Uneasy Relations (4 page)

Frowning, Julie turned to Gideon. “What is a furniture van doing in the middle of the runway?”

“That’s a curious aspect of the Gibraltar airport,” Vanderwater answered for him. “You see—”

But the pilot, with a superior audio system, overrode him. “Now, folks, I know what you’re thinking: ‘What is a furniture lorry doing in the middle of an airport runway in the first place?’ Well, among the many unique aspects of Gib is the fact that it has the only international airport you’re likely to see whose runway is crossed by the main road into town. The only road into town, actually. As you’ll see as we circle past it, the runway extends crosswise across the entire isthmus and then some way out into the bay, so there’s no way for vehicles to get around it. They all have to drive over it. Sorry about the delay, but just settle back for a little longer and enjoy your VIP aerial tour of Gibraltar, courtesy of British Airways.”

“It’s hardly the only thing about the Gibraltar airport that’s unique,” came from 18B. “It’s closer to the city it serves than any other international airport in the world. A lot of people just walk into town from it . . .”

“Really,” said Julie, who was perhaps becoming just a little lectured-out. “That’s—”

“A five-hundred-yard stroll, and you’re at Casemates Square in the town center. An extremely interesting history there, by the way . . .”

Julie quietly sighed, closed her eyes, and settled back.

For the next half hour they circled, Vanderwater eventually running out of things on which to elucidate (not something that happened every day) and Julie running out of attention span, not in that order.

“Gideon,” she said quietly, when there had been a welcome silence from behind them for a few minutes, followed by what sounded suspiciously like a soft, tranquil snore, “I wanted to ask you something about this whole mixing-theory thing.”

“Ha. I knew you weren’t really awake at the Bella Italia. You were faking it.”

“No, I was paying strict attention. This is something you didn’t talk about. I get the impression that you don’t really buy into the admixture-theory idea.”

“Oh, it’s not that I don’t buy into it. Humans and Neanderthals coexisted in the same area for several thousand years, after all, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the occasional particularly cute human babe caught the eye of some horny Neanderthal caveman, or vice versa. Genetically, there really doesn’t seem to be that much difference between us. But I’m not about to jump on the bandwagon and declare it to one and all as Revealed Truth. I mean, there’s not that much difference between us and chimps either, but I haven’t heard of any hot romances lately, have you? Not that I’m definitively on the other side either. There are still plenty of uncertainties.”

“But you’re the one who did that analysis on the skeletons.”

“Well, one of the team, yes. Don’t forget, there were Lyle and Harvey too.”

“Don’t be modest. You were the senior author of the paper. And if the child is a hybrid between the humans and—”

“That’s the issue, Julie. We never used the term
hybrid
. We just described what we found.”

“You weaseled, in other words.”

“Precisely.” He laughed. “Well, no, not that I haven’t been known to weasel when the situation demanded it, but in this case the data just didn’t warrant anything more conclusive See, most of the differences between Neanderthal and human skeletons are really quantitative, not qualitative. Oh, there are some specific, pretty minor distinctions — Neanderthal jawbones have this space behind their molars, the retromolar gap, that we don’t have, and there’s a difference in the shape of the mandibular foramen — but essentially, we’re talking about matters of scale.”

“The Neanderthals were bigger? More rugged?”

“Not bigger overall, no. They did have thicker bones, bigger brow ridges, bigger occipital buns; but we have bigger chins, bigger foreheads. And there are differences in the relative proportions of long-bone lengths. It’s that kind of thing. So, sure, we all can agree that such and such an adult skeleton is Neanderthal, and another one is human, but when it comes to somebody like the First Kid, Gibraltar Boy, he’s still a child; you’re dealing with traits that haven’t yet reached their adult form. He looks a little like both. So, yes, he might be a hybrid, or maybe you’re simply looking at a Neanderthal that just happened to have a smaller brow ridge than his friends. Or maybe you’re looking at a human child who had a receding chin.”

“Well, what do
you
think? I mean, you personally, not professionally? ”

“I honestly don’t know. I certainly wouldn’t be bowled over if he
is
a hybrid. I also wouldn’t be bowled over if he isn’t. Could be human. Could also be Neanderthal.”

“Oh, that’s helpful.”

“Sorry, it’s the best I can do. The thing is, it’s not as if we have thousands of Neanderthal remains to look at and compare. At most there are only a few hundred in the entire world, and most of those are just fragments, and very few are children, so we’re still learning what their traits were. Anyway, the truth is, I was more excited about the pathology on the female’s skeleton. That was something you could hang your hat on. The earliest known case of ankylosing spondylitis in a human being. Until Gibraltar Woman, the first case we knew about was from the Egyptian Neolithic, a good fifteen thousand years later!”

“I remember how excited about that you were.” She smiled. “I can see how excited you are about it
now
. And wasn’t there some graduate student somewhere who was going to do her dissertation on it?”

“Yes, from Cal, I think. She contacted me a year or so after Europa Point. She was pretty sure she’d run across another case of it from about the same time period, at some little site in Portugal, or was it Spain? Spain, I think. She thought there might be a dissertation topic there, on genetic anomalies among early modern humans.”

“And was there?”

“I don’t know. She e-mailed me a couple of times with questions and then I never heard from her again. Which probably means there wasn’t. Maybe the case she’d come across wasn’t ankylosing spondylitis after all; maybe it was just advanced arthritis and she hadn’t been able to tell the difference on her own. She probably found something else to work on.”

“Well, the runway’s clear, folks,” the captain announced. “We’re on our way in.”

There was scattered applause, and then, after a thoughtful pause, Julie said, “Gideon, back to the hybrid issue, what about those specific traits you mentioned? That space behind the molars, that mandibular foramen thing? Did Gibraltar Boy have them or didn’t he?”

“Moot point. The jawbone’s missing. They’re both partial skeletons, remember, and pretty banged up at that.”

“Okay, what about DNA? Wouldn’t that tell if he was human, or Neanderthal, or a mix?”

“No DNA. It’s always pretty iffy with things that old. In this case the bones have lost too much collagen for a reliable test.”

“So I guess we’ll never know for sure.”

“I guess we won’t.” He smiled. “I can live with it. There are more important things to worry about.”

“THE
Rock itself,” said the donnish-looking, donnish-sounding gentleman to his huddled audience of four men and three women, “on the very crest of which we now stand, is, as most of you already know, not really a ‘rock’ in the sense of a single giant monolith, but a narrow, limestone spine running north-south for approximately, ah, mmm, three miles. The famous massive, perpendicular aspect that we know from photographs is simply its northern terminus. Now, to the west, behind us, it slopes less precipitously down to Gibraltar town, which you can see spread out approximately thirteen hundred feet below us — or rather four hundred
meters
, as the lords of Brussels now decree that I must say, ah-ha-ha.”

Donnish he might be, but in fact he was the only member of the group, other than Julie Oliver, who was not a teacher. Rowley G. Boyd, MA (Oxon), Gideon’s soon-to-be fellow author in Javelin’s Frontiers of Science series, was the director of the Gibraltar Museum of Archaeology and Geology. It was the museum that had arranged this visit to the Rock (including a complimentary three-course lunch) for this group of five scholars and two spouses who had arrived a day early for the Paleoanthropological Society conference, so as to be able to participate in this evening’s symposium for Ivan Gunderson. Rowley had thought that the distinguished assemblage would appreciate a recreational outing to the top of Gibraltar’s celebrated monolith, even though several had been there before. Part of the treat was to have been the breathtaking ride up by cable car, but they’d had to drive up in a stuffy, uncomfortable taxi van instead because the cable was shut down today on account of the strong winds at the top.

Which was also the reason that Rowley’s audience was huddled so tightly.

“Now then, to the south,” he continued, “across the straits, the dun-colored mountains are the, ah, er, Atlas Mountains of Morocco. To the west, across Gibraltar Bay, we have Algeciras, Spain, about which, heh-heh, there is an amusing saying . . .”

But they were not to learn what the amusing saying about Algeciras was, at least not yet. Rowley was somewhat of a mumbler — a hem-and-hawer — at the best of times (an impediment not helped by the small, ceramic-bit pipe that was forever clenched between his teeth, usually unlit), and this morning’s wind gusts sporadically plucked the words out of his mouth and whirled them, unheard, out over the strait.

“Can’t hear a damn thing, Rowley,” said Audrey Godwin-Pope, the Horizon Foundation’s director of Field Archaeology, whose metallic, incisive voice would have had no difficulty being heard above buffeting that was far stronger than this. “Too windy. And please make an effort not to swallow your words.”

Rowley, taking no offense (Audrey was Audrey; what could one do?), expanded his chest and attempted to raise his volume a tad, though he didn’t go so far as to take the pipe from his mouth. “Yes, this wind is a curious meteorological phenomenon, you know, and unique to the Straits of Gibraltar. The Spaniards refer to it the
poniente
, and it—”

“Far be it from me to correct a native, Rowley, especially you, but I’m afraid you’re in error there,” said Adrian Vanderwater. “The
poniente
is the westerly wind that comes in from the Atlantic. This one, coming from the east, out of the Mediterranean, would be the
levanter
. . .”

“The
levanter
?” echoed Rowley, removing the pipe and tapping it against his teeth. “Are you sure? You know, I always remember the difference by—”

“. . . which, might I add, would mean that the rain and fog are not likely to be very far behind.”

“Well, whatever the hell you call it, it’s getting pretty bad out here,” Audrey grumped, drawing her coat around her lean, spiky frame. “The fog’s starting to come in, all right, and I just got a spatter of rain on my glasses. And it’s getting cold.”

“Oh, now, Aud,” said her burly husband, Buck, standing beside her, “it’s not as bad as all that.” As he spoke, he swept off his jacket — he wore only a polo shirt underneath — and offered it to her.

Gideon, knowing Audrey (but not Buck), expected her to swat it irritably aside. Instead, he watched in amazement as she practically melted, allowing Buck to place it tenderly around her shoulders, from which it hung down to her knees. And all the while she looked up at him — he was a good foot taller than she was — the way a besotted teenager gazes at her lover.

Astounding. But it lasted no more than a few seconds. As soon as the jacket was settled comfortably around her, she was her old self again, assailing Rowley. “In any case, I’m ready to eat. It’s almost noon. Where do we get this lunch you promised? It better be indoors.”

Rowley chuckled. “Why, of course it’s indoors. There’s a charming little restaurant right in the cable car terminal building. I’ve booked the whole place for us. And yes, I suppose it would be best to straggle off to it before it gets any worse. It’s just up the path, no more than a five-minute walk.”

And off they straggled in twos and threes. They’d all had dinner together at the hotel the previous evening, renewing old acquaintances and making new ones. Among the old acquaintances for Gideon and Julie was Pru McGinnis, she of the short, flyaway red hair, the muscular washerwoman forearms, the thick, chapped, red wrists, and the overall build of a VW bus, big, square, and sturdy. Now a fellow at the august Franco-American
Institut de Préhistoire
in Les Eyzies, France, she’d been a student of Gideon’s in the very first graduate course he’d ever taught, although she was only a few years his junior. A jolly, animated, resourceful New York-born woman approaching forty, she’d gotten an MA in physical anthropology under Gideon, then — to Gideon’s disappointment — had switched to theoretical archaeology for her doctorate. He had been on her doctoral committee and had had to sit in on the defense of her dissertation:
Post-processual, Structural, and Contextual Paradigms in Archaeology, Considered from an Epistemological Perspective.
He hadn’t understood a word.

Before moving on to the
Institut
, she’d taught for a few years at the University of Missouri, where she’d picked up a Western accent, soon gone, and a penchant for Western garb, which had stayed with her. Today she was in a tailored plum-colored cowboy shirt, a flouncy denim-and-gingham square-dancing skirt (sans crinoline), and worn, lizard-skin boots.

As a student, she had been criticized by one of Gideon’s fellow instructors as being “insufficiently reverent,” but Gideon had found her to be a breath of fresh air in an otherwise hidebound department. He had liked her as a pupil, been proud of her as a protégée, and now considered her a friend, as did Julie.

Like most first-time visitors to the Rock, the Olivers were fascinated by the Barbary apes that scrambled around them or sat hunched and glowering along the edges of the path, grooming each other or moodily eating handouts given them by the mostly British tourists despite the prominent signs warning of a five-hundred-pound penalty for doing so. And the snacks they fed the animals were as bad as the snacks they fed themselves: sweets, sweets, and more sweets — candy bars, muffins, sugared biscuits, and packaged cakes, with the occasional bag of flavored crisps to break the monotony.