Prophet of Bones (43 page)
“If you’ll excuse me,” the woman said, and stepped into the other room.
The receptionist returned with her boss and Paul repeated himself.
“How numerous we talking?” the boss asked. He was a heavyset man in his fifties with a sun-creased face.
“Hard to say.”
“That so?” The boss’s expression was unreadable.
The boss got on the phone and made a call. The conversation was short, and Paul couldn’t hear what transpired. “If you’ll take a seat,” the boss said.
Paul and Lilli sat and waited until a police car arrived, its lights spinning.
It was a county officer who arrived first.
The officer stepped through the door, and the boss gestured to Paul and Lilli, and Paul repeated himself a third time.
“Who died?”
“A lot of people. The workers at a laboratory. The whole lab. Everyone.”
The officer looked at Paul, sizing him up, then got on his radio, requesting backup.
The baby started to cry.
“Does the child need assistance?” the policeman asked.
“Milk,” Lilli said. “If you can get it, baby formula.”
The man looked at the infant, then at Lilli, his confusion growing. For a moment he seemed on the edge of asking something, a question about the child that was not a child, but then he kept it to himself.
Two more police cars pulled up outside. More policemen. More questions. Paul tried to tell them about James. “He was the first to die. His throat was cut.”
“Where did this happen?”
“An island called Flores.”
“Do you have a last name for James?”
Paul glanced out the front window, saying softly, “Herpetology, mate.”
An older cop with a thick gray mustache seemed to be in charge.
“We’re going to need you to come back to the station.”
Paul and Lilli stood and followed the officers outside. More people had gathered on the sidewalk now, staring at the clump of police cars.
“We’d like to get a complete statement from you,” the officer said. “For the record.”
“I’ll tell you everything,” Paul answered. It’s what prophets did.
They ushered Lilli to one squad car, Paul to another.
Lilli started to pull back, but Paul told her, “Just go with them. It’s okay. Just tell them what you know.”
She nodded and let herself be steered away gently by the arm.
Paul’s officer opened the back door of his squad car, and Paul ducked his head and sat. He pulled the report out and set it on the car seat next to him. The papers were crinkled but still legible. A dozen pages that might or might not matter. The car idled while the officer talked to the newspaper boss for a moment, and then the two shook hands and the officer headed for the car.
Paul watched the newspaper boss head back inside his building to write the next day’s headline. He wondered what it would look like. He wondered if there would be future headlines, in other cities, as the scope of what had happened was finally revealed.
The officer climbed into the car and shut the door. The back of his head was slick with sweat. “It’s gonna be a hot one today,” Paul said.
“Yeah,” the cop said. “Feels like.”
The cop started the car and eased past the throng of onlookers crowding the sidewalks. They stood staring from both sides of the wide city street, watching the police lights. Paul took off his eye patch and looked out the window at the curious faces, with both his good eye and the ghost eye, and then he closed his eyes in silent prayer as the cop car pulled down the road, leaving the faces behind.
SOURCES
Arka, I. W., and J. Kosmas. “Passive without passive morphology? Evidence from Manggarai.” Australian National University conference paper (2002), available online at
http://hdl.handle.net/1885/41059
.
Behar, D. M., M. F. Hammer, D. Garrigan, R. Villems, B. Bonne-Tamir, M. Richards, D. Gurwitz, D. Rosengarten, M. Kaplan, S. Della Pergola, L. Quintana-Murci, and K. Skorecki. “MtDNA evidence for a genetic bottleneck in the early history of the Ashkenazi Jewish population.”
European Journal of Human Genetics
12, no. 5 (May 2004): 355–64.
Bertranpetit, J., and F. Calafell. “Genetic and geographical variability in cystic fibrosis: evolutionary considerations.”
Ciba Foundation Symposium
197 (1996): 97–114.
Biello, D. “Searching for God in the brain.”
Scientific American Mind
18, no. 5 (October/November 2007): 38–45.
Clan Donald USA website. Online at
http://clan-donald-usa.org/CDCMS/index.html
.
Clarey, M. G., J. P. Erzberger, P. Grob, A. E. Leschziner, J. M. Berger, E. Nogales, and M. Botchan. “Nucleotide-dependent conformational changes in the DnaA-like core of the origin recognition complex.”
Nature Structural and Molecular Biology
13, no. 8 (August 2006): 684–90.
Currie, L. A. “The remarkable metrological history of radiocarbon dating [II].”
Journal of Research of the National Institute of Standards and Technology
109, no. 2 (March/April 2004): 185–217.
Cuthbert, A. W., J. Halstead, R. Ratcliff, W. H. Colledge, and M. J. Evans. “The genetic advantage hypothesis in cystic fibrosis heterozygotes: a murine study.”
Journal of Physiology
482, pt. 2 (January 15, 1995): 449–54.
Derenko, M. V., B. A. Maliarchuk, M. Wozniak, G. A. Denisova, I. K. Dambueva, C. M. Dorzhu, T. Grzybowski, and I. A. Zakharov. “Distribution of the male lineages of Genghis Khan’s descendants in northern Eurasian populations” [article in Russian].
Genetika
43, no. 3 (March 2007): 422–26.
Deshpande, O., S. Batzoglou, M. W. Feldman, and L. L. Cavalli-Sforza. “A serial founder effect model for human settlement out of Africa.”
Proceedings of the Royal Society B
276, no. 1655 (January 2009): 291–300.
Dienekes’ Anthropology Blog. “Forbidden DNA sequences.” Available online at
http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2007/01/forbidden-dna-sequences.html
.
Doughty, B. R. “The changes in ABO blood group frequency within a mediaeval English population.”
Medical Laboratory Sciences
34, no. 4 (October 1977): 351–54.
Electric Scotland, “MacDonald Genetic Project.” Available online at
http://www.electricscotland.com/webclans/m/macdonald_genetic.htm
.
Electric Scotland, “The Norse Code.” Available online at
http://www.electricscotland.com/history/articles/norse.htm
.
Fehér, O., H. Wang, S. Saar, P. P. Mitra, and O. Tchernichovski. “De novo establishment of wild-type song culture in zebra finch.”
Nature
459, no. 7264 (May 28, 2009): 564–68.
Founder Scots DNA website. Online at
http://www.ourfamilyorigins.com/scotland/founderscots.htm
.
Gabriel, S. E., K. N. Brigman, B. H. Koller, R. C . Boucher, and M. J. Stutts. “Cystic fibrosis heterozygote resistance to cholera toxin in the cystic fibrosis mouse model.”
Science
266, no. 5182 (October 1994): 107–9.
Hammer, M. F., A. J. Redd, E. T. Wood, M. R. Bonner, H. Jarjanazi, T. Karafet, S. Santachiara-Benerecetti, A. Oppenheim, M. A. Jobling, T. Jenkins, H. Ostrer, and B. Bonné-Tamir. “Jewish and Middle Eastern non-Jewish populations share a common pool of Y-chromosome biallelic haplotypes.”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
97, no. 12 (June 2000): 6769–74.
Hampikian, G., and T. Andersen. “Absent sequences: nullomers and primes.”
Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing
12 (2007): 355–66.
Kirsch, J. “Moses Unmasked.”
U.S. News & World Report
special issue,
Mysteries of Faith: The Prophets
(2006).
Kwiatkowski, D. P. “How malaria has affected the human genome and what genetics teaches us about malaria.”
American Journal of Human Genetics
77, no. 2 (August 2005): 171–92.
Morwood, M., and P. van Oosterzee.
A New Human: The Startling Discovery and Strange Story of the “Hobbits” of Flores, Indonesia
. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 2007.
Nebel, A., D. Filon, B. Brinkmann, P. P. Majmuder, M. Faerman, and A. Oppenheim. “The Y chromosome pool of Jews as part of the genetic landscape of the Middle East.”
American Journal of Human Genetics
69, no. 5 (November 2001): 1095–1112.
Nebel, A., D. Filon, M. Faerman, H. Soodyall, and A. Oppenheim. “Y chromosome evidence for a founder effect in Ashkenazi Jews.”
European Journal of Human Genetics
13, no. 3 (March 2005): 388–91.
Oriá, R. B., P. D. Patrick, H. Zhang, B. Lorntz, C. M. de Castro Costa, G. A. Brito, L. J. Barrett, A. A. Lima, and R. L. Guerrant. “APOE4 protects the cognitive development in children with heavy diarrhea burdens in Northeast Brazil.”
Pediatric Research
57, no. 2 (February 2005): 310–16.
Page, M. Book review of C. M. Woolgar, D. Serjeantson, and T. Waldron,
Food in Medieval England: Diet and Nutrition
.
English Historical Review
123, issue 501 (2008): 419–21.
Pestana de Castro, A. F., P. Perreau, A. C. Rodriques, and M. Simoes. “Haemagglutinating properties of Pasteurella multocida type A strains isolated from rabbits and poultry.”
Annals of Microbiology
(Paris) 131, no. 3 (May/June 1980): 255–63.
Peters, F. E. “Abraham’s Miraculous Journey.”
U.S. News & World Report
special issue,
Mysteries of Faith: The Prophets
(2006).
Sheler, J. L. “The Lure of the Prophetic Word.”
U.S. News & World Report
special issue,
Mysteries of Faith: The Prophets
(2006).
Sykes, B.
Adam’s Curse: A Future Without Men
. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004.
_____
.
Blood of the Isles: Exploring the Genetic Roots of Our Tribal History
. London: Bantam, 2006.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
No book is an island. This one in particular owes an immense debt of gratitude to a great many people. I’d like to thank the many biologists, archaeologists, geneticists, and anthropologists throughout the years whose combined body of knowledge I have been the fortunate recipient of. Without their scientific efforts, this novel could never have been written. I’d like to thank the scientific thinkers John Hawks, Razib Khan, Carl Zimmer, Dienekes Pontikos, and Blaine T. Bettinger, whose blogs are amazing repositories for cutting-edge thought in the fields of genetics and anthropology. This book would have looked very different without their influence. I’d like to especially thank the archaeological dig team who did the
real
work on the Flores fossils. I’ve never met you—and nothing about this book was meant to intersect in any way with
anyone
associated with the real find—but without the discoveries made in Flores this work of fiction would have lacked a factual foundation to build upon. You have my respect and gratitude. If at any point in the novel I got the science wrong, it is nobody’s fault but my own.
I’d like to thank my writer friends Jack Skillingstead, Michael Poore, Nancy Kress, and Marc Laidlaw for hanging out with me and talking shop during the time I was writing the novel. I’d like to thank Patrick Swenson and the Rainforest Writers’ Village for giving me a quiet place by the water where I could finish the book. I’ll be back. I’d like to thank the entire Seattle-area writer community for being so open and supportive toward a new member of the kindred.
I’d also like to thank Aaron Schlechter, my editor, who believed in this novel and took a risk on it. And, of course, my agent Seth Fishman, and the Gernert Company, who got the book into the right hands and made the sale possible. I’d like to thank my parents again, in this book, too, because you can never thank your parents enough. I’d like to thank Jonathan Long for the great discussions on science and religion back when we were lab partners. I’d like to thank St. Patrick’s Elementary School and the old church where I was an altar boy. I have fond memories of those days. And Bob I’d like to thank for walking the ice all those years ago. You did fall through. And you pulled yourself out.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
T
ED
K
OSMATKA
was born and raised in northwest Indiana and spent more than a decade working in various laboratories before moving to the Pacific Northwest. His short fiction has been nominated for both the Nebula Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award and has appeared in numerous year’s best collections. He now works in the video-game industry, where he’s a full-time writer at Valve, home of
Half-Life, Portal,
and
Dota 2.
Henry Holt and Company, LLC
Publishers since 1866
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, New York 10010
Henry Holt
®
and
®
are registered trademarks of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.