Orphan of Creation

by Roger MacBride Allen

  Suddenly moving with great care and deliberation, she set down the box, most gently, on the exact center of his desk blotter, and stepped back to stand in front of his desk, like a student waiting for the teacher to examine her science project.

  “Dr. Marchando, what the devil is the—” But Dr. Jeffery Grossington stopped himself in mid-outburst and finally took a good hard look at Barbara. She was flushed, excited, and her dark brown face was alight, exhilarated. Her eyes gleamed, her hair was disheveled, her makeup was blurred and smeared. Her clothes, which she normally kept up so carefully, were wrinkled, mussed-up, and looked as if they had been slept in for a day or two. All of which was totally out of character for the prim, careful Dr. Marchando.

  “Well, open it, Dr. Grossington,” she said. “Aren’t you going to open it?” she asked breathlessly. “I’ve been travelling all last night and the whole day before—bus, train, plane, taxi—to get it to you. Open it!”

  He looked at her curiously, and his big, callused, well-manicured hands moved involuntarily toward the cord that held the lid of the box on. He hesitated, much unnerved, and looked hard at the hatbox, as if he feared it might contain a bomb. He looked again to Barbara. He had a nasty feeling things in his world were about to turn upside down. “Barbara, what’s in here?”

  She grinned, almost wild-eyed, and leaned over the desk, her whole face shining with enthusiasm. “The end, Jeffery, the goal,” she said, daring to use his first name. “The end of so many searches. That’s what’s in there. Maybe the collapse of every existing theory of human evolution. Open it.”

  Grossington swallowed hard and undid the cord. He lifted the worn black-lacquer top off the octagonal box and set it aside. There was a layer of shredded bits of foam rubber hiding the contents proper. Grossington removed the bits of padding carefully, one by one. Years of field work had made slow and careful work a matter of reflex action for him. He wanted to make sure there was no danger of his damaging the whatever-it-was by moving too fast.

  Just as Barbara had done two days before, he gradually uncovered the prize. As he dug it out from under the bits of padding, he saw more and more details of what it was, and his years of practice told him what the whole was before it was fully uncovered, before he had really seen it: a skull, a human skull, a fully intact cranium with a complete upper dental arcade, all the teeth intact, every detail fully present and preserved.

  And then he removed the last of the padding, and looked again, and saw what was truly there, not what was expected. His eyes widened in shock: hominid, yes—but it was not human.

  Grossington could feel his heart starting to pound, the sweat coming out on his forehead as he carefully, oh so carefully, removed the prize from the hatbox.

  The prominent sagittal crest, the huge, flat molars, the large but human-like canine teeth, the box-shaped dental arcade, the obvious positioning of the skull’s balance point to allow for an erect, bipedal gait. The prominent, exaggerated brow ridges—a dozen, a hundred things that spoke, even shouted, the impossible. This was an australopithecine, a member of a hominid species that had died out a million years ago.

  But this was no fossil. This was bone, not the mineralized shadow of bone; none of the once-living material of this skull had leached away to be replaced by other matter. What he held in his hands was the actual, true, once-living matter, browned and stained and weakened by time, but still bone—and of recent vintage. Not so long ago, these bone had been as alive as Grossington himself was.

  Like Hamlet with Yorick’s skull, Grossington held the cranium in his hand and stared into its empty eyes, fascinated, for a long time.

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  Barbara stood there, in front of Grossington’s desk, for what could have been a minute, or could have been an hour, watching him examine the impossible find. Finally the old man spoke. “When and where, Dr. Marchando?” he managed to ask at last, very quietly. “How old is this, and where in heaven’s name does it come from?”

  “Sir, that cranium—and the well-preserved complete skeleton found with it—were buried—deliberately, ritualistically buried—about one hundred forty years ago. In Gowrie, Mississippi, U.S.A. My home town.”

  Grossington sat there, stunned. “How? How could that possibly be?”

  “I don’t know, sir. I honestly don’t know. But I have a very strong hunch that our friend here might have some living relatives still around, if we knew where to look.”

  That much she had realized on the endless bus ride through the Mississippi darkness, rushing for the Jackson airport. It was plain bad luck that she had had to hustle for the fastest route she could manage in the overbooked chaos of Thanksgiving Sunday, when all America was headed home. At least the endless delays had given Barbara the chance to think, to consider, to contemplate—to let her imagination run away with her.

  “If these creatures survived up to the 1850s, why couldn’t they still be around?” she asked in as nearly a conversational tone as she could manage. Then, for the first time, the excitement went out of Barbara’s voice, to be replaced by something else, something mixed of awe, and fear, and wonder. She reached out and touched the face of the musty skull that Grossington still held. “I think we’ve got some company. Out there. Somewhere.”

  Grossington set down the cranium, bafflement plainly overwhelming him. This was as incredible to him as a dawn in the west would be to an astronomer. His face was blank, expressionless, the face of a man who had no adequate reaction.

  For a terrible moment, Barbara thought he had suffered a stroke or a heart attack, but then he seemed to come back to himself a bit, at least enough to replace the precious cranium in its nest of foam rubber. But still he said nothing, and Barbara found herself talking on, the words rushing out for the sake of something to say, something to fill the silence. “I left my cousin down there to watch over the rest of the skeleton. The rest of it is still in situ. Once I realized what I had, I didn’t dare try and work the area without professional help and equipment. I just removed the cranium and headed back here as fast as I could. We’ve got the dig roped-off and tarped over, but we still need to get back down there and recover the rest of the specimen. It looked as if there was still some skin, even fur, left on parts of it. It’ll be very delicate work, and we’ll need the best diggers in the house for it.” She paused for a moment, looked down at her boss again, reached out and touched his hand. “Dr. Grossington?”

  He jerked away, startled, and looked back at her from whatever place his mind had been. “Hmmm? Diggers? Field workers? Yes, yes, in due time, Dr. Marchando, in due time. This—this requires a great deal of thought.” His eyes drifted back toward the timeworn skull, and he seemed to forget her once again. “I simply cannot believe this.”

  Barbara winced inside. She should have thought of this, should have taken Grossington’s personality into account. She had imagined him pushing the buttons on his phone, pulling all his people in, issuing crisp orders that would set the needed work in motion. That was the way she would have responded—but instead, she was dealing with a man who seemed suddenly lost. His life was no longer the well-ordered place it had been ten minutes before. He had to be prodded into action, and there was no time to guide him into his course gently. She knew Grossington hated knee-jerk reactions to the press of events, but now he had no choice. It was time to bully the old man a bit.

  “Dr. Grossington, you must believe it—and you must act quickly! The rest of this skeleton is lying, partially excavated, under a tarp. It’s more or less protected, but it’s at least potentially exposed to weather and extremes of temperature. One good rain, one good cold snap that embrittles the bones, and we could lose it all. We have to get a team down there to recover and catalog all the bones. There are very likely other sets of remains buried nearby that must be uncovered . . .” Her voice trailed off as she watched him. Her boss was acting most strangely.

  “Yes, yes,” Grossington said, nodding vaguely, barely aware that she had stopped talking. He reach
ed down into the hatbox and softly stroked the weathered brow of bone over the blank eye sockets. “Yes, of course,” he said to no one at all. A strange eagerness seemed to steal slowly over him. His face lost its customary reserve, and he pulled the horn-rimmed glasses off his nose. He massaged his own forehead with his right hand as the left caressed the mysterious skull. “This is—is quite incredible, Dr. Marchando. I have not felt this way in years.” He looked up at her abruptly. His breath seemed short, and his eyes gleamed with excitement and pleasure. “I cannot recall feeling this alive.”

  He stared down at the dead, grinning enigma that challenged him, and quite uncharacteristically grinned back at it. “I cannot recall feeling this young.”

  And Barbara chided herself for underestimating Jeffery Grossington.

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  Livingston Jones sat at a table on the back porch and stared out at the crude canvas top staked down over the excavation. He knew himself to be a man with a mission, though he did not exactly know what that mission was. Clearly, someone had to stay here and keep an eye on things, just in case—but just in case what? Until Barbara called with news, or unless it rained, or animals started prowling around the tarp, or some nosy neighbor started poking around the dig, there was very little to do.

  The last of the Thanksgiving guests had left that morning, and Great-aunt Josephine had the huge old place to herself again, except for Livingston, of course. She was busily at work, cleaning up after her relations, tidying up and setting to rights what was already neat as a pin. She had chased Liv out of the way more than once, convinced that neither he nor any other male could possibly get anything polished or straight or ironed or clean or put away well enough to suit her.

  Livingston sighed and picked up Zebulon’s journal book again. It was not the focus of reverence to him that it was to the older relations, but it was something to read. It would have been interesting enough even it hadn’t led to a shocking discovery in the backyard. At first he had thought there might be more in the old book about the creatures or their burial, but there didn’t seem to be any further mention. He opened it again at random, and found himself in the days when Zebulon had first returned home, after the War, and was struggling to buy out the bankrupt shell that was Gowrie Plantation.

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  It is scarce worth mentioning the difficulties of the project I described. Any Reader who has traveled so far along in this Journal, indeed, any Person who has ever witnessed the behavior of the White Race toward the Negro, knows full well the catalog of indignities, the discourtesies and acts of violence both committed and threatened; the insidious and endless Legal tangles that might be thrown up in the face of a Negro audacious enough to purchase his former owner’s home. I had returned to my native town intent only on setting up a commercial stable, but when, on my arrival, I learned that Ambrose Gowrie had recently died a bankrupt and his lands and home were the court’s to sell as a means of satisfying the creditors, it occurred to me that I was the only person with a purse large enough to buy.

  Indeed, I think it safe to say that scarce any Negro ever dared try any such a thing. Few to my knowledge did, and grim though the fact is, of that small number, I believe only I myself succeeded—or even survived.

  The period of Reconstruction was a time of such great and heady chaos in this land that I myself can scarce credit all that I saw in my travels, both good and ill: Proud Negro soldiers of the Union cause; Shattered towns; Landscapes that, years after the battles that made their names immortal, were strewn with bleaching human bones, like so many hideous and infertile seeds sewn by the Reaper of Death.

  I rejoiced to see the Slaves’ Auction Block destroyed, but the Northern Carpetbaggers were swarming over the land, forcing whatever agreements they wished on Southerners compelled at the point of a Federal bayonet, to the detriment of all citizens of either race. The Kuklux Klan ran wild, meting out its own rabid mockery of law and justice. In somewhat later years, Negroes (among them myself) from half a dozen Southern states were elected to Serve in the Congress of the United States, a body which could never decide whether to Govern the former Confederate States or simply to wreak vengeance against them. Then the Poll Tax, and the maliciously impossible Literacy Tests, the Klan’s intimidations and a thousand more subtle threats drove the Negro from the Poll, from the schoolhouse, from the Seats of government.

  But I digress into bitter topics. Suffice it to say that it was against such a background of a world turned upside down that I bought Gowrie, and secured it. It took the entire fortune I had amassed in trading horses, and recourse to the hiring of a private army made up of discharged Negro soldiers eager to tangle with the Klan’s cowardly night riders.

  And it also took an ally, one that I found in a most unlikely place—in the offices of the Gowrie Gazette. The local news paper was in those days a biweekly affair published by one Stephen Teems. Teems was that rare combination, a Southern native and an Abolitionist, a believer—at least in principle—of the equality of the races.

  It was Teems, who was not only a publisher and journalist, but a lawyer trained before the War at Harvard, who searched the land titles, cleared my deeds, made each legal document a paragon of perfection, and used the law to compel the Federal occupiers who were not altogether willing to help.

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  Livingston closed the old book and thought for a moment. Documents. That was it. Somewhere, somehow, in the old family records, maybe there were the deeds and receipts that would mention the creatures. One thing they were sorely lacking at this point was information. Maybe there were more surprises concerning those old bones lying around among the old family papers. He went off to find Great-aunt Josephine and pester her until she showed him where to look.

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  When people think of the Smithsonian, they usually think only of the grand museums that bear that name. But the public areas of the museums are the smallest part of the whole. Behind the vast exhibit halls are endless scientific, scholarly, and artistic endeavors, from astronomy and stamp collecting to puppeteering and violin playing.

  Even when people do think of the scholars and scientists who work in those grand museums and in the labs and offices behind the scene, they have a natural but totally erroneous tendency to assume that the grandeur extends beyond the public view. They think of gleaming labs full of astonishing equipment, of serene scientists in their ever-present lab coats, toiling over their experiments on acres of shining formica. They imagine imposing offices, control panels full of quietly blinking lights, and reading rooms of polished oak.

  Barbara couldn’t speak for the whole endless establishment, but she knew just how far from the truth that image was for the Department of Anthropology. Anthro was jammed into part of the overcrowded third floor of the cavernous Natural History Museum.

  There were strange things there, behind the scenes at Natural History. Somewhere in the building was a carefully caged and isolated colony of Dermestidae lardarius—alias museum beetles, alias larder beetles. Those strange and voracious bugs would swarm over a corpse and eat everything—except bone. They used the museum beetles for cleaning small animal skeletons. A dead carcass would be left in with the beetles for them to swarm over like insect piranha, and in a day or so nothing would remain but the gleaming bones. The staff taxidermists lived in dread of the beetles escaping into the exhibits and devouring all the mounted specimens.

  Anthro had its own strange features. Long rows of shelves lined the hallways of the third floor there, running floor to ceiling. Endless identical wooden boxes the size of a small suitcase lined the shelves—each with a disarticulated human skeleton inside. All told, there were thirty thousand skeletons in the massive reference collection, packed away wherever they might fit.

  The living, breathing scientists were packed in nearly as tight as the dear departed. The lower-ranking scientists were crammed in with each other, four or five desks stuffed into rooms intended for two. The main workroom was even worse, the desks there even m
ore banged up and crowded together. A small, dusty table was wedged up by the window for the sorting and organizing of specimens. Bookcases sprouted everywhere, reaching for the old-fashioned high, white-painted ceilings, their shelves filled to bursting with papers, boxes full of bones from the reference collections, and of course, books. Books were everywhere. Books neatly put away, books stacked up precariously, books left open to a key page, books closed up and waiting forlornly for someone to come along and remove dozens of improvised bookmarks.

  To such a place—scruffy, untidy, disorganized, full of the fruits of learning and learning yet to be sown, grown, and harvested, Barbara took the precious cargo she had carried from Mississippi. She set down the hatbox on the papers that hid her desk and started trying to clear some sort of work space on the sorting table. She paused for a minute and looked over the overheated, drafty, musty, dusty place. They called it the Diggers’ Pit, and it deserved the name. She smiled. It was nice to be back.

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  Fifteen minutes later she was balanced on a rickety revolving-seat stool, perched in front of the sorting table. She was most carefully working a compressed-air gun over the pitted surface of the cranium, the compressor’s motor humming and throbbing a demented background rhythm. She wanted to be sure to blow out as much dirt and crud as possible before treating the fragile bone with a toughening preservative. The tricky part was in emptying the braincase, which was full of loosely packed dirt. It was slow, delicate work that required pure, focused concentration. That sort of work was good therapy, just what she needed right now. Small details drove the grand issues out of her mind. When she was trying to break up that last big clump of dirt, she couldn’t think of what finding this fellow meant, or what Grossington was deciding back in his office. The skull was lying upside down in front of her. She carefully eased the nozzle of the air gun into the foramen magnum, the hole at the base of the skull through which the spinal cord reached into the brain.