by Jeff Long
“All right, then. She came from very deep, from an atmosphere rich in oxygen, judging by the relatively small rib cage. Her DNA shows a relevant difference from samples sent to us from other regions around the world. The consensus is that these hadals all evolved from Homo erectus, our own ancestor. It’s common knowledge that we shared a mother and father long ago. But then the same can be said about us and orangutans, or lemurs, or even frogs. At some point we all share genesis.
“One surprise is how alike the hadals are to us. Another is how unalike they are to one another. Have you ever heard of Donald Spurrier?”
“The primatologist?” said Thomas. “He was here?”
“Now I’m really embarrassed,” Yamamoto said. “I’d never heard of him, but people told me later he’s world-famous. Anyway, he stopped up to see our little girl one afternoon and essentially conducted an impromptu seminar for us. He told us that Homo erectus spun off more variations than any other hominid group. We’re one of the spinoffs. Hadals may be another. Erectus apparently migrated from Africa to Asia hundreds of thousands of years ago, and the splinter groups possibly evolved into different forms around the world, before going into the interior. Again, I’m not an expert on such things.”
To Branch, Yamamoto’s modesty was engaging, but a distraction. They were here today on business, to glean every possible clue that she and her colleagues had harvested from this hadal corpse. “In great part,” Thomas said, “you have just stated our purpose, to understand why we turn out the way we do. What more can you tell us?”
“There’s a high concentration of radioisotopes in her tissue, but that’s to be expected, coming from the subplanet, a stone cavity bombarded by mineral radiation from all directions. My own hunch is that radiation may help explain the mutations in their population. But please don’t quote me on that. Who really knows why any of us turn out the way we do?”
Yamamoto passed a hand over the block of blue gel, as if stroking the monstrous face. “To our eye, Dawn looks so primitive. Some of our visitors have remarked on what a throwback she is. They think she’s so much closer to erectus and the Australopithecenes than we are. In fact, she is every bit as evolved as we are, just in a different direction.”
That had been one surprise for Branch. You expected stereotypes and racism and prejudices from the ordinary masses. But it was turning out that the sciences were just as rife with it. Indeed, intellectual biases—academic arrogance—helped explain why hell had gone undiscovered for so long.
“Dawn’s dental formula is identical to yours and mine—and to hominid fossils three million years old: two incisors, one canine, two premolars, three molars.” Yamamoto turned to another table. “The lower limbs are similar to ours, though hadal joints have more sponge in the bone, which suggests Dawn might have been even more efficient at walking than Homo sapiens sapiens. And she did a lot of that, walking. It’s tough to see through the gel, but if you look hard, she put a lot of miles on those feet. The calluses are thicker than my thumbnail. Her arches have fallen. Somebody measured her: size eleven, quadruple wide.”
She moved to the next table, the thorax and upper arms. “So far, few surprises here, either. The cardiovascular system is robust, if not perfectly healthy. The heart’s enlarged, meaning she probably came up rapidly from minus four or five miles. Her lungs show chemical scarring, probably from breathing gases vented from the deeper earth. That’s an old animal bite there.”
Yamamoto turned to the final table. It held the abdomen and lower arms. One hand was clenched, the other graceful. “Again, it’s hard to get a clear view. But the finger bones have a significant crook, midway between ape and human digits. That helps explain the stories we hear about hadals scaling walls and pulling themselves through underground nooks and crannies.”
Yamamoto gestured at the abdominal chunk. The blade had begun at the top and was shaving back and forth toward the pelvic area. The pubis had scant black hair, the start of womanhood.
“We did nail down part of her short, savage history. Before mounting her in gel and starting the cuts, we reviewed the MRI and CT images. Something about the pelvic saddle didn’t look right, and I got the head of our Ob/Gyn department up for a look. He recognized the trauma right away. Rape. Gang rape.”
“What’s this you’re saying?” Foley asked.
“Twelve years old,” said Vera. “Can you imagine? That explains why she came up, though.”
“How do you mean?” asked Yamamoto.
“The poor thing must have fled from the creatures that did this to her.”
“I didn’t mean to suggest it was hadals who did this to her. We typed the sperm. It was all human. The injuries were very recent. We contacted the sheriff’s department in Bartlesville, and they suggested we talk to the male attendants at the nursing home. The attendants denied it. We could take samples from them, but it wouldn’t change anything. This kind of thing’s not a crime. One group or another helped themselves to her. They had her locked in a refrigerated meat locker for several days.”
Again, Branch had seen worse.
“What a remarkable conceit civilization is,” said Thomas. His face looked neither angry nor sad, but seasoned. “This child’s suffering is ended. Yet, even as we speak, similar evil plays out in a hundred different places, ours upon them, theirs upon us. Until we can bring some sense of order to bear, the evil will continue to have a hiding place.”
He was speaking to the child’s body, it seemed, perhaps reminding himself.
“What else?” Yamamoto asked herself aloud. She looked around at the body parts. They were at the abdominal quadrant. “Her stool,” Yamamoto started again, “was hard and dark and rank-smelling. A typical carnivore’s stool.”
“What was her diet then?”
“In the last month before death?” said Yamamoto.
“I would have thought oat-bran muffins and fruit juices and whatever else one might scavenge in a geriatric kitchen. Foods with fiber and roughage, easy to digest,” suggested Vera.
“Not this gal. She was a meat-eater, no two ways about it. The police report was clear. The stool sample only confirmed it. Exclusively meat.”
“But where—”
“Mostly from the feet and calves,” said Yamamoto. “That’s how she went undetected for so long. The staff thought it was rats or a feral cat, and just applied ointments and bandages. Then Dawn would come back the next night and feed some more.”
Vera was silent. Yamamoto’s little “gal” had not exactly lent herself to cuddling.
“Not pretty, I know,” Yamamoto continued. “But then she didn’t have a pretty life.”
The blade hissed, the block moved imperceptibly.
“Don’t get me wrong. I’m not justifying predation. I’m just not condemning it. Some people call it cannibalism. But if we’re going to insist they’re not sapiens, then technically it’s no different from what mountain lions do to us. But these incidents do help explain why people are so scared. Which makes good, undamaged specimens that much harder to obtain. And deadlines impossible to meet. We’re way behind.”
“Way behind whom?” asked Vera.
“Ourselves,” said Yamamoto. “We’ve been handed deadlines. And we haven’t made one yet.”
“Who’s setting your deadlines?”
“That’s the grand mystery. At first we thought it was the military. We kept getting raw computer models for developing new weapons. We were supposed to fill in the blanks—you know, tissue density, positions of organs. Generally provide distinctions between our species and theirs. Then we started getting memos from corporations. But the corporations keep changing. Now we’re not even sure about them. For our purposes, it really doesn’t matter. The light bill’s getting paid.”
“I have a question,” Thomas said. “You sound a little uncertain about whether Dawn and her kind are really a separate species. What did Spurrier have to say?”
“He was adamant that hadals are a different species, some kind
of primate. Taxonomy’s a sensitive subject. Right now Dawn is classified as Homo erectus hadalis. He got upset when I mentioned the move to rename them Homo sapiens hadalis. In other words, an evolutionary branch of us. He said the erectus taxon is wastebasket science. Like I said, there’s a lot of fear out there.”
“Fear of what?”
“It runs against the current orthodoxy. You could get your funding cut. Lose your tenure. Not get hired or published. It’s subtle. Everyone’s playing it very safe for now.”
“What about you?” Thomas asked. “You’ve handled this girl. Followed her dissection. What do you think?”
“That’s not fair,” Vera scolded Thomas. “She just got through saying how dangerous the times are.”
“It’s okay,” Yamamoto said to Vera. She looked at Thomas. “Erectus or sapiens? Let me put it this way. If this were a live subject, if this were a vivisection, I wouldn’t do it.”
“So you’re saying she’s human?” asked Foley.
“No. I’m saying she’s similar enough, perhaps, not to be erectus.”
“Call me a devil’s advocate, certainly a layman,” Foley said. “But she doesn’t look similar to me.”
Yamamoto went over to her wall of drawers and pulled a lower tray out. It held a carcass even more grotesque than the ones they’d seen. The skin was wildly scarified. Body hair had grown rampant. The face was all but hooded with a cabbage-like dome of fleshy calcium deposits. Something close to a ram’s horn had grown from the middle of the forehead.
She rested one gloved hand on the creature’s rib cage. “As I said, the idea was to find differences between our two species. We know there are differences. Those are obvious to the naked eye. Or seem to be. But so far all we’ve found are physiological similarities.”
“How can you say he’s similar?” asked Foley.
“That’s exactly the point. We were sent this specimen by our lab chief. Sort of a double-blind test to see what we’d come up with. Ten of us worked on the autopsy for a week. We compiled a list of almost forty distinctions from the average Homo sapiens sapiens. Everything from blood gases to bone structure to ophthalmic deformities to diet. We found traces of rare minerals in his stomach. He’d been eating clay and various fluorescents. His intestines glowed in the dark. Only then did the lab chief tell us.”
“Tell you what?”
“That this was a German soldier from one of the NATO task forces.”
Branch had known it was human from the start, but he let Yamamoto make her point.
“That can’t be.” Vera began lifting and opening surgical cavities and pressing at the bony helmet. “What about this?” she said. “And this?”
“All residuals from his tour of duty. Side effects from the drugs he was told to take or from the geochemical environment in which he was serving.”
Foley was shocked. “I’ve heard of some amount of modification. But never anything like this disfigurement.” Suddenly remembering Branch, he stopped himself.
“He does look demonic,” Branch commented.
“All in all, it was an instructive anatomy lesson,” Yamamoto said. “Very humbling. I came away with one abiding thought. It doesn’t matter if Dawn stems from erectus or sapiens. Go back far enough and sapiens is erectus.”
“Are there no differences, then?” Thomas asked.
“Many. Many. But now we’ve seen how many incongruities there are between one human and another. It’s become an epistemological issue. How to know what we think we know.” She slid the drawer shut.
“You sound demoralized.”
“No. Distracted, perhaps. Derailed. Off track. But I’m convinced we’ll start hitting real discrepancy in three to five months.”
“Oh?” said Thomas.
She went back to the table where Dawn’s head and shoulders were slowly, very slowly feeding into the pendulum. “That’s when we’ll begin entering the brain.”
Begin at the beginning …
and go on till you come to
the end: then stop.
—LEWIS CARROLL, Turtle Soup
LOSING THE LIGHT
BETWEEN THE CLIPPERTON AND
GALÁPAGOS FRACTURE ZONES
In groups of four, they were winched into the depths off the cliffs of Esperanza. Like great naval guns, a battery of five winches faced out along the chasm rim, motors roaring, their great spools of wire cable winding out. Freight and humanity alike rode the nets and platforms down. The chasm was over four thousand feet deep. There were no seat belts or safety instructions, only frayed come-along straps and oily chains and floor bolts to secure crates and machinery. The live cargo managed for itself.
The massive winch arms creaked and groaned. Ali got her pack nestled behind her, and hitched herself to the low railing with carabiners and a knot. Shoat came over with a clipboard in hand. “Good morning,” she yelled into the roar and exhaust fumes.
As he had predicted, a number of them had quit the game overnight. Five or six so far, but given Shoat’s and Helios’s manner, Ali had expected more to resign. Judging by Shoat’s pleased grin, it seemed he had, too. She had never spoken with him. A sudden fear flashed through her other fears, that he might suddenly remove her from the expedition.
“You’re the nun,” he said. You could never call the pinched face and hungry eyes disarming, but he was personable enough. He offered his hand, which was surprisingly thin, given the pumped biceps and thighs.
“I’m here as an epigrapher and linguist.”
“We need one of those? You kind of came out of nowhere,” he said.
“I didn’t hear about the opportunity until late.”
He studied her. “Last chance.”
Ali looked around the deck and saw some of those who were staying. They looked ferocious, but forlorn, too. It had been a night of tears and rage and vows of a class-action suit against Helios. There had even been a fistfight. Part of the resentment, Ali realized, was that these people had made their minds up once, and Shoat had forced them to do it again. “I’ve made my peace,” Ali assured him.
“That’s one way of putting it.” Shoat checked her name on the list.
The cables came taut overhead. The platform lifted. Shoat gave it a hearty shove and walked away as they went swinging into the abyss. One of Ali’s companions shouted good-bye to the group of scientists staying behind.
The sound of the winch engines vanished high overhead. It was as if the lights of Esperanza had been flicked off. Suspended by a wire, they sank into blackness, slowly spinning. The overhang was stupendous. Sometimes the cliff wall was so far away their flashlights barely reached it.
“Live worm on a hook,” one of her neighbors said after the first hour. “Now I know how it feels.”
That was it. Not another word was uttered by any of them all the way down.
Ali had never known such emptiness.
Hours later, they neared the floor. Chemical runoff and human sewage had pooled in a foul marsh stretching along the base and extending beyond the light across the floor. The stench cut through Ali’s dust mask. She gasped, then dumped the stench with disgust. Closer still, her skin prickled with the acidity.
The winch landed them with a bump on the edge of the beach of poisons. A hand—something meaty, but gnarled and missing two fingers—grabbed the railing in front of her. “Bajarse, rapido,” the man barked. Rags hung from his head, perhaps to soak up his sweat or to shield him from their lights.
Ali unhooked herself and clambered off, and the character threw her pack off. Their platform started to rise. The last of her neighbors had to hop to the ground.
She looked around at this first wave of explorers. There were fifteen or twenty of them, standing in a clump and shining their flashlights. One man had drawn a big handgun and was aiming it vaguely toward the remoteness.
“Bad place to stand. Better move before something falls on your heads,” a voice said. They turned toward a niche in the rock. Inside sat a man, his assault rifle pa
rked to one side. He had night glasses. “Follow that trail.” He pointed. “Keep going for about an hour. The rest of your people will catch up soon enough. And you, pendejo, the gunslinger. Put it back in your pants before someone gets shot.”
They did as he said. Lights wagging, they followed a trail that meandered around the cliff base. There was no chance of getting lost. It was the only trail.
A bleak fog hung across the floor. Rags of gas drifted at their knees. Small toxic clouds swirled at head level, blinding white in their headlamps. Here and there, licks of flame sprang up like St. Elmo’s fire, then extinguished.
It was a swamp, deathly quiet. Animals had come here by the tens of thousands. Drawn by the spillage or non-native nutrients or, after a while, by the meat of earlier visiting animals, they had eaten and drunk here. Now their bones and decay spoiled among the rocks mile after mile.
Ali paused where two of the biologists were conversing by a pile of liquefying flesh and spiny bones. “We know that spines and protective armor are the proof of expanding numbers of predators in an environment,” one explained to her. “When predators begin devouring predators, evolution starts building body defenses. Protein is not a perpetual-motion machine. It has to begin somewhere. But no one’s ever found where the hadal food chain begins.” At least to date, no one had found evidence of plants down here. Without plants, you had no herbivores; what you ended up with was an entire ecology based on meat.
His friend pried the jaws open to examine the teeth. Something scaly and clawed came crawling out, another invader species from the surface. “Just the way I expected,” the friend said. “Everything is hungry down here. Starved.”
Ali moved on and saw at least a dozen different sizes and shapes of skulls and rib cages, a brand-new menagerie that was not entirely new to her imagination. One set of bones had the dimensions of a short snake with a large head. Something else had once transported itself on two legs. Another animal could have been a small frog with wings. None of it moved.
Soon Ali was sweating and breathing hard. She’d known there would be a period of adaptation to the trail, that it was going to take time to acclimate to the depths, to build up their quadriceps and adjust to new circadian rhythms. The stench of animal carcasses and the mining network’s sewage didn’t help. And an obstacle course of rusting cables, twisted rails, sudden ladders, and staircases made progress more difficult.