by John Darnton
“It sounds close to ESP,” said Susan. “For that matter, what’s the difference between reading someone’s mind and actually seeing what that person is seeing, especially when the phenomenon leaps over the species barrier? If both species thought in the same way, maybe they could read our thoughts. As it is, they can only see what we see.”
“I think you’re right,” said Kellicut.
“And do you believe that they’ve failed to develop language because they don’t need language?” Matt asked.
“Failed?”
“Okay, forget failed. That they haven’t developed language because they don’t need language?”
“Precisely. Why crawl when you can walk?”
“So perhaps the evolutionary paleontologists who believe in the linguistic explanation are correct—that the great divide occurred because we acquired language. In the beginning was the word.”
“With one important difference. Their theory is based upon the assumption that Homo sapiens went on toward fuller development, that language was an advantage rather than a hindrance. Whereas here we can see that the opposite is true.”
“The opposite?”
“Don’t you get it?” Kellicut was annoyed again. “Here communication occurs in its purest form. The individual is submerged in the group. The world is complete, so there is little need to push ahead to something else. Why strive for progress when change can only mean regression?”
“That doesn’t sound very Darwinian to me,” said Matt.
“Darwin has nothing to do with it. Survival of the fittest was a brilliant concept, but it doesn’t admit any moral or ethical dimension. It’s the world as a giant, ever-changing, malevolent obstacle course. It’s history written after Genesis.”
“And what we have here is before Genesis?” asked Matt.
“Absolutely. If you can’t understand that, God help you. Don’t you see that you are surrounded by innocent, naive, trusting beings? You have found Eden itself, the great garden of paradise, before Adam and Eve’s transgression. It’s all part of nature’s grand design, repeating over and over.”
“Eden?” Matt questioned.
“Yes, Eden. In every way.”
“Every way? Does that mean we can expect to find God here?”
“Most surely. I have. And not only that.”
“What else?”
“You will find Satan too. And he is prepared to turn into a snake.”
“Who is Satan?”
“It’s not for me to say. I may be wrong.” It occurred to Matt, and he realized that the suspicion had been creeping up on him for some time, that Kellicut might be crazy. He looked over at Susan, who appeared enthralled. Why didn’t she see it?
Kellicut had retreated into obfuscation. Matt thought back to the chase through the caves only a few days ago. Suddenly he remembered Van warning them to close their eyes when they were hiding in the cutaway, the urgency in his voice. Of course! Van knew about their powers. He knew they could see through another’s eyes. He had known all along. The realization made him angry. “Tell me,” he said. “Did you know anything about this before you came here?”
“Not a bit.”
Matt believed him. “And the killer Neanderthals that we ran into, where do they fit in?”
“I can’t say. I’ve never seen them, though of course I know they come down here from time to time on raids. Susan told me about your experience. I’m sorry about Sharafidin; he was a great help to me. And I heard about the death of your friend. Much of what I know has been conjecture. I have a theory that I’m working on, but it’s premature to divulge it.”
Matt and Susan knew better than to press him. Kellicut was not the type to give way once he dug in his heels.
“What I’d like to know,” said Matt, “is why they’re so brutal. They killed Rudy without a moment’s hesitation.”
“I should think the answer’s obvious,” said Kellicut.
“What is it?”
“They hate us.”
“Hate us? Why?”
“Because we beat them. We nearly exterminated them—nearly but not quite. The worst thing to do to a mortal enemy is almost kill him.”
That evening Susan tried an experiment. Just before dusk she slipped off alone and skirted the edge of the village, making her way quietly, brushing past branches that hung low across the path. It was not fear that made her move so stealthily; already she had adapted to the valley and was conscious of being drawn to its tranquil rhythms, especially at the day’s end. She moved noiselessly because she didn’t want to be deterred.
She heard a rustling in the bushes of some small animal close to her feet. It stopped but when she passed it started up again, scurrying away. She paused at a fork, got her bearings, and took a path to the left where the woods grew thicker. She was headed toward a grove of birch trees near a stream, which she knew was frequented by Leviticus.
She thought for a fleeting moment about the outside world, the bustle and jangle that had been her life. That used to be reality. This was timelessness, weightlessness. Could the mind and body move from one world to another just like that? She realized with a pang how much she missed what she had left behind, while at the same time on a different level how ready she was to jettison it. Was there no center to her at all?
As she came around a bend to the stream, she saw Leviticus on the opposite bank, arms bent at his sides like a cat, drinking deeply from the water. Ripples moved out in gentle concentric circles from his chin. The top of his head, thick and bushy black, was arched upward, and from beneath his eyebrows he was watching her. The scar on his cheek glistened. She sat down on the bank across from him three feet away.
He raised his head and stared at her. She waited. In this position his shoulder muscles were flexed and enormous. He’s like a panther, she thought, lithe and powerful. She looked at his forehead. There was the beetle brow, standing out starkly against the other features. It was impossible to ignore this ridge of bone, pale and solid, a huge hump where the skin should be smooth. Combined with the receding chin and flattened skull, it pulled the face forward like some sort of distorted reflection in a bottle, an embryo behind glass. It made her shiver involuntarily, like that quick shudder when falling off to sleep. Is there something in us that despises another species because it is so close, because the minor variances loom as unbearable deformations? she wondered. Is it that we are so afraid of deviations in ourselves? Yet the eyes were perfect and clear and human. She saw that his irises were hazel and his whites were webbed with tiny red blood lines. She had an impulse to reach over and touch his brow; would it be hard or would it yield? Repulsion or attraction—they merged into one.
In the dark water below him, she could make out Leviticus’s reflection. The view from below was the same as when he had carried her down the mountain. He stopped drinking and stared back. She held her breath, and then she began to feel what she had come for. It started somewhere on the periphery of her mind like a shadow, then gathered force surprisingly quickly and became dense. She sat unmoving and let it wash through her. It grew and expanded until a warmth like melting wax seemed to fill her skull and move down the top of her spinal column. She was transfixed. Her mind was soaring; it skipped above the treetops and fled into the clouds; then, like a feather, it floated down slowly until it came to rest. For a moment they locked eyes and held each other in a stare; then Leviticus turned away and moved off into the bushes behind him without a backward glance.
Susan sat rooted to the spot for a long time, savoring the afterglow. It was getting dark, she realized abruptly. She rose, languidly undid the buttons of her khaki blouse, stepped out of her pants and her panties, and slipped slowly into the darkening water.
Resnick did not like to go into the cell himself, because of both the smell and a sense of anxiety that had unaccountably been getting stronger. By now the odor was truly overpowering. It was hard to tell what caused it. Dried-up feces and flatulation due to an alien diet had been
his first guess, sweat glands his second, exema his third. They had tried everything, including dousing the creature with shampoo and hosing it down, back when it could stand, but nothing had helped and finally they gave up. When the smell penetrated upstairs, they burned incense. When the keepers went into its cell they wore gauze mouth and nose masks smeared with globs of Vicks VapoRub.
There was another reason that Resnick didn’t care to approach the creature, but he didn’t admit it to anyone; it seemed too weird, the way he got those headaches. Best to keep something like that to himself. It could even be his own mind playing tricks, some psychosomatic problem.
In his student days decades ago, he had been Van Steed’s eager lab assistant. That was back when Van was cutting a wide swath through the behavioral sciences department at Chicago. Even Harry Harlow at nearby Wisconsin was forced to sit up and take notice of the brilliant graduate student and, to a lesser degree, the student’s helper. Van was a behaviorist back then, before he took up this far-out psycholingual business. He was ingenious and on top of the latest research, always reading papers in journals no one else had even heard of. Resnick had a memory flash: Van sitting in the basement beer hall and explaining, with more than a hint of condescension, the latest theory on DNA bonding.
Van was a bit strange even back then. Once Resnick opened the lab door and found him sitting at a small white table mounting rat brains on slides. The rats, operated upon and run through experiments to test perception, had been “sacrificed,” as the scientific term had it. Their limp white bodies with pink tails and split-open braincases lay in a heap on newspaper on the floor underneath a banana skin. Van was still chewing the banana as he sliced their brains with the ennui of a deli-counter worker cutting ham.
From rats, Van and Resnick moved on to rhesus monkeys. These operations were much more complicated and took hours to perform. Standing there in the miniature operating room where even the anesthetizing mask was doll size, Resnick used to pretend that they were doctors, performing cutting-edge neurosurgery on an accident victim, and handed over the sterilized instruments solemnly. In truth the operations were advanced—Van was moving into new regions of the brain that were largely uncharted—except that he wasn’t trying to repair brain tissue but to destroy it. The method was crude: Van burned lesions, with a needle connected to a tube of liquid nitrogen, and he removed the septal region. Once recovered, the monkey would fly into an automatic rage response at the slightest stimulus, so that just walking past a row of the caged animals, each with a metal plug sticking out of its head, would set them bouncing around like lunatics. When Van removed the amygdala, the monkey turned placid and would smear its feces on the walls of its cage like a kindergartner finger-painting. When he removed sections of the hypothalamus, the mysterious floor of the third ventricle that is thought to be the core of inner functioning, the monkey would sit phlegmatically, emptied of all affect and personality. Once Van planted an electrode in the pleasure center and rigged up an apparatus so the monkey was self-stimulating. He left the animal alone until it died of exhaustion. “Sixty-one hours,” he remarked as he checked the timer afterward. “Not a bad way to go.”
Van had secured this job for Resnick, and Resnick was grateful. But he didn’t feel that Van had the right to come in here at all hours, the way he did when the creature was first captured. Van had been frustrated at the lack of results from the experiments and he was almost brutal in the way he handled the creature and attached it to the EEG and other machines that the creature detested. Resnick was glad Van hadn’t been around for months.
As he reached over for his coffee mug, Resnick caught a blur of movement on the top left monitor. That would be Grady or Allen moving in close to the bars. It was Allen; his handlebar mustache over the mouth mask could be seen easily on the snowy black-and-white screen.
Allen was wearing dark glasses—like the ones Van used to wear—and that was a mistake; it seemed to upset the creature. He was carrying the extra belts, three of them, each two inches thick. Now Grady came into view and the creature began that awful moaning sound. Keys jangled as they unlocked the cell door. Resnick looked into his mug and decided he needed a refill, so he left the room. He wasn’t really supposed to do so—the rules called for round-the-clock observation—but two keepers were down there. The third was activating the force feeder and would join them in a minute. It was not, he had to admit, a pleasant sight, even on a monitor.
Resnick busied himself in the kitchen and took his time making the coffee, humming to himself loudly. When he walked back into the control room, the feeding was over. Was it his imagination, or were there bits of food on the cell wall? The keepers were talking. “Fucker pissed all over me,” said Grady. Allen laughed. Resnick saw the cell door swing shut and heard the loud clang interrupt the soft moaning. On the screen a huddled object rocked slowly.
Then suddenly, as before, Resnick felt a massive pain inside his head, beginning far back in his temporal lobes and then moving forward and spreading out like lava. It was far worse than any migraine he had ever experienced. He reached for the giant-sized bottle, pulled out four aspirins, and swilled them down with his coffee.
He sometimes wondered exactly what Van had been after during his visits to the basement cell. It seemed that only since then had the creature been so hard to handle.
16
Matt and Blue-Eyes circled each other in the pit, each looking for an advantage. Blue-Eyes—named after Sinatra because he liked to vocalize—was not much of a wrestler, but he was game.
In fact none of the hominids were good wrestlers, despite their superior strength. It was a Martial sport, and concepts such as domination, victory, and loss had no place in their mental universe. They did appreciate a hard fall to the ground, but whether they viewed it as funny or not was difficult to tell, since they did not laugh but seemed instead to become excited. Their humor, such as it was, was unfathomable to Matt and Susan. Nothing based upon trickery, cunning, or deceit—games involving substitution of one object for another—drew any response other than blank incomprehension. But certain activities were clearly enjoyable. The children chased each other a lot, squealing in a strident, loud-pitched way, though they did not end by tackling one another. Susan tried to teach them tag but it was a failure because the notion of being “it” was beyond their grasp.
Lines and boundaries were also alien to them. Matt theorized that the concept of an arbitrary end to space must somehow be bound up with egocentrism. If your psychic powers allow your world to grow beyond the horizon and then shrink back within an eye blink, how is it possible to comprehend a limit? But he was soon to discover that in one critical area—death—the delineation was starkly made.
As a practical matter Matt found that it made no sense to try to mark out the boundaries of a wrestling ring. But near the village center he discovered a large depression in the ground, which he dubbed “the pit,” and it served the purpose as he tried to teach them the sport. The contestants usually stayed inside, though nothing could stop them from suddenly plopping down in the middle of a match whenever the notion struck them.
Matt enjoyed the physical contact. He recalled the jolt he had received the day he took Longface’s hand. But he could not say the promise of this touch had been fulfilled. Though they had been living in the valley for days now, neither he nor Susan had achieved a breakthrough in communication with the hominids.
For their part, the hominids seemed to have lost interest in Matt and Susan. While they did not in any way feel unwelcome, they had become to a certain degree unremarkable—in a sense invisible. “It doesn’t bother me,” Matt joked to Susan one night. “I can take rejection. I’ve lived in England.” But the sense of solitude was growing oppressive. They had only each other—and to a lesser degree Kellicut, who was often away, inside the cavern by the waterfall receiving what he called “spiritual instruction.” When he was with them his presence created problems. Matt felt that Kell
icut acted as if part of his mind had evaporated; Susan believed his mind had entered a higher plane. Furthermore, he concentrated all his energy and approval on Susan and seemed increasingly hostile toward Matt.
“You still look up to him, don’t you?” Matt had said to her once.
“Of course,” was all she said.
Now, as Matt and Blue-Eyes circled around in the dirt like two ends of a compass arrow, Matt began to bob and weave, a prelude to the feints and dodges that had worked so well before. Blue-Eyes moved in a clumsy sidestep with his arms outstretched, looking like a hopeless dancer. Matt lunged to the right toward his opponent’s left leg. Blue-Eyes panicked and bolted to his right, off balance, tottering and almost falling without Matt even touching him. Then he righted himself and the circling began once more.
Blue-Eyes was young. At first Matt had found it hard to judge their ages. The brow bones affected their pattern of wrinkles, and unless there were clear signs of old age like white hair or sagging breasts, most men and women looked about the same once they reached full stature. But gradually he was able to pick up clues. Strength and sprightliness of step were among them, and by those two criteria, Blue-Eyes must have been in his early twenties. Looking at his opponent’s stout biceps and barrel chest, Matt thought, He could crush me to death if he wanted to.
Suddenly Blue-Eyes lowered his head and charged for Matt’s right leg. Matt spun back halfway, shifting his weight abruptly, leaving his left leg exposed, and the next thing he knew, Blue-Eyes darted sideways in mid-course, grabbed his left leg, and spun him on his back. He raised Matt up with both arms above his head, as easily as lifting a branch, and tossed him a good eight feet. Matt landed with a thud. He was so surprised it took him a while to realize he had landed right on his bruise. Blue-Eyes sat on the edge of the pit, not at all winded. Watching from a distance, Susan laughed so hard she had to sit down. Kellicut, sitting some distance away in the lotus position, stared into space.