Greg Bear - Darwin's Radio

Dicken reached into the shopping bag and produced a bottle of merlot. “Zoo security could bust us,” he said, “but this is the least of our sins. Some of what needs to be said may only be said if we’re properly drunk.”

“I gather you two have shared ideas already,” Mitch said to Kaye as Dicken poured the wine. “I’ve tried to read everything I could just to get ready for this, but I’m still way behind.”

“I don’t know where to begin,” Kaye said. Now that they were more relaxed, the way Mitch Rafelson looked at her — direct, honest, assessing her without being obvious about it — stirred something she had thought almost dead.

“Begin with where you two met,” Mitch said.

“Georgia,” Kaye said.

“The birthplace of wine,” Dicken added.

“We visited a mass grave,” Kaye said. “Though not together. Pregnant women and their husbands.”

“Killing the children,” Mitch said, his eyes suddenly losing their focus. “Why?”

They sat at a plastic table near a closed refreshment stand, deep in the shadows of a canyon. Brown and red roosters pecked through the bushes beside the asphalt road and beige concrete walkways. A big cat coughed and snarled in its cage and the sound echoed eerily.

Mitch pulled a file folder from his small leather satchel and laid the papers neatly on the plastic table. “This is where it all comes together.” He laid his hand on two papers on the right. “These are analyses made at the University of Washington.

Wendell Packer gave me permission to show them to you. If somebody blabs, however, we could all be in deep zoo-doo.”

“Analyses of what?” Kaye asked.

“The genetics of the Innsbruck mummies. Two sets of tissue results from two different labs at the University of Washington. I gave tissue samples of the two adults to Wen-dell Packer. Innsbruck, as it turned out, sent a set of samples of all three mummies to Maria Konig in the same department. Wendell was able to make comparisons.”

“What did they find?” Kaye asked.

“That the three bodies were really a family. Mother, father, daughter. I knew that already — I saw them all together in the cave in the Alps.”

Kaye frowned in puzzlement. “I remember the story. You went to the cave at the request of two friends…Disturbed the site…And the woman with you took the infant in her backpack?”

Mitch looked away, jaw muscles tight. “I can tell you what actually happened,” he said.

“That’s all right,” Kaye said, suddenly wary.

“Just to straighten things out,” Mitch insisted. “We need to trust each other if we’re going to continue.”

“Then tell me more,” Kaye said.

Mitch went through the whole story in brief. “It was a mess,” he concluded.

Dicken watched them both intently, arms folded.

Kaye used the pause to look through the analyses spread on the plastic table top, making sure the papers did not get stained by leftover catsup. She studied the results of carbon 14 dating, the comparisons of genetic markers, and finally, Packer’s successful search for SHEVA.

“Packer says SHEVA hasn’t changed much in fifteen thousand years,” Mitch said. “He finds that astonishing, if they’re junk DNA.”

“They’re hardly junk,” Kaye said. “The genes have been conserved for as much as thirty million years. They’re constantly refreshed, tested, conserved…Locked up in tight-packed chromatin, protected by insulators…They have to be.”

“If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to tell you both what I think,” Mitch said, with a touch of boldness and shyness Kaye found both puzzling and appealing.

“Go ahead,” she said.

“This was an example of subspeciation,” he said. “Not extreme. A nudge to a new variety. A modern-type infant born to late-stage Neandertals.”

“More like us,” Kaye said.

“Right. There was a reporter named Oliver Merton in Washington state a few weeks ago. He’s investigating the mummies. He told me about fights breaking out at the University of Innsbruck—” Mitch looked up and saw Kaye’s surprise.

“Oliver Merton?” she asked, frowning. “Working for Nature ?”

“For The Economist , at the time,” Mitch said.

Kaye turned to Dicken. “The same one?”

“Yeah,” Dicken said. “He does science journalism, some political reporting. Has one or two books published.” He explained to Mitch. “Merton started a big ruckus at a press conference in Baltimore. He’s dug pretty deeply into Americol’s relationship with the CDC and the SHEVA matter.”

“Maybe it’s two different stories,” Mitch said.

“It would have to be, wouldn’t it?” Kaye asked, looking between the two men. “We’re the only ones who have made a connection, aren’t we?”

“I wouldn’t be at all sure,” Dicken said. “Go on, Mitch. Let’s agree that there is a connection before we get fired up about interlopers. What were they arguing about in Innsbruck?”

“Merton says they’ve connected the infant to the adult mummies — which Packer confirms.”

“It’s ironic,” Dicken said. “The UN sent some of the samples from Gordi to Konig’s lab.”

“The anthropologists at Innsbruck are pretty conservative,” Mitch said. “To actually come across the first direct evidence of human speciation…” He shook his head in sympathy. “I’d be scared if I were them. The paradigm doesn’t just shift — it snaps in two. No gradualism, no modern Darwinian synthesis.”

“We don’t need to be so radical,” Dicken said. “First of all, there’s been a lot of talk about punctuations in the fossil record — millions of years of steady state, then sudden change.”

“Change over a million or a hundred thousand years, in some cases maybe as little as ten thousand years,” Mitch said. “Not overnight. The implications are damned scary to any scientist. But the markers don’t lie. And the baby’s parents had SHE VA in their tissues.”

“Urn,” Kaye said. Again, the howler monkeys let loose with continuous musical whoops, filling the night air.

“The female was injured by something sharp, perhaps a spear point,” Dicken said.

“Right,” Mitch said. “Causing the late-term infant to be born either dead or very near death. The mother died shortly after, and the father…” His voice hitched. “Sorry. I don’t find it easy to talk about.”

“You sympathize with them,” Kaye said.

Mitch nodded. “I’ve been having weird dreams about them.”

“ESP?” Kaye asked.

“I doubt it,” Mitch said. “It’s just the way tny mind works, putting things together.”

“You think they were pushed out of their tribe?” Dicken asked. “Persecuted?”

“Someone wanted to kill the woman,” Mitch said. “The man stayed with her, tried to save her. They were different. They had something wrong with their faces. Little flaps of skin around their eyes and nose, like masks.”

“They were shedding skin? I mean, when they were alive?” Kaye asked, and her shoulders shuddered.

“Around the eyes, the face.”

“The bodies near Gordi,” Kaye said.

“What about them?” Dicken asked.

“Some of them had little leathery masks. I thought it might have been…some bizarre product of decay. But I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“We’re getting ahead of ourselves,” Dicken said. “Let’s focus on Mitch’s evidence.”

“That’s all I have,” Mitch said. “Physiological changes substantial enough to place the infant in a different subspecies, all at once. In one generation.”

“This sort of thing had to have been going on for over a hundred thousand years before your mummies,” Dicken said. “So populations of Neandertals were living with or around populations of modern humans.”