And here, in these unremarkable caves, the ancestors stayed, generation on generation.
The pace of change was now terribly slow. At first the ancestors wore clothes, but — as hundreds of generations withered away — the clothing was of decreasing quality, reducing at last to simple skin bags tied around naked waists, and at length not even that. They would hunt with stone-tipped spears and hand axes, no longer with arrows. But the stone tools too were of increasing coarseness, the hunting less ambitious, often no more than a patchy attempt to finish off a wounded eland.
In the caves — whose floors gradually sank deeper over the millennia, as successive layers of human detritus were removed — at first there was something like the sophistication of a human society. There was even art, images of animals and people, laboriously layered on the walls with dye-stained fingers.
But at last, more than twelve hundred generations deep, the walls became blank, the last crude images scraped away.
David shivered. He had reached a world without art: there were no pictures, no novels, no sculptures, perhaps not even songs or poetry. The world was draining of mind.
Deeper and deeper they fell, through three, four thousand generations: an immense desert of time, crossed by a chain of ancestors who bred and squabbled in this unadorned cave. The succession of grandmothers showed little meaningful change-but David thought he detected an increasing vagueness, a bewilderment, even a state of habitual, uncomprehending fear in those dark faces.
At last there was a sudden, jarring discontinuity. And this time it was not the landscape that changed but the ancestral face itself.
David slowed the fall, and the brothers stared at this most remote grandmother, peering from the mouth of the African cave her descendants would inhabit for thousands of generations.
Her face was outsized, with her eyes too far apart, nose flattened, and features spread too wide, as if the whole face had been pulled wide. Her jaw was thick, but her chin was shallow and sliced back. And bulging out of her forehead was an immense brow, a bony swelling like a tumour, pushing down the face beneath it and making the eyes sunken in their huge hard-boned sockets. A swelling at the back of her head offset the weight of that huge brow, but it tilted her head downward, so that her chin almost rested on her chest, her massive neck snaking forward.
But her eyes were clear and knowing.
She was more human than any ape, and yet she was not human. And it was that degree of closeness yet difference which disturbed him.
She was, unmistakably, Neanderthal.
“She’s beautiful,” Bobby said.
“Yes,” David breathed. “
And, he wondered suddenly, how many watchers from his own far future would be studying him and his brother, even now, as they became the first humans to confront their own deep ancestors? He supposed he could never begin to imagine their forms, the tools they used, their thoughts — even as this Neanderthal grandmother could surely never have envisaged this lab, his half- invisible brother, the gleaming gadgets here.
And beyond
All of it — supposing the Wormwood spared anybody at all.
“…Oh,” Bobby whispered. He sounded disappointed.
“What is it?”
“It’s not your fault. I knew the risk.” There was a rustle of cloth, a blurred shadow.
David turned. Bobby had gone.
But here was Hiram, storming into the lab, clattering doors and yelling. “I got them. Bugger me, I got them.” He slapped David on the back. “That DNA trace worked like a charm. Manzoni and Mary, the pair of them.” He raised his head. “You hear me, Bobby? I know you’re here.
David stared into the deep eyes of his lost ancestor — a member of a different species, five thousand generations removed from himself — and cleared down the SoftScreen.
Chapter 27
Family history
When she was forcibly restored to open human society, Kate was relieved to find she’d been cleared of the criminal conviction brought against her. But she was stunned to find she was taken away from Mary, her friends, and immediately incarcerated — by Hiram Patterson.
The door to the suite opened, as it did twice a day.
There stood her guard; a woman, tall, willowy, dressed in a sober business-like trouser suit. She was even beautiful — but with a deadness of expression and in her dark eyes that Kate found chilling.
Her name, Kate had learned, was Mae Wilson.
Wilson pushed a small trolley through the door, hauled out yesterday’s, cast a fast, professional glance around the room, then shut the door. And that was that, over without a word.
Kate had been sitting on the room’s sole piece of furniture, a bed. Now she got up and crossed to the trolley, pulled back its white paper cover. There was cold meat, salad, bread, fruit, and drinks, a flask of coffee, bottled water, orange juice. On a lower deck there was laundry, fresh underwear, jumpsuits, sheets for Kate’s bed. The usual stuff.
Kate had long exhausted the possibilities of the twice-daily trolley. The paper plates and plastic cutlery were useless for anything but their primary purpose, and a nearly useless for that. Even the wheels of the trolley were of soft plastic. She went back to her bed and sat desultorily munching on a peach.
The rest of the room was just as unpromising. The walls were seamless, coated with a clear plastic she couldn’t dig her nails through. There wasn’t even a light fitting; the grey glow that flooded the room — twenty-four hours a day — came from fluorescents behind ceiling panels, sealed off behind plastic, and anyhow out of her reach. The bed was a plastic box seamlessly attached to the floor. She’d tried ripping the sheets, but the fabric was too tough. (And anyhow she wasn’t yet ready to visualize herself garrotting anybody, even Wilson.)
The plumbing, a john and a shower fixture, was likewise of no value to her greater purpose. The toilet was chemical, and it seemed to lead to a sealed tank, so she couldn’t even smuggle out a message in her bodily waste — even supposing she could figure out how.
…But despite all that, she had come close to escape, once. It was enjoyable to replay her near-triumph in her mind.
She’d concocted the scheme in her head, where even the WormCam couldn’t yet peer. She’d worked on her preparations for over a week. Every twelve hours she had left the food trolley in a slightly different place — just that fraction further inside the room. She choreographed each setup in her head: three paces from bed to door, cut the second pace by that fraction more…
And each time she’d come to the door to collect the trolley, Wilson had been forced to reach a little further.
Until at last there came a time when Wilson, to reach the trolley, had to take a single pace into the room. Just a pace, that was all — but Kate hoped it would be enough.
Two running steps took her to the doorway. A shoulder charge knocked Wilson forward into the room, and Kate made it as far as two paces out the door.
Her room turned out to be just a box, standing alone in a giant, hangar-sized chamber, the walls high and remote and dimly lit. There were other guards all around her, men and women, getting up from desks, drawing weapons. Kate looked around frantically, seeking a place to run -
The hand that had closed on hers was like a vice. Her little finger was twisted back, and her arm bent sideways. Kate fell to her knees, unable to keep from screaming, and she felt bones in her finger break in an explosion of grinding pain.
It was, of course, Wilson.
When she’d come to, she was on the floor of her prison, bound there with what felt like duct tape, while a medic treated her hand. Wilson was being held back by another of the guards, with a murderous look on that steely face.
When it was done, Kate had a finger that throbbed for weeks. And Wilson, when she next came to the door on her twice-daily routine, fixed Kate with a glare full of hate. I wounded her pride, Kate realized. Next time, she will kill me without hesitation.
But it was clear to Kate that, even after her attempted escape, all that hate wasn’t directed at
In the same way, she knew, she had never been Hiram’s real target. She was just bait, bait in a trap.
She was just in the way of these crazy people with their unguessable agendas.
It did no good to brood on such things. She lay back on her bed. Later, in the routine she’d used to structure her empty days, she’d take some exercise. For now, suspended in light that was never quenched, she tried to blank her mind.
A hand touched hers.
Amid the chaos and recrimination and anger that followed the retrieval of Mary and Kate, David asked to see Mary in the cool calm of the Wormworks.
He was immediately jotted by the familiarity of Mary’s blue eyes, so like the eyes he had followed deep into time, all the way back to Africa.
He shivered with a sense of the evanescence of human life. Was Mary really no more than the transient manifestation of genes which had been passed to her through thousands of generations, even from the long-gone Neanderthal days, genes which she in turn would pass on into an unknown future? But the WormCam had destroyed that dismal perspective. Mary’s life was transient, but no less meaningful for that; and now that the past was opened up, she would surely be remembered, cherished by those who would follow.
And her life, shaped in a fast-changing world, might yet take her to places he couldn’t even imagine.
She said, “You look worried!”
“That’s because I’m not sure who I’m speaking to.”
She snorted, and for an instant he saw the old, rebellious, discontented Mary.
“Forgive my ignorance,” David said. “I’m just trying to understand. We all are. This is something new to us.”
She nodded. “And therefore something to fear?… Yes,” she said eventually. “Yes, then.
“Shared?”
“Yes.” She studied him. “But I know what you imply by that.
