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Chapter 21 Neanderthals

“All I care about is Erectus,” said Wheaton. “But yes, of course I’d like a chance to look at Neanderthals. They are ancestral to all post-African humans.”

“You’re curious about everything,” said Ram. “You always have been.”

“But I wouldn’t waste my time going back to meet—whomever. Galileo. Jesus.”

“Maybe you would,” said Noxon, “if you could pass through the Wall and acquire their languages. So you could converse normally with them.”

Wheaton barked out a laugh. “I might at that. People always forget the language barrier when they imagine having dinner with some ancient celebrity. Socrates! What a miserable dinner that would be. Fifteen minutes in, he’d expose me as a fool, and I’m not sure I’m ready for that much brutal self-discovery.”

“Which is why you would choose him,” said Ram. “And why you’re willing to make our trial run with Neanderthals. Because that was your first college thesis.”

“I do want to know if bullfighting and bull-leaping are Sapient reenactments of Neanderthal hunting techniques.”

“And if it turns out that they aren’t,” said Ram, “will that count as brutal self-discovery?”

“It will count as finding out that my hypothesis was wrong,” said Wheaton. “And that is at the heart of science. Anyone who hides from the possibility of his hypothesis being wrong is not a scientist at all.”

“So brutal self-discovery is the core experience of science,” said Deborah.

“I raised her well, didn’t I?” said Wheaton.

“I discovered that entirely on my own,” said Deborah.

Noxon chuckled.

“Do you doubt the possibility of adequate self-education?” asked Deborah—so sweetly that it was clear she was hoping for a quarrel.

“All education is self-education,” said Noxon. “And all self-education builds on the foundation provided by your teachers.”

“I’ll make sure that’s inscribed in stone somewhere,” said Deborah. “Your headstone, for instance.”

“I can’t escape the teachings of my father,” said Noxon. “Everything I figure out by myself, I find him underneath it, holding it up. I find him ahead of me, leading me to where I can see new things and understand them.”

“Well, your father was an expendable,” said Deborah. “Mine was an absent-minded professor. I had to pair his socks for him. I had to lay out his underwear while he showered, so he’d remember to put some on.”

“That’s a myth,” said Wheaton. “Please, take us into the past so I can escape this conversation.”

“I can move us in time,” said Noxon. “And I can move things in space, just a little. But it won’t do us any good to go back in time until we’re in the place where you’ll be able to see the things you want to see.”

“You’re right. All the Neanderthals were dead by the time Sapiens reached America.”

“A trip to Europe,” said Deborah. “I’ve been urging that for years.”

Ram sighed. “Noxon and I will have to make the flight invisibly. No identification.”

“Not a problem, though, with time-slicing,” said Noxon. “It’s boring because we can’t talk to each other or hear anything that anybody else is saying. But I’ll slice us fast enough that we won’t be in that state for very long.”

“Can you slice me with you?” asked Deborah.

“It’s not good for you to disappear in a closed space like a plane,” said Noxon. “People will notice you’re not there.”

“I’ll go to the bathroom, and then you come to the door and take me out through it.”

“We move very slowly in slicetime,” said Noxon. “Do you think it’s fair to the other passengers to tie up a bathroom that long?”

“Then I’ll go as if toward the bathroom, and we’ll slice without leaving a closed bathroom door behind us.”

Deborah seemed so eager, but Noxon wondered how long that eagerness would last, in the boredom of slicing time. He thought of Param, who had sliced her way through so many hours, days, months of her youth, and the price she had paid for it. But Deborah has also paid a price; even with mechanical eyes, she has lacked many normal experiences. Perhaps her excitement over timeshaping is a welcome relief from an otherwise tedious life.

With this thought, Noxon looked at Deborah’s uncle, to see what he was making of her attitude.

Wheaton seemed to take Noxon’s glance as a cue to speak. “I’m glad you’re treating this scientific expedition so seriously,” he said. Sarcastically, of course, but also affectionately, or so it seemed to Noxon.

“They’re children,” said Ram. “Let them play.”

So Deborah passed most of the trans-Atlantic flight invisible, and Noxon made the time flow around them very quickly, so that the whole voyage only took a few dozen steps. But he returned her to regular time as the airport approach began, or the attendant would have noticed that she wasn’t there for the landing.

Once they were out of the airport and checked into a hotel, the first order of business was to figure out where their leap into the past should take place. Noxon’s pathfinding should allow them to pick exactly the spot they wanted—but there was a lot of Europe to search through. No point in going to all this trouble just to watch a Neanderthal take a long hike.

“I don’t know what a pathfinder can see,” said Wheaton. “But what I need is a time and place where Neanderthals were hunting bulls. Aurochs, probably, the giant Ice Age bovine.”

“But they weren’t entirely prehistoric,” said Deborah. “The last of them died in Poland in 1627. They seem to be ancestral to modern cattle. Both Asian zebus and Western taurines.”

“A fount of knowledge,” said Wheaton.

“I’m telling him that we’re not looking for cows,” said Deborah. “We’re looking for this.” She held out a tablet with a photo of an aurochs skeleton. “Note that the horns bend forward. That’s what led Father to guess that—”

“Hypothesize,” said Wheaton.

“Take a wild stab-in-the-dark guess,” Deborah recorrected him, “that the ancient Cretan depictions of bull-leaping show a sport that would have made far more sense with aurochsen rather than taurine bulls. You need to have those forward-­reaching horns if you’re going to grab them and leap onto the creature’s back.”

“The real source of the hypothesis,” said Wheaton, “is the fact that Neanderthals seem to have made no projectile ­weapons. Their spears were useful only for stabbing. And the terrain they lived in didn’t lend itself to open running, the way Erectus hunted. I don’t care how stealthy you are, you can’t sneak close enough to an aurochs to jab it between the ribs. The last distance has to be crossed in a run, and then the Neanderthal had to jump on its back and stab it at the base of the skull, severing the spinal column.”

“And the aurochs held still for this,” said Ram.

“It bucked and ran like a son-of-a-bitch,” said Wheaton. “But Neanderthals are strong. They gripped with their thighs long enough to ram that spear into the spine and bring the beast crashing down.”

“Though Father’s guesswork,” said Deborah, “doesn’t explain how you jump onto a bull’s back over the horns and somehow end up facing forward.”

“They were very agile,” said Wheaton.

“Let’s go find out,” said Noxon. “Perhaps you can get me to a place where you know that aurochses were hunted.”

“Not aurochses,” said Deborah. “ ‘Aurochs’ is singular and plural.”

“But Deborah uses the pseudo-Germanic plural ‘aurochsen’ when she wants to show off,” said Wheaton.

“Like ‘ox’ and ‘oxen,’” she said.

“A place where you know they were eating aurochsoto,” said Noxon, using a plural from the trade language of the Stashi riverlands. “Then I can hunt for paths with a reasonable hope of success.”

The place turned out to be in Slovenia, a tiny nation. But it had one of the better Neanderthal settlement sites, occupied for thousands of years. What Noxon quickly realized was that it was actually occupied six times for a single season each. But there was no way the anthropologists could have seen the discontinuities.

Noxon found paths that seemed to be hunters returning from a large kill—their arrival was followed by a feast and then a lot of meat-smoking—and then sensed where they had acquired their kill. That first attempt was a dead end, though—the hunters had found a dead aurochs, brought down by a combination of dire wolves and disease.

But his second try brought the hunters back to the path of a living aurochs, and Noxon could sense that one Neanderthal’s path did indeed take him onto the aurochs’s back while it was still alive. Then he looked over the map, fitting the paths onto it as best he could. “No roads take us any closer than we already are,” he said. “So we’ve got about ten kilometers of walking to do.”

“How old is the event?” asked Wheaton.

“It’s the oldest group that spent a season here,” said Noxon. “Isn’t there already a date? Carbon 14, at least?”

“The oldest fire built here dates from ninety thousand years ago,” said Wheaton.

“That sounds about right,” said Noxon. “My view of the paths doesn’t come with a calendar. But that ninety-thousand-year figure gives me a benchmark.”

“Ten kilometers,” said Ram wearily.

“You walk almost as far changing planes at the airport,” said Noxon.

“Not even close,” said Ram.

“Then stay here,” said Noxon. “You can watch over the stuff we don’t need, so we don’t have to carry it all with us.”

“We’ll lock that in the boot,” said Ram. “I’m not going to miss this.”

“No, you’re just going to complain the whole way. Those Neanderthals, so thoughtless—hunting uri where they happen to be, instead of hoping they’ll wander closer.”

“Uri?” asked Deborah.

“The Latinized plural of the root word ‘urus,’” said Noxon. “I think it’s a better name than aurochs anyway.”

“See, Father?” said Deborah. “There are worse language wonks in the world than I am.”

“He’s not from this world,” said Wheaton.

The hike was difficult—lots of ups and downs, scrambling into ravines and out again, and scraping their way through thickets. But they had dressed for hiking and when they got to the site, they were tired but not exhausted.

“If Neanderthals were careful hunters,” said Noxon, “there’s no chance we could suddenly appear without their noticing us. So I’m thinking that I bring us to that time behind this rise, and then I slice us forward as we climb the hill. I won’t slice us very fast, so we’ll see their actions speeded up but it won’t be a blur.”

“Will my camera be able to record the images?” asked Wheaton.

“If our eyes can see, the camera can record it,” said Noxon. “Images move quickly enough not to lose coherency when we time-slice. Not like sound, which turns into meaningless ragged waves.”

“Then that sounds like an excellent plan,” said Wheaton.

With the clarity that his facemask brought him, Noxon easily brought them to the moment that he chose and then sliced them with precision as they moved up the rise to perch on the crest. It was close enough for a good clear view, but not so close that they’d have to worry about Neanderthals walking through them.

The hunting was a long, slow process, and several times Noxon sped up the time-slicing so it didn’t get too uncomfortable waiting there on the crest. It wasn’t just about boredom: Somebody would need to empty bladder or bowel if it took too long.

The four Neanderthals approached the grazing herd with infinite patience. It was incredible how slow their movements were, how utterly still they could remain while holding awkward poses. Each Neanderthal man—two seeming to be in their ­twenties, two in their teens—had a short spear strapped to his back, stone tip near the man’s head. Their hands were empty.

Unlike wolves and hunting cats, they had not sought out an old, ailing, or especially young aurochs. Instead, they had chosen the most powerful male. Apparently they liked a challenge—or they figured that if they were going to take the time to hunt, they should bring home enough meat for it to be worth the effort.

Finally the hunters got near enough that the aurochs began to get nervous. If there was some signal among the hunters, it had to be by sound, because there was nothing visible to the party of Sapient watchers. But the hunters all leapt up at once. The three that were not directly in front of the aurochs pulled their spears as they ran and prepared to jab at the animal’s sides. But the one in front kept his hands empty and open as he ran directly at the great horned head, waving his arms and, judging from his open mouth, shouting.

The other members of the aurochs herd began to move away nervously; some of them broke into a run. But the big bull turned to face the shouting man rushing toward him; the bull lowered its head and began to move forward, clearly intending to catch the man on its horns and gore him or toss him out of the way.

The lead hunter’s gaze never left those horns. At the last moment, the horns went down and the head turned slightly, to point one horn directly at the hunter. He caught that horn with one hand and then, as he vaulted upward, caught the other horn with the other hand.

The bull tossed him, and the hunter swiveled around in midair, so that when he landed astride the animal’s back, he faced forward. It wasn’t a crotch-crushing impact—the man’s feet landed first, and his legs slid downward, already gripping so that when the man’s crotch came in contact with the bony ridge of the bull’s spine, his downward momentum was almost nil.

It was the most perfectly controlled athletic move Noxon had ever seen.

At the exact moment that the lead hunter was perfectly astride the aurochs, the three other hunters jabbed at one shoulder and both rear thighs, striking deeply enough that they did not try to withdraw the spears. The wounds would not be fatal in themselves, but because they left their spears in place, Noxon could imagine that if the lead hunter failed to bring down the beast, it would leave a trail of blood as it ran away, and would become weaker and weaker, so the hunters would be sure of a kill even if it wasn’t a quick one.

But the lead hunter was no novice. As he settled onto the bull’s back, his hands were already pulling the spear upward out of its binding. As the bull began to react to the wounds inflicted by the other hunters, the rider jabbed downward with enormous power, and the spear seemed to go twenty centimeters into the animal’s spine.

It shuddered once and then flopped sideways, having lost all control of its muscles when its spinal cord was severed.

As it fell, the lead hunter sprang from its back, so he was not pinned under it.

Noxon thought back through what the man had done. In a single fluid motion, he had caught the bull’s horns, vaulted into the air, spun halfway around, landed on his feet, slid down into a tight-gripping straddle, withdrawing his spear and stabbing in the exact place with all his strength and leverage, and then leapt clear of the animal. In realtime it hadn’t been as rapid as it seemed in slicetime, but Noxon hadn’t been slicing that fast. It really had been unbelievably quick.

The other three hunters fell on the fallen animal instantly, using small stone blades to slice open the throat and belly. They disemboweled the animal and skinned it in smooth, practiced movements, each man knowing and doing his job. Noxon sped up his time-slicing enough that they could see the whole process before they needed to leave. When the men had the main cuts of beef and the aurochs hide wrapped in skins, and their spears and knives were fastened again to their bodies, Wheaton pumped his fist and Noxon and the others rose up and walked down the back slope of the hill they had watched from.

Noxon stopped slicing time, so they could talk again. “Need to see any more?”

In answer, Wheaton played back his own recording of the event. “I hope I can slow it down or at least take it frame by frame because there’s so much to see,” he said. “But I got it. A thing of beauty.”

They had been speaking in low tones. But the Neanderthals hadn’t survived this long by being careless or unobservant. Noxon looked over and saw that the beef-bearing hunters had spotted them. And, enhanced as his hearing was by the facemask, he could hear them talking. It wasn’t a highly advanced ­language—it consisted of names and single words. “Who.” “What.” “Enemy.” “Kill.”

How the Wall had given him the ability to understand such fragmented speech—from Neanderthals rather than Sapiens—would be a matter for Noxon to speculate about later.

“Disappear but stay in this time?” asked Noxon. “Or return to the future?”

“I have everything I need here,” said Wheaton.

The Neanderthals had already dropped their burdens of beef and, with spears in hand, were running toward the observation party.

“Future it is,” said Noxon. “I might be able to do this without holding your hands, but let’s be safe.”

They took each other’s hands. The Neanderthals were so fast—Noxon could already smell them, not just their bodies but their breath, when he made a random jump forward in time.

They returned a few days before they had first arrived in the car. Not wanting to go through the tedium of time-slicing, Noxon flung them forward again. But the jump was imprecise enough that he overshot—now there were policemen and a tow truck at their car. They could probably have talked their way through the situation, but they would have had to explain why Noxon was fluent in Slovenian and how they had managed to camp for however many days the car had been abandoned. And then there was that lack-of-identification problem.

So Noxon jumped them back to a time soon after their own paths had disappeared over a hill, and they returned to the car long before their earlier selves would have reached the site of the Neanderthal aurochs hunt.

“We can’t prove that modern humans ever saw Neanderthals hunt that way,” said Deborah. “But Sapiens and Neanderthals coexisted so long that it would strain credulity to claim that they did not.”

“I agree,” said Wheaton. “My hypothesis isn’t proven, but this certainly didn’t contradict it. Right down to the picadors, that was a bullfight. And the birth of the sport of bull-leaping. Though the Minoan vase paintings show the bull-leapers going clean over the bull. Nobody seems to have tried to ride the things.”

“That had to wait for the rodeo,” said Deborah. “Such strength, such control, such patience. How could Homo sapiens have ever defeated these people?”

“They didn’t have to defeat them,” said Wheaton. “The fact that Homo sapiens has no mitochondrial DNA from Neanderthals suggests that if there were head-to-head battles, the Neanderthals always won, and their males mated with the Sapient women, never the other way around.”

“Or Neanderthal women were so strong that they broke the necks of any gracile humans who tried to mate with them,” said Deborah.

Noxon wasn’t sure he liked the relish with which she said that.

“Seeing all that bloody beef made me hungry,” said Deborah.

“Why?” asked Wheaton. “You always like your beef cooked into a flavorless stringy mass.”

“But I know that it begins with those great bloody haunches and sides,” said Deborah, “and I could do with a nice parmentier about now. Or a hamburger.”

“Well, Noxon,” said Wheaton, “in all honesty, today’s work completely pays for the easy half of the bargain—providing you with a place to stay while you wait to see why the people of Earth decide to wipe out your world. So if you want to stop taking me into the distant past, I’d still consider us more than even.”

“None of us would be happy without a visit to Homo erectus,” said Noxon. “Today’s excursion was its own reward.”

Wheaton laughed. “Here I am marveling at the athleticism of Neanderthal hunters, while the only reason I could witness it was because the human race has evolved an ability that nobody could have foreseen.”

“Cameras?” asked Noxon, feigning innocence.

Wheaton only laughed. While Deborah took Noxon’s hand and squeezed it. So it wasn’t all neck-breaking with her.

They decided not to fly back to the United States. Instead, they would go directly to Africa, and search for the paths of an early Erectus tribe. Not ninety thousand years, but nine hundred thousand, at least. Maybe twice that.

And this time, they would want to watch for days, not an hour or so. Neanderthal-watching had left Noxon exhausted. Erectus-watching would be far harder. But… it was all part of saving the world. And he was almost as eager to see what they might learn as Wheaton and Deborah were.

At the back of the plane to Nairobi, when they took a toilet break from time-slicing, Ram Odin asked him, “Are you up to this? It looked like that expedition really wore you out.”

“In Africa, maybe we won’t have to hike so far,” said Noxon. “And we’ll just watch for a few hours a day, then return to camp in the present. I won’t push myself too hard. And this”—he tapped the facemask—“helps keep me strong.”

“It doesn’t replace food, water, and rest,” said Ram.

“It seems you want to talk,” said Noxon. “But I need that toilet.”

Ram gestured him toward the open bathroom door. Noxon went inside and marveled, once again, at the machinery of daily life that humans of this era of Earth regarded as minimal acceptable conditions. Only a few hours on the plane, but these people had to replace several rows of seats with contraptions for carrying away bodily waste, and with galleys for the preparation of food and drink.

Few of these people could last three days in the wilderness where Noxon had spent his childhood. But they had, and would soon use, the power to wipe the world of Garden out of existence. These feeble toilet-using snack-eating destructive babies—but, like the weaker, possibly stupider Sapients whose superior ­weapons out-hunted and, maybe, outfought the Neanderthals, they had moved their evolution away from their bodies and onto their tools. They didn’t have to be individually clever or strong, patient or wise, or skilled at either peace or war. They could never have wiped out the Neanderthals hand-to-hand. But once arrows and spear-throwers joined their toolkit, the Sapients would use machines to do their killing from a safe distance.