I mumble something about the quest for knowledge. The hawk stare fixes on me again and I have an acute insight into how a rabbit might feel, having indiscreetly poked its head out of its hole.
“Knowledge? Then why so many of us? What can science learn from so many that it cannot learn from a few? What can science learn from us at all, really? We are not Neanderthals, we cannot teach science very much about Neanderthals.” She raises a stout finger.
“Humankind is lonely,” she says. “You cannot bear the thought that there is no-one else out there to talk to. There might have been, right under your noses, but you exterminated most of those without even realising, including all your nearest relatives. The few that are left are too foreign. Even as you fear the possibility, you want—desperately want—for there to be someone else, someone different but enough like you. That is why the Neanderthals were such a crushing disappointment. They were the closest thing to you that ever existed, and they do not want to know you.”
Her choice of “you” rather than “we” is both striking and discomforting. I comment on it.
“Ah!” she says. “But we are not just Sapiens with a robust chassis, are we? No. And neither are we Neanderthal. We are something else. Our quest is to find out what.”
I ask if that’s why she has brought so many of her fellows to join her in the park.
“Yes,” she says, simply.
When I ask the other Thalers why they’re out here, they all give similar enough answers to suggest that it’s a matter that’s been much discussed.
“Looking for who I am, I guess,” from Kip, with that heavy-shouldered shrug of hers.
“Don’t belong anywhere else, do we?” from Doro.
“Where else would I be?” from Pek, after a thoughtful chew on his cigar.
Yellen has the answer that, perhaps, sums up all of them. “Look at us. We’re made from nothing, out of nowhere. I went to Gibraltar, once, to see the caves where Neanderthals used to be. I went to the one where there’s those carvings that they say were by Neanderthals. I got a tattoo.” He rolls up his sleeve to show me the crosshatch design on his bicep. “But what does it mean, really? The last people like us, Sapiens and Neanderthal in one, they were forty thousand years ago. A person needs to fit, and we got nowhere to fit.”
Overhearing this, Daniel, one of the Chipewyan men, leans across to add, “My people have told stories here since time immemorial. Even your archaeologists say our stories go back ten thousand years in this country.”
Yellen nods. “Maybe here is a place where we can find a way for us to fit together, find a reason to be a people. Make our own stories.”
“And are you? Finding something?”
He gives me a crooked grin, that curl of his lip that shows off the gap in his teeth, and sweeps his arm around, a gesture that encompasses the horizon. “Of course. Who wouldn’t find something out here?”
Northern Canada is like that, with its heavy, intrusive quiet and the even greater weight of emptiness, of human absence, all around. It’s a place where you feel like the world is talking directly to you, with none of the usual clutter in between, and you can almost—almost—hear what the world is saying.
I share beers up on the watchtower again with Jonathan. He tells me that he was raised among his mother’s Cree people, but his father is Métis.
“They started out as the children of English and French fur trappers and First Nations women,” he says. “No one wanted them. But there were so many, they made their own culture. Some of it’s from indigenous traditions, some of it’s European, some of it they invented themselves.”
A campfire springs to life, light invented in the dark. Someone’s out there.
A couple of days later, I catch Yellen and Kip carving at knuckles of sheep bone. They hunch over their projects, intent, holding them close to their faces. Kip’s expression is set in a scowl of concentration, brow furrowed, eyes narrow. Yellen gurns while he etches the fine details.
They’re shy when I ask to see, but Yellen holds up his. It’s a mammoth, stylised but not quite like any style I know.
Kip is more diffident. Eventually, Yellen’s cajoling gets her to open her hand. She’s carving a fat little woman figure, clearly inspired by the Paleolithic Venus figurines that have been found across northern Europe.
I tell her it looks like Gnarly. Yellen thinks that’s hilarious.
“What does she mean?” I ask Kip.
She gives her heavy shrug, looks me in the eye.
“Something.”
Mines
ELEANOR ARNASON
Eleanor Arnason published her first novel, The Sword Smith, in 1978, and followed it with Daughter of the Bear King and To the Resurrection Station. In 1991, she published her best-known novel, one of the strongest novels of the ’90s, the critically acclaimed A Woman of the Iron People, a complex and substantial novel that won the prestigious James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award. Her short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Amazing, Orbit, Xanadu, and elsewhere. Her other books are Ring of Swords and Tomb of the Fathers and a chapbook, Mammoths of the Great Plains, which includes the eponymous novella plus an interview with her and a long essay. Her most recent book is a collection, Big Mama Stories. Her story “Stellar Harvest” was a Hugo Finalist in 2000. Her most recent books are two new collections, Hidden Folk: Icelandic Fantasies and the major science fiction retrospective collection Hwarhath Stories: Transgressive Tales by Aliens. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Here settlers on a colony planet must learn how to deal with the deadly aftermath of war, still killing people long after the battles have ended.
We ruined Earth. Not completely. Some places are still okay: archologies in the far north and south and the off-planet colonies: a handful in space and one on the Moon. They’re for the very rich, the very well educated; and the lucky few who maintained the machinery. The rest of us lived with rising oceans, spreading deserts, and societies that are breaking down or already broken.
I was born in a refugee camp in Ohio. It still rained there, though most of the rest of the Midwest was dry. We lived in a tent and got one meal a day. There was some health care, thanks to Doctors and Dentists Without Boundaries. I didn’t die of appendicitis, because of the Doctors. The Dentists pulled some teeth and taught me to brush and floss.
When I was ten the recruiters came around, and I joined the EurUsa space force. That got me to another camp, where I lived in a barracks and ate three meals a day, meat and dairy as well as grain. There was regular medical and dental care. I thought I had died and gone to heaven, though I wasn’t allowed to go home.