Uneasy Relations

by Aaron Elkins

  Gideon’s story took them through their main course—they both had had the smoked salmon fettuccine—at the Bella Italia on Front Street, and Julie nodded as he finished.

  “Okay, thanks. I think I get the picture now.”

  “You managed to stay awake the whole time?”

  “Oh, there may have been a teeny-weeny lapse or two, right around the mitochondrial DNA part, but I managed to get most of it.”

  Their waiter, Bruce, finished clearing away their dinner plates and offered them a dessert menu.

  “Just a latte for me,” Julie said, fending it off.

  “And I’ll have an espresso,” said Gideon.

  Bruce feigned shock. “No postre? But our chef della pasticceria will be grossly offended. I fear to tell him.” Bruce had served them many a fine meal and had earned the right to talk with them like this.

  “Oh, in that case . . . ,” said Julie, snatching back the menu and poring over it. “Gideon, will we be able to get zabaglione in Gibraltar?”

  “I doubt it. It’s pretty British there, from what I hear. Pasties, gateaux, trifle, yes. Probably Spanish and Moroccan food too, I’d guess. Zabaglione? Don’t count on it.”

  “Well, then, you’d better have it here,” Bruce said reasonably.

  Gideon handed back the dessert menu. “Makes sense to me.”

  THREE

  "IT’S so tiny,” Julie said disappointedly, her face pressed to the window of seat 17A.

  As indeed it was. They were nearing the end of their three-hour flight from London, and from the air Gibraltar was a bit of a let-down, an insignificant little worm of a peninsula—shaped remarkably like a human vermiform appendix, Gideon thought—sticking improbably out into the Mediterranean from the vast, flat mainland of Andalusian Spain. They could easily see the whole of it from their seats over the wing as the Boeing 747 banked out over the Strait: the humped mass of the famed Rock itself, surrounded by its skirt of flat, coastal plain, with almost all of its population of thirty thousand crowded into the narrow, dense warren of streets at the base of its western flank.

  “It is, isn’t it?” Gideon agreed. “I imagine it’ll look more impressive when we’re down there looking up at it.”

  “Oh, it will, it will, I can assure you of that.” The affable, self-possessed voice, borne on a faint waft of Irish whiskey, came from 18B in the row behind them. “And more impressive still when you’re standing on top of the Rock looking down over the edge.”

  The voice was that of Professor Emeritus Adrian Vanderwater, who had leaned forward to make himself heard, unconcerned with not having been invited, and unapologetic for having been eavesdropping. Vanderwater, the renowned archaeologist who had directed the Europa Point dig five years earlier, was of the opinion that such niceties were neither here nor there, at least inasmuch as they applied to him. He was, after all, Adrian Vanderwater. Who could be other than pleased to have him participate in a conversation?

  As a brilliant young graduate student at the University of Michigan forty years before, he had been anointed the next generation’s great paleoarchaeologist, and many scholars in the field—like anyone else, he had his detractors—would have agreed that the prediction had come to pass. For the last several decades he had been one of the two or three most eminent men in the discipline, an admirably exacting field-worker, and teacher of half the current crop of European Neolithic archaeologists.

  The whiskey breath that hung about him—and it was still well before noon—came as no surprise. It was as inextricably attached to him as his voice. In a leather-clad, stainless-steel flask in his attaché case, Gideon knew, was a pint of Tullamore Dew Irish whiskey, the day’s (but not the evening’s) supply. Gideon had never seen him drunk, nor heard tales of binges from others (and academics are eager tale-tellers), but he’d never seen him wholly sober either. He drank from the time he got up—Gideon had been at a seven A.M. conference breakfast with him once, and the flask was already in use, spicing up his coffee—until he went to bed. But he did it only a very little at a time, just a few drops, so that there was always alcohol in his system, but never enough to make him even close to tipsy. Whether his typical good humor was whiskey-induced there was no way of knowing, since he was never without the flask.

  Round, soft, and rosy, he was built more like an infant than a man of seventy. His head was large for his body, his arms and legs stubby, and his hands small and fat, with puffy, dimpled wrists. A belly like an overinflated beach ball; a globular forehead; pink, smooth, bulgy cheeks; a gurgling, throaty sort of chuckle always at the ready. One of Gideon’s associates (not a fan of Vanderwater’s) referred to him as Big Baby. “Did you know Big Baby’s getting the Childe award this year?” “Did you hear Big Baby’s coming out with another damn book?”

  “But you’re correct,” Big Baby went on cheerfully enough. “It is astonishingly small, considering its history. A mere two and a half square miles, but what a two and a half square miles! In classical times, you know, the Rock was one of the Twin Pillars of Hercules. The Phoenicians knew it as Calpe. The Carthaginians came here, and the Romans. The Vandals swept ruthlessly into it on their southward rampage through the Roman Empire, and then the Visigoths.”

  Gideon couldn’t help smiling. Retired for two years from his position at the University of California, Vanderwater couldn’t stop being a professor. He could—and did—slip into a full-scale, seemingly well-prepared lecture at the drop of a hat. For a man recognized as one of the great figures of archaeology, recipient of almost every award and honor the field had to give, he had an inextinguishable need to demonstrate that he knew more about anything than anyone else, whatever the subject might happen to be. He did it engagingly enough, and with genuine erudition, but after a while it could get on one’s nerves, not least because he was just about always right.

  “From the other direction,” Vanderwater continued, “it was at the southernmost tip of Gibraltar—right down there, Europa Point, in fact—can you see where that lighthouse is?—that Tarik ibn Zeyad set foot in 711 to begin the long Moorish domination of Iberia. Yes, right there.”

  He was close to purring as his plummy voice caressed the words Europa Point, and with good reason. His appointment five years earlier as director of the Europa Point dig, and the subsequent discovery, under his supervision, of the First Family, had provided the brightest jewel in the crown of his reputation. Late in his career, on the verge of retirement and an inevitable drift into relative inconsequence, he had suddenly become, in the eyes of his peers, the acknowledged authority on the most sensational find of the decade. (Outside the narrow, arcane circle of academe, of course, in the less-demanding world of popular culture, it was Ivan Gunderson who enjoyed that position.) Since the find, Vanderwater had been the sole or senior author of a dozen monographs and two well-received scholarly books, all dealing with the social and cultural implications of the First Family and Gibraltar Boy, and their many ramifications. Even now, he was rumored to be working on a third.

  “The name Gibraltar, as you may know, is a corruption of the Arabic Jebel Tarik, or ‘Jebel’s Mountain.’ And Jebel’s Mountain it remained until 1462, when the Arabs were driven out by Spain, which held the land for more than two centuries, until Britain took it in 1704.”

  “Yes,” Gideon said. “They—”

  “This they accomplished, during the War of Spanish Succession, by means of an Anglo-Dutch fleet under the command of Admiral George Rooke, and the British have held it ever since, the much-fortified Rock proving an impregnable military outpost of Empire— ‘safe as the Rock of Gibraltar’ has been a catch phrase since the nineteenth century, you know—through the long years of the Great Siege, the Napoleonic Wars, and the terrible world conflicts of the twentieth century.”

  Julie, who had been listening courteously until now, her head cocked, glanced at Gideon with her eyebrows raised, her forehead creased. “Is he reading, or what?” she whispered.

  Gideon suppressed his laugh. “I’ve
never been able to figure out how he does that.”

  Still, it was, as always, an impressive performance. Not an uh, not an um, not a pause. Not for the first time he wondered if Vanderwater didn’t prepare these sermons ahead of time, knowing he’d have the chance to use them at some point.

  The older man had leaned back in his seat now, and was orating, rather than merely lecturing, supremely confident that his seatmate, and anyone else within earshot, would be appreciative of the edification provided.

  “But as the technology of warfare changed, you see, and this great rock that had stood guard over the entrance to the Mediterranean for so many centuries lost its value and sank into obscurity, a staunchly British outpost improbably tacked onto the southern extremity of Spain and notable, if it was notable at all, for the never-ending squabbles between Spain and Great Britain over access, duties, governance—”

  “Folks,” said the pilot’s voice, “you’re not going to believe this, but a furniture lorry has broken down on the runway, so we’re going to be circling for a while to permit them to clean up and get it out of there. Shouldn’t be long.”

  Frowning, Julie turned to Gideon. “What is a furniture van doing in the middle of the runway?”

  “That’s a curious aspect of the Gibraltar airport,” Vanderwater answered for him. “You see—”

  But the pilot, with a superior audio system, overrode him. “Now, folks, I know what you’re thinking: ‘What is a furniture lorry doing in the middle of an airport runway in the first place?’ Well, among the many unique aspects of Gib is the fact that it has the only international airport you’re likely to see whose runway is crossed by the main road into town. The only road into town, actually. As you’ll see as we circle past it, the runway extends crosswise across the entire isthmus and then some way out into the bay, so there’s no way for vehicles to get around it. They all have to drive over it. Sorry about the delay, but just settle back for a little longer and enjoy your VIP aerial tour of Gibraltar, courtesy of British Airways.”

  “It’s hardly the only thing about the Gibraltar airport that’s unique,” came from 18B. “It’s closer to the city it serves than any other international airport in the world. A lot of people just walk into town from it . . .”

  “Really,” said Julie, who was perhaps becoming just a little lectured-out. “That’s—”

  “A five-hundred-yard stroll, and you’re at Casemates Square in the town center. An extremely interesting history there, by the way . . .”

  Julie quietly sighed, closed her eyes, and settled back.

  For the next half hour they circled, Vanderwater eventually running out of things on which to elucidate (not something that happened every day) and Julie running out of attention span, not in that order.

  “Gideon,” she said quietly, when there had been a welcome silence from behind them for a few minutes, followed by what sounded suspiciously like a soft, tranquil snore, “I wanted to ask you something about this whole mixing-theory thing.”

  “Ha. I knew you weren’t really awake at the Bella Italia. You were faking it.”

  “No, I was paying strict attention. This is something you didn’t talk about. I get the impression that you don’t really buy into the admixture-theory idea.”

  “Oh, it’s not that I don’t buy into it. Humans and Neanderthals coexisted in the same area for several thousand years, after all, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the occasional particularly cute human babe caught the eye of some horny Neanderthal caveman, or vice versa. Genetically, there really doesn’t seem to be that much difference between us. But I’m not about to jump on the bandwagon and declare it to one and all as Revealed Truth. I mean, there’s not that much difference between us and chimps either, but I haven’t heard of any hot romances lately, have you? Not that I’m definitively on the other side either. There are still plenty of uncertainties.”

  “But you’re the one who did that analysis on the skeletons.”

  “Well, one of the team, yes. Don’t forget, there were Lyle and Harvey too.”

  “Don’t be modest. You were the senior author of the paper. And if the child is a hybrid between the humans and—”

  “That’s the issue, Julie. We never used the term hybrid. We just described what we found.”

  “You weaseled, in other words.”

  “Precisely.” He laughed. “Well, no, not that I haven’t been known to weasel when the situation demanded it, but in this case the data just didn’t warrant anything more conclusive See, most of the differences between Neanderthal and human skeletons are really quantitative, not qualitative. Oh, there are some specific, pretty minor distinctions—Neanderthal jawbones have this space behind their molars, the retromolar gap, that we don’t have, and there’s a difference in the shape of the mandibular foramen—but essentially, we’re talking about matters of scale.”

  “The Neanderthals were bigger? More rugged?”

  “Not bigger overall, no. They did have thicker bones, bigger brow ridges, bigger occipital buns; but we have bigger chins, bigger foreheads. And there are differences in the relative proportions of long-bone lengths. It’s that kind of thing. So, sure, we all can agree that such and such an adult skeleton is Neanderthal, and another one is human, but when it comes to somebody like the First Kid, Gibraltar Boy, he’s still a child; you’re dealing with traits that haven’t yet reached their adult form. He looks a little like both. So, yes, he might be a hybrid, or maybe you’re simply looking at a Neanderthal that just happened to have a smaller brow ridge than his friends. Or maybe you’re looking at a human child who had a receding chin.”

  “Well, what do you think? I mean, you personally, not professionally? ”

  “I honestly don’t know. I certainly wouldn’t be bowled over if he is a hybrid. I also wouldn’t be bowled over if he isn’t. Could be human. Could also be Neanderthal.”

  “Oh, that’s helpful.”

  “Sorry, it’s the best I can do. The thing is, it’s not as if we have thousands of Neanderthal remains to look at and compare. At most there are only a few hundred in the entire world, and most of those are just fragments, and very few are children, so we’re still learning what their traits were. Anyway, the truth is, I was more excited about the pathology on the female’s skeleton. That was something you could hang your hat on. The earliest known case of ankylosing spondylitis in a human being. Until Gibraltar Woman, the first case we knew about was from the Egyptian Neolithic, a good fifteen thousand years later!”

  “I remember how excited about that you were.” She smiled. “I can see how excited you are about it now. And wasn’t there some graduate student somewhere who was going to do her dissertation on it?”

  “Yes, from Cal, I think. She contacted me a year or so after Europa Point. She was pretty sure she’d run across another case of it from about the same time period, at some little site in Portugal, or was it Spain? Spain, I think. She thought there might be a dissertation topic there, on genetic anomalies among early modern humans.”

  “And was there?”

  “I don’t know. She e-mailed me a couple of times with questions and then I never heard from her again. Which probably means there wasn’t. Maybe the case she’d come across wasn’t ankylosing spondylitis after all; maybe it was just advanced arthritis and she hadn’t been able to tell the difference on her own. She probably found something else to work on.”

  “Well, the runway’s clear, folks,” the captain announced. “We’re on our way in.”

  There was scattered applause, and then, after a thoughtful pause, Julie said, “Gideon, back to the hybrid issue, what about those specific traits you mentioned? That space behind the molars, that mandibular foramen thing? Did Gibraltar Boy have them or didn’t he?”

  “Moot point. The jawbone’s missing. They’re both partial skeletons, remember, and pretty banged up at that.”

  “Okay, what about DNA? Wouldn’t that tell if he was human, or Neanderthal, or a mix?”

  “No DNA.
It’s always pretty iffy with things that old. In this case the bones have lost too much collagen for a reliable test.”

  “So I guess we’ll never know for sure.”

  “I guess we won’t.” He smiled. “I can live with it. There are more important things to worry about.”

  FOUR

  “THE Rock itself,” said the donnish-looking, donnish-sounding gentleman to his huddled audience of four men and three women, “on the very crest of which we now stand, is, as most of you already know, not really a ‘rock’ in the sense of a single giant monolith, but a narrow, limestone spine running north-south for approximately, ah, mmm, three miles. The famous massive, perpendicular aspect that we know from photographs is simply its northern terminus. Now, to the west, behind us, it slopes less precipitously down to Gibraltar town, which you can see spread out approximately thirteen hundred feet below us—or rather four hundred meters, as the lords of Brussels now decree that I must say, ah-ha-ha.”

  Donnish he might be, but in fact he was the only member of the group, other than Julie Oliver, who was not a teacher. Rowley G. Boyd, MA (Oxon), Gideon’s soon-to-be fellow author in Javelin’s Frontiers of Science series, was the director of the Gibraltar Museum of Archaeology and Geology. It was the museum that had arranged this visit to the Rock (including a complimentary three-course lunch) for this group of five scholars and two spouses who had arrived a day early for the Paleoanthropological Society conference, so as to be able to participate in this evening’s symposium for Ivan Gunderson. Rowley had thought that the distinguished assemblage would appreciate a recreational outing to the top of Gibraltar’s celebrated monolith, even though several had been there before. Part of the treat was to have been the breathtaking ride up by cable car, but they’d had to drive up in a stuffy, uncomfortable taxi van instead because the cable was shut down today on account of the strong winds at the top.