by Ian Whates
Anna pressed her face to the window of the police vehicle and said nothing.
“We’re not saying those horrible feelings they give us aren’t real,” Janet persisted, “but that’s not a reason for killing them, is it?”
Still looking out into the forest, Anna lifted her small thin hand to her mouth and chewed at a broken nail.
“I’ll tell you something about indigenes, though,” Janet tried again. “They can’t tell us stuff that isn’t already in our heads. How could they? How could a goblin know anything about us?’
Anna still looked out of the window, and her voice was so quiet that Janet could hardly make out the words she spoke
“You’re goblin-lovers,” she said, “all of you Agency people, and we hate you for it. You never take our side, do you, even though we’re people like you? No, you always take theirs.’
HOMO FLORESIENSIS
KEN LIU
Ken Liu (kenliu.name) is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. His fiction has appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons among other places. He is a winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts. Ken’s debut novel, The Grace of Kings, first in a fantasy series, will be published by Saga Press, Simon & Schuster’s new imprint, in 2015. Saga will also publish a collection of his short stories.
BENJAMIN DUCKED INTO the bar reluctantly. It was loud, stuffy, full of gaudy decorations for the tourists, and he didn’t like the idea of having to buy a drink when he didn’t want to. But it was that or getting drenched in the thunderstorm.
He cursed his own lack of preparation. Here in Maluku Province, the heart of the Spice Islands, it was always hot and humid and rain a possibility every day.
While he sipped his beer (watery and overpriced) and waited for the rain to stop, two locals approached him.
“I don’t need a guide,” he said preemptively. Each day, he got several such offers.
“No problem,” one of the men said in English. He was burly, squat, with a grin that seemed to stretch across the entirety of his wide face. “On vacation?”
“No,” Benjamin said. “I’m a grad student.” He figured that giving the honest answer was the best policy. If he made it clear that he wasn’t some wealthy Westerner looking for exotic local mementos, maybe they’d find someone else to fleece. To emphasize his uselessness as a source of foreign currency, he pointed to the heavy, muddy backpack on the ground next to his foot. “I study birds. I’m going to be camping most of the time.”
Unfortunately, this failed to have the anticipated effect. If anything, the two men’s eyes lit up.
“You are a scientist then?” the squat man asked. “You’ll like these.”
He took out a thick photo album and flipped it open in front of Benjamin. It was full of pictures of parrots, their iridescent plumage like costumes at some convention for superheroes, none alike.
“We can get you anything you see in here. Fair prices. Dead, alive, stuffed, whatever you want. Some of these no one outside of this island knows about. I know you scientist like that.”
Benjamin looked at the pictures, stunned. He recognized at least three species that were thought to be on the verge of extinction.
“This is illegal,” he muttered.
The man misunderstood his tone. “If you’re worried about customs, we’ll show you how to hide them. We have a good system.” The other man said something in Ambonese, and the squat man added, “You can always slip the agent a few bills. It won’t be very expensive.”
Rage gradually rose in Benjamin as he recovered from the shock. Who knows how many species have been hunted to death because these men wanted to make a few extra dollars from the collectors? And to think that they actually thought scientists would be a good niche market!
“I’m going to the police with this,” he said, taking the photo album from the man. Righteous disgust made him feel brave. “I’m here to study them, not kill them. Don’t you have any respect for life?”
The ingratiating grins on the men’s faces froze. They looked at each other, and then back at Benjamin. Now their gazes were cold, and the air seemed to solidify with tension. The squat man reached behind him. For a weapon?
Benjamin looked around the bar: the tourists were oblivious; the locals and the bartender studiously avoided looking this way.
Benjamin tensed his body and tightened his fists. He had thought he would be a good visitor, someone who respected local traditions, not an ugly American. But here he was, about to get into a violent confrontation with poachers.
“I see you’ve already met,” said a voice to the side. The accent was American.
Three heads turned at the same time. The speaker was a woman, older, maybe in her late forties. She was wiry, compact, her face leathery from years spent in the tropics.
Benjamin had no idea who she was.
“I thought you weren’t going to arrive for another day,” she said, coming up to Benjamin and giving him a hug as though they were old friends. “I was going to introduce you to my two favorite suppliers, but they are, as usual, more proactive.”
She turned to the two locals and spoke to them in Ambonese, glancing at Benjamin from time to time. The two men looked from her to Benjamin and back again, and their expressions gradually relaxed. The squat man’s hand came out from behind his back, empty. The woman spoke some more, and she and the two men laughed.
Benjamin was utterly baffled, but he decided to wait and see what the strange woman had in mind. Now that the rush of adrenaline was over, his body was trembling uncontrollably. He was not a violent man, and he deeply regretted his earlier rashness. Maybe it’s best to just let it go.
She turned to him. “I explained you were just testing them to be sure they weren’t working with the authorities to entrap you. Your act was very convincing, maybe a bit too convincing.” While she continued to laugh, her eyes locked gaze with his.
He decided to play along. “You have to be careful of strangers.”
“Of course,” she said as she looked back at the two locals, spreading her hands in a you see? gesture. The men nodded and relaxed some more.
She spoke more to the men in Ambonese, asking a question at the end. The two men looked at each other. The squat one said, “Sure. But you have to come along. We don’t have them here.”
They turned and left the bar, and the woman followed, pulling Benjamin along.
“What is this about?” he hissed at her, keeping his voice low so that the men wouldn’t hear. “And who are you?”
“I’m Lydia. I told them that you’re really interested in fossils. So they’re going to show you some. You’re going to have to buy something.”
“It’s illegal to trade fossils, too.”
She looked askance at him as they walked, a smirk on her face. “Fossils are already dead. Unlike the birds, they’re not going to kill anything for your patronage. I figured it’s the best compromise.”
“That’s not the point.”
“Would you like to spend some time in a local jail? You’ve really pissed off Loy and Thias with that holier-than-thou display. If you don’t buy something from them, they’ll go to the police and report you as a smuggler.”
Benjamin stumbled. “That’s –”
“– how things are done here,” said Lydia. “Is this your first time doing field work?”
“I’ve been in the field every summer for three years,” Benjamin said indignantly.
“Let me guess, you worked only on permitted expeditions with official support,” Lydia said. “It’s not quite the same when you’re on your own, is it?”
Benjamin said nothing, which gave her all the answer she needed.
They arrived at a small house, barely more than a storage shed. The squat man, Loy, looked around to be sure the street was clear, then he opened the padlock and swung the door open. The
four of them ducked and entered.
It was hot and stuffy inside, the space harshly illuminated by a single lightbulb dangling from a wire.
Benjamin looked around. The walls of the shed were filled with shelves from floor to ceiling. Fossils and bones lining the shelves cast long shadows. There were also trussed-up, feathered bundles.
“What do you want to see? Bird fossils? Primates? Lizards?” Loy asked.
“Birds,” Benjamin said.
Loy went to one of the walls and came back with a shoebox. He opened it to show Benjamin. “We got these from the field by the hill west of the town. I can get you the exact coordinates and even some pictures of where we dug them up. I know you guys like that.”
Giving the contents a cursory glance, Benjamin asked the only question that he cared about: “How much?”
Loy held up five fingers.
“Five hundred?”
Loy and Thias laughed and shook their heads in disbelief. The shoebox was snatched away and put back on the shelf. “You better be serious,” Loy said, looking at Lydia.
Lydia shrugged. “He’s just a lowly grad student. He has to file all expenses with his professor and the grant committee. Not a whole lot of room to hide things in the budget. He just wants something to show he hasn’t been lazy on this trip, you understand. But he might become a big deal in a few years, and then he’ll come back with the big bucks. You have to build the business.”
Loy and Thias were visibly disappointed. But they tried to make the best of it. Loy thought about it for a while, went to another wall, and came back with a brown paper bag. He emptied the contents onto a small table.
Benjamin examined the bones. They looked like curved pieces of a skull and segments of arm or leg bones: maybe a monkey or something similarly sized. He had taken classes on primates as part of his program, of course, but he wasn’t an expert.
Lydia came over and looked at the bones as well. She picked one up and held it under the lightbulb to examine it closely. Then she put it back on the table, apparently bored.
“I can let you have these for a thousand,” Loy said.
Benjamin was about to refuse again and ask for something still cheaper, but Lydia spoke up first. “Come on, Loy, these aren’t even fossils. They’re just bones. Maybe from something you killed last week. Who are you trying to fool?”
Loy chuckled. “Can’t blame a guy for trying.”
“Where did you get these?” Lydia asked.
Loy looked to Thias, who answered by telling some long story in Ambonese. He made exaggerated gestures, and Lydia listened, rapt.
“What did he say?” Benjamin asked.
“He says he got it out of the stomach of a dead shark.” She turned back to Loy and Thias. “Maybe he can do something with it. But you have to be reasonable.”
“Five hundred then,” Loy said, resigned.
Lydia looked at Benjamin, and he understood that this was as good a deal as he was going to get. It was still a lot of money, but it was better than going to jail.
Reluctantly, he nodded.
“SO YOU’VE JUST been living here since you didn’t get tenure?” Benjamin asked.
“Why not? It’s cheap here, and I get to help my fellow scientists with acquiring research materials from the locals. I’m still doing science.”
They were back at the bar. While they sipped warm, watery beer, Lydia continued to examine the bones Benjamin had bought. She had explained that she used to be a specialist in lizards, but these days, she was a sort of jack-of-all-trades, learning a little about everything so she could arrange meetings between Western fossil collectors, scientists, resellers, and the locals who had the goods they wanted.
“This isn’t the 19th century any more,” Benjamin said. “We shouldn’t be acting like colonial explorers. You’re encouraging them to break the laws designed to protect Indonesia’s natural heritage.”
“The laws? You mean the rules those bureaucrats made up in Jakarta to show how they’re in charge? What do they know about the livelihoods of the people here? Besides preserving scientific evidence, I’m also helping the poor make a few bucks from rocks they dig up from the fields and the animals they catch for food. My conscience is clear.”
“You’re just making excuses. Because of you, the poachers end up killing already endangered species for money.”
“You think poachers are the problem? You do understand that the real threat is habitat destruction, right? People here have to clear the jungle to make fields so they can feed more mouths, or else they have to turn the land into resorts for tourists. The poachers are the only chance for us to get any specimens before they’re all gone.”
“Then you should be working at helping the locals manage development more responsibly.”
“Listen to you. Who are you to tell these people how to live their lives? And you think I’m the one with the ‘colonial’ attitude here?”
Benjamin wanted to argue some more, but Lydia shushed him. “These bones aren’t from a black macaque, as I thought. I don’t know what kind of animal it’s from. It may be a new primate species in Maluku.”
Benjamin was skeptical. “How likely is that? New species of birds or lizards, maybe, but an unknown primate coming out of the stomach of a shark?”
“Why not? Plenty of new species have been discovered when some scientist ordered a new dish in a restaurant in the tropics. There’s plenty we don’t know in the world.”
“Well, you can have the bones if you want them,” Benjamin said. “I’ll be leaving for other islands tomorrow. Thanks... for stepping in.”
“Good luck,” Lydia said.
STILL GROGGY, BENJAMIN rolled out of bed. The pounding on his door was loud and continuous. The police? Have Loy and Thias decided to carry through their threat despite the bribe?
But it was only Lydia at the door. Without waiting to be invited, she pushed past him into the room.
“What is this about?” Benjamin asked. Dressed only in his underwear, he felt vulnerable, embarrassed.
“I took some pictures of those bones and sent them to a colleague who I thought might know more. And I got the answers back this morning.”
“And?”
Lydia handed a stack of papers to him. “Read these.”
Benjamin flipped through the papers: A New Cranial Capacity Estimate for H. floresiensis; Proposed Skeletal Reconstruction of H. floresiensis; A Meta-Analysis of Latest Survival Date of Hominid Species...
He looked at some of the photographs in the papers: old bones, tens of thousands of years old, not quite fossils yet; small skulls, like children.
Lydia kept on talking, but Benjamin only caught the end of what she said. “... I want you to come with me. Are you awake enough to understand what I’m telling you?”
Benjamin desperately wished for coffee. His mind felt sluggish, not working at full speed. He remembered hearing something about the ‘Flores Men’ a few years ago. The media had dubbed them ‘hobbits’: a new hominid species that might have been alive as recently as 12,000 years ago. Our cousins, of a sort, kind of like the Neanderthals.
Here in Indonesia.
“No, it can’t be,” he said, finally understanding. “You must be wrong.”
“I could be,” Lydia said. “But do you want to miss risk missing the discovery of a lifetime if I’m right?”
“I study birds! What do I know about... extinct hominid species with fantasy names?”
“So? My thesis was on lizards. But the anthropology department didn’t turn me down back when I applied to join the expedition to make contact with uncontacted tribes in Brazil. Field experience is field experience. I can use someone who can carry a heavy bag and won’t complain.” She appraised him some more and added, “It even helps that you’re impulsive. Shows that you still have a sense of adventure.”
“And someone you can boss around because you think he’s young and raw.”
Lydia grinned. “I prefer to think of it as sharing my wis
dom with the next generation.”
“But the terms of my grant only cover bird surveys.”
“Look, I know what’s on your mind as a grad student. I’ve been there. What do you think is going to put you in a better position for a teaching job: more bird specimens, or confirmation of the survival into modern times of a hominid species?”
Benjamin rolled his eyes. But he didn’t say no.
AFTER INTERROGATING LOY and Thias to find out where, exactly, the shark that yielded up the strange bones had been caught, Lydia badgered her shark specialist friends until they gave her their best guesses as to the shark’s likely migration path. Like bloodhounds on a trail, Lydia and Benjamin set off to hunt down the source of the bones.
Everywhere they went, they asked the inhabitants about rumors of a tribe whose members were unusually small in stature. Some shook their heads and laughed at the strange scientists. Others told them long, fantastic tales that turned out to be elaborate jokes at the visitors’ expense.
Benjamin found that he enjoyed hiking through the jungle and island-hopping with Lydia. He knew some of his professors and colleagues back home would disapprove of her methods – she had no compunction about paying bribes or lying when it suited her – but he had to admit she was effective.
They switched from planes to ferries to rented speedboats. They moved further from the conveniences of modern life, and each island they set foot on was more sparsely populated than the last. This archipelago of more than 18,000 islands held one of the most diverse biospheres in the entire world. There were many far-flung isles that had never been explored.
Finally, on Beliwan, a tiny isle in the Banda Sea, a local elder brought up legends of the ‘little people’ on a nameless, jungle-covered isle to the north, which did not appear on the charts. “They speak, and do not speak.”
