science. Like I said, there's a lot of fear out there.'
'Fear of what?'
'It runs against the current orthodoxy. You could get your funding cut. Lose your tenure. Not get hired or published. It's subtle. Everyone's playing it very safe for now.'
'What about you?' Thomas asked. 'You've handled this girl. Followed her dissection. What do you think?'
'That's not fair,' Vera scolded Thomas. 'She just got through saying how dangerous the times are.'
'It's okay,' Yamamoto said to Vera. She looked at Thomas. 'Erectus or sapiens? Let me put it this way. If this were a live subject, if this were a vivisection, I wouldn't do it.'
'So you're saying she's human?' asked Foley.
'No. I'm saying she's similar enough, perhaps, not to be erectus .'
'Call me a devil's advocate, certainly a layman,' Foley said. 'But she doesn't look similar to me.'
Yamamoto went over to her wall of drawers and pulled a lower tray out. It held a carcass even more grotesque than the ones they'd seen. The skin was wildly scarified. Body hair had grown rampant. The face was all but hooded with a cabbage-like dome of fleshy calcium deposits. Something close to a ram's horn had grown from the middle of the forehead.
She rested one gloved hand on the creature's rib cage. 'As I said, the idea was to find differences between our two species. We know there are differences. Those are obvious to the naked eye. Or seem to be. But so far all we've found are physiological similarities.'
'How can you say he's similar?' asked Foley.
'That's exactly the point. We were sent this specimen by our lab chief. Sort of a double-blind test to see what we'd come up with. Ten of us worked on the autopsy for a week. We compiled a list of almost forty distinctions from the average Homo sapiens sapiens. Everything from blood gases to bone structure to ophthalmic deformities to diet. We found traces of rare minerals in his stomach. He'd been eating clay and various fluorescents. His intestines glowed in the dark. Only then did the lab chief tell us.'
'Tell you what?'
'That this was a German soldier from one of the NATO task forces.'
Branch had known it was human from the start, but he let Yamamoto make her point.
'That can't be.' Vera began lifting and opening surgical cavities and pressing at the bony helmet. 'What about this?' she said. 'And this?'
'All residuals from his tour of duty. Side effects from the drugs he was told to take or from the geochemical environment in which he was serving.'
Foley was shocked. 'I've heard of some amount of modification. But never anything like this disfigurement.' Suddenly remembering Branch, he stopped himself.
'He does look demonic,' Branch commented.
'All in all, it was an instructive anatomy lesson,' Yamamoto said. 'Very humbling. I came away with one abiding thought. It doesn't matter if Dawn stems from erectus or sapiens. Go back far enough and sapiens is erectus .'
'Are there no differences, then?' Thomas asked.
'Many. Many. But now we've seen how many incongruities there are between one human and another. It's become an epistemological issue. How to know what we think we know.' She slid the drawer shut.
'You sound demoralized.'
'No. Distracted, perhaps. Derailed. Off track. But I'm convinced we'll start hitting real discrepancy in three to five months.'
'Oh?' said Thomas.
She went back to the table where Dawn's head and shoulders were slowly, very slowly feeding into the pendulum. 'That's when we'll begin entering the brain.'
Begin at the beginning... and go on till you come to the end: then stop.
– LEWIS CARROLL, Turtle Soup
11
LOSING THE LIGHT Between the Clipperton and Galapagos Fracture Zones
In groups of four, they were winched into the depths off the cliffs of Esperanza. Like great naval guns, a battery of five winches faced out along the chasm rim, motors roaring, their great spools of wire cable winding out. Freight and humanity alike rode the nets and platforms down. The chasm was over four thousand feet deep. There were no seat belts or safety instructions, only frayed come-along straps and oily chains and floor bolts to secure crates and machinery. The live cargo managed for itself.
The massive winch arms creaked and groaned. Ali got her pack nestled behind her, and hitched herself to the low railing with carabiners and a knot. Shoat came over with a clipboard in hand. 'Good morning,' she yelled into the roar and exhaust fumes. As he had predicted, a number of them had quit the game overnight. Five or six so far, but given Shoat's and Helios's manner, Ali had expected more to resign. Judging by Shoat's pleased grin, it seemed he had, too. She had never spoken with him. A sudden fear flashed through her other fears, that he might suddenly remove her from the expedition.
'You're the nun,' he said. You could never call the pinched face and hungry eyes disarming, but he was personable enough. He offered his hand, which was surprisingly thin, given the pumped biceps and thighs.
'I'm here as an epigrapher and linguist.'
'We need one of those? You kind of came out of nowhere,' he said.
'I didn't hear about the opportunity until late.' He studied her. 'Last chance.'
Ali looked around the deck and saw some of those who were staying. They looked ferocious, but forlorn, too. It had been a night of tears and rage and vows of a class-action suit against Helios. There had even been a fistfight. Part of the resentment, Ali realized, was that these people had made their minds up once, and
Shoat had forced them to do it again. 'I've made my peace,' Ali assured him.
'That's one way of putting it.' Shoat checked her name on the list.
The cables came taut overhead. The platform lifted. Shoat gave it a hearty shove and walked away as they went swinging into the abyss. One of Ali's companions shouted good-bye to the group of scientists staying behind.
The sound of the winch engines vanished high overhead. It was as if the lights of Esperanza had been flicked off. Suspended by a wire, they sank into blackness, slowly spinning. The overhang was stupendous. Sometimes the cliff wall was so far away their flashlights barely reached it.
'Live worm on a hook,' one of her neighbors said after the first hour. 'Now I know how it feels.'
That was it. Not another word was uttered by any of them all the way down. Ali had never known such emptiness.
Hours later, they neared the floor. Chemical runoff and human sewage had pooled in a foul marsh stretching along the base and extending beyond the light across the floor. The stench cut through Ali's dust mask. She gasped, then dumped the stench with disgust. Closer still, her skin prickled with the acidity.
The winch landed them with a bump on the edge of the beach of poisons. A hand – something meaty, but gnarled and missing two fingers – grabbed the railing in front of her. 'Bajarse, rapido,' the man barked. Rags hung from his head, perhaps to soak up his sweat or to shield him from their lights.
Ali unhooked herself and clambered off, and the character threw her pack off. Their platform started to rise. The last of her neighbors had to hop to the ground.
