The epic, Sally tells me, is an immense account of everything that’s ever happened: the Iliad and the Odyssey and the Encyclopedia Britannica all rolled into one, a vast tale of gods and kings and men and warfare and migrations and vanished empires and great calamities. The text is so big and Sally’s recounting of it is so sketchy that I have only the foggiest idea of what it’s about, but when I hear it I want desperately to understand it. It’s the actual history of a forgotten world, the tribal annals of thirty millennia, told in a forgotten language, all of it as lost to us as last year’s dreams.
If I could learn it and translate it I would set it all down in writing so that maybe it would be found by archaeologists thousands of years from now. I’ve been taking notes on these people already, an account of what they’re like and how I happen to be living among them. I’ve made twenty tablets so far, using the same clay that the tribe uses to make its pots and sculptures, and firing it in the same beehive-shaped kiln. It’s a godawful slow job writing on slabs of clay with my little bone knife. I bake my tablets and bury them in the cobblestone floor of the house. Somewhere in the 21st or 22nd century a Russian archaeologist will dig them up and they’ll give him one hell of a jolt. But of their history, their myths, their poetry, I don’t have a thing, because of the language problem. Not a damned thing.
Noon has come and gone. I find some white berries on a glossy-leaved bush and, after only a moment’s hesitation, gobble them down. There’s a faint sweetness there. I’m still hungry even after I pick the bush clean.
If I were back in the village now, we’d have knocked off work at noon for a lunch of dried fruit and strips of preserved reindeer meat, washed down with mugs of mildly fermented fruit juice. The fermentation is accidental, I think, an artifact of their storage methods. But obviously there are yeasts here and I’d like to try to invent wine and beer. Maybe they’ll make me a god for that. This year I invented writing, but I did it for my sake and not for theirs and they aren’t much interested in it. I think they’ll be more impressed with beer.
A hard, nasty wind has started up out of the east. It’s September now and the long winter is clamping down. In half an hour the temperature has dropped fifteen degrees, and I’m freezing. I’m wearing a fur parka and trousers, but that thin icy wind cuts right through. And it scours up the fine dry loose topsoil and flings it in our faces. Some day that light yellow dust will lie thirty feet deep over this village, and over B.J. and Marty and Danny and Paul, and probably over me as well.
Soon they’ll be quitting for the day. The house will take eight or ten more days to finish, if early-season snowstorms don’t interrupt. I can imagine Paul hitting the drum six good raps to wind things up and everybody making a run for indoors, whooping and hollering. These are high-spirited guys. They jump and shout and sing, punch each other playfully on the arms, brag about the goddesses they’ve screwed and the holy rhinos they’ve killed. Not that they’re kids. My guess is that they’re 25, 30 years old, senior men of the tribe. The life expectancy here seems to be about 45. I’m 34. I have a grandmother alive back in Illinois. Nobody here could possibly believe that. The one I call Zeus, the oldest and richest man in town, looks to be about 53, probably is younger than that, and is generally regarded as favored by the gods because he’s lived so long. He’s a wild old bastard, still full of bounce and vigor. He lets you know that he keeps those two wives of his busy all night long, even at his age. These are robust people. They lead a tough life, but they don’t know that, and so their souls are buoyant. I definitely will try to turn them on to beer next summer, if I last that long and if I can figure out the technology. This could be one hell of a party town.
Sometimes I can’t help feeling abandoned by my own time. I know it’s irrational. It has to be just an accident that I’m marooned here. But there are times when I think the people up there in 20l3 simply shrugged and forgot about me when things went wrong, and it pisses me off tremendously until I get it under control.
I’m a professionally trained hard-ass. But I’m 20,000 years from home and there are times when it hurts more than I can stand.
Maybe beer isn’t the answer. Maybe what I need is a still. Brew up some stronger stuff than beer, a little moonshine to get me through those very black moments when the anger and the really heavy resentment start breaking through.
In the beginning the tribe looked on me, I guess, as a moron. Of course I was in shock. The time trip was a lot more traumatic than the experiments with rabbits and turtles had led us to think.
There I was, naked, dizzy, stunned, blinking and gaping, retching and puking. The air had a bitter acid smell to it—who expected that, that the air would smell different in the past?—and it was so cold it burned my nostrils. I knew at once that I hadn’t landed in the pleasant France of the Cro-Magnons but in some harsher, bleaker land far to the east. I could still see the rainbow glow of the Zeller Ring, but it was vanishing fast, and then it was gone.
The tribe found me ten minutes later. That was an absolute fluke. I could have wandered for months, encountering nothing but reindeer and bison. I could have frozen; I could have starved. But no, the men I would come to call B.J. and Danny and Marty and Paul were hunting near the place where I dropped out of the sky and they stumbled on me right away. Thank God they didn’t see me arrive. They’d have decided that I was a supernatural being and would have expected miracles from me, and I can’t do miracles. Instead they simply took me for some poor dope who had wandered so far from home that he didn’t know where he was, which after all was essentially the truth.
I must have seemed like one sad case. I couldn’t speak their language or any other language they knew. I carried no weapons. I didn’t know how to make tools out of flints or sew a fur parka or set up a snare for a wolf or stampede a herd of mammoths into a trap. I didn’t know anything, in fact, not a single useful thing. But instead of spearing me on the spot they took me to their village, fed me, clothed me, taught me their language. Threw their arms around me and told me what a great guy I was. They made me one of them. That was a year and a half ago. I’m a kind of holy fool for them, a sacred idiot.
I was supposed to be here just four days and then the Zeller Effect rainbow would come for me and carry me home. Of course within a few weeks I realized that something had gone wonky at the uptime end, that the experiment had malfunctioned and that I probably wasn’t ever going to get home. There was that risk all along. Well, here I am, here I stay. First came stinging pain and anger and I suppose grief when the truth finally caught up with me. Now there’s just a dull ache that won’t go away.
In early afternoon I stumble across the Scavenger Man. It’s pure dumb luck. The trail has long since given out—the forest floor is covered with soft pine duff here, and I’m not enough of a hunter to distinguish one spoor from another in that—and I’m simply moving aimlessly when I see some broken branches, and then I get a whiff of burning wood, and I follow that scent twenty or thirty yards over a low rise and there he is, hunkered down by a hastily thrown-together little hearth roasting a couple of ptarmigans on a green spit. A scavenger he may be, but he’s a better man than I am when it comes to skulling ptarmigans.
He’s really ugly. Jeanne wasn’t exaggerating at all.
His head is huge and juts back a long way. His mouth is like a muzzle and his chin is hardly there at all and his forehead slopes down to huge brow-ridges like an ape’s. His hair is like straw, and it’s all over him, though he isn’t really shaggy, no hairier than a lot of men I’ve known. His eyes are gray, yes, and small, deep-set. He’s built low and thick, like an Olympic weightlifter. He’s wearing a strip of fur around his middle and nothing else. He’s an honest-to-God Neanderthal, straight out of the textbooks, and when I see him a chill runs down my spine as though up till this minute I had never really believed that I had traveled 20,000 years in time and now, holy shit, the whole concept has finally become real to me.
He sniffs and gets my wind, and his big brows kn
it and his whole body goes tense. He stares at me, checking me out, sizing me up. It’s very quiet here and we are primordial enemies, face to face with no one else around. I’ve never felt anything like that before.
We are maybe twenty feet from each other. I can smell him and he can smell me, and it’s the smell of fear on both sides. I can’t begin to anticipate his move. He rocks back and forth a little, as if getting ready to spring up and come charging, or maybe bolt off into the forest.
But he doesn’t do that. The first moment of tension passes and he eases back. He doesn’t try to attack, and he doesn’t get up to run. He just sits there in a kind of patient, tired way, staring at me, waiting to see what I’m going to do. I wonder if I’m being suckered, set up for a sudden onslaught.
I’m so cold and hungry and tired that I wonder if I’ll be able to kill him when he comes at me. For a moment I almost don’t care.
Then I laugh at myself for expecting shrewdness and trickery from a Neanderthal man. Between one moment and the next all the menace goes out of him for me. He isn’t pretty but he doesn’t seem like a goblin, or a demon, just an ugly thick-bodied man sitting alone in a chilly forest.
And I know that sure as anything I’m not going to try to kill him, not because he’s so terrifying but because he isn’t.
“They sent me out here to kill you,” I say, showing him the flint knife.
He goes on staring. I might just as well be speaking English, or Sanskrit.
“I’m not going to do it,” I tell him. “That’s the first thing you ought to know. I’ve never killed anyone before and I’m not going to begin with a complete stranger. Okay? Is that understood?”
He says something now. His voice is soft and indistinct, but I can tell that he’s speaking some entirely other language.
“I can’t understand what you’re telling me,” I say, “and you don’t understand me. So we’re even.”
I take a couple of steps toward him. The blade is still in my hand. He doesn’t move. I see now that he’s got no weapons and even though he’s powerfully built and could probably rip my arms off in two seconds, I’d be able to put the blade into him first. I point to the north, away from the village, and make a broad sweeping gesture. “You’d be wise to head off that way,” I say, speaking very slowly and loudly, as if that would matter. “Get yourself out of the neighborhood. They’ll kill you otherwise. You understand? Capisce? Verstehen Sie? Go. Scat. Scram. I won’t kill you, but they will.”
I gesture some more, vociferously pantomiming his route to the north. He looks at me. He looks at the knife. His enormous cavernous nostrils widen and flicker. For a moment I think I’ve misread him in the most idiotically naive way, that he’s been simply biding his time getting ready to jump me as soon as I stop making speeches.
Then he pulls a chunk of meat from the bird he’s been roasting, and offers it to me.
“I come here to kill you, and you give me lunch?”
He holds it out. A bribe? Begging for his life?
“I can’t,” I say. “I came here to kill you. Look, I’m just going to turn around and go back, all right? If anybody asks, I never saw you.” He waves the meat at me and I begin to salivate as though it’s pheasant under glass. But no, no, I can’t take his lunch. I point to him, and again to the north, and once more indicate that he ought not to let the sun set on him in this town. Then I turn and start to walk away, wondering if this is the moment when he’ll leap up and spring on me from behind and choke the life out of me.
I take five steps, ten, and then I hear him moving behind me.
So this is it. We really are going to fight.
I turn, my knife at the ready. He looks down at it sadly. He’s standing there with the piece of meat still in his hand, coming after me to give it to me anyway.
“Jesus,” I say. “You’re just lonely.”
He says something in that soft blurred language of his and holds out the meat. I take it and bolt it down fast, even though it’s only half cooked—dumb Neanderthal!—and I almost gag. He smiles. I don’t care what he looks like, if he smiles and shares his food then he’s human by me. I smile too. Zeus is going to murder me. We sit down together and watch the other ptarmigan cook, and when it’s ready we share it, neither of us saying a word. He has trouble getting a wing off, and I hand him my knife, which he uses in a clumsy way and hands back to me.
After lunch I get up and say, “I’m going back now. I wish to hell you’d head off to the hills before they catch you.”
And I turn, and go.
And he follows me like a lost dog who has just adopted a new owner.
So I bring him back to the village with me. There’s simply no way to get rid of him short of physically attacking him, and I’m not going to do that. As we emerge from the forest a sickening wave of fear sweeps over me. I think at first it’s the roast ptarmigan trying to come back up, but no, it’s downright terror, because the Scavenger is obviously planning to stick with me right to the end, and the end is not going to be good. I can see Zeus’ blazing eyes, his furious scowl. The thwarted Ice Age chieftain in a storm of wrath. Since I didn’t do the job, they will. They’ll kill him and maybe they’ll kill me too, since I’ve revealed myself to be a dangerous moron who will bring home the very enemy he was sent out to eliminate.
“This is dumb,” I tell the Neanderthal. “You shouldn’t be doing this.”
He smiles again. You don’t understand shit, do you, fellow?
We are past the garbage dump now, past the butchering area. B.J. and his crew are at work on the new house. B.J. looks up when he sees me and his eyes are bright with surprise.
He nudges Marty and Marty nudges Paul, and Paul taps Danny on the shoulder. They point to me and to the Neanderthal. They look at each other. They open their mouths but they don’t say anything. They whisper, they shake their heads. They back off a little, and circle around us, gaping, staring.
Christ. Here it comes.
I can imagine what they’re thinking. They’re thinking that I have really screwed up. That I’ve brought a ghost home for dinner. Or else an enemy that I was supposed to kill. They’re thinking that I’m an absolute lunatic, that I’m an idiot, and now they’ve got to do the dirty work that I was too dumb to do. And I wonder if I’ll try to defend the Neanderthal against them, and what it’ll be like if I do. What am I going to do, take them all on at once? And go down swinging as my four sweet buddies close in on me and flatten me into the permafrost? I will. If they force me to it, by God I will. I’ll go for their guts with Marty’s long stone blade if they try anything on the Neanderthal, or on me.
I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to think about any of this.
Then Marty points and claps his hands and jumps about three feet in the air.
“Hey!” he yells. “Look at that! He brought the ghost back with him!”
And then they move in on me, just like that, the four of them, swarming all around me, pressing close, pummelling hard. There’s no room to use the knife. They come on too fast. I do what I can with elbows, knees, even teeth. But they pound me from every side, open fists against my ribs, sides of hands crashing against the meat of my back. The breath goes from me and I come close to toppling as pain breaks out all over me at once. I need all of my strength, and then some, to keep from going down under their onslaught, and I think, this is a dumb way to die, beaten to death by a bunch of berserk cave men in 20,000 B.C.
But after the first few wild moments things become a bit quieter and I get myself together and manage to push them back from me a little way, and I land a good one that sends Paul reeling backward with blood spouting from his lip, and I whirl toward B.J. and start to take him out, figuring I’ll deal with Marty on the rebound. And then I realize that they aren’t really fighting with me any more, and in fact that they never were.
It dawns on me that they were smiling and laughing as they worked me over, that their eyes were full of laughter and love, that if they had t
ruly wanted to work me over it would have taken the four of them about seven and a half seconds to do it.
They’re just having fun. They’re playing with me in a jolly roughhouse way.
They step back from me. We all stand there quietly for a moment, breathing hard, rubbing our cuts and bruises. The thought of throwing up crosses my mind and I push it away.
“You brought the ghost back,” Marty says again.
“Not a ghost,” I say. “He’s real.”
“Not a ghost?”
“Not a ghost, no. He’s live. He followed me back here.”
“Can you believe it?” B.J. cries. “Live! Followed him back here! Just came marching right in here with him!” He turns to Paul. His eyes are gleaming and for a second I think they’re going to jump me all over again. If they do I don’t think I’m going to be able to deal with it. But he says simply, “This has to be a song by tonight. This is something special.”
“I’m going to get the chief,” says Danny, and runs off.
“Look, I’m sorry,” I say. “I know what the chief wanted. I just couldn’t do it.”
“Do what?” B.J. asks. “What are you talking about?” says Paul.
“Kill him,” I say. “He was just sitting there by his fire, roasting a couple of birds, and he offered me a chunk, and—”
“Kill him?” B.J. says. “You were going to kill him?”
“Wasn’t that what I was supposed—”
He goggles at me and starts to answer, but just then Zeus comes running up, and pretty much everyone else in the tribe, the women and the kids too, and they sweep up around us like the tide. Cheering, yelling, dancing, pummelling me in that cheerful bonesmashing way of theirs, laughing, shouting. Forming a ring around the Scavenger Man and throwing their hands in the air. It’s a jubilee. Even Zeus is grinning. Marty begins to sing and Paul gets going on the drum. And Zeus comes over to me and embraces me like the big old bear that he is.
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