Year Zero (8 page)

Not for lack of trying, Miranda guessed. The international effort must have been fantastic—and fruitless—to earn his anxiety. “What else could it be?” she asked. Bacteria and rickettsias were too large to miss. Given the state of modern immunology, they would be like elephants wandering through Lincoln Tunnel. A prion, then? They were the next new thing in alien contagions.

He shut down the line of inquiry. Back to Chairman of the Boxes. Boxes within boxes within boxes. “For now,” he said, “I don’t want you working with animals.”

“I hear your concern about this outbreak,” she said. “But Winston is separate. He’s not a problem.”

“He may be separate, but he is similar,” her father said. “Like viruses, he constitutes a kingdom unknown. We don’t know what he is, therefore he is a danger. I won’t argue.”

“There’s something more you need to know,” she blurted out. “About Winston. It’s important.”

His eyes darted from her to the pond. Shards of broken ice bobbed on the dark water.

How to sum it all up? “I boosted his growth,” she said. “In the womb. Winston was born the way you just saw him. Same height. Same weight. He was born fully formed.”

Ever the reductionist, her father broke the notion into manageable parts. “You grew him to full maturity? Inside a Plexiglas box? Impossible,” he said.

She skipped on. “I accelerated his development. The trigger was there. I just had to switch it on. That wasn’t the hard part.”

“What was the hard part then?”

“Switching the trigger off. Otherwise he would have died of old age a month ago. I had to find a way to stop it at the genetic level.”

“Miranda,” her father slowly entoned. “You had to find a way to stop what?”

“Aging. Death.”

“What?”

“I found the brake. I built it in.”

Her father was staring at her. “That can’t be.”

“Why not?” she said. “Because it’s me that found it?”

“Because, Miranda,” he said, “it’s not chronological with the research being done. It comes out of nowhere. And yes, because it’s you, an unpublished, unfunded sixteen-year-old girl working in secret by herself. With no assistance, with a few stolen instruments, out of the scientific community’s view, with no guidelines, no oversight.”

She interrupted. “Dad. Seventeen. For the record. Two weeks ago.”

His mouth opened and closed. Usually one of his secretaries faked it for him, some roses and a check. She watched his chagrin, a matter of jaw muscles. “If what you say is true,” he said, returning to Winston’s genesis, “you’ve jumped across the entire process.”

She
had
jumped their chronology. So what? “There’s nothing mystical about it,” she hurried on. Her ten minutes were nearly up. “It’s as natural as nature. Everyone’s so busy with gene mapping and cloning mice, they haven’t bothered going out into the world to test-drive the code. I did. That’s how I made the real discovery.”

She had his complete attention now. “You have to see this for yourself,” she said. “We have to go closer.” She hopped down to the next ledge.

“Get out of there, Miranda. It’s dangerous.”

“Just a little closer. So he can get a better look at you. Then you’ll see.”

“You don’t know what it’s capable of.”

“But I do,” she insisted. “He’s like a miracle. You know the law of unintended consequences. Results you didn’t build for.”

Something—her conviction, his curiosity—bridged their gap. He took off his trenchcoat, and lowered himself to her ledge. Miranda hopped one lower, and he followed. She didn’t take him all the way to the water. He was close enough.

Miranda unwrapped the final bundle, another lobster. She skated it on top of the ice a few feet away. “Here, Winston,” she called.

The monster came. He was a powerful swimmer, and his lime green dorsal ridge cast a small roostertail of water behind him. There was no showing off or fancy dolphin leaps this time. He came to a halt just behind the lobster and heaved his head and shoulders up through the thin ice, facing them.

Winston’s face was so fantastic that he was either revolting or supremely beautiful. There was no middle ground, no ordinariness by which to judge him. His head was wider than it was high, the nostrils were flared and black, his skin slick. He had lips, human shaped, but bleached of all colors. His teeth were a mess, crooked in gums too weak to keep order, broken from chewing on bones, rotting. The scalp wanted to grow, but his frog genes stunted it, and the result was pimpled follicles. Half in, half out of the ice, he reached for the lobster and started nipping away the shell. He burrowed into the viscera and took it like a string of spaghetti. All the while, he pretended not to be studying them.

“Hello, Winston,” said Miranda.

His ear stubs rotated.

“How’s my little prince?”

The monster spoke. He didn’t bark or hoot. His sounds were very close to human speech, a series of garbling and glottal stops. The string of wet noises marched on. He was talking about something with great consideration.

“It’s real language,” she informed her father. “If you listen carefully, now and then, you can make out certain words. Almost in English. I think his hyoid bone is malformed. He can’t shape sounds. But he definitely has things to say. And he understands me.”

“You’ve built yourself a pet. A parrot. You taught him words.”

“That’s the strange part.” Miranda looked back at her father. “The day he was born, he already knew how to speak. He came out of the incubator with a full vocabulary.”

“Enough,” her father snapped.

“That’s what I said. I didn’t believe it. But it kept happening.”

“What,” he demanded.

“He kept remembering things.”

He snorted. “Miranda.”

She went on. “Old things. Things from my past.”

“Stop.”

“Memories. My memories. I brought a box of my toys from home. I mixed them with stuff from the Goodwill. He sorted out what was mine.”

“You’re saying memory is hard-wired into our genetic code?”

“Or soft-wired. Why not? Genetic diseases are. They become part of us at the cellular level. Metabolic circuitry. Cellular wiring. Whatever you want to call it.”

“Memory is a genetic disease?” he scoffed.

“That’s a cynical way of putting it,” she said.

“I’ve had enough of this.” He turned away.

“What’s my name, Winston?” she suddenly asked. Her father paused.

The monster looked up from his lobster. His green eyes were bright and happy. “Mirn-dot,” he said.

“And him? Who is he?” She pointed at her father, who shook his head sadly.

Winston had that one all figured out. “Da-da,” he said.

“Tricks,” her father declared. “You showed him my photograph.”

Miranda faced her father. His jaw was set. He could stop the bad things that were about to happen with a word. Instead he was going to unleash whoever they were lurking in the forest. Her little Winston was history. They would poison the pond or shoot him or sedate and cage him. She had failed her creation. The old coldness settled into her heart.

“One big problem with that explanation,” she told her father.

He waited.

“I don’t have photos of you to show him.” She went for the jugular. “I threw those out a long time ago.”

He retreated behind stone eyes. Not a wince. “I’m sorry this hurts you so much,” he said.

It did. It hurt. Then it did not. Love was no use. Its bonds were false. So she did not say goodbye to her creation. She turned so that her father could not see the tear in her eye, and walked away into the woods.

T
HE
H
IMALAYAS
M
AY

G
od!” Nathan Lee’s hand twitched. It was watching him, the white face crowning a mass of fur.

The telephoto jiggled. He lost it. His yeti.

Metoh-kangmi,
the Tibetan refugees had called it, Sherpa for dirty or wild man. The Chinese term was
yerin.
From the beginning there’d been a chance that this was a wild goose chase, that even if there was a body, it would prove worthless, one more lost yak herder or refugee or frozen ascetic. But it was real. In that single glance, he’d seen something elusive and radically primitive.

Trembling, Nathan Lee scoped the mountainside again, but his eyes were tired. He looked at his watch, then at the larger vista.

At 24,400 feet above sea level, Makalu La—the pass between Makalu and a neighboring peak—wasted no refinement. It invited no repose. You were here only to get there, whichever side of the Nepal border that might be. To the north lay the inert, mythical Tibetan plateau in the People’s Republic of China. At his back loomed the enormous west face of Makalu, frisked by morning winds. Seven miles west, Everest’s upper pyramid was bright orange with sunrise, practically Egyptian atop the sea of darkness.

He checked the trail below. Ochs and a porter named Rinchen had finally left last night’s camp, a small blue tent inside a wind break built of rocks. They were like ants on the lower switchbacks. Nathan Lee gave a shout. They looked up. He pointed higher. Ochs waved slowly, then resumed his bovine plod. Just watching him made Nathan Lee feel spent and afflicted. Anymore, it seemed, he and Ochs had become characters trapped in a film, doomed to replay the same thieves’ tale over and over.

Jerusalem had led to a regular calendar of other lootings: Guatemala, the Noco digs in Peru, more raids on quake-ruined Year Zero sites near Qumran, even a few break-ins at monasteries and churches in the former Soviet Union. Sometimes it was commissioned by private clients or, as with the Smithsonian, by established museums. The landscape changed, but never the errand: time crime, the FBI and Interpol called the trafficking in artifacts and bones.

Rinchen followed behind Ochs, idling with that deep patience of Himalayan people. A tiny puff of tobacco smoke leaked from his mouth. The grizzly old shepherd hunted snow leopards for the Chinese black market. He had gold teeth and spoke a little English. He claimed to know the territory, though not, Nathan Lee had come to realize, this territory. The man had never been close to Makalu La. He was just another outlaw along for the ride.

The past two weeks had been strained by ugly banter. Nathan Lee had learned to rise early and set off alone, letting Ochs share the trail with Rinchen. He had tried in vain to separate himself from the grave robber and the poacher. Ochs saw his self-loathing. At their campfires, he reveled in it.
He who fights with monsters,
he taunted through the flames,
beware lest he become a monster.

Nathan Lee returned to the yeti. With the camera balanced on a boulder, he methodically swept the ridge bordering the pass. The light changed. Shadows opened. The mountains had a way of sliding out from under your feet up here. You had to work hard to keep up with the dragon.

He found it again. Somehow the refugees had spotted the body with the naked eye. Even with a 200-power lens, he’d passed over it a dozen times. The figure was perched on a ledge, white and black among the white and black rocks, hidden in plain sight. There was little to see but patches where the skin—or bone—stood exposed. The face had not moved. It was still aimed at Nathan Lee on his cold rock. Through the telephoto, he carefully memorized the shelves and ramp leading upward.

He stood and began packing his things, nestling his camera beside the body bag. It was one of those same bags they’d used to trick the Year Zero bones out of Jerusalem. Four years had passed since then, but it was like time had stood still. He was still slouching circles around the ivory tower, basically faking it. He had no title, no position, no presence in the world. About all he did have was a reputation for looting, and visitation rights with Grace, which Lydia and her divorce sharks were tearing to bits while he dragged her brother through the Himalayas.

He strapped on his scratched red helmet and started up. Faraway, rocks hissed down from the heights. Avalanches flowered in utter silence. There was no need for a helmet here. The climbing was scarcely a scramble. But he was taking no chances. Nathan Lee loved the high mountains, but had come to hate the dangers. Fatherhood had made him a chicken.

He picked his way across the scree field. The slope steepened. Scree gave way to shelves shingly with the fossils of small sea animals. The Chago Glacier gaped two thousand feet below.

As conceived by an ambitious curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Man, their plan involved locating the body, if it truly existed, then carrying it several miles to the south, well into Nepal, safely away from the border and any claims by the People’s Republic of China. Everyone in the museum business recalled the pitched battle between Italy and Austria over the Iceman found on their alpine border. The Smithsonian wanted no such complexities.

Two days downvalley, Nathan Lee had found a cave used by Buddhist hermits over the centuries. It was empty now. They’d cached all their supplies there for the trek out and agreed it would be the perfect spot to replant their own iceman, then “discover” him. Besides averting an international tug of war, it would allow the Smithsonian to negotiate with Nepalese ministers who were even more corrupt than the karaoke commies, as Ochs called the Chinese generals controlling Tibet. Ochs was going to use his part of the take to purchase a Hockney painting. Nathan Lee’s part was going to go to Lydia and lawyers.
All in the family,
he thought.

After a half hour, Nathan Lee started a handline for Ochs and the Khampa. It would help get Ochs up. More importantly, it would help get the body down. He unknotted his coil of hot-pink perlon, tied one end to a rock, and the other to his waist. The rope was light and thin, only seven millimeters, but very strong and almost five hundred feet in length.

He lost sight of the ledge with the body, but followed his landmarks. There was the snapped pinnacle, here the dark streak. Rounding a bend, he mantled up onto a flat ledge. And there it was.

For some reason, he had expected a male. Certainly the jaw was massive enough, and the enormous hands and feet. But there was no questioning the exposed breast, even shriveled to an empty pale pouch. She didn’t belong here. No one did really, but especially not her, and not because she was a woman. When the rumor of a body had first arrived, the Smithsonian thought this would be just another quick-frozen neolithic stray. She was different.

No one could have predicted the body would turn out to be a Neandertal woman thirty or fifty millenia old.

Homo neandertalis
had never been found in this part of the world. A complete specimen had never been found anywhere in the world. Nathan Lee stood very still, as if she might flee. Perfectly mummified, she sat slumped against the wall, facing Makalu.

Strangely, the goraks—ravens with huge black wings for the thin air—had not taken her eyes. They were milky and mineralized beneath half-closed lids with long sun-bleached lashes. Her lips had stretched back to the gum. She was intact except for the windward side where some of the scalp and one cheek had been polished away. A breeze sifted through her long black hair.

Nathan Lee remembered the rope at his waist. He untied himself and anchored the handline with a figure-eight loop over an outcrop. He faced the body again, almost shy with awe. The find was incredible. The flesh was still on the bones!

Dazed by the enormity of the event, the archaeologist in him stirred. A thousand questions flooded in. What on earth had a Neandertal been doing in the high Himalayas? Exploring? Migrating? Searching for gods? He couldn’t get over it. Her remains implied that an isolated pocket had survived in some mountain sanctuary, a lost race in Shangri-la.

Besides her total displacement in time, something was strange here. Her presence in this place didn’t make sense. It was too damn hard to get here. He’d seen and read about ice men and maidens found in the Andes, and she didn’t fit. For one thing there were no outward signs of violence, no strangulation cords around the neck, nothing to suggest ritual murder. Gently, as if pressing eggshells, he palpated her skull. There were no depressions, no evidence of an accidental fall or some shaman’s ax or club. If this were a burial they would have laid her flat, or folded or bound her limbs.

He stood back and took it in. To all appearances, she had been alive when she came to this ledge. You could tell by the way she was seated, in a cup of stone, and protected from the wind. She had made herself comfortable. It struck him that she might have have chosen this place herself, then waited to die. But why here, why would she do such a thing? Was she a suicide? Had she sacrificed herself to some god? He felt mystery, then pleasure, then strangely hope.

Far to the south, white monsoon clouds were rising like smoke over the Indian plains. Another half hour went by. Nearly noon. Still no Ochs or Rinchen.

Ever since Jerusalem, he’d been searching for a way out, or a way back in. He’d come to see a quest as nothing more than burglary. Ochs had done that to him. He’d done it to himself. But he could undo it. Why not? He could do it right. He could go legitimate. In one fell swoop, he could restore his reputation. He could do real science, write her up, get his doctorate, come out of the shadows. The possibilities grew.

His training took over, he let it return to him, he invited it. The site was everything. He began to treat the ledge like a crime scene, backing off, getting his camera from the pack. He changed the lens and shot two rolls of Fuji from every direction. Only then did he allow himself to approach.

Nathan Lee ran his fingertips across the deep aboriginal furrows on her forehead. None of her teeth were missing or decayed or worn. She seemed healthy, no outward signs of injury or disease. This was no old woman abandoned by her tribe. She was a sturdy young woman in her prime.

Ochs would never need to know. It was simple enough. Before Ochs and Rinchen got any closer, Nathan Lee could bury her under rocks and beat a retreat. He would remove his rope. Erase his tracks. Halt the search. In three months, he could return…free of the Ochs “franchise.”

Nathan Lee scrambled to his knees. Not in years had he felt this absolutely clear. His gangster days were over. He began carefully stacking rocks over her legs. He worked quickly, piling them haphazardly. Another few minutes, that’s all he needed.

“Good lord.”

Nathan Lee lowered his rock.

Ochs’s massive head and shoulders were perched at the edge of the ledge. He was a mess, his beard and chest ribboned with snot and drool. Bound to the back of his pack, the point of his ice axe stuck above his head like an exclamation point.

“We were wrong,” said Nathan Lee. “It’s just another body. Some poor refugee.”

“The hell,” Ochs croaked. Even in his hypoxic state, sucking for air like a beached fish, he recognized what this was. Instantly the spirit of the place felt fouled.

“We have to go down,” Nathan Lee tried. “There’s a storm coming in.”

The rope tugged. Rinchen arrived, quiet as a whisper. Eyes masked by ancient steel-rimmed glacier glasses, his mouth a round O, he looked like a deep-sea diver from Jules Verne. A goiter bulged at his throat. Long scars striped one cheek.

Rinchen took one look at the dead woman and went very still. He looked stricken. Then his big, gnarled peasant hands came together, and he began to pray. Nathan Lee realized he wasn’t praying for the Neandertal woman. He was praying to her.

“What a glorious bitch,” Ochs crowed. “The Ice Queen. That’s got a ring to it. Goddess of the Death Zone.” He patted her head.

“Unh,” Rinchen grunted at the irreverent pat.

Ochs was oblivious. He started pitching the heaped stones from the ledge, palming boulders that had taken Nathan Lee two hands to move. The rocks ricocheted downhill and disappeared into the glacier.

A gust of wind licked across the mountain. The woman’s black hair suddenly came alive, lifting off her shoulders. The long ends were braided.

“Leave her,” said Nathan Lee.

“What?”

“For another day.”

Ochs snorted. He was sick of the wilds, sick of the thin air, sick of camp life. All he talked about was getting back to his beamer and art works and DuPont Circle condo. For an answer, he seized the woman’s arm and gave a yank. The arm didn’t move. She was anchored in place, her back fused to the ledge. Ochs tried again. But she had become part of the mountain.

Nathan Lee took the chance. He revealed his dream. “We can come back. Start over.”

“Go straight?”

“Something like that.”

Ochs looked at him. “That simple?” he said. He emptied Nathan Lee’s pack on the ledge and picked up the body bag.

“You’re not listening,” said Nathan Lee. He grabbed at the folded packet. Ochs fumbled it. The packet went sailing over the edge. They watched it fall.

A corner caught on a rock, tearing the plastic, and the body bag suddenly ballooned open. It drafted downwards, a white gossamer tube. The sight encouraged him. That was the last of their beginning. “It’s over,” he said firmly.