Orphan of Creation (22 page)

“Then what?” Barbara asked.

“I don’t know,” Clark said cheerfully. “Your Smithsonian people and the reports I got from the locals both place a tribe called the Utaani, whom I assume are your Yewtani under a different spelling, as being somewhere in the vicinity of Makokou, without any further details. We have to ask about, find them somehow.”

“How tough could that be?” Livingston asked.

“Pretty tough,” Clark said. “They are semi-nomadic, slash-and-burn farmers. Slash-and-burners tend to move around fairly often, and most of the neighboring tribes seem to make it a point to have nothing to do with the Utaani. Also, they’re a small tribe, which should also make them a bit hard to find.
But
the interesting thing is that they are also the center of a lot of nasty stories and legends around Makokou—stuff about their dealing with goblins, black magic, lost souls, that sort of thing.

“When a person vanishes, lost in the jungle somehow, they say the Utaani have taken him and turned him into one of their
tranka
. That is a word that translates badly, but it means something very like ‘goblin’ or ‘ghoul,’ and it got my attention. Think about it—what would one of your australo-whatchamacallits look like to a person if he stumbled across it in the jungle? Mothers use the Utaani and the
tranka
stories to scare their kids into being good. All very suggestive, no?” Clark asked with a sly little smile, his glasses hanging low on his fleshy nose. “Leaving folklore to one side, the Utaani are also supposed to be extremely secretive, strange, and unpleasant people.”

He scooped up the map and rolled it into a tight cylinder. “One last thing: the Utaani were also one of the last tribes to give up kidnapping their neighbors and selling them down the river as slaves. Put all that together and I feel pretty confident that they are the ones we are after.”

“You mean, they can lead us to the australopithecines?” Livingston asked.

Clark shrugged. “In theory, yes. In practice, who knows? We’re dealing with rumors and a Mississippi newspaper ad from the last century. But I chased around every library and archive and ethnologist I could find in Libreville, and they seem to be the most likely lead by far. Let’s be on our way.”

<>

They were packed and out of the hotel in fifteen minutes, Clark leading the way, carrying a small, professional backpack that didn’t seem to match the years or bearing of the fussy little man they had met in the capital. But in his khakis and hiking shoes, a brown canvas bush hat plopped down on his head, carrying an improvised walking stick that had once been a broom handle, the neatly packed backpack an unnoticed burden gracefully balanced on his back, he seemed a transformed and far happier man.

Rupert walked alongside him, all but staggering under the weight of his far heavier pack. Liv and Barb brought up the rear, returning stare for stare with the curious locals. Booué was a railroad boom town, just in the first stages of growing from a collection of near-shacks strung out along a single road into a real town. The four of them had to cross an enormous rail yard, far larger than the town itself, to get where they were going. It was a frantically busy place, full of men and equipment bound for the northeast spur that was still abuilding, and freight and passenger cars switching back and forth for the runs to Libreville on the coast and Franceville in the southeast interior. It all seemed wildly out of proportion to the still-sleepy village next door. At the edge of the rail yard they came to a small garage, a weathered but well-cared-for Land Rover parked out front. A wiry, middle-aged man with white hair, skin the color of ebony and the texture of leather, dressed in shorts and a much-washed white cotton shirt was squatting on the hood of the Rover, polishing the windshield.

Clark called to him, and the man stood up on the hood, turned around, and grinned broadly, an expression which made his entire face fold up into a series of wrinkles. “
Bonjour, M’sieu, bonjour
!” he called and jumped down from the Rover.

Clark returned his greeting in French and then made the introductions. “This is Monsieur Ovono, who owns this fine vehicle.
M’sieu Ovono, j’presente Monsieur Rupert Maxwell. Monsieur Maxwell parle Francais aussi. Et, j’presente Mademoiselle Barbara Marchando, et Monsieur Livingston Jones
.”

Monsieur Ovono helped them load their gear onto the roof rack, very carefully laid a tarp over the luggage, and tied it down firmly. In fifteen minutes they were jouncing along on their way, grinding through the rubble and red mud of the railroad’s right-of-way, plowing through the raw, unhealed slash sliced through the surrounding jungle. The stumps of dead trees lay everywhere, some of them uprooted, torn from the muddy red soil. The right-of-way was 300 hundred feet wide, but the narrow service road—little more than a rough path in places—ran almost in the shadows of the great dark trees that stood, brooding and sullen green, alongside the empty rail line. The jungle, its massive trees rearing up to block out half the sky, seemed much displeased at the invasion.

Rupert found himself in the front seat of the Land Rover next to Monsieur Ovono. “So, you four are driving to Makokou,” Ovono said in rapid French. “What takes you to such a place?”

“We are looking for a certain tribe who might know something about an animal we wish to study,” Rupert said, choosing his words carefully. He had no idea what Ovono might think of the Utaani, but from what he had learned so far, it wasn’t likely to be favorable.

“What tribe is that? I’m Fang myself, of course.”

“One of the smaller ones.”

“Which one? Eshira? Bapounou? Okande?”

“No, no. They are called the Utaani,” Rupert replied, fearful of the response.

Ovono laughed out loud. “That mob? What could they know about animals? A bunch of dirty farmers they tell foolish tales about.”

“You’ve heard of them in Booué? I thought they were little known far from Makokou.”

“No, no. Not from Booué. I am in Makokou many times, and they tell the same mad tales about the Utaani every time, having fun frightening the railroad workers who come to drink.”

Clark White leaned forward from the back seat, holding on to the back of Rupert’s seat to keep from being thrown about by the

bone-rattling ride. “Then you have no concern of the Utaani, M’sieu?” he asked, shouting over the noise of the Rover.

“No, not at all,” Ovono shouted back. “Every town has its ghost stories. If you believed them all, it would not be safe to step outside your house for fear of six kinds of monster leaping from the forest to eat you. I am a good Catholic,” Ovono said proudly, pulling a small crucifix on a chain out of his shirt, “not one of those damned animists who sees spirits in every tree and twig.” He gestured grandly at the ruined strip of landscape. “Look, it is a hundred meters wide and hundreds of kilometers long. If every tree had a spirit, could they have sliced down all these trees without being cursed forever?”

Rupert looked out at the huge trees that marched alongside the right-of-way, with the dark, murky clouds of a rainstorm suddenly gathering above them. He shuddered, for the moment quite ready to believe the trees, the jungle, all of nature, could be angered at this affront and ready to strike back.

The cloudburst exploded over their heads, an impenetrable, torrential rain that made the world ten feet away from the Rover invisible. Ovono simply rolled up the windows, switched on the windshield wipers and the headlights, and drove on, not slowing down at all.

They rode on, the noise of the storm making speech impossible.

<>

They camped by the side of the maintenance road that night, with that same angry jungle rearing over them, a deeper blackness blocking out the stygian darkness of an overcast, moonless night sky. Ovono said there was little danger of more rain and they shouldn’t bother with a tent. He took two long bamboo poles and slipped them through rings atop the roof rack, so that the poles hung out over the side of the Rover. Then he draped a huge piece of mosquito netting over the whole rig, Rover and all. He quickly built a fire outside the netting and got dinner going. The sun set abruptly, as it always does in the tropics, but by the time it did, Ovono had them ready for the night, a can of stew heating on the fire. Everyone was hungry and set to the meal eagerly. They ate off tin plates balanced on their knees, sitting on rickety folding camp stools. Rupert pulled a tiny short-wave radio out of his backpack and, after great fiddling with the dial, managed to pick up a music program on the Voice of America broadcasting out of God-knows-where. It made for a pleasant background to dinner. Ovono had the plates gathered up the moment everyone was done, wiping them off and packing them away before any insects could be attracted. Rupert shut his radio off to save the batteries, and everyone discovered how tired they were.

Without the noises of the Rover or the radio or the bustling around of making camp, they could really hear the sounds of the jungle for the first time that night—screams, shouts, murmurs, crashes, scraping noises, rustlings in the underbrush and the scratches of claws on bark in the trees overhead. Ovono seemed quite unconcerned, and placidly stared into the campfire, smoking his pipe. Rupert and Clark, who had at least been in the jungle before, seemed, if not at ease, at least ready to deal with the situation, and Barbara was too exhausted by jet lag for anything to keep her awake.

But Livingston, named in a misspelled way for a great jungle explorer, eager for so long to be in his idea of the real Africa, far away from civilization, yearning for the romance of the jungle—Livingston and his imagination listened, wide awake and wide-eyed, to the endless ravings and stalking of homicidal maniacs in the forest all night long. He didn’t get a wink of sleep until daybreak, and Ovono nudged him awake all too soon after that.

Interlude

<>

They were all beginning to fear her, hate her. Her own kind sensed, somehow, that she was becoming different, growing apart from them.

It was the things she was learning—language and the power of words, of symbols—that set her apart. Because she knew the words, she had the power to know many things. She was always first to the food, last to the work. She learned craftiness, learned how to avoid punishment.

As she grew more confident of her ability, she seemed to need the approval and reassurance of her fellows less. She gradually stopped taking part in the grooming sessions. She ceased to take an interest in the constant fussing and scrambling over who would get the most favorable sleeping spot in the hut. The males began to avoid her, and she did not care.

She grew more silent as well, hardly ever making a noise on her own, and rarely responding much to the grunts and growls and shouts and hoots of her fellows. Perhaps she was losing her skills at that sort of communication as she was gaining new ones, or perhaps she had learned to be quiet in order to listen. It became easier and easier for her to think in the new way, and it was no longer taxing or difficult to concentrate. She no longer forgot what she was doing. Now she rarely slipped back into the old habits of dull obedience and conformity.

Those of her kind gave her a wider and wider berth, and began to resist orders from the humans to work next to her. The younger ones especially would bare their teeth and chitter at her, or simply run away.

The humans grew to fear her as well. This was not the first time one of the tranka had behaved strangely, and it had often ended badly in the past. The keeper had seen it before, had been warned of the dangers by the old keeper, his father. A tranka, usually one of the less docile ones, would suddenly change, would grow more and more uncontrollable, upsetting the other slave-beasts, disrupting the work schedule. No one knew why it happened, but it did. Sometimes the tranka would seem to forget whatever it was that upset it, begin to behave normally again, and things would get back to normal of their own accord. It was worth waiting for a time to see if such a thing would happen; tranka were hard to breed, hard to train, and not to be lightly discarded.

But if things did not improve with this one, and soon, the keeper knew what he would have to do. It would have to be done quietly, so as not to upset the other tranka, but it would have to be done.

This rebellious female would have to be destroyed.

February

Chapter Fourteen

Pete Ardley had a first-rate view of the top of Joe Teems’s head as he stood over his editor’s desk, watching the old man slowly read Pete’s story.

Teems had a pencil in his mouth and was chewing it methodically as he read, making small crunching noises when he bit down, and an odd little irregular clicking when he rolled the pencil around on his teeth. Every now and then he would pause in his reading, refer back to a previous page, and then shift his position just a trifle, making a small
uffing
noise as the movement forced the air out of his lungs and squeezed it past the pencil. Then Teems would snort to get some air back in his lungs and go on with his reading. Pete ignored the small noises and concentrated on examining Teems’s head, noting the sparse little wisps of hair and the mottled liver spots that dotted his bald spot, which appeared surprisingly large from this angle. The old blowhard was sure as hell taking his time reading the piece. Was that a good sign or a bad?

<>

HUMAN-LIKE MYSTERY SKULLS UNEARTHED IN GOWRIE

by Peter Ardley, Gowrie Gazette Staff

Skulls of a species of hominid previously known only from African fossils millions of years old have been excavated in secret on the outskirts of Gowrie, throwing many firmly held ideas about the human past into confusion. The five skulls, along with an undetermined number of post-cranial (“below-the-skull”) bones, were removed from the site by a team of scientists, apparently led by a prominent anthropologist from Washington, D.C.

Professor Roberta Volsky of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Mississippi, working from photographs obtained by the Gazette, has identified the skulls as being of the genus “Australopithecus.” She described the discovery as “absolutely incredible. I can’t imagine how those bones got there. This whole area of Mississippi was underwater when these creatures lived, and australopithecines have never been seen outside Africa. I can’t imagine how these skeletons got here. We may have to write a whole set of theories to account for this.”

The skulls were dug up from the grounds of Gowrie House, on the outskirts of the town, over the last month. Gowrie House is the home of Mrs. Josephine Jones, a retired school teacher. Mrs. Jones declined to be interviewed for this article.

Citing various details of the skulls visible in the photographs, and noting features of the photographs themselves, Professor Volsky discounted the possibility of a hoax. “I can’t imagine anyone trying to pass off this as real if it wasn’t,” she said. “This discovery is such an unlikely occurrence that it will inevitably be subjected to the most severe scrutiny when it becomes public. Any possible phony skulls or other fraud would be instantly obvious.” Professor Volsky also cited the reputations of the persons in the photographs of the site as an argument against fraud.

Identified in the photographs taken at the excavation are Dr. Jeffery Grossington, Dr. Rupert Maxwell, and Dr. Barbara Marchando, all of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, and Mr. Livingston Jones. Dr. Marchando and Mr. Jones are relatives of the owner of the house, Mrs. Josephine Jones.

Professor Volsky discounted the secretive nature of the work as evidence of fraud, and said the secrecy could be attributed to caution, the scientists confirming their work before revealing it to a skeptical world. “I expect that Dr. Grossington will reveal everything in due course. It simply takes some time to analyze what you have found. Many important features of a skull aren’t immediately obvious. But I have full faith in Jeffery Grossington.”

According to Professor Volsky, four species of Australopithecus, all closely resembling each other, are generally recognized by science. They are (in chronological order) Australopithecus afarensis, Australopithecus africanus, Australopithecus robustus, and Australopithecus boisei. A possible fifth species, Australopithecus aethiopicus, has been proposed but not yet generally accepted. The oldest australopithecine remains are about four million years old, and the genus was believed to vanish from the earth about one million years ago. Professor Volsky believes the skulls uncovered in Mississippi are either robustus or boisei, two species that are so similar that some scientists regard them as one species erroneously given two names.

Although australopithecus means “southern ape,” Professor Volsky pointed out that this is misleading. In taxonomic terms all australopithecines are members of the family “hominidea,” the scientific grouping that includes all fully upright bipeds. Taxonomically, human beings are called Homo sapiens sapiens, of the genus Homo, also of the family hominidea. The australopithecines are related far more closely to own our species than to the apes, which are not included in the family hominidea. Taxonomy is the science of naming species and relating them to each other.

Professor Volsky said the species to which the newly found skulls belong is not ancestral to man, but instead shares a common ancestor with us. “In evolutionary terms,” Professor Volsky said, “the robust australopithecines are our long-lost cousins, not our grandparents.”

According to the theory of evolution, a species of plant or animal can respond to changes in its habitat, or adapt to a new habitat, by changing, or evolving, into another species. However, the ancestral species need not die out—it may survive, and even flourish, side by side with the descendant species. Many do not believe this theory, and instead point to the creation story of the Bible to explain the appearance and diversity of life.

However, most scientists believe the earliest australopithecines (i.e., afarensis) were ancestral to two branches of descendants, one leading to own species, Homo sapiens sapiens, perhaps through Australopithecus africanus, and the other leading to the late australopithecines before dying out. Other scientists, such as the noted paleontologist Richard Leakey, believe that the human and australopithecine lines may not share a recent common ancestor, and afarensis is not so closely related to man. In this theory, Australopithecus afarensis led only to the later australopithecines, and the human line will eventually be found to be more ancient when more fossil are found. According to this idea, even the earliest of the australopithecines are thus humanity’s “cousins,” not its ancestors.

Whatever ancestors they shared with modern man, it has been generally agreed that the later australopithecines, boisei and robustus, left no evolutionary descendants and that their line became extinct one million years ago. . . .

<>

Pete sweated it out. There was nothing more miserable for a writer than watching someone else read his work. Pete decided a dozen times in ten minutes that Teems would kill the piece, and decided just as many times that he would let it run.

Either way, it didn’t really matter. Pete had already decided to quit if Teems turned down this story, didn’t let him run it and put it on the wire. If Teems said no, Pete could hawk the story elsewhere, no question. This story was his ticket out, and he was taking that trip whether or not the Gowrie
Gazette
cooperated.

At long last, the pencil stopped rattling around in Teems’s mouth and the old man tossed the last page of the story on his desk and looked up at Pete. “Are you actually expecting people to believe this hogwash?” Teems asked. “You expect
me
to believe it? The folks around here don’t even believe in evolution—
I
don’t believe in evolution. Why the hell should I run the piece?”

“Because it’s a hell of a big story that will put this town on the map!” Pete said eagerly. “And even if you don’t believe it, dammit, we’ve got the
pictures
! And not just of the skulls—I’ve gotten IDs on three scientists from Washington, D.C. It’s all there in the story.”

“Mmmph. And I notice how you’ve cast the story so it’ll all fall on this Grossington’s head, and then you put in a plug for creationism, as if that would keep the locals from going crazy. Nice fence sitting. Did you call Grossington up for comment?”

“No sir, I didn’t. I don’t want him to know anyone is on to him until the story hits. He’s been keeping this whole thing secret for some reason—why should we give him the warning he needs to put the kibosh on it?”

Teems reached out to the story on his desk and tapped it. “Do you think it’s a hoax in the making?”

Pete shrugged. “It’s possible, but I don’t believe it. Right there in the story, Professor Volsky says it’s quite normal for scientists to take the time to do some thinking and analyzing before they report their findings publicly—sometimes it takes as much as a year or more. But if it
isn’t
a hoax, he might well
ask
us not to publish until he’s ready. If we went ahead and published anyway at that point, he might have grounds for a suit, claiming he had only agreed to talk because we agreed to delay. And this thing is sure to leak again sooner or later. If we do get asked to delay, and politely wait until Grossington says it’s okay to print, someone else will break the news and we’ll lose the scoop. Besides, if it
is
a hoax he’s preparing, we want to catch him with his pants down, don’t we?”

“The point being that, in either event, you don’t think it’d be such a swift idea to talk with him,” Teems said. “Okay, fair enough. What about this Volsky woman?” he asked. He picked up the best photo of the skulls. “Your story flat out says she identified the skulls as some kind of ape-man. Was she really that certain? They’re strange-looking skulls, but was she really that positive?”

“All she wondered about was if the pictures were genuine. She checked the pictures against a lot of sources, and she was flat-out certain by the time she was finished.”

Teems dropped the photo on the table. “I want to know how you got on to this,” he said suspiciously. “You haven’t actually admitted to taking these photos, and I’m not going to ask if you did. If the sheriff decides to arrest you for trespassing, I don’t want to be in the middle of it. So we’ll leave the photos. But you’d better tell me how you knew to go looking for this.”

Pete Ardley shook his head. If Teems didn’t remember Livingston Jones coming into the office, didn’t recognize Livingston in the little group examining the skull in the outdoor shots, couldn’t put two and two together, that was his problem. Pete intended to write follow-ups on this story, but he didn’t plan on writing them for Teems. “I’m sorry, I can’t tell you just yet. I’ve got to protect that source for a while.”

“You’ve been seeing too many movies about reporters on TV,” Teems said irritably. “But don’t think for a moment you’re fooling me for a moment, boy. This is the biggest story ever to come out of Gowrie—if it’s true—and I’d bet anything you like that you’ve got your resignation all typed up if I spike this story. You’d be in Jackson trying to freelance it this afternoon. No loyalty. Which means I can’t really trust you, can I?”

Teems glared at him and then went on. “That’s bad for you, because it’s up to me to decide if it would be good for the
Gazette
to run this story, up to me to decide if it’s true. And I’ve just concluded I can’t trust you. And I’ll tell you something else. You’ve got more information than you put in this story. You’re holding back, hoping to parley it into a big follow-up, maybe keep other reporters from getting ahead of you on this story.” Teems smiled abruptly and nastily, exposing his scraggly yellow teeth in all their ugliness, and Pete felt as if the old man were staring right through him. Suddenly the smile vanished, replaced by an angry, suspicious glare. “Except it’s your ass on the line too, and
you
couldn’t have put a hoax like this together by yourself, and if you
did
put it together, you fooled that lady professor, and you ought to be able to fool the rest of us for long enough so it won’t look bad for me when it blows up in your face. And I don’t want to force you to quit so I have to break in a new reporter. Cut the last two ‘graphs and run it. Page one. And then recast it for a non-local audience, get rid of the weasel-worded creationism fence-sitting stuff so that we sound like big-city folks who believe in evolution, and put it on the goddamn wire, while you’re at it.”

But Pete had bigger plans than just getting on the wire. Two hours later he had packages mailed off Express Mail to the New York
Times
, the Washington
Post
, and the Jackson
Clarion-Ledger
. He wanted this story to break wide. He sent a third package to Dr. Jeffery Grossington, care of the Smithsonian Institution. He also wanted to
control
this story.

<>

Livingston leaned back in his unsteady chair and stared at the far wall of the tiny café. Makokou was like Booué, he decided, only more so—smaller, rougher, smellier, rawer. It was also duller, if such a thing were possible. And it was a rotten place to do the one thing he was able to do at the moment—wait. So far as finding the australopithecines, nothing further was possible until they learned the present whereabouts of the Utaani tribe. Livingston, who spoke no French, was of no help in the researches. Rupert and Clark, accompanied by M. Ovono to translate the tribal tongues for them, were busily scouring the countryside for miles around, following up this rumor and that. Barbara couldn’t speak French either, but she at least had brought work along to keep her busy. She was constantly borrowing Rupert’s portable computer, finishing up a routine paper she had been working on before Thanksgiving had brought so much excitement.