Biosealed buses suggested a serious biohazard. And yet there was nothing in the brochures to indicate what that biohazard might be. It's not as if herds of bison could sneak onto the buses if you cracked the seal.
The answer to this mystery was no doubt the answer to my question about why Elizio died, and I impatiently demanded that my parents explain.
They urged me to be patient, and then took me right past the regular buses and on to a nondescript door with the words --in small letters-- "Special Tours."
"What's so special?" I asked.
They ignored me. The clerk seemed to know without explanation exactly what my parents wanted. Then I understood that my parents must have called ahead.
It was a private tour. And not on a bus. We were taken down an elevator into a deep basement, and then put aboard a train on which we rode for more than an hour-longer than the trip from Saltillo to El Paso, though I suspect we were going much slower. Underground, who can tell?
We came up another elevator, and, like the underground train, this one had no trappings of tourism. This was a place where people worked; gawking was only a secondary concern.
We were led by a slightly impatient-looking woman to a smallish room with windows on four sides and dozens of sets of binoculars in a couple of boxes. There were also chairs, some stacked, some scattered about almost randomly. As if someone hadn't bothered to straighten up after a meeting.
"Are they close?" asked Mother. "We're here because the water is nearby," said the woman. "If they aren't close now, they will be soon."
"Where's the water?" asked Father. The woman pointed vaguely in a direction. It's clear she didn't want us there. But Mother and Father had the gift of patience. They were here for me, and bore the disdain of the scientist. If that's what she was.
The woman went away.
My parents picked up binoculars and searched. I also picked out a set and tried to figure out how to focus it.
"It senses your vision automatically," Father explained. "Just look, and it will come into focus."
"Bacana," I said. I looked.
There was a lot of dry grassy land, interspersed with drier, sagebrushy land.
In one direction were some trees. That must be where the water was.
"Spotted them yet?" Mother asked.
"To the left of the trees?" asked Father.
"There too?"
"Where did you see them?"
"In the shade of that rock"
I searched and finally found what they were looking at.
Men and women. Long-haired. Filthy. Naked.
My straitlaced parents brought me here to see naked people?
Then I looked again, more closely. They weren't exactly people after all.
"Neanderthals," I said.
"Homo neanderthalensis," said Father.
"They've been extinct forever!"
"For about twenty thousand years, most conservative guess," said Father. "Maybe longer."
"But there they are," I said.
"There was a long debate," said Father. "About how the Neanderthals died out."
"I thought that Homo sapiens wiped them out." "It wasn't so simple. There was plain evidence of communities of sapiens and neanderthalensis living in close proximity for centuries. It wasn't just a case of 'kill-the-monsters.' So there were several theories. One was that the two species interbred, but Neanderthal traits were discouraged to such a degree that they faded out. Like round eyes in China."
"How could they interbreed?" I asked. I was proud of my scientific erudition, as only eleven-year-olds can be. "Look at how different they are from humans."
"Not so different," said Mother. "They had rudimentary language. Not the complicated grammar we have now basically just imperative verbs and labeling nouns. But they could call out to each other across a large expanse and give warning. They could greet each other by name."
"I was talking about how they look."
"But I was talking about brain function," said Mother, "which is much more to the point, don't you think?"
"Another theory" said Father, "was that Homo sapiens evolved from the Neanderthals. That one was discredited and then revived several times. It turns out that was the closest theory to being right."
"You know, none of this explains why there are Neanderthals out here in the North American Wild Animal Park."
"You surprise me, Son," said my father. "I thought you would have leaped to at least some conclusion. Instead you seem to be passively awaiting our explanation."
I hated it when Father patronized me. He knew that, so he did it whenever he wanted to goad me into thinking. It always worked. I hated that, too.
"You brought me here because of the way I reacted to Elizio's death," I said. "And because you're famous scientists yourselves, you got to pull strings and get me a special tour. Not everybody sees this, right?"
"Actually, anybody can, but few want to," said Father. "And the biohazard stuff-that suggests some kind of disease agent. What you said about the evolved-from-Neanderthals scenario being close to correct suggests ... there's some disease loose in the wild here that causes regular people to turn into cavemen?"
Father smiled wanly at Mother. "Smart boy," he said.
I looked at Mother. She was crying.
"Just tell me," I demanded. "No more guessing games."
Father sighed, put his arm around Mother, and began to talk It didn't take long to explain.
"The greatest breakthrough in the medical treatment of disease was the germ theory, but it took an astonishingly long time for doctors to realize that almost all human ailments were caused by infectious agents. A few were genetic-such as cystic fibrosis and sickle-cell anemia but those all seemed to be recessive genes that conferred a benefit when you had one of them, and killed you only if you had two. All the others--heart disease, dementia, schizophrenia, strokes, nontraumatic cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, most cancers, even some crimes-all were actually diseases. What disguised them from researchers for so long was the fact that these diseases were passed along in the womb, across the placenta, mostly by disease agents composed of proteins smaller than DNA. Some were passed along in the ovum. So we had no way to compare a clean, healthy organism with an infected one until we finished mapping the human genetic code and realized that these diseases weren't there. When we finally tracked them down as loose proteins in the cells, we--"
"We?" I asked.
"I speak of our forebears, of course," said Father. "Our predecessors."
"You aren't in medical research."
"Our colleagues in science," said Father. "We've come a long way to have you quibble about my choice of pronouns. And anthropology is the science of which medicine is merely a subset."
I had a snappy retort about how nobody ever asks if there's an anthropologist in the house, but I kept it to myself, mostly because I didn't want to win points here, I wanted to hear the story.
"How do you inoculate an organism against in utero infection?" asked Mother rhetorically. "How do you cleanse an ovum that has already been infected?"