What Lot's Wife Saw (12 page)

“I fail to see any logic in these orders from the Seventy-Five,” disagreed Captain Drake.

“Can we really expect to be able to fathom – ignorant mental midgets that we are – the administrative methods of our superhuman employers!” I shouted.

“Of course, we all know what a low value the Seventy-Five place on human life, we’ve felt it in our bones,” sighed Montenegro.

“Yes, but such a dishonourable finale?” commented Drake in disbelief.

I, on the other hand, found the finale both noble and magnificent, worthy of the stature of the Governor and the genius of the Seventy-Five. It’s possible that Bera had known the exact date of his termination from the beginning, that it’d be two weeks before the Colony’s twentieth anniversary. In the light of this realisation, his whole stance, his behaviour towards us, could be viewed in a totally different way. I felt the need to bow low.

Lady Regina sat on the edge of the bed, leant over her husband’s face and scrutinised it. She ascertained that Bera had shaved himself last night, despite the fact that he wouldn’t be leaving the house. He’d shaved and then dressed to die? Couldn’t he have even bothered to say goodbye or, at least, informed her of his plans?

“Speak!” she ordered. She raised her hand and slapped his face. “Talk, you bastard! I was a widow-in-waiting and no one bothered to tell me? What other plans did you and your depraved Seventy-Five have in store for me?”

Montenegro pulled her back off the bed but she angrily twisted free and started to rove around the room, inspecting each corner carefully. She could see that Bera had left it uncharacteristically tidy, surely for the first time in his life. Even the ashtray on the dresser, which normally would have borne witness to the cigars he had smoked at night, was washed and dried. The unblemished tidiness of the room made her hair stand on end.

“This is no bedroom, it’s a mausoleum! And we, willingly, locked ourselves in with him without having the slightest clue why!”

Drake worried whether the Governor’s death meant that the Colony was in grave danger, perhaps from a full-blown attack by the Suez Mamelukes or from an eruption from the Rift. Perhaps the Seventy-Five judged that they couldn’t evacuate the Colony in time and so informed Bera, who chose to die peacefully, with decorum.

Montenegro griped that if the Colony were destroyed, the Seventy-Five wouldn’t have to account to anyone. “We are so isolated that they could offer any theory they want to world opinion, without there being anyone in a position to check up on them.” Should we all embark on Cortez’s boat and escape while we still could?

Fabrizio maintained that if some catastrophe was expected, we would’ve heard about it. Drake reminded him that we’re three weeks behind as far as world news was concerned so in that he wasn’t wrong. Bateau suggested that we ask Bianca if she’d read anything, as she’s the only one who reads the world press. We cannot stand the sight of newspapers, we have no wish to learn anything that occurs in the world we left behind, but Bateau’s daughter pores over them, cover to cover. She has no experience of the outside world and might well not understand all that she reads, but our group seemed more willing to put their trust in her rather than in common logic.

I pleaded with them to consider the possibility that should the Colony remain unaffected and intact but without Secretary, Judge, Captain of the Guard, Doctor, Priest and Governor’s widow, on our arrival in Paris fines and handcuffs would await us. Our contracts are perfectly clear on the matter of abandoning our posts, criminal neglect and dereliction of duty. The Colony would paralyse in our wake, resulting in incalculable loss of income for the Seventy-Five, and it would take us over thirty lifetimes to work off our debt. Thankfully, Dr Fabrizio agreed with me.

“Can’t we stop continuously thinking of the worst possible scenarios? Couldn’t it be that Bera simply failed to meet some criteria and as punishment was instructed by the Seventy-Five to take his own life?”

“How can you all be so sure that this was a suicide?” Judge Bateau screamed.

“Because if it isn’t a suicide, and an enforced suicide at that, it means that for the first time the Seventy-Five have got it very wrong, since the Colony will remain ungoverned for a minimum of six weeks. They either failed to protect a sane Bera should he have been murdered or, equally miserably, protect the Colony from him since he must have been an unbalanced, schizophrenic suicide. Are you ready to live with such tragic fallibility in the Seventy-Five, for I am not!” Montenegro stated emphatically.

No one could make the mistake of underestimating the wise Seventy-Five, but also, no one could come up with a logical explanation. We were at our wits’ end, trying to imagine what our employers would be expecting of us. Were we being tested? Were we being punished? What in the world did they want us to do?

PRIEST MONTENEGRO

… I was looking at the dead Governor and I felt the sabre-toothed tiger coming back to life in my memory. The prehistoric feline which had injured my youth and transformed me from a paleontologist into a fossil thief, just as the Overflow had transformed me from a smuggler of antiquities into a priest. Would this smiling cadaver transform me yet again?

A lifetime ago, when Europe had a south and I hadn’t yet learnt how ephemeral reality was, I was enthralled by exploring the caves of lower Africa, with the ink not yet dry on my anthropology degree. I believed that there’d always be time to return to my homeland, Danilovgrad, where my grandmother was waiting, because science, unlike her, couldn’t wait.

All the peoples of the Balkans secretly love Africa, their hearts bleed when they dream of it, and even though they might never have seen it on a map, they smell it on their fingertips, they can sense it in the throbbing of their veins, they breathe it in the twilight, but my boundless curiosity, with a sprinkling of the magic spells of the science of illusions, hypnotised me and led me to this continent from where life began, and where, one day, it will end. The hardships of the jungle invigorated me: sleeping under the rain, the foul drinking water, the deadly snakes, and even the endless arguments with local anthropologists with whom I was in perpetual disagreement. Whoever seeks to illuminate the secrets of man’s evolutionary history must be prepared to sink into the mud up to his chin, expose his blood to all sorts of infectious insect bites and to break his fingernails hanging off cliff walls. The more I suffered, the more momentous would be the discovery that awaited me in the end.

When, after an exhausting expedition and several unproductive excavations, we unearthed the paleontological skeleton from the depths of the cave, I nearly went mad with delight. There was no doubt that it was an
Australopithecus
, a hominid, a kind of pre-human. The stalagmites in the cave could be dated back to three million years of age. The recovered skeleton was almost complete. In height, it was no taller than today’s Pygmies and its bones displayed many of the characteristics of apes. However, if you studied the spinal column, the pelvis with the thigh bones, and the occipital section in the base of the skull, you would conclude that this being walked upright and not on all fours. The canines were of medium size, and the curved set of teeth bore witness more to the teeth of a human than an ape. We’d come face to face with an astonishing relic of that transitional period when man’s ancestors branched off from the primates and began taking their first tentative steps on the ladder of evolution.

I was overwhelmed with emotion as I gazed at my remote ancestor. I, who had dedicated my life to filling in the gaps in the story of man’s long march along the road from fish through amphibian to ape, was in nirvana. The transformations of this small animal with its unbelievable potential enabled it to fulfil its destiny to conquer the earth.

I knelt and reverently studied the skull bones, which appeared capable of encasing a brain larger than that of an ape. The larger brain was the only weapon in my ancestor’s armoury from all the way back to the time that it was a scrawny tree shrew but still blessed with more grey matter than the dim-witted mighty dinosaurs. After millions of years it evolved to take the shape of this Australopithecine which, although disadvantaged and defenceless, was still able to survive in a jungle dominated by monstrous felines with canines of up to half a metre in length which protruded below their lower jaw. Small and naked, with jokes for nails and stubs for teeth, the Australopithecine must have secretively stared out from behind the wet leaves at the sabre-toothed cats and felt intensely jealous of their armament while little realising that they were condemned to extinction, whereas he was destined to emerge from prehistory in increasing numbers. His line would comprehensively out-trump his lethal adversary, which not only became extinct, but faded from memory.

The team encamped near the discovery and set to work. We carefully cleared the cave from the layers of soil that had covered the stratum that contained the skeleton in order to recreate the scene and allow it to tell its own story. Usually, next to such remains you can find a refuse heap of the scraps of the occupants’ meals and of their discarded tools. I was sure that Australopithecines were tool users, something that I’d argued in my university thesis, and had sworn that I’d find evidence to prove it. The local anthropologists vehemently disagreed, citing the numerous Australopithecine digs in the limestone caves of this region. Not one of them had revealed a single tool, not even a shaped stone which had displayed signs of having been purposefully worked. In the cave we’d explored, however, we found plenty of bones of large mammals, wild pigs, ancestors of giraffes and antelopes. Their skeletons revealed that they’d been attacked from the side and had borne the scars of a sharp implement that had torn into them, suggesting a single, right-handed attacker. We found baboon skulls as well that’d been cracked open by a sharp tool. These animals must’ve been the prey of the anthropoid, which had hunted them down and had dragged them into its cave to eat in safety. Bones had been tossed about after the meal and so, three million years later, we could collect them and admire his protein-rich diet. Our ancestor may have been short of stature, and possibly incapable of fashioning tools, but he must’ve used sharp sticks and stones. How else could he have brought down animals larger, faster and better armed than himself? The fact that the Australopithecus had hunted baboons for food, although they were his distant kin, meant that he was already aware of his superiority and had completed his conscious split from them. In addition, his skeleton, with most of the bones unbroken, was more intact than the other ones, which indicated that he’d been the hunter who died of natural causes, while the others had been torn to pieces and their bones gnawed.

I was intoxicated by the discovery and I was already mapping out my next paper. I instructed Ali to guard the cave and spent every waking hour studying the remains. I wished that my deceased ancestor would speak to me and describe how he’d vanquished the gigantic beasts that lay spread around him and help me prove my theory. I searched in a wide radius around the hunter’s cave but could find no trace of a tool or a weapon. The native anthropologists laughed as they refused even to entertain the possibility that this humanoid would’ve attacked these beasts, pointing to his teeth which proved him to be a vegetarian and, at a stretch, a consumer of small game like frogs, lizards and rats. But I’d found the fruits of the hunt which upset all the existing theories and proved that the Australopithecines had started eating meat earlier than had been believed. It seemed that in this region of Africa the advance of civilisation had taken a shortcut; Australopithecus had dared to take on the ferocious beasts of the jungle. For him to have gained the necessary confidence, it meant that he’d found some way to surprise them, corner them and overcome them.

Many weeks passed during which I was begging the Australo-pithecus to reveal the secrets of his superiority, which I never doubted. Up to the day when it was finally, but definitely, established that the cave was not the abode of Australopithecus but the lair of carnivorous felines. His presence there was not as a hunter, but as prey of some giant sabre-toothed cat which had decapitated him with one snap of its jaws, had torn through the flanks of the larger mammals with its extraordinary canines and perforated the skulls of the baboons. Its meals had been dragged back to the cave to be consumed at leisure. My distant ancestor, who was destined to conquer the earth, had been nothing but the carnivore’s snack. The reason that his skeleton seemed to be in such better condition compared to those of the larger animals could well be attributed to the puny resistance he put up both before and after death. My theory of his superiority and success had been perversely based on his comparative, extreme weakness. He hadn’t fought back; instead through stupidity or dull reflexes he’d meekly accepted to be eaten.

This revelation hit below the belt. It plunged me into the uncharted depths of depression, not only because my thesis had just flown out the window, but because the magnitude of my stupidity had been made painfully clear and youthful insistence on molding the past to fit my concept of its future had been exposed for the amateurism it was. Finding ten scattered skeletons, one of which, with a little imagination, resembled mine, I immediately jumped to the conclusion that that was the main actor of the scene, the victor of the debacle, for if he were not, how come it was I and not some descendant of the sabre-tooth that was studying the fossils? What consolation could I draw from my science, which had allowed me to believe that there was a law, valid through the ages, that decreed that one genus would display its superiority over another at each opportunity (my genus, damn it!), and now I’m forced to swallow the indigestible truth that who ends up the victim and who the hunter comes down to the circumstances of the moment, those of each separate contest. Luck might play a role but the outcome is never preordained by axiomatic superiority. By analogy, all theories based on predestination are therefore disproved and so how am I, a Balkan, to continue my life while accepting the uncomfortable truth that there is no mysterious elixir hidden in the last chain of my DNA which, my present predicament notwithstanding, would ensure my future triumph? Suddenly, mankind’s supremacy over cats has no relevance because of the find where this particular ancestor, in the vicinity of that specific cave, had been so shamefully vanquished. It seemed hard to imagine how I could’ve been so derogatory of the sabre-tooth’s failure to avoid extinction, when that specific sabre-tooth, who’d excelled in that specific debacle, must’ve been thinking as he picked my ancestor’s bones from between his teeth, “What a dumb animal.”