Human (27 page)

Suddenly, there wasn’t enough oxygen in the air. Orrin locked eyes with the tiny woman who was frozen in place. He recoiled. She narrowed her eyes accusingly.
Defiantly
. Her lips rolled back in an ugly grimace.

“Ash-awa negitah,” her voice came at him in a low whisper, suffused with hatred. The cold night air caught in his throat. She was speaking to him;
it
was speaking to him.

She hissed and looked down, twisting slightly and Orrin realised there was something in her arms. With macabre curiosity, Orrin focussed on the dark space, his blood pounding in his ears.

A pair of eyes stared up at him from her arms. Wide eyes. A baby. Naked, perfect dark lips, olive face. Undeniably more human than animal. But wrong – misshapen, alien. Its little fingers clenched and reached upwards, toward the light. Toward him.

The air left him like a kick in the guts.

Orrin turned, stumbling and falling into the darkness, desperate to slam the steel door between himself and the aberration of reality behind it.

Hidden in thorny bushes on the far side of the river, Neil Crawford spat. The small green berries he chewed were bitter and did nothing to placate his gnawing stomach. He scraped the grit off his tongue grudgingly. He wouldn’t have eaten them at all, if he hadn’t seen her doing it first.
I’m surprised she can stomach this crap.
Without her entourage of freaks, Neil was sure the redhead would have died already, starved, no doubt.
He’d
survived on his own, of course.

He’d been watching the woman for days and stuffed himself into the cavity of a decaying tree each night. The hollow trunk was wide and long and had previously been home for a nest of vipers. The slithering golden offspring had broken through their membranous casings only hours before he’d found them, their mother birthing them live and escaping into the dark forest floor. He couldn’t have known that the three dark brown spots ringed in black and white that ran down their body identified them as one of the most poisonous snakes in the world. If he had, Neil wouldn’t have been so quick to claim their home. As it was, he didn’t know, and each of the eleven juveniles remaining in the nest received a swift stab at the base of its neck between the dark patches on each blunt temple. He’d sliced them open to find three of them had already consumed their less aggressive siblings. Each one in turn, was consumed by Neil. The taste was smoky and rubbery, like chicken left out too long. The snakes had placated his hunger for two days, and then his gut had grown sick and twisted in retaliation, tying him in agonising knots. For the past eighteen hours Neil had had nothing but water stolen from the river after dark. This morning he was hungry again.

His mobile phone had run flat days ago, robbing him of his compass and the only tangible link he had to the real world.
I never asked for this shit.
He let his resentment grow thick like a shield. Given his time again, Neil wouldn't have gone to the lab at all.
But who would have suspected this?
Nothing could have prepared him for it. His shoulder still ached, his feet were blistered and swollen with the heat and his ageing body felt punished. The chill night air of the mountains compressed his cigarette-damaged lungs. But he pushed through it, refusing to succumb. The pain made him stronger.
They underestimated me.
There was pride and victory in that, at least.

When Neil first spied the redhead by the river, putrid and furious as he was, he very nearly broke his cover. After all, she’d left him unconscious with a mangled arm in the forest, for God knows how long. She
must
have. Anyone with half a brain would have searched the area before taking off into the forest. She
must
have seen him lying there, exposed to the elements and predators, left to die. Reason fled and he itched to show her that he wasn’t so easily disregarded. That she’d walked away from the wrong man. That he wanted answers from her, regardless of the means he had to use to get them.

While tracking her, Neil's mental interrogation had replayed over and again, growing exponentially fierce.

Who the hell are you? Who did this to me? Terrorists? The University? Some damned private backer pulling strings on the world’s energy supply? Another government department? What was going on in that lab? How did they control the energy field? What were they planning to do with it? Convert it? Redirect it? Who was their target?
And most importantly;
how the hell am I going to get out of this shit hole?

Neil had finally found her, as he knew he would. He stepped out from the shadows, ready to shout. Within a heart-beat he’d changed his mind. Neil had thrown himself back into the thorny hide-out, his mouth dry and the stinging of torn skin unnoticed. Since that moment, nearly four days ago, only one question became critical;
what the hell is really going on?

Bizarre, dwarfed ape-men were constantly by her side, surrounding her, leading her, protecting her. They were freakishly small, half-man half-animal - like something you’d see in a National Geographic magazine. Neil could find no place for them in his expansive knowledge; they looked like an insult to humanity. Whether they were some sort of sick transgenetic experiment or a well-kept evolutionary secret he could only guess.

They carried spears and arrows and even from a distance Neil suspected he didn’t want to be caught on the end of one. The creatures visited the river in small groups, at least seventy so far, although it was hard to tell. They all looked the same, like pot bellied children with abnormally long arms and misshapen heads. They were mostly naked too, and even more unappealing for it. In his hiding place, Neil learned to lie still. He gently flexed his limbs one by one as he lay there, discouraging the spasms of contracting muscles. The ape men were vigilant; he had to give them that. He’d been nearly caught twice already. Even the children lifted their eyes to the slightest movement in the trees.
Children.
He spat again with distaste.
Not children. Animals.

So far, there were only three things he was sure of.
One, I’m outnumbered. Two
,
I don't know enough and three, the woman is somehow involved.
Neil never acted from a position of disadvantage.
Know thy enemy.

So he watched.

And watched.

The redhead showed no aversion to the ape-men, on the contrary, she seemed almost deferential to them. Contrary to his initial belief, Neil now doubted that the woman had known he was even there, lying unconscious merely twenty feet from where she’d been herself. This woman wouldn’t have left an injured, vulnerable man to the elements if she’d known. Any woman who could muster up enough sympathy to treat these beasts as equals was clearly a slave to her own conscience, which would make it that much easier to manipulate her.

The woman’s limp was nearly gone and she was usually barefoot. She was quiet, but not submissively so. It seemed a more calculated quietness, like she was
observing
the goings on around her with an air of fascination and God forbid,
affection
. Neil wondered if she even knew why she was there.
Maybe not.
Regardless, she still knew something. This woman was the only link between the physics laboratory and this death-trap.

For now, her intentions seemed the same as his; watch and learn. The only difference was the object of scrutiny.

She was watching the ape-men; Neil was watching her.

Each morning, she sat by the river with her macabre menagerie and drew symbols in the dirt, with what he had now realized, was a chimpanzee. Once, he had sought out those drawings after dusk, risking a burning torch to see them, only to find the geometric shapes and patterns made no sense. It wasn’t long after, the ape-men started copying her and the redhead had become agitated and left. A couple of days later though, she began to teach them willingly.

It was infuriating. The woman was wasting her time, teaching shapes to imbeciles, while he suffered. But this was bigger than him. The civilised world had probably suffered at the hands of this conspiracy. And damn it, those hands could have been his.

A niggling memory chewed at Neil’s brain and he tossed it around again, as he had all night. There was something he couldn’t quite place, his last memory of the lab, of her…
A flash of black and a pulse of neon blue that burned white in his closed eyelid
s…
Damn it!
There was something about that moment, something that seemed significant that kept slipping away.

Neil needed answers and the redhead was quickly becoming dispensable.
If I could just get her alone.

Justification was a beautiful thing.

It was magic. Not the magic of spells and supernatural incantations, but
real
magic. The magic of storytelling.

It was a trademark of all human societies, no matter the form it took. A story, a song, a folktale, a chant, a parable. A gift passed from generation to generation preserving history without pens or paper. The story embellished, reworded, broken and rebuilt like a string of Chinese whispers through time immemorial. But there was always meaning behind the words, Ivy knew, that had been saved for so long. There was always a truth, no matter how far buried, in the bones of the tale.

Bright stars glittered in the night, almost close enough to touch. A cool wind swept the cave entrance where Ivy sat amongst the tribe. Trahg was curled in her lap and Kyah pressed against her side, the odd pair still inseparable. All eyes were on an old, bent woman standing to Ivy's right. The woman's name was Phren. Her wrinkled hand clutched Ivy’s, the amulet warm and pulsing between their palms. With a cry that cast the restless night into silence, Phren threw her free arm out theatrically and began her story.

Ivy looked at Kyah, momentarily sad at the bonobo's inability to grasp the inherent spirituality of the situation. But the hobbits surrounding her were different. They not only grasped their oral history, they embraced it.
How very human.
Was it
culture
that defined humanity then? Ivy mused. She considered the elements of culture that each of the three species of ape represented here tonight, shared. Each species had the capacity to learn behaviour from its parents, to use that behaviour and teach others. Each species recognised its allies and foes and formed lifelong relationships based on kinship and rank. They all solved problems creatively, they cooperated and they empathized, they anticipated behaviour and the reactions of others. Culture was a concept shared, by that definition.

But this - telling a story; this was different, Ivy knew. Using words as symbols to explain an idea that might be purely hypothetical, changeable or even completely ambiguous.
Is this what defines us as human? Our driving instinct to understand where we came from and our ability to recount it over thousands of years?
Story was a powerful tool for learning, where each word - each symbol - could possess multiple meanings and only through context and shared experience might become meaningful at all.

“Baby. Hug.” Kyah signed and pulled at Trahg’s arm. The boy happily shifted into the bonobo’s lap and settled. Trahg was beginning to understand Kyah’s symbols, a realisation that left Ivy a little uneasy.

Kyah shifted next to her and Ivy raked her fingers gently across the bonobo’s arm.
So what was the very first story?
Ivy wondered.
What idea, what symbol, could have been powerful enough to throw the human species from an intelligence that already worked perfectly in its time and place, into a feedback loop of this new, different type of intelligence? The type that forced our lives and tools, our language and brains into increasing complexity. How had it begun, and how blurry were the lines between us really?

There was a tranquillity about Kyah tonight which suggested that although she may not appreciate the meaning, she felt a certain reverence for the situation.

Phren paused in her story and the tribe began their dusk song again. This time, Kyah listened to it, spellbound, with wide eyes. The bonobo’s face was still and her breathing deep and slow. For a moment, Ivy could see no sense of self in their depths. An interesting thought occurred to Ivy, as she watched the bonobo.
Had Kyah lost herself in the beauty of the voices? Could she honestly feel the intensity that hung palpable in each note? How close to a spiritual epiphany might Kyah have come? How close to symbolic thought, might she be, if not there already? A tiny fantasy conceived and acted upon that led to another and another, so slowly, changing the way we learn, the way we think… Is this how it all began?