by Greg Bear
Beck spoke to the officer soothingly in broken Georgian and better Russian. Lado gently retranslated his attempts. Beck then took Kaye’s elbow and moved her to a long canvas canopy that had been erected a few yards from the trenches.
Under the canopy, two battered folding card tables supported pieces of bodies. Completely amateur, Kaye thought. Perhaps the enemies of the head of the sakrebulo had laid out the bodies and taken pictures to prove their point.
She circled the table: two torsos and a skull. There was a fair amount of mummified flesh left on the torsos and some unfamiliar ligaments like dark dry straps on the skull, around the forehead, eyes, and cheeks. She looked for signs of insect casings and found dead blowfly larvae on one withered throat, but not many. The bodies had been buried within a few hours of death. She surmised they had not been buried in the dead of winter, when blowflies were not about. Of course, winters at this altitude were mild in Georgia.
She picked up a small pocket knife lying next to the closest torso and lifted a shred of fabric, what had once been white cotton, then pried up a stiff, concave flap of skin over the abdomen. There were bullet entry holes in the fabric and skin overlying the pelvis. “God,” she said.
Within the pelvis, cradled in dirt and stiff wraps of dried tissue, lay a smaller body, curled, little more than a heap of tiny bones, its skull collapsed.
“Colonel.” She showed Beck. His face turned stony.
The bodies could conceivably have been fifty years old, but if so, they were in remarkably good condition. Some wool and cotton remained. Everything was very dry. Drainage swept around this area now. The trenches were deep. But the roots—
Chikurishvili spoke again. His tone seemed more cooperative, even guilty. There was a lot of guilt to go around over the centuries.
“He says they are both female,” Lado whispered to Kaye.
“I see that,” she muttered.
She walked around the table to examine the second torso. This one had no skin over the abdomen. She scraped the dirt aside, making the torso rock with a sound like a dried gourd. Another small skull lay within the pelvis, a fetus about six months along, same as the other. The torso’s limbs were missing; Kaye could not tell if the legs had been held together in the grave. Neither of the fetuses had been expelled by pressure of abdominal gases.
“Both pregnant,” she said. Lado translated this into Georgian.
Beck said in a low voice, “We count about sixty individuals. The women seem to have been shot. It looks as if the men were shot or clubbed to death.”
Chikurishvili pointed to Beck, and then back to the camp, and shouted, his face ruddy in the backwash of flashlight glow. “Jugashvili, Stalin.” The officer said the graves had been dug a few years before the great People’s War, during the purges. The late 1930s. That would make them almost seventy years old, ancient news, nothing for the UN to become involved in.
Lado said, “He wants the UN and the Russians out of here. He says this is an internal matter, not for peacekeepers.”
Beck spoke again, less soothingly, to the Georgian officer. Lado decided he did not want to be in the middle of this exchange and walked around to where Kaye was leaning over the second torso. “Nasty business,” he said.
“Too long,” Kaye spoke softly.
“What?” Lado asked.
“Seventy years is much too long,” she said. “Tell me what they’re arguing about.” She prodded the unfamiliar straps of tissue around the eye sockets with the pocket knife. They seemed to form a kind of mask. Had they been hooded before being executed? She did not think so. The attachments were dark and stringy and persistent.
“The UN man is saying there is no limit on war crimes,” Lado told her. “No statue—what is it—statute of limitations.”
“He’s right,” Kaye said. She rolled the skull over gently. The occiput had been fractured laterally and pushed in to a depth of three centimeters.
She returned her attention to the tiny skeleton cradled within the pelvis of the second torso. She had taken some courses in embryology in her second year in med school. The fetus’s bone structure seemed a little odd, but she did not want to damage the skull by pulling it loose from the caked soil and dried tissue. She had intruded enough already.
Kaye felt queasy, sickened not by the shriveled and dried remains, but by what her imagination was already reconstructing. She straightened and waved to get Beck’s attention.
“These women were shot in the stomach,” she said. Kill all the firstborn children. Furious monsters. “Murdered.” She clamped her teeth.
“How long ago?”
“He may be right about the age of the boot, if it came from here, but this grave isn’t that old. The roots around the edge of the trenches are too small. My guess is the victims died as recently as two or three years ago. The dirt here looks dry, but the soil is probably acid, and that would dissolve any bones over a few years old. Then there’s the fabric; it looks like wool and cotton, and that means the grave is just a few years old. If it’s synthetic, it could be older, but that gives us a date after Stalin, too.”
Beck approached her and lifted his mask. “Can you help us until the others get here?” he asked in a whisper.
“How long?” Kaye asked.
“Four, five days,” Beck said. Several paces distant, Chikurishvili shifted his gaze between them, jaw clenched, resentful, as if cops had interrupted a domestic quarrel.
Kaye caught herself holding her breath. She turned away, stepped back, sucked in some air, then asked, “You’re going to start a war crimes investigation?”
“The Russians think we should,” Beck said. “They’re hot to discredit the new Communists back home. A few old atrocities could supply them with fresh ammunition. If you could give us a best guess—two years, five, thirty, whatever?”
“Less than ten. Probably less than five. I’m very rusty,” she said. “I can only do a few things. Take samples, some tissue specimens. Not a full autopsy, of course.”
“You’re a thousand times better than letting the locals muck around,” Beck said. “I don’t trust any of them. I’m not sure the Russians can be trusted, either. They all have axes to grind, one way or the other.”
Lado kept a stiff face and did not comment, nor did he translate for Chikurishvili.
Kaye felt what she had known would come, had dreaded: the old dark mood creeping over her.
She had thought that by traveling and being away from Saul, she might shake the bad times, the bad feelings. She had felt liberated watching the doctors and technicians working at the Eliava Institute, doing so much good with so few resources, literally pulling health out of sewage. The grand and beautiful side of the Republic of Georgia. Now . . . Flip the coin. Papa Ioseb Stalin or ethnic cleansers, Georgians trying to move out Armenians and Ossetians, Abkhazis trying to move out Georgians, Russians sending in troops, Chechens becoming involved. Dirty little wars between ancient neighbors with ancient grievances.
This was not going to be good for her, but she could not refuse.
Lado wrinkled his face and stared up at Beck. “They were going to be mothers?”
“Most of them,” Beck said. “And maybe some were going to be fathers.”
3
The Alps
The end of the cave was very cramped. Tilde lay under a low shelf of rock, knees drawn up, and watched Mitch as he kneeled before the ones they had come here to see. Franco squatted behind Mitch.
Mitch’s mouth hung half open, like a surprised little boy’s. He could not speak for a time. The end of the cave was utterly still and quiet. Only the beam of light moved as he played the torch up and down the two forms.
“We touched nothing,” Franco said.
The blackened ashes, ancient fragments of wood, grass, and reed, looked as if a breath would scatter them but still formed the remains of a fire. The skin of the bodies had fared much better. Mitch had never seen more startling examples of deep-freeze mummification. The tissues were
hard and dry, the moisture sucked from them by the dry deep cold air. Near the heads, where they lay facing each other, the skin and muscle had hardly shrunk at all before being fixed. The features were almost natural, though the eyelids had withdrawn and the eyes beneath were shrunken, dark, unutterably sleepy. The bodies as well were full; only near the legs did the flesh seem to shrivel and darken, perhaps because of the intermittent breeze from farther up the shaft. The feet were wizened, black as little dried mushrooms.
Mitch could not believe what he was seeing. Perhaps there was nothing so extraordinary about their pose—lying on their sides, a man and a woman facing each other in death, freezing finally as the ashes of their last fire cooled. Nothing unexpected about the hands of the man reaching toward the face of the woman, the woman’s arms low in front of her as if she had clasped her stomach. Nothing extraordinary about the animal skin beneath them, or another skin rumpled beside the male, as if it had been tossed aside.
In the end, with the fire out, freezing to death, the man had felt too warm and had thrown off his covering.
Mitch looked down at the woman’s curled fingers and swallowed a rising lump of emotion he could not easily define or explain.
“How old?” Tilde asked, interrupting his focus. Her voice sounded crisp and clear and rational, like the ring of a struck knife.
Mitch jerked. “Very old,” he said quietly.
“Yes, but like the Iceman?”
“Not like the Iceman,” Mitch said. His voice almost broke.
The female had been injured. A hole had been punched in her side, at hip level. Blood stains surrounded the hole and he thought he could make out stains on the rock beneath her. Perhaps it had been the cause of her death.
There were no weapons in the cave.
He rubbed his eyes to force aside the little jagged white moon that rose into his field of vision and threatened to distract him, then looked at the faces again, short broad noses pointing up at an angle. The woman’s jaw hung slack, the man’s was closed. The woman had died gasping for air. Mitch could not know this for sure, but he did not question the observation. It fit.
Only now did he carefully maneuver around the figures, crouched low, moving so slowly, keeping his bent knees an inch above the man’s hip.
“They look old,” Franco said, just to make a sound in the cave. His eyes glittered. Mitch glanced at him, then down at the male’s profile.
Thick brow ridge, broad flattened nose, no chin. Powerful shoulders, narrowing to a comparatively slender waist. Thick arms. The faces were smooth, almost hairless. All the skin below the neck, however, was covered with a fine dark downy fur, visible only on close examination. Around their temples, the short-trimmed hair seemed to have been shaved in patterns, expertly barbered.
So much for shaggy museum reconstructions.
Mitch bent closer, the cold air heavy in his nostrils, and propped his hand against the top of the cave. Something like a mask lay between the bodies, actually two masks, one beside and bunched under the man, the other beneath the woman. The edges of the masks appeared torn. Each had eye holes, nostrils, the appearance of an upper lip, all lightly covered with fine hair, and below that, an even hairier flap that might have once wrapped around the neck and lower jaw. They might have been lifted from the faces, flayed away, yet there was no skin missing from the heads.
The mask nearest the woman seemed attached to her forehead and temple by thin fibers like the beard of a mussel.
Mitch realized he was focusing on little mysteries to get past one big impossibility.
“How old are they?” Tilde asked again. “Can you tell yet?”
“I don’t think there have been people like this for tens of thousands of years,” Mitch said.
Tilde seemed to miss this statement of deep time. “They are European, like the Iceman?”
“I don’t know,” Mitch said, but shook his head and held up his hand. He did not want to talk; he wanted to think. This was an extremely dangerous place, professionally, mentally, from any angle of approach. Dangerous and dreamlike and impossible.
“Tell me, Mitch,” Tilde pleaded with surprising gentleness. “Tell me what you see.” She reached out to stroke his knee. Franco observed this caress with maturity.
Mitch began, “They are male and female, each about a hundred and sixty centimeters in height.”
“Short people,” Franco said, but Mitch talked right over him.
“They appear to be genus Homo, species sapiens. Not like us, though. They might have suffered from some kind of dwarfism, distortion of the features . . .” He stopped himself and looked again at the heads, saw no signs of dwarfism, though the masks bothered him.
The classic features. “They’re not dwarfs,” he said. “They’re Neandertals.”
Tilde coughed. The dry air parched their throats. “Pardon?”
“Cavemen?” Franco said.
“Neandertals,” Mitch said again, as much to convince himself as to correct Franco.
“That is bullshit,” Tilde said, her voice crackling with anger. “We are not children.”
“No bullshit. You have found two well-preserved Neandertals, a man and a woman. The first Neandertal mummies . . . anywhere. Ever.”
Tilde and Franco thought about that for a few seconds. Outside, wind hooted past the cave entrance.
“How old?” Franco asked.
“Everyone thinks the Neandertals died out between a hundred thousand and forty thousand years ago,” Mitch said. “Maybe everyone is wrong. But I doubt they could have stayed in this cave, in this state of preservation, for forty thousand years.”
“Maybe they were the last,” Franco said, and crossed himself reverently.
“Incredible,” Tilde said, her face flushed. “How much would they be worth?”
Mitch’s leg cramped and he moved back to squat beside Franco. He rubbed his eyes with a gloved knuckle. So cold. He was shivering. The moon of light blurred and shifted. “They’re not worth anything,” he said.
“Don’t joke,” Tilde said. “They are rare—nothing like them, right?”
“Even if we—if you, I mean—could get them out of this cave safely, intact, and down the mountain, where would you sell them?”
“There are people who collect such things,” Franco said. “People with lots of money. We have talked to some about an Iceman already. Surely an Iceman and woman—”
“Maybe I should be more blunt,” Mitch said. “If these aren’t handled in a proper scientific fashion, I will go to the authorities in Switzerland, Italy, wherever the hell we are. I will tell them.”
Another silence. Mitch could almost hear Tilde’s thoughts, like a little Austrian clockwork.
Franco slapped the floor of the cave with his gloved hand and glared at Mitch. “Why fuck us up?”
“Because these people don’t belong to you,” Mitch said. “They don’t belong to anybody.”
“They are dead!” Franco shouted. “They do not belong to themselves, do they, anymore?”
Tilde’s lips formed a straight, grim line. “Mitch is right. We are not going to sell them.”
A little scared now, Mitch’s next words rushed out. “I don’t know what else you might plan to do with them, but I don’t think you’re going to control them, or sell the rights, make Caveman Barbie dolls or whatever.” He took a deep breath.
“No, again, I say Mitch is right,” Tilde stated slowly. Franco regarded her with a speculative squint. “This is very huge. We will be good citizens. They are everybody’s ancestors. Mama and Papa to the world.”
Mitch could definitely feel the headache creeping up. The earlier oblong of light had been a familiar warning: oncoming head-crushing train. Climbing back down the mountain would be difficult or even impossible if he was going to fall under the spell of a migraine, a real brain-splitter. He hadn’t brought any medicine. “Are you planning to kill me up here?” he asked Tilde.
Franco shot a glance at him, then rolled to look at Tilde
, waiting for an answer.
Tilde grinned and tapped her chin. “I am thinking,” she said. “What rogues we would be. Famous stories. Pirates of the prehistoric. Yo ho ho and a bottle of Schnapps.”
“What we need to do,” Mitch said, assuming that she had answered in the negative, “is to take a tissue sample from each body, with minimal intrusion. Then—”
He reached for the torch and shone the light beyond the close, sleepy-eyed heads of the male and female to the far recesses, about three yards farther back in the cave. Something small lay there, bundled in fur.
“What’s that?” he and Franco asked simultaneously.
Mitch considered. He could hunker and sidle his way around the female without disturbing anything except the dust. On the other hand, it would be best to leave everything completely untouched, to retreat from the cave now and bring back the real experts. The tissue samples would be enough evidence, he thought. Enough was known about Neandertal DNA from bone studies. A confirmation could be made and the cave could be kept sealed until—
He pressed his temples and closed his eyes.
Tilde tapped his shoulder and gently pushed him out of the way. “I am smaller,” she said. She crawled beside the female toward the rear of the cave.
Mitch watched and said nothing. This was what it felt like to truly sin—the sin of overwhelming curiosity. He would never forgive himself, but, he rationalized, how could he stop her without harming the bodies? Besides, she was being careful.
Tilde squeezed so low her face was on the floor beside the bundle. She gripped one end of the fur with two fingers and slowly turned it around. Mitch’s throat seized with anguish. “Shine a light,” she demanded. Mitch did so.
Franco aimed his torch as well.
“It’s a doll,” Tilde said.
From the top of the bundle peered a small face, like a dark and wrinkled apple, with two tiny sunken black eyes.
“No,” Mitch said. “It’s a baby.”
Tilde pushed back a few inches and made a small surprised hmm!
Mitch’s headache rolled over him like thunder.