CRO-MAGNON (20 page)

A few moments later she was gratified to hear the clink of Calder’s tank behind her. He must have gone to school on her tactics. Remounting her tank, she finned through the gloom.

She needn’t have worried about the second offset. If anything, the quake had widened the turning point at the upper right of the passage, but she still found it necessary to dismount the tank again. After squirming through, she pushed the tank up the gently rising tunnel, knowing that the cave with its priceless human treasure was not far ahead.

With a clink, the tank bottomed. Rising to her knees, water cascading from her shoulders, she pointed her flashlight and saw the cave as they had left it. Too impatient to wait for Calder, she repositioned the now heavy tank on her back and fastened the harness.

Careful not to slip on the icy floor, she rose to her feet, shed her flippers, and plodded forward. A blaze of new color signaled that Calder’s catalytic heater had vaporized the permafrost over the next panel of paintings.

Good! She could hardly wait for a new installment of the prehistoric woman’s adventures. She realized she’d become addicted.

Behind, she again heard the clink of Calder’s tank, the sound unexpectedly musical in the naturally compressed air of the cave.

She halted at the body of the woman, planning to use a large syringe to take samples of flesh, a hand drill for a bone specimen, and a pair of pliers to yank a molar, as mitochondrial DNA was best preserved in teeth. Although incomplete because it was inherited only from the mother, the mtDNA would complement the nuclear DNA. Because it only recorded the matrilineal line, it was often used in comparison with other samples to determine what geographical area a fossil had originated in. It might, she mused, have some bearing on Calder’s dubious claim that indigenous humans of both varieties were ancestral to modern Europeans.

What she really wanted, she reminded herself, was a sample of brain tissue so that she could continue developing her admittedly bizarre idea. But for reasons she still hadn’t completely worked out, she would refrain from that for the time being. Except, perhaps, for the lion.

She glanced at Calder, who had remounted his tank and was wielding a pair of calipers over the Neanderthal. Did he really think he could draw conclusions about a creature’s origins by measuring its bones? Why, two creatures could have almost identical genotypes and yet their phenotypes would show diverse morphology. All you had to do was look at modern humans, so different on the surface but nearly identical underneath.

Shaking her head, she bent to take a specimen of cheek tissue. Calder’s notion that the Neanderthal’s blond hair and other physical features marked the man as ancestral to modern Europeans seemed to her only slightly more scientific than the nineteenth-century practice of phrenology.

She lost herself in her work. After a few minutes, Calder’s mask-muffled voice broke the silence: “Let’s get ready.”

She groaned. “I need some germ cells. Preferably, gametes.”

“
Next time.” He peeled open his camera pouch. “I’ll snap some photos. Then we need to start back if we want to dive this afternoon.”

“
Damn.”

“
You’re the one who set the schedule.”

“
I know.”

Tucking her implements and vials into dry-suit pockets and bracing against the weight of the scuba tank, she heaved upright and watched her associate snap flash photos from several angles. The newly uncovered panel lay next to yesterday’s and likewise contained four paintings in several shades of ochre.

The first picture was of a woman being shouldered by a stocky man with a pulled-forward face, his free hand holding a thick spear. Again, Blaine was amazed by the detail the artist had achieved with her primitive materials and stone medium, particularly facial characteristics. The obviously Cro-Magnon woman’s tip-tilted nose mirrored the one in the previous panel, and the man’s prodigious nose had clearly been broken more than once. Both figures’ garments sagged, obviously sopping.

Two other men with broad shoulders and boulder-like skulls loomed in the background, one exhibiting gray hair and a lined face, the other showing a gap in place of an incisor. They carried a deer slung from a pole, its antlers pulling its head to one side.

“
Those spears look like the one that killed the lion,” she said. “Thick shafts, stone points.”

“
They ought to,” Calder said. “A Neanderthal hunting party rescued her from the river.” He waggled his hand. “Though she probably didn’t consider it a ‘rescue.
’
”

The second painting showed the young Cro-Magnon woman seated by a campfire in a crude-looking rock shelter, a bruised leg sticking straight out. She was holding a chunk of meat while watching a stocky Neanderthal woman gyrate before the flames. A scraggly-haired woman sat beside her, while the gray-haired man stood beyond in semi-darkness.

Blaine wondered what the activity signified. Some kind of acceptance ceremony? She’d have to see what Calder thought. Maybe the next picture would provide a clue. She could hardly believe how eager she was to pry into the woman’s long-ago life.

The painting on the lower left depicted the same woman lying on her back with her leather trousers pulled down, revealing a dark bruise on her right thigh. The gap-toothed man crouched beside her, his hand clamped over her crotch.

Uh-oh.
Things weren’t looking so good.

Blaine moved to the final picture. The Neanderthal with the broken nose, accompanied by a neat-looking man with a ponytail, stood between the recumbent woman and the gap-toothed man, while the scraggly-haired woman looked on. The artist had made their postures tense, and Blaine even thought she could discern a worried expression on the older woman’s face.

She blinked as Calder’s camera flashed again.

“
Time to go,” he said. Tucking the little camera into his kit bag, he gestured at the black water of the tunnel.

“
Ladies first.”

#

The outboard sputtered and died. Zinchenko braced his tree-trunk legs and gave the cord another yank. Another sputter.

Great, Calder thought. They were in the middle of nowhere, diving under an unstable mountain and dependent on a balky engine. He wondered how well the scuba gear had been maintained. If s regulator seized while they were in the cave . . .

Finally the engine caught and the big Russian swung the prow of the johnboat. Calder, facing forward beside Blaine on the thwart, focused on the two trailers that hunkered on the far shore of the elongated lake. He didn’t see any movement.

He turned. “Fedor, when we entered the tunnel this morning a portion had shifted.”

“
Da
?”

“
Do you experience small quakes like last night’s very often?”

“
Da
.”

“
And do you regularly get big ones?”

He cocked his head, as if considering. “
Nyet
.”

“
I’m wondering why the tunnel is still intact after thousands of years, when a minor temblor can cause a shift.”

Zinchenko adjusted their heading, skirted a raft of thin ice, and pointed the prow toward the trailers again. Calder heard a cry and looked up to see a huge eagle soar over the lake. It dipped its beak and screamed, the age-old sound echoing off the frozen mountainside.

After more silence from the camp master, he said, “Fedor?”

“
Other diver set charge. Maybe make rock to . . . to de . . .de…”

“
Destabilize?” Calder knew he tended to be didactic, and he hoped he didn’t sound condescending. He himself would get absolutely nowhere in Tajik or spoken Russian, he thought, although he could read the latter.

“
Da
.”

“
And what would you recommend?”

“
Work quick.”

“
Mm.” Calder watched the two trailers grow larger. Sage advice, he thought, if a tad simplistic. The hitch was that he and Blaine were not in a position to rush the job. Not if they wanted to extract the information they’d come for, no less decide how much to pass on to Laszlo Salomon. He wondered again if the potential gain was worth the risk.

Blaine turned to him, her face pixyish under the tight rubber helmet, and Calder was struck again by her slim voluptuousness. What had she meant to imply by
Is that a proposition?
He shook his head, forcing his mind back to the present.

“
I saw you inspecting the male subject’s hands,” Blaine said.

Obviously, he thought, her mind was focused on the job.
Where his should be.

“
He was left-handed.”

She nodded and turned away, seeming lost in thought. She opened her mouth to speak, then stopped and gazed over the lake, which was a cobalt blue this afternoon.

After a moment Calder said, “What is it?”

She hesitated a moment longer. “You know that ninety percent of modern humans are right-handed.”

“
Uh-huh.” Calder glanced around the small boat. “I’m a righty. You also. Fedor is. In fact, if I remember, so are Teague, Fitrat, and Ayni.”

“
And I think, Mathiessen. But when Salomon came to Maui I noticed he’s a lefty, which somehow doesn’t surprise me.”

Calder glanced at Zinchenko, sitting stolidly in the stern. He turned back to Blaine.

“
What are you getting at?”

“
I don’t know.” She stared over the lake again. “Maybe that germ of an idea that I never did explain to you is expanding.”

“
How?” Calder was eager discredit any idea that might further jeopardize his plans to get out of Tajikistan while they still could.

“
Our brains are contralateral. Each hemisphere controls the opposite side of the body. In other words, right-handers have dominant left hemispheres.”

“
I knew that.”

“
The left half of the brain controls functions like reasoning, written and spoken language, arithmetic, and scientific skills. And the right brain performs such roles as insight, imagination, artistic and musical ability, spatial relationships, and complex imagery.”

“
I also knew that,” Calder said. “From my work in computer-aided paleoanthropology. But I suppose you’re going to tell me more.”

“
A study at UCLA found that left-handers have a more flexible brain structure than right-handers because righties force their brains into a more one-sided structure. Without the right-hand bias, you get more nonstandard patterns of brain organization.”

She paused as if to compose her thoughts, and Calder sensed that his was more than chitchat. He wondered how it tied into their mission. He had plenty of problems without adding to them. But he supposed he’d better keep track of his partner’s ides, if only to understand her motivation.

“
So?”

“
For lefties, this means more people at the top and bottom in various categories of thinking, and less in the middle.”

Calder nodded. “I accept that, assuming this left-brain right-brain flexibility idea has any validity. But again, so what?”

“
This effect may explain why so many creative geniuses have been left-handed: Einstein, Newton, Beethoven, Michelangelo, da Vinci, Charlie Chaplin, and Bobby Fisher, to name a few.”

“
Okay, I’ll buy that for now.” Calder smiled. “You’re not telling me this just for show are you?”

Blaine didn’t smile back. “The flexibility comes at a cost. A dominant right hemisphere tends to store information in non-verbal form, and the extra communication between the two halves will make that person seem slow in verbal communication, although his underlying processes are just as fast or faster.”

She paused, and Calder wondered where she was going with this.

“
Maybe you get genius,” she said, “when the two halves communicate readily.”

Calder mulled this. “Are you implying your boss is a creative genius because he’s left-handed and his brain self-communicates well?”

“
He didn’t build a mega corporation by being a conventional thinker.”

“
Supposing you’re right—a big stretch—how does this right-brain, left-brain stuff affect our mission?”

Blaine glanced at Zinchenko, and Calder knew she was remembering to keep the conversation abstract because it was possible the camp master knew more English than he let on, and only Salomon and Mathiessen were to know the real reason for the expedition.

The Russian stared impassively ahead as he steered the boat toward the two trailers.

Blaine said, “It’s something that could have big-time implications for the human race, Ian.” She clenched her hands, held them together. “If only we could . . .”

That was about the third time she’d used his first name, Calder thought. He realized he’d been keeping count. Plus, this morning’s
in and out
wisecrack . . .

He snapped back to the present. “If we could what?”

She shook her head, and he again thought how pixyish her face looked without her ash-blond hair swishing about her shoulders.