regions around the world. The consensus is that these hadals all evolved from Homo erectus , our own ancestor. It's common knowledge that we shared a mother and father long ago. But then the same can be said about us and orangutans, or lemurs, or even frogs. At some point we all share genesis.
'One surprise is how alike the hadals are to us. Another is how unalike they are to one another. Have you ever heard of Donald Spurrier?'
'The primatologist?' said Thomas. 'He was here?'
'Now I'm really embarrassed,' Yamamoto said. 'I'd never heard of him, but people told me later he's world-famous. Anyway, he stopped up to see our little girl one afternoon and essentially conducted an impromptu seminar for us. He told us that
Homo erectus spun off more variations than any other hominid group. We're one of the spin-offs. Hadals may be another. Erectus apparently migrated from Africa to Asia hundreds of thousands of years ago, and the splinter groups possibly evolved into different forms around the world, before going into the interior. Again, I'm not an expert on such things.'
To Branch, Yamamoto's modesty was engaging, but a distraction. They were here today on business, to glean every possible clue that she and her colleagues had harvested from this hadal corpse. 'In great part,' Thomas said, 'you have just stated our purpose, to understand why we turn out the way we do. What more can you tell us?'
'There's a high concentration of radioisotopes in her tissue, but that's to be expected, coming from the subplanet, a stone cavity bombarded by mineral radiation from all directions. My own hunch is that radiation may help explain the mutations in their population. But please don't quote me on that. Who really knows why any of us turn out the way we do?'
Yamamoto passed a hand over the block of blue gel, as if stroking the monstrous face. 'To our eye, Dawn looks so primitive. Some of our visitors have remarked on what a throwback she is. They think she's so much closer to erectus and the Australopithecenes than we are. In fact, she is every bit as evolved as we are, just in a different direction.'
That had been one surprise for Branch. You expected stereotypes and racism and prejudices from the ordinary masses. But it was turning out that the sciences were just as rife with it. Indeed, intellectual biases – academic arrogance – helped explain why hell had gone undiscovered for so long.
'Dawn's dental formula is identical to yours and mine – and to hominid fossils three million years old: two incisors, one canine, two premolars, three molars.' Yamamoto turned to another table. 'The lower limbs are similar to ours, though hadal joints have more sponge in the bone, which suggests Dawn might have been even more efficient at walking than Homo sapiens sapiens. And she did a lot of that, walking. It's tough to see through the gel, but if you look hard, she put a lot of miles on those feet. The calluses are thicker than my thumbnail. Her arches have fallen. Somebody measured her: size eleven, quadruple wide.'
She moved to the next table, the thorax and upper arms. 'So far, few surprises here, either. The cardiovascular system is robust, if not perfectly healthy. The heart's enlarged, meaning she probably came up rapidly from minus four or five miles. Her lungs show chemical scarring, probably from breathing gases vented from the deeper earth. That's an old animal bite there.'
Yamamoto turned to the final table. It held the abdomen and lower arms. One hand was clenched, the other graceful. 'Again, it's hard to get a clear view. But the finger bones have a significant crook, midway between ape and human digits. That helps explain the stories we hear about hadals scaling walls and pulling themselves through underground nooks and crannies.'
Yamamoto gestured at the abdominal chunk. The blade had begun at the top and was shaving back and forth toward the pelvic area. The pubis had scant black hair, the start of womanhood.
'We did nail down part of her short, savage history. Before mounting her in gel and starting the cuts, we reviewed the MRI and CT images. Something about the pelvic saddle didn't look right, and I got the head of our Ob/Gyn department up for a look. He recognized the trauma right away. Rape. Gang rape.'
'What's this you're saying?' Foley asked.
'Twelve years old,' said Vera. 'Can you imagine? That explains why she came up, though.'
'How do you mean?' asked Yamamoto.
'The poor thing must have fled from the creatures that did this to her.'
'I didn't mean to suggest it was hadals who did this to her. We typed the sperm. It was all human. The injuries were very recent. We contacted the sheriff's department in Bartlesville, and they suggested we talk to the male attendants at the nursing home. The attendants denied it. We could take samples from them, but it wouldn't change anything. This kind of thing's not a crime. One group or another helped themselves to her. They had her locked in a refrigerated meat locker for several days.'
Again, Branch had seen worse.
'What a remarkable conceit civilization is,' said Thomas. His face looked neither angry nor sad, but seasoned. 'This child's suffering is ended. Yet, even as we speak, similar evil plays out in a hundred different places, ours upon them, theirs upon us. Until we can bring some sense of order to bear, the evil will continue to have a hiding place.'
He was speaking to the child's body, it seemed, perhaps reminding himself.
'What else?' Yamamoto asked herself aloud. She looked around at the body parts. They were at the abdominal quadrant. 'Her stool,' Yamamoto started again, 'was hard and dark and rank-smelling. A typical carnivore's stool.'
'What was her diet then?'
'In the last month before death?' said Yamamoto.
'I would have thought oat-bran muffins and fruit juices and whatever else one might scavenge in a geriatric kitchen. Foods with fiber and roughage, easy to digest,' suggested Vera.
'Not this gal. She was a meat-eater, no two ways about it. The police report was clear. The stool sample only confirmed it. Exclusively meat.'
'But where –'
'Mostly from the feet and calves,' said Yamamoto. 'That's how she went undetected for so long. The staff thought it was rats or a feral cat, and just applied ointments and bandages. Then Dawn would come back the next night and feed some more.'
Vera was silent. Yamamoto's little 'gal' had not exactly lent herself to cuddling.
'Not pretty, I know,' Yamamoto continued. 'But then she didn't have a pretty life.' The blade hissed, the block moved imperceptibly.'
'Don't get me wrong. I'm not justifying predation. I'm just not condemning it. Some people call it cannibalism. But if we're going to insist they're not sapiens, then technically it's no different from what mountain lions do to us. But these incidents do help explain why people are so scared. Which makes good, undamaged specimens that much harder to obtain. And deadlines impossible to meet. We're way behind.'
'Way behind whom?' asked Vera.
'Ourselves,' said Yamamoto. 'We've been handed deadlines. And we haven't made one yet.'
'Who's setting your deadlines?'
'That's the grand mystery. At first we thought it was the military. We kept getting raw computer models for developing new weapons. We were supposed to fill in the blanks – you know, tissue density, positions of organs. Generally provide distinctions between our species and theirs. Then we started getting memos from corporations. But the corporations keep changing. Now we're not even sure about them. For our purposes, it really doesn't matter. The light bill's getting paid.'
'I have a question,' Thomas said. 'You sound a little uncertain about whether Dawn and her kind are really a separate species. What did Spurrier have to say?'
'He was adamant that hadals are a different species, some kind of primate. Taxonomy's a sensitive subject. Right now Dawn is classified as Homo erectus hadalis
. He got upset when I mentioned the move to rename them Homo sapiens hadalis. In other words, an evolutionary branch of us. He said the erectus taxon is wastebasket
