Prophet of Bones (39 page)

The old man pushed through a set of security doors and led Paul into a laboratory. “This is the anthropogeny lab,” he said.

The lab was white and sterile. Jars and microscopes graced shelves that lined one wall. Banks of computers occupied the other side of the room.

“It took us years to perfect the procedure,” the old man continued. “This is where we made them.”

“Made what, exactly?” Paul asked.

The old man ignored him, moving ahead with the guided tour. “The jars are the miscarriages. Chromosomal abnormalities, mostly.”

Paul saw then that the jars contained fetuses. A moment earlier, the jars had seemed to hold formless brown shapes that could have been anything. But now he recognized them for what they were, all at once, the whole wall of monsters. Arms and legs and twisted hands. Misshapen skulls. Faces like blooming flowers. Things with tails.

“The difference in chromosome count is small,” the old man continued. “But it does complicate things. Less in the first generation, though. Backcrosses are the real problem.”

“I still don’t understand.”

“You will. Follow me.”

Paul followed him through the lab to a set of double doors that led to a long hallway. He had a sense that they were leaving the main building and entering one of the wings.

The old man carded them through a security door, and they stepped into a dark room. A moment later, the lights clicked on with an audible click. They were standing in an enormous atrium. It took Paul a moment to recognize it for what it was. An ape house.

As if in response to the light, the apes moved to the front of their cages and began to call out. Soft hoots at first, but growing louder and more intense as the moments passed.

“This is where we house the juveniles,” the old man said.

Floor to ceiling, twenty-five feet high, cages were stacked one atop another like children’s building blocks. Each cage five feet cubed. Each housing a young chimp. The noise was deafening.

Paul lifted his hands to cover his ears.

The old man smiled. “Of course, the staff came up with their own name for this room.”

He spread his arms wide while the chimps shrieked all around them. The cages shook, the dark shapes inside spitting in rage.

“They call it hell.”

*   *   *

Lowering his arms, the old man continued walking. Paul stayed close, his hands still over his ears. Behind them, the two guards followed at a distance.

The old man led them through another set of doors and into an outdoor area. High cement walls closed them in. It was obviously an animal run of some kind.

“For the very young chimps,” the old man offered. “Before they get too dangerous.” At the far end of the run was a narrow steel door. He opened it with a key that hung around his neck.

“A bit old-fashioned,” he said. “But then, I’m an old man, and old-fashioned security gives me comfort at times.”

He led them into another building.

“And here,” he said, stepping aside so that Paul could enter, “here is the final destination for your bone sequences. This is where the data goes. This is what it is all for.”

Paul looked around, trying to take it all in. They stood just outside a vast nursery.

Paul moved forward. His mouth hung agape. It was impossible to process what he was seeing.

In this room, a dozen toddlers played behind glass.

Things almost human. They wore diapers and nothing else.

“What…” he began, but he could not finish. Could not formulate a coherent sentence.

“In Aristotle’s time, chimps were unknown to civilization—did you know that?”

“No.”

“It’s true. Aristotle was preoccupied with nature, and with man’s position within it. And all the time that he was writing, and theorizing, and formulating his understanding of what it meant to be human, there were these beasts living in the jungles of darkest Africa—beasts with ten fingers and ten toes, small primates who are so like us, and not. And what would Aristotle have thought, I wonder? If he’d seen one. If he’d known that they existed and walked the same world as us.”

“These aren’t chimps.”

“No.”

“What are they?”

“Clones,” the old man said. “
Australopithecus. Homo erectus. Homo habilis.
Our newest creations.”

Paul moved closer to the glass. He touched it with his hand, feeling the cool, smooth surface. On the other side, small miracles played. Rangy-limbed. The inhuman side by side with the almost human.

“And others, too,” the old man continued. “The Denisovans. KNM-ER fourteen-seventy.
All
the archaeological finds. Here they are, Paul. The bones you’ve been studying your entire life. Here they are.”

The old man put a hand on Paul’s shoulder. “That’s what I offer.”

Paul looked at him. Speechless.

“And next will be Flores,” the old man said softly.

*   *   *

Paul stood, entranced, and watched the toddlers play for nearly an hour. Beyond the glass, activity in the nursery continued without noticing him. A man and woman in white lab coats took turns caring for the children.
Children.
The word snagged in his mind. Not quite right. But close. Closer than any other word that might be applied. For what else could they be called? Yet they were most decidedly not like any children he’d ever seen before—strange little child-things that scrambled around the room.

“Do you want to go inside?”

Paul could only nod. Martial took him to the door and let him into the glass room. The children backed away at first, fearful of the large stranger. Paul took a knee, and one of the little ones moved across the padded floor. Crawling. This one was bare-skinned, but with a face like no toddler he’d ever seen. The skin a medium brown, the hair a shade lighter than the skin. An unusual combination, but not unique.

“Hold your hand out,” the old man said.

Things that aren’t man. But almost man. It crawled around in a diaper.

The child was a boy, Paul decided. Something masculine in the face, even at so young an age. The hair was tawny-colored, like wet beach sand. Straight and coarse. Paul held out his hand, and the child moved closer and wrapped its fist around his finger. Muscles bunched in its shoulder, and Paul marveled at its strength.

“One of our most vigorous specimens.” The old man had come up behind him without Paul noticing.

“What is he?”

“We call him Samson.”

“No, I mean … what is he? Which one? Which kind?”

The old man looked down at Paul appraisingly. “Which one do you think? I’m curious to hear your guess.”

Paul looked at the child. It looked very human, but it was hard to say how it might develop. The infants of many animals looked very much alike—more alike than the adult forms. It was one of the mysteries of biology. The babies of many species were indistinguishable, while the adult forms varied wildly. A baby puma and a baby house cat looked very much alike.

“One of the Java specimens,” Paul said.

The old man smiled. “A reasonable guess.”

“Am I correct?”

“It’s possible.”

“Aren’t you going to tell me?”

“No, I only said I was curious to hear your guess, not that I’d give you an answer. But there’s still more to see. Would you like to see more?”

“More than this?”

“So much more.”

Martial led him out of the nursery and down a long hall to still another room. Martial handed him a mask. “Until the children are vaccinated, we can’t have you breathing on them without a mask. We have to vaccinate them for
everything
. What is a minor sickness in us tends to kill them. It’s like the early colonial die-offs, but worse.”

Paul donned the mask and stepped through the door.

“I’ll leave you to it,” the old man said. “But before I do, I have something for you.” He motioned to one of his guards. The guard handed Paul a folder.

“The report from your computer technician,” the old man explained. “It was saved on the flash drive. We took the liberty of printing it out for you.”

Paul opened the folder. Inside were a dozen pages of type.

“Interesting reading,” Martial offered. “Feel free to peruse it at your leisure. But for now…” He gestured to the door.

Paul stepped inside. The old man didn’t follow.

Paul wasn’t alone in the room. Lillivati was sitting in a rocker, holding a bottle in an infant’s mouth.

The infant was tiny, little more than a newborn. Its bare limbs were covered with a fine, downy coat of hair a few centimeters long. Its feet were square and blocky—the toes slightly long, but aligned in the familiar configuration. Only the slightest gap between the first and second toes gave any hint that the feet were anything but human. The face, though, could scarcely be confused. Broad and projecting, with a low, bony brow and a sloped forehead. The top of the skull seemed small in comparison to the size of the face. The mouth simian, lipless. The eyes were large and dark and lacked any whites at all. The sclera of its eyes as black as any ape’s. The ears were the ears of any hominoid, delicate and curled and perfect. The nose was broad, cartilaginous, projecting—a nose truly, and not the nasal depression found in apes.

Although the infant was small enough to be a newborn, it looked up when Paul entered the room and watched him alertly with its dark eyes. It reached up and held the bottle in its hands. The thumbs were prehensile, grasping the bottle.

Lilli rocked the child as she fed it.

When Paul finally tore his gaze away from the infant to look at her, he saw that there were tears in her eyes.

“It’s impossible,” she said.

*   *   *

The guards took them back to their room an hour later. The door latch made a loud click behind them.

A moment later, Paul tried the doorknob. “Locked,” he said.

They both sat on the bed. They sat for a long time without speaking.

Finally, Paul opened the folder and began reading the report. He thought of Alan on the bridge. His black eyes, his broken nose. The results in the report were clear. When Paul finished reading, he closed the folder.

“What is that?”

“It’s a phylogenetic analysis of the Flores sequence.”

“What does it say?”

“Other,” he said softly.

“What?”

“They’re divergent,” Paul said. “The bones from the Flores dig are from a population divergent from humans.”

“How divergent?”

“More divergent than the age of the earth.” They were an other who used stone tools. Who hunted as humans hunted and lived as humans lived. Beings who weren’t human. And whose existence no religion on earth had ever mentioned.

There was too much to take in. Most of all, the question. And finally she voiced it.

“Why show us all this?” she asked. “The lab, the report, the babies.”

Paul didn’t answer at first. “To brag,” he said. “For men like him, without somebody to show it to, it makes it matter less.”

“But he has colleagues. He has the politicians to show. So why us?”

Paul shook his head. “I suspect not many people have seen what we’ve seen—and I bet most of them work here. He can only show people he trusts, or people he can control. Which is the same thing. But politicians…” Paul let the word linger. “They wouldn’t want to see this. They’d make a point of it. Even if they saw it, they wouldn’t see it. Plausible deniability. They’d
have
to not see it.”

“Maybe,” Lilli said, but she looked doubtful. “But there’s got to be more than just ego behind it.”

“Never underestimate ego.”

Lilli’s face went slack. She lay down on the bed, resting her head on the pillow. Paul knew that she’d come to the same conclusion he had regarding another matter. “Regardless of whatever else it might mean,” she said, “it most surely and definitely means one thing in particular.”

Paul nodded but didn’t speak.

“It means he’s never going to let us leave.”

41

Paul walked the river ice. An endless ribbon of white. He saw tree branches scrawled black against a chalky winter sky. The girl was up ahead somewhere, he knew, though he couldn’t see her. Around the bend. Just out of sight. He followed her footsteps in the snow. Though he shouldn’t, he ran. The ice cracked like gunshots, but that meant it was safe. Then the sound changed, dying out, becoming another kind of sound. A sound like old leather. Paul rounded the bend in the river, the girl’s name on his lips … but when he looked, there was no girl. Only a hole in the ice where she’d fallen through.

Paul opened his eye and turned his head toward the doorway. He nudged Lilli awake, and she startled. He realized she’d been lost in her own dream.

Paul swung his feet to the floor and walked to the door. “Yes?” He spoke through the thick wood.

There came the sound of a key in the lock, and a moment later the door swung open.

It was the guard. The same big one who’d first come for them. He stuck his face into the room. “Breakfast is in ten minutes,” he said. He shut the door behind him. The key jangled in the lock.

“Breakfast?” Lilli said, dumbfounded.

They showered and dressed quickly.

Ten minutes later, the guard was back. He led them along the corridor, then down a flight of stairs that opened to an outdoor veranda. The old man was already there, sitting at a vast table spread with a white tablecloth and bearing several bowls of fruit.

“Coffee?” he asked.

Paul nodded as he sat. “I’ll take some.”

A server materialized out of nowhere and poured coffee for the three of them. Then the server just as quickly disappeared again, sliding behind the hedge that divided the veranda from the rest of the exterior space.

“Lillivati Gajjar,” the old man said. “A beautiful name for a beautiful woman. Bilingual. You attended college with Paul. Trained in primatology. Until recently, employed as a museum researcher.”

“
Still
employed,” she said.

“You’ve lived in the U.S., Sri Lanka, and India. Divorced. You tried teaching, but your contract wasn’t renewed.”

“It wasn’t renewed because I wasn’t interested.”

“Really? You weren’t interested, or they weren’t interested?”