Greg Bear - Darwin's Radio

Wide and slow, the Columbia River glided like a plain of polished jade between black basalt walls.

Mitch pulled off state route 14, drove for half a mile on a dirt and gravel road through scrub trees and bushes, then turned at a bent and rusted sheet-metal sign that read IRON CAVE.

Two old Airstream trailers gleamed in the sun a few yards from the edge of the gorge. Wooden benches and tables heaped with burlap sacks and digging tools surrounded the trailers. He parked the car off the road.

A chill breeze picked at his felt Stetson. He gripped the hat with one hand as he walked from the car to the edge and stared down upon Eileen Ripper’s encampment, fifty feet below.

A short young blond woman in frayed and faded jeans and a brown leather jacket stepped down from the door of the nearest trailer. In the moist air off the river, he instantly picked up the young woman’s scent: Opium or Trouble or some such perfume. She looked remarkably like Tilde.

The woman paused under the outstretched awning, then stepped out and shaded her eyes against the sun. “Mitch Rafelson?” she asked.

“None other,” he said. “Is Eileen down there?”

“Yeah. It’s falling apart, you know.”

“Since when?”

“Since three days ago. Eileen worked real hard to make her case. Didn’t make much difference in the long run.”

Mitch grinned sympathetically. “Been there,” he said.

“The woman from Five Tribes packed up two days ago. That’s why Eileen thought it would be okay for you to come out here. Nobody gets mad now if you show up.”

“Nice to be popular,” Mitch said, and tipped his hat.

The woman smiled. “Eileen is feeling low. Give her some encouragement. I think you’re a hero, myself. Except maybe for those mummies.”

“Where is she?”

“Just below the cave.”

Oliver Merton sat on a folding chair in the shadow of the largest canvas canopy. About thirty, with flaming red hair, a pale broad face and short pushed-up nose, he wore a look of utter and almost fierce concentration, his lips drawn back as he punched the keyboard of a laptop computer with his index fingers.

Hunt-and-peck, Mitch thought. A self-taught typist . He checked out the man’s clothes, distinctly out of place at a dig: tweed slacks, red suspenders, a white linen dress shirt with a banded collar.

Merton did not look up until Mitch was within touching distance of the canopy.

“Mitchell Rafelson! What a pleasure!” Merton shifted the computer to the table, jumped to his feet, and held out his hand. “It’s damned gloomy here. Eileen is up the slope by the dig. I’m sure she’s eager to see you. Shall we?”

The six other workers on the site, all young interns or graduate students, looked up in curiosity as the two men passed. Merton walked ahead of Mitch and climbed over natural shelves cut by centuries of river erosion. They paused twenty feet below the bluff where an old, rust-streaked cave dug into an outcrop of basalt. Above and east of the outcrop, part of an overlying ledge of weathered stone had collapsed, scattering large blocks down the gentle slope to the shore.

Eileen Ripper stood at the outside of a posted series of carefully excavated square pits marked with topometric grids — wire and string — on the western side of the slope. In her late forties, small and dark, with deep-set black eyes and a thin nose, Ripper’s most conspicuous beauty lay in her generous lips, which contrasted appealingly with a short, unruly cap of peppered black hair.

She turned at Merton’s hail. She did not smile or call out. Instead, she put on a determined face, walked gingerly down the talus, and held out her hand to Mitch. They shook firmly.

“We got radiocarbon figures back yesterday morning,” she said. “They’re thirteen thousand years old, plus or minus five hundred…and if they ate a lot of salmon, they’re twelve thousand five hundred years old. But the Five Tribes folks say that Western science is trying to strip them of the last of their dignity. I thought I could reason with them.”

“At least you made the effort,” Mitch said.

“I apologize for judging you so harshly, Mitch. I kept my cool for so long, despite little signs of trouble, and then this woman, Sue Champion…I thought we were friends. She advises the tribes. She comes back here yesterday with two men. The men were…so smug, Mitch. Like little boys who can piss higher up the barn door. They tell me I am fabricating evidence to support my lies. They say they have the government and the law on their side. Our old nemesis, NAGPRA.”

That stood for the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Mitch was very familiar with the details of this legislation.

Merton stood on the loose slope, trying to keep from slipping, and made little darting glances between them.

“What evidence did you fabricate?” Mitch asked lightly.

“Don’t joke.” But Ripper’s expression loosened and she held Mitch’s hand between hers. “We took collagen from the bones and sent it to Portland. They did a DNA analysis. Our bones are from a different population, not at all related to modern Indians, only loosely related to the Spirit Cave mummy. Caucasoid, if we can use that loose term. But hardly Nordic. More Ainu, I believe.”

“That’s historic, Eileen,” Mitch said. “That’s excellent. Congratulations.”

Once started, Ripper couldn’t seem to stop. They walked down the trail to the tents. “We can’t even begin to make modern racial comparisons. That is what is so infuriating! We let our screwball notions of race and identity cloud the truth. Populations were so different back then. But modern Indians did not come from the people our skeletons belonged to. They may have competed with the ancestors of modern Indians. And they lost.”

“The Indians won?” Merton said. “They should be glad to hear it.”

“They think I’m trying to divide their political unity. They don’t care about what really happened. They want their own little dream world and the hell with truth!”

“You’re telling me?” Mitch asked.

Ripper smiled through tears of discouragement and exhaustion. “The Five Tribes have got counsel petitioning in federal court in Seattle to take the skeletons.”

“Where are the bones now?”

“In Portland. We packed them up in situ and shipped them out yesterday.”

“Across state lines?” Mitch asked. “That’s kidnapping.”

“It’s better than waiting around for a bunch of lawyers.” She shook her head and Mitch put an arm around her shoulders. “I tried to do it right, Mitch.” She wiped at her cheeks with a dusty hand, leaving muddy streaks, and forced a laugh. “Now I’ve even got the Vikings mad at us!”

The Vikings — a small group of mostly middle-aged men calling themselves the Nordic Worshippers of Odin in the New World — had come to Mitch as well, years before, to conduct their ceremonies. They had hoped that Mitch could prove their claims that Nordic explorers had populated much of North America thousands of years ago. Mitch, ever the philosopher, had let them conduct a ritual over the bones of Pasco man, still in the ground, but ultimately he had had to disappoint them. Pasco man was in fact quite thoroughly Indian, closely related to the Southern Na-dene.

After Ripper’s tests on her skeletons, the Worshippers of Odin had once again left in disappointment. In a world of fragile self-justification, the truth made no one happy.

Merton brought out a bottle of champagne and vacuum packs of smoked salmon and fresh bread and cheese as the daylight waned. Several of Ripper’s students built a large fire that snapped and crackled on the shore as Mitch and Eileen toasted their mutual insanity.