Robert Sawyer - Wake

The Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology was located at 142 Xi-Wai-Da-Jie in western Beijing. Wong Wai-Jeng enjoyed working there, more or less, and the irony was not lost on him that doing so made him a civil servant: the dissident Sinanthropus was an employee of the Communist Party. But the irony of the government supporting this institution devoted to preserving old fossils wasn’t lost on him, either.

Today for his morning coffee break, Wai-Jeng decided to stroll around the second-floor gallery of the museum — the four connected balconies that looked down on the exhibits below. He paused in front of the great glass tank on the granite pedestal that held the pickled coelacanth. There was irony here, too, for the giant lobe-finned fish was labeled a “living” fossil — which it had been until fishermen had netted it off the Comoros a few decades ago. It seemed in good shape still; he wondered if Chairman Mao was faring as well in his mausoleum.

Wai-Jeng turned and walked over to the railing around the opening that looked down onto the ground floor, ten meters below, with its dinosaurs mounted in dramatic poses above beds of fake grass. No school group was visiting today, but two old men were down there, sitting on a wooden bench. Wai-Jeng often saw them here. They lived in the neighborhood, came inside most afternoons to get out of the heat, and just sat, almost as motionless as the skeletons.

Directly below him, an allosaur was dispatching a stegosaur. The latter had fallen on its side, and the carnivore’s great jaws were biting into its neck. The postures were dramatic, but the thick layer of dust visible on the tops of the bones from this vantage point belied the sense of movement.

Wai-Jeng looked off to his right. The great tapered neck of Mamenchisaurus snaked up through the giant opening from the floor below and—

And there was Dr. Feng, over by the metal staircase, accompanied by two other men; they’d presumably just come down from the labs upstairs. The two men didn’t look like scientists; they were too burly, too sharp-edged, for that — although one of them did look familiar. Feng was pointing in Wai-Jeng’s direction, and he did something he never did — he shouted: “There you are, Wai-Jeng! These men would like a word with you!”

And then it clicked: the shorter of the two men was the cop from the wang ba; the old paleontologist was warning him. He turned to his left and started to run, almost knocking over a middle-aged woman who was now standing in front of the coelacanth tank.

There was only one way out; modern fire codes were new to Beijing and this museum had been built before they’d been instituted. If the two cops had split up, one going left and the other right around the large opening that looked down on the dinosaurs below, they would have caught him for sure. In fact, if one of them had just stayed put by the staircase, Wai-Jeng would have been trapped. But cops, like all party minions, were creatures of knee-jerk response: Wai-Jeng could tell by the sound of the footfalls, echoing off the glass display cases, that both were pursuing him down this side of the gallery. He’d have to make it to the far end, take the ninety-degree turn to the right, run across the shorter display area there, make another right-angle turn, go all the way up the far side, and round one more bend before he’d reach the staircase and any hope of getting downstairs and out of the building.

Below him, the duckbill Tsintaosaurus was mounted on its hind legs. Its skull poked up through the giant opening between the floors, and its great vertical crest, like a samurai’s raised sword, cast a shadow on the wall ahead.

“Stop!” yelled one of the cops. A woman — perhaps the one who’d been near the coelacanth — screamed, and Wai-Jeng wondered if the cop had taken out a gun.

He was almost to the end of this side of the gallery when he heard a change in the footfalls, and, as he rounded the corner and was able to look back, he saw that the cop from the wang ba had reversed course, and was now running the other way. He now had a much shorter distance to go back to the staircase than Wai-Jeng still needed to cover.

The one who was still running toward Wai-Jeng was indeed brandishing a pistol. Adrenaline surged through him. As he rounded the corner, he dropped his cell phone into a small garbage can, hoping that the cops were too far back to notice; the bookmarks list on its browser would be enough to send him to jail — although, as he ran on, he realized evidence or lack thereof hardly mattered; if he were caught, his fate at any trial had doubtless already been decided.

The cop from the Internet café rounded the corner back by the staircase. Old Dr. Feng was looking on, but there was nothing he, or anyone, could do. As he passed cases of pterosaur remains, Wai-Jeng felt his heart pounding.

“Stop!” the cop behind him yelled again, and “Don’t move!” the second cop demanded.

Wai-Jeng kept running; he was now coming up the opposite side of the gallery from where he’d began. On his left was a long mural showing Cretaceous Beijing in gaudy colors; on his right, the large opening looking down on the first-floor displays. He was directly above the skeletal diorama with the allosaur attacking the stegosaur. The ground was far below, but it was his only hope. The wall around the balcony opening was made of five rows of metal pipe painted white, with perhaps twenty centimeters of space between rows; the whole thing made climbing easy, and he did just that.

“Don’t!” shouted the cop from the wang ba and Dr. Feng simultaneously, the former as an order, the latter with obvious horror.

He took a deep breath, then jumped, the two old men below now looking up as he fell, fear on their lined faces, and—

Ta ma de!

— he hit the fake grass, just missing the giant spikes of the stegosaur’s tail, but the grass hardly cushioned his fall and he felt a sharp, jabbing pain in his left leg as it snapped.

Sinanthropus lay face down, blood in his mouth, next to the skeletons locked in their ancient fight, as footfalls came clanging down the metal staircase.

Dillon Fontana made it to the gazebo first; he was wearing his usual black jeans and a black T-shirt. Hobo would not let him look at anything until he’d properly hugged the ape, and that gave time for Maria Lopez and Werner Richter to arrive, as well. Given his bulk, it was no surprise that Harl Marcuse was the last of the four to make it across the wide lawn, over the drawbridge, and up to the gazebo.

“What is it?” he asked in a wheezing tone that said, Anyone who makes me run better have a damn good reason.

Shoshana indicated the painting, its colors softer now in the late-afternoon sunlight. Marcuse looked at it, but his expression didn’t change. “Yes?”

But Dillon got it at once. “My God,” he said softly. He turned to Hobo and signed, Did you paint this?

Hobo was showing his yellow teeth in a big, goofy grin. Hobo paint, he replied. Hobo paint.

Maria was tilting her head sideways. “I don’t—”

“It’s me,” said Shoshana. “In profile, see?”

Marcuse moved forward, eyes narrowed, and the others got out of his way. “Apes don’t make representational art,” he said in his commanding voice, as if his declaration could erase what was in front of them.

Dillon gestured at the canvas. “Tell that to Hobo.”

“And he did this while I was away,” Shoshana said. “From memory.” The Silverback frowned dubiously. She pointed at the hidden camera. “I’m sure it’s all been recorded.”

He glanced at the same spot and shook his head — although not, she realized after a moment, in negation, but rather in disappointment. The camera kept watch on Hobo — and that meant it showed the easel from the rear. The footage wouldn’t reveal the order in which he’d added elements to the painting. Did he paint the head first? The eye? Was the colored iris added at the same time, or was it a final, finishing touch?