Greg Bear - Darwin's Children

“Do you have a specific criticism?” Cross asked mildly.

“A number of them, actually,” Morgenstern said. Liz handed Kaye a note. Kaye looked over the quickly scrawled message. Morgenstern published twenty papers with Jackson over the last five years. She’s his contact on the Americol jury.

Kaye looked up and stuffed the note in her coat’s side pocket.

“My first doubt—,” Morgenstern continued.

This was the true beginning of the frontal assault. All that had come before was just the softening up. Kaye swallowed and tried to relax her neck muscles. She thought of Stella, far across the continent, wasting her time in a school run by bigots. And Mitch, driving to rejoin an old lover and colleague on a dig in the middle of nowhere.

For one very bad moment, Kaye felt she was about to lose everything, all at once. But she drew herself up, caught Cross’s gaze, and focused on Morgenstern’s stream of precisely phrased, mind-numbing technicalities.

OREGON

They had left the dirt road twenty minutes ago and Mitch still had not seen anything compelling. The game was beginning to wear. He slammed on the brakes and the old truck creaked on its shocks, swayed for a moment, then stalled out. He opened the door and mopped his forehead with a paper towel from the roll he kept under his front seat, along with a squeegee to remove mud.

Dust billowed around them until a stray draft between narrow rills spirited it away.

“I give up,” Mitch said, walking back to stare into Eileen’s window. “What am I supposed to be looking for?”

“Let’s say there’s a river here.”

“Hasn’t been one for a few centuries, by the looks of things.”

“Three thousand years, actually. Let’s go back even further—say, more than ten thousand years.”

“How much more?”

Eileen shrugged and made an “I’m not telling” face.

Mitch groaned, remembering all the troubles that came with ancient graves.

Eileen watched his reaction with a weary sadness that he could not riddle. “Where would you set up some sort of long-term fishing camp, say, during the fall salmon run? A camp you could come back to, year after year?”

“On hard ground above the river, not too far.”

“And what do you see around here?” Eileen asked.

Mitch scanned the territory again. “Mostly mudstone and weak terraces. Some lava.”

“Ash fall?”

“Yeah. Looks solid. I wouldn’t want to dig it out.”

“Exactly,” Eileen said. “Imagine an ash fall big enough to cover everything for hundreds of miles.”

“Broken flats of ash. That would have to be above this bed, of course. The river would have worn through.”

“Now, how would an archaeologist find something interesting in all that confusion?”

He frowned at her. “Something trapped by ash?”

Eileen nodded encouragement.

“Animals? People?”

“What do you think?” Eileen peered through the dusty windshield of the Tahoe. She looked sadder and sadder, as if reliving an ancient tragedy.

“People, of course,” Mitch said. “A camp. A fishing camp. Covered by ash.” He shook his head, then mockingly smacked his forehead, Such a dummy.

“I’m practically giving it away,” Eileen said.

Mitch turned east. He could see the dark gray-and-white layers of the old ash fall, buried under ten feet of sediments and now topped by a broken wall of pines. The ash layer looked at least four feet thick, mottled and striated. He imagined walking over to the cut and fingering the ash. Compacted by many seasons of rain, held in place by a cap of dirt and silt, it would be rock hard at first, but ultimately frangible, turning to powder if he hit it vigorously with a pick.

Big fall, a long time ago. Ten thousand and more years.

He looked north again, up a wash and away from the broad mud and gravel bed of the long-dead river, spotted with hardy brush and trees, a course now cut off even from snow melt and flash floods. Undisturbed by heavy erosion for a couple of thousand years.

“This used to be a pretty good oxbow, I’d say. Even in the Spent River heyday, there’d have been shallows where you could walk across and spear fish. You could have set up a weir in that hollow, under that boulder.” He pointed to a big boulder mostly buried in old silt and ash.

Eileen smiled and nodded. “Keep going.”

Mitch tapped his lips with his finger. He circled the Tahoe, waving his arms, making swooshing sounds, kicking the dirt, sniffing the air.

Eileen laughed and slapped her knees. “I needed that,” she said.

“Well, shucks,” Mitch said humbly. “If I’m tapping into mystic spirits, I got to act the part.” He fixed his gaze on a gap that led to higher ground, above the ash. His head leaned to one side and he shook out his bad arm, which was starting to ache. He got the look of a hound on the scent. Eyes sweeping the rough ground, he walked up the wash and climbed around the boulder.

Eileen yelled, “Wait up!”

“No way,” Mitch called back. “I’m on it.”

And he was.

He spotted the camp ten minutes later. Eileen came up beside him, breathless. On a level plateau only thinly forested, marked by patches of gray where the deep ash layer had been exposed by erosion, he saw twelve low-slung, light-weather tents covered with netting, dead branches, and bushes uprooted from around the site. A pair of old Land Rovers had been parked together and disguised as a large boulder.

Mitch had taken a seat on a rock, staring glumly at the tents and vehicles. “Why the camouflage?” he asked.

“Satellites or remoters doing searches for the BLM and Army Corps, protecting Indian rights under NAGPRA,” Eileen said. Federal interpretation of the complaints of certain Indian groups, citing NAGPRA—the Native American Graves Protection Act—had been the nemesis of American archaeologists for almost twenty years.

“Oh,” Mitch said. “Why take the chance? Do we need that now? Having the feds cover your dig with concrete?” That was how the Army Corps of Engineers had protected Mitch’s dig against further intrusion, more than a lifetime ago, it seemed now. He waved his hand at the site and made a face. “Not very smart, staying hidden like this, hoping to avoid the Big Boys.”

“Isn’t that what you did?” Eileen asked.

Mitch snorted with little humor. “It’s a fair cop,” he admitted.

“These are not rational times,” Eileen said. “You’ll understand soon enough. Don’t we all need to know what it means to be human? Now more than ever? How we got to where we are, and what’s going to come later?”

“What are a few old Indian bones going to tell us that we don’t already know?” Mitch asked, feeling his sense of discovery start to sputter and stall.

“Would I have called you out here if that was all we had at stake?” Eileen said. “You know me better than that, Mitch Rafelson. I hope you do.”

Mitch wiped his hand on his pants leg and looked over his shoulder at the long fan of the wash. They had climbed about twenty feet, but he could still see evidence of ancient bank erosion. “Big river, way back when,” he said.

“It was smaller at the time of our site,” Eileen said. “Just a broad, shallow stream filled with salmon. Bears used to come down and fish. One of my students found an old male on the other side. Killed by an early phase of the ash fall, stage one of the eruption.”

“How long ago?” Mitch asked.

“Twenty thousand years, we’re estimating. Ash gives a good potassium-argon result. We’re still refining with carbon dating.”

“Something more than just a dead grizzly?”

Eileen nodded like a little girl confirming that there were, indeed, more dolls in her room. “The bear was female. She was missing her skull. It had been cut off, the bones hacked through with stone axes.”