Orphan of Creation

by Roger MacBride Allen

  He pulled himself together, picked up the phone and pressed the intercom key. If the story was out, his job was to get the facts out as accurately as he could. “Harriet, talk to the Public Affairs people and see about arranging a press conference in the next day or so. I’ll want to notify the long press list, not just the local science reporters, so we’ll need a large room. But first, see if you can’t get me through to the Secretary’s office. It seems the boss is going to hear about what we’ve been doing, so he might as well hear it from me.”

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  Barbara’s heart was pounding in her chest as they entered the village. What, if anything, was there to prevent these people from killing them all? What would the natives and visitors say to each other?

  That was not the only thing that frightened her. She had seen that line of figures walking a few minutes before, seen the way they were led, seen, in a few seconds’ glimpse, a hundred tiny details of action and behavior that told her what she was seeing. It had never really dawned on her that the Utaani kept the australopithecines, the tranka, as slaves. She had imagined the Utaani as simply knowing about the tranka, perhaps being able to find them, able to tell Barbara where they were, share some woodsy lore so she could find them to study. But slaves. It was so obvious, now that she considered it, that she wondered how she could ever have thought otherwise. But slaves did not exist anymore in her world. How could she have known? And in any event, could animals—even animals in human form—be slaves?

  They reached the central clearing of the village and stopped. Barbara looked around nervously. The village was a miserable spot, a degraded, colorless, spiritless place of grey, cloying mists. The smells of rotting, spoiled food and decaying human waste were everywhere. No living thing grew in the grey, gullied mud of the village clearing. Most of the huts were ramshackle things that seemed to be threatening to collapse at any moment.

  At first, as they entered the clearing, the village had seemed empty of life, silent in spite of all the sounds they had heard from the trail. But now, slowly, faces were appearing from around the doorways of huts, children were peeking out from behind their mothers’ legs, men were sidling in from the fields.

  Barbara was glad she could see no weapons, but she took no real comfort from that. They could be hidden anywhere.

  Monsieur Ovono was even more rattled than Barbara. He had never believed in the tranka, had never understood, or even cared, what the party was looking for. He had been far less prepared than the others for the sight of those inhuman apparitions on the path. But he was the one who would have to speak for the visitors. No one else knew the language—assuming he and the Utaani shared a mutually intelligible dialect.

  A small knot of Utaani villagers was slowly forming in front of them. One, a tall, muscular man with greying hair, stepped forward. He was wearing an ornate necklace that looked like it had just been hurriedly put on for the ceremony of meeting a stranger, judging by the way the beads were tangled up.

  Ovono recognized him as the chief and stepped forward himself, holding his hands out, palms up and pointing at the sky. He bowed and spoke a few works of Eshiri. The chief answered back, and Ovono smiled nervously at him. Ovono turned to Rupert and spoke in French. “I have said hello, we mean no harm, and the chief has said no harm will come to honest visitors, and that he has never seen skin and hair like yours, though he has heard there were such people. He asks why you come here. You are here to see those creatures, of course, but would that be the wisest thing to tell these people?”

  Rupert turned to Barbara, Clark, and Livingston. The situation would have been absurd, if it had not been so frightening. They were surrounded by a whole tribe of edgy Africans, with a trusty guide translating for them, and the very clear sense that if they didn’t talk smoothly enough, they were dead. “Okay, gang, now what?” Rupert asked. “The natives are getting restless, if you’ll pardon the expression. What can we say that won’t freak them out? Should we ask if they’ll have us for dinner, or what?”

  Clark stepped forward. “Let me,” he said, and went on in French. “Monsieur Ovono, ask if there are not tales that tell of people like us coming before?”

  Ovono relayed the question. The chief consulted with some of the men standing with him before he answered. He spoke, and Ovono nodded. “Yes,” Ovono said, “but not in the lifetime of this chief or his father. But they came, and were peaceful traders who did no harm and did not come to pry.”

  Clark thought quickly and said, “Tell him our legends tell of just such a meeting, and we have come in the footsteps of that trader.”

  The idea seemed to appeal to Ovono, and he translated it hurriedly.

  The chief smiled and gestured for them to step closer as he spoke. “In that case,” Ovono translated into French, “all is well.” As the Utaani pressed around them, Rupert hurried relayed what was going on to Livingston and Barbara. They moved toward the center of the clearing, and their hosts clustered in around them. Caught up in the middle of a crowd of tribesmen curious to get a look at these strange new people, Livingston found himself wondering just how well all was going to turn out to be.

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  With a nice calculation of how fast the mails traveled, Pete picked up the phone to call Grossington a hour after the scientist had received the package. This was going to require delicate handling, but Pete had thought it all out beforehand. With all his notes carefully arranged in front of him, he dialed the call.

  A secretary at the other end answered. “Dr. Grossington, please,” Pete said.

  “May I tell him who’s calling?”

  “Pete Ardley from the Gowrie Gazette.”

  “One moment,” the secretary said, and there was the quiet clunk of a hold button. After the briefest of delays a gruff old man’s voice came on the line. “Hello?”

  “Dr. Grossington?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Pete Ardley of the Gowrie Gazette. Have you received my package?”

  “Yes, I have,” Grossington replied, his voice betraying some degree of nervousness. “Might I ask why you are calling me?”

  “In a way, to apologize, Doctor. I wanted to talk with you before we went to press on the story,” Pete lied, “but my editor said no. He felt the whole thing was a hoax and you shouldn’t be given any warning about it being blown. As it stands, the story I sent you will appear in tomorrow’s edition. Already at the printers.”

  “I see. Well, it appears the damage is done,” Grossington said. “I really don’t see the point in discussing it further.”

  “I’m afraid that the damage goes a bit further than that,” Pete said. “The story is also going out on the wire, along with several of the photographs I sent you. And copies of the package you’ve got have gone to the Washington Post and the New York Times. I apologize for that, as well,” Pete said, “but I’m afraid there was no real way around it.” That last statement, as far as it went, wasn’t a lie, but it was as close as the truth could get to being false. True, if the goal was to further Pete Ardley’s ambitions, there was no way around it.

  Pete knew the first rule of effective lying—tell as much of the truth as you can. Right now the goal of his lying was to get Grossington to feel as if Pete was on his side, so he might be willing to talk. But even so, he felt a little bad about it. Grossington seemed a decent enough old guy, and Pete was giving him trouble. He reminded himself that this story was important, and that if it was true, it belonged to the world. No bunch of scientists had the right to parcel out the facts when they saw fit.

  “Your apology doesn’t do much to make my position any easier,” Dr. Grossington said irritably.

  “No, but maybe you can help me patch things up for you,” Pete said in his most earnest voice. He was betting that Grossington had little experience of reporters. If that were so, his trick might work. “Nothing has reached the public yet on all this, and you can bet the Post and the Times are going to do some fact-checking before they publish. If you can give me a cr
edible denial, something that explains what really happened down here and accounts for the facts we’ve got, I should be able to get my editor to print a withdrawal and send word to the other news organizations that it was all a misunderstanding. The only published report in that case would be in one tiny little hometown paper. Can you give me a good denial to take to my editor?”

  There was silence from the other end of the phone, and with each denial-free second it lasted, Pete felt more jubilant—and more guilty. He didn’t like playing these games on the old guy, but that silence made him even more certain that the whole improbable story was true. He had gone out on a limb, and it wasn’t going to be cut off. Finally, Pete heard a long, unhappy sigh.

  “No, Mr. Ardley,” Grossington replied, “I’m afraid I can’t deny it. For the simple reason that it is true. We don’t know how, we don’t know why, but about a hundred and thirty-seven years ago, at least five members of a nonhuman hominid species, a species that was supposedly extinct these last million years, were buried in Mississippi. And we’ve just dug them up.”

  “I see,” Pete said, trying for a sympathetic tone to his voice. “I’m afraid that changes the situation, doesn’t it?”

  “Don’t try to play games with me, Ardley,” Grossington snapped backed irritably. “You’re a reporter, and a reporter wants a story, and my saying ‘no, it’s all a mistake’ is no damn story at all. You’ve got the biggest scoop of your life, and you’re trying to figure out how to run with it.”

  “Of course it’s a hell of a story,” Pete said. “I ought to know. I wrote it. But that doesn’t make it impossible for me to sympathize with your predicament. The word is out now, and there’s nothing that can be done about that. Now the question is, how do you handle it now that it’s out there? I think I can help.”

  “I’m all ears,” Grossington said. “I’m sure you’ve got nothing in mind but my well-being. You’re just chasing a story, Ardley, and you don’t care who gets hurt.”

  “Sure, right. Look, think what you want,” Pete said, starting to feel annoyed. “But this is my job, Doctor. Getting the truth to the public quickly. Maybe I’m a little sneaky and dishonest in the way I go about things at times, but I have to be that way if I want to get the job done. And before you sneer at me, let me ask you a question. If we waited until you were ready, how long would it be until the world learned about those skulls?”

  “I honestly don’t know. At least some months. Maybe longer. We need time to study the facts, follow the leads this has opened up—”

  “Have you considered what that means? In the year or two or three until you’re good and ready to talk, what happens to the rest of us?” Pete demanded, surprised at himself. Even as he spoke, he knew he shouldn’t be handling a source this way. “This isn’t some dry little gentlemen’s scientific disagreement. It affects all of us. The people’s right to know is important here. There’s a big debate over creationism versus evolution in the world today. People are deciding whether schoolbooks should even be allowed to mention the word evolution.

  “People are using that debate to push school boards around, yank books out of libraries, take kids out of classes for fear their brains will get polluted by an unapproved thought. I cover a lot of school board stuff, and I’ve seen it. Thought control is being practiced down here, and nine times out of ten it’s the fight over evolution that’s the thin edge of the wedge. That starts it, and then the censors find out how easy it is to stamp out books and ideas. Do you have any idea how tough it was for me to find any books on human origins in the stores and the libraries down here?

  “You’re sitting on an incredibly potent weapon up there, one that could strengthen the hand of people interested in teaching children the truth instead of what their parents wish was the truth. And every day you withhold your discovery, another little township school board is going to knuckle under and agree to use the sanitized, bowdlerized textbooks approved by people who think you can change the truth if you don’t like it. Do you have any idea how much more damage could be done by the time you felt ready to tell the world what you’ve found?”

  Grossington cleared his throat again. “Excuse me, Mr. Ardley. I’m surprised to learn you care about anything.”

  Pete shrugged, knowing it was a pointless gesture over the phone. He was a little surprised to learn it himself. “I beg your pardon, Dr. Grossington, I didn’t mean to get so worked up. I hope you don’t take offense. I just get scared at the mush they’re putting in the kids’ heads.”

  “It scares me too, Mr. Ardley, and we’ve argued that very same point in this office, I assure you. Just not quite so persuasively. So tell me, how can you ‘help’?”

  Pete hesitated for a moment. He had gotten a little off track and had to collect himself. “It’s like this, Doctor. I’ve had some time to work on this. I’ve had a month to read up on the subject, I’ve interviewed an expert in the field, I’ve had a chance to think and to learn about the subject of paleoanthropology to the point where I know what I’m talking about. I can write a follow-up story about these skulls without calling them missing links or ape-men, without people thinking you’re saying that something that died just before the Civil War could be their ancestor. I can make it clear what their relation is to human beings, what the significance of the find is.

  “When the other news media pick this up, they’re going to put general assignment reporters on it—reporters who were writing about the mayor yesterday and a burglary the day before that. They or she won’t know any more than I did a month ago—and I didn’t know anything. I can put the case for your find clearly, without falling into the traps those guys will land in. And since I broke the story, I’m in a position to sell freelance pieces and wire stories. That could set the tone for reporting on this whole thing. With a little luck, we can keep the debate fairly civilized. Will you help me?”

  There was another long silence. Finally Grossington spoke. “You talk a convincing line, Mr. Ardley, but I still can’t see where I owe you anything. However, I’m calling a press conference for two p.m. the day after tomorrow, and if you can be here then, I suppose you’d be welcome. Good day to you.”

  Pete already had the airline schedule out before Grossington had the phone handset back on the cradle. Pete had been hoping for a real interview, but he’d have to settle. Those were the risks of the game when you forced somebody’s hand. Pete spread the schedule out and glanced at his watch. The real trick would be getting up to Jackson fast to catch an early flight. It would do some good to be on the ground in Washington before the news conference. He had some leads up there to follow.

  Chapter Sixteen

  In the movie-cliché version of Africa, there should have been a glorious feast in their honor that night, with spectacular music and dancing around a roaring fire, shouting and laughing people surrounding the flames as the sparks flew up into the jet-black sky. The food should have been wonderful as well, of course, with all sorts of delicacies laid before the travelers.

  However, the Utaani apparently hadn’t been to the movies recently, and didn’t know about such things. The five visitors were crammed into the chief’s rather fragrant hut along with the chief and several of the village’s leading citizens. They sat on mats on the floor of the hut, wedged into a tight circle of bodies alongside the great man, choking on the smoke from the sullen little fire in the hut’s center, forcing down the bland, pasty glup that seemed to be the Utaani idea of a feast food. Livingston found himself missing the canned-goods elegance of the hotel at Booué.

  Liv had seen a lot on this trip, seen a lot of ways for people to live, but this was the first he had ever seen that just plain felt wrong. There was nothing, exactly, that he could put his finger on, but this was a bad place. Nasty, brutish. He had yet to see anything clean, or orderly, or well-made, anything a person could be proud of.

  Livingston turned to Rupert and nudged him in the ribs to get his attention. “So what in hell goes on around here? What does Monsieu
r Ovono think?”

  Rupert shrugged. “I’ll ask him.” Rupert got Ovono’s attention and the two of them talked in French for a moment or two, both men making a big show of speaking in a very animated way, very happy and effusive. Rupert turned backed to Livingston. “He says he has never seen such a miserable place or such uncultured people,” Rupert reported, still keeping his voice animated and excited, so the Utaani would think he was happy. “None of the villages he has seen have been as unhappy as this. Do not judge the jungle villages of Gabon by this miserable example. They live like pigs here. So says Monsieur Ovono,” Rupert finished up.

  “Okay, I’ll go with that, but what about the reason we’re here?” Livingston asked, being a bit cryptic so as not to upset either their guide or their hosts. He wasn’t quite sure how either would react to mention of the creatures they were there to find. He didn’t want to mention the one Utaani word he knew, tranka and he didn’t want to refer to them by the scientific name australopithecine either, as Ovono would be sure to spot it.

  “Hold on a sec.” Rupert and Ovono started talking again, and after a moment Clark joined in. Then the Utaani chief tapped Ovono on the shoulder and spoke, apparently asking what his visitors were talking about. Ovono replied, no doubt at least sanitizing what the visitors were saying in French, but more likely out-and-out lying, inventing something that would satisfy the chief. Then, of course, the chief had to tell the visitors something, which Ovono had to translate, and so on. Livingston sighed. By the sounds of things, it was threatening to be a rather long conversation. He had gotten used to not being able to speak French, but now he felt doubly out of it for not speaking the dialect of Eshiri that the Utaani spoke.

  Barbara poked him in the ribs and laughed. “It’s okay, Liv, I feel a little out of touch myself. So much for cultural relativism, huh?”