Uncontacted, page 6
It was February 29, 1972.
He eyed his father. “I have the same birthday as the tribe, is what you’re saying.”
His father nodded. “And as me.”
Inside Antonio felt things click into place. His father did have the same birthday as he did. He remembered the day when, as a teenager, his father had come down from the attic, dusty and sweaty, waving a creased piece of paper in each hand as he barged into Antonio’s room. “I found it!”
“Found what?”
“My real birth certificate. It was in a box of things from your grandmother’s house. Antonio’s grandma had passed away a few months before. It had been the first funeral Antonio had ever been to.
“I thought you already had that.”
“I thought I did, too. But look!” He smoothed out the yellowed old paper on young Antonio’s homework desk, and next to it placed a newer-looking white one. Both were his birth certificate, but he pointed to the year on the yellow one.
“See that date there?”
Antonio nodded. “February 29, 1940…Hey! We just had your birthday last week, and it was March 1st!”
“That’s right, kiddo. All my life I have. I’m just finding this out right now. I think it must be because the hospital made my parents pick a date on either side of it, to avoid clerical and administrative problems.“
Antonio took a deep breath before continuing. It was all getting too much to bear, like he could feel a certain truth closing in on him but wasn’t sure what it was yet. “You never answered my earlier question: How did you hear about what’s happening here in the first place?”
“I became a part of it, that’s how.” He saw the shocked look forming on his son’s face and quickly added, “Not the deaths. They’re only a side-effect of what these people have been entrusted with.”
Antonio held out the note. “Speaking of deaths what’s this about? Your tribe—adopted family, I guess you could say—is going to kill me?”
His father nodded, voice lowering to barely above a whisper. “I’m risking my own life—or what’s left of it—“ He turned away to cough out more bloody phlegm. “…to warn you. Listen to me, son. There is an object being guarded deep in the jungle by this tribe.”
Antonio shrugged. “What object?”
“I’d like to show you. It’s impossible to explain. Not only that, son, but I am very ill. It seems that the decades of primal living have caught up to me, and I am sure that I do not have long. Probably only weeks at best. That’s why they give me the run of the best hut,” he finished, waving an arm around at the simple structure as though it were the Ritz Carlton.
“Okay, where is it?” Antonio looked outside the hut door as though it might be right there.
“it’s not far from here, a short hike through the jungle. I can point you the way on the right path, but from there you’ll be on your own. I’m not fit enough to make the trek.”
“Looks like I’m used to you leaving me on my own, anyway, right?”
His father maintained eye contact and slowly shook his head. “The world is in danger, son. If I hadn’t done what I’d done…” He trailed off and shook his head. “Humanity would be done for. So I waited for someone to come along all these years. I figured the odds were good it would be you.”
“Fine, show me the way to go see this thing, whatever it is.”
“First, I must warn you: the tribe already suspects you are a threat, due to the timing of your appearance. If they find out that you know about the object, they will kill you immediately and without any sort of due process. Crush your head in between the ends of two logs swung through the air on ropes. I’ve seen it happen to others. I wouldn’t be able to stop it.” The old man blanched for a moment and swallowed back rising bile.
“Why did you tell me about it then, you idiot?” Antonio felt awful calling his father that, especially after being so long apart, but his anger had the better of him now, being tricked like this, and now subjecting him to some kind of tribal danger.
“Because the world needs to know, Antonio. Everyone will die if we don’t know—I mean everyone, not just the tribe.”
“You said that before. It makes no sense to me.”
“Just come with me—quickly!” He looked out of the doorway and then jogged down the six steps to the dirt below. Antonio followed, and his father led him behind the long hut until they were shielded from the village. He broke a stick off of a branch and pointed with it into the jungle, along a large game trail the hunters used daily.
”Listen, son. This is your path. You follow along this path until it forks, and I will draw you the rest.” He used the same stick to scratch out lines and shapes in the dirt, with a surprisingly fast and accurate hand for so frail a person. To Antonio it looked like he had just finished and was looking back up from his work when his father gripped his throat and slumped into the dirt.
“Dad, what’s the matter—Dad?”
Antonio knelt and pulled his fathers hand away from his neck, straightening him out on the ground, preparing to give him CPR. He felt for a pulse, and felt the last one before it stopped forever. Antonio performed CPR on his father anyway, but he knew it was no use. It was almost as if his father had been expecting this, had been waiting for him to get here so that he could die. He had finally found his father and now he had left him again.
Antonio looked down at the drawing his father had left him and wondered if everything he said could have been the result of delirium. He looked into the dense jungle along the path his Dad had pointed out for him, and then back to the drawing, studying it for a few moments until he was sure he understood it. He wished he could take a picture of it, but he’d foolishly given his camera to the tribe.
He stood and passed his boot across the map before walking around the end of the same hut he’d been inside, to the village circle. He felt exposed, as if all eyes must be on him, but in actuality the tribe was going about their business, some of them still playing with the items he’d given them. He picked up a spear from a rack and pointed to a boar in a crude cage. The natives huddled nearby grinned at him.
Antonio pointed to himself, then to the boar, then to the forest, holding up the spear while he did so. I go hunt pigs now, he hoped he was conveying. The tribal men grew wide smiles and laughed to each other, until a couple of them waved their arms in jerky motions toward the jungle. Yes, go, more boar!
Antonio nodded to them and moved with his spear and the small pack he wore to the edge of the rain forest.
Chapter 9
Andaman Islands, Indian Ocean
Stel Foster grinned as he walked along the rain forest trail, leaving the beach behind. Antonio Medina, eh? Calling out of the blue with something that sounds interesting. He must really need help if he swallowed his pride enough to call me. He’d promised Antonio on the call that he would get over to the Amazon. He had another grant to work on there if Antonio’s promising lead turned out to be a wild goose chase, so there wasn’t much to lose, really. But first he had an obligation to attend to for the Indian government, right here on this very isle.
“Watch it, Alfred!” he called out to his colleague up ahead. “Try to cut that branch off completely if you can, not sure the porters are going to be able to make it under there.”
The expedition was small by Dr. Foster’s standards. Only himself, his long-time, trusted colleague, Dr. Alfred Algers, also from Oxford, and a pair of Indian porters to carry much of their gear. In addition, there was the boat crew that would remain at anchor off the beach until Stel’s party returned.
“Right, mate, got it,” Algers called back, and then Stel heard the hacking of a metal blade on wood. The obstacle was cleared out of the way and then the small procession resumed its trek deeper into the interior of this remote, forbidding island. When they reached the top of a grassy rise that afforded a view into a deep, forested valley below, Stel shrugged off his pack and called for a rest break. But before they could relax, he raised a hand in the air, a signal for quiet. Then he crouched and signaled for the others to do the same.
As they watched, a tribal man with black hair and his body painted in solid red, raised a spear above his head. He arched his back as he brought it forward in a thrusting motion. Even from this height, Stel could hear the squeal of the hunter’s intended target, followed by the rustle of bushes. Then a small deer ran from the clump of foliage into a small clearing, where it began spinning and kicking wildly, a spear protruding from its right flank. The human was on his prey in an instant. Stel saw a piece of rock glint dully in the tropical sunlight before it came down with a thud on the animal’s head. They continued to observe in silence, Algers taking video, while the hunter cleaned and dressed his kill. That done, he then slung his prize over his shoulder and walked away from Stel’s party, deeper into the island forest.
Stel and his team visually tracked the warrior until he had disappeared from sight into the forest proper. Stel waved his arm and they descended the hill. Down on flat ground, they carefully picked their way toward where the tribal hunter had disappeared. They passed over the blood-matted grass where the animal kill was made and squeezed through the low brambles, taking cover in their head-high chaos while they watched and listened for the tribal man.
The humidity stifled all, except for the hum of insects that was a constant, droning presence. Stepping over a log, Stel watched a snake—he thought it might be a black mamba—wind itself out from under the wood before it slithered off into a pile of palm fronds. They moved on, all careful now to watch for signs of animal predators as well as tribal presence. This tribe was known to be hostile, and so safety and watchfulness would be key.
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Safety meant proceeding slowly, and so it was well into the afternoon by the time they were within earshot of the tribal settlement. Not a large one by area or people, Stel figured it was probably one of several neighboring “pods” or contained villages. He was sure there would be a central village somewhere, but for now this outpost would have to do.
It quickly became apparent that the one huge opportunity it did afford was language observance. With silence maintained on the expedition team in order to remain undetected, it was easy to hear individual conversations. Stel leaned in as he silently activated a long-range audio recorder, to capture linguistic samples of the tribe. Once he was sure it was recording and that the levels were good, Stel concentrated on the language itself. At first he thought the sound quality was garbled, because he couldn’t make out what they were saying. Which was pretty much impossible, since Dr. Stel Foster knew almost every tribal language on Earth.
The realization struck him like a brick: he really couldn’t understand what they were saying. And the reason he couldn’t was because their language was previously undocumented, and that could mean only one thing: that this was an uncontacted tribe.
Stel shook his head slowly as he observed the primitive humans, watching them with the naked eye from afar but listening to their conversations through the sensitive microphone. Unbelievable. He was aware that on this planet there were maybe a handful of such tribes still hanging on, and he also knew, from previous studies of tribes in this general region where flare-ups occur between the tribe and people from the modern world, that they were a more primitive group than usual. But this….he cocked his head to one side and shushed one of the porters as they made noise scuffling their feet to shift positions. This seemed to be an entirely new tribe, smack dab in the middle of the region that he’d never dealt with before. What a godsend.
And then a feeling that was hard for him to describe took hold as he recalled his rival’s out-of-the-blue phone call, asking him to come to the Amazon. The second uncontacted tribe in the same day? It was unthinkable, so beyond mere coincidence that he wanted to think about it extensively, for he knew there must be a—
“Stel. Stel!”
Alfred’s voice broke him from his thoughts. “Watch, over there.” He pointed off to his left and saw four tribal men focusing their attention on a mound of chiseled stones, working or doing something to it. Stel had been so focused on listening to the tribe that he’d forgotten to watch them, to look around.
“What are they doing?”
Alfred fumbled in the pockets of his photography vest until he removed a pair of compact binoculars. He focused them on the activity. “They appear to be removing a stone cap of some sort…wait, hold on…another one of them is bringing a stone tablet, it looks like…they’re dropping it into the pit….” He looked up from the binoculars. “What do you think that’s all about?” he asked Stel.
“It’s got to be either some kind of religious observance or…” He reached out a hand to Alfred. “Let me see the glasses.” Alfred handed them over and Stel focused in on the scene. “They seem to be rearranging whatever’s in there. More stone tablets. They’re now replacing the stone cap.” He handed the binoculars back to Alfred, who added, “Religious observance, or what?”
“Or a record keeping system.”
Alfred appeared to consider this carefully for a moment. “What kind of primitive—not just primitive, mind you, but so primitive that they’re virtually uncontacted—tribe keeps written records, about anything?”
“This one, Alfred. This one does, I’d say. But let’s go pay them a visit and find out for sure, shall we?”
Chapter 10
Brazilian Amazon
The jungle grew very thick only a few meters away from the village, so much so that Antonio had to stop often to snap branches out of the way or clear vines from his path. He wished he had his machete, but he hadn’t brought it because it was too much for the ultralight, and even if he had it, it would have been taken from him by the tribe. He hadn’t seen any metal objects in their possession at all so far, and had no doubt that they’d want the blade for that reason alone.
After clearing out an area that gave him enough room to stand unmolested by plants, Antonio came upon a fork in the path. He mentally pictured the crude map his father had drawn in the dirt. Just before he died. He zoomed in on it with his mind’s eye, a peanut gallery of exotic birdcalls his only soundtrack while he concentrated. After a short time he could picture it clearly, as if he was standing in the dirt right beside it.
He moved off accordingly, to his left, toward the green cliff. If anything the vegetation grew even thicker the closer he got to the wall, but he kept moving. After a while he heard the sound of rushing water. Falling water, he realized, picturing the waterfall he’d seen on his aerial pass on the way in here. He moved toward the sound. The ground grew damper the closer he got, spray from the waterfall coating everything, including Antonio himself.
He heard a rustling off to his right, and swiveled his head in time to see some sort of small mammal dart off into the underbrush. It occurred to him that he was supposed to be on a hunting trip, and that if he could actually come back with some game it would bolster his story greatly. So far he had used the spear he had made a show of taking only as a walking stick. He was under no illusion that catching a wild animal in that manner would be easy, though. He’d never tried it himself, although he’d seen it done more than once by tribespeople. Still, maybe he would get lucky, he thought, and so he ducked under some branches and moved away in the direction in which the animal had gone.
After a few steps he glanced left, right, and then right again, but saw nothing. Only a few seconds had passed since he’d seen the beast, and he didn’t see how it could have moved beyond his sight yet. He looked straight ahead and caught the slightest movement—the leaves on the end of a branch bouncing ever so slightly. He took three more steps in that direction and then froze.
The ground opened up in what could be called either a large burrow or a small tunnel. It descended gradually beneath the earth at a walkable angle, although Antonio would have to stoop to pass through. Clearly that’s where the animal had gone.
Antonio walked to the edge of the opening and peered inside. He pictured his father’s map again, and it dawned on him that this feature could be that one strange line he had questioned earlier, something that hadn’t seemed right but when viewed in person, as an underground feature it made perfect sense.
Was this what his father was bringing him to? He wasn’t about to go down there after an animal, but for whatever it was his Dad had wanted him to see…He crouched lower and gazed into the tunnel, wondering how far it went. Picturing the map yet again, if his assumption was correct about that part of it representing subterranean avenues, then it should be extensive and not merely a cul-de-sac style animal burrow.
He wished he had a flashlight, but he’d given the one small one he’d taken along to the tribe, who were no doubt still amazing themselves with it at this very moment. Deciding he would explore the tunnel to the extent that daylight penetrated, the scientist lowered his head and duck-walked into the subterranean opening.
Chapter 11
Antonio cursed softly to himself as he lost his footing in the loose mud of the confined space. Even though his eyesight was adjusting to the dim light, it was still very dark in here and he questioned how much farther he would be able to go without artificial light or at least a torch, of which he had neither.
He descended deep into a complex labyrinth of crisscrossing tunnels, and before he knew it, the darkness was almost absolute and he had to look back to see any light at all. Turning back around to face the blackness ahead of him, he wished he had some equipment. He wasn’t afraid of caves or being underground. As an ecologist, he’d done his PhD dissertation on bats in Costa Rica, and as part of that research he had ventured deep into their underground lairs to observe their habits. Since then, he’d been underground many times, which was why he was okay with what he was doing now. But without equipment, he had real limits. He wasn’t foolhardy. At a bare minimum, a light source and guidance system, like a simple spool of rope to pay out as he progressed inside, were necessary to avoid getting lost and wandering in the dark, bumping into walls until he blacked out from thirst and starvation.
