Year's Best SF 10, page 13
“Sure.” I shrug, and blow bittersweet smoke rings, remembering the taste of ser mouth.
“A shame, though,” Dan says. “Thought you two made an interesting couple.”
“Thanks. Could’ve been worse. We can still work together at least.”
Danny isn’t fooled. Neither are all those unhappy neurons that won’t shut up, especially there in my anterior cingulate gyrus, down deep in my insula and caudate nucleus. All now wailing like hungry babes. Feeling like something essential has been hacked out at the most sensitive roots. Connections lost, seemingly irreparable, leaving only painful ghosts.
Scout’s Honor
TERRY BISSON
Terry Bisson [www.terrybisson.com] lives in Oakland, California. He is an automobile mechanic, copywriter, and SF writer of distinction. His website lists a bushel of accomplishments. He is the author of seven genre fantasy or SF novels: Wyrldmaker (1981); Talking Man (1987), a World Fantasy Award nominee; Fire on the Mountain (1988); Voyage to the Red Planet (1990); Pirates of the Universe (1996); The Pickup Artist (2001); and most recently, Dear Abby(2003). His short fiction is collected in Bears Discover Fire(1993), In the Upper Room (2000), and Greetings (2005).
“Scout’s Honor” was published electronically by SciFi.com; this is its first appearance in print. A researcher who studies Neanderthals happens upon a posting on an internet bulletin board from an anthropologist who seems to have traveled back in time to study living Neanderthals. Bisson provides a vivid and very unusual vision of what Neanderthals were like and how they died off. Bisson says, in an SF Weekly interview: The anthropologist in my story, by the way, was based on Paul Park’s brilliant autistic sister, Jesse. It occurred to me that she might understand our cousins better than any of us.” Given that, it is interesting to compare this character to the central character of Brenda Cooper’s story.
On the morning of July 12, 20__, I got the following message on my lab computer, the only one I have:
Monday
Made it. Just as planned. It’s real. Here I am in the south of France, or what people think of now (now?) as the south of France. It seems to the north of everywhere. If the cleft is at 4200 feet, it means the ice is low. I can see the tongue of a glacier only about 500 feet above me. No bones here yet, of course. It’s a clear shot down a narrow valley to the NT site, about 1?2 mile away. I can see smoke; I didn’t expect that. Wouldn’t they be more cautious? Maybe they aren’t threatened by HS yet and I’m too early. Hope not. Even though it’s not part of the protocol, I would love to learn more about our first encounter (and last?) with another human (hominid?) species. I do like to see the smoke, though. I never thought I would feel loneliness but here I do. Time is space and space is distance (Einstein). Heading down for the NT site. More later.
The subject line was all noise and so was the header. I was still puzzling what it was all about, for excepting the Foundation’s newsgroup, I get no messages at all, when another came through the very next morning. The dates are mine.
Tuesday
It’s them all right. I am watching about 20 NTs, gathered in the site around a big smoky fire. Even through binoculars, from 50 yards away, they look like big moving shadows. It’s hard to count them. They cluster together then break apart in groups of 2 or 3, but never alone. I can’t tell the males from the females, but there are 4 or 5 children, who also stay together in a clump. Wish I could see faces, but it’s dim here. Perpetual overcast. I have been watching almost four hours by the clock on my com, and none have left the site. Separating one out may prove a problem. But I have almost 5 days (-122) to worry about that. Tomorrow I’ll observe from a different position where I can get a little closer and the light may be better; above, not closer. I know the protocols. I helped write them. But somehow I want to get closer.
I began to suspect a prank, to which I enjoy a certain deliberate and long-standing immunity. But I do have a friend—Ron—and naturally I suspected him (who else?) after the next and longer text came through, on the very day we were to meet.
Wednesday
Totally unexpected change in plans. I am sitting here in the cleft with “my own” NT. He’s the perfect candidate for the snatch, if I can keep him here for 4 days (-98). They are nothing like we thought. The reconstructions are far too anthropomorphic. This is NOT a human, though certainly a hominid. What we thought was a broad nose is more of a snout. He’s white as a ghost, which I guess is appropriate. Or am I the ghost? He is sitting across the fire staring at me, or through me. He seems oddly unconscious much of the time, thoughtless, like a cat. What happened was this: I was heading down to observe the site this morning when I dislodged a boulder that fell on my left leg. I thought for sure it was broken (it isn’t), but I was trapped. The rock had my leg wedged from the knee downward, out of sight in a narrow crevice. I couldn’t help thinking of that turn-of-the-century Utah dude who sawed off his own arm with a Swiss army knife. I was wondering when I would be ready to do that, for I was in a worse spot than him: unless I made it back to the cleft in less than 100 hours, I was trapped here, and by more than a stone. By Time itself. The numbness scared me worse than pain. It was starting to snow and I was worried about freezing. I must have fallen asleep, for the next thing I remember, “my” NT was squatting there looking at me—or through me. Quiet as a cat. Oddly, I was as little surprised as he was. It was like a dream. I pointed at my leg, and he rolled the stone away. It was as simple as that. Either he was immensely strong or had a better angle, or both. I was free, and my leg was now throbbing painfully and bleeding but not broken. I could even stand on it. I hobble.
Ron is a sci-fi writer who teaches a course at the New School. We meet every Wednesday and Friday, right before his class at 6. This is not by his plan or mine. It’s a promise he made to my mother, I happen to know, right before she died, but that’s OK with me. No friends at all would be too few, and more than one, too many.
“What is this?” he asked, when he finished reading the printout.
You oughta know, I said, raising my eyebrows in what I hoped was a suggestive manner. In accord with my own promise to my mother, I practice these displays in front of the mirror, and for once it seems to have paid off.
“You think I wrote this?”
I nodded, knowingly I hoped, and listed my reasons: who else knew that I was studying Neanderthal bones? Who but he and I had savored the story of the Utah dude so long ago? Who else wrote sci-fi?
“Science fiction,” he said grumpily (having made that correction before). While we waited for his burger and my buttered roll, he listed his objections. “Maybe it’s a mistake, not intended for you. Lots of people knew about the Utah dude; it was a national story. And I am a little insulted that you think that I wrote this.”
Huh?
“It’s crude,” Ron said. “He, or maybe she, uses ‘oddly’ twice in one paragraph; that would never get by me. And the timeline is all wrong. The escape comes before the danger, which deflates the suspense.”
You didn’t send this, then?
“No way. Scout’s Honor.”
And that was that. We talked, or rather he talked, mostly of his girlfriend Melani and her new job, while the people walked by on Sixth Avenue, only inches away. They were hot, and we were cold. It was like two separate worlds, separated by the window glass.
Thursday morning I went in eagerly, anxious to get back to my bones. I scanned the Foundation’s newsgroup first (rumors about a top secret new project) before opening the latest message.
Thursday
Sorry about that. I stopped transmitting yesterday because “my” NT woke up, and I didn’t want to alarm him. Since my last truncated message, we’ve been snowed in. He watched me build a fire with a sort of quiet amazement. God knows what he would think of this thing I’m talking into. Or of the talk itself. He only makes 3 or 4 sounds. I wait until he’s asleep to use the com. After the NT freed me, he followed me up the hill. It was clear that he didn’t intend to harm me, although it would have been pretty easy. He is about 6 feet tall if he stood straight up, which he never does. Maybe 250 lbs. It’s hard to judge his weight since he’s pretty hairy, except for his face and hands. I was in a big hurry to dress my leg, which was bleeding (OK after all). We found the cleft very different from the way I had left it. Something had gotten into my food. A bear? The follow box was smashed and half the KRs were gone. Luckily the space blanket had been left behind. I spread it out, and he laid his stuff beside it: a crude hand axe, a heavy, stiff and incredibly smelly skin robe, and a little sack made of gut, with five stones in it: creek stones, white. He showed them to me as if they were something I should understand. And I do: but of that later. He’s starting to stir.
On Fridays I skip lunch so I will have an appetite in the restaurant. I wasn’t surprised to find yet another message, and I printed both Thurs. and Fri. to show to Ron. At the least, it would give him something to talk about. I think (know) my silences are awkward for him.
Friday
It’s snowing. The stones are his way of counting. I watched him throw one away this morning. There are 3 left: like me, he’s on some kind of schedule. We’ve been eating grubs. Seems the NTs hide rotten meat under logs and stones and return for the grubs. It’s a kind of farming. They’re not so bad. I try to think of them as little vegetables. Grub “talks” a lot with his hands. I try to reply in kind. When we are not talking, when I do not get his attention, he is as dead, but when I touch his hands or slap his face, he comes alive. It’s as if he’s half asleep the rest of the time. And really asleep the other half; the NT sleep a lot. His hands are very human, and bone white like his face. The rest of him is brown, under thick blond fur. I call him Grub. He doesn’t call me anything. He doesn’t seem to wonder who I am or where I came from. The snatch point is still 2 days away (-46), which means that I get him to myself until then. An unexpected bonus. Meanwhile, the weather, which was already fierce, is getting fiercer, and I worry about the com batteries, with no sun to charge them. More later.
Ron and I always meet at the same place, which is the booth by the window in the Burger Beret on Sixth Ave. at Tenth St. Ron shook his head as he read the messages. That can mean lots of different things.
He said, “You astonish me.”
Huh?
“Don’t huh me. You wrote it. It’s very clever, considering.”
I couldn’t say huh again, so I was just very still.
“The vegetarian business is what tipped me off. And no one else knows that much about Neanderthals. Their counting, the limited speech. It’s what you told me.”
That was common theory, I said. There was nothing new in it. Besides, I don’t make stories. I write reports.
Even I could see that he was disappointed. “Scout’s Honor?”
Scout’s honor, I said. Ron and I went to Philmont Scout Ranch together. That was years ago, before he had entered the world and I had decided to keep it at arm’s length. But the vows still hold.
“Well, OK. Then it must be one of your colleagues playing a joke. I’m not the only one who knows you do research. Just the only one you deign to talk to.”
Then he told me that he and Melani were getting married. The conversation sort of speeded up and slowed down at the same time, and when I looked up, he was gone. I felt a moment’s panic, but after I paid the bill and went up to my apartment, it gradually dissipated, like a gas in an open space. For me a closed space is like an open space.
The newsgroup was silent for the weekend, but the scrambled-header messages kept coming through, one a day, like the vitamins I promised my mother I would take.
Saturday
The KRs are gone, but Grub drags me with him to look under logs for grubs. He won’t go alone. Third day snowed in. One more to go. I have to conserve our wood, so we stay huddled together against the back wall of the cleft, wrapped in my space blanket and Grub’s smelly robe. We sit and watch the snow and listen to the booming of the icefall—and we talk. Sort of. He gestures with his hands and takes mine in his. He plucks at the hair on my forearms and pulls at my fingers and sometimes even slaps my face. I’m sure he doesn’t understand that I am from the far future; how could he even have a concept of that? But I can understand that he is in exile. There was a dispute, over what, who knows, and he was sent away. The stones are his sentence, that I know: Grub feels that about them. Every morning he gets rid of one, tossing it out the door of the cleft into the snow. His sense of number is pretty crude. 5 is many, and 2—the number left this morning—is few. I assume that when they are gone, he gets to go “home,” but he’s just as desolate with 2 as he was with 5. Perhaps he can’t think ahead, only back. Even though I’m cold as hell, I wish the snatch point wasn’t so near. I’m learning his language. Things don’t have names, but the feelings about them do.
Saturday and Sunday I spend at the lab, alone. What else would I do? When else could I be alone with my bones? I am the only one who has access to the Arleville Find, which is two skeletons, an NT and an HS found side by side, which proves there was actual contact. The grubs confirmed my study of the NT teeth. Of course, this was just a story, according to Ron. Or was it? Sunday I found this:
Sunday
Change in plans: I want to alter the snatch point, put it back one cycle. I know this is against the protocols, but I have my reasons. Grub is desperate to get rid of the stones and return to the site and his band. These creatures are much more social than we. It’s as if they hardly exist, alone. I’m getting better at communicating. There is much handwork involved, gesture and touch, and I understand more and more. Not by thinking but by feel. It’s like looking at something out of the corner of my eye; if I look directly, it’s gone. But if I don’t, there it is. It’s almost like a dream, and maybe it is, since I am in and out of sleep a lot. My leg is healing OK. Grub is down to one stone, and he’s happy, almost. I am feeling the reverse: the horror he would feel at being separated from his band forever. Are we going to create an Ishi? What desolation. I am convinced we will wind up with a severely damaged NT. So we start our count at 144 again. Some peril here, since the com is getting low. But I have a plan—
Monday is my least favorite day, when I have to share the lab (but not the bones) with others. Not that they don’t leave me alone. I scrolled down past the newsgroup, looking for the daily message and found it like an old acquaintance:
Monday
Made it. I am speaking this amid a circle of hominids, not humans, squatting (rather than sitting: they either stand, lie, or squat but never sit) around a big smoky fire. I quit worrying about what they would think of the com; they don’t seem curious. Since I arrived with Grub, they have accepted me without question or interest. Maybe it’s because I have picked up Grub’s smell. They lay or squat silently a lot of the time, and then when one awakens, they all awaken, or most, anyway. There are 22 altogether, including Grub: 8 adult males, 7 females, and 5 children, 2 of them still nursing; plus 2 “Old Ones” of indeterminate sex. The Old Ones are not very mobile. The NTs grab hands and “talk” with a few sounds and a lot of pushing and pulling, plus gestures. Their facial expressions are as simple and crude as their speech. They look either bored or excited, with nothing in between. Lots of grubs and rotten meat get eaten. They put rotten meat under logs and rocks, and then come back for the grubs and maggots. It’s a kind of farming, I guess, but it has all but spoiled my appetite. Perhaps any kind of farming does, seen up close.
All of this was interesting, but none of it was new. Any of it could have been written by my colleagues at the lab, but I knew it wasn’t. They’re in another world, like the people on Sixth Avenue on the other side of the glass. Most of them didn’t even know my name.
Tuesday
Something is happening tomorrow. A hunt? I sense fear and danger, and lots of work and lots of food. All these imprecise communications I got from the group as a whole. This afternoon they burned a bush of dry leaves and inhaled the smoke, passing it around. It’s some kind of herb that seems to help in NT communication. Certainly it helps me. Between the “burning bush” and the grunts and pulling of hands, I got a picture (not visual but emotional) of a large beast dying. It’s hard to describe. I’m learning not to try and pin things down. It’s as if I were open to the feelings of the event itself instead of the participants. Death, defeat, and victory; terror and hope. A braided feeling, like the smoke. All this was accompanied, I might even say amplified, by one of the Old Ones (more mobile than I thought!) spinning around by the fire, brandishing a burning stick. Later I amused the little ones (more easily amused than their elders) by cooking some grubs on a stick. Like cooking marshmallows. They wouldn’t eat them though, except for one small boy I call “Oliver” who kept smacking his lips and grinning at me as if it were me he wanted to eat. Even the little NTs have a fierce look that belies their gentle nature. The men (Grub, too) have been sharpening sticks and hardening the points in the fire. Now they are asleep in a big pile between the fire and the wall, and I am staying apart, which doesn’t bother them. I can take the smell of Grub, but not of the whole pile; that is, band.
Wednesday was a long day. I printed out the last four (including Wednesday) to show Ron. For some reason, I was eager for a little “conversation.” Maybe mother was right, and I need to maintain at least one friend. Mother was a doctor, after all.
Wednesday
This morning we were awakened by the children pulling at the space blanket. Grub had joined me during the night. Is it me or the space blanket he likes? No matter; I am glad of his company and used to his smell. He was part of the hunt and dragged me along. He understood that I wanted to go. The others ignore me, except for the children. The party consisted of 7 men and 2 women. No leader that I could tell. They carried sharpened sticks and hand axes, but no food or water. I don’t think they know how to carry water. We left the children behind with the Old Ones and the nursing mothers and spent most of the morning climbing up a long slope of scree and over a ridge into a narrow valley where a glacial stream was surrounded by tall grass. There I saw my first mammoth, already dead. It lay beside a pile of brush and leaves, and I “got” that they had baited it into this narrow defile. But something else had killed it. It lay on its side, and for the first time I saw what I thought might be sign of HS, for the beast had already been butchered, very neatly. Even the skull had been split for the brain. Only the skin and entrails were left, with a few shreds of stringy meat. The NTs approached fearfully, sniffing the air and holding hands (mine included). I could feel their alarm. Was it the remnants of the smoke or my own imagination that gave me a terrified sense of the “dark ones” that had killed this beast? Then it was gone before I could be sure. The NTs went to work with their sticks, driving away 3 hyena-like dogs that were circling the carcass. Their fear was soon forgotten with this victory, and they started carving on the carcass, eating as they went. The kill was new, but pretty smelly. The NTs piled entrails and meat in a huge skin, which we had brought with us. By late afternoon we had a skin full, which we carried and dragged over the ridge and down the long scree slope. We were within a half mile of the site when the sun set, but the NTs hate and fear the dark. So here we are holed up under a rock ledge, in a pile. A long, cold, and smelly night ahead. No fire, of course. They whimper in their sleep. They don’t like being away from their fire. Me neither. I am beginning to worry about the com, which is showing a low power (LP) signal every time I log on. Not as much sunlight here as anticipated. None at all, in fact.
