The Find (13 page)

The attack behind the gym was broken up by Mr Myers, and the ringleader, Barry Sutherland, eventually penned a letter of apology which was published in the
Echo
. Barry became very religious (and was now the local constable). Still, Scott had not felt like returning to school, not even to show, as the principal suggested, that he wasn't intimidated. Why go there where he didn't fit in? Right to an education? Learning what, exactly? By then, he had the Internet, the electronic tit, which offered endless information and virtual everything, and fit better around life with Mac... Now, abruptly weaned, Scott lay on his back in actual darkness, saw the stars, listened to the night — human footsteps, and laughter, unidentifiable rustlings, a sudden, animal shriek — while the pole wandered, and the earth boiled inside.

‘Thanks for the education,' he said to Felix when he finally got up to leave.

‘Who
is
he?' he heard Kevin ask as he made his way to his tent.

‘We're all asking,' Jason said.

‘Let it go, Jayce,' Greta said then. ‘I like him.'

I should not find it astounding, Anna typed, sitting only six metres away from Scott in her tent, that two such opposites as Mike Swenson and Scott Macleod can co-exist, but I do. If I ignore Swenson and focus on Scott I feel stronger. The important thing is the work itself, which is why he is here in the first place. I need to remain calm and patient, and take the longer view...

♦ ♦ ♦

Scott turned on his flashlight, opened his book at random, stumbled over
deoxyribonucleic acid, nucleotides, cytosine, guanine, thymine, adenine
— somehow, he gathered, these words translated themselves into proteins: flesh, blood, bones. Skipping, he found a chapter with actual people, scientists in laboratory in Massachusetts, thirty years ago, trying to discover which part of the enormously long sequence of code correlated with the disease. They needed a sign, a marker; to find that, they needed blood samples from several generations of an affected family — a large family or else the result would be inconclusive. They worked for years, getting nowhere except better at the technical side of things. But they were unable to give up because they wanted so badly to find their answer, knew it was right there, hidden, invisible, but there in the test tubes of blood they could pick up and hold in their hands.

—
♦ —

JASON AND FELIX WERE JACKHAMMERING
—
jackhammering
— a trench a metre away from the skull area.

‘I thought we did everything with a paintbrush!'

‘Later! When they're done, we'll hand-cut through the layers closer to the concretion…lever them off.' Anna was shouting, her voice tinny in Scott's ear. Even with ear protectors on, everyone could hear and feel the sound of metal on rock, its echo, the pulses of the generator and compressors. Over by the cliff, the same thing was happening; if one team was quiet, the other was not.

When at last the noise did stop echoing from the cliffs, the silence following it seemed unreal: a weird, Zenish, cloudlike thing that descended on them: a happy nothing happeningness, just the buzz of crickets and other bugs while they studied the ground, tapped and pried, brushed, scraped and sifted.

They had knee protectors, although not everyone wore them. They squatted or knelt on the rock, looking down at what was before them, trying to see how it was made and how it would break. No one said much; no one took an extra break, even when the sun hung right above them, burning up the shade.

Tap, tap and tap: the shale held out once, twice, three times or more and then shattered, perhaps into countless pieces, perhaps into two thick layers, then a thin one, and then a hard lump that might or might not be of significance. Steadily, they worked towards the specimen itself, invisibly wrapped in its own especially dense stone: compacted clay, Felix explained, in which the spaces between the grains of sediment had been filled with a mineral deposit.

‘It's like working blind,' Scott said. They'd gathered for lunch under the canopy rigged up for shade, and were drinking water that was tepid but nonetheless wonderful to drink, and eating folded-over slices of bread and cheese. ‘But the rest of you, you've a clear picture in your minds of what you're looking for?'

Anna said that sometimes what you saw outside and what you pictured in your head could come together and reveal what was really there. What you saw outside could alter the image you carried in your mind and likewise the picture in your mind could open up what was in front of you — or blind you to it: that was how you read the rock.

She put her food down and fetched a book, tapped her finger on the drawing inside.

‘Ours,' she said, ‘is going to be
something
like this, not exactly the same, of course: it may or may not have had tooth sockets like this one,' she explained, brushing crumbs from the page, ‘or it could be a toothless with a kind of cartilaginous filtering system, like the baleen plates of a whale. Then again, it might have a beak, though I tend to feel... Come, let me show you,' she told him, and leaving the others to finish their food, they squatted on the safe side of the trench in the rock by the skull area.

Her hands moved between book and rock. There might or might not be a crest on the top of the head, here. There would be upper and lower
temporal fenestrae
, openings in the skull something like this, and also pre-orbital openings, nostrils and rings of bony plates around the sockets of the eyes.

‘If we're lucky, there will be a cast of the
inside
of the braincase. Hereabouts, in the ventral position, beneath the braincase, will be the
occipital condyle
. It's a ball and socket articulation with the first vertebra… You know I'm going in a little closer than I'd like,' she told him, ‘because I really want the skull to come out in one piece. The rock is dense, and then you add in the plaster and so on — we just could end up with something too heavy to be lifted out, and have to cut it in two after all the trouble we've gone through. It's a juggling act.'

She pointed out the position of the elongated cervical vertebrae. The dorsal vertebrae she expected to be fused together to make a
notarium
with a
superneural
plate to support various moving parts… Ribs, of course. ‘Underneath the notarium we'll likely find a sternum—' her hand migrated briefly to the centre of her chest, ‘to which the flight muscles attach…broad, with a kind of keel, do you see?'

He saw how much she saw.

But who invented all these words? And how many more were there? Words for all the parts of everything that were normally invisible, for the insides of bodies, the layers of the earth, the kinds of rock, words for the invisible parts of things that first had to be seen or guessed about, and then given names.

They moved around and down. She spoke of extra ribs,
gastralia
, the position of the sacrum and the pelvis, the caudal vertebrae: the tail.

‘My territory!' Scott joked, and she grinned at him from behind her sunglasses, her skin lightly varnished with sweat. A damselfly with huge turquoise eyes darted between them.

‘Actually, the tail plays a very important role in flight. So, do you have more of a picture of it now? The limbs are straightforward enough: femur, fibula and tibia, tarsus, metatarsals, humerus—' and here she pointed to her own arm, opened her hand: ‘Radius, ulna, carpals, metacarpals, phalanges.'

Her hands were small with square palms, the fingers proportionately long. There would be a word for that, too, he thought and found himself opening his own hand.

‘Not so different, then,' he began.

‘Different to what?'

‘Humans!' he said. ‘Apart from that fourth finger.' He pointed to the picture in the book, looked back at her, frowned as if making a serious comparison — and then they were both laughing and the rest of the team looked up from their lunch. Lin smiled; Jason and Greta, sitting shoulder to shoulder, stared. Felix chewed steadily on, studying them as if they were some mildly interesting kind of wildlife.

‘There are some very significant structural differences! But, really, you're absolutely right,' she told him. ‘The vertebrate skeleton really is remarkably similar throughout the subphylum.' The
what
? From above came a sudden burst of deep, throaty calls: the raven,
Corvus corax
, she had told him earlier, after which his hometown was likely misnamed. Ravens, she'd said, had very large brains, proportional to their size, and they showed some highly intelligent, almost scientific behaviour.

‘That was the female call, I think.' It was a strange, lovely sound and they both fell silent until it was done.

‘The avian skeleton, too, has many similarities with our own.' She smiled. ‘And with that of the pterosaur — but the differences are what matters.'

When he looked up to see where Anna was, often he'd see her checking on him too: sometimes their eyes would veer away; at other times, she might give a nod, the twitch of a smile.

Her naming of things seemed to make them more alive — he wanted more of it, but at times it was almost too much to bear that every part of the world about him, and of himself, was so much more than it seemed.

♦ ♦ ♦

Scott took his turn in town. He drove their garbage to the dump and arrived at the Mountain View just as night fell: why not stay where once he worked? He did not want to go home, and the room would be paid for whether he used it or not.

Marilyn Jensen was working what used to be his job.

‘Hey, star,' she said, raising her eyebrows as she handed over the key with its worn cedar tag. ‘Saw you on TV! But Lauren's still mad about you dumping the job. She'll just flay you.'

‘I'll skip the breakfast tomorrow, then.' He smiled back at Marilyn, appreciating what there was to like: the plumpness of her cheeks, the full breasts. She was three years older than him, and already a mother twice.

He threw himself on the double mattress, appreciating the foam and springs as if they'd just been invented, and called Phoenix House. Minutes stretched out, slowly passed and passed again while someone went to fetch his father: he could hear footsteps and voices, their TV, in the background, and over it all, someone loudly complaining about someone else being out of order.

‘Son? That you?'

‘You doing okay?'

‘Why don't you try it? The world hurts,' Mac said, his voice slow. ‘It hurts, like every sound and every ray of light is made to torture you. Whose fucking idea was this?'

‘You're nearly through the worst.' Mac didn't respond to this, but almost a week had passed, and he was
still there
. The doctor there had scared him to death, Mac said.
At las
t, Scott thought.

‘You've never got this far before. Hang in. I'm proud of you.' A few minutes after they hung up, Scott's cell rang.

‘You're right. I'm over the hump. But Scotty, come and get me. They're such cruel bastards here. I can do this better at home.'

‘I
can't
,' Scott told him and pressed End, wished he could keep pressing it over and over, wiping out all the crap that ever was:
end, end, end, end
.

He had Anna's laptop so he could download her email for her. He put it on the shelf in the closet and hid it beneath the spare pillow before setting out to meet Matt at Joe's.

‘So what's it like up there with that blonde with the awesome boobs: you getting what you deserve or are those nerds top of the food chain?' Matt nodded at the TV above the bar, and there it was: the dig. Himself, kneeling on the rock. Greta in her tight top. Jason and Felix carrying a sack of plaster over to the storage area. Anna photographing the grid. Mike Swenson supervising his team.

‘Scientists at Big Crow hope to settle a dispute as to whether these animals could actually fly, or had to launch themselves from clifftops and glide. Dr Swenson, an expert in flight, is a long-time champion of the gliding theory—'

‘That something this big could fly, as opposed to glide, is just a fashionable new theory. It's gained momentum of late. But I'm not convinced. I'm hoping we can finally settle the matter. Some very exciting things will emerge I'm sure. This site is comparable to recent finds in Brazil...'

‘It may be the Brazil of the North, but the scientists at Big Crow sure have a difficult job ahead of them and a big one, too.'

Matt, clean-shaven, almost straight-looking, apart from the multiple earrings, leaned back in his chair, interlaced his fingers and then pushed his arms up and back, palms turned out, for a stretch. It was ironic, Scott often thought, that his dealer friend looked so much like the type that mothers liked their girls to bring home: clean-shaven, a good provider.

‘So what goes on up there?'

‘Work, work, work. No pay, though.'

‘I'd like to help out,' Matt said, sitting a little straighter, ‘but this is business.'

‘No, I didn't mean that. I'm thinking of cleaning up a bit.'

‘Think away,' Matt said, laughing. But later, when he drove Scott back to the Mountain View, they sat in the carpark with the radio, lights and engine on.

‘You want to sample? It's very good.'

‘I'm okay, thanks,' Scott said.

‘What about the nerds?' Matt asked as Scott made to get out of the vehicle, ‘Don't they need to relax? I could come up with a good price, if it was worth my while. Hey, is it true you're going to blast the cliff to get those fossils out? Can people come watch?'

Marilyn finger-waved to him as he came in, and looked as if she'd like to talk, but he went straight up and downloaded email. Anna had 402 new messages. He had 26, deleted them all and then slipped into the Net.

Dr Michael Swenson, he learned, was the Chair of Palaeontology, currently taught Diapsid Anatomy, Foundations of Palaeontology, and Cladistics; he declared an interest in proto-avian species, had a list several screens long of articles with long titles. Students could rate their professors and here Swenson came out average. Some gave him five stars and some none. Comments ranged from
Totally inspiring!!
to KYD, which decoded as
keep your distance
. You liked him or you loathed him. Or liked, then loathed?

Scott turned out the light, dreamed of flying effortlessly through a huge dry canyon, the sides and floor dotted with little camps. He came lower, saw a homely, grey-haired man sitting with a woman and child by a campfire, and knew at once that it was Dr Coneally. Scott had read about him the night before: how a park ranger drove at night through the Grand Canyon to give him the news from his lab — they had found a correlation, a marker, which narrowed the location of the Huntington gene down to somewhere on the short arm of Chromosome 4. It was the culmination of over a decade of work, the high point of his entire life, Coneally said.

♦ ♦ ♦

By eight o'clock the next morning it was already warm; Anna had sent Jason over twice to ask Dr Swenson if he would please ask his crew to turn their music down. Twice, the volume had briefly diminished, and then increased: a thumping beat, wailing guitars, crescendos of percussion: things she'd heard twenty years ago and had not wanted to remember since, music with a brain-scouring, aggressive quality she did not want in her life, least of all here, where she was trying to work. The sound itself was rough-edged, blurred with echo, verging on pure noise. It was impossible to hear each other, or the birds and the insects; even the ring of hammer on chisel was more of a vibration in the hands and arms than an actual sound. She knew it would make things worse if she tried to confront Mike, willed herself to stay on her side of the dividing line, but felt as if she might at any moment burst into tears or scream.