by Greg Bear
The driver took his seat.
“Let’s go!” Will shouted. Behind him, one of the boys began to hoot. The female guard swiveled and glared at them, just in time to be hit by another crumpled ball of paper.
The male guard walked to the back along the boys’ side of the plastic barrier.
“Go! Go!” Will shouted, and bounced in his seat.
“Sit down, damn it,” the first guard said.
“Why not tie us down?” Will asked. “Why not strap us in?”
“Shut up,” the guard said.
Stella felt a chill. They were being taken somewhere by a team that had had little experience with SHEVA children. She had an instinct for such things. These two, and the driver, looked even dumber than Miss Kantor. None of the humans inside or outside of the bus looked happy; they looked as if something had gone wrong.
Stella wondered what had happened to that other bus, the one they usually used.
Will was watching the guards and the driver like a hawk, eyes steady. Stella tried to keep his face in focus through the plastic, but he leaned back and got fuzzy.
The wire-reinforced plastic windows were locked shut from the outside; this was the kind of bus she had seen as a child carrying prisoners to pick up trash or cut down brush along the highways. She stared out through the window and shivered.
Her body ached. In front of her, Celia hunched forward, whispering to herself, her hands clasping the padded rail. LaShawna was yawning, pretending not to care. Felice had wrapped herself in her arms and was trying to go to sleep.
“Go, go, go!” the boys hooted, bouncing in their seats. Felice laid her head against the window. Stella wanted the boys to be quiet. She wanted everything to be quiet so she could close her eyes and pretend she was somewhere else. She felt betrayed by the school, by Miss Kantor, by Miss Kinney.
That was stupid, of course. Being at the school was a betrayal in the first place. Why would leaving be any worse? She leaned her head back to keep from feeling nauseated.
The female guard told the driver to close and lock the door. The driver started the bus and put it in gear. It lurched forward.
Celia began to throw up. The driver jerked the bus to a halt at the end of the concrete apron before the main road.
“Never mind!” the female guard shouted, her face a mask of disgust. “We’ll clean it up when we get there. Just go!”
“Go, go, go!” the boys chanted. Will glanced at Stella, straightened his lips, and began to peel another page from the paperback.
Once the bus was under way, air began to move through small vents above the windows and Stella felt better. Celia stayed quiet, and the two other girls sat stiffly in their seats. Stella was thinking over their situation and decided it was all very clumsy and badly planned, probably last-minute. They were being transported like lobsters in a tank. Time was of the essence. Someone was eager to get to them while they were still fresh.
Stella tried to make some spit to moisten her mouth. The taste on her tongue was terrible.
“This will take about an hour and ten minutes,” the driver said as they pulled out of the school parking lot. “There’s water in bottles below each seat. We’ll make one bathroom stop.”
Stella reached below the blue seat and picked up a plastic bag with a bottle of water inside. She looked down at it, wondering what it held besides water; what was going to happen at the end of the ride, their treat for being such good little boys and girls? To stay calm, she thought of Kaye, and then she thought about Mitch. Last, but not least, she remembered holding their old orange cat, Shamus, and stroking him while he purred.
If she was going to die, she could at least be as dignified as old Shamus.
30
OREGON
Mitch got up before sunrise, dressed without waking Merton, and left the tent they shared to stand at the rim of the Spent River gulley. He watched the early-morning sun try to spread light over the shaded landscape. He could clearly see Mount Hood, twenty miles away, its snows purple in the dawn.
He found a twig and stuck it between his lips, then bit it with his teeth.
Mitch had never thought he was prescient, sensitive, psychic, whatever name one gave to having second sight. Kaye had told him, years ago, that scientists and artists shared similar origins for creative thinking—but that scientists had to prove their fancies.
Mitch had never told Kaye what he had gotten out of that conversation, but in a way it had helped him put things in perspective—to see the artistic side of how he came to his own, often logically unsupportable conclusions. It wasn’t ESP.
He was just thinking like an artist.
Or a cop. Nature was the world’s most efficient serial killer. An anthropologist was a kind of detective, not so much interested in justice—that was entirely too abstract in the face of time’s immensity and so many deaths—but in figuring out how the victims had died and, more important, how they had lived.
He wiped his eyes with one finger and looked north along the gulley, to the deeper gorge that had long ago been cut through alternating layers of mud and lava and ash. Then he turned and peered at the L-shaped site with its array of canvas and plastic covers, concealed by camouflage netting.
“Shit,” he said, almost in wonder at the way his feet began to walk him along the rim of the gulley, away from the main dig.
That bear. That damned, enigmatic bear that had started it all.
The bear had come down to the river to do some fishing and had been suffocated by a fall of ash—but several days before the humans had arrived. The humans typically tracked bears, he was almost sure of it, relying on them to find good fishing. Someone had claimed the skull, but had not butchered the carcass—there were no cut marks on the bones—which meant it was probably in an unappetizing condition by the time they found it.
Salmon came back in the spring, summer, and fall to spawn and die, different groups and different species at different seasons. Nomadic bands had timed their journeys and arranged their settlements to take advantage of one or more of these returns, when the rivers ran thick with rich, red-fleshed fish.
Leaves changing color. Water running crisp and cold. Salmon wriggling over the rocky streambeds like big red pull toys. Bears waiting to march across the stream and grab them.
But most of the bears had probably left with the first ash fall, leaving behind one old male too sick to travel far, maybe chewed up in a fight, waiting to die.
Guessing. Just guessing, goddamnit.
Why would people walk up the river and ignore the ash fall? Not even hunger could have driven them into that landscape, or made them stay once there. Unless it had been raining, every step would have brought up a cloud of choking ash. Setting up a fishing camp would have been stupid in the extreme.
Like the bear, they were being followed.
He had dreamed about the bones in the night. He did not know whether artists dreamed their work—or whether detectives dreamed solutions to their cases. But the way he worked was, he often dreamed of the people he found, in their graves or where they had fallen and died.
And sometimes he was right.
Often he was right.
Hell, nine times out of ten, Mitch’s dreams turned out to be right—so long as he waited for them to evolve, to ripple through their necessary variations and reach their inevitable conclusion. That was how it had been with the Alpine mummies. He had dreamed about them for months.
But now there was not enough time. He had to rely on what amounted to a hunch.
The Australians had clued him, even more than the Homo erectus skeletons. They were very far north. Only now was anthropology accepting the many tides and clashes of peoples in the Americas—the early arrival by storm-driven boats of a few Australians in the south, the later and frequent arrivals of the Asians moving along and over the land and ice bridges in the north.
The Australoids had been in South America—and now it was apparent North America—for tens of thousands of years
before they met the Asians. The Asians conquered and killed, subdued, pushed them back south from whatever northern territories they might have explored. It must have been a monumental war, spread out over millions of square miles and many thousands of years, race-based and violent.
In the end, the Australians had all but vanished—leaving only a few mixed-race descendants on the eastern coast of South America: the Tierra del Fuegans familiar to Darwin and other explorers.
They were being chased. They partnered with the Homo erectus individuals because they faced a common enemy.
Mitch stepped out like an automaton, eyes sweeping the ground ahead, ignoring everything but the pound of his boots on the old rounded river rocks. It was no place to take a tumble, especially with one bum arm.
Too far north. In dangerous territory, surrounded by Asians. They had come up here for the rich runs of fish, following the bears; men and women, an extended family group. Perhaps united under one powerful male—and maybe he did like dabbling with the Homo erectus females. No sense being naÏve.
But his women did not care. No babies ever resulted. Mitch could almost see the Homo erectus males and females tagging along, behind the Australians, begging at first, then being set up to do work for the women, then offering themselves to the men, their own males indifferent to the exchange. Attitudes of a hungry, dying people.
In the end, there had been some measure of affection, perhaps more than masters for their pets. Equals? Probably not. But the Homo erectus members of the group were not stupid. They had survived for more than a million years. Homo sap was just a newcomer in the equation.
Mitch snuffed air and blew his nose into his handkerchief; the warming air was thick with grass pollen. He was not normally susceptible, but his years in prison, with musty air and lots of mold, had exaggerated his reactions.
If the men are out here—and no guarantee of that—they couldn’t save the women. They failed, and they probably died, too. Or they hightailed it out of this miserable place ahead of the wave of hot mud—leaving the women behind.
How am I any better?
I left my women behind, and they took Stella.
What if I do find the males, what of it? What in hell am I looking for? Salvation? An excuse?
He glanced up at the sun, then shaded and dropped his eyes. The thickest deposit of mudstone had set in a dark brown layer all around the banks of the old river, weathered in spots to soil rich enough to support shrubs and trees, hard and stripped and barren elsewhere. Boulders the size and shape of soccer balls pocked the ground, and nowhere any clue as to where an elusive collection of fossils might just poke up underfoot.
He sat on a weather-split boulder and lifted his left elbow onto his knee to get the tingle out of his slack arm. Sometimes the blood just cut off in that arm, and then the nerves, and after a while the arm jerked awake and hurt like hell.
It wasn’t easy staying attentive and on point. Something insisted on getting in the way, perhaps an all-too-real sense of the complete futility of what he was trying to do. “Where would you go?” he whispered. He hunched his knees slowly around the rock, turning his eyes to sweep the rugged land, up the high ground and down into the swales filled with brush. “Where would you weather out twenty thousand years after you died? Come on, guys. Help me out.”
A light breeze whistled through the brush and touched his hair like phantom fingers. He blew a fly away from his lips and brushed the hair out of his eyes. Kaye had always chided him about getting haircuts. After a while she had just let it drop, giving up, and Mitch wondered what he resented more—being treated like a little boy or being given up on by his own wife.
His teeth ground lightly, like a beast scaring away enemies. His chest ached from loneliness and guilt.
Wandering.
His eyes could tell a chip of bone from a pebble at a dozen paces, even now. He could set mental filters to ignore squirrel and rabbit bones, any recent subset of bleached, chewed, or sinew-darkened remnant.
His eyes narrowed to slits.
An experienced band of males might have seen or heard the lahar and become frightened, tried to make it to high ground. That’s where he was now, where his feet had taken him, to the highest ground in the area, a ridge of hard rock and cupped pockets of soil and brush. He could see the camp, or at least where he knew it was, about half a mile away, obscured by tall brush and trees.
And north, the ever-present sentinel of Mount Hood, a quiet, squat dunce cap of repressed Earth energy, hissing faint plumes of steam but confessing nothing about past tantrums, past crimes.
Mitch closed his eyes completely and visualized the head male of the band. The picture cleared. Mitch went away, and in his place stood the band’s lead hunter, the chief.
The chief’s face was dark and intent, hair flecked with ash, skin streaky gray with ash, like a ghost. In Mitch’s imagination, the chief started out purple-brown and quite naked, but pieced skins suddenly appeared on his lanky, stooped frame, not crude rags even twenty thousand years ago, because people were savvy about fashion and utility even then; leggings and tunic tied at the waist, pouch for flints and obsidian tips or whatever they might have with them.
Their hearts beat fast seeing the pallor on their skins, they already look dead. They’re afraid of each other. But the chief holds them together. He jumps and makes faces until they crow at their ashen complexions. The chief is more than smart; he cares about the anomalous little group of males, partners in this harsh land; and he is solicitous of the females, the chewers of skins and makers of the clothing he wears.
Never underestimate your ancestors, your cousins. They lasted a long, long time. And even then they loved, they cared, they protected.
31
ARIZONA
The bus cut through a Flagstaff suburb, low, flat, brown brick and stucco houses surrounded by dusty gravel yards. Stella had lived in such a suburb as a girl. She laid her head back on the plastic seat and stared at the passing homes. Even with air-conditioning, the bus was hot inside and her water was running out fast.
The boys had stopped talking and Will seemed to be asleep next to a small pile of crumpled yellow pages from his old paperback book.
Someone tapped her shoulder. It was the male guard. He had a larger plastic bag from which he pulled another bottle of water.
“Not long now,” he said, and stuck the bottle into her hand. “Give me the empties.” The girls handed him their empties and he passed them to the female guard, who stuck them into another bag and sealed it. Then he stepped around the curtain at the front of the bus and gave the boys fresh bottles, again collecting the empties.
The male guard shook his head and glared down disapprovingly at Will’s mess before giving the boy a bottle.
“Having fun?” he asked Will.
Will stared up at him and shook his head slowly.
The bus driver was making lots of turns, taking them up and down many streets as if he were lost. Stella did not think the driver was lost. They were trying to avoid someone or something.
That made her sit up. She looked behind. The bus was being followed by a small brown car. Up front, as they turned a corner she saw another car, this one green, with two people in the front seat. The bus was following the lead car. They had escorts.
Nothing too unexpected about that. Why, then, did Stella feel that none of this had been planned out well, that something had gone awry?
Will was watching her. He pushed close to the plastic curtain and moved his lips but she could not hear what he was saying over the road noise; they were on gravel now, rumbling across a farm track through a fallow dirt field to a state road. The bus bounced up onto the asphalt and swung left. The lead car slowed for the bus to catch up.
She tracked Will’s lips more carefully now that the bouncing had stopped: Sandia, he was mouthing silently. She remembered him asking earlier if she had heard of it, but she still did not know what Sandia was.
Will drew his finger across his throat
. Stella closed her eyes and turned away. She could not watch him now. She did not need to be any more scared than she already was.
Another hour, and they rode on a straight stretch of highway between rocky desert with low red mountains on the horizon. The sun was almost directly overhead. The trip was taking a lot longer than Joanie had said it would.
The highway was almost empty, only a few cars going either way. A small red BMW with New Mexico plates swung around to the left of the short caravan and zoomed by. The boys tracked its speedy passage listlessly, then held up their hands with crooked finger signs and laughed.
Stella did not know what they meant. The laughter sounded harsh. The boys worried her. They seemed wild.
The long, sandy, rocky stretches beside the highway hypnotized her. The mountains were always far away. She wondered what Sandia meant once more, then stuffed the word away, hating the sound of it, more so because it was actually a pretty word.
Screech of tires.
She was jerked up out of a doze by a sudden swerve. Stella clung to the seat back in front of her as the bus veered left, then right, then tilted. Tires kept on screaming over the asphalt. Celia’s head and shoulders bounced one way then another, and as Stella looked right, the outside world flew up and dropped down, mountains and desert and all. Then everything shoved sideways, and she slipped along the plastic seat and crashed down on the window, jamming her head, neck, and shoulder against the plastic. Plastic crazed and peeled away in wire-clasped ripples and her shoulder pressed into dirt and gravel.
For a moment, the bus was very quiet. It seemed to be lying on one side, the right side, her side. The light was not very good and the air was thick and still and full of the smell of burned rubber.
She tried to move and found that she still could, which caused a surge of excitement. Her body was still working, she was still alive. She pushed up slowly and heard jingling and ripping sounds. Then, a boy fell onto the curtain and jammed his knee into her side. Through the taut veil of plastic above her, she saw another boy’s denim-clad butt and a vague, contorted face. Will, she thought, and with a grunt, pushed up against the body, but could not move it.