“Either that or she ate babies,” Merton said. Another twitch of the lip from Eileen.
“Oliver’s on borrowed time,” Fitz said.
“Matriarchy,” Merton accused, deadpan.
The tent suddenly seemed very stuffy. Mitch would have sat down had there been a convenient chair. “She looks early. Different from Charlene. Is she a hybrid?” he asked.
“No one’s willing to say,” Eileen replied. “You’ll like our late-night debates. A few weeks back, when I wanted you to join us, everyone shouted me down. Now, we’re all at each other’s throats, and Oliver, I’m told, convinced Daney it was time.”
“I did,” Merton said.
“Personally, I’m glad you’re here,” Eileen added.
“I’m not,” Fitz said. “If the feds find out about you, if there’s any publicity at all, we’re NAGPRA toast.”
“Tell me more, Mitch,” Eileen suggested.
Mitch massaged the back of his neck and for the ninth time watched the image of the skull grow and rotate. “Skull seems compressed. She’s long-headed, more even than the Australian. There’s a flint implement near her hand, and she’s carrying some sort of grass bag over her shoulder, if I’m not mistaken.”
“You’re not.”
“Filled with what looks like bush or small tree roots.”
“Desperation diet,” Fitz said.
“Maybe that was just her assignment, gathering roots for the stone soup.”
Merton looked puzzled. Eileen explained stone soup.
“How colonial,” Merton said.
“Ever the B-movie Brit, aren’t you?” Fitz said.
“Please, children,” Eileen warned.
“Relatively tall, taller than Charlene, maybe, and pretty robust, heavy boned,” Mitch continued, trying to talk himself out of what he was seeing. “Sloping forehead, mid-sized to small brain case, but the face is fairly flat. Impressive supraorbital torus. A bit of a sagittal keel, even an occipital torus. I’d love to get a better look at the incisors.”
“Shovel-shaped,” Eileen said.
Mitch rubbed his limp hand to still the tingling and looked at the others as if all of them might be crazy. “Gertie is much too early. She looks like Broken Hill 1. She’s Homo erectus.”
“Obviously,” Fitz said with a sniff.
“They’ve been extinct for more than three hundred thousand years,” Mitch said.
“Apparently not,” Eileen said.
Mitch laughed and stood back with a snap as if he had been leaning over a wasp that had suddenly taken flight. “Jesus.”
“Is that it?” Eileen asked. “Is that the most you can say?” She was kidding, but her tone had an edge.
“You’ve had longer to get used to it,” Mitch said.
“Who says we’re used to it?” Eileen asked.
“What about the fetus?”
“Too early and too little detail,” Fitz said. “It’s probably a lost cause.”
“I’m thinking we should drive a tube, take a thin core sample, and PCR mitochondrial DNA from the remaining integuments,” Merton said.
“Dreamer,” Fitz said. “They’re twenty thousand years old. Besides, the lahar cooked them.”
“Not to mush,” Merton countered.
“Think like a scientist, not a journalist.”
“Shh,” Eileen said in deference to Mitch, who was still staring at the rolled-out screen, mesmerized. “Here’s what we have on the central group,” she said, and paged through another set of ghostly images. “Gertie and Charlene are outliers. These four are Hildegard, Natasha, Sonya, and Penelope. Hildegard was probably the oldest, in her late thirties and already racked with arthritis.”
Hildegard, Natasha, and Sonya were clearly Homo sapiens. Penelope was another Homo erectus. They lay entwined as if they had died hugging each other, a mandala of bones, elegant in their sad way.
“Some of the hardliners are calling this a flood deposition of unassociated remains,” Fitz said.
“How would you answer them?” Eileen challenged Mitch, reverting to his teacher of old.
Mitch was still trying to remember to breathe. “They’re fully articulated,” he said. “They have their arms around each other. They don’t lie at odd angles, tossed together. This is in no way a flood deposit.”
Mitch was startled to watch Fitz and Eileen hug each other. “These women knew each other,” Eileen agreed, tears of relief dripping down her cheeks. “They worked together, traveled together. A nomadic band, caught in camp by a burp from Mount Hood. I can feel it.”
“Are you with us?” Fitz asked, her eyes bright and suspicious.
“Homo erectus. North America. Twenty thousand years ago,” Mitch said. Then, frowning, he asked, “Where are the males?”
“To hell with that,” Fitz fumed. “Are you with us?”
“Yeah,” Mitch said, sensing the tension and Eileen’s discomfort at his hesitation. “I’m with you.” Mitch put his good arm around Eileen’s shoulders, sharing the emotion.
Oliver Merton clasped his hands like a boy anticipating Christmas. “You realize that this could be a political bombshell,” he said.
“For the Indians?” Fitz asked.
“For us all.”
“How so?”
Merton grinned like a fiend. “Two different species, living together. It’s as if someone’s teaching us a lesson.”
23
NEW MEXICO
Dicken showed his pass at the Pathogenics main gate. The three young, burly guards there—machine pistols slung over their shoulders—waved him through. He drove the cart to the valet area and presented the pass for his car.
“Going for a drink,” he told the serious-faced middle-aged woman as she inspected his release.
“Did I ask?” She gave him a seasoned, challenging smile.
“No,” he admitted.
“Don’t tell us anything,” she advised. “We have to report every little thing. Vodka, white wine, or local beer?”
Dicken must have looked flustered.
“I’m joking,” she said. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
She returned driving his leased Malibu, adapted for handicapped drivers.
“Nice setup, all the stuff on the wheel,” she said. “Took me a bit to figure it out.”
He accepted the inspection pass, made sure it was completely filled out—there had been some trouble with such things yesterday—and slipped it into a special holder in the visor. The sun was lingering over the rocky gray-and-brown hills beyond the main Pathogenics complex. “Thanks,” he said.
“Enjoy,” the valet said.
He took the main road out of the complex and drove through rush hour traffic, following the familiar track into Albuquerque, then pulled into the parking lot of the Marriott. Crickets were starting up and the air was tolerable. The hotel rose over the parking lot in one graceless pillar, tan and white against the dark blue night sky, proudly illuminated by big floodlights set around stretches of deep green lawn. Dicken walked into a low-slung restaurant wing, visited the men’s room, then came out and turned left to enter the bar.
The bar was just starting to crowd. Two regulars sat at the bar—a woman in her late thirties, looking as if life and her partners had ridden her hard, and a sympathetic elderly man with a long nose and close-set eyes. The worn-down woman was laughing at something the long-nosed man had just said.
Dicken sat on a tall stool by a high, tiny table beside a fake plant in an adobe pot. He ordered a Michelob when the waitress got around to him, then sat watching the people come and go, nursing his beer and feeling miserably out of place. Nobody was smoking, but the air smelled cold and stale, with a tang of beer and liquor.