Lord of All Things Page 36

  “Though we have no idea where the thing could be hiding either. We don’t even know what kind of machine it was. They’ve made it damn hard for our agents. I’ve got to hand them that.”

  “And…is there any news of our friend?”

  Mitch shook his head and peered out into the darkness of the garden. “It’s all just business as usual. He’s sitting in that house of his up in the mountains in California, making money hand over fist with nanotech inventions and donating it to wacko groups looking for aliens. Oh yeah, and recently he’s been giving money to the Atlantis nuts, too.” He took one last drag on his cigarette and then flung it out into the night. “And we still don’t have permission to listen in on him. It makes me sick.”

  It was good to hear Brenda’s voice. Even if it was just over the phone, it went a long way toward calming Charlotte’s nerves.

  “All in all it’s great,” she answered happily when Brenda asked how things were going in Mexico with her bunch of nuts. “The sun’s shining, I get to speak Spanish again…”

  “Aren’t you holding that conference of yours in English?”

  “Well yes, English is the official conference language. But I get out of the conference center when I can. As much as I can, in fact.”

  The conference center looked like a spaceship that had made an emergency landing in the Miguel Hidalgo suburb of Mexico City. Which made it a pretty good venue for a conference on alternative theories on prehistory. Most of the speakers were advancing some variation on the hypothesis that at some time before the dawn of history, mankind had been in touch with beings from the stars—some even posited the human race had been created by aliens.

  Charlotte leaned against the balustrade in the gallery and watched the hustle and bustle in the hall below. Chairs and name plaques were being set up on the central stage where the big podium discussions took place in the afternoons. In the evenings the hall hosted concerts by offbeat, avant-garde bands. There was still more than an hour to go before the next scheduled event, but people were already sitting down in the auditorium and making sure they had their video cameras at the ready. Others were reading or deep in excitable conversation.

  “How are things here?” Charlotte repeated Brenda’s question. “We have a lot of papers on topics like ‘Did the Neanderthals make contact with aliens?’ or ‘The search for Atlantis’ and that sort of thing. But there are others as well; it’s just those are the ones the journalists grab hold of for their headlines. There are some reputable scientists here as well, serious people.” Wasn’t she just trying to put a brave face on things, though? The prevailing atmosphere made it awfully difficult to hold on to the idea this was a scientific event—a venue for hypothesis, argument, and verification—rather than just a propaganda forum for half-baked ideas. She also had to admit that the Open Horizon Forum that was hosting the conference was not exactly an organization of intellectual firecrackers.

  “Oh, it’s fun,” she went on doggedly. “And it’s certainly thought-provoking. We’ll all have a lot to talk about when we go home. Of course, any claims made here will need double-checking, but that’s true anywhere these days, isn’t it?”

  “Charley,” Brenda said indulgently, “it’s fine if you’re just having fun. Or doing something crazy. That’s allowed, you know.”

  Charlotte felt a lump in her throat. Come what may, Brenda would always be on her side, unwaveringly so. She was a rock. A mainstay of Charlotte’s life.

  She swallowed and did her best not to sniffle as she asked, “And what’s up with you? Is everybody doing well? Does Jason still have that cold?”

  “He told me yesterday he would feel much better if he didn’t have to get up so early every morning,” Brenda chuckled. “It’s still an ordeal to get him to go to school. But I’m actually calling about something else. Do you happen to remember Adrian? Adrian Cazar? He was at Jason’s christening. The two of you chatted out on the deck. Climatologist.”

  A vague memory of a slim young man who looked a little like Johnny Depp. “Yes,” Charlotte said. “I remember him.”

  “He asked me for your phone number. I thought I’d better check with you before I gave it to him.”

  Charlotte made a face. “Uh-huh. Why does he want it? You know I’ve sworn off men. I’m a nun now, chastely devoted to paleoanthropology.”

  Brenda laughed merrily. “Yeah, yeah. Until the next man comes along. That sounds pretty much like Tom’s motto that the best way to stay trim is to eat nothing at all between meals. Anyway, Adrian wanted to talk shop. It’s about some scientific project he’s planning. He was keeping very quiet about the specifics, said he would have to tell you himself.”

  “I’m not sure. I have plenty to keep me busy with my own work, unscientific though it might be. I can’t do everything.”

  “Oh come on, Charley. He’s a serious guy. You should at least listen to what he has to say. You can always say no after that.”

  Charlotte sighed. “Well all right then. I’ll do as you say. He can call me. But not until this conference is over. I can’t concentrate on anything else until I’ve delivered my lecture.”

  “You’ll do fine,” Brenda said with infectious certainty. Oh Brenda. She would have loved to have more children, but that looked unlikely. After three miscarriages, there was little hope of a brother or sister for Jason.

  After hanging up, Charlotte roamed around the conference center restlessly, wondering how she could fill the three hours that remained until her lecture. Not that there was any point being nervous. Nobody would come anyway. They had given her the worst possible slot—a time when anybody with any sense would be off looking for a bite to eat—in one of the most remote and least attractive rooms. She would consider herself lucky if she didn’t end up standing in front of rows of empty chairs. Though there were moments when she hoped that was precisely what would happen. Like now, for instance.

  After going back to Harvard, she had stopped caring about academic convention. She no longer bothered attending the seminars that struck her as nothing more than busywork. Why collect credits for their own sake? Instead, she had gotten transfer credits by taking a course in forensics and general criminology at a police academy. The professor had told her she had a gift for it and asked whether she would be interested in a career in forensics. No, she told him. Then she had set out to review all the material evidence that underlay current thinking on human prehistory. She was determined to take a personal look at the evidence wherever possible. It was an ambitious project but by no means impossible; after all, there were far more paleoanthropologists in the world than actual finds.

  The core of her project was to apply forensic standards to the paleoanthropological evidence, to dissect the established arguments the way an attorney might pick them apart in court. For every single find, she planned to work out which of the accepted academic conclusions stood up to scrutiny and which could be blown apart as unfounded conjecture. She would cross-examine every last fragment of skull and hominid tooth, every scrap of bone and skeletal remains that had ever been excavated and cataloged as early human or hominid.

  This was no way to make friends, of course. In the academic world a great deal of weight is attached to who says what, not just what they say. The unproven hypothesis of a renowned scholar carries much more clout than the provable claim of some nobody without a title, degree, or publication record. Many established researchers felt personally aggrieved by Charlotte’s project. So far none of the prestigious scientific journals of record had accepted any of her articles.

  Nonetheless, she had some startling revelations to make. She had, for instance, been able to examine the Broken Hill skull in the Natural History Museum in London. This was generally accepted to be a well-preserved fossil of Homo rhodesiensis, a transitional form between the common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans, Homo heidelbergensis, and early Homo sapiens. The skull was dated to sometim
e between 125 thousand and 300 thousand years ago and had a cranial capacity of 1,300 cubic centimeters, not far off the volume of the modern human brain.

  But the most remarkable feature of the skull was the bullet hole.

  The hole was on the right side of the skull, easily visible on most published photos. The classic interpretation was that holes such as these were made by large predators or caused by a fall. But if you examined the bones under a microscope—and if you had recently completed a course in basic forensics at the Boston Police Academy—then it looked a hell of a lot like a bullet entry wound.

  From at least 130 thousand years ago.

  Charlotte had been able to establish that the hole expanded on the inward side of the skull—typical of bullet entry wounds—and that even in its fossilized state the bone showed the characteristic network of fracture lines radiating out from the hole itself. Furthermore—and this was something the published photographs usually did not show—a large part of the skull was missing on the opposite side. This wasn’t unusual for a skull find; since skulls are hollow and are often found buried in stone, it was almost inevitable that the bone would be further crushed at some point after death. But at several points along the edge of this larger hole, Charlotte had spotted marks that would make any criminologist swear on the stand that this skull had been broken open from the inside. For instance, by a projectile exiting at high speed, taking a mass of mangled brain tissue along with it. A gunshot wound, in other words.

  It was impossible to publish such findings in a reputable academic journal. And this was just one of several dozen finds she had cast doubt upon in the last few years. Of course, she had used her own particular talent to help her examinations, but it had never served as a substitute for proof. At most, she used it to get pointers as to what she should be looking for next. But no matter what she found, no matter how carefully she framed her arguments, she couldn’t get a foot in the door in the academic world. Which was why she had ended up at this conference, where she needed no more qualifications than “Charlotte Malroux, student of paleoanthropology at Harvard.”

  She stopped in front of a bulletin board showing the day’s events. Perhaps she should go listen to another lecture. That would keep her mind occupied until her own session. She noticed that a Prof. Diego Fernando Andrade, from Ecuador, was giving a lecture that day. Charlotte had chatted with him briefly at the speakers’ reception on the first evening. Prof. Andrade was a prim, fussy old gentleman who taught at the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador in Quito and was visibly taken aback by the more colorful side of the conference. He wasn’t used to this sort of thing, he told her. He also told her what he would be lecturing on: a set of pre-Columbian ceramic artifacts that were held in the Museum of Quito and which had been a headache for historians for years. They were small figurines, each of which seemed to be wearing a space suit. The trouble was that these figures were at least twelve hundred years old and must have been made well before anyone on Earth had ever seen a space suit. Some of the sculptures were featured on the official program for the conference, and they did indeed look like designs taken from the latest science-fiction movie.

  He told her the theory that the figurines were linked to folk legends considerably older than the artifacts themselves. He was most put out by the way his lecture had been announced. The casual reader got the misleading impression he would be advancing claims that mankind had not only been visited by aliens in the dim and distant past but also had been caught up in some kind of galactic war.

  He sighed. “I can only hope nobody back home will ever see the program,” he said. “My superiors would not approve in the least. We have all taken an oath to teach nothing that contradicts the Catholic faith.”

  Charlotte was still undecided as she went down the broad staircase to the main hall. What if Prof. Andrade turned out to be such a wonderful speaker that she ended up with an inferiority complex? That couldn’t be ruled out; after all, the man had been through seminary, and the Jesuits were well-known for their public-speaking skills. Perhaps she’d do better just to sneak off to the cafeteria and nurse a large latte macchiato. Or maybe she should lock herself in the restroom.

  Standing by the door to the lecture hall was a hideous plaster cast that had been in the entrance lobby up until now. Someone had moved it. It was a cast of a stele from Guatemala showing a weird fire-breathing monster that also seemed to be wearing a space suit. The audience was already beginning to stream into the hall, visibly excited about what they might learn. Charlotte had to stop for a moment and take a deep breath. Did she really want to do this? She looked at the label and read the inscription. “El Baúl Stele, copy of the original at Santa Lucía Cozumalhuapa, Guatemala, probably Mayan.”

  “So what do you think?” asked a voice next to her. “Did fire-breathing beasties wage war against mankind?”

  Charlotte spun round. “Hiroshi!”

  There he was. Standing there chatting to her as though it hadn’t been six years since they’d last seen each other.

  “Hello, Charlotte,” he said. His eyes lit up. He looked good, really good. Lean, in a simple white linen suit with an achingly cool pair of sunglasses perched on his nose.

  Charlotte shook her head in amazement. “That’s just…I mean really, this is some surprise. What in the world are you doing here?”

  He raised an eyebrow and rubbed the side of his nose with his thumb. “Just between you and me, I give this group a little money. So I thought I’d drop by and see what they do with it all.”

  “You sponsor this event?” She knew he had made money. Brenda had once saved a newspaper article about young inventors for her, part of which had been about Hiroshi Kato and the successful company he had founded in California.

  He nodded briefly. “Yes. I do that kind of thing from time to time. I’ve also given some money to the Science Heritage Foundation, and before that I supported the Explorer Travel Trust.”

  It took Charlotte a moment to understand what he was saying: he didn’t sponsor these organizations, he’d been sponsoring her! The ETT at Harvard had given her a grant for her first trips to examine the finds she wanted to look at. Once someone in the trust had read her reports, however, they declined any further grants on the grounds her work was not compatible with the basic principles of Harvard research. After that the Science Heritage Foundation had financed her research for a while, but then they had raised their own doubts about her academic conduct and cut her support.

  Hiroshi smiled. Evidently, he could see that she had understood. “I’m also funding SETI,” he added. “For Rodney’s sake. I have to do something with all the money.”

  “You could come and listen to my lecture,” Charlotte suggested. “That way at least I’d have one person in the audience.”

  “If you’re okay with that,” Hiroshi said. “In fact, it’s the other reason I came.”

  After the lecture—which went much better than she had feared, drawing a bigger crowd than she’d expected, and leading to an interesting discussion—they just had time for a glass of wine in the cafeteria before Hiroshi caught his flight that evening.

  “It was a good lecture,” he said. “You should write a book on the subject.”

  “Oh Lord!” she groaned. “Everybody says that.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  Write a book. Easier said than done. She had started to take a few notes and to rework her academic articles, given that the specialist journals hadn’t taken much interest in them, but she still wasn’t sure. She didn’t want to make the same mistake she had had to point out in so many of her fellow researchers: she didn’t want to jump to any conclusions without having considered all possible alternatives. She didn’t want to follow the obvious implications blindly, and she felt the danger of doing so was much greater when writing a book, putting down her thoughts in black and white for all time. It was different in a lecture or a d
iscussion, when she could tell by people’s reactions whether she had made herself clear. It gave her the chance to rephrase things if need be. Even the chance to change her mind.

  She looked down into her glass of disappointing white wine. “So you’ve been following what I’ve been doing all these years,” she stated.

  “From time to time,” he said evasively.

  “And you? What have you been up to?”

  “I imagine you can probably guess.”

  She looked at him. Yes, she could quite easily guess. “You’re still working on your project. You never give up.”

  He glanced around as though worried they might be overheard, then leaned toward her and said in a conspiratorial tone, “I’m just about to crack it. Just about to. It’s merely a matter of decades.”

  “Decades!”

  “Well, perhaps centuries.”

  She couldn’t help but laugh. “Is it really as bad as all that?”

  “It’s like I’m a donkey with a carrot dangling in front of my nose.” He lifted his hand and brought his finger and thumb close together, less than a quarter of an inch apart. “So close. Just beyond reach.” He sighed and put his hand down. “It gets frustrating sometimes.”

  She took a sip of her wine and then put it down, determined to leave the rest undrunk. Sour wine they made hereabouts. “Whatever happened to the machine you made back then? The complex?”

  He leaned back in his chair. “Well, that’s an odd story. We struck camp and shipped everything off, but by the time the ship got back to Hong Kong the crate with the complex in it had vanished.”

  “Somebody stole it, then.”

  “That’s the official version at least.” He smiled ever so slightly. “Although some people claim in all seriousness that the complex still had a program running. Supposedly, it turned the crate into sawdust and then jumped into the sea…”

  She grinned as well. “The things people say.”