The Bone Labyrinth (61 page)

Wincing, Kowalski finally managed to sit up. “Okay, now that’s settled.” He waved brusquely toward the forest. “Go make some new friends.”

Baako bounded up and raced happily toward his new life.

May 15, 8:13
A
.
M
. ECT

Andes Mountains, Ecuador

Shu Wei woke out of a fever dream—and into a nightmare.

Her senses returned in bits and pieces. She smelled forest, her own blood. Mucus dripped down to her lips, stinging. The world swirled in hues of green leaf and blue sky. Her stomach ached, rising bile in her throat. She had no sense of time, remembering the past days fitfully.

Where am I?

She recalled Kwan falling, of her body being lifted and held. She remembered the arrow striking her in the stomach. She tried to stare down, but she could not move her head. She felt a stiff board under her back and tried to shift her limbs, but failed in this effort, too.

Why am I tied down?

She remembered being dragged through water, then passing out. When last she had woken, her body had been racked with fever, her body burning brightly. She vaguely recalled a bare-breasted woman applying a mud-colored salve across her stomach. It hurt so much she had passed out again.

Now I’m awake . . . still alive
.

She took deep breaths through her nose, unable to speak as her mouth was bound. Still, a moan escaped her.

Then a familiar face rose into view.

It was the old tribesman again. He spoke to someone out of view. Shadows fell over her body as more gathered around.

She struggled, thrashing.

Let me go
.

The natives ignored her. The old man lifted a curved bone needle that trailed a length of sinew. She kept hearing one word over and over again.

Tsantsa.

She struggled to understand. If the tribe had healed her, what did they want now?

Another familiar face leaned over her and seemed to recognize her confusion. It was the boy. He lifted an object into view. At first she thought it was a wizened and leathery piece of native fruit, but then she spotted the sewn lips and eyelids, the fall of dark hair. It was a shrunken head.

But not
any
head.

The face bore a unique pattern of scars.

Kwan
.

The savages had turned the Black Crow into a trophy.

The boy lifted the shrunken head higher and named the object in his hand, smiling brightly. “
Tsantsa
.”

Understanding dawned on her. She tried to scream, feeling the sting across her lips. She stared at Kwan’s sewn mouth and knew the same had been done to her.

But the natives were not finished.

The old man leaned over her, lifting his thick needle—and reached for her eyelids.

EPILOGUE

TEN YEARS LATER

Σ

September 18, 5:32
P
.
M
. WAT

Republic of Congo

“
Dr. Crandall, the sun will soon set,” Kyenge warned in his musical Congolese accent. “You must not be out here alone, and I must return to my missus.”

Maria patted the dog at her side as she sat in the meadow. “I’m not alone. I have Tango.”

“Of course you do. And I don’t mean to disparage such a glorious companion, but he is very old and sick.”

She sighed sadly at this truth.

Hepatocellular carcinoma
.

It was inoperable and malignant.

Tango had only a few weeks left.

It was one of the reasons she had come to the gorilla preserve at the Virunga National Park, hoping to glimpse Baako, hoping the presence of Tango might lure him from the forest.

If only so he could say good-bye
.

Maria owed them both that much. But she had not seen Baako for over five years, which was actually a good sign. He had acclimated and seemed happy. She knew he was still alive, as the rangers occasionally caught sight of him and his troop.

She listened to the forest as it settled from the day and woke for the night. Bats swooped through the trees and out into the open, casting out ultrasonic nets. Insects buzzed, burred, and whined. Birds sang to the setting sun or rising moon. Monkeys hollered their constant complaints.

“Dr. Crandall, perhaps you can try again tomorrow.”

She sighed and creaked her way to her feet, stretching kinks. She had been here since the early morning. And this was her third day. She had to accept the truth and get Tango back home.

“I think it’s time for me to return to the States,” she admitted.

Kyenge looked sadly upon her. “I’m sorry.”

Then she heard a heavy chuff, the note deeper than she remembered, but familiar.

Smiling, Kyenge stepped back, allowing Maria to move closer to the forest.

“Baako?”

The thick wall of leaves parted, and a large shape bulled into view, leaning on the knuckles of one arm. Dark eyes stared at her. The wide rump was saddled with silver fur, marking his maturity.

A hand rose and thumbed that wide chin.

[
Mama
]

She cried and ran forward, trailed by Tango, who came more slowly.

Baako eyed the dog and let out a soft wheeze, his version of laughter. Tango sniffed toward him, then began wriggling his backside as if he were a pup again, recognizing the scent of his big friend.

Maria reached Baako and did her best to hug her arms around his beefy neck, but her limbs barely reached. He hugged his free arm around her, leaning on her, almost crushing her under his weight.

Tango joined them, letting out an impatient bark.

Baako let go of Maria and settled to his rump, legs out. Tango leaped up and climbed into that furry lap. Baako let out a long sigh of contentment.

His gaze searched the meadow, then touched a thumb to his forehead.

[
Papa
]

Maria pushed closer, not sure what to say. She signed to him hoping he would understand.

[
Let me tell you a story . . .
]

Over the next hour, she told him the truth—but not all of it. Some parts were too painful for her to speak, even with her hands. When she was done, Baako had sagged his head, crouched over Tango, rocking very gently.

Giving him a moment, she stared down at the diamond glinting on her ring finger. She knew she should remove it, set it aside along with the mix of pain and joy it represented.

But not yet . . .

She wasn’t ready. Instead, she rose and crossed over to Baako. She came over and nestled with him in the dark, under a full moon. They remained together that way for a long time, until finally a soft hoot rose from the forest. Baako grunted back and motioned with one arm.

From the edge of the forest, a smaller shape revealed herself, a female gorilla with a child cradled to her breast. The female pointed toward Baako, then motioned to her chest. She followed this by cupping her palm and sliding it along the arm that held the infant ape.

Maria’s eyes widened with amazement, recognizing the gesture and what it implied

He taught his mate to sign . . .

The female repeated the same combination, only more imperatively this time.

[
Come . . . night
]

Maria grinned, realizing Baako was being scolded for staying so late. Maria’s gaze dropped to the child, whose small eyes shone back at her.

She turned and signed to Baako.

[
You are a papa now
]

He grunted his acknowledgment, then reached over and brushed his knuckles along Maria’s cheek, clearly saying good-bye. He rose to his feet, making plain that it was time for him to return to the forest, to his troop, to his family.

Maria backed away, having to let him go.

Tango followed after his friend, still wagging his short tail.

Baako looked from the dog back to Maria.

She signed to him, though she suspected Baako’s sharper senses had already discerned the sad truth.

[
He is old. He is sick
]

Baako shook his head and pinched fingers to his cheek, drew it to his ear, then back again. He corrected her one last time.

[
He is home
]

Baako turned away and shambled into the forest with Tango, the two friends determined to be there together at the end.

She watched them go, knowing she would never see the two again.

Neither glanced back.

This broke her heart—and made her immensely happy.

Deep into the night, Baako sits with his troop gathered in the forest. All are asleep. Even Tango lies curled against his side. He balances his boy between his folded legs, then gently takes those tiny fingers and molds them through a series of letters. The little one is too young to understand, but he will as he grows older.

It is the name he has given the child.

In honor of another.

He repeats those letters again.

[J-O-E]

Finally, small eyes drift closed, and Baako takes the child to his chest. As he rocks gently, he stares up through the crowd of dark leaves to the shining face of the moon, at the beauty of the stars . . . and wonders about everything.

AUTHOR’S NOTE TO READERS:
TRUTH OR FICTION

Once again we are at that moment when I will do my best to extract the truth buried within the story. I thought I’d also use the following pages to answer the one harrowing question that all authors fear:
Where do your ideas come from?
To that end, I’ll attempt to explain the genesis of this story, along with sharing how I stumbled upon the basic ideas.

Here we go.

First, this novel started out as an exploration into the origins of human intelligence, basically seeking to discover where we came from and where we are headed next. This line of inquiry led to the discovery of an intriguing anthropological mystery. For the past 200,000 years, human brains have been roughly the same size and shape, but for some inexplicable reason, roughly 50,000 years ago, there was an explosion in art, ingenuity, and civilization. Why? No one knows. This conundrum has been given the name the Great Leap Forward and has baffled both anthropologists and philosophers.

Why
did
human intelligence suddenly surge ahead?

Various theories have been proposed, but no true consensus has ever been reached. The most common thought is that the Great Leap Forward coincided with early man’s migration out of Africa, when we were exposed to foreign lands and unique challenges, which stimulated new innovations and ways of looking at life.

But what if it was something
more
? What if during this migration, early man encountered something more powerful than simply new lands, something that changed our DNA? Geneticists know that it was around this same time that man first encountered Neanderthal tribes and began to interbreed.

One accepted fact of biology is a condition called hybrid vigor, where the mating of two different species results in an offspring of a stronger constitution than either parent—and this applies to their intelligence levels, too. Here’s one example: mules are the result of the crossing of a female horse with a male donkey, and spatial intelligence tests confirm that mules are in fact smarter than either parent.

But could hybrid vigor also apply to us? Could the union of Neanderthals and early man have created children with some enhanced intelligence? We can never say for sure as there is no current way to produce that pure hybrid, an individual truly 50 percent
Homo neanderthalensis
and 50 percent
Homo sapiens
(though we’re not far from achieving that goal, which raises a whole slew of ethical questions). Still, we do know that our interbreeding with Neanderthals was beneficial enough that we still carry their DNA in our genome.

So exploring this possibility became the seed from which this novel grew. But let’s look more closely at some of the facts and tease out what’s true and what’s not.

Neanderthals and Other Hominins

Our understanding of the history of early man and our relationship with other tribes has changed rapidly over the past couple of years. Even over the course of writing this novel, I had to keep tweaking the story line to address the latest revelations. We do know it wasn’t just Neanderthals that left traces in our genomes, but also an extinct species called the Denisovans, who contributed an important and unique gene that allows Tibetans to live at high altitudes. Likewise, over the past year, another fingerprint in our DNA suggests there was a
third
extinct species that also added to our genome, but anthropologists have yet to identify those individuals—though they do believe they lived somewhere in the Far East and were likely an offshoot of our earlier relative
Homo erectus
.

This brings us to another important hominin species,
Meganthropus
, which was a
Homo erectus
offshoot who lived in the Far East and was a contemporary of early man. Could this be that mysterious long-lost contributor to our DNA? What we do know from the fossil record is that this species was indeed large, by some estimates well over nine feet tall.

Likewise,
other
hominin species shared the planet with us, including the hobbit-like
Homo floresiensis
from Indonesia and the mysterious Red Deer Cave people of China. So ultimately the true history of early man continues to grow and expand.

Lastly, while this final beast isn’t a hominin, it’s worth mentioning that the extinct species of giant gorilla,
Gigantopithecus blacki
, truly existed in the Far East, surviving long enough to share the planet with early man. The beasts towered ten feet tall and weighed half a ton each. Some believe such creatures may still exist today, thriving in remote areas of the Himalayas; they may possibly even be the basis behind the legends of yetis and abominable snowmen.