Darwin's Children

by Greg Bear

  He wants to be with Luella, Kaye thought. He's tired of this fight and he wants to be with his wife. For the next fight.

  No peace. No rest.

  Mitch leaned forward to peer through the side window, looking for the first signs of the Spent River and the camp. He had not wanted to return here. “I've given up the dead,” he had told Kaye after the visit from Oliver Merton a week ago. “No more dirt and bones for me. Give me the living. They're trouble enough.”

  Mitch did not like the publicity aspect, nor the connection with William Daney, Eileen Ripper's benefactor at the Spent River dig; it smacked too much of a stunt. None of this junket had appealed to him, and at first Kaye had shared his opinion. Why go forth into the world to help an administration that had come to the table so late, after so much destruction—one of three clueless, terrible administrations in a row?

  What good to help the monsters understand? Best to stay in Oldstock, hidden away from everyone and wait for Stella's baby.

  But Oldstock was no longer hidden. Morgan had been doing a lot of talking. Reporters were arriving, pilgrims, parents searching for lost children.

  It had taken a visit from Senator Bloch to finally persuade Kaye that this was a good idea. Troublesome gifts sometimes came out of left field; it was unwise to ignore them. Or impossible.

  Kaye understood that better than most.

  The EMAC schools were closing down or being converted to orphanages. Sandia Pathogenics was fighting for its existence and trying to redefine itself. Eileen's Spent River site was about to become an object lesson. The president of the United States wanted it as a symbol for a country trying to come together after a long and awful battle between conscience and fear.

  “There are always those who fear the future,” Bloch had told Kaye and Mitch. “They fear change, fear being replaced; one thing they do in their fear is kill children. They have to be left completely powerless, or the nastiness will start all over again.

  “Either you join in, or you get left behind.” Bloch had said. “I think you should go. Fruits of victory. People want to know what Kaye thinks.” She had added, “You, too, Mitch.”

  In the end, it was Stella who had tipped the scales.

  “Let's go,” she had said in the kitchen of the Oldstock cafeteria, wiping her hands on a dish towel and resting them on her prominent stomach. “I've always wanted to see where Dad worked.”

  The line of cars and vans crested a rise and descended on the rough road to the dry meander of the ancient river bed. A few of the cars, with lower suspensions, were being left behind.

  “There it is,” Mitch said. “They've taken off the camouflage.” The girls turned their heads to follow his finger. The site had expanded enormously. There were over thirty tents and shelters now on both sides of the old brush-strewn river bed.

  Secret Service agents waited for them, checked with the drivers, then flagged them through, diverting the VIP vans to one area and the reporters to another.

  The two long vans pulled into a makeshift parking lot marked by crumbling logs and shut off their engines. Senator Bloch waited for them under a white plastic awning. The sun poked through uncertain clouds and illuminated the covered H of the new main dig shelter. Again, linked Quonset huts provided cover. It lay at the end of a fenced pathway leading north.

  “Is this where they died?” LaShawna asked.

  Secret Service agents opened the van doors. Five photographers, led by a subdued Oliver Merton, surrounded the trucks and snapped pictures and made video. They concentrated on Stella.

  Oliver smiled at Mitch and Kaye and stared at Stella with something like reverence. It was a quiet side of Oliver Kaye had never seen before.

  “Just a year ago,” a reporter was saying into her lapel mike, staring earnestly into a tiny camera mounted on a curved pole poking from her belt, “the sight of a pregnant Shevite female would have caused panic. Now—”

  Kaye turned away and refused to listen.

  Mitch spotted Eileen Ripper walking along the trail from the big new shelter. He would have recognized her slow, deliberate saunter even had she worn a mask. She did not like this any more than he did, but it was indeed a triumph. A federal circuit court judge had ruled just three months before, after almost twenty years of litigation, that the Five Tribes had no standing—could claim no legitimate relationship to the remains of peoples physically and temporally so far from their own. The Department of the Interior would no longer halt these digs or return any remains found to the complaining tribes.

  Thus had ended a long nightmare for North American archaeology.

  Strange that Mitch did not feel any sense of victory.

  The bones he had found, goaded on by Eileen's challenge, had been just part of the story. He had not, after all, completely understood the motives of the ghosts flitting over the landscape.

  Perhaps ghosts also lied to get their own way.

  Eileen pushed through the photographers and past Bloch's entourage with hardly a nod. She came straight to Mitch and Kaye, and her eyes lingered for a moment on the girls as she held out her hand to Kaye.

  “Welcome,” she said with a broad, nervous smile. “And welcome back. Glad you could bring the family.”

  She set about introducing the others, all moving forward with varying degrees of shyness or confidence or diffidence in front of the cameras.

  Mitch was sure this was going to turn out badly.

  At the airport, LaShawna and Celia had been glad to see Stella again. Breaking from John Hamilton's protection, LaShawna had grabbed Celia and then Stella and they had all gone off together to the closest women's restroom—a frightening place for them all, even more than the airplane, with the smells of so many humans.

  LaShawna had dragged Stella into a stall and whispered fiercely at her, “What are you doing, girl, going wasp and getting yourself puffed! Was it that boy Will?”

  Celia had called through the closed door, “She'll explain later. Let's go! I don't like it in here.”

  But there had been little time for talk, much less clouding and conveying the full story. The ride in the truck had made them all a little quiet, even with Kaye and Mitch and John along. LaShawna had whispered in Stella's ear, “Your mother looks good.”

  Stella had pulled back and looked LaShawna full in the face.

  “Momma has it,” LaShawna had said sadly, dropping her chin to her chest and pulling up her knees, propping them against the seat back. “She's in a wheelchair.”

  Stella brushed the short hair from her eyes as the wind blew in her face. She stepped down from the truck and blinked at the cameras. Celia and LaShawna seemed to fall in place behind her like ducklings. Being pregnant gave her seniority, she wondered why; it was stupid the way it had happened, stupid losing Will. She had left Oldstock to come here in part to get perspective; she wondered how much longer she would live at the compound.

  Without Will, she doubted she would ever find the childish freedom that had once seemed so important. As she smelled and felt the baby inside her, she thought of responsibility and getting things done.

  Meeting with a senator and with all these other folks was a start.

  The landscape around the dry river bed was somewhere between bleak and pretty and it smelled much like Oldstock though cooler; the trees knew less sun than the trees around Lake Stannous. Quiet, cool pines poked up through gray brush and hard, crusty dirt with broken pieces of purple-black and gray rock overlying.

  There was something going on between the woman archaeologist, Eileen, and her father. They were old friends. Something had happened between them along ago; Stella was sure of it. She watched her mother, but Kaye did not seem bothered. In fact, Kaye and Eileen seemed to walk alike and to look around with the same dignified curiosity.

  That pleased Stella.

  Mitch put an arm around her shoulder. Stella leaned into his embrace and cameras whirred and flashed all around.

  “They're affectionate,” said a male newscaster to u
nseen eyes. “Isn't that wonderful?”

  Mitch gently squeezed Stella. “Never mind,” he said in a low voice. “We're going to visit the bones.” He sounded as if that would be like entering a church.

  And it was. They walked down into the big shelter, following long plywood sheets, and reporters were instructed to turn off their bright lights. A large sunburned man, about thirty years old, in muddy jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt, with dirty forearms and a bandanna around his head, and dental tools and brushes slung on his belt, made the reporters pass through inspection and a shoe scrub. They all donned plastic booties. “Dirt is important here,” the man explained, his voice a rich tenor. “We don't want to add anything that doesn't belong.”

  Eileen broke from a small group of reporters and introduced him. “This is Carlton Fierro,” she said. “Carlton the Doorman. We call him that because he can hardly fit through most doors. He's in charge of this dig now.”

  Stella smiled at Carlton.

  “Glad you could make it,” he told the girls.

  Connie Fitz walked around a sculpted pillar of dirt and hooked arms with Eileen. “We need big boys to protect us when there are reporters around,” she said, and winked at Mitch.

  Stella did not understand any of this. She focused on Carlton, who was shaking hands with Mitch. “We've got the biggest grouping over here,” Carlton said, and led them all along the boards and through a connecting corridor to the second wing of the shelter. They turned right and stood before a wide excavated mesa, sheared off about ten feet below the datum—the level of the surrounding land. Scaffolds had been erected around the mesa and filtered sunlight fell on them all through milky fiberglass sheets.

  “Eight at a time,” Carlton instructed, “and that includes me.” The reporters pushed around him, trying to keep the girls and Kaye in direct view.

  He made a path through the crowd for the people Eileen pointed out, holding her hand over their heads and nodding.

  “Coming through,” Carlton said, and they climbed the aluminum steps. He was the last.

  Stella looked down on the excavation. At first, all she saw was a large jumble of dark bones on hard planed dirt, mud, and what looked like old ash. She could smell the dust. Nothing more.

  Mitch and Kaye stood across from her, Celia and LaShawna beside her; John Hamilton and Senator Bloch, both very quiet, were catercorner on the scaffold beside Carlton. Oliver Merton was staying out of the way, standing alone in one corner with arms crossed.

  Eileen and Connie Fitz and Laura Bloch had also stayed below. It was now Carlton's show.

  “There are eight adult females and two children, one male and one female, in this grouping,” Carlton said. “A lahar of volcanic gas and mud and water came roaring down this river bed about twenty thousand years ago. They died together, covered with hot mud. One of them dropped a woven grass basket. Its mold is still in that cube of unexcavated mudstone to the right. The woman on top of the group—she's marked with a red plastic square, and her outline is made more clear by the thin strip of blue tape—is taller and more robust; she's Homo erectus, a late stage variety similar to heidelbergensis but as yet without a scientific designation. She appears to be in her forties, well past child bearing and very old for the time. A grandma type. We think she was protecting the children, and perhaps two other women. The female child and the other females are all Homo sapiens, virtually indistinguishable from you and me. The male child is another Homo erectus.

  “At first, we thought—Connie and Eileen and the pioneers at this site thought, that is; I'm sort of late here—that there were only females, that the males had run off and abandoned them. Later, Mr. Rafelson found the first signs of the males, not far away and across the river. We thought they might have been out hunting and coming back to their females. Well, that may still be the case, but there was a lot more going on. We've since excavated thirteen sites around the Spent River, all within a thousand yards of here. We've found a total of fifty-three whole skeletons and perhaps seventy partials, a bit of femur or skull cap or tooth here and there.

  “This was a kind of village, set up in the autumn to take advantage of salmon runs in the river. Family groups made camp along a loose network of trails, waiting for the run to begin. They were caught by the volcanic eruption and frozen in time, for us to find, and to reacquaint ourselves with . . . well, I think of them as old friends. Old teachers, actually.”

  Stella glanced at Mitch and saw a tear on his cheek.

  Carlton paused to gather his thoughts. Celia was transfixed and maybe a little frightened by this big, rough-looking male. Her jaw hung open. LaShawna was frowning in concentration.

  “And what they teach us now is pretty simple. They were traveling as equals. Personally, I don't know what they were offering each other. But we've found roughly equal numbers of both species, erectus and sapiens. There are children of both species, and males as well. Our first site was anomalous. If I could make a guess . . .”

  “He's a lot like you, Mitch,” Eileen called from the crowd below the scaffold.

  Carlton smiled shyly. “I'd say maybe the erectus individuals worked as hunters, using tools made by the sapiens. We haven't finished analyzing one of the outermost digs yet, a hunting party, but it looks like some of the erectus females served as lead hunters. They carried flint knapping tools and the heavy weapons and some stones that might or might not be hunting charms. That's right. Tall girls with great sniffers leading the brainy boys.

  “We're looking for a central butchering ground for game—usually near where the large cutting tools were manufactured. In those days hunters tended to carry big game back to the village and butcher it in a protected area. We aren't sure why—either they hadn't yet thought of carrying the butchering tools with them, or they were trying to avoid attracting large predators.

  “The sapiens females cooperated in weaving grass and leather and bark and preparing the fish and gathering berries and bugs and such around the camps. We've found beetles and grubs and grass and blackberry seeds in some of the baskets. Everyone had their place. They worked together.”

  “So should we all,” said Senator Bloch, and Stella could see that she, too, was deeply moved.

  Stella did not know what to think. The bones were still a tangle, as were her thoughts.

  “As we reveal the bones, remove the overburden and brush them clean, we don't know what beliefs they held, twenty thousand years ago,” Carlton said softly. “So basically we just respect them with silence, for a while, and gratitude. We get acquainted, as it were. They were not our direct ancestors, of course—we'll probably never find direct ancestors that old. It would be like digging up needles in a mighty sparse and distributed haystack.

  “But the people down here, and all around the Spent River, they're still us. Nobody owns them. But they're family.” Carlton nodded to his own strong convictions.

  “Amen,” Eileen and Connie Fitz said simultaneously below the scaffold.

  Stella saw her father's hands on the rail. His knuckles were white and he was staring directly at her. Stella leaned her head to one side. He moved his lips. She could easily tell what he was saying.

  Human.

  Eileen and Laura Bloch and Mitch watched as the photographers arranged Kaye and the girls at the base of the mesa, standing in front of the scaffolding. No pictures of the bones were being allowed.

  “Rumor has it Kaye met God,” Eileen said in a low voice to Mitch. “Is it true?”

  “So she tells me.”

  “That's got to be awkward for a scientist,” Eileen said.

  “She's doing okay,” Mitch said. “She calls it just another kind of inspiration.”

  Senator Bloch listened to this with a focused pug-dog expression.

  “What about you?” Eileen asked.

  “I remain blissfully ignorant.”

  “Kind of a sometime thing, huh?”

  Bloch weighed in. “That can't be bad,” she mused. “Not for politics. Did she see Jesus?
”

  Mitch shook his head. “I don't think so. That's not what she says, anyway.”

  Bloch pouched out her lips. “If there's no Jesus, we best keep it under our hats for now.”

  “What does God tell her about all of this?” Eileen asked, sweeping her hand over the excavations, the revealed bones.

  Mitch scowled. “Not much, probably. It doesn't seem to be that kind of relationship.”

  “What good is he, then?” Eileen asked petulantly.

  Mitch had to look hard to tell if she was joking. She appeared to be, and she lost interest as some photographers came too near a grid square propped against a table and almost knocked it over.

  After berating them and resetting the square, she came back and patted Mitch on the shoulder. “Good for Kaye,” she said. “Just proves that we're a tough old species. We can survive anything, even God. How about you? Going to come back soon and dig with us?” Eileen asked.

  “No,” Mitch said. “That's over for me.”

  “Shame. He was the best,” Eileen said to Bloch. “A real natural.”

  Mitch helped Kaye back into the van. Kaye sat and massaged her calves. Her feet were numb and she had had a difficult time climbing the stairs out of the shelter.

  Stella and Celia and LaShawna walked in a tight cluster to the van and climbed in behind her, then sat quietly. John Hamilton and Mitch stood talking as they waited for Bloch to rejoin them.

  Kaye could hear her husband and John, but only a scatter of words between whisks of dusty wind.

  John was saying, “. . . and bad. They say it's worse with two. Summer in Maryland is going to be tough. She wanted to come here. Just couldn't.”

  Kaye licked her dry lips and stared forward. Stella placed her hand on Kaye's shoulder and touched her cheek.

  “How are you all doing?” Kaye asked abruptly, swiveling around despite the twinges in her thighs and surveying the girls—the young women.