The Prophet of Flores Read online

  He learned of the recently discovered Alzheimer’s gene, APOE4—a gene common throughout much of the world; and he learned theories about how deleterious genes grew to such high frequencies. Paul learned that although APOE4 caused Alzheimer’s, it also protected against the devastating cognitive consequences of early childhood malnutrition. The gene that destroys the mind at seventy, saves it at seven months. He learned that people with sickle cell trait are resistant to malaria; and heterozygotes for cystic fibrosis are less susceptible to cholera; and people with type A blood survived the plague at higher frequencies than other blood types, altering forever, in a single generation, the frequency of blood types in Europe. A process, some said, now being slow-motion mimicked by the gene CKR5 and HIV.

  In his anthropology courses, Paul learned that all humans alive today could trace their ancestry back to Africa, to a time almost six thousand years ago when the whole of human diversity existed within a single small population. And there had been at least two dispersions out of Africa, his professors said, if not more—a genetic bottleneck in support of the Deluvian Flood Theory. But each culture had its own beliefs. Muslims called it Allah. Jews, Yahweh. The science journals were careful not to call it God anymore; but they spoke of an intelligent designer—an architect, lowercase “a.” Though in his heart of hearts, Paul figured it all amounted to the same thing.

  Paul learned they’d scanned the brains of nuns, looking for the God spot, and couldn’t find it. He learned about evolutionism. Although long debunked by legitimate science, adherents of evolutionism still existed—their beliefs enjoying near immortality among the fallow fields of pseudo-science, cohabitating the fringe with older belief systems like astrology, phrenology, and acupuncture. Modern evolutionists believed the various dating systems were all incorrect; and they offered an assortment of unscientific explanations for how the isotope tests could all be wrong. In hushed tones, some even spoke of data tampering and conspiracies.

  The evolutionists ignored the accepted interpretation of the geological record. They ignored the miracle of the placenta and the irreducible complexity of the eye.

  During his junior and senior years, Paul studied archaeology. He studied the ancient remains of Homo erectus, and Homo neanderthalensis. He studied the un-Men; he studied Afarensis, and Australopithecus, and Pan.

  In the world of archeology, the line between Man and un-Man could be fuzzy—but it was never unimportant. To some scientists, Homo erectus was a race of Man long dead, a withered branch on the tree of humanity. To those more conservative, he wasn’t Man at all; he was other, a hiccup of the creator, an independent creation made from the same tool box. But that was an extreme viewpoint. Mainstream science, of course, accepted the use of stone tools as the litmus test. Men made stone tools. Soulless beasts didn’t. Of course there were still arguments, even in the mainstream. The fossil KNM ER 1470, found in Kenya, appeared so perfectly balanced between Man and un-Man that a new category had to be invented: near-Man. The arguments could get quite heated, with both sides claiming anthropometric statistics to prove their case.

  Like a benevolent teacher swooping in to stop a playground fight, the science of genetics arrived on the scene. Occupying the exact point of intersection between Paul’s two passions in life—genetics and anthropology—the field of paleometagenomics was born.

  Paul received a bachelor’s degree in May and started a graduate program in September. Two years and an advanced degree later, he moved to the East Coast to work for Westing Genomics, one of the foremost genetics research labs in the world.

  Three weeks after that, he was in the field in Tanzania, learning the proprietary techniques of extracting DNA from bones 5,800 years old. Bones from the very dawn of the world.

  * * *

  Two men stepped into the bright room.

  “So this is where the actual testing is done?” It was a stranger’s voice, the accent urban Australian.

  Paul lifted his eyes from the microscope and saw his supervisor accompanied by an older man in a gray suit.

  “Yes,” Mr. Lyons said.

  The stranger shifted weight to his teak cane. His hair was short and gray, parted neatly on the side.

  “It never ceases to amaze,” the stranger said, glancing around. “How alike laboratories are across the world. Cultures who cannot agree on anything agree on this: how to design a centrifuge, where to put the test tube rack, what color to paint the walls—white, always. The bench tops, black.”

  Mr. Lyons nodded. Mr. Lyons was a man who wore his authority like a uniform two sizes too large; it required constant adjustment to look presentable.

  Paul stood, pulled off his latex gloves.

  “Gavin McMaster,” the stranger said, sticking out a hand. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. Carlson.”

  They shook.

  “Paul. You can call me Paul.”

  “I apologize for interrupting your work,” Gavin said.

  “It’s time I took a break anyway.”

  “I’ll leave you two to your discussion,” Mr. Lyons said, and excused himself.

  “Please,” Paul said, gesturing to a nearby work table. “Take a seat.”

  Gavin sank onto the stool and set his briefcase on the table. “I promise I won’t take much of your time,” he said. “But I did need to talk to you. We’ve been leaving messages for the last few days and—”

  “Oh.” Paul’s face changed. “You’re from—”

  “Yes.”

  “This is highly unusual for you to contact me here.”

  “I can assure you these are very unusual circumstances.”

  “Still, I’m not sure I like being solicited for one job while working at another.”

  “I can see there’s been a misunderstanding.”

  “How’s that?” “You called it a job. Consider it a consulting offer.”

  “Mr. McMaster, I’m very busy with my current work. I’m in the middle of several projects, and, to be honest, I’m surprised Westing let you through the door.”

  “Westing is already onboard. I took the liberty of speaking to the management before contacting you today.”

  “How did you…” Paul looked at him, and Gavin raised an eyebrow. With corporations, any question of “how” was usually rhetorical. The answer was always the same. And it always involved dollar signs.

  “Of course, we’ll match that bonus to you, mate.” McMaster slid a check across the counter. Paul barely glanced at it.

  “As I said, I’m in the middle of several projects now. One of the other samplers here would probably be interested.”

  McMaster smiled. “Normally I’d assume that was a negotiating tactic. But that’s not the case here, is it?”

  “No.”

  “I was like you once. Hell, maybe I still am.”

  “Then you understand.” Paul stood.

  “I understand you better than you think. It makes it easier, sometimes, when you come from money. Sometimes I think that only people who come from it realize how worthless it really is.”

  “That hasn’t been my experience. If you’ll excuse me.” Politeness like a wall, a thing he’d learned from his mother.

  “Please,” Gavin said. “Before you leave, I have something for you.” He opened the snaps on his briefcase and pulled out a stack of glossy eight-by-ten photographs.

  For a moment Paul just stood there. Then he took the photos from Gavin’s extended hand. Paul looked at the pictures. Paul looked at them for a long time. Gavin said, “These fossils were found last year on the island of Flores, in Indonesia.”

  “Flores,” Paul whispered, still studying the photos. “I heard they found strange bones there. I didn’t know anybody had published.”

  “That’s because we haven’t. Not yet, anyway.”

  “These dimensions can’t be right. A six-inch ulna.”

  “They’re right.”

  Paul looked at him. “Why me?” And just like that, the wall was gone. What lived behind it
had hunger in its belly.

  “Why not?”

  It was Paul’s turn to raise an eyebrow.

  “Because you’re good,” Gavin said.

  “So are others.”

  “Because you’re young and don’t have a reputation to risk.”

  “Or one to stand on.”

  Gavin sighed. “Because I don’t know if archaeology was ever meant to be as important as it has become. Will that do for an answer? We live in a world where zealots become scientists. Tell me, boy, are you a zealot?”

  “No.”

  “That’s why. Or close enough.”

  There were a finite number of unique creations at the beginning of the world—a finite number of species which has, since that time, decreased dramatically through extinction. Speciation is a special event outside the realm of natural processes, a phenomenon relegated to the moment of creation, and to the mysteries of Allah.

  —Expert witness, heresy trials, Ankara, Turkey.

  The flight to Bali was seventeen hours, and another two to Flores by chartered plane—then four hours by Jeep over the steep mountains and into the heart of the jungle. To Paul, it might have been another world. Rain fell, stopped, then fell again, turning the road into a thing which had to be reasoned with.

  “Is it always like this?” Paul asked.

  “No,” Gavin said. “In the rainy season, the roads are much worse.”

  Flores, isle of flowers. From the air it had looked like a long ribbon of jungle thrust from blue water, part of a rosary of islands between Australia and Java. The Wallace Line—a line more real than any on a map—lay kilometers to the west, toward Asia and the empire of placental mammals. A stranger emperor ruled here.

  Paul was exhausted by the time they pulled into Ruteng. He rubbed his eyes. Children ran alongside the Jeep, their faces some combination of Malay and Papuan—brown skin, strong white teeth like a dentist’s dream. The hill town crouched one foot in the jungle, one on the mountain. A valley flung itself from the edge of the settlement, a drop of kilometers.

  The men checked into their hotel. Paul’s room was basic, but clean, and Paul slept like the dead. The next morning he woke, showered and shaved. Gavin met him in the lobby.

  “It’s a bit rustic, I apologize.” Gavin said.

  “No, it’s fine.” Paul said. “There was a bed and a shower. That’s all I needed.”

  “We use Ruteng as a kind of base camp for the dig. Our future accommodations won’t be quite so luxurious.”

  Back at the Jeep, Paul checked his gear. It wasn’t until he climbed into the passenger seat that he noticed the gun, its black leather holster duct-taped to the driver’s door. It hadn’t been there the day before.

  Gavin caught him staring. “These are crazy times we live in, mate. This is a place history has forgotten till now. Recent events have made it remember.” “Which recent events are those?”

  “Religious events to some folks’ view. Political to others.” Gavin waved his hand. “More than just scientific egos are at stake with this find.”

  They drove north, descending into the valley and sloughing off the last pretense of civilization. “You’re afraid somebody will kidnap the bones?” Paul asked.

  “Yeah, that’s one of the things I’m afraid of.”

  “One?”

  “It’s easy to pretend that it’s just theories we’re playing with—ideas dreamed up in some ivory tower between warring factions of scientists. Like it’s all some intellectual exercise.” Gavin looked at him, his dark eyes grave. “But then you see the actual bones; you feel their weight in your hands, and sometimes theories die between your fingers.”

  The track down to the valley floor was all broken zig-zags and occasional, rounding turns. For long stretches, overhanging branches made a tunnel of the roadway—the jungle a damp cloth slapping at the windshield. But here and there that damp cloth was yanked aside, and out over the edge of the drop you could see a valley that Hollywood would love, an archetype to represent all valleys, jungle floor visible through jungle haze. In those stretches of muddy road, a sharp left pull on the steering wheel would have gotten them there quicker, deader.

  “Liange Bua,” Gavin called their destination. “The Cold Cave.” And Gavin explained that was how they thought it happened—the scenario. This steamy jungle all around, so two or three of them went inside to get cool, to sleep. Or maybe it was raining, and they went in the cave to get dry—only the rain didn’t stop, and the river flooded, as it sometimes still did, and they were trapped inside the cave by the rising waters, their drowned bodies buried in mud and sediment.

  The men rode in silence for a while before Gavin said it, a third option Paul felt coming. “Or they were eaten there.”

  “Eaten by what?”

  “Homo homini lupus est. ” Gavin said. “Man is wolf to man.”

  They crossed a swollen river, water rising to the bottom of the doors. For a moment Paul felt the current grab the Jeep, pull, and it was a close thing, Gavin cursing and white-knuckled on the wheel, trying to keep them to the shallows. When they were past it he said, “You’ve got to keep it to the north; if you slide a few feet off straight, the whole bugger’ll go tumbling downriver.”

  Paul didn’t ask him how he knew.

  Beyond the river was the camp. Researchers in wide-brimmed hats or bandanas. Young and old. Two or three shirtless. A dark-haired woman in a white shirt sat on a log outside her tent. The one feature unifying them all, good boots.

  Every head followed the Jeep, and when the Jeep pulled to a stop, a small crowd gathered to help unpack. Gavin introduced him around. Eight researchers, plus two laborers still in the cave. Australian mostly. Indonesian. One American.

  “Herpetology, mate,” one of them said when he shook Paul’s hand. Small, stocky, red-bearded; he couldn’t have been more than twenty-two. Paul forgot his name the moment he heard it, but the introduction, “Herpetology, mate,” stuck with him. “That’s my specialty,” the small man continued. “I got mixed up in this because of Professor McMaster here. University of New England, Australia.” His smile was two feet wide under a sharp nose that pointed at his own chin. Paul liked him instantly.

  When they’d finished unpacking the Jeep, Gavin turned to Paul. “Now I think it’s time we made the most important introductions,” he said.

  It was a short walk to the cave. Jag-toothed limestone jutted from the jungle, an overhang of vine, and beneath that, a dark mouth. The stone was the brown-white of old ivory. Cool air enveloped him, and entering Liange Bua was a distinct process of stepping down. Once inside, it took Paul’s eyes a moment to adjust. The chamber was thirty meters wide, open to the jungle in a wide crescent—mud floor, low-domed ceiling. There was not much to see at first. In the far corner, two sticks angled from the mud, and when he looked closer, Paul saw the hole.

  “Is that it?”

  “That’s it.”

  Paul took off his backpack and stripped the white paper suit out of its plastic wrapper. “Who else has touched it?” “Talford, Margaret, me.”

  “I’ll need blood samples from everybody for comparison assays.”

  “DNA contamination?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We stopped the dig when we realized the significance.”

  “Still. I’ll need blood samples from anybody who has dug here, anybody who came anywhere near the bones. I’ll take the samples myself tomorrow.”

  “I understand. Is there anything else you need?”

  “Solitude.” Paul smiled. “I don’t want anybody in the cave for this part.”

  Gavin nodded and left. Paul broke out his tarps and hooks. It was best if the sampler was the person who dug the fossils out of the ground—or better yet, if the DNA samples were taken when the bones were still in the ground. Less contamination that way. And there was always contamination. No matter what precautions were taken, no matter how many tarps, or how few people worked at the site, there was still always contamination.
br />   Paul slid down into the hole, flashlight strapped to his forehead, white paper suit slick on the moist earth. From his perspective, he couldn’t tell what the bones were—only that they were bones, half buried in earth. From his perspective, that’s all that mattered. The material was soft, un-fossilized; he’d have to be careful.

  It took nearly seven hours. He snapped two dozen photographs, careful to keep track of which samples came from which specimens. Whoever these things were, they were small. He sealed the DNA samples into small, sterile lozenges for transport.

  It was night when he climbed from under the tarp.

  Outside the cave, Gavin was the first to find him in the firelight. “Are you finished?”

  “For tonight. I have six different samples from at least two different individuals. Shouldn’t take more than a few days.”

  McMaster handed him a bottle of whiskey.

  “Isn’t it a little early to celebrate?”

  “Celebrate? You’ve been working in a grave all night. In America, don’t they drink after funerals?”

  * * *

  That night over the campfire, Paul listened to the jungle sounds and to the voices of scientists, feeling history congeal around him.

  “Suppose it isn’t.” Jack was saying. Jack was thin and American and very drunk. “Suppose it isn’t in the same lineage with us, then what would that mean?”

  The red-bearded herpetologist groaned. His name was James. “Not more of that doctrine of descent bullshit,” he said.

  “Then what is it?” someone added.

  They passed the drink around, eyes occasionally drifting to Paul as if he were a priest come to grant absolution—his sample kit just an artifact of his priestcraft. Paul swigged the bottle when it came his way. They’d finished off the whiskey long ago; this was some local brew brought by laborers, distilled from rice. Paul swallowed fire.

  Yellow-haired man saying, “It’s the truth,” but Paul had missed part of the conversation, and for the first time he realized how drunk they all were; and James laughed at something, and the woman with the white shirt turned and said, “Some people have nicknamed it the ‘hobbit.’”