Prophet of Bones (7 page)

That first day of employment, his trainer met him in the lobby, and he followed her around as she explained his duties. He watched her slender form as they walked the cement corridor. She was young, another student. Brown skin, beautiful dark hair.

“This job isn’t what you think” was the second thing she said to him. The first was: “I hate to break your heart.”

They took the stairs up to the second floor. “You come highly recommended, let’s get that out of the way” she said.

“I do?”

She shrugged. “Let’s assume. And you have stellar grades, too. You must, or you wouldn’t be here.” Her accent was subtle, hard to place at first. “But still, there are no strings you can pull to get a different set of duties, so don’t bother asking. The new hires all want the monkeys, but that’s not what you’ll be working with mostly.”

“Okay,” he said. He followed her deeper into the facility. The research building was huge. It was a maze of rooms upon rooms. White walls and white tile. The top two floors were dedicated to the research library, but the rest belonged to the animals. She wore her dark hair in a ponytail that exposed the delicate curve of her neck.

“Besides that,” she said. “You only
think
you want the monkeys. Monkeys are dangerous. They’re fast and insanely strong for their size. Seven times stronger than humans, pound for pound. Plus, they bite.”

She paused before a set of double doors and withdrew a pair of green foam earplugs from the breast pocket of her lab coat. Paul could already hear the barking from the other side, so he knew what to expect. As they entered the kennel, the sound became deafening. “And these are the dogs,” she shouted, in case there was any doubt. “Another popular aspiration for new hires. But you won’t be working with these either, unless one of the regular workers calls in sick for the day, in which case you’ll probably be responsible for the bigger dogs.” She gestured toward the row of German shepherds at the end. “They poop more,” she added by way of explanation.

They took another flight of stairs.

“We house all kinds of animals in the facility. A few for the veterinary program and the psychology department, but most are for the genetics program, the medical school, and the experimental sciences.”

“Which animals do you take care of?”

“Me?” She smiled, revealing neat white teeth and a dimple. “The monkeys, of course.”

“I had a feeling.”

She went on: “The monkeys and dogs are the positions that everyone seems to want, and that you probably won’t stay long enough to get. So as the new guy, you’ll get what’s left over.”

They came to a door at the end of the hall. The trainer swiped a badge and opened the door. She hit the lights.

Paul’s mouth dropped open.

“And this is where you’ll be working,” she said, sweeping an arm out in front of her. “Welcome to the mouse room.”

*   *   *

During his junior and senior years, Paul dove into archaeology. He examined the ancient remains of
Homo erectus
and
Homo neanderthalensis.
He examined the un-men:
afarensis,
and
Australopithecus,
and
Pan.

He examined the shape and skin and touch of a girl named Lillivati.

They took a class together: ancient skeletal anatomy.

She also trained him for his job in the biology department. Her specialty: monkeys. Together they studied for tests, and they found reasons not to study, stealing moments between classes and work shifts.

Lillivati’s long fingers clasped the small of his back, pulling him into her, dark hair an inky pool around her head while she whispered to him in Gujarati. Though he asked, she’d never reveal what she said to him in these moments. She’d only smile, her dark eyes half-lidded, and say, “It’s dirtier than you think.”

Students at most Ivy-caliber schools could be divided into three categories. First (of course) were those who were rich. Second were those who might or might not be rich but had, more significantly, gotten scholarships. Third were those who were going to graduate with a debt approximating the national deficit.

This third category could be subdivided. Some of these debt-indentured students would, after graduation, go on to make an amount of money even more obscene than the world-crushing debt they’d labor under. They’d work their asses off. Money would rain from the sky and sluice into the overflowing gutters of their bank accounts. They would, in fact, pay off their obscene debt without too much trouble and later wonder what all the fuss was about. Anybody could do it, right? They’d succeed largely because they were computer savants or good-looking, charismatic lawyers with the attention surfeit of competitive Chinese rice farmers and eidetic recall of corporate tax law, or because they’d invent Google or something. In short, they’d be able to pay off their obscene debt because they came out of the box preoptimized for dollar acquisition. The rest of the students in that third category were screwed, though.

Lillivati was in the first category; Paul, the second.

They used her room for sex, because her parents could afford for her not to have a roommate.

She was a year older than him and graduated early.

And true to her first words to him: she left. Or had to leave.

I hate to break your heart.

First, home to India. Then graduate school in Seattle.

Paul threw himself into his schoolwork, taking independent study in the osteochronology of ancient anthropoid remains.

In the world of archaeology, the line between man and un-man could be fuzzy, but it was never unimportant. To some scientists,
Homo erectus
was a race of man long dead, a withered branch on the tree of humanity. To those more conservative, he wasn’t man at all; he was other, a hiccup of the creator, an independent creation made from the same toolbox. But that was an extreme viewpoint.

Mainstream science, of course, accepted the use of stone tools as the litmus test. Men made stone tools. Soulless beasts didn’t. Of course there were still arguments, even in the mainstream. The fossil KNM-ER 1470, found in Kenya, appeared so perfectly balanced between man and un-man that an additional category had to be invented: near man. The arguments could get quite heated, with both sides claiming anthropometric statistics to prove their case.

Like a benevolent teacher swooping in to stop a playground fight, the science of genetics arrived on the scene. Occupying the exact point of intersection between the slopes of Paul’s two passions in life—genetics and anthropology—the field of paleometagenomics was born.

And here he found his calling.

He received a bachelor’s degree in May and started a graduate program in September. A year later, there came a letter and an airline ticket, and a company called Westing flew him to the East Coast for a job interview.

They sat in a conference room. The company logo was a DNA double helix.

“I won’t finish my master’s for another six months,” he told them, confused by the offer.

“We’re more interested in ability than academic credentials,” the chief interviewer said. “The schools can’t keep up. Field techniques are obsolete by the time the textbooks are printed. If you want to see the curriculum three years early, sign our employment contract.”

“This is all moving so fast.”

The interviewer smiled. “Like the field itself.”

They shook hands over a glossy table.

Three weeks after that, he was in the field in Tanzania, sweating under an equatorial sun, collecting samples for later laboratory analysis. He drank quinine water by the gallon and dodged malaria.

They flew him back and forth between labs and dig sites.

All the while, he worked closely with his team, learning the proprietary techniques for extracting DNA from bones that were fifty-eight hundred years old.

Bones from the very dawn of the world.

9

The flight to Bali was seventeen hours, and another two to Flores by chartered plane—then four hours by jeep over the steep mountains and into the heart of the jungle. To Paul, it might have been another world. Rain fell, then stopped, then fell again, turning the road into a thing which had to be reasoned with.

“Is it always like this?” Paul asked.

“No,” Gavin said. “In the rainy season, it’s much worse.”

The jeep slalomed along the rutted track, throwing rooster tails of black mud as it negotiated the pitched landscape.

Paul gripped the jeep’s roll bar to steady himself and stared out into the thick growth that slid past on both sides of the road.

Flores, isle of flowers. From the air it had looked like a green ribbon of jungle thrust out of blue water, a single bead in the rosary of islands that stretched between Australia and Java. Sulawesi lay to the north, New Guinea to the northeast. The Wallace line—a line more real than any border scrawled across a map—lay miles to the west, toward Asia and the empire of placental mammals. But here a stranger emperor ruled.

Paul was exhausted by the time they pulled into Ruteng. He rubbed his eyes. Children ran alongside the jeep, their faces some compromise between Malay and Papuan: brown skin, strong white teeth like a dentist’s dream. The town crouched with one foot in the jungle, one on the mountain. A valley flung itself from the edge of the settlement, a drop of kilometers.

The jeep wound its way through the crowded streets, past shops, and houses, and thronging tent bazaars, past smaller clapboard structures whose function Paul could only guess at. Small vans and motorbikes shouldered each other for space at intersections, horns blaring. If there were driving laws, Paul couldn’t deduce them from the available data.

Rail-thin pariah dogs lurked in the gaps between buildings. Paul noted their colors with a geneticist’s eye, reading their genes as they picked through the garbage, tails curved upward over their bony hips. The yellow one was Ay; the black-and-tan, at/at. And others: E/m, bb, s/i. He saw no solid blacks. That color variety hadn’t been among the first dogs carried across the Wallace line in bamboo rafts. That kind didn’t exist here.

The jeep pulled to a stop in front of a small two-story structure.

The men checked into their hotel, handing over 170,000 rupiah apiece. Paul had no idea if that was expensive or not, but he found his room basic and clean. He slept like the dead.

The next morning he woke, showered, and shaved. Gavin met him in the lobby.

“It’s a bit rustic, I admit,” Gavin said. His hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail, keeping it clear of his face.

“No, it’s fine,” Paul said. “There was a bed and a shower. That’s all I needed.”

“We use Ruteng as a kind of base camp for the dig. Our future accommodations won’t be quite so luxurious.”

Back at the jeep, Paul checked his gear. It wasn’t until he climbed into the passenger seat that he noticed the gun, its black leather holster duct-taped to the driver’s door. It hadn’t been there the day before.

Gavin caught him staring. “These are crazy times we live in, mate.”

“And the times require researchers to carry guns?”

“This is a place history has forgotten. Recent events have made it remember.”

“Which recent events are those?”

“Religious events, to some folks’ view. Political to others’.” Gavin waved his hand. “More than just scientific egos are at stake with this find.”

They drove north, descending into the valley and sloughing off the last pretense of civilization. “You’re afraid somebody will kidnap the bones?” Paul asked.

“That’s one of the things I’m afraid of.”

“One?”

“It’s easy to pretend that it’s just theories we’re playing with—ideas dreamed up in some ivory tower between warring factions of scientists like it’s all some intellectual exercise.” Gavin looked at him, his dark eyes grave. “But then you see the actual bones; you feel their weight in your hands, the sheer factual irrefutability of their existence…” Gavin stared at the road ahead. Finally, he said, “Sometimes theories die between your fingers.”

The track down to the valley floor was all broken zigzags and occasional rounding turns. Gavin leaned into the horn as they approached blind curves, though they never came across another vehicle. The temperature rose as they descended. For long stretches, overhanging branches made a tunnel of the roadway, the jungle a damp cloth slapping at the windshield. But here and there that damp cloth was yanked aside, and out over the edge of the drop you could see a valley Hollywood would love, an archetype to represent all valleys, jungle floor visible through jungle haze. On those stretches of muddy road, a sharp left pull on the steering wheel would have gotten them there quicker, deader.

“Liang Bua,” Gavin called their destination. “The Cold Cave.” And Gavin explained that this was how they thought it happened, the scenario: this steamy jungle all around, so two or three of them went inside to get cool, to sleep. Or maybe it was raining, and they went into the cave to get dry—only the rain didn’t stop, and the river flooded, as the local rivers often did, and they were trapped inside the cave by the rising waters, their drowned bodies settling to the bottom to be buried by mud, and sediment, and millennia.

The men rode in silence for a while before Gavin said it, a third option, Paul felt coming: “Or they were eaten there.”

“Eaten by what?”

“
Homo homini lupus est
,” Gavin said. “Man is wolf to man.”

They forded a swollen river, water rising to the bottom of the doors. Paul felt the current grab the jeep, pull, and it was a close thing, Gavin cursing and white-knuckled on the wheel, trying to keep them to the shallows while the water seeped onto the floorboards. When they were past it he said, “You’ve got to stay to the north when you cross; if you slide a few feet off straight, the whole bugger’ll go tumbling downriver.”

Paul didn’t ask him how he knew.

Beyond the river was the camp. Researchers in wide-brimmed hats or bandannas. Young and old. Two or three shirtless. Men with buckets, trowels, and bamboo stakes. A dark-haired woman in a white shirt sat on a log outside her tent. The sole commonality between them all: a kind of war weariness in their eyes. They’d been here long enough to have been worn down by the place.