Ali ran her fingers along the wall. 'It might have been carved to be read. Like
Braille.'
'That's writing?'
'A word. A single word. See this character here.' Ali traced a y-tailed mark, then a backward E. 'And this. They're not capped. But look at the linear form. It's got the stance and the stroke of ancient Sanskrit or Hebrew. Paleo-Hebrew, possibly. Probably older. Old Hebrew. Phoenician, whatever you want to call it.'
'Hebrew? Phoenician? What are we dealing with, the lost tribes of Israel?'
'Our ancestors taught hadals how to write?' someone said.
'Or else hadals taught us,' Ali said.
She could not take her fingertips from the word. 'Do you realize,' she whispered,
'man has been speaking for at least a hundred thousand years. But our writing goes back no further than the upper Neolithic. Hittite hieroglyphics. Australian aboriginal art. Seven, eight thousand years, tops.
'This writing has got to be at least fifteen or twenty thousand years old. That's two or three times older than any human writing ever found. These are linguistic fossils. We could be closing in on the Adam and Eve of language. The root origin of human speech. The first word.'
Ali was enraptured. Looking around, she could tell the others didn't understand. This was big. Human or not, it doubled or tripled the timeline of the mind. And she had no one to celebrate it with! Settle down, she told herself. For all her travels, Ali's was a paper world of linguists and bishops, of library carrels and yellow legal pads. She had occupied a quiet place that didn't allow celebration. And yet, just once, Ali wanted someone to knock the head off a bottle of champagne and douse her with bubbles, someone to gather her up for a wet kiss.
'Hold up your pen beside the letters for scale,' one of the photographers told her.
'I wonder what it says,' someone said.
'Who knows?' Ali said. 'If Ike's right, if this is a lost language, then even the hadals don't know. Look how they had it buried under more primitive images. I think it's lost all meaning to them.'
Returning to their rafts, for some reason, the name circled around on her. Ike. Her slow dancer.
On September 5, they found their first hadals. Reaching a fossilized shore, they unloaded their rafts and hauled gear to high ground and started to prepare for night. Then one of the soldiers noticed shapes within the opaque folds of flowstone.
By shining their lights at a certain angle, they could see a virtual Pompeii of bodies laminated in several inches to several feet of translucent plastic stone. They lay in the positions they had died in, some curled, most sprawled. The scientists and soldiers fanned out across the acres of amber, slipping now and then on the slick face.
Pieces of flint still jutted from wounds. Some had been strangled with their own entrails or decapitated. Animals had worked through all of them. Limbs were missing, chest and belly walls had been plundered. No question, this had been the end of a whole tribe or township.
Under Ali's sweeping headlamp, their white skin glittered like quartz crystal. For all the heavy bone in their brows and cheeks, and despite the obvious violence of their end, they were remarkably delicate.
H. hadalis – this variety, at any rate – looked faintly apelike, but with very little body hair. They had wide negroid noses and full lips, somewhat like Australian aborigines, but were bleached albino by the perpetual night. There were a few slight beards, little more than wispy goatees. Most looked no older than thirty. Many were children.
The bodies were scarred in ways that had nothing to do with sports or surgery: no appendectomy scars in this group, no neat smile lines around the knees or shoulders. These had come from camp accidents or hunts or war. Broken bones had healed crookedly. Fingers had been lopped off. The women's breasts hung slack, thinned and
stretched and unbeautiful, basic tools like their sharpened fingernails and teeth or their wide flattened feet or their splayed big toes for climbing.
Ali tried integrating them into the family of modern man. It did not help that they had horns and calcium folds and lumps distorting their skulls. She felt strangely bigoted. Their mutations or disease or evolutionary twist – whatever – kept her at arm's length. She was sorry to be walking on them, yet glad to have them safely encased in stone. Whatever had been done to them, she imagined they would have been capable of doing to her.
That night they discussed the bodies lying beneath their camp.
It was Ethan Troy who solved their mystery. He had managed to chip loose portions of the bodies, mostly of children, and held them out for the rest to see. 'Their tooth enamel hasn't grown properly. It's been disrupted. And all the kids have rickets and other long-limb malformations. And you only have to look to see their swollen stomachs. Massive starvation. Famine. I saw this once in a refugee camp in Ethiopia. You never forget.'
'You're suggesting these are refugees?' someone asked. 'Refugees from who?'
'Us,' said Troy.
'You're saying man killed them?'
'At least indirectly. Their food chain was ruptured. They were fleeing. From us.'
'Nuts,' scoffed Gitner, lying on his back on a sleeping pad. 'In case you missed it, those are Stone Age points sticking out of them. We had nothing to do with it. These guys got killed by other hadals.'
'That's beside the point,' said Troy. 'They were depleted. Famished. Easy prey.'
'You're right,' Ike said. He didn't often enter group discussions, but he had been following this one intently. 'They're on the move. The whole world of them. This is their diaspora. They've scattered. Gone deep to avoid our coming.'
'What's it matter?' said Gitner.
'They're hungry,' said Ike. 'Desperate. That matters.'
'Ancient history. This bunch died a long time ago.'
'Why do you say that?'
'The accretion of flowstone. They're covered in it. At least five hundred years'
worth, probably more like five thousand. I haven't run my calculations yet.' Ike went over to him. 'Let me borrow your rock hammer,' he said.
Gitner shoved it into Ike's hand. These days he seemed chronically fed up. Their endless debate about hadal links to humanity gnawed at what little good humor he'd ever had. 'Do I get it back?' he said.
'Just a loaner,' Ike said, 'while we sleep.' He walked over and placed it flat next to the wall and walked away.