Part 22 (2/2)

'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 m.u.f.fins 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 cla.s.sified as h.o.m.o erectus hadalis. He got upset when I mentioned the move to rename them h.o.m.o sapiens hadalis. In other words, an evolutionary branch of us. He said the erectus taxon is wastebasket 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. 'Erectusor 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 beerectus.'

'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 carca.s.s 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 h.o.m.o 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.'

<script>