by Greg Bear
He made a path through the crowd for the people Eileen pointed out, holding her hand over their heads and nodding.
“Coming through,” Carlton said, and they climbed the aluminum steps. He was the last.
Stella looked down on the excavation. At first, all she saw was a large jumble of dark bones on hard planed dirt, mud, and what looked like old ash. She could smell the dust. Nothing more.
Mitch and Kaye stood across from her, Celia and LaShawna beside her; John Hamilton and Senator Bloch, both very quiet, were catercorner on the scaffold beside Carlton. Oliver Merton was staying out of the way, standing alone in one corner with arms crossed.
Eileen and Connie Fitz and Laura Bloch had also stayed below. It was now Carlton’s show.
“There are eight adult females and two children, one male and one female, in this grouping,” Carlton said. “A lahar of volcanic gas and mud and water came roaring down this river bed about twenty thousand years ago. They died together, covered with hot mud. One of them dropped a woven grass basket. Its mold is still in that cube of unexcavated mudstone to the right. The woman on top of the group—she’s marked with a red plastic square, and her outline is made more clear by the thin strip of blue tape—is taller and more robust; she’s Homo erectus, a late stage variety similar to heidelbergensis but as yet without a scientific designation. She appears to be in her forties, well past child bearing and very old for the time. A grandma type. We think she was protecting the children, and perhaps two other women. The female child and the other females are all Homo sapiens, virtually indistinguishable from you and me. The male child is another Homo erectus.
“At first, we thought—Connie and Eileen and the pioneers at this site thought, that is; I’m sort of late here—that there were only females, that the males had run off and abandoned them. Later, Mr. Rafelson found the first signs of the males, not far away and across the river. We thought they might have been out hunting and coming back to their females. Well, that may still be the case, but there was a lot more going on. We’ve since excavated thirteen sites around the Spent River, all within a thousand yards of here. We’ve found a total of fifty-three whole skeletons and perhaps seventy partials, a bit of femur or skull cap or tooth here and there.
“This was a kind of village, set up in the autumn to take advantage of salmon runs in the river. Family groups made camp along a loose network of trails, waiting for the run to begin. They were caught by the volcanic eruption and frozen in time, for us to find, and to reacquaint ourselves with… well, I think of them as old friends. Old teachers, actually.”
Stella glanced at Mitch and saw a tear on his cheek.
Carlton paused to gather his thoughts. Celia was transfixed and maybe a little frightened by this big, rough-looking male. Her jaw hung open. LaShawna was frowning in concentration.
“And what they teach us now is pretty simple. They were traveling as equals. Personally, I don’t know what they were offering each other. But we’ve found roughly equal numbers of both species, erectus and sapiens. There are children of both species, and males as well. Our first site was anomalous. If I could make a guess…”
“He’s a lot like you, Mitch,” Eileen called from the crowd below the scaffold.
Carlton smiled shyly. “I’d say maybe the erectus individuals worked as hunters, using tools made by the sapiens. We haven’t finished analyzing one of the outermost digs yet, a hunting party, but it looks like some of the erectus females served as lead hunters. They carried flint knapping tools and the heavy weapons and some stones that might or might not be hunting charms. That’s right. Tall girls with great sniffers leading the brainy boys.
“We’re looking for a central butchering ground for game—usually near where the large cutting tools were manufactured. In those days hunters tended to carry big game back to the village and butcher it in a protected area. We aren’t sure why—either they hadn’t yet thought of carrying the butchering tools with them, or they were trying to avoid attracting large predators.
“The sapiens females cooperated in weaving grass and leather and bark and preparing the fish and gathering berries and bugs and such around the camps. We’ve found beetles and grubs and grass and blackberry seeds in some of the baskets. Everyone had their place. They worked together.”
“So should we all,” said Senator Bloch, and Stella could see that she, too, was deeply moved.
Stella did not know what to think. The bones were still a tangle, as were her thoughts.
“As we reveal the bones, remove the overburden and brush them clean, we don’t know what beliefs they held, twenty thousand years ago,” Carlton said softly. “So basically we just respect them with silence, for a while, and gratitude. We get acquainted, as it were. They were not our direct ancestors, of course—we’ll probably never find direct ancestors that old. It would be like digging up needles in a mighty sparse and distributed haystack.
“But the people down here, and all around the Spent River, they’re still us. Nobody owns them. But they’re family.” Carlton nodded to his own strong convictions.
“Amen,” Eileen and Connie Fitz said simultaneously below the scaffold.
Stella saw her father’s hands on the rail. His knuckles were white and he was staring directly at her. Stella leaned her head to one side. He moved his lips. She could easily tell what he was saying.
Human.
Eileen and Laura Bloch and Mitch watched as the photographers arranged Kaye and the girls at the base of the mesa, standing in front of the scaffolding. No pictures of the bones were being allowed.
“Rumor has it Kaye met God,” Eileen said in a low voice to Mitch. “Is it true?”
“So she tells me.”
“That’s got to be awkward for a scientist,” Eileen said.
“She’s doing okay,” Mitch said. “She calls it just another kind of inspiration.”
Senator Bloch listened to this with a focused pug-dog expression.
“What about you?” Eileen asked.
“I remain blissfully ignorant.”
“Kind of a sometime thing, huh?”
Bloch weighed in. “That can’t be bad,” she mused. “Not for politics. Did she see Jesus?”
Mitch shook his head. “I don’t think so. That’s not what she says, anyway.”
Bloch pouched out her lips. “If there’s no Jesus, we best keep it under our hats for now.”
“What does God tell her about all of this?” Eileen asked, sweeping her hand over the excavations, the revealed bones.
Mitch scowled. “Not much, probably. It doesn’t seem to be that kind of relationship.”
“What good is he, then?” Eileen asked petulantly.
Mitch had to look hard to tell if she was joking. She appeared to be, and she lost interest as some photographers came too near a grid square propped against a table and almost knocked it over.
After berating them and resetting the square, she came back and patted Mitch on the shoulder. “Good for Kaye,” she said. “Just proves that we’re a tough old species. We can survive anything, even God. How about you? Going to come back soon and dig with us?” Eileen asked.
“No,” Mitch said. “That’s over for me.”
“Shame. He was the best,” Eileen said to Bloch. “A real natural.”
Mitch helped Kaye back into the van. Kaye sat and massaged her calves. Her feet were numb and she had had a difficult time climbing the stairs out of the shelter.
Stella and Celia and LaShawna walked in a tight cluster to the van and climbed in behind her, then sat quietly. John Hamilton and Mitch stood talking as they waited for Bloch to rejoin them.
Kaye could hear her husband and John, but only a scatter of words between whisks of dusty wind.
John was saying, “… and bad. They say it’s worse with two. Summer in Maryland is going to be tough. She wanted to come here. Just couldn’t.”
Kaye licked her dry lips and stared forward. Stella placed her hand on Kaye’s shoulder and touched her
cheek.
“How are you all doing?” Kaye asked abruptly, swiveling around despite the twinges in her thighs and surveying the girls—the young women.
“We’re just fine,” LaShawna said dreamily. “I wish I knew what this was all about.”
“I think-KUK I do,” Celia said. “Human politics.”
“How are you, dear?” Kaye asked Stella.
“We’re fine,” Stella said, and her cheeks flushed butterfly gold with something like fear, and something like joy.
She gets it, Kaye thought. What we just saw. She’s like her father that way.
She watched Stella lean back in the seat and put on a distant, thoughtful expression, cheeks paling to beige. Celia and LaShawna sat back with her.
Together, they all folded their arms.
That evening, Stella and Celia and LaShawna sat in their own room in a motel in Portland. Kaye and Mitch and John Hamilton were in other rooms in the same motel; the girls had asked to be together, alone, “To just lie back and revert,” Stella had explained.
They had eaten with the others and watched Senator Bloch and Oliver Merton leave in a limo to fly back on a red-eye to Washington, D.C., and now they were relaxing and thinking quietly.
Seeing the bones had bothered Stella. Will was not much more than bones now. All that time, all that life; gone, leaving nothing but scattered rubble. Celia and LaShawna were also quiet at first, absorbed in their own individual thoughts.
They were saddened by the prospect of parting, but they all had things to do at home, loved ones to attend to. Celia was living with the Hamiltons and working with Shevite outreach services in Maryland and had her own life. LaShawna was getting her general education requirements at a local high school and planned on going to a junior college to study nursing. With her father, she took care of her mother, who was not getting around on her own much now, and her baby sister.
So much had changed in a few short months.
Stella sat up from a pile of pillows and made a circling motion with her palm, dipping her head like a bird, and LaShawna seconded. Celia gave a little groan of weary protest but joined them on the bed farthest from the curtained window. They palm-touched and sat in a circle, and Stella felt her cheeks flush and her ears grow warm.
“Who we are,” LaShawna sang. “What we are/ who. What we are/ who. Get us in, get us out/ who.”
It was a chant that helped them focus; they had done it before at Sable Mountain when the teachers and counselors weren’t watching or listening, and especially after a difficult day.
The room filled with their scents. A little something like electricity passed between them and LaShawna started to hum two tunes, two sets of over and under. She was good at that, better than Stella.
The day seemed to melt away and Stella felt her neck and back loosen and they began to remember all the good they had experienced together.
“Lovely. We’re in it,” LaShawna said, and started to hum again.
“I can-KUK feel the baby,” Celia said. “He’s so small and quiet. He smells like Will, a little—if I remember, it’s been so long.”
“He smells like Will,” Stella agreed.
“It’s so good to be with both of you again,” Celia said.
“I had a dream about this, weeks ago,” LaShawna said. “I was awake, with my friends, but everything was dark, and I was looking so far down into myself it hurt. I saw something down there. A little glow hidden way at the bottom…”
“Like what?” Celia said, squirming in fascination.
“Let me show you,” LaShawna said, and squeezed their palms tightly.
Celia bit her lip and closed her eyes. “I’m looking deep.”
“Can you see them?” LaShawna whispered. She chanted softly, “If you take away/strip it down/ all the days and years/ all the thoughts… Who are we? Umm-hmm. Down there deep in a cave. Get us in, get us out/ Who?”
Stella reached down to where LaShawna was, using her palm-touch for guidance. She actually did see something at the bottom of a long, deep well, three somethings, actually, and then four, the baby within her joining. Like four luminous golden kernels of corn, hidden away at the bottom of four separate tunnels of memory and life.
“What are they?” Celia asked quietly, eyes still closed. Stella closed her own eyes now to see these peculiar things more clearly.
“They’re like us, part of us, but way below us,” LaShawna said.
“They’re so quiet-KUK, like they’re asleep. Peaceful.”
“The baby’s is not much different from ours,” Stella observed. “Why is that?”
“Maybe they’re the important ones and we’re just shadows trapped way up here. We’re ghosts to them, maybe. Ummm… I’m losing them… I can’t see them now,” LaShawna said, and opened her eyes with a sigh. “That was spooky.”
The waking dream ended and left Stella feeling a little woozy. The air in the room had turned cold and they shivered and laughed, then clasped hands tighter, listening to their own heartbeats.
“Spooky,” LaShawna said again. “I’m glad you see them, too.”
They sat that way for hours, just touching hands and scenting and being quiet together until the dawn came.
7
LAKE STANNOUS
The third snow of the year came in late October, fat flakes slipping down and nodding between the trees and over the dirt and gravel pathways throughout Oldstock. Kaye hurried from her classroom in the overheated school building, clutching a parka over her shoulders. Puffing, her lips and fingers numb, she met Mitch and Luce Ramone on the path to the infirmary—a name Kaye hated, with its emphasis on dysfunction. Mitch wrapped her in his arms and she marched quickly, close to his side, looking up at him with tight lips and large eyes.
“We have the partners and side mothers in the birthing room,” Luce said. Most of the children—the Shevites, Kaye corrected—did not speak in doubles, over-under, around them, more out of politeness than any obvious reserve or caution. Slowly, over the last four months, the Shevites had come to trust Kaye and Mitch, and together they had worked out procedures to calm mothers about to give birth. Kaye did not know whether it was mumbo jumbo or a new way of doing things. She was about to find out. Now there were twelve pregnancies in Oldstock and Stella was serving a very important function. Keep reminding yourself. Be proud. Be courageous. Oh, God.
So much was being learned. So many questions were being answered. But why my daughter? Why someone who, if she dies, takes me with her, soul if not body?
The last two months had been the happiest in Kaye’s life, and the most tense and awkward.
They gingerly climbed the snowy steps into the old infirmary and down the linoleum-tiled floors, along the plastered hallway lit with dim incandescent bulbs, into the delivery room.
Stella was sitting on the bent and padded bench, puffing and blowing. A rusty gurney covered with a foam mattress and clean white sheets waited for her if she wanted to sleep. She gritted her teeth into a contraction.
Kaye set about arranging the medical instruments, making sure they had been kept in the old autoclave long enough.
“Where did you get these antiques?” she asked Yuri Sakartvelos as he came in, hands held in the air, dripping from the scrub station. Yevgenia smiled at Kaye and her wrinkled cheeks grew golden-green as she slipped the gloves on Yuri’s hands.
“Pray they don’t have to do anything,” Kaye whispered grimly to Mitch.
“Shush,” Mitch warned. “They’re doctors.”
“From Russia, Mitch,” Kaye responded. “How long since they’ve done anything but set a broken leg or dress a wound?”
As Mitch caught a catnap, in the twelfth hour of Stella’s long delivery—that had not changed much, difficult births for babies with large heads—Kaye stood outside the infirmary and breathed the cold early morning air and watched the snow.
While Kaye taught in the village school, Mitch had helped the Shevites restore a small lumber mill and clear the debris from
the old concrete foundations and start putting up new houses for the families.
It was not yet clear what shape those families would take; probably not just father, mother, and children, and on this score the Sakartvelos were as clueless as Kaye and Mitch. There had never been so many Shevites together before; though some said there were larger communities in the East and the South, perhaps in New Jersey or Georgia or Mississippi, lying low.
The young Shevites were designing the homes. They felt uncomfortable when deprived of company for more than a few hours. Large windows Kaye could certainly understand, after so many years in cramped dorms and even cells. But there was no double pane glass available, not yet, and winters in Oldstock could be cold. While the foundations provided some constraint on their imaginations, some of the drawings were looking very odd indeed: bathrooms and toilet facilities without walls—“Why privacy? We know what’s happening”—and narrow “scent shafts” connecting adjacent homes. The whole idea of privacy seemed up for grabs.
Kaye’s best moments were spent with Stella and Mitch and Stella’s deme. Most of the students in Kaye’s class were part of Stella’s deme. Her curiosity and relative ease with these intruder humans, her parents, seemed to blend over into those closest to her, and that extended family had adopted Kaye and Mitch.
The Sakartvelos, on the other hand, treated Kaye and Mitch civilly enough, but seldom socialized. They seemed a little standoffish even with the others in their community, perhaps because of early trauma and years of living alone, growing middle-aged with little company.
The concept and practice of demes was still growing, but the demes formed thus far made up the most stable of all the social structures and experiments going on in Oldstock, and the oldest. Stella’s deme consisted of seven permanent partners—three males and four females—and twelve exchange members.
Deme partners usually did not mate, though they could fall in love—Stella was very definite about that, but not very clear what it entailed. Romantic love was running wild in Oldstock, complete with exchanges of dried fruit, perfumes when available, carved wooden statues, but such infatuations seldom had anything to do with sex.