings or badly reproduced photos that were too muddy and dark to see properly. Pete’s photos were clear, but his shots at the excavation were all from far off, and the shots into the basement were looking down on the skulls from an oblique angle that wasn’t shown in any book. Worse, Pete had no idea which shapes and features of a skull were important and which were meaningless variants.

  But Pete had plugged grimly on, trying to match his photos up with the pictures in the books. At one point or another, he convinced himself of matches with the chimp, the gorilla, Homo erectus, and Sinanthropus pekinensis, until he discovered that science had long since decided that last species did not exist. Then he thought the skulls might be orangutans, Neanderthals or even just some sort of big monkey. He had even found an ancient book all about Eoanthropus dawsoni—Dawson’s dawn man—and thought that might be the match, before he realized Eoanthropus was nothing more or less than a forgery, the Piltdown Man.

  Leafing through the book, he found some cold comfort in the

  oft-repeated tales of trained scientists who had studied this skull or that endlessly before clearly and confidently misidentifying it. But if they all got it wrong so often, how could he hope to get it right?

  It was impossible for him to decide definitely what this crowd from Washington was up to. What was it all about? Had he stumbled on to a bunch of eccentrics digging up some old monkeys some nut had buried there, or was this what his hunch told him it was—the biggest story of his life, bigger than he could ever dream of? Suppose he treated it like a mega-scoop and it blew up in his face, turned out to be an unstory not worth wasting newsprint on? It had to be one or the other; there was no middle ground.

  He looked up again through the plate-glass window and watched Livingston waving goodbye to the others. Now it looked like they were all going home. That suggested maybe it was all a bust. Why would they pull out if it was a big deal?

  The damnable thing was that doing nothing was so safe. If he left the story alone, nothing bad would happen to his career, no risk would accrue. And it seemed like such a far-off long shot ...

  Regretfully, he closed the folders, shoved them back into the files, and shoved the drawer shut with a bit more force than necessary.

  He sat there for ten solid minutes, staring at that drawer, telling himself over and over again all the reasons for letting it alone.

  Then, quite abruptly, he stood up and went into the row of reference shelves that lined one side of the newsroom. The phone books for the whole state were there. He pulled down the book for JACKSON, brought it back to his desk, and began riffling through the pages, looking through the entries for Mississippi State University.

  Working the phones was second nature—or maybe first—in the newspaper business. In ten minutes he had the name of Dr. Roberta Volsky of the anthropology department. Unfortunately, her receptionist said, Dr. Volsky would be unavailable until after the Christmas holiday. Pete shrugged that off. Those skull had waited underground a long time—they could wait a bit longer. He settled for a January 11 appointment at ten a.m.

  He felt better afterwards, and spent the afternoon happily working on a soppy little holiday feature about the animal shelter’s annual adopt-a-pet campaign. Front page stuff for the Gazette, with a shot of a puppy with big soulful eyes alongside. Pete didn’t care anymore. Maybe on January 11 he would be through with all that.

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  Rupert rattled his keys into the lock, wiggled them this way and that until the catch caught, stepped into his apartment—and was jumped from behind, grabbed hard in the leg, his shin exploding into red blossoms of pain.

  He dropped his suitcase and cried out in alarm, then caught himself and bent down to disentangle the yowling Chairman Meow from his blue jeans. He should have been expecting it. The poor guy had been left all alone for three weeks, with just Blanche from next door coming in once a day to feed him. No wonder he was happy to see Rupert come home. Rupert had his hands full for a minute, trying to calm the excited cat. Finally, he managed to settle the Chairman down enough to hold him in one arm, leaving the other free to switch on lights and so on. The Chairman snuggled down into his chest and began buzzing loudly, pumping his forepaws into Rupert’s sweater.

  Rupert sniffed the air suspiciously. Yup, the apartment definitely smelled of used cat. Well, he couldn’t blame Blanche for not changing the box more often—that was no one’s favorite job. Rupert sighed and started opening windows. It smelled like time to clean the mouse cage as well. Getting home was always such a blast.

  Two hours later the place was aired out, the mail was sorted, and the apartment, to Rupert’s eye, was in some semblance of order. To anyone but Rupert, the place would have seemed immaculate, but to him it was just barely tolerable.

  He switched on his desk computer and fiddled with it for a bit, transferring files from the portable. But that was just stalling, and he knew it. He had some writing to do: his portion of the paper on Ambrose and company—and a letter. Rupert hated writing, hated the endless fiddling with phrases and adverbs to get things to come out right on paper. Sc
ribbled notes and quick jottings were all right—it was formal writing that he couldn’t bear. Everything he set down always sounded so stilted, so formal in the first draft—and the second, and the third. The final results were always quite satisfactory, but getting to that point was endless pain—so tough for him that he never let anyone at the office see him in the act of writing, but did it all in the privacy of his own home. Setting down words always made him long for the clear precision of numbers, charts, graphs, solid facts.

  Across town, he knew, Barbara was already hard at work on the section dealing with the discovery of the skulls. Harrumphing old Grossington was supposed to do the comparative section, once he had scared up the money needed for the trip to Gabon. All of that left Rupert to do the actual description of the bones. It was a logical division of labor, and gave Rupert that part of the job that made best use of his talents, but he hated it all the same. He had that all-important letter to write as well. And no one else could do that job.

  Chairman Meow vaulted up from the floor onto the desk and bounced up to his accustomed place atop the mouse cage. Rupert reached up and scratched him behind the ears. “Don’t get too comfortable, partner,” Rupert told him. “With any luck, I’ll be off on another trip before long and leave you on your lonesome again. Let’s hope Blanche can still put up with you.”

  He sighed and started in on the letter first.

  January

  Chapter Twelve

  Clark White carefully eased his broad rump down into his superannuated government-issue swivel desk-chair, and set the chair to creaking loudly as he leaned back and cleared his throat with a heroically noisy harrumph. He rubbed his fleshy chin, or chins, to be more accurate, where the razor had nicked him that morning, folded his hands over his expansive potbelly, and stared glumly at his in-basket.

  Every morning it was the same, here in Gabon or at any posting he had ever held. Paperwork. Somehow, somewhere, he knew, all these bits of paper got things done. Nothing would happen, could happen, without the bits of paper. But how or why that was so, he could never explain. He glanced out over the thrumming window air-conditioner through the flyspecked window at the streets of Libreville, just to be sure the foreign capital was still there. For all the excitement and exotica of his job, he might as well be back at his desk in Foggy Bottom, Washington, D.C.—or back home in Des Moines for that matter.

  With infinite reluctance, and with more than a passing thought for the pastries calling to him from the shop around the corner, he pulled out his scruffy old reading glasses and started his daily quest for the bottom of that damned in-basket. It was all routine stuff, of course. Urgent requests for emergency supplies from the Howfritz expedition, a panicky note from the Museé de l’Homme in Paris requesting transport for one of their primatologists who was stuck in the back of beyond in some God-forsaken village north of Booué in the central region of the country. A squabble between two American scientists over charges for trans-shipment of equipment. Rush visas for three graduate students needed by the lepidopterologists in the south, near Franceville—undoubtedly told to bring their own butterfly nets; that group was strapped for cash.

  The job of science attaché usually had more to with lost luggage than with great discoveries. It was all stuff he could do in his sleep. He knew it all by rote—which Gabonese office to call, who owed whom favors, who in which embassy was cooperative only after a lengthy liquid lunch, who knew where to get Land Rover parts, all the minutiae of running science in the jungle. And that was just one part of his job. In a small embassy like this one, everyone wore more than one hat.

  It was getting on toward eleven and coffee-break time before Sam, the embassy clerk, came around with the mail. Mail was always the high point of Clark’s day. It might just be more bits of paper, but at least it was bits of paper specifically for him, not some bureaucratic rigmarole.

  Clark’s mail was delivered straight to the embassy. It got there faster and more reliably than anything sent to his home through the local postal system. Besides, the embassy would know where to find him after he left Gabon. This was his seventh or eighth posting, and he still got mail forwarded to him from every former address—stuff forwarded again and again, circling the globe to get to him.

  A grown daughter in Washington saw to it that mail to his home address was forwarded just as diligently—not just letters, but junk mail, magazines he had never gotten around to canceling, bills, the whole beautiful, domestic, pedestrian stacks of mail every American got every day. Getting a dozen notices screaming You May Already Be A Winner from Ed McMahon made him feel a bit less cut off from life in America. He trashed it all, of course, but even so, it was satisfying to retain some tiny shred of the way they lived back home. In fact, it was strange, but mail from home was the one thing that made him feel far from home. This dull, paper-pushing existence took place in Limbo, not in a real foreign place.

  Some of the bigger embassies Clark had served in—especially the one in Bonn—made that Limbo by contriving to create a tiny island of Americanism in the midst of the foreign capital—American food: American furniture, American-style telephones, musty American banged-up government furniture and dismal linoleum, an American school for the Embassy kids, American products in an American-style embassy grocery store. All the unreal, inappropriate American-style this-and-that served not to comfort the staff, but only to remind them how cut off from local life they really were—how alone, how alien. Going through the rituals that made sense only in office buildings found half a world away made day-to-day embassy life seem otherworldly, unreal.

  Here in Gabon, it took the whole tiny diplomatic community working together to create a different kind of Limbo, a microcosm not out of place, but misplaced in time. It was the French, in their far larger embassy, who did most of the work. There was still a weird, dated paternalism to French dealings with their former colony. The colonial-era buildings, the school-book French everyone seemed to speak, the various peculiar adaptations of Western-style formal attire to the tropics, the institutions the Gabonese borrowed, all seemed to make the past realer, clearer, sharper than the sleepy present. It all had an air of unreality about it, like the forced hominess of a divorced man’s lonely bachelor apartment. It formed a shroud of protective, cloying cotton wool, serving only to make the staff feel even more cut off from the rough, bustling, baffling world of an overcrowded African coastal city baking between the Equator and the Atlantic.

  But mail from home was of the present day and real, proof that home was still there, and operating in the present day. Today the mail was a satisfyingly thick stack that thumped down solidly on his desk, a fat bundle strapped together with thick rubber bands. Most of the envelopes had been travelling some time: they looked worn, much used, and their original addresses were scratched out, with PLEASE FORWARD scribbled on them.

  Clark White happily threw away the ads from stores a world away, the invitations to sign up for credit cards he could never use here, laughed over postcards from Foreign Service pals scattered about the globe, frowned over a note from the IRS, skimmed over the late-arriving Christmas cards from here and there, and, saving the best for last, eagerly read and reread his weekly letter from his daughter. All was well at home, it seemed, and his Christmas package had arrived in time. At least, he thought that his daughter’s letter was the last of the mail. But there was something else he had overlooked.

  At the bottom of the stack was that rare thing, a piece of personal mail that had been sent directly to his current address. He looked at the postmark. Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. He ripped the envelope open, pulled out a thick wad of paper, spotted a reference to Mississippi, and wrinkled his brow. He checked the name on the return address. Rupert Maxwell? What the hell had he been doing in the back of the bayou beyond?

  Clark harrumphed to himself and examined the letter. That was Rupert’s style all right—classy paper, obviously written on a computer, a perfect print-out job. With a sorry glance in the di
rection of his worn-out old Royal Upright, he wished, not for the first time, that the Embassy budget would allow for some hardware like that. Then maybe people would take his correspondence seriously. He sighed, adjusted his glasses, and began reading.

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  Dear Clark—

  Greetings to you! I expect that Libreville is even more like it was than ever, and I hope you’re doing all right over there.

  I am writing in hopes that you can scrape up some information in preparation for a trip over there. Some friends of mine and I are interested in getting a look at a tribe called the Yewtani. (That is an old and possibly corrupted spelling—as you and I both know, such things are bound to get garbled in transliteration.)

  At the moment, we have but a single reference to them, which reports them to be in ‘The Gabon.’ I am writing you in some haste, and prior to getting results I am expecting from other sources. Since we don’t know how much information our in-house people will have, and since any duplicated information will also serve as a valuable cross-check, I would ask you to research the tribe as completely as possible. We are eager to know where the tribe is, what language (or dialect) they speak, what trade languages we might be able to use for communication with them, how large their population is, what sort of life they lead, how many villages they live in, and so on. I would further ask that you include any anecdotal information—gossip, if you will, concerning the tribe—the details that could give us the ‘feel’ of the tribe.

  By this time you are really starting to wonder about me, I’m sure. None of this is in my field, or even remotely connected with it. Not only that, but you are wondering why on Earth you should bestir yourself over the question of some diddly-squat tribe over in East Nowhere. Okay. I have been hesitating since the beginning of this letter for a way to explain this, but I guess the best way is to tell you a story. It began when a friend of mine found an old diary . . .