“How old is the event?” asked Wheaton.
“It’s the oldest group that spent a season here,” said Noxon. “Isn’t there already a date? Carbon 14, at least?”
“The oldest fire built here dates from ninety thousand years ago,” said Wheaton.
“That sounds about right,” said Noxon. “My view of the paths doesn’t come with a calendar. But that ninety-thousand-year figure gives me a benchmark.”
“Ten kilometers,” said Ram wearily.
“You walk almost as far changing planes at the airport,” said Noxon.
“Not even close,” said Ram.
“Then stay here,” said Noxon. “You can watch over the stuff we don’t need, so we don’t have to carry it all with us.”
“We’ll lock that in the boot,” said Ram. “I’m not going to miss this.”
“No, you’re just going to complain the whole way. Those Neanderthals, so thoughtless—hunting uri where they happen to be, instead of hoping they’ll wander closer.”
“Uri?” asked Deborah.
“The Latinized plural of the root word ‘urus,’” said Noxon. “I think it’s a better name than aurochs anyway.”
“See, Father?” said Deborah. “There are worse language wonks in the world than I am.”
“He’s not from this world,” said Wheaton.
The hike was difficult—lots of ups and downs, scrambling into ravines and out again, and scraping their way through thickets. But they had dressed for hiking and when they got to the site, they were tired but not exhausted.
“If Neanderthals were careful hunters,” said Noxon, “there’s no chance we could suddenly appear without their noticing us. So I’m thinking that I bring us to that time behind this rise, and then I slice us forward as we climb the hill. I won’t slice us very fast, so we’ll see their actions speeded up but it won’t be a blur.”
“Will my camera be able to record the images?” asked Wheaton.
“If our eyes can see, the camera can record it,” said Noxon. “Images move quickly enough not to lose coherency when we time-slice. Not like sound, which turns into meaningless ragged waves.”
“Then that sounds like an excellent plan,” said Wheaton.
With the clarity that his facemask brought him, Noxon easily brought them to the moment that he chose and then sliced them with precision as they moved up the rise to perch on the crest. It was close enough for a good clear view, but not so close that they’d have to worry about Neanderthals walking through them.
The hunting was a long, slow process, and several times Noxon sped up the time-slicing so it didn’t get too uncomfortable waiting there on the crest. It wasn’t just about boredom: Somebody would need to empty bladder or bowel if it took too long.
The four Neanderthals approached the grazing herd with infinite patience. It was incredible how slow their movements were, how utterly still they could remain while holding awkward poses. Each Neanderthal man—two seeming to be in their twenties, two in their teens—had a short spear strapped to his back, stone tip near the man’s head. Their hands were empty.
Unlike wolves and hunting cats, they had not sought out an old, ailing, or especially young aurochs. Instead, they had chosen the most powerful male. Apparently they liked a challenge—or they figured that if they were going to take the time to hunt, they should bring home enough meat for it to be worth the effort.
Finally the hunters got near enough that the aurochs began to get nervous. If there was some signal among the hunters, it had to be by sound, because there was nothing visible to the party of Sapient watchers. But the hunters all leapt up at once. The three that were not directly in front of the aurochs pulled their spears as they ran and prepared to jab at the animal’s sides. But the one in front kept his hands empty and open as he ran directly at the great horned head, waving his arms and, judging from his open mouth, shouting.
The other members of the aurochs herd began to move away nervously; some of them broke into a run. But the big bull turned to face the shouting man rushing toward him; the bull lowered its head and began to move forward, clearly intending to catch the man on its horns and gore him or toss him out of the way.
The lead hunter’s gaze never left those horns. At the last moment, the horns went down and the head turned slightly, to point one horn directly at the hunter. He caught that horn with one hand and then, as he vaulted upward, caught the other horn with the other hand.
The bull tossed him, and the hunter swiveled around in midair, so that when he landed astride the animal’s back, he faced forward. It wasn’t a crotch-crushing impact—the man’s feet landed first, and his legs slid downward, already gripping so that when the man’s crotch came in contact with the bony ridge of the bull’s spine, his downward momentum was almost nil.
It was the most perfectly controlled athletic move Noxon had ever seen.
At the exact moment that the lead hunter was perfectly astride the aurochs, the three other hunters jabbed at one shoulder and both rear thighs, striking deeply enough that they did not try to withdraw the spears. The wounds would not be fatal in themselves, but because they left their spears in place, Noxon could imagine that if the lead hunter failed to bring down the beast, it would leave a trail of blood as it ran away, and would become weaker and weaker, so the hunters would be sure of a kill even if it wasn’t a quick one.
But the lead hunter was no novice. As he settled onto the bull’s back, his hands were already pulling the spear upward out of its binding. As the bull began to react to the wounds inflicted by the other hunters, the rider jabbed downward with enormous power, and the spear seemed to go twenty centimeters into the animal’s spine.
It shuddered once and then flopped sideways, having lost all control of its muscles when its spinal cord was severed.
As it fell, the lead hunter sprang from its back, so he was not pinned under it.
Noxon thought back through what the man had done. In a single fluid motion, he had caught the bull’s horns, vaulted into the air, spun halfway around, landed on his feet, slid down into a tight-gripping straddle, withdrawing his spear and stabbing in the exact place with all his strength and leverage, and then leapt clear of the animal. In realtime it hadn’t been as rapid as it seemed in slicetime, but Noxon hadn’t been slicing that fast. It really had been unbelievably quick.
The other three hunters fell on the fallen animal instantly, using small stone blades to slice open the throat and belly. They disemboweled the animal and skinned it in smooth, practiced movements, each man knowing and doing his job. Noxon sped up his time-slicing enough that they could see the whole process before they needed to leave. When the men had the main cuts of beef and the aurochs hide wrapped in skins, and their spears and knives were fastened again to their bodies, Wheaton pumped his fist and Noxon and the others rose up and walked down the back slope of the hill they had watched from.
Noxon stopped slicing time, so they could talk again. “Need to see any more?”
In answer, Wheaton played back his own recording of the event. “I hope I can slow it down or at least take it frame by frame because there’s so much to see,” he said. “But I got it. A thing of beauty.”
They had been speaking in low tones. But the Neanderthals hadn’t survived this long by being careless or unobservant. Noxon looked over and saw that the beef-bearing hunters had spotted them. And, enhanced as his hearing was by the facemask, he could hear them talking. It wasn’t a highly advanced language—it consisted of names and single words. “Who.” “What.” “Enemy.” “Kill.”
How the Wall had given him the ability to understand such fragmented speech—from Neanderthals rather than Sapiens—would be a matter for Noxon to speculate about later.
“Disappear but stay in this time?” asked Noxon. “Or return to the future?”
“I have everything I need here,” said Wheaton.
The Neanderthals had already dropped their burdens of beef and, with spears in hand, were running toward the observation party.
“Future it is,” said Noxon. “I might be able to do this without holding your hands, but let’s be safe.”
They took each other’s hands. The Neanderthals were so fast—Noxon could already smell them, not just their bodies but their breath, when he made a random jump forward in time.
They returned a few days before they had first arrived in the car. Not wanting to go through the tedium of time-slicing, Noxon flung them forward again. But the jump was imprecise enough that he overshot—now there were policemen and a tow truck at their car. They could probably have talked their way through the situation, but they would have had to explain why Noxon was fluent in Slovenian and how they had managed to camp for however many days the car had been abandoned. And then there was that lack-of-identification problem.
So Noxon jumped them back to a time soon after their own paths had disappeared over a hill, and they returned to the car long before their earlier selves would have reached the site of the Neanderthal aurochs hunt.
“We can’t prove that modern humans ever saw Neanderthals hunt that way,” said Deborah. “But Sapiens and Neanderthals coexisted so long that it would strain credulity to claim that they did not.”
“I agree,” said Wheaton. “My hypothesis isn’t proven, but this certainly didn’t contradict it. Right down to the picadors, that was a bullfight. And the birth of the sport of bull-leaping. Though the Minoan vase paintings show the bull-leapers going clean over the bull. Nobody seems to have tried to ride the things.”
“That had to wait for the rodeo,” said Deborah. “Such strength, such control, such patience. How could Homo sapiens have ever defeated these people?”
“They didn’t have to defeat them,” said Wheaton. “The fact that Homo sapiens has no mitochondrial DNA from Neanderthals suggests that if there were head-to-head battles, the Neanderthals always won, and their males mated with the Sapient women, never the other way around.”
“Or Neanderthal women were so strong that they broke the necks of any gracile humans who tried to mate with them,” said Deborah.
Noxon wasn’t sure he liked the relish with which she said that.
“Seeing all that bloody beef made me hungry,” said Deborah.
“Why?” asked Wheaton. “You always like your beef cooked into a flavorless stringy mass.”
“But I know that it begins with those great bloody haunches and sides,” said Deborah, “and I could do with a nice parmentier about now. Or a hamburger.”
“Well, Noxon,” said Wheaton, “in all honesty, today’s work completely pays for the easy half of the bargain—providing you with a place to stay while you wait to see why the people of Earth decide to wipe out your world. So if you want to stop taking me into the distant past, I’d still consider us more than even.”
“None of us would be happy without a visit to Homo erectus,” said Noxon. “Today’s excursion was its own reward.”
Wheaton laughed. “Here I am marveling at the athleticism of Neanderthal hunters, while the only reason I could witness it was because the human race has evolved an ability that nobody could have foreseen.”
“Cameras?” asked Noxon, feigning innocence.
Wheaton only laughed. While Deborah took Noxon’s hand and squeezed it. So it wasn’t all neck-breaking with her.
They decided not to fly back to the United States. Instead, they would go directly to Africa, and search for the paths of an early Erectus tribe. Not ninety thousand years, but nine hundred thousand, at least. Maybe twice that.
And this time, they would want to watch for days, not an hour or so. Neanderthal-watching had left Noxon exhausted. Erectus-watching would be far harder. But . . . it was all part of saving the world. And he was almost as eager to see what they might learn as Wheaton and Deborah were.
At the back of the plane to Nairobi, when they took a toilet break from time-slicing, Ram Odin asked him, “Are you up to this? It looked like that expedition really wore you out.”
“In Africa, maybe we won’t have to hike so far,” said Noxon. “And we’ll just watch for a few hours a day, then return to camp in the present. I won’t push myself too hard. And this”—he tapped the facemask—“helps keep me strong.”
“It doesn’t replace food, water, and rest,” said Ram.
“It seems you want to talk,” said Noxon. “But I need that toilet.”
Ram gestured him toward the open bathroom door. Noxon went inside and marveled, once again, at the machinery of daily life that humans of this era of Earth regarded as minimal acceptable conditions. Only a few hours on the plane, but these people had to replace several rows of seats with contraptions for carrying away bodily waste, and with galleys for the preparation of food and drink.
Few of these people could last three days in the wilderness where Noxon had spent his childhood. But they had, and would soon use, the power to wipe the world of Garden out of existence. These feeble toilet-using snack-eating destructive babies—but, like the weaker, possibly stupider Sapients whose superior weapons out-hunted and, maybe, outfought the Neanderthals, they had moved their evolution away from their bodies and onto their tools. They didn’t have to be individually clever or strong, patient or wise, or skilled at either peace or war. They could never have wiped out the Neanderthals hand-to-hand. But once arrows and spear-throwers joined their toolkit, the Sapients would use machines to do their killing from a safe distance.
CHAPTER 22
Finding a Home for Square
“What I’m about to ask may seem unpleasant to you,” said Auntie Wind.
Umbo responded more to her tone than her words; her tone said that everything was fine, and Umbo would be delighted. “Ask and we’ll see,” he said.
“I’m concerned about the baby you brought from the future. The little boy called Square.”
Umbo was puzzled. “How do you know about him?”
“Your friend Loaf passed him into our care a few weeks ago,” Auntie Wind answered. “I assumed you knew.”
“Loaf tells me only what he thinks I need to know.”
“Well, no matter what he thinks, I think you need to know, because as the timeshaper you are the one who saved the boy’s life and brought him into our time.”
“I do care what happens to him,” said Umbo.
“Loaf told us that the boy’s mother does not regard him as her own,” said Auntie Wind. “I understand this, in that she has no memory of carrying him in her womb. Though I do not understand why she cannot take him into her heart as any woman would take an orphan in need of care.”
“Leaky can’t make herself feel what doesn’t come to her naturally.” Or keep herself from feeling what does come; Umbo had too many painful memories of trying to get her to curb her emotions long enough to simply hear him out.
“That is unfortunate in a full-grown person,” said Auntie Wind. “Our difficulty is that our lives are spent in the sea, but caring for Square means that we must keep one nursing mother or another on land for extended periods. Since Square’s mother won’t have him, I ask consent to introduce him to a mantle and take him into the sea with us. It’s a good life.”
“I don’t think Loaf would want that,” said Umbo, “and yet I think it’s hard to ask Larfolders to stay on land. Let me talk to him.”
“I was hoping for a quick answer,” said Auntie Wind. “I’m facing a bit of a rebellion, I’m afraid—there’s already so much resentment over the mice that you brought in to possess our land, and some are saying now, Let the baby drink mousemilk, and leave us out of it.”
Umbo had heard nothing about resentment of the mice. As far as he knew, the Larfolders hadn’t even noticed them.
“Underwater,” said Auntie Wind, “it would be an easy matter to care for
him. Even on land, with a mantle he wouldn’t need diapering.”
“The mantle makes it so you don’t have to . . .” Umbo was uncomfortable referring to defecation.
“No, but the mantle reaches down and cleans the baby, then washes itself. It’s very sanitary. Our mantles have had thousands of years to become habituated to our needs.”
Umbo sighed. “I understand your urgency. But remember what I can do. I’ll go ask Loaf, but I’ll return to you within an hour from now.”
“Will you?” she asked mildly.
Umbo was annoyed at her doubt. “If I don’t,” said Umbo, “it’ll be because I’m dead.”
“I wasn’t doubting your word,” said Auntie Wind, amused but kind. “I didn’t understand you to have so much precision in your movement in time.”
“It’s fairly recently acquired,” said Umbo. “But now, yes, I can place myself in time with some exactness, especially if it’s near a time where I remember having been. Like now.”
“Then I will wait here,” said Auntie Wind, “though it’s dry and hot and you have many days’ travel ahead of you.”
Let her think what she will, Umbo decided. He had no interest in taking days to find Loaf. He had the knife, which was also a “phone”—a communicator that could call for the Larfold flyer. So he walked only a mile from the shore before the flyer came to him. He didn’t bother making it find a landing spot; it lowered a ladder and he stepped onto it and waited as it drew itself—and him—upward through the floor of the vehicle.
Thus it was not even nightfall on the same day when Umbo came to the settlement between folds where Loaf trained soldiers for Umbo’s army. It was inconvenient that whenever Umbo arrived there, he was treated as king. Fortunately, he had refused to allow much folderol to develop, because, as he pointed out, Param was the reigning Queen-in-the-Tent, and he was merely King Consort. So the greetings were only a distraction as he searched for Loaf; there were no time-consuming visits to be paid for protocol’s sake.