CRO-MAGNON (66 page)

His own blood was coursing in a diminishing stream, his consciousness fading, and he knew the lion had sent his whole family to the Land of Shadows. His mind flashed on the planned visit to the clan and the tribe, and he was gripped by an infinite sadness that he would never see the greater world.

The fire, depleted by Leya and scattered by the lion, was going out. Dimly, Brann saw Gar manage to stand despite his torn-out throat and plod toward the lion. In the fading pink light his pale eyes blazed with hatred, his spear riding low in his thick hands.

Fel looked dead but still clung to the big cat’s throat. The lion roared and backed away, trying to shake him off, and through a narrowing tunnel Brann saw Gar lurch forward, bunch his shoulders and make a mighty thrust into the beast’s gaping mouth, driving the big animal back into the crevice at the rear of the cave. He heard what he knew was the lion’s death-growl, and his final vision was of the spear’s bloody stone tip protruding out the back of the lion’s skull, while the blood-drenched Gar staggered toward him and Leya before pitching down.

#

Volker and Golub had left their seats to hover over the gurney alongside Calder, Blaine, Mathiessen, and Ayni. They all stood watching the boy’s eyelids twitch faster.

“
He’s experiencing memories all right,” Mathiessen said. “I confess I was afraid to believe.”

Calder said, “Judging from his movements, he seemed to be lifting something bulky and then walking some disgtance. Now I think he’s reliving the fight with the lion, just as the wolf seemed to.”

“
Remarkable.” Mathiessen looked at Blaine. “You never explained to me just how the brain stores memories.”

“
I’m a geneticist,” Blaine said, glancing at Volker and Golub. “I’ll let the experts field that one.”

“
We don’t really know,” Volker said, his gaze glued on the boy’s frenzied twitching. “We do know from experiments on the marine snail Aplysia and the Drosophila fly that memories are stored in electromagnetic fields generated by the synapses, not by the neurons themselves. The brain uses these fields to reconstruct pictures.”

“
What pictures?”

Golub chewed and swallowed something, and said, “The national Institute of Mental Health has been funding functional magnetic resonance imaging, trying to decipher the brain’s code—which is controlled by the prefrontal cortex—for recognizing objects and faces. In other words, pictures.”

“
In fact,” Volker said with a disdainful grin, “NIMH unknowingly funded part of our project.”

Golub said, “Their latest report suggests that all impressions received by the sensory organs are fed through the medulla oblongata and the reticular formation to the thalamus, which sends the now coded information to the cerebrum, where it’s stored, via electromagnetic fields, in pictorial form.”

“
But as I told Mr. Salomon,” Volker said,
“we do not need to understand the details any more than a chef has to know how taste buds work.”

Golub nodded. “As our eyes-only report last week to Mr. Salomon explained, we reverse-Fourier the synaptic signals and feed them into the optic nerve like any visual perception. The brain does the rest.”

Mathiessen’s glance took in both Blaine and Calder. “Speaking of Laszlo Salomon, I know you must think I’m obsessed by this subject, but he did fund your initial work, Caitlin, and also you and Ian’s exploration of the cave.”

“
That was there and then,” Blaine said, glancing at the writhing figure on the gurney and them at the readout on the console. “This is here and now.”

Mathiessen frowned. “I know the man is dead, but his corporation—”

“
Presumed dead,” Calder said. “The chopper crashed into a stream bank above some rapids. Days later, the Salomon Industries team located the spot and retrieved a piece of the cockpit, but no bodies.”

“
I saw the fireball,” Blaine said. “No one could survive that and walk out of a remote area of the Hindu Kush. If he had, we’d have long since heard.”

Mathiessen stroked his beard. “Even so, when we announce our results
,
”
—he glanced at the boy on the gurney—“Salomon Industries may . . .”

Blaine shook her head. “I’ve told you before, Rolf. They can’t challenge us, because we cloned humans, not mice, and to do that we had to solve the motor protein problem. All the work we did since then—”

“
Would be for the courts to assess,” Mathiessen said. “Our legal department predicts that . . .”

On the gurney the boy’s throes ceased and his sturdy body relaxed. As his eyelids began to flutter, everyone watched.

#

The death growl of the cave lion ceased. Brann’s eyes were closed, but he was oddly awake. He still pictured Gar, his throat torn out, dispatching the lion with a mighty thrust of his spear and then collapsing. But he also sensed a bright light beyond his lids and heard a woman—not Leya—speaking confidently in a strange tongue and a man seeming to dispute her. The voices fell silent, leaving an otherworldly hum.

Was he already in the Land of Shadows?

He tried to open his eyes, but his mind felt foggy and the lids refused to budge. He felt something warm and wet on his face and heard a worried whine.

Fel?!

How could that be? The aged wolf could not have survived his crushed ribs. And hadn’t Leya’s people believed the Land a dreary place where each spirit wanders forever?

Some link between Brann’s mind and body seemed to shift, and his eyes popped open.

The first thing he saw was a wolf’s muzzle, and beyond it Fel’s unique yellow ruff. But something was different. His sense of smell had returned and he sniffed the wolf’s meaty breath, which strangely did not seem familiar. But that was not what bothered him. Fel’s snout was a normal grayish brown but was not grizzled, and this eyes were not rheumy. The wolf looked like a younger version of himself.

Brann tried to gather his thoughts.

What was this place?

Where were Leya and Gar? If Fel was here with him, they should be too, for all four were certainly dead.

He started to sit up, but found that he could not. He glanced down. Straps of some strange material circled his chest.

Alarm flooded him. Was he to lie here for seasons without end, while spirits quarreled over his body?

But that could not be it, because Fel was free. Something moved behind the wolf’s furry head, and a woman’s smooth face appeared.

Not his
mator.
Blond and blue-eyed, though not to the degree that Gar had been.

She reached toward him. He flinched but then lay still, not wanting to anger a spirit. But when her fingertips touched his forehead they felt cool and dry, not spirit-like. He felt something peel from his temples.

Bowing his neck, he saw other people—a man with brown eyes and graying brown hair, a tall older man with silver hair and beard, a black-mustached man with pale skin and erect stance, a puffy-faced young man, and a man with crystals in a frame over his eyes. They all seemed of the People and, though somewhat frail-looking, looked too substantial for spirits.

Beyond, he saw a magical cave with smooth walls and strange objects, surely things that no man could fashion.

So, he
was
in some other land.

Not the Land of Shadows, because the place was too bright. But certainly another world.

Fel licked him again, his tail wagging, and he began to relax. The wolf did not feel threatened, so why should he?

Sighing, he let his head flop back. The two of them would just have to make the best of a very strange situation.

Chapter 29

“
Uhhh.”

Ajmal gasped. He let go of the invalid’s slick body, letting him flop back onto the blue plastic tarp. It was the first sound he had ever heard the man make.

He bent to peer into the featureless face. Moments before, he had allowed himself to wish the stranger had been killed in whatever mishap had left him in this eighth level of torment. Perhaps the man had heard his thoughts.

Could he be a
djinn,
sent by Allah to test the people of the village? Quickly, Ajmal reviewed what he knew of the man.

Two years ago Ghafoor, the village handyman, had been gathering pine nuts in a nearby gorge when he found a man wandering naked and raving in a thicket of holly oak. The wretch was so badly burned that his face, torso, and limbs, except for one shoulder and part of one leg, were a suppurating mess.

By the time Ghafoor had driven away three bearded vultures, the man had fallen into a stupor. Ghafoor shouldered him, despite some blackened skin sloughing off, and lugged him home. The crone who served as the village healer did not think he would live. But after the man survived the night Safdar, the head man, placed him with his large family of parents, sons, single daughters, and grandchildren living under one roof.

The victim did not die, but neither did he improve. His burns turned to scars so thick that his face became a slick mask and parts of his body seemed mummified. Safdar radioed the district capital, which consulted Peshawar. But the bureaucrats had their hands full with unrest in Gilgit-Baltistan, and no one ever came.

The
m’amalat
did not permit refusal of aid to a stranger in need, so the burned man had lain in a daze in Safdar’s house these many months, being spoon-fed gruel and not responding to questions. Not that he could have spoken anyway with a crusted hole for a mouth, but he seemed unable even to make eye contact. It was as if his mind had retreated to a far place.

Ajmal, as Safdar's youngest son, had been charged with feeding and watering the poor devil and cleaning up after him. This morning he had set to with his usual stoicism. It was when he started to roll the smallish body in order to change his soiled moss that the man had uttered the sound.

Now, from the recesses of lidless sockets, a dark gaze bored into Ajmal’s eyes and the man again breathed, “Uhhh . . .”

“
What do you mean?” Ajmal said in Khowar, the language spoken in this remote valley in the Chitral district of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province.

“
Uhhh.” Slowly the man's leathery left arm lifted, and the claw at the end made scribbling motions. “Uhhh.”

Ajmal turned and scampered into the main room where his mother, Zahra, was grinding buckwheat.

“
Naan, Naan!
Come quick.”

#

As on that day three years ago, Rolf Mathiessen was glad to step into the shaded interior of the abandoned mine building. Once again he paused to wipe his brow.

“
Hot out there.”

“
Tell me,” Murzo Ayni said, having picked up American idioms. “We’ve sweated it for nearly five years.”

“
The secrecy is almost over, Murzo. If today proves successful, you can start spending part of your time in Oregon, move your family if you want.”

The administrator nodded. “We want.”

Mathiessen mopped his brow again as they started toward the renovated portion of the dilapidated structure. “How’s Brann taking it?”

“
Now that the time has finally arrived, he’s beside himself.” Ayni began walking, and Mathiessen was pleased to see that the limp the man had incurred in the Hindu Kush had faded to a slight hitch.

“
I can’t believe the way Brann has progressed.”

Ayni smiled. “He’s fifteen. Apparently, people developed faster thirty thousand years ago.”

“
But to learn to communicate with you in Wahki, then pick up English, obtain his GED, and go on to earn degrees in anthropology, biology, and computer science over the Internet, all in the space of three years . . .”

“
He had Caitlin and Ian to coach him, as well as Peter and Henrik. All world-class in their fields. And plenty of lab work.”

“
It’s still an amazing achievement. And to think he did it without any urging! Most boys—”

“
Brann’s no boy,” Ayni said. “He grew up in an age when each day was a life-and-death struggle. He’s effectively a grown man. He’s already started on three graduate degrees, you know.”

“
Caitlin told me they think his mental acuity is due to combinations of genes that allow his left and right brains to communicate seamlessly via the corpus callosum.”

“
She’s been rooting through the genome, trying to identify the haplotypes.” Ayni shook his head. “Given Brann’s abilities, I’m surprised that hybrid Cro-Magnon-Neanderthals didn’t become the norm in prehistoric times.”

“
Ian thinks that social taboos held interbreeding to a minimum. There simply weren’t enough crossbreeds, and those that did pop up were probably pariahs.”

The IHE director followed the former forest ranger into the lab. Caitlin Blaine, Ian Calder, Peter Golub, and Henrik Volker were wearing their normal shorts and sandals, having dispensed with lab coats as an unnecessary bother.

Brann Magnon-Neander, as his Nauruan birth certificate and passport read, stood in a buckskin tunic beside two gurneys that had replaced the glass-topped growth tanks. He was even more robust than last time, Mathiessen noted, and muzzle-faced in a handsome way.