Otherness (10 page)

There were skeletons everywhere!

Big ones, men in their prime. Smaller ones . . . women, children . . . little babies . . .

None showed discernible traces of violent death. No sign they had ever been moved after burial. The cemetery-dumping scenario evaporated in smoke, never to be raised again.

We keep working shifts, digging, loading trucks, hauling the dross of fifty years away to the far end of Hyperion . . . though some suspect even that step might prove temporary. For the most part, we work silently, though each of us knows what ferment is crossing the airwaves. A ferment of newer, more imaginative theories.

There is talk of death squads, like they've had from time to time in South America, with vigilantes scouring the city for "undesirables" and burying their victims in the dump. Credible, perhaps, if they had killed dozens, even hundreds, but no way in the numbers we are finding. The same goes for satanic or cannibalistic cults. More colorful notions involve everything from extraterrestrial vivisections to a lost underground civilization. One fellow suggests that something about the specific gravity of bones causes them to migrate through garbage . . . though where they came from in the first place he has no idea.

My favorite idea of the current crop is
spontaneous calcification
. It is based on homeopathy—the notion that all objects carry the imprint of any other object that was ever in contact with them. And what did every single object in Hyperion Landfill have in common? Every one was touched countless times by human beings! Next throw in a crackpot reversal of fossilization—the process by which groundwater leaches calcium from bones and replaces it with the stuff of rock—and you've got an idea that would have surely made it to the New Age best-seller list, back in my parents' generation.

Leave trash alone long enough, and it starts precipitating out skeletons
.

In other words, garbage recapitulates its makers. We are what we waste.

A fine, maniacal notion. I don't dismiss it lightly.

Or are they metaphors? Perhaps guilt festers and makes tangible a city's crimes.

What, after all, did we do to the homeless, the forgotten? Those spilled out of mental hospitals to fend on their own? In effect, we threw them away. The malnourished, the ill educated, the drug racked and brain wounded. We threw out all the possibilities they might have brought to light with strong hands and minds, just as surely as those big trucks carried off all else inconvenient and disposable.

I look back on Persia, China, India . . . wherever I dug and found middens of bones, thinking them burial grounds of real people. Perhaps the same thing happened there, as well! In each culture
shame
may have leaked from the living, seeping underground to wherever lost hopes go, congealing into hideous shape within the ground. . . .

No, no! I have
felt
the bones in my hands. They are real, stretching away in all directions. They were once draped in flesh, I know it.

People are welcome to their crackpot theories. But all metaphysics aside, something happened here. Something terrible.

SEPTEMBER

Nobody is bothering with police cordons anymore. Everyone and anyone is welcome to come up to Hyperion, to help dig. Sometimes it seems half the population under fifty must be here, assisting with the excavation, browsing through the detritus, carting things away. It looks like a scene from some fantastic D. W. Griffith epic about the construction of the pyramids, only on a vaster scale. Here, under only the loosest of direction, a mob, a horde, a
civilization
labors amid dust and stink to undo the greatest single edifice built by their ancestors, taking it apart by hand and hauling the bits off in trucks, cars, wheelbarrows.

What our grandparents created here—what they
buried
—is fast growing apparent, and they don't like it. They wander among us, old folks, confused, distracted, grabbing us by the sleeve and begging us to stop. When questioned, none of them can explain why. Tearfully, they just say that it's wrong. That we must leave it be.

It's the same with officials, politicians, judges. The eldest issue pronouncements, file writs. We ignore them and dig on, uncovering layer after layer of the dead.

A million skeletons so far, with no end in sight.

Reports come in from other cities. Of landfill boneyards in New York, Atlanta, Seattle . . . though none as extensive or dating so far back as Los Angeles. Perhaps that means it happened first and most profoundly here, in L.A.

But what? What happened here? Whence came the dead?

Zola claims that the skulls are different from ours. She points to a slight, statistical difference in the shape of the occipital lobe.

"They were more like Neanderthals than we are," she says, with the eagerness of a proselyte. "They would have been more intuitive, more empathic beings. . . ."

Les and I think all this must have driven her over the edge. None of us can see any difference worth getting excited over.

On the other hand, maybe we don't want to see. Any difference that held true would support the scariest theory—that we are
all
murderers.

That we're invaders.

That the true, rightful denizens of L.A. lie buried where our grandparents put them, after slaying them, one by one. In the course of taking over their city, their lives.

The fact that the idea comes straight out of classic sci-fi doesn't repudiate it. The paranoiac films of those days may reflect an instinctual terror felt by those who
saw
no difference in their friends and family, but somehow knew them for replacements, doppelgangers. Somehow knew their own turn was coming.

It might explain why old folks act the way they do. Deep inside, at some inner core, they are still aliens. Long ago they adopted the memories, behavior, attitudes of the Angelenos they replaced—becoming passionate Democrats, Republicans, junkies, and Zen Buddhists—while deep down part of them still knows what they were.

But we, their descendants, were born thinking ourselves human, if a bit strange for living in this bizarre city. We grew up glorying in quirky ideas—wild individuality, diversity, cool—and most of all the novel notion that "weird" is no four-letter word.

If someone killed two million Angelenos, our first instinct is pure, ironic.

To avenge them.

OCTOBER

There is another theory. We might simply have thrown them all away.

The bodies, I mean.

Just the bodies.

They were ours, and we exchanged them. Traded them in. Got new models. Threw out the old.

Why not? It suits our style. Despite all the conservation laws passed for harder times. Despite draconian recycling. Despite a soaring cost of living caused by wastrel days, we still think basically the same. Like magpies, we'll try whatever's shiny, new.

What if someone once made our grandparents an offer they couldn't refuse?

"Sign here, and I'll show you how to molt and be reborn livelier, more interesting people! Do this and your city will soar heights, explore depths, no other has ever known. Only in order to trade up, you must forget this pact. Forget the husks you shed. Toss them into the trash along with this week's newspapers, detergent boxes, TV-dinner trays! Toss them out, and live!"

I wonder about the fine print. Would Angelenos even stop to read it, in their rush to sign?

I also wonder if I'm going mad.

WINTER

Hyperion is deep . . . deeper than we ever imagined. Yet, slowly, inexorably, it empties itself of all we had put there.

Where the detritus is taken, I don't know. Only that it climbs a hundred trails out of this valley, by machine, by human back, sometimes in a floating haze that seems to scale the dusty hills without aid. Like a superfluid—like some entity awakened—the waste departs, spilling from a container unable to hold it any longer.

Our dross, our toys, our broken machine servants, our used wrappers . . . how could we ever think the bonds linking us to our things could be broken simply by throwing them away? Destiny firmly connects the maker and the made. User and used. Creation and creator. So it was in the myths of Ur and Thebes. So it always shall be.

We never really threw our things away. We just put them down for a while.

Now they are coming home.

Picked clean, it holds a certain sterile beauty. A valley of bare, trampled clay between steep hills. Bare clay covered with four million skeletons, the only man-made things now left behind.

It makes a pretty scene—Hyperion Boneyard. Peaceful.

All the hordes are gone. Just a few of us remain, sitting around, waiting.

Things are happening just over the rim, where Los Angeles can be heard fast turning into something different again. By now one theory or another must have proved true. Or else no one cares anymore about past truths, so involved are they in rapid changes. Merging the reclaimed into what's shiny new. But some of us stay in Hyperion, fed from time to time by kindly visitors. We wait, keeping vigil for others who cannot.

Sometimes it rains. Bones sink slowly into the softening mud.

Full of nutrients, I hear. Bones are. They belong in good earth.

Yesterday I thought I saw a condor, winging near the sun.

Yes, yes. I know things are going on elsewhere. I'll go take part again, really. Soon as I've rested. Thought a few things out. Seen events through to their conclusion.

I'll just stay a little while longer . . . and watch the first oaks grow.

It all began when my publisher sent me out on what used to be called a Chautauqua circuit—public seminars and panels and rubber-chicken dinners—to promote my books. That's when I began noticing something very strange about the way people have started thinking these days.

Publicity tours can be pretty tedious at times. Even science-fiction conventions start to blur after too long an exposure. Maybe that's why I started seeing things I otherwise would have ignored.

It started innocuously enough: my second novel was about genetically engineered dolphins, and its no secret that—next to unicorns—those friendly sea mammals are just about everybody's favorite creatures. People at these gatherings seemed mostly to like the way I handled them.

Inevitably, though, someone in the crowd would ask what I think of porpoise intelligence here and now, in the real world.

It's predictable. There is something compelling about a species that so obviously (for lord knows what reason)
likes us
. People want to know more about them. They ask how much progress has been made in teaching dolphins to speak our language. Or have researchers yet learned to talk to them in theirs?

Such questions are based on so many implicit assumptions . . . I really hate disappointing folks, but there is a duty to tell the truth.

"I'm not a real expert," I tell them. "But the data are pretty easy to interpret. I'm afraid real dolphins simply aren't all that smart. Those folktales about high cetacean intelligence, at or above our level, are just stories. It's a shame, but they just aren't true."

This, apparently, is not how a lecturer remains popular. Not once has the reaction varied.

"
But you cant know that
!"

A universal mutter of agreement. Angry, nodding heads.

"
If we can't communicate with them, it must be because we're not smart enough
!"

I reply as best I can. "Well, Professor Luis Herman of the University of Hawaii has worked for a long time with the deepwater species
Steno bredanensis
—widely recognized as one of the brightest breeds. Dr. Herman has, indeed, proved that the higher dolphins are pretty smart animals. They can parse four- and even five-element command 'sentence' signals at least as well as those famous 'sign-language' chimpanzees. In fact, the evidence for dolphins is more rigorous than it is for chimps."

This has them smiling. But I make the mistake of going on.

"Nevertheless, the basic problem-solving skills of even the brightest porpoise cannot match those of a human toddler. I'm afraid if we want other minds' to talk to, we're going to have to look elsewhere . . . or construct them ourselves."

Again, instant protests.

"
But . . . but there may be other ways of dealing with the world intelligently than those we imagine
!"

"
Right
!" another person agrees. "
Those problems the dolphins had to solve were designed by human beings, and may miss the whole point of cetacean thought! In their environment they're probably as smart as we are in ours
!"

How does one answer statements like those?

I've listened to recorded dolphin "speech," transposed in frequency. The sounds are repetitive, imprecise . . . clearly filled with emotional, not discursive, information.

Subjective opinion, to be sure. So I'd patiently describe the brilliantly simple experiments of Herman and others, which had forced
me
to abandon my own early optimism that it was only a matter of time until we learned to understand dolphin speech.

But this only seemed to deepen the questioners' sullen insistence that there must be
other varieties of intelligence
.

Finally, I gave up arguing.

"You know," I said, "every group of nonscientists I've talked to reacts this way. It's really had me wondering. But now I think I've figured it out."

They looked puzzled. I explained.

"Anthropologists tell us that every culture has its core of central, commonly shared assumptions—some call them zeitgeists, others call them dogmas. These are beliefs that each individual in the tribe or community will maintain vigorously, almost like a reflex.

"It's a universal of every society. For instance, in the equatorial regions of the globe there's a dogma that could be called machismo, in which revenge is a paramount virtue that runs deeper even than religion. From Asian family centrism to Russian pessimism, there are worldviews that affect nations' behavior more basically than superficial things like communism, or capitalism, or Islam. It all has to do with the way children are raised.