Michael Bishop - Ancient of Days

CAROLINE: Excuse me, Dr. Blair. Isn’t Homo zarakalensis a term you coined two years ago for a hominid skull that one of your Kikembu assistants found in the Lake Kiboko digs?

BLAIR: Yes, it is. It means “Zarakali Man.”

CAROLINE: But there’s controversy over that designation. Your skull appears similar to those of the habiline specimens unearthed by the Leakeys at Koobi Fora in Kenya. Richard Leakey, in fact, claims they’re identical.

BLAIR: That may be. We paleoanthropologists are aggressively territorial. What I’ve always stressed, however, is that my discovery is somewhat older—perhaps by as much as a half million years—than the Leakey “habilines.” In other words, this distinctive hominid probably originated in what is today Zarakal and only later migrated into what is today Kenya. For that reason, if for no other, it ought to be called Zarakali Man.

CAROLINE: But habilis is altogether neutral in regard to the hominid’s place of origin. It suggests the creature’s tool-making ability. Is it fair to discard that bit of preexisting descriptive nomenclature for a term that has only your own egotistical chauvinism to recommend it?

BLAIR ( chuckling benignantly ): Well, that’s what I’m trying to ask Adam. You see, it’s his place to decide. Just as American blacks decided they wished to be called blacks, Adam ought to be the sole authority in this matter. It directly affects only him. I’m not going to throw a tantrum if he opts to go with habilis . He’s the one who’ll have to answer to Handyman, Handyman, Handyman.

CAROLINE: Dr. Blair, it seems to me—

BLAIR: For someone who was going to let Adam and me converse, young lady, you’re becoming a fair threat to monopolize our talk.

CAROLINE ( forthrightly ): Forgive me.

BLAIR: Now, then, Adam. Which do you prefer? Homo habilis —Handyman, you know. Or Homo zarakalensis ? Your word, I have a strong hunch, will be the paleoanthropological community’s command.

ADAM: Is not Homo sapiens sapiens within my humble purview? I’m not a handy person, and never in my life have I set foot in Zarakal.

BLAIR: Homo sapiens sapiens ?

ADAM: Mais oui . With Miss RuthClaire’s tender help, I fathered a human child. And thanks to the surgeons at Emory, I speak even as you do, sir. Also, I have many perplexing spiritual longings and a freshly emergent concept of God. Considered in these lights, am I not a twentieth-century human being whose archaic bone structure is irrelevant to his dignity and worth?

BLAIR: But many species are interfertile, Adam. And your ability to speak is an acquired characteristic. A surgically acquired characteristic. To assign yourself to a species classification on that account is to fall prey to insidious Lamarckian error. Please, Adam, think .

CAROLINE: He’s thought, sir. He wants to be called Homo sapiens sapiens . You said you wouldn’t quibble with him.

ADAM: In truth, I’d prefer to be called Adam. Adam Montaraz.

CAROLINE: That’s fine with me. How about you, Dr. Blair?

BLAIR: I find it perfectly acceptable. But let’s get on with this. We’ve many important things to talk about.

( At this point, the participants took a short break. Caroline checked her recorder. Then the conversation resumed .)

BLAIR: I’m afraid I’ve been doing all the talking, Adam. What I’d like to know, of course, is how you were raised, what you remember of your childhood and youth, and whether any of your people, be they called habilines or Homo sapiens , still exist on this island. Would you mind addressing those questions?

ADAM: Very happy to. The first two are more difficult to answer than the last one, however. I can only do my best.

BLAIR: No one asks more of you, Adam. Begin with the easiest of the three and then proceed as you like.

ADAM: Miss RuthClaire told me once of the Yahi Indian called Ishi, about whom Theodora Kroeber wrote eloquently. Ishi was the last of his tribe in the state of California. Like Ishi, I am the last of my tribe—my species, you would say—on the island of Montaraz. In the entire great world, too, I fear.

( I glanced at RuthClaire. Her letter, of course, directly contradicted Adam’s testimony. Ostensibly, after all, I had come to Montaraz to see, evaluate, and perhaps represent the work of an unspecified number of habiline artists. Was Adam lying to Blair, or had RuthClaire lied to us to give us a compelling reason to come? Wearing a sheepish grin, she shrugged and looked away. )

BLAIR: What happened to your people?

ADAM: Exterminated. Persecuted, hunted, killed. Those who escaped the Duvalier pogrom—a very few—were scattered on the winds of politics and commerce. Off the coast of Cuba, five years ago, two of my people died at the hands of a man greatly more animalish than we. One who died was my brother. These deaths ended all our desperate struggles to prevail in a world such as this. I was then the last one of us all.

BLAIR: Weren’t there any women on Montaraz to keep things going? Isn’t it possible that some far-scattered fellow habilines may still be alive?

ADAM: No sightings, no reports. Such a hope seems foolish.

BLAIR ( sighing audibly ): Ah, well. Yet another proof of contemporary humanity’s unparalleled ability to muck up or destroy what clearly ought to be preserved. It makes me ashamed.

ADAM: Don’t reproach yourself too harshly, sir. Should I die before H. sapiens sapiens obliterates itself along with this oh-so-lovely planet, why, your kind will have outlasted mine. Only by a little, and only after a reign much briefer than the furtive persistence of us habilines—but you must take your victories, Dr. Blair, where you find them, even if they are upsettingly Pyrrhic. Not so?

CAROLINE: You seem to be identifying yourself as a habiline now, Adam. Do you mean to?

ADAM: I am identifying with my people, whom others have called habilines. Also, of course, I’m a good H. sapiens sapiens myself. Perhaps my people were too, even lacking speech. In my mind, Miss Caroline, they will always seem human—nobly human.

BLAIR: I take scant comfort from surviving by a mere breath an ancestral human species that preexisted us by at least two million years.

ADAM: Then you are noble, too, sir.

BLAIR: Thank you. I appreciate your vote of confidence.

CAROLINE: Adam, Dr. Blair’s other questions concerned your childhood and youth, your memories of habiline society and culture here on Montaraz. Those strike me as topics of crucial value to any study of your vanished people. Would you tell us what you can about those topics?

ADAM: You and Dr. Blair must never forget that that portion of my life corresponds to the portion of ongoing human experience you call “prehistory.” I have a prehistoric life and an ego-documented life. I’m speaking now out of the latter context. Recovering the prehistoric elements of my life from the vantage of my crystallized ego is very hard. Distortions arise. Who I am now contaminates what then I was. Contaminates and discolors.

BLAIR: You’re wholly unable to reconstruct your early life?

ADAM: Of course not. It goes around in my head like a dream. It’s a hard dream to tell, though, because then I had no language with which to chain and tame it. I had heard language spoken, but I had none of my own, and if you had seen me in those days, you would have thought me a feral thing surviving by instinct rather than wit. I had an invisible umbilical cord to my family, and another to the island’s soil and vegetation, and another to the snakes and capybaras, and yet another to the sea and air. Everything around us was magical, and I was a kind of joyfully suffering magician. Falling down might hurt. Getting kicked might hurt. Going hungry might hurt. But the living of life, the living of even these many cruelties and hurts, was ever and always magical, Dr. Blair.