Prophet of Bones

7

Gavin McMaster stepped into the bright room.

“So this is where the actual testing is done?” he asked. The accent was urban Australian.

“Yes,” Mr. Lyons answered.

Gavin shifted his weight and glanced around the room. His hair was long, more salt than pepper, worn in a thick ponytail that hung down over the back of his shirt collar. Behind him, the door swung shut with the telltale hiss of positive air pressure—a hedge against contamination.

It never ceased to amaze him how alike laboratories are across the world. Cultures that could not agree on anything agreed on this: how to design a centrifuge, where to put the test tube rack, what color to paint the walls—white, always. The bench tops, black. Gavin had been in a dozen similar labs over the years. Only the people made them different.

“Please wait here; I’ll see if he’s available.”

Gavin nodded. “Of course.”

He watched the small man scamper toward the research team working at the lab bench.

One of the team members, a broad, dark-haired man, sat hunched over a test tray of PCR tubes, pipette in hand. The young man straightened when Mr. Lyons whispered in his ear. He was big and young—Asian cheekbones, blocky shoulders. His father’s shoulders, Gavin thought. Gavin knew it was Paul without being told.

Paul stood, pulled off his latex gloves, and followed Mr. Lyons across the room for an introduction.

“Gavin McMaster.” Gavin stuck out his hand. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. Carlsson.”

They shook.

“Paul,” the young man said. “You can call me Paul.”

“I apologize for interrupting your work.”

“It’s time I took a break anyway. I’d been sitting at that stool all morning.”

“I’ll leave you two to your discussion,” Mr. Lyons said, excusing himself.

“Please,” Paul gestured to a nearby worktable. “Take a seat.”

Gavin sank onto the stool and set his briefcase on the table. “I promise I won’t take much of your time,” he said. “But I did need to talk to you. We’ve been leaving messages for the last few days and—”

“Oh.” Paul’s face changed. “You’re from—”

“Yes.”

“This is highly unusual.”

“I can assure you, these are unusual circumstances.”

“Still, I’m not sure I like being solicited for one job while working at another.”

“I can see there’s been a misunderstanding.”

“What misunderstanding?”

“You called it a job,” Gavin said. “We just want to borrow you, not hire you away. Consider it a temporary change of pace—a transfer position.”

“Mr. McMaster, I currently have more than a full workload. I’m in the middle of a project, and to be honest, considering the backlog we’re dealing with, I’m surprised Westing let you through the door.”

“Is that what you’re worried about?” Gavin smiled. “Your company is already on board. They’ve granted you a… let’s call it a sabbatical of sorts. I took the liberty of speaking to management before contacting you. They were very accommodating.”

“How did you…” Paul looked at him, and Gavin raised an eyebrow. With corporations, the question of “how” was usually rhetorical. The answer was always the same. And it always involved dollar signs. Pay a company enough money, and they’ll subcontract you any employee you want.

Gavin saw understanding dawn in Paul’s eyes. “Of course, we’ll match that bonus to you, mate.” Gavin unfolded a check from his suit pocket and slid it across the counter.

Paul barely glanced at it. Instead he looked around for Mr. Lyons, who was nowhere to be seen.

“Is this how you usually staff a project?” Paul said.

“We’d prefer not to take on reluctant third-party participants, if that’s what you’re asking. On the other hand, we’re on a tight schedule, and, as I mentioned, this is an unusual circumstance. We need to be wheels-up in twenty-four hours, so I’m afraid we really must insist.”

“Insist? What if I refuse?” Paul’s face was unreadable.

Gavin smiled. “Normally I’d take that as a negotiating tactic, angling for a bigger check. But that’s not the case here, is it?”

“No.”

Gavin studied the young man in front of him. “I was like you once. Hell, maybe I still am.”

“Then you understand.” Paul smiled tightly.

“I understand you better than you think. It makes it easier, sometimes, when you come from money. Sometimes I think that only people who come from it realize how worthless it really is.”

“That hasn’t been my experience,” Paul said curtly. “Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

Gavin had seen this before, politeness like a wall. He understood it. Did you learn that politeness from your mother, Paul? What did you learn from your father?

“If you want to refuse, you can take it up with your management.” Gavin stood.

“I will.”

“But you might find they’re a little more reluctant to part with their check. Until I hear otherwise, I’m going to assume your cooperation, as your employer assured.”

“You can assume whatever you’d like.”

“We leave tomorrow afternoon. You haven’t asked what you’ll be working on.”

“Does it matter?” Paul said, the slightest irritation seeping into his voice. He was on the edge of walking away—but that same politeness held him there for the vital split second.

“Perhaps it doesn’t,” Gavin said. “Before you turn your back, I have something for you. Something perhaps more interesting than a check.”

Gavin opened the latches on his briefcase and pulled out a stack of glossy eight-by-ten photographs. He held them out for Paul to take.

For a moment Paul just stood there, and Gavin was afraid the young man wouldn’t accept them. If he walked away without looking, then tomorrow could be tricky.

Paul reached out and took the photographs from Gavin’s extended hand.

Paul looked at the photos.

He looked at them for a long time.

“Give us two weeks,” Gavin said. “If, after two weeks, you don’t want to stay, we’ll have you transferred back, no questions asked. And you can keep the check.”

“Where were these taken?”

Gavin said, “These fossils were found last year on the island of Flores, in Indonesia.”

“Flores,” Paul whispered, still studying the photos. He leafed through them slowly, one after another. “I heard they found strange bones there. I didn’t know anybody had published.”

“That’s because we haven’t. Not yet, anyway.”

Paul came to one photograph and stopped. He was silent for a long time, then said, “I’m not sure what I’m looking at here.”

“Neither are we. Not one hundred percent sure, anyway.”

“It looks adult, by the wear on the teeth.”

“It is.”

“These dimensions can’t be right.”

“They’re right.”

“A six-inch ulna?”

Gavin nodded.

“Then these are unique.” Paul looked at him. “You must have people clamoring to work on this.”

“We’re holding these close to the vest at the moment.”

“You could take your pick of samplers.”

“We did,” Gavin said. “Why else would I be here?”

Paul’s brow furrowed. “I don’t understand.”

“You don’t need to.”

“No,” Paul said. “Maybe I do.” And just like that, the wall was gone. Politeness replaced by something different.

“You have the education and training we’re looking for.”

It was Paul’s turn to raise an eyebrow. “So do other samplers.”

“We need someone who works fast.”

“I’m hardly the fastest.”

Gavin sighed. “I don’t know if archaeology was ever meant to be as important as it has become. Will that do?”

Paul only stared and said nothing.

“We live in a world where zealots become scientists. Tell me, boy, are you a zealot?”

“No.”

“Then that’s your reason. Or close enough.”

8

Paul’s father had died of a heart attack in the summer after his freshman year of college. It happened suddenly, leaving a thousand things unsaid.

The funeral procession followed the hearse from the church to the graveyard where four generations of his father’s family lay buried. A green hill where Paul suspected that he, too, would someday find his final repose. His mother cried.

“I could take a semester off,” he told her. “I could stay.”

“No,” she said. “Go back to school.”

“You shouldn’t be alone.”

“I’m not alone; I have the church.”

And it was true. For the last several years, as his father’s behavior had grown more erratic, his mother had retreated into her Bible study. She spent five days a week up at the church. Sometimes she didn’t come home.

“Your father’s things are yours now,” she told him.

“What things?”

“The things fathers give their sons.”

On the last night he was in town, he went up to his father’s room. His mother was downstairs. She’d fallen asleep on the couch.

Paul opened his father’s closet. Shirts and ties. Books. In the back, near the wall, a loaded gun, silver black. He’d seen it before, years earlier.

He found a coin collection. Susan B. Anthonys, and a dozen Liberty Bells. There was a stack of scientific periodicals. Inside each one, a scrap of paper bookmarked a page. Paul realized these were his father’s publications. All his published papers. Studies on antagonistic pleiotropy, heterosis, and the mitochondrial haplotype distribution of the Przewalski’s horse.

Behind the stack of journals, against the wall, something caught his eye. He reached in and grabbed the green spiral notebook. He opened it, recognizing his own childish hand. His father had kept it, all these years.

He flipped the pages until he found it. Not a date, but a mouse. January-17.

He closed the notebook and threw it back into the closet.

The next day he headed back to school.

At Stanford, Paul double-majored in genetics and anthropology, taking eighteen credit hours a semester. He sat in classrooms while men in tweed jackets spun theories about Kibra and T variants, about microcephalin 1 and haplogroup D. He plowed into 300-level biology, where from the lectern his professor singled him out from the other students, responding to his question by saying, “You have the gift of insight, my boy.” And then, to Paul’s startled expression, he added, “You know which questions to ask.”

There were classes in comparative interpretation and biblical philosophy. He experimented with fruit flies and amphioxi and, while still an undergraduate, won a prestigious summer internship working under renowned geneticist Mathew Poole.

He also scrutinized the fringe theories. He contemplated balancing equilibriums and Hardy-Weinberg. But alone at night, walking the dark halls of his own head, it was the trade-offs that fascinated him most. Paul was a young man who understood trade-offs.

In the medical library, he came across research on the recently discovered Alzheimer’s gene APOE4—a gene common throughout much of the world—and he wondered how deleterious genes grew to such high frequencies. Paul discovered that although APOE4 often produced Alzheimer’s, it also protected against the cognitive consequences of early childhood malnutrition. The gene that destroys the mind at seventy saves it at seven months. He read that people with sickle-cell trait are resistant to malaria; and heterozygotes for cystic fibrosis are less susceptible to cholera; and people with type A blood survived the plague at higher frequencies than other blood types, altering forever, in a single generation, the frequency of blood types in Europe. A process, some said, now being slow-motion mimicked by Delta 32 and HIV.

In his anthropology courses, Paul was taught that all humans alive today can trace their ancestry back to Africa, to a time almost six thousand years ago when the whole of human diversity existed within a single small population. And there had been at least two dispersions out of Africa, his professors said, if not more—a genetic bottleneck that supported the Flood Theory. But each culture had its own beliefs. Muslims called it Allah. Jews, Yahweh. The science journals were careful not to specify, but they spoke of an intelligent designer—an architect, lowercase a. Though in his heart of hearts, Paul figured it all amounted to the same thing.

Paul read that they’d scanned the brains of nuns, looking for the God spot, and couldn’t find it. He examined, too, the theory of evolutionism. Although long debunked by legitimate science, adherents of evolutionism still existed, their beliefs enjoying near immortality among the fallow fields of pseudoscience, cohabitating the fringe with older belief systems like astrology, phrenology, and acupuncture. Modern evolutionists believed the various dating systems were all incorrect, and they offered an assortment of ridiculous and unscientific explanations for how the isotope tests could all be wrong.

The evolutionists ignored the geological record. They ignored the ice cores, the hermeneutics, and the wealth of biological evidence. They ignored the miracle of the placenta and the irreducible complexity of the eye.

“After all, the eye,” his anatomy professor lectured, “is biologically useful only in the sum of its parts. It can’t be reduced to functional precursor components.”

During his sophomore year, Paul got a job cleaning cages in the biology department. There were snakes and rabbits and owls, and a lonely alligator with a broken jaw—a veritable mini-zoo on the campus grounds, all of it housed in state-of-the-art facilities and cared for by a small army of lab-coated undergrads.

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.

That was when it occurred to Paul that some of these people had probably been digging here, in this same camp, for years.

Every face followed the jeep, and when it pulled to a stop, a small crowd gathered to help them unpack. Gavin introduced Paul around. Eight researchers, plus two laborers still in the cave and another two still working the sieves. Australian mostly. Indonesian. One American.

“Herpetology, mate,” one of them said when he shook Paul’s hand. Small, stocky, red-headed; he couldn’t have been more than twenty-two. He wore a shaggy, coppery beard. Paul forgot his name the moment he heard it, but the introduction, “Herpetology, mate,” stuck with him. “That’s my specialty,” the small man continued. “I got mixed up in this because of Professor McMaster here. University of New England—the Australian one.” His smile was two feet wide under a sharp nose that pointed at his own chin. Paul liked him instantly.

When they’d finished unpacking the jeep, Gavin turned to Paul. “So are you ready for the tour?”

Paul nodded.

The operation was larger than he’d expected. There were two different sieving setups, one dry, one wet, and a dozen tables and tents and benches, all spread out in a small clearing just beyond the mouth of the cave. A generator rumbled in the background, providing all the electricity for their lights and equipment. Construction-helmeted laborers shuffled to and from the cave, bent under their work, local villagers who spoke a language Paul couldn’t understand.

“We used to sleep in the village of Terus during the dig season,” Gavin said. “It’s just up the road. But you’ll be staying here.” Gavin gestured toward a white canvass tent.

Paul lifted the heavy tent flap and stuck his head inside. The space was clean and functional, like the room in Ruteng.

“Why don’t you stay in Terus anymore?”

“Safety issues.”

“So Terus isn’t a friendly place, I take it?”

“No, Terus is wonderful. It’s their safety we’re worried about.”

Gavin’s face produced a smile. “Now I think it’s time we made the most important introductions.”

It was a short walk to the cave. Jag-toothed limestone jutted from the jungle, an overhang of vine, and, beneath that, a dark mouth. The stone was the brown-white of old ivory. Cool air enveloped Paul, and entering Liang Bua was a distinct process of stepping down. Inside, it took Paul’s eyes a moment to adjust. The chamber was thirty yards wide, open to the jungle in a wide crescent—mud floor, high-domed ceiling. The overall impression was one of expanse, like the interior of an ancient church. He followed Gavin deeper. There was not much to see at first. In the far corner, two sticks angled from the mud, and when he looked closer Paul saw the hole.

“Is that it?”

“That’s it.”

Paul took off his backpack and stripped the white paper suit out of its plastic wrapper. He peered down into the dig. “Who else has touched it?”

“Talford, Margaret, me.”

Paul pulled a light from his backpack and shined it into the hole. It was then that he realized just how deep it went. A system of bamboo ladders led down to the bottom, thirty feet below. He was staring into a pit. “I’ll need blood samples from everybody for comparison assays.”

“DNA contamination?”

“Yeah.”

“We stopped the dig when we realized the significance.”

“Still. I’ll need blood samples from anybody who’s dug here, anybody who came anywhere near the bones. I’ll take the samples myself tomorrow.”

“I understand. Is there anything else you require?”

“Solitude.” Paul smiled. “I don’t want anybody in the cave for this part.”

Gavin nodded and left. Paul broke out his tarps and hooks. It was best if the sampler was the person who dug the fossils out of the ground—or, better yet, if the DNA samples were taken when the bones were still in the ground. Less contamination that way. And there was sure to be contamination. Always. No matter what precautions were taken, no matter how many tarps or how few people worked at the site, there was still always contamination.

Paul staked the tarps down at one end and slid into the hole, a flashlight strapped to his forehead, his white paper suit slick on the moist earth. He gripped the ladder as he descended into the dark cold, the bamboo rungs flexing under his weight like thin ice. He wondered how much heavier he was than the average worker on the site. When his feet finally touched down on damp clay, he turned and squatted. The working floor was two meters by two meters.

From his perspective, he couldn’t tell what the bones were—only that they were bones, in situ, half-buried in earth. But that was all that mattered. The material was soft, unfossilized; he’d have to be careful. It was commonly accepted that bones needed at least a few thousand years to fossilize. These were younger than a lot of archaeological finds.

The procedure took nearly seven hours. He coated the bone surface with sodium hyperchlorate, then used a Dremel tool to access the unexposed interior matrix. He snapped two dozen photographs, careful to record the stratigraphic context. Later it would be important to keep track of which samples came from which specimens. Whoever these things were, they were small. He sealed the DNA samples into small, sterile lozenges for transport.

It was night when he climbed from under the tarp.

Outside the cave, Gavin was the first to find him in the firelight. “Are you finished?”

“For tonight. I have six different samples from at least two different individuals.”

“Yeah, that’s what we thought, two individuals. So far.”

“So far?”

“We’re not sure how far down the cache goes. When we remove those bones, there could be more underneath.”

“Is that common here?”

Gavin shrugged. “It’s unpredictable. The deposits will go shy on you sometimes. You’ll have a dozen feet of nothing, just sterile soil, and then you’ll brush away the next centimeter and the dig will go active for another dozen feet: rat bones, and bird, and charcoal, and stone tools. Even Stegodon, a kind of pygmy elephant. Sometimes more interesting things.”

“I’d say those bones were interesting,” Paul said.

“So that means you’ll stay on with us?”

“Yeah,” Paul said. “I’ll stay.”

Gavin handed him a bottle of whiskey.

“Isn’t it a little early to celebrate?”

“Celebrate? You’ve been working in a grave all day. Don’t they drink at wakes in America?”

That night, around the campfire, Paul listened to the jungle sounds and to the voices of scientists, feeling history congeal around him.

“Suppose it isn’t,” Jack was saying. Jack was thin and American and very drunk. “Suppose it isn’t in the same lineage with us, then what would that mean?”

The red-bearded herpetologist groaned. His name was James. “Not more of that dogma-of-descent bullshit,” he said.

“Then what is it?” someone asked.

They passed the bottle around, eyes occasionally drifting to Paul like he was a priest come to grant absolution, his sample kit just an artifact of priestcraft. Paul swigged from the bottle when it came his way. They’d finished off the whiskey long ago; this was some local brew distilled from rice. Paul swallowed fire.

Yellow-haired man saying, “It’s the truth,” but Paul had missed part of the conversation, and for the first time he realized how drunk they all were; James laughed at something, and the woman with the white shirt turned and said, “Some people have nicknamed it the hobbit.”

“What?”

“Flores man—the hobbit. You know, little people three feet tall.”

“Tolkien would be proud,” a voice contributed.

“A mandible, a complete cranium, segments of a radius, and left inominate.”

“But what is it?”

“It is what it is.”

“Exactly.”

“Hey, are you staying on?”

The question was out there for three seconds before Paul realized it was aimed at him. The woman’s brown eyes were searching across the fire. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m staying.”

Then the voice again, “But what is it?”

“That is the question, isn’t it?”

Paul took another swallow—thinking of the bones and trying to cool the voice of disquiet in his head.

Paul learned about her during the next couple of days, the woman with the white shirt. Her name was Margaret. She was twenty-eight. Australian. Some fraction aborigine on her mother’s side, but you could only see it for sure in her mouth. The rest of her could have been Dutch, English, whatever. But that full mouth: teeth like Ruteng children’s, teeth like dentists might dream.

She tied her brown hair back from her face, so it didn’t hang in her eyes while she worked in the hole. This was her sixth dig, she told him. “This is the one.” She sat on the stool while Paul took her blood, a delicate index finger extended, red pearl rising to spill her secrets.

“Most archaeologists go a whole lifetime without a big find,” she said. “Maybe you get one. Probably none. But this is the one I get to be a part of.”

“What about the Leakeys?” Paul asked, dabbing her finger with cotton.

“Bah.” She waved at him in mock disgust. “They get extra. Bloody Kennedys of archaeology.”

Despite himself, Paul laughed.

10

Bone is a text. It writes its history for those able to read it.

When Paul first started at Westing, he often worked late into the evenings. Many nights in the bone room, he would lay the skeletal remains out carefully on the clean blue felt, articulating the pieces, forming an assemblage. He matched the bones in front of him to the perfect image he held in his head.

But now, as he sat alone at the bottom of Gavin’s pit, he found that no perfect image rose up in his mind. He looked at the bones, and his imagination failed him. The lights cast strange shadows across the phalanx of chalky gray-white material. Heat from the lamp made steam in the damp air. The pit smelled of earth and muck.

Somewhere above him, it was almost morning, just before dawn. In a few minutes, the rest of the camp would wake and the day would start. The team would congregate and climb down into the pit to continue the dig. Paul had woken early, needing one last look at what couldn’t possibly exist.

“What are you?” he whispered into the silence of the pit. He gently blew dust away from the surface of the bone.

Anatomy textbooks say there are 206 bones in the human body, but this is not strictly true. There exists a range of variation. The number of vertebrae in the coccyx, for example, is not fixed in the human species. Some people have more, some less. Also, there exists in some individuals of Mesoamerican ancestry an extra cranial suture. By virtue of its presence, this additional suture creates an additional bone: the Inca bone, which lies at the base of the skull in direct conjugation with the lambdoid suture and the sagittal suture.

In spite of what the Bible says, men and women possess the same number of ribs.

Bone is what remains of us after we’re gone. It’s as close as you can get to a permanent record of our lives.

It was in the silence and austerity of the bone room that Paul first learned that bones can answer you. They can whisper their secrets across a distance of millennia.

Now he adjusted the light. With a latexed hand, he brushed the dirt away. Here was the radius, impossibly small. Like a child’s arm, though beside it rested a portion of tiny jaw—the adult molars already worn smooth.

Bone is made primarily of soft collagen and crystalline calcium phosphate. Although resistant to change and to decay, it is rarely featureless. Bone is the scaffolding on which our lives are slung, and it shows the marks of this interface. The stronger a person is, the more they mark their skeleton. There are foramina, tubercles, grooves, and tuberosities, the raised marks of muscle and ligament attachments. There are signs of trauma and healing, the stresses and strains of our lives, written in bone. And other secrets.

Bone is recycled by the living body. Calcium is laid down and picked up in a repeating pattern of formation and resorption. A never-ending cycle of birth, growth, and senescence. Like nature itself.

From above came a sound, the rattle of the tarp, pulling Paul from his reverie. Then a voice called down, “Paul?”

“Yeah,” Paul answered.

“You’re up early today.” It was Gavin. “Didn’t expect to see you down there.”

“I was checking on one last thing.”

“Everything okay?”

“Yeah. I’m good.”

“You need anything?”

“No, I’m done here.” Paul stood and gripped the ladder. He clicked off his light and climbed back up to the land of the living.

Days passed.

The dig continued. The rain continued. Jungle heat and jungle sounds. The hack of machetes on firewood. The chatter of men.

Flores.

In the distance, the Wae Racang River hissed white static against the rocks, an ever-present roar that played background music to the clamor of the busy camp.

By the fourth day, Paul had grown tired of watching everyone work. He had his samples carefully sealed in their protective lozenges. Until more bones were discovered, he technically had nothing to do, so he gave himself a job. He joined the local labor force and helped carry buckets of soil between the sieves.

At first the Manggarai workers eyed him suspiciously, this strange, big American with the Asian face, but as the hours wore on they gradually warmed to him. Cebong Lewe they called him, and later, sitting around the campfire, one of the researchers explained that this meant “bathe long,” referring to Paul’s habit of taking a dip in the river at the end of the workday. He lumbered among them, toting buckets of soil in each hand. He could carry more than they could, but he couldn’t squat, couldn’t kneel in the dirt, hunched for hours over the sieves. The workers rotated in their duties, first carrying buckets, then taking turns working at the fine-mesh grates. After only minutes at the sieves, Paul’s knees were screaming. His calves burned like fire. He was too big, too heavy to fold himself up like that. He traded jobs with one of the bucket carriers, who seemed confused by the offer of trade. Paul realized the Manggarai viewed the bucket carrying as the work and the sieving as a break.

Back in the United States, Paul’s principal form of exercise had been kayaking. He paddled the cold waters of the Chesapeake for three seasons of the year, pulling himself along with the strength of his arms.

Now Paul trudged the buckets back and forth—his body, he discovered, being particularly well suited to the role of pack animal.

The native population of Flores divided itself into a half dozen tribes: the Lio, the Sikka, the Bajawa, the Endenese, the Ngadha, and the Nagekeo. Some of the tribes were related, others not at all. Paul had studied a book on the island’s history on the long flight over. Flores sat in an intertidal zone between converging waves of Asians to the east and the older, endemic Australoid groups to the west. The men he worked with represented a complex mixture of both. Uniformly dark-skinned, many looked almost Filipino or Cambodian, with straight black hair and delicate frames; others were more Austronesian in appearance, with curly hair and strong noses. All chewed betel nuts as they worked, drooling blood-red spit into the dirt. They spoke two or three dialects apiece, and understood more.

For lunch, they ate simple meals of rice and fish, gulped small spotted eggs straight from the shell. They sipped rice wine while they ate—an extended hand, an offered jug. “Safer than the water,” one of them said in perfect English.

Paul drank deep.

That evening when the dig shut down, Paul helped Gavin pack the jeep for a trek back up to Ruteng. “I’m driving two of our laborers back to town,” Gavin told him. “They work one week on, one off. You want to come with me?”

“Sure,” Paul said.

The trip up the valley was just as perilous as the trip down. If anything, the track had grown muddier.

Gavin rented Paul a hotel room for the night and gave him some money—three ten-thousand-rupiah notes. To Paul’s questioning look, he answered, “About sixty dollars, American.”

Paul showered properly and shaved his four-day stubble. He threw himself onto the bed. After the previous few nights in the camp, sleeping in a bag in a tent, this bed felt like the under-down of baby angels.

In the morning, he woke early and walked the streets, past the already thronging masses, into the bazaar. The sun angled down from a clear blue sky. A cool breeze blew up from the ocean several miles away, thick with the smells of jungle. Large black lizards, skinned and cooked, hung like ghoulish bunches of bananas from vendors’ tent posts.

“Hello mister, hello mister!”

He walked on, ignoring the calls, losing himself in the crowds. Bright fabrics draped the small shops in color. The smells of spices and fresh fruit permeated the air—a multitude of vendors cooking their products in tiny, smoky stands wedged strategically into the flow of foot traffic. Music skirled from radios hung at the backs of shops, marking territory by aural display, outlining each vendor’s sphere of influence.

He saw Chinese noodles and blue sarongs, and coconuts, and fish, and western T-shirts, and cigarette lighters, and shoes that would not fit him. People on bicycles and motorbikes.

He saw a trinket hanging from a post, a beaded necklace with a shark’s tooth dangling from the bottom. He paused for only a millisecond, the slightest hint of hesitation, and a voice came out of the booth: “Hello, mister.”

Paul turned. “How much?”

The shop owner came forward. He was old and gray and bent. His rheumy, bloodshot eyes did a quick appraisal. “With respect, sir,” he said in good English, pointing to a pair of small signs that seemed to give two different prices for the same necklace. One sign read 25,000 RP and the other 15,000. “Very nice necklace. Grandson caught shark with own hands.”

“Which price is it?”

“That depend,” the old man said.

“On what?”

“On if you want haggle. You want haggle, we start this price here,” he said, gesturing to the sign with the higher price. His knuckles were knobby with arthritis.

“I’d rather start there,” Paul said, pointing to the other sign.

The man shook his head. “No, that the no-haggle price. If you want haggle, we start at twenty-five thousand rupiah. But don’t worry, we talk price down.”

“How far down?”

“Almost to here,” he said, pointing to the lower price.

“Almost?”

“Can’t haggle all the way to the no-haggle price. You understand, sir. I must earn something for my time, yes? Now I start. Mister, this is price of necklace.” The old man pointed to the higher price. “Very nice necklace. Grandson caught shark with own hands. I can go no lower. What you offer?”

Paul grinned and shook his head. “I’ll take the no-haggle price.” He opened his wallet and pulled out two ten-thousand-rupiah notes. He knew when he’d met his match. “Keep the change.”

Paul found Gavin back at the hotel a few hours later.

“You had me worried,” Gavin said. He was sitting at a table near the front steps, sipping coffee. The sun was higher now, but the building’s awning provided shade.

“About what?”

“About where you’d gotten to.”

Paul gestured around. “There’s not a lot of places to wander off. This town isn’t that big.”

“Call it a healthy paranoia. To be honest, bringing you here has created some attention we didn’t want yet. I had several meetings this morning—some of them unexpected. So far, we’ve shuffled under the radar, but now…” Gavin let the sentence die.

“Now what?”

“We’ve flown in an outside tech, and people want to know why.”

“What people?”

“Official people. Unpleasant people. Indonesia is suddenly very interested.”

“And I’m the outside tech in question?”

“The very same.”

“I take it this interest is a bad thing.”

“Interest from officials always is.”

“Is it a question of permission?”

“We have all the right permits, of course, from the Ministry of Culture and Social Politics. And more permits from ARKENAS and the Department of Education—a mountain of permits, let me tell you, and half of them redundant. In Flores, bureaucracy is raised to the level of a martial art. Even our permits have permits, and all of it costs money. And worse than that, it costs time. Our visas come straight from the Indonesian Academy of Sciences. But maybe none of that will matter now.”

“Why?”

“Because certain people might decide it doesn’t matter. That’s all it takes.”

“Are you worried they’ll shut down the dig?”

Gavin smiled. He remained silent for a while and sipped his coffee. Paul thought he wasn’t going to answer, but then Gavin asked, “Have you studied theology?”

“Why?”

“I’ve long been fascinated by the figure of Abraham. You’re familiar with Abraham?”

“Of course,” Paul said, unsure where this was going.

“From this one otherwise ordinary sheepherder stems the entire natural history of monotheism. He’s at the foundation of all three Abrahamic faiths—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. When Jews, Christians, and Muslims get on their knees for their one true God, it is to Abraham’s God they pray.” Gavin closed his eyes. “And still there is such fighting over steeples.”

Around them, Flores bustled on. A small gray van blared its horn at a swerving motorbike.

“What does this have to do with the dig?”

“The word ‘prophet’ traces back to the original Greek word prophetes. In Hebrew, though, the word is nabi. I think Abraham Heschel said it best when he wrote, ‘The prophet is the man who feels fiercely.’ What do you think, Paul? Do you think prophets feel fiercely?”

“Why are you asking me this?”

“Never mind.” Gavin smiled again and shook his head. “It’s just me rambling again.”

“You never said if you think they’ll shut down the dig.”

“We come onto their land, their territory; we come into this place and we find bones that contradict their beliefs; what do you think might happen? Anything.”

“Contradict their beliefs?” Paul said. “What do you believe about these bones? You still haven’t said.”

“I don’t know. Strange bones like this, they could just be pathological.”

“That’s what they said about the first Neanderthal bones. Except they kept finding them.”

“It could be microcephaly.”

“What kind of microcephaly makes you three feet tall?”

“The odd skull shape and small body size could be unrelated. Pygmies aren’t unknown to these islands.”

“There are no pygmies this small.”

“But perhaps the two things together… perhaps the bones are just a microcephalic variant on the local pygmy phenotype.”

“So both pygmy and microcephalic?”

Gavin sighed. He looked suddenly defeated.

“That’s not what you believe, is it?” Paul said.

“These are the smallest bones discovered that look anything like us. Could they just be pathological humans? I don’t know. Maybe. Pathology can happen anywhere, so you can’t rule it out when you’ve only got a few specimens to work with. But what my mind keeps coming back to is that these bones weren’t found just anywhere.”

“What do you mean?”

“These bones weren’t found in Africa, or Asia, or Europe. They weren’t found on the big landmasses. These tiny bones were found on a tiny island. Near the bones of dwarf elephants. And that’s a coincidence? They hunted dwarf elephants, for God’s sake.”

“So if not pathological, what do you believe they were?”

“That’s the powerful thing about genetics, my friend. You take your samples, do your tests. One does not have to believe. One can know. And that’s precisely what is so dangerous.”

“Strange things happen on islands.” Margaret’s white long-sleeved shirt was gone. She sat slick-armed in overalls. Skin like a fine coat of gloss. The firelight beat the night back, lighting candles in their eyes. It was nearly midnight, and Paul sat in the circle of researchers, listening to the crackle of the fire. Listening to the jungle. Gavin had already retired to his tent for the night.

“Like the Galápagos,” Margaret said. “The finches.”

“Oh, come on,” James said. “The skulls we found are small, with brains the size of chimps’. Island dwarfing of genus Homo—is that what you’re proposing? Some sort of local adaptation over the last five thousand years?”

“It’s the best we have.”

“But in five thousand years?”

“It’s possible.”

“Those bones are too different. They’re not of our line.”

“But they’re from younger strata than the other archaics. It’s not like erectus, some branch cut down at the dawn of time. These things survived here. The bones aren’t even fossilized.”

“It doesn’t matter, they’re still not us. Either they share common descent from man or they were a separate creation at the beginning. There is no in-between. And they’re only a meter tall, don’t forget.”

“That’s just an estimate.”

“A good estimate.”

“Achondroplasia—”

“Those skulls are as achondroplastic as I am. I’d say the sloped frontal bone is anti-achondroplastic.”

“Some kind of growth hormone deficiency would—”

“No,” Paul said, speaking for the first time. Every face turned toward him.

“No, what?”

“Pygmies have normal growth hormone levels,” Paul said. “Every population studied—the Negritos, the Andamanese, the Mbuti. All normal.”

The faces stared. Pale ovals in firelight. “It’s the domain of their receptors that are different,” Paul continued. “Pygmies are pygmies because of their GH receptors, not the growth hormone itself. If you inject a pygmy child with growth hormone, you still get a pygmy. It’s a completely different etiology.”

“Well, still,” Margaret said. “I don’t see how that impacts whether these bones share common descent or not.”

The firelight crackled. James turned to the circle of faces. “So are they on our line? Are they us or other?” He looked around at the circle of faces in the firelight.

“Other,” came a voice.

“Other.”

“Other.”

Softly, the woman whispered in disbelief, “But they had stone tools.”

The faces turned to Paul, but he only watched the fire and said nothing.

They drank deep into the night. The wine put a nice buzz in Paul’s head. One by one the researchers wandered back to their tents. Paul stood, enjoying the slight wobble to his legs.

Margaret stood, too. She grabbed his hand. “I want to show you something.”

He let himself be pulled along, away from the tents, away from the cave, toward the river, to a place with tall grass and an overhang of trees. Crickets chirped loudly in the brush.

“What did you want to show me?” he asked.

“This, of course,” she said, and then she kissed him.

He kissed her back, feeling her body move against him.

“Can you keep a secret?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“Are you sure?” She kissed him again.

“Absolutely,” he said.

“Because people talk.”

“What people?”

“All people.”

“Not all people.”

“Well, most people,” she said, then kissed him again. “So this is our secret, just between us?”

He nodded. “Top secret.”

“A girl could get a reputation,” she said.

“Not from me.”

“You’re very convincing.”

“My lips are sealed.”

“Then just this once, okay?” She unhooked her overalls and let them fall to the grass. “Just this one time.” Her bare breasts swayed in the moonlight, full and heavy. He touched her. She moved against him, skin on skin, and then her mouth found his, and they sank onto the grass.

Paul skipped the manual labor the next day. The sun blazed down and his head throbbed a dull hangover, reminding him that last night hadn’t all been a dream. He kept an eye out for Margaret, but she hadn’t emerged from her tent yet. Instead of heading to the sieves, he made his way up to the cave and stepped into the shadows. The sudden coolness was almost analgesic. He moved to the back, to the place where a bamboo ladder jutted from the ground.

He looked down at the men working thirty feet below. There were three of them. They’d excavated most of the bones that Paul had samples for and would soon be digging deeper, looking for more. The men at the bottom of the pit wore hard hats. Flashlights lit the base of the hole. The sound of the generator rumbled in the distance.

Paul tried to imagine the weight of all that dirt pressing down. He tried to imagine the processes that could have painted the bones with soil, layer after layer, year after year, until thirty feet of the world stood atop them. The floods, and the mud, and thousands of years.

James found him standing there. “A Catholic priest was first to dig here,” he said, leaning over to glance down into the hole.

“When was that?”

“Oh, it was a long time ago—middle of the last century, after the Dutch first started trying to convert the island’s heathen population into good, God-fearing folk.”

“A priest archaeologist in the 1800s?”

James scratched his copper-wire beard. “Well, he wasn’t called an archaeologist, mind, but he did do a wholly inordinate amount of digging for a fella with eyes turned skyward.”

“Did he find anything interesting?”

“Stone tools, charcoal, a few bones. Father Theodor Verhoeven. He’s been dead now a long time, and his work has been mostly ignored.”

“He found bones? Like these?”

“Not like these. He didn’t go that deep. The bones he found were more normal. His work probably would have been completely forgotten if not for the attention the cave is getting now.”

“What about his other work?” Paul asked. “Did that go better than his digs?”

“Converting the heathens, you mean? Marginally better, I suppose.”

Paul watched the men dig. Flashlights wavered at the bottom of darkness.

“Indonesia is one big mosaic now,” James said. “Part Muslim, part Christian. All of it layered over the older ancestor worship and various other animist traditions. In some remote villages, they sacrifice pigs on Christian holidays.”

“One religion absorbs the traditions of another.”

“That’s one way to put it,” James said.

“And how would you put it?”

“I’d say one religion eats another. Means about the same thing but has a slightly different inflection. It’s like one of the origin stories you still hear in the highlands—the first man having come from the ashes of burned bamboo. They still tell that story, though after the missionaries, they were kind enough to change his name to Adam. Flores is one of the religious borders. Always has been. There’s been fighting in the Moluccas and Sulawesi. Bloody business. Maybe Gavin told you.”

“He told me there was some trouble.”

“And more coming, likely. And that was all happening before they even dug here,” James said. “Lately it’s been worse.”

“It’s just a research dig,” Paul said.

“No such thing, these days. Between you and me, the sooner we’re done, the better.”

“Do digs like this end?” Paul asked.

“There’s bedrock down there somewhere.”

“I suppose that’s true.”

“So these samples,” James said, gesturing toward the pit. “You’re sure you can make ’em talk?”

“They’ll sing. And it’s more than just the DNA. There’s also stable isotope analysis of bone matrix collagen.”

“And this tells you what?”

Paul shrugged. “Lots of things. Ancient diet, trophic level, variation by latitude.”

James nodded, taking this in. After a long pause, he asked, “Did Gavin ever tell you what this place was before?”

“Before it was a cave, you mean?”

James smiled indulgently. “After it was a cave, before it was a dig.”

“No.”

“They used it as a school.”

“This place?”

James nodded. “Father Theodor, before he starting digging, taught school here for the local village children.”

Paul looked down into the pit. “A place of learning, still.”

The next morning started with a downpour. The dig team huddled in tents or under the tarped lean-to near the fire pit. Only James braved the rain, stomping off into the jungle. Paul watched him disappear into the undergrowth.

Gray clouds obscured the mountainside. The sieving crew made strong coffee and chewed betel nuts.

Gavin found Paul in his tent. He stuck his shaggy head under the tent flap. “I have to go back up to Ruteng.”

“Again?”

“There’s been an issue,” Gavin said. “I’ve received some troubling news. You want me to take the samples with me?”

Paul shook his head. “Can’t. There are stringent protocols for chain of possession.”

“Where are they now?”

Paul patted the cargo pocket of his pant leg.

Gavin seemed to consider this for a moment. “So when you get those samples back, what happens next?”

“I’ll hand them over to an evaluation team.”

“You don’t test them yourself?”

Paul shook his head. “I’m the sampler. I can assist in actual testing, but there are rules. I test animal DNA all the time, and the equipment is the same, but genus Homo requires a license and oversight.”

“All right, mate, then I’ll be back tomorrow.” Paul followed Gavin to the jeep. There, Gavin surprised him by handing him the satellite phone. “In case anything happens while I’m gone.”

“Do you think something will?”

“No,” Gavin said. Then: “I don’t know.”

Paul fingered the sat phone, a dark block of plastic the size of a shoe. Something had changed. He could see it in the older man’s face. He considered asking more but didn’t.

Gavin climbed into the jeep and pulled away. Paul watched the vehicle struggle up the muddy track heading to town.

An hour later the rain had stopped and James was back from his excursion in the dripping jungle, smiling ear to ear. He returned to camp covered in mud but otherwise none the worse for the wear.

“Well, will you look at that,” James said, holding something out for Paul to see.

“What is it?”

“Partially eaten monitor.” His face practically beamed. “A species only found here.”

“Partially eaten? You know, I would have shared my lunch.”

The smile grew wider. “I’d have to be pretty hungry to take a chomp of this bit of jerky. A few bites, and it would likely be my last meal. Lots of nasty bacteria in these things, starting with their mouths. That’s how they kill their prey, you know. They bite and then follow. For days, sometimes. Eventually, the bacteria does the job, and they move in for the kill.”

Paul saw now that it was a clawed foot that James held in his freckled hand. It was the size of a St. Bernard’s paw.

“That’s one big lizard.”

“Oh, no.” He shook his head emphatically. “This was just a juvenile. They get a lot bigger.”

“How big?”

“Big enough to worry about. Mother Nature is odd this side of the Wallace line.”

“So it would appear.”

“Not only are most of the species this side of the line not found anywhere else, a lot of them aren’t even vaguely related to anything else. It’s like God started from scratch to fill all the niches.”

James reared his arm back and flung the rotting paw into the jungle. “I’d save it for my collection, but I don’t have a way to preserve the tissue until we leave. Shame, really.”

“This a big collection of rotting lizard parts you have?”

“Oh, you have no idea.”

“How’d you get started in herpetology?”

“The bush, when I was a kid, was right out the back door. I was never any good at sports, so I used to play out there with my older brother, collecting lizards. It turned into a thing.” He shrugged. “That thing turned into this thing, and here I am.”

“Ah, so you have your brother to blame.”

“To thank, you mean. I have him to thank for this lucrative and highly fulfilling career path. Also, it’s a magnet for the ladies, in case you couldn’t guess.”

“A few days ago, McMaster mentioned a dwarf elephant.”

“Yeah, stegodons.”

“What happened to them?”

“They’ve been extinct for a long time now. This island was one of their last strongholds.”

“What killed them off?”

“Same thing that killed off a lot of the ancient fauna on the island. The classic case, a volcanic eruption. We found the ash layer just above the youngest bones.”

“Cataclysm,” Paul whispered.

Once, lying in bed with a woman, Paul had watched the moon through the window. The woman had traced his scars with her finger.

“Your father was brutal.”

“No,” Paul had said. “He was broken, that’s all.”

“There’s a difference?”

“Yeah.”

“What?”

“He was always sorry afterward.”

“That mattered?”

“Every single time.”

11

It came the next morning in the guise of police action. It came in shiny new Daihatsus with roll bars and off-road tires. It came with guns. Mostly, it came with guns.

Paul heard them before he saw them, men shouting in a language he couldn’t understand. He was with James at the cave’s entrance. When Paul saw the first assault rifle, he sprinted for the tents. He slid the DNA lozenges into a pouch in his belt and punched numbers on the sat phone. Gavin picked up on the second ring. “The police are here,” Paul said.

There was a pause on the other end of the line. “I just spoke to the officials today,” Gavin said. Outside the tents there were shouts—angry shouts. “They assured me that nothing like this would happen.”

“They lied.”

Behind him, James said, “This is bad.”

“Where are you?” Paul spoke into the phone.

“I’m still in Ruteng,” Gavin said.

“Then this will be over by the time you can get here.”

“Paul, it’s not safe for you th—”

Paul hung up. Tell me something I don’t know.

He took his knife from his sample kit and slit the back of the tent open. He slid through, James following close behind. They crouched in the mud. Paul saw Margaret standing uncertain at the edge of the jungle. She was frozen in place, watching the men with guns, caught somewhere between running into the camp and running away from it. Paul moved his hand, a subtle gesture to catch her attention. Their eyes met, and Paul motioned toward the jeeps.

She nodded.

They all ran for it.

A dozen yards across the mud, moving quickly. They climbed into a jeep and shut the doors. The soldiers—for that’s what Paul knew they were now—the soldiers didn’t notice them until Paul started the engine. Malay faces swung around, mouths open in shouts of outrage. A gun came up, more shouting, and the message was clear.

Here was the choice, to comply or not. It always came down to a choice.

“You’ll probably want your seat belts for this,” Paul said. Then he gunned it, spitting dirt.

“Don’t shoot, don’t shoot, don’t shoot,” James whispered softly in the backseat, eyes closed in prayer.

“What?” Paul said.

“If they shoot, they’re not police.”

A round smashed through the rear window and blew out a chunk of the front windshield, spidering the safety glass.

“Shit!” Margaret screamed.

A quick glance in the rearview, and Paul saw soldiers climbing into one of the Daihatsus. He yanked the wheel to the right.

“Not that way!” Margaret shouted. Paul ignored her and floored the accelerator.

Jungle whipped past, close enough to touch. Ruts threatened to buck them from the cratered roadway. The Daihatsu whipped into view behind them. Shots rang out, a sound like Chinese firecrackers, the ding of metal. The land sloped downward, and for a moment the road dropped away from jeep’s wheels, maxing out the suspension. The jeep landed and slid and bounced through the mud. Paul fought for control, spinning the wheel in the direction of the slide. The jeep fishtailed, and Paul spun the wheel in the other direction, gunning the engine. Mud sprayed the windows, and they accelerated through another deep rut, going airborne again.

James braced his hand against the roof of the jeep to keep from slamming his head. Margaret screamed in the passenger seat.

More shots rang out, but none struck the jeep. Their pursuers were having the same problem with the road. Still, Paul knew it was only a matter of time. There was no way they’d outrun them.

They rounded the bend, and the river came into view—wide and dumb as the sky itself. The road sloped down to the water’s edge. Paul hit the accelerator.

“We’re not going to make it across!” James shouted.

“We only need to get halfway.”

Another shot slammed into the back of the jeep—a loud crack, the sound of hammer on metal.

They hit the river in a slow-speed crash, water roaring up and over and through the broken windshield, pouring inside in a single muddy glut, soaking the interior of the jeep, the smell of muck overpowering.

Paul stomped his foot to the floor.

The jeep chugged, drifted, caught gravel. The wheels churned across stone. They got about halfway across before Paul yanked the steering wheel to the left. The world came unstuck and started to shift. The right front fender rose up, rocking with the current. The engine died. Sudden silence.

They were floating.

Paul looked back. The pursuing vehicle skidded to a halt at the shoreline and men jumped out. The jeep heaved, one wheel pivoting around a submerged rock.

“Can you swim?” Paul asked.

“Now you ask us?”

“I’d unbuckle if I were you.”

The jeep hit another rock, metal grinding on stone. Then the sky traded places with water and everything went dark.

Water surged through shattered windows. Paul caught half a breath before the river knocked him into the backseat.

His head slammed into something jagged, and he was suddenly upside down, underwater, face crushed into the jeep’s roof. The river was a cold fist on his back, holding him down. The sound was deafening—rending metal and breaking glass, the scrape of stone on steel just beneath his cheek as the vehicle dredged the stony river bottom. Then the jeep rolled again, a violent movement, and the rear door flew open, twisted from its hinges—and he was suddenly out, flailing in the water.

He sucked in a lungful of air, trying to stay at the surface.

Gunshots came from behind them, bullets zinging across the water, and Paul ducked beneath the surface. He went deep, letting the cold river carry him. His shoulder slammed into a submerged boulder, knocking the air from his lungs. He surfaced again, gasping. More shots, farther away this time. Somewhere behind him, he heard the jeep slam into a rock. The cold fist of the river carried him forward.

Paul saw James paddling a dozen feet ahead of him.

“James!”

“Here!” came the answer. James coughed and splashed.

Then a moment later, from somewhere behind him: “Paul!” It was Margaret. The jeep loomed close behind, rolling in the frothing water. A battering ram ready to crush anything in its path.

“Stay to the side!” Paul shouted. “Let the current take you.”

But behind Margaret the jeep hit a boulder, turned, wedged itself sideways. Water roared up and over the top, pinning it in place. Margaret kicked away.

Paul kept his feet out in front of him to fend off the rocks. Up ahead, a sound Paul knew. The roar of water, and the river dropped away.

“Jesus,” James said.

There was no time for anything else. James was swept into a narrowing and then was gone, over some hidden edge. Five feet or a hundred.

“Look out!” Paul called behind him to Margaret. He sucked a deep lungful of air, and the river swept him over the falls.

There was no sense of falling, only of being in the grip of the river.

He hit and was pulled deep, spinning upside down. Kicking his way to the surface, he broke free and took a gasp of air. The current pulled him forward.

The river flattened over the next few hundred meters. Trees hung low over the water in a broad green drape, and the rapids slowly died away.

They dragged themselves out of the dark flow several miles downriver, where a bridge crossed the water. It was the first sign of civilization they’d seen since leaving the camp. For a long while, they lay on the rocky shore, just breathing. When they could stand, they followed the winding dirt road to a place called Rea. From there they took a bus. Margaret had money.

They didn’t speak about it until they arrived at Bajawa.

“Do you think they’re okay?” Margaret asked. Her voice wavered.

“I think it wouldn’t serve their purpose to hurt the dig team. They only wanted the bones.”

“They shot at us.”

“Because they assumed we had something they wanted. They were shooting at the tires.”

“No,” she said. “They weren’t.”

Three nights in a rented hotel room, and James couldn’t leave—that hair like a great big handle anybody could pick up and carry, anybody with eyes and a voice. Some of the locals hadn’t seen red hair in their lives, and James’s description was prepackaged for easy transport. Paul, however, blended—just another vaguely Asian set of cheekbones in the crowd, even if he was half a foot taller than most of the locals.

That night, staring at the ceiling from one of the double beds, James said, “If those bones aren’t us… then I wonder what they were like.”

“They had fire and stone tools,” Paul said. “They were probably a lot like us.”

“We act like we’re the chosen ones, you know? But what if it wasn’t like that?”

“Don’t think about it,” Margaret said.

“What if God had all these different varieties… all these different walks, these different options at the beginning, and we’re just the ones who killed the others off?”

“Shut up,” she said.

“What if there wasn’t just one Adam but a hundred Adams?”

“Shut the fuck up, James,” Margaret said.

There was a long quiet, the sound of the street filtering through the thin walls. “Us or other,” James said softly, not a question but something else, the listing of two equal alternatives. After another long quiet he said, “Paul, if you get your samples back to your lab, you’ll be able to tell, won’t you?”

Paul thought of the evaluation team and wondered. He said nothing.

“The winners write the history books,” James said. “Maybe the winners write the bibles, too. I wonder what religion died with them.”

The next day, Paul left to buy food. There was no choice. When he returned, Margaret was gone.

“Where is she?”

“She left. She said she’d be right back.”

“Why didn’t you stop her?”

“How was I supposed to do that, hold her down? She said she wouldn’t be gone long, and then she left.”

They ate in silence. Noodles and fish.

Day turned into evening. By darkness, they both knew she wasn’t coming back.

“How are we going to get home from here?” James asked.

“I don’t know.”

“And your samples. How are you going to get them off the island? Even if we got to an airport, they’d never let you on the plane with them. You’ll be searched. They’ll find the samples and they’ll be confiscated.”

“We’ll figure out a way once things have settled down.”

“Things are never going to settle down.”

“They will.”

“You still don’t understand, even after everything that happened.”

“Understand what?”

“What these bones could mean,” James said. “When your entire culture is predicated on an idea, you can’t afford to be proven wrong.”

Out of dead sleep, Paul heard it. Something. At the edge of perception.

He’d known this was coming, though he hadn’t been aware that he’d known until that moment. The creak of wood, the gentle breeze of an open door.

Shock and awe would have been better—an inrush of soldiers, an arrest of some kind, expulsion, deportation, a legal system, however corrupt. A silent man in the dark meant many things. None of them good.

Paul breathed. There was a cold in him—a part of him that was dead, a part of him that could never be afraid. A part of him his father had put there.

Paul’s eyes searched the darkness and found it: the place where shadow moved, a dark breeze that eased across the room. If there was only one of them, then there was a chance.

He thought of making a run for it, sprinting for the door, leaving the samples and this place behind, but James, still sleeping, stopped him. He made up his mind.

Paul exploded from the bed, flinging the blanket ahead of him, wrapping that part of the room, and a shape moved, a theoretical darkness like a puma’s spots, black on black—there even though you can’t see it. And Paul knew he’d surprised him, that darkness, and he knew, instantly, that it wouldn’t be enough. A blow rocked Paul off his feet, forward momentum carrying him into the wall. The mirror shattered, glass crashing to the floor.

“What the fuck?” James hit the light, and suddenly the world snapped into existence, a flashbulb stillness—and the intruder was Indonesian, crouched in a stance, preternatural silence coming off him like a heat shimmer. He carried endings with him, nothingness in a long blade. The insult of it hit home. The shocking fucking insult, standing there, knees bent, bright blade in one hand: blood on reflective steel. That’s when Paul felt the pain. It was only then he realized he’d already been opened.

And the Indonesian moved fast. He moved so fast. He moved faster than Paul’s eyes could follow, covering distance like thought, across the room to James, who had time only to flinch before the knife parted him. Such a professional, and James’s eyes went wide in surprise.

Paul reacted using the only things he had, size, strength, momentum. He hit the intruder like a linebacker, sweeping him into his arms, crushing him against the wall. Paul felt something snap—a twig, a branch, something in the man’s chest—and they rolled apart, the intruder doing something with his hands; the rasp of blade on bone, a new blackness, and Paul flinched from the blow, feeling the steel leave his eye socket.

There was no anger. It was the strangest thing. To be in a fight for his life and not be angry.

The man came at him again, and it was only Paul’s size that saved him. He grabbed one arm and twisted, bringing the fight to the floor. They rolled, knocking over the table, and Paul came up on top. A pushing down of his will into three square inches of the man’s throat—a caving in like a crumpling aluminum can, but Paul still held on, still pushed until the lights went out of those black eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he said to the empty eyes. “I’m sorry.”

Paul rolled off the dead man and collapsed to the floor. He crawled over to James. It wasn’t a pool of blood. It was a swamp, the mattress soggy with it. James lay on the bed, still conscious, the neck wound a surgical gash at the carotid.

The blood from Paul’s eye spattered the red beard, mixing with the blood that ran onto the bed.

“Don’t bleed on me, man,” James said. “I know all about you promiscuous Americans. No telling what you might carry, and I don’t want to have to explain it to my girlfriend.”

Paul smiled at the dying man, crying and bleeding on him, wiping the blood from his beard with a pillowcase. He held James’s hand until he stopped breathing.

12

Paul’s eye opened to white. He blinked. A man in a suit sat in the chair next to the hospital bed. A man in a police uniform stood near the door. “Where am I?” Paul asked. He didn’t recognize his own voice. It was an older man. Who’d eaten glass.

“Maumere,” the suited man said. He was white, mid-thirties, lawyer written all over him.

“How long?”

“A day.”

Paul touched the bandage over his face. “Is my eye…”

“I’m sorry.”

Paul took the news with a nod. “How did I get here?”

“They found you naked in the street. Two dead men in your room.”

It came back to him then, all of it, like a weight settling onto him.

“So what happens now?”

“Well, that depends on you.” The man in the suit smiled. “I’m here at the behest of certain parties interested in bringing this to a quiet close.”

“Quiet?”

“Yes.”

“Where is Margaret? Gavin McMaster?”

“They were put on flights back to Australia this morning.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Whether you believe or not is of no consequence to me. I’m just answering your questions.”

“What about the bones?”

“Confiscated for safekeeping, of course. The Indonesians have closed down the dig.”

“On what grounds?”

“It is their cave, after all.”

“What about my DNA samples in the hotel room, the lozenges?”

“They’ve been confiscated and destroyed.”

Paul sat quietly. He looked at the man, imagining his skull beneath the thin layer of epidermis. He knew all his bones would be smooth and fine, with hardly a mark of muscle attachment, the perfect gracile skeleton.

“How did you end up in the street?” the man asked.

“I walked.”

“How did you end up naked?”

“I figured it would increase my odds.”

“Explain.”

“I knew what they wanted,” Paul said. “And I was bleeding out. Being naked was the fastest way to prove I wasn’t armed and didn’t have the samples. I knew they’d still be coming.”

“You are a smart man, Mr. Carlsson, leaving those in the hotel room.” The suited man stood, apparently satisfied with Paul’s answers. “So you figured you’d just let them have the samples?”

“Yeah,” Paul said.

The man nodded his good-bye, then turned to leave. He closed the door behind himself.

“Mostly,” Paul said.

On the way to the airport, Paul told the driver to pull over. He paid the fare and climbed out. He took a bus to Bengali, and from there took a cab to Rea.

He climbed on a bus in Rea, and as it bore down the road Paul yelled, “Stop!”

The driver hit the brake. “I’m sorry,” Paul said. “I’ve forgotten something.” He climbed off the bus and walked back to town, checking for a tail. No car followed.

Once in town, down one of the small side streets, he found it: the flowerpot with the odd pink plant. The flowerpot whose appearance and location he’d memorized the week before, when he’d first left the hotel room covered in blood. He scooped dirt out of the base.

An old woman shouted something at him, coming out of her house. He held out money. “For the plant,” he said. “I’m a flower lover.” She might not have understood English, but she understood money.

He walked with the plant under his arm. James had been right about some things. Wrong about others. Not a hundred Adams, no.

Just two.

All of Australoid creation like some parallel world.

But why would God create two Adams? That’s what Paul had wondered. The answer was that He wouldn’t.

Two Adams.

Two gods. One on each side of the Wallace line.

Paul imagined that it began as a competition. A line drawn in the sand, to see whose creations would dominate.

Paul understood the burden Abraham had carried, to witness the birth of a religion.

As Paul walked through the streets he dug his fingers through the dirt of the flowerpot. His fingers touched it, and he pulled the lozenge free. The lozenge no evaluation team would ever lay eyes on. He would make sure of that.

He slid the last remaining DNA sample into his pocket.

He passed a woman in a doorway, an old woman with beautiful teeth like dentists might dream. She reminded him of someone. He thought of the bones in the cave, and of the strange people who had once crouched on this island, fashioning tools from bits of stone.

He handed her the flower. “For you,” he said.

He hailed a cab and climbed inside. “Take me to the airport.”

As the old cab bounced along the dusty roads, Paul took off his eye patch. He saw the driver glance into his rearview and then look away, repulsed.

“They lied, you see,” Paul told the driver. “About the irreducible complexity of the eye. Oh, there are ways.”

The driver turned his radio up, keeping his face forward. Paul pulled off the bandage. He grimaced as he unpacked his eye, pulling white gauze out in long strips, pain exploding in his skull. It was more pain than he’d ever experienced in his life, a white-hot nova in his head. The gauze made a small, bloody pile on the seat next to him.

“A prophet is one who feels fiercely,” he said, and then he slid the lozenge into his empty eye socket.