Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction

by Leigh Grossman

  Finally, grimly, he broke the trance in which the thoughts had held him. He worked deliberately, forcing himself to do what he knew must be done.

  He took off his windbreaker and carefully wrapped the shoulder-blade palette and the pipe inside it, leaving the lamp. He let himself down into the fissure and crawled, carefully protecting the bundle that he carried. In the cave again, he meticulously fitted the blocks of stone together to block the fissure mouth, scraped together handfuls of soil from the cave floor, and smeared it on the face of the blocks, wiping it away, but leaving a small, clinging film to mask the opening to all but the most inquiring eye.

  Luis was not at his camp on the terrace below the cave mouth; he was still on his errand into the village.

  When he reached his hotel, Boyd made his telephone call to Washington. He skipped the call to Paris.

  * * * *

  The last leaves of October were blowing in the autumn wind, and a weak sun, not entirely obscured by the floating clouds, shone down on Washington.

  John Roberts was waiting for him on the park bench. They nodded at one another, without speaking, and Boyd sat down beside his friend.

  “You took a big chance,” said Roberts. “What would have happened if the customs people…”

  “I wasn’t too worried,” Boyd said. “I knew this man in Paris. For years he’s been smuggling stuff into America. He’s good at it and he owed me one. What have you got?”

  “Maybe more than you want to hear.”

  “Try me.”

  “The fingerprints match,” said Roberts.

  “You were able to get a reading on the paint impressions?”

  “Loud and clear.”

  “The FBI?”

  “Yes, the FBI. It wasn’t easy, but I have a friend or two.”

  “And the dating?”

  “No problem. The bad part of the job was convincing my man this was top secret. He’s still not sure it is.”

  “Will he keep his mouth shut?”

  “I think so. Without evidence, no one would believe him. It would sound like a fairy story.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Twenty-two thousand. Plus or minus three hundred years.”

  “And the prints do match. The bottle prints and…”

  “I told you they match. Now will you tell me how in hell a man who lived twenty-two thousand years ago could leave his prints on a wine bottle that was manufactured last year.”

  “It’s a long story,” said Boyd. “I don’t know if 1 should. First, where do you have the shoulder blade?”

  “Hidden,” said Roberts. “Well hidden. You can have it back, and the bottle, any time you wish.”

  Boyd shrugged. “Not yet. Not for a while. Perhaps never.”

  “Never?”

  “Look, John, I have to think it out.”

  “What a hell of a mess,” said Roberts. “No one wants the stuff. No one would dare to have it. Smithsonian wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. 1 haven’t asked. They don’t even know about it. But I know they wouldn’t want it. There’s something, isn’t there, about sneaking artifacts out of a country…”

  “Yes, there is,” said Boyd.

  “And now you don’t want it.”

  “I didn’t say that. I just said let it stay where it is for a time. It’s safe, isn’t it?”

  “It’s safe. And now…”

  “1 told you it is a long story. I’ll try to make it short. There’s this man—a Basque. He came to me ten years ago when I was doing the rock shelter…”

  Roberts nodded. “I remember that one.”

  “He wanted work and I gave him work. He broke in fast, caught on to the techniques immediately. Became a valuable man. That often happens with native laborers. They seem to have the feel for their own antiquity. And then when we started work on the cave he showed up again. I was glad to see him. The two of us, as a matter of fact, are fairly good friends. On my last night at the cave he cooked a marvelous omelet—eggs, tomato, green pimientoes, onions, sausages, and home-cured ham. I brought a bottle of wine.”

  “The bottle?”

  “Yes, the bottle.”

  “So go ahead.”

  “He played a pipe. A bone pipe. A squeaky sort of thing. Not too much music in it…”

  “There was a pipe…”

  “Not that pipe. Another pipe. The same kind of pipe, but not the one our man has. Two pipes the same. One in a living man’s pocket, the other beside the shoulder blade. There were things about this man I’m telling you of. Nothing that hit you between the eyes. Just little things. You would notice something and then, some time later, maybe quite a bit later, there’d be something else, but by the time that happened, you’d have forgotten the first incident and not tie the two together. Mostly it was that he knew too much. Little things a man like him would not be expected to know. Even things that no one knew. Bits and pieces of knowledge that slipped out of him, maybe without his realizing it. And his eyes. I didn’t realize that until later, not until I’d found the second pipe and began to think about the other things. But I was talking about his eyes. In appearance he is a young man, a never-aging man, but his eyes are old…”

  “Tom, you said he is a Basque.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Isn’t there some belief that the Basques may have descended from the Cro-Magnons?”

  “There is such a theory. I have thought of it.”

  “Could this man of yours be a Cro-Magnon?”

  “I’m beginning to think he is.”

  “But think of it—twenty thousand years!”

  “Yes, I know,” said Boyd.

  * * * *

  Boyd heard the piping when he reached the bottom of the trail that led up to the cave. The notes were ragged, torn by the wind. The Pyrenees stood up against the high blue sky.

  Tucking the bottle of wine more securely underneath his arm, Boyd began the climb. Below him lay the redness of the village rooftops and the sere brown of autumn that spread across the valley. The piping continued, lifting and falling as the wind tugged at it playfully.

  Luis sat crosslegged in front of the tattered tent. When he saw Boyd, he put the pipe in his lap and sat waiting.

  Boyd sat down beside him, handing him the bottle. Luis took it and began working on the cork.

  “I heard you were back,” he said. “How went the trip?”

  “It went well,” said Boyd.

  “So now you know,” said Luis.

  Boyd nodded. “I think you wanted me to know. Why should you have wanted that?”

  “The years grow long,” said Luis. “The burden heavy. It is lonely, all alone.”

  “You are not alone.”

  “It’s lonely when no one knows you. You now are the first who has really known me.”

  “But the knowing will be short. A few years more and again no one will know you.”

  “This lifts the burden for a time,” said Luis. “Once you are gone, I will be able to take it up again. And there is something…”

  “Yes, what is it, Luis?”

  “You say when you are gone there’ll be no one again. Does that mean…”

  “If what you’re getting at is whether I will spread the word, no, I won’t. Not unless you wish it. I have thought on what would happen to you if the world were told.”

  “I have certain defenses. You can’t live as long as I have if you fail in your defenses.”

  “What kind of defenses?”

  “Defenses. That is all.”

  “I’m sorry if I pried. There’s one other thing. If you wanted me to know, you took a long chance. Why, if something had gone wrong, if I had failed to find the grotto…”

  “I had hoped, at first, that the grotto would not be necessary. I had thought you might have guessed, on your own.”

  “I knew there was something wrong. But this is so outrageous I couldn’t have trusted myself even had I guessed. You know it’s outrageous, Luis. And if I’d not found the grotto�
��Its finding was pure chance, you know.”

  “If you hadn’t, I would have waited. Some other time, some other year, there would have been someone else. Some other way to betray myself.”

  “You could have told me.”

  “Cold, you mean?”

  “That’s what I mean. I would not have believed you, of course. Not at first.”

  “Don’t you understand? I could not have told you. The concealment now is second nature. One of the defenses I talked about. I simply could not have brought myself to tell you, or anyone.”

  “Why me? Why wait all these years until I came along?”

  “I did not wait, Boyd. There were others, at different times. None of them worked out. I had to find, you must understand, someone who had the strength to face it. Not one who would run screaming madly. I knew you would not run screaming.”

  “I’ve had time to think it through,” Boyd said. “I’ve come to terms with it. I can accept the fact, but not too well, only barely. Luis, do you have some explanation? How come you are so different from the rest of us?”

  “No idea at all. No inkling. At one time I thought there must be others like me and I sought for them. I found none. I no longer seek.”

  The cork came free and he handed the bottle of wine to Boyd. “You go first,” he said steadily.

  Boyd lifted the bottle and drank. He handed it to Luis. He watched him as he drank. Wondering, as he watched, how he could be sitting here, talking calmly with a man who had lived, who had stayed young through twenty thousand years. His gorge rose once again against acceptance of the fact—but it had to be a fact. The shoulder blade, the small amount of organic matter still remaining in the pigment, had measured out to 22,000 years. There was no question that the prints in the paint had matched the prints upon the bottle. He had raised one question back in Washington, hoping there might be evidence of hoax. Would it have been possible, he had asked, that the ancient pigment, the paint used by the prehistoric artist, could have been reconstituted, the fingerprints impressed upon it, and then replaced in the grotto? Impossible was the answer. Any reconstitution of the pigment, had it been possible, would have shown up in the analysis. There had been nothing of the sort—the pigment dated to 20,000 years ago. There was no question of that.

  “All right, Cro-Magnon,” said Boyd, “tell me how you did it. How does a man survive as long as you have? You do not age, of course. Your body will not accept disease. But I take it you are not immune to violence or to accident. You’ve lived in a violent world. How does a man sidestep accident and violence for two hundred centuries?”

  “There were times early,” Luis said, “when I came close to not surviving. For a long time I did not realize the kind of thing I was. Sure, I livea longer, stayed younger than all the others—I would guess, however, that I didn’t begin to notice this until I began to realize that all the people I had known in my early life were dead—dead for a long, long time. I knew then that I was different from the rest. About the same time, others began to notice I was different. They became suspicious of me. Some of them resented me. Others thought I was some sort of evil spirit. Finally I had to flee the tribe. I became a skulking outcast. That was when I began to learn the principles of survival.”

  “And those principles?”

  “You keep a low profile. You don’t stand out. You attract no attention to yourself. You cultivate a cowardly attitude. You are never brave. You take no risks. You let others do the dirty work. You never volunteer. You skulk and run and hide. You grow a skin that’s thick; you don’t give a damn what others think of you. You shed all your noble attributes, your social consciousness. You shuck your loyalty to tribe or folk or country. You’re not a patriot. You live for yourself alone. You’re an observer, never a participant. You scuttle around the edges of things. And you become so self-centered that you come to believe that no blame should attach to you, that you are living in the only logical way a man can live. You went to Roncesvalles the other day, remember?”

  “Yes. I mentioned I’d been there. You said you’d heard of it.”

  “Heard of it? Hell, I was there the day it happened—August 15, 778. An observer, not a participant. A cowardly little bastard who tagged along behind that noble band of Gascons who did in Roland. Gascons, hell. That’s the fancy name for them. They were Basques pure and simple. The meanest crew of men who ever drew the breath of life. Some Basques may be noble, but not this band. They weren’t the kind of warriors who’d stand up face to face with the Franks They hid up in the pass and rolled rocks down on all those puissant knights. But it wasn’t the knights who held their interest. It was the wagon tram. They weren’t out to fight a war or to avenge a wrong. They were out for loot. Although little good it did them.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “It was this way,” said Luis. “They knew the rest of the Frankish army would return when the rear guard didn’t come up, and they had not the stomach for that. They stripped the dead knights of their golden spurs, their armor and fancy clothes, the money bags they carried, and loaded all of it on the wagons and got out of there. A few miles farther on, deep in the mountains, they holed up and hid. In a deep canyon where they thought they would be safe. But if they should be found, they had what amounted to a fort. A half-mile or so below the place they camped, the canyon narrowed and twisted sharply. A lot of boulders had fallen down at that point, forming a barricade that could have been held by a handful of men against any assault that could be launched against it. By this time I was a long way off. I smelled something wrong, I knew something most unpleasant was about to happen. That’s another thing about this survival business. You develop special senses. You get so you can smell out trouble, well ahead of time. I heard what happened later.”

  He lifted the bottle and had another drink. He handed it to Boyd.

  “Don’t leave me hanging,” said Boyd. “Tell me what did happen.”

  “In the night,” said Luis, “a storm came up. One of those sudden, brutal summer thunderstorms. This time it was a cloudburst. My brave fellow Gascons died to the man. That’s the price of bravery.”

  Boyd took a drink, lowered the bottle, held it to his chest, cuddling it.

  “You know about this,” he said. “No one else does. Perhaps no one had ever wondered what happened to those Gascons who gave Charlemagne the bloody nose. You must know of other things. Christ, man, you’ve lived history. You didn’t stick to this area.”

  “No. At times I wandered. I had an itching foot. There were things to see. I had to keep moving along. I couldn’t stay in one place any length of time or it would be noticed that I wasn’t aging.”

  “You lived through the Black Death,” said Boyd. “You watched the Roman legions. You heard firsthand of Attila. You skulked along on Crusades. You walked the streets of ancient Athens.”

  “Not Athens,” said Luis. “Somehow Athens was never to my taste. I spent some time in Sparta. Sparta, I tell you—that was really something.”

  “You’re an educated man,” said Boyd. “Where did you go to school?”

  “Paris, for a time, in the fourteenth century. Later on at Oxford. After that at other places. Under different names. Don’t try tracing me through the schools that I attended.”

  “You could write a book,” said Boyd. “It would set new sales records. You’d be a millionaire. One book and you’d be a millionaire.”

  “I can’t afford to be a millionaire. I can’t be noticed, and millionaires are noticed. I’m not in want. I’ve never been in want. There’s always treasure for a skulker to pick up. I have caches here and there. I get along all right.”

  Luis was right, Boyd told himself. He couldn’t be a millionaire. He couldn’t write a book. In no way could he be famous, stand out in any way. In all things he must remain unremarkable, always anonymous.

  The principles of survival, he had said. And this was part of it, although not all of it. He had mentioned the art of smelling trouble, the hunch ability. Th
ere would be, as well, the wisdom, the street savvy, the cynicism that a man would pick up along the way, the expertise, the ability to judge character, an insight into human reaction, some knowledge concerning the use of power, power of every sort, economic power, political power, religious power.

  Was the man still human, he wondered, or had he, in 20,000 years, become something more than human? Had he advanced that one vital step that would place him beyond humankind, the kind of being that would come after man?

  “One thing more,” said Boyd. “Why the Disney paintings?”

  “They were painted some time later than the others,” Luis told him. “I painted some of the earlier stuff in the cave. The fishing bear is mine. I knew about the grotto. I found it and said nothing. No reason I should have kept it secret. Just one of those little items one hugs to himself to make himself important. I know something you don’t know—silly stuff like that. Later I came back to paint the grotto. The cave art was so deadly serious. Such terribly silly magic. I told myself painting should be fun. So I came back after the tribe had moved, and painted simply for the fun of it. How did it strike you, Boyd?”

  “Damn good art,” said Boyd.

  “I was afraid you wouldn’t find the grotto and I couldn’t help you. I knew you had seen the cracks in the wall; I watched you one day looking at them. I counted on your remembering them. And I counted on your seeing the fingerprints and finding the pipe. All pure serendipity, of course. I had nothing in mind when I left the paint with the fingerprints and the pipe. The pipe, of course, was the tipoff, and I was confident you’d at least be curious. But I couldn’t be sure. When we ate that night, here by the campfire, you didn’t mention the grotto and I was afraid you’d blown it. But when you made off with the bottle, sneaking it away, I knew I had it made. And now the big question. Will you let the world in on the grotto paintings?”