“These are the smallest bones discovered that look anything like us. Could they just be pathological humans? I don’t know. Maybe. Pathology could happen anywhere, so you can’t rule it out when you’ve only got a few specimens to work with. But what my mind keeps coming back to is that these bones weren’t found just anywhere.”
“What do you mean?”
“These bones weren’t found in Africa or Asia. These tiny bones were found on a tiny island. Near the bones of dwarf elephants. And that’s a coincidence? They hunted dwarf elephants, for God’s sake.”
“So if not pathological, what do you believe they were? You still haven’t said.”
“That’s the powerful thing about genetics, my friend. One does not have to believe. One can know. And that’s precisely what is so dangerous.”
“Strange things happen on islands.” Margaret’s white shirt was gone. She sat slick-armed in overalls. Skin like a fine coat of gloss. The firelight beat the night back, lighting candles in their eyes. It was nearly midnight, and the researchers sat in a circle, listening to the crackle of the fire. Listening to the jungle.
“Like the Galápagos,” she said. “The finches.”
“Oh come on,” James said. “The skulls we found are small, with brains the size of chimps. Island dwarfing of genus Homo; is that what you’re proposing? Some sort of local adaptation over the last five thousand years?”
“It’s the best we have.”
“Those bones are too different. They’re not of our line.”
“But they’re younger than the other archaics. It’s not like erectus, some branch cut down at the dawn of time. These things survived here for a long time. The bones aren’t even fossilized.”
“It doesn’t matter, they’re still not us. Either they share common descent from Man, or they were a separate creation at the beginning. There is no in-between. And they’re only a meter tall don’t forget.”
“That’s just an estimate.”
“A good estimate.”
“Achondroplasia—”
“Those skulls are as achondroplastic as I am. I’d say the sloped frontal bone is anti-achondroplastic.”
“Some kind of growth hormone deficiency would—”
“No,” Paul said, speaking for the first time. Every face turned toward him.
“No, what?”
“Pygmies have normal growth hormone levels,” Paul said. “Every population studied—the negritos, the Andaman, the Congolese. All normal.”
The faces stared. “It’s the circulating domain of their receptors that are different,” Paul continued. “Pygmies are pygmies because of their GH receptors, not the growth hormone itself. If you inject a pygmy child with growth hormone, you still get a pygmy.”
“Well still,” Margaret said. “I don’t see how that impacts whether these bones share common descent or not.”
James turned to the circle of faces. “So are they on our line? Are they us, or other?”
“Other.”
“Other.”
“Other.”
Softly, the girl whispered in disbelief, “But they had stone tools.”
The faces turned to Paul, but he only watched the fire and said nothing.
The next morning started with a downpour. The dig team huddled in tents, or under the tarped lean-to near the fire pit. Only James braved the rain, stomping off into the jungle. He was back in an hour, smiling ear to ear.
“Well, will you look at that,” James said, holding something out for Paul to see.
“What is it?”
“Partially eaten monitor. A species only found here.”
Paul saw now that it was a taloned foot that James held. “That’s a big lizard.”
“Oh, no. This was just a juvenile. Mother nature is odd this side of the Wallace Line. Not only are most of the species on this side not found anywhere else. A lot of them aren’t even vaguely related to anything else. It’s like God started from scratch to fill all the niches.”
“How’d you get interested in herpetology?” Paul asked.
“By His creations shall ye know God.”
“McMaster mentioned a dwarf elephant.”
“Yeah, stegadon. They’re extinct now though.”
“What killed them off?”
“Same thing that killed off a lot of the ancient fauna on the island. Classic catastrophism, a volcanic eruption. We found the ash layer just above the youngest bones.”
Once, lying in bed with a woman, Paul had watched the moon through the window. The woman traced his scars with her finger.
“Your father was brutal.”
“No,” Paul had said. “He was broken, that’s all.”
“There’s a difference?”
“Yeah.”
“What?”
“He was always sorry afterward.”
“That mattered?”
“Every single time.”
A: Incidences of local adaptation have occurred, sure. Populations adapt to changing conditions all the time.
Q: Through what process?
A: Differential reproductive success. Given genetic variability, it almost has to happen. It’s just math and genes. Fifty-eight hundred years is a long time.
Q: Can you give an example?
A: Most dogs would fall into this category, having been bred by man to suit his needs. While physically different from each other, when you study their genes, they’re all one species—though admittedly divided into several distinct clades.
Q: So you’re saying God created the original dog, but Man bred the different varieties?
A: You called it God, not me. And for the record, honey, God created the gray wolf. Man created dogs.
—excerpted from the trial of geneticist Michael Poore.
It came the next morning in the guise of police action. It came in shiny new Daihatsus with roll bars and off-road tires. It came with guns. Mostly, it came with guns.
Paul heard them before he saw them, men shouting in a language he could not understand. He was with James at the cave’s entrance. When Paul saw the first assault rifle, he sprinted for the tents. He slid the DNA lozenges into a pouch in his belt and punched numbers on the sat phone. Gavin picked up on the second ring. “The police are here,” Paul said.
“Good Lord, I just spoke to officials today,” Gavin said. There was shouting outside the tents—angry shouts. “They assured me nothing like this would happen.”
“They lied.”
Behind him, James said, “This is bad. This is very bad.”
“Where are you?” Paul asked.
“I’m still in Ruteng,” Gavin said.
“Then this will be over by the time you can get here.”
“Paul, it’s not safe for you th—”
Paul hung up. Tell me something I don’t know.
He took his knife from his sample kit and slit the back of the tent open. He slid through, James following close behind. Paul saw Margaret standing uncertain at the edge of the jungle. Their eyes met and Paul motioned toward the Jeeps; on the count of three, they all ran for it.
They climbed in and shut the doors. The soldiers—for that’s what Paul knew they were now—the soldiers didn’t notice them until Paul started the engine. Malay faces swung around, mouths open in shouts of outrage.
“You’ll probably want your seat belts on for this,” Paul said. Then he gunned it, spitting dirt.
“Don’t shoot,” James whispered in the backseat, eyes closed in prayer.
“What?” Paul said.
“If they shoot, they’re not police.”
A round smashed through the rear window and blew out a chunk of the front windshield, spidering the safety glass.
“Shit!” Margaret screamed.
A quick glance in the rearview, and Paul saw soldiers climbing into one of the Daihatsus. Paul yanked the wheel right.
“Not that way!” Margaret shouted. Paul ignored her and floored the accelerator.
Jungle whipped pas
t, close enough to touch. Ruts threatened to buck them from the cratered roadway. The Daihatsu whipped into view behind them. Shots rang out, a sound like Chinese firecrackers, the ding of metal. They rounded the bend, and the river came into view—big and dumb as the sky. Paul gunned the engine.
“We’re not going to make it across!” James shouted.
“We only need to get halfway.”
Another shot slammed into the back of the Jeep.
They hit the river like a slow-speed crash, water roaring up and over the broken windshield—the smell of muck suddenly overpowering.
Paul stomped his foot to the floor.
The Jeep chugged, drifted, caught gravel. They got about halfway across before Paul yanked the steering wheel to the left. The world came unstuck and started to shift. The right front fender came up, rocking with the current. The engine died. They were floating.
Paul looked back. The pursuing vehicle skidded to a halt at the shoreline, and men jumped out. The Jeep heaved, one wheel pivoting around a submerged rock.
“Can you swim?” Paul asked.
“Now you ask us?”
“I’d unbuckle if I were you.”
The Jeep hit another rock, metal grinding on stone, then sky traded places with water, and everything went dark.
They dragged themselves out of the water several miles downriver, where a bridge crossed the water. They followed the dirt road to a place called Rea. From there they took a bus. Margaret had money.
They didn’t speak about it until they arrived at Bajawa.
“Do you think they’re okay?” Margaret asked.
“I think it wouldn’t serve their purpose to hurt the dig team. They only wanted the bones.”
“They shot at us.”
“Because they assumed we had something they wanted. They were shooting at the tires.”
“No,” she said. “They weren’t.”
Three rented nights in the hotel room, and James couldn’t leave—that hair like a great big handle anybody could pick up and carry, anybody with eyes and a voice. Some of the locals hadn’t seen red hair in their lives, and James’s description was prepackaged for easy transport. Paul, however, blended—just another vaguely Asian set of cheekbones in the crowd, even if he was a half a foot taller than the locals.
That night, staring at the ceiling from one of the double beds, James said, “If those bones aren’t us … then I wonder what they were like.”
“They had fire and stone tools,” Paul said. “They were probably a lot like us.”
“We act like we’re the chosen ones, you know? But what if it wasn’t like that?”
“Don’t think about it,” Margaret said.
“What if God had all these different varieties … all these different walks, these different options at the beginning, and we’re just the ones who killed the others off?”
“Shut up,” she said.
“What if there wasn’t just one Adam, but a hundred Adams?”
“Shut the fuck up, James.”
There was a long quiet, the sound of the street filtering through the thin walls. “Paul,” James said. “If you get your samples back to your lab, you’ll be able to tell, won’t you?”
Paul was silent. He thought of the evaluation team and wondered.
“The winners write the history books,” James said. “Maybe the winners write the bibles, too. I wonder what religion died with them.”
The next day, Paul left to buy food. When he returned Margaret was gone.
“Where is she?”
“She left to find a phone. She said she’d be right back.”
“Why didn’t you stop her?”
“I couldn’t.”
Day turned into evening. By darkness, they both knew she wasn’t coming back.
“How are we going to get home?” James asked.
“I don’t know.”
“And your samples. Even if we got to an airport, they’d never let you get on the plane with them. You’ll be searched. They’ll find them.”
“We’ll find a way once things have settled down.”
“Things are never going to settle down.”
“They will.”
“No, you still don’t get it. When your entire culture is predicated on an idea, you can’t afford to be proven wrong.”
Out of deep sleep, Paul heard it. Something.
He’d known this was coming, though he hadn’t been aware that he’d known, until that moment. The creak of wood, the gentle breeze of an open door. Shock and awe would have been better—an inrush of soldiers, an arrest of some kind, expulsion, deportation, the legal system. A silent man in the dark meant many things. None of them good. The word assassin rose up in his mind.
Paul breathed. There was a cold in him—a part of him that was dead, a part of him that could never be afraid. A part of him his father had put there. Paul’s eyes searched the shadows and found it, the place where shadow moved, a breeze that eased across the room. If there was only one of them, then there was a chance.
Paul thought of making a run for it, sprinting for the door, leaving the samples and this place behind; but James, still sleeping, stopped him. He made up his mind.
Paul exploded from the bed, flinging the blanket ahead of him, wrapping that part of the darkness; and a shape moved, darkness like a puma’s spots, black on black—there even though you can’t see it. And Paul knew he’d surprised him, that darkness, and he knew, instantly, that it wouldn’t be enough. A blow rocked Paul off his feet, forward momentum carrying him into the wall. The mirror shattered, glass crashing to the floor.
“What the fuck?” James hit the light, and suddenly the world snapped into existence, a flashbulb stillness—and the assassin was Indonesian, preternatural silence coming off him like a heat shimmer. He carried endings with him, nothingness in a long blade. The insult of it hit home. The shocking fucking insult, standing there, knees bent, bright blade in one hand—blood on reflective steel. That’s when Paul felt the pain. It was only then he realized he’d already been opened.
And the Indonesian moved fast. He moved so fast. He moved faster than Paul’s eyes could follow, covering distance like thought, across the room to James, who had time only to flinch before the knife parted him. Such a professional, and James’s eyes went wide in surprise. Paul moved using the only things he had, size, strength, momentum. He hit the assassin like a linebacker, sweeping him into his arms, crushing him against the wall. Paul felt something snap, a twig, a branch, something in the Indonesian’s chest—and they rolled apart, the assassin doing something with his hands; the rasp of blade on bone, a new blackness, and Paul flinched from the blow, feeling the steel leave his eye socket.
There was no anger. It was the strangest thing. To be in a fight for his life and not be angry. The assassin came at him again, and it was only Paul’s size that saved him. He grabbed the arm and twisted, bringing the fight to the floor. A pushing down of his will into three square inches of the Indonesian’s throat—a caving-in like a crumpling aluminum can, but Paul still held on, still pushed until the lights went out of those black eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
Paul rolled off him and collapsed to the floor. He crawled over to James. It wasn’t a pool of blood. It was a swamp, the mattress soggy with it. James lay on the bed, still conscious.
“Don’t bleed on me, man,” James said. “No telling what you Americans might carry. Don’t want to have to explain it to my girlfriend.”
Paul smiled at the dying man, crying and bleeding on him, wiping the blood from his beard with a pillowcase. He held James’s hand until he stopped breathing.
Paul’s eye opened to white. He blinked. A man in a suit sat in the chair next to the hospital bed. A man in a police uniform stood near the door. “Where am I?” Paul asked. He didn’t recognize his own voice. It was an older man. Who’d eaten glass.
“Maumere,” the suited man said. He was white, mid-thirties, lawyer written
all over him.
“How long?”
“A day.”
Paul touched the bandage over his face. “Is my eye …”
“I’m sorry.”
Paul took the news with a nod. “How did I get here?”
“They found you naked in the street. Two dead men in your room.”
“So what happens now?”
“Well, that depends on you.” The man in the suit smiled. “I’m here at the behest of certain parties interested in bringing this to a quiet close.”
“Quiet?”
“Yes.”
“Where is Margaret? Mr. McMaster?”
“They were put on flights back to Australia this morning.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Whether you believe or not is of no consequence to me. I’m just answering your questions.”
“What about the bones?”
“Confiscated for safekeeping, of course. The Indonesians have closed down the dig. It is their cave, after all.”
“What about my DNA samples in the hotel room, the lozenges?”
“They’ve been confiscated and destroyed.”
Paul sat quietly.
“How did you end up in the street?” the suit asked.
“I walked.”
“How did you end up naked?”
“I figured it was the only way they’d let me live. The only way to prove I didn’t have the samples. I was bleeding out. I knew they’d still be coming.”
“You are a smart man, Mr. Carlson. So you figured you’d let them have the samples?”
“Yeah,” Paul said.
The suited man stood and left the room.
“Mostly,” Paul said.
On the way to the airport, Paul told the driver to pull over. He paid the fare and climbed out. He took a bus to Bengali, and from there took a cab to Rea.
He climbed on a bus in Rea, and as it bore down the road, Paul yelled, “Stop!”
The driver hit the breaks. “I’m sorry,” Paul said. “I’ve forgotten something.” He climbed off the bus and walked back to town. No car followed.
The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007 Page 95
