The Mammoth Book of Time Travel SF

by Mike Ashley

  There was silence as I sipped my coffee. Almost before I knew it, my cup was empty. I was expected to say something, apparently.

  “Genetic engineering was around in the early 1990s, when Els would have been born,” I suggested, seriously out of my depth and well aware of it.

  “Balls,” replied Garces wearily, as if he had heard the suggestion too many times over the past few days. “That’s like saying that Nazi Germany put men in space, just because they had primitive rockets. Even today we can’t engineer genetic changes on the scale found in the subject’s DNA.”

  “Her name is Els,” I insisted.

  “Yes, yes, Els. Whatever her name, she—”

  “She’s the victim of some cruel genetic hoax!” I began angrily.

  “Haven’t you been listening?” Garces demanded, banging his fists on the table.

  “Yes, and to get back to your analogy, the Nazis flew at least two types of manned rocket, and they drew up designs for manned spacecraft as well. I saw a documentary on television, the Nazis put rockets into space big enough to carry a man—”

  “All right, all right, Nazis in space is a bad analogy,” he conceded, waving his hands. “The point is that we have never had the skills to make the massive changes to human DNA that I have observed in, er, Els. Yes, we could fool about with bits and pieces of the genome and clone the occasional sheep in the 1990s, but not create a new race – or should I say re-create an old one.”

  “But Els is a fact,” I insisted. “Genetics only proves—”

  “This isn’t just genetics!” said Garces sharply. “Els has stepped straight out of the Middle Pleistocene! She has practically no radioactive contaminants in her tissues from bomb nuclear tests or the Chernobyl fallout. Her levels of industrial contaminants like dioxin also suggest that she had been eating food grown in this century for only two weeks.”

  “I don’t understand,” I admitted.

  “Els and her tribe are genuine,” said Marella. “That girl in the clinic across the road is an ice-age hominid; she is from the ice age.”

  That was a conversation stopper, if ever there was one. For a time we sat staring at each other, saying nothing. The waiter returned. We all ordered more coffee.

  “Are you willing to put that in a press release?” I asked once we were alone again.

  “Young man, if I had been unfaithful to my husband I would not want it in a press release, whether it was true or not,” interjected Marella, almost in a snarl. “Not unless it was a matter of life and death, anyway. Before we all go making fools of ourselves with public statements, we need to know Els’s side of the story.”

  Tormes looked particularly uncomfortable, and Garces squirmed. Marella glared at me until I stared down at the table. She was clearly used to taking no nonsense from any man, whether plumber or prime minister.

  “All their pelt cloaks are new sheepskin, and their scrapers are new,” said Tormes. “Their spears have been cut from modern hawthorn stands.”

  “You mean you have evidence of a whole tribe?” I exclaimed.

  Yet again there was silence. Tormes had said too much in the heat of the moment.

  “I think we have said enough,” suggested Marella coldly. “Carlos, what do you have to say about Els – as a linguist?”

  I was annoyed but cautious. The body language displayed by Tormes and Garces suggested that they were treating Marella very carefully. Her face was familiar, in a way that a face glimpsed countless times on television might be.

  “Five days is not enough for a truly informed assessment,” I explained first. “Els’s language is primitive yet highly functional. It’s adequate to coordinate a hunting party, pass on tool-making skills, and so on. She actually has a word for ‘ice’, even though there is no naturally occurring ice in the area—”

  “That’s significant,” exclaimed Marella. “She may remember an ice age. Did she talk about bright lights in the sky, or flying things? Strange men with god-like powers?”

  “No. She has no concept of gods and spirits. She doesn’t even have words to describe what she’s seen here in Puerto Real over the past five days.”

  “We must teach her Spanish,” said Marella.

  “No!” cried Tormes firmly. “She is our only window on Middle Pleistocene culture; she must not be contaminated. She will be kept with you, Carlos, well away from the rest of us.”

  “My marriage and reputation are at stake!” exclaimed Marella.

  “Marella, Els is bigger than—”

  “And your position at the university is certainly at stake,” Marella warned.

  “What else do you have to tell us, Carlos?” asked Garces hurriedly.

  “Well, nearly a third of Rhuun words are devoted to arithmetic, their calendar, the seasons and the passage of time. Els can understand and name numbers up to a hundred thousand, and she even understands the concept of zero.”

  “So?” asked Marella impatiently.

  “Zero is a very advanced concept, it has only been around for a few centuries,” I explained.

  “On this world, anyway,” said Marella. “The rest of you may be too frightened to talk about aliens, but I am not.”

  Within minutes I was back in the Middle Pleistocene, dumping another dead sheep beside the fire. I had been bringing in the firewood wrapped in blankets belonging to the clinic, and I now found Els had made a simple, tent-like shelter from them. The heidelbergensians had invented artificial shelters, Tormes had said. I fed a few branches into the fire, then lay down beside it, wrapped in a spare blanket. Looking up at the stars, I recalled that I had not slept in the open since a school camp five years ago. Although I did windsurfing and rode a scooter, I am not the outdoors type and I prefer to sleep under a roof.

  I gave a start as a hand touched my shoulder. Els! She moved as silently as a cat on carpet. Settling beside me, she said “Crrun.” The word meant something like fellow hunter, tribesman, and family member all in one, but this time her intonation was softer, almost a purr. Perhaps the Rhuun also stretched it to cover sweetheart and lover.

  Aware that a video camera was recording everything, I gestured to the space between me and the fire. Els lay down, staring anxiously at me. Perhaps she was terrified that I had not mated with her because I was planning to abandon her. Only a few metres away a dozen anthropologists were gathered around a video screen, and were probably laughing. Els began to draw up the hem of her cloak. I seized her hand hurriedly.

  “Els, Carr, crrun,” I assured her, then added that I was tired from a difficult hunt.

  The words transformed her. Frightening and dangerous this place might be, yet a male had now declared crrun with her, whatever that really meant. I was also a good hunter, and I liked to talk. After staring up at the stars for a while and reciting something too fast for me to follow, she eventually pulled my arm over her, pressed my hand against her breast and went to sleep.

  The next morning Els began to make me a cloak out of the sheepskins that had begun to accumulate. This was apparently the only form of Rhuun dress, but it was immensely practical and versatile. In an ice-age winter it would have also provided the wearer with a sort of mobile home as well as a sleeping bag. Instead of sewing the skins together, she pinned them with barbed and sharpened hawthorn twigs. I made a big show of being pleased with it.

  Because Rhuun words were short, simple nouns and verbs, strung together with rudimentary grammar, we were able to communicate adequately after only days. Intonation was important too, but that was far harder to learn. My theory was that Rhuun words, which were generally guttural, had developed to blend in with the snorts, grunts and calls of the animals they hunted. The hunters might have stalked wild sheep under the cover of their pelt cloaks, smelling like sheep themselves and calling to each other with bleat-like words.

  On the other hand, the mathematics of the Rhuun calendar was quite advanced for a nomadic, stone-age tribe. The Rhuun might have developed their own, simple language, then come in contact
with members of a very advanced society and copied ideas like counting and calendars. Els had no grasp of nations, laws or even machines. To her all machines were animals. She knew nothing of tame animals, either. To her all animals were either prey or predators.

  That evening Marella was not at the debriefing meeting. Most of the discussion revolved around the way Els fastened the sheepskins of my cloak together, and how this might have been the birth of clothing. Tormes approached me later, as I sat alone in the clinic’s cafeteria.

  “Eating another salad?” he asked.

  “Els is more of a carnivore than we humans,” I replied, “but I can’t get by on meat alone.”

  “She seems to be taking a shine to you.”

  “I like her too. She has a strangely powerful charisma.”

  “And pleasantly firm boobs?”

  “That too. I appear to be her mate, even without consummation.”

  “Would you consider staying with her, say for a trip to Madrid?”

  “Madrid?”

  “For her unveiling, so to speak. As her companion.”

  Appearing on television in a sheepskin cloak was not an appealing prospect,

  “There are far better linguists than me,” I pointed out.

  “But she really trusts you. You would gain a lot of favour with some very powerful people. Some would even like you to screw her, to research Middle Pleistocene sexual practices.”

  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.

  “Look, this is grotesque!” I snapped. “Just who are you? Do you think you can—”

  “I am a professor of anthropology, Carlos, and I recognize what Els represents. A genuine archaic hominid, straight out of the Pleistocene.”

  I shook my head.

  “Apart from Els herself we have no other evidence.”

  “We do have other evidence, Carlos; we just don’t understand it. Last year I made a strange find, in what had once been the bed of a shallow lake. It was a collection of stone scrapers, knives and hand-axes.”

  “So?”

  “So similar sites have been found since then. It’s as if a tribe of heidelbergensians just dropped everything they were carrying and vanished.”

  “They probably dropped everything and ran when something frightened them,” I said. “A bear, maybe.”

  “Possibly, but that’s not the point. The site I found was seven thousand years old, four times more recent than the last neanderthal and a quarter of a million years later than homo heidelbergensis was around.”

  Reality began to waver before my eyes. I was sitting in a table in a clinic, wearing a Middle Pliocene hairstyle, eating a salad, and engaged to a heidelbergensian girl.

  “There are some odd folk tales told in this area,” Tormes continued. “Huge monkeys with spears, enormously strong wild men who kill cattle, that sort of thing.”

  “Are you serious?” I exclaimed. “A lost tribe of cave men in southern Spain? This is not even a wilderness area. There’s little to hunt, apart from . . . well, okay, quite a lot of sheep and cattle.”

  “I said we have evidence, not an explanation.”

  I munched the last of my salad.

  “I must get back to Els,” I said as I stood up.

  “Marella and I are – were – having an affair,” Tormes suddenly but unashamedly confessed. “We were on a field trip, looking for excavation sites. When we found Els . . . well, our cover was compromised. Marella’s husband is a minister in the government, and the government cannot afford scandals in the current political climate.”

  So there was no love child, but there was a sex scandal.

  “Where do I fit in?” I asked.

  “Els is to be made public. Very public.”

  “She will be terrified.”

  “You can make it easier for her by remaining her translator and companion. There will be a lot of money and fame in it for you as well. You need only do one questionable thing.”

  “And that is?”

  “Pretend to be Marella.”

  I agreed. The story was very simple, and the most important part was already on videotape. I had supposedly contacted Tormes about doing voluntary field work at a site called the Field of Devils, just north of Cadiz. We met had six days earlier at the farm of a man named Ramoz, and I had been videoing for two hours when Els had first appeared.

  “We are about to watch the most important part of the video that Marella shot,” said Tormes as we sat with Marella and Uncle Arturo in the darkened committee room. “A version has been made without the soundtrack. We shall say that you were inexperienced with the camera and disconnected the microphone.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because my voice can be heard,” said Marella icily.

  The screen lit up, showing scrubby pasture and hills. It was fertile, windswept country and a bull was visible, grazing in the long grass. Suddenly Marella zoomed in on a group of people dressed in cloaks and carrying spears. They were stalking the bull. The scene might have been straight out of the Pleistocene had the bull not been wearing a yellow plastic ear tag.

  The hunters worked as a team, and there were three men and a girl. We watched as they stripped off their cloaks, then approached the bull naked. Their hair was drawn back and pinned with feathers. The men positioned themselves in long grass and crouched down. The girl collected some stones, then cautiously approached the bull. She flung a stone, which went wide. The bull ignored her. She hit it with her next stone. It looked up, then returned to cropping the grass. The next stone struck the bull just above the eye. It charged. The girl dropped her other stones and ran for the ambush site. The bull slowed, snorted, and then returned to its grazing.

  “They’re re-enacting a stone-age hunt,” came Marella’s voice.

  “Why bother recording it?” replied Professor Tormes, disgust plain in his voice. “They’re doing so much wrong, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

  “But it’s a lot of fun,” Marella said as she panned back to take in the overall scene. “They must be actors, practising for a documentary.”

  “Maybe. Their consistency people can’t be there, or they’d be screaming about the bull’s plastic eartag.”

  “There are no camera crews yet, they must be practising.”

  “Well as a re-creation of neanderthal hunting it has more holes than a block of Swiss cheese. I mean look at the girl trying to goad the bull into chasing her by throwing stones. It’s all wrong.”

  “Why?”

  “Neanderthals didn’t have projectile weapons.”

  “But even monkeys throw stones.”

  “Bah, that’s just behaviour learned from watching us humans,” scoffed Tormes. “Real neanderthals would drive the bull to the hidden hunters, not let themselves be chased. As for the spears! Neanderthal spears had stone tips; those are just pikes with fire-hardened points.”

  I turned to glance across at Tormes. He was squirming in his seat.

  “I presume that they cleared this with the man who owns this land – and the bull,” said his voice from the speakers.

  “Well, yes. Ramoz is a bit excitable,” Marella agreed. “We should go down and warn them.”

  “Not with that bull running loose and no fences to stop it.”

  The bull looked up warily as the girl approached again, armed with another a handful of rocks. She shouted and waved. The bull stared at her. She flung a rock, hitting it squarely on the nose. The bull bawled angrily and charged, and this time it did not break off the chase as the girl fled. Although she was fast and had a good start, the bull closed the gap between them quickly as she ran for the ambush site.

  “Well now what?” Tormes’s voice asked. “They can’t kill the bull—”

  Even as he spoke, the naked three men erupted out of the grass and drove their spears into the flanks of the bull as it charged past them. Far from defeated by the initial attack, the animal turned on the hunters. Now two boys who had been hiding nearby ran up with fresh spears, and
the leader worried at the bull’s face with his spear while the other two men attacked its flanks and hind legs. After suffering perhaps a dozen spear wounds the bull’s hind legs gave way, and then the end came quickly.

  “I don’t believe this!” Tormes exclaimed. “That bull is part of a prize breeding herd.”

  “Was,” said Marella.

  We could now hear the tones of a cellphone as Tormes punched in the number for the police operations centre. He described what had happened, there was a pause, then he reported to Marella that there were no re-enactment groups or documentary crews in the area. On the screen, a hunter jumped on to the bull’s carcase and waved a spear high in triumph.

  “The police said there’s a military helicopter in the area, and they’re diverting it to these GPS coordinates. That group is definitely illegal.”

  “So Ramoz does not know that one of his stud bulls is the star of a documentary on neanderthal hunting?” Marella asked.

  “Apparently not. The police said to stay out of sight until they arrive.”

  “I’d better stay out of sight even after they arrive,” said Marella.

  “Yes, your husband might not react sympathetically.”

  “Pity. My tape could make the television news: the last neanderthals, arrested for poaching and taken away in a helicopter.”

  “Your tape must vanish without trace, preferably into a fire.”

  With the bull dead, several women, girls and children arrived at the kill. The hunters put their cloaks back on and sat down to rest. Using what appeared to be stone knives and scrapers the group began to butcher the carcase. They were efficient and skilled, and it might have even made a convincing picture had it not been for a woman with the cigar and the bull’s bright yellow eartag. The children started gathering wood, and presently the smoker used her cigar to start a fire. They began to roast cuts of the bull.

  “I later found the cigar; it turned out to be a roll of leaves and grass used for starting fires,” Tormes explained to me.