Brother Esau

by John Gribbin, Douglas Orgill

Genres: Science Fiction; Hard Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

The Earth does not belong to man alone The Himalayas bury their secrets well. Two skulls unearthed in the cradle of the human race - the remote heights of Kashmir - throw evolutionary theory into chaos. But a far more disturbing secret lies hidden deep in the bleak mountains and snow-swept valleys unseen by human eyes. A few miles from the explosive triangle of tension where Afghanistan and Pakistan border on India the story of the century breaks. And the echoes of the most shattering revelation yet made to man threaten to plunge the world into total war which will turn the cradle of the human race into its final grave.

Release date: February 25, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 216

Sample

The snow leopard had twenty seconds to live. Satiated, half-asleep, he stretched beside a spur of rock which buttressed the first few feet of a sheer drop into the Himalayan valley. His belly was comfortably full of the feral goat he had killed a hundred feet lower, twenty minutes ago. Far, far below, the silver thread of a river cut across the green-brown patchwork of the valley floor. Although the ledge where the leopard sunned his eighty pounds of flesh and bone and muscle was fully 12,000 feet higher, the midday air was warm. Two bright orange butterflies skipped over the thin grass, endlessly spiralling for position in an intricate game of territory or sex or something more unknowably complicated than either of these. Lazily, the leopard blinked his yellow eyes as they passed within paw-length, but he was too relaxed to cuff at them in play as he sometimes did. He was safe, supreme, in the heart of his own territory … the undisputed ruler of three desolate square miles of the Great Himalaya.

White clouds, driven by air currents funnelled from the mountain walls, moved steadily down the valley, hundreds of feet below the ledge where the leopard lay. Yet above them the air was still. The autumn sunlight gilded the fronds of a cluster of ferns sprouting from the base of the spur. It etched sharp shadows from the wrecked trunk of a long-dead pine which lay a few feet along the ledge. The whole world seemed set in the stillness of a trance. There came the very faintest phantom of a sound. Instantly, in that first thousandth of a second, the snow leopard’s ears pricked. In the same splinter of time, the rock beside which he sprawled seemed to blur and alter shape.

The leopard was seized through the thick mottled fur of his neck, and below the muscles of a hind-leg. Even as he struggled, snarling, to turn his jaws behind, his back was arched uncontrollably, helplessly. With a sharp snap, his spine broke. He twitched on the turf, his eyes clouding. The butterflies drifted back, still intent on their private manoeuvres. The white clouds navigated on down the valley towards China and Ladakh. For a moment or two, a higher cloud passed across the sun, and the ledge was chill. As though pulled down by invisible strings, the orange butterflies sank to earth, the flying veins in their wings contracting as they cooled. Nothing now moved on the ledge. The leopard was dead.

Kneeling uncomfortably on the flinty ground, Prakash Chowdhuri thrust the fingers of his right hand through the scum-like crust which remained in the lee of the rocks from last winter’s snowfall. There was definitely something there. He could feel it, embedded in the volcanic tuff under the overhang of the rock. A gust of wind, with a first scattering of rain, blew up the valley, fluttering the plastic tags on the grid of one-meter squares which made up Bed Four. He glanced over his shoulder. On the other side of the dig Mohammad, the foreman of the Kashmiri workmen, was watching him covertly. Chowdhuri sat back, squatting on his heels.

‘Bring me the sieve,’ he said sharply. ‘And then go down to the tents and fetch my camera.’

As soon as Mohammad had placed the sieve beside him and disappeared down the old stream bed towards the camp, Chowdhuri turned back to the overhang where he had been working. He took from his belt the pointed, flat-bladed chisel that a back-yard foundry in Srinagar had made for him from a fifteen-centimetre nail. Delicately, he began to probe the point into the shale, working it steadily back and forward until the tuff began to break up. Then he put his hand back under the overhang and drew out handfuls of powdered, crumbled tuff—the residue of a volcanic eruption long, long ago, when the Himalayas were still young. One by one the handfuls went into the sieve. At last he sank back on his heels and gently shook the sieve. Something lay greyish-white against the red ash.

He picked it out of the sieve, holding it between finger and thumb. There was no doubt what it was … a tooth. With mounting excitement he turned it over, holding it now in the cupped palm of his other hand. It wasn’t one of the frequently-encountered fossil fangs from the ancestral form of hyena which had roamed here ten thousand centuries ago, but a large primate molar, from a monkey or an ape. Unbelievingly, he counted the bump-like cusps around its edge. Yes, there were five. Its owner, then, had been an ape. He was no specialised anatomist, but he knew enough anatomy for his job. Men and other apes, like chimpanzees, had five cusps. Monkeys had four.

The rain-gusts were settling into a steady drizzle, scudding up the valley and soaking the shale around him. Heedless of this, he lay full-length on the ground and thrust his wrist further into the overhang. His fingers met with a hard smooth surface, and then, exploring lower, with a curved row of jagged indentations. A jaw … he was sure of it … it was a jaw. His trousers and anorak were now sodden, but he pressed himself up against the overhang, unclipping a small pencil-torch from his belt. With his head wedged under the overhang he positioned the torch against his ear and switched it on. Little more than a foot away the empty eye-sockets of a skull stared into his.

The blood rushed to his head, and he felt physically sick, almost faint. He wriggled into a better position, his heart pounding, and looked once more at the skull in the thin light of the torch. It seemed to be wedged awkwardly between two layers of hardened tuff. The upper half, with the eye-sockets and the great brow-ridge, was mostly in shadow, and however he manoeuvred the torch in the few inches of space available, he could see no more of it. The jaw, both mandible and frontal teeth, was broken away, embedded in the lower level of tuff, at the edge of which his fingers had found the single molar.

Chowdhuri forced himself to be calm. Even on this shadowy inspection it looked as though the frontal dentition, at least, was almost complete. He peered again at the upper half. The torch battery was beginning to fade, and the shadows around the empty eyes were deeper than ever. There was something alien about that brow-ridge … no matter, no matter, that would have to wait for Liliane. It was going to be a difficult skull to move. But Liliane would deal with that.

As he rose stiffly to his feet he saw that Mohammad was back from the tents. Silently, the Kashmiri held out Chowdhuri’s camera. The light was poor, but Chowdhuri took four pictures of the general site from various angles, and then tried to position the camera, with its flash attachment, under the overhang of the rock. There was no way he could get his eye to the viewfinder, but he took four more flash pictures with the lens pointing to where the two halves of the skull were wedged. The pictures were unlikely to be of much value, but at least he would be able to tell Liliane he had obeyed her rules. He looked round. Mohammad was standing beside him.

‘Is there something there, sahib?’

There was no point in completely evading the question, though Chowdhuri was not eager to have the find talked about yet among the workmen. If that happened, he reflected, it would be all over Srinagar, the next time one of the Kashmiris went into the little Kashmir summer capital for supplies.

‘Yes, there is something, Mohammad. What it is—’ he hesitated for a moment—‘I am not sure. We will leave it until the memsahib returns.’

‘Shall I make a shelter for it, sahib? As we did for the hyena bones? It is a time of rain.’

Chowdhuri considered for a moment.

‘No,’ he said at last. ‘It—whatever it is—is well sheltered by the rock.’

Better, he thought, not to indicate too closely either what or precisely where it is. He had no especial reason to distrust Mohammad or the other four workmen, but after all, they were Kashmiris. Any Indian from further south knew that Kashmiris were a treacherous, dishonest, swindling race.

When he reached the huddle of tents on the grassy expanse of the mountain merg, two hundred feet below Bed Four, Harry Kernow was waiting for him. His eyes rested on the camera which swung from Chowdhuri’s shoulder.

‘Have you found something, Prakash?’

Chowdhuri nodded, hesitating for a moment. ‘Yes, I think it may be important. You’re picking up Liliane tomorrow?’

‘Yes, I’m leaving early in the morning. Mohammad can take the ponies down and wait for Liliane and me to get back in the Land-Rover from Srinagar. Unless the plane is late we’ll be back before dark. Or we might stay on the houseboat. Anyway, Mohammad has a friend who runs that old dak-bungalow in the valley. He can wait there. But what have you found?’

‘I’d rather not say yet, Harry. I think we should wait for Liliane. She’ll be back tomorrow, or the next day.’

The Englishman grinned. ‘Have it your way.’

‘It’s not my way, Harry, it’s Liliane’s way. She made the rules. You know that.’

‘You always obey the rules, don’t you, Prakash?’ said another voice, behind them.

Chowdhuri swung round. It was the American, Tom Meachem, looking at him, half-smiling.

‘What’s to stop me or Harry going up there and looking as much as we want?’ said Meachem.

Harry laughed, patting Chowdhuri on the shoulder. ‘Count me out, Tom. You and Prakash and Judy and Liliane are the palaeontologists. It’s you who’re rooting around here for human beginnings, not me. I’m just here to run thexamp. I don’t join the in-fighting.’

Chowdhuri looked at Meachem and swallowed, ‘I don’t think you should go up there, Tom. Liliane wouldn’t like that.’

Never certain whether Meachem was joking or serious, Chowdhuri was always nervous of these exchanges with the American, though they usually fizzled out and came to nothing.

‘I’m asking you not to go,’ Chowdhuri said again. ‘I am second-in-charge here. I hope you will agree not to go up there yet.’

Meachem looked at him for a moment, shrugged, and went back into his tent. Harry turned to Chowdhuri.

‘He won’t do it, you know. He just likes to assert his independence from time to time. But he won’t cross Liliane.’

‘How is Judy?’ asked Chowdhuri, to change the subject.

Kernow jerked his head towards the second of the six tents. ‘Asleep at the moment,’ he said. ‘But I think she’s going to be all right in a day or so. I’ve given her a couple of tablets, and she can have two more this evening. They should do the trick. We all get a touch of tummy when we first come out here. That’s where you’re lucky, Prakash.’

‘Oh, I’ve had it, too, last year,’ said Chowdhuri. ‘These damn Kashmiris—they never wash the fruit …’

Almost four hundred miles south of the tents on the mountain meadow, Liliane Erckmann lay awake in her hotel room in Chandigarh, listening to the quiet hiss of the punkah blades revolving on the ceiling above her. She was annoyed—with herself as much as with others, though the realisation did not soothe her. Why, for three days, had she wasted her time here in the Indian Punjab, when she ached to be back at the dig in Kashmir? Surely Harry could have had enough perception to see that she ought to have stayed at Shalamerg at this stage of the operations, how that they were beginning on Bed Four. It’s mostly my own fault, though, she reminded herself. When they put me in charge, I made up my mind that I’d behave like a man, take no privileges, lead from the front. I ought to have known that’s precisely how a man would not have behaved—that he’d have taken all the privileges he wanted, having led from the front just long enough to prove himself to the other men. It was ridiculous. Here she was, with a doctorate in anthropology from Berkeley and another in palaeontology from the Sorbonne, by far the best qualified investigator in the party—and the best brain, too, she told herself firmly—wasting time and nervous energy on a hot sticky return trip to the University of the Punjab to dump a load of not-very-exciting specimens at the Institute, simply because it was her turn for that particular job. Somebody else could easily have done it, but nobody else had offered. Harry Kernow was supposed to be in charge of administration. He could have managed it so that she stayed at Shalamerg, even if it meant altering the rota.

Yet perhaps it had a bonus side after all. The University here was important—its prestige in India was the deciding factor which had persuaded the Government in Delhi to give permission for the dig. Kashmir was a very fraught area, politically speaking, as Chowdhuri sometimes reminded them. Chowdhuri was observer as well as colleague, acting as the University’s representative in the party. So maybe it was no bad thing that the Indians at the Institute should see that she, the leader, didn’t mind coming down to Chandigarh every so often. If she’d sent Chowdhuri again, out of turn, they—and he—might have thought he was being used as a messenger boy.

I don’t like Chandigarh, she thought sleepily. Too modern, too rectilinear, a battery city for battery human beings. No, that’s unfair. Indians aren’t battery humans. They’ve been what they are for a long, long time … longer than the American half of me, or the French half, for that matter, can properly comprehend. Not battery humans at all. Just humans in an intolerable situation, like the rest of us. A situation that’s been developing steadily for five thousand years. And even that’s a totally inadequate concept. Of all the people in the world, I should be one of the few who know better. Not five thousand years. Not fifty thousand years. Something, give or take a few millennia, closer to a million years.

As she turned on her side to sleep her mind flicked for a last drowsy moment to the rocky slope in Kashmir, marked with its red and blue plastic tags, that was now known as Bed Four. Perhaps Bed Four was one of the places where it had all begun.

‘How much longer do you imagine Erckmann will be able to carry on out there?’ asked the Directeur of the Musée de I’Homme Primitif, looking absently out of his high office window, watching the tops of the lime trees shake in the sunshine. Somewhere to the east roared Paris, but here in the great museum’s administrative annexe it was peaceful. The man opposite shrugged, wagging his grey head with wry amusement.

‘Who knows? She’s got American money, of course—as well as our own grant. And it’s a small party. Not too expensive …’

The Directeur reached out and stirred his tea. This cup in the afternoon was an English habit—almost the only Anglo-Saxon habit he liked.

‘Oh, Emile, it’s always expensive in Kashmir,’ he said. ‘I remember ten years ago. We were working on that new area for Ramapithecus, you recall?’

The other nodded.

‘It was expensive then,’ said the Directeur. ‘We were fifteen per cent over budget. The costs must be horrific now.’

‘And we got results on Ramapithecus,’ said Emile.

The Directeur laughed. ‘Well, we confirmed other people’s findings, at any rate, Emile. That jaw—the best yet. Eleven million years ago, and it ate like a man—well, something like a man. More like a man than an ape, at any rate.’

‘You should see some of my students eat,’ said Emile morosely. ‘And so … what are you going to do about Erckmann?’

‘Give her another month, and then put the whole thing to the Committee,’ said the Directeur. ‘I think they’ll conclude she’s had a fair chance. They’ll have to refer everything to Berkeley, of course, but even in America the optimism must be running a little low. And American money … it isn’t endless, these days. I think we’ll be seeing la Liliane back in Paris within a few weeks.’

‘I’m sorry for her,’ said the other. ‘No, I mean it. I know she has a royal arrogance, but she’s clever, M’sieu Directeur. She’s more than clever. She’s brilliant.’

The Directeur smiled. ‘Too much like the Maid of Orleans for my taste. But I know what you mean. In any case, she’ll get work soon enough. She could go out to the Fayum Depression with the Germans, Stross and Rindt.’

‘She doesn’t like Germans.’

‘There’s a new project in Tanzania, with that young Englishman everybody talks about … Kemble.’

‘She’s not too enthusiastic about the English, either,’ said Emile.

Impatiently, the Directeur stirred his tea. ‘Then if she wants to work in France and not in America, she’ll have to settle down here at the Musee, though God knows she’s not the easiest of colleagues. But she can’t go on spending a lot of money looking for human origins in the Great Himalaya, following up what is basically a purely personal theory. She’s got this absolute obsession that the Himalayas were the cradle of mankind. But we could use the same money to send out a party to Tanzania. And get better results in a month than Erckmann has managed in half a year at Shalamerg.’

‘No doubt,’ said Emile. ‘But I’m glad it’s you, not I, who’ll have to tell her.’

Harry Kernow waited out on the edge of the dusty concrete apron in front of the airport administration building at Srinagar. Reaching a howling crescendo, an ochre-coloured MIG 21 wearing the green insignia of the Indian Air Force hurtled off the far runway and climbed steeply, trailing a streamer of expended fuel across the hard bright blue of the Kashmir sky. It was followed by another … and another … and another. They’re putting on a bit of a show for the old man today, thought Kernow, looking beyond the apron to where a group of medalled Indian air force and army officers stood beside a brown, bald man in an elegant grey corduroy suit. Three camouflaged army cars waited nearby and, as Kernow watched, the party arranged itself inside them and drove slowly off the airfield, preceded by a couple of smart despatch riders on motorcycles.

From long habit Kernow looked at them critically as they rode by, sitting upright in the saddle in attitudes of rigid attention. We British left India one thing that was really good, he thought, with a faintly absurd sense of pride. The Army. It was good when my father was in it, and it’s good now. He wondered what the man in the corduroy suit, an Indian Deputy Defence Minister, thought about that. Long, long ago, in the days of the King-Emperor, the Minister had been a subadar, a captain, in the Mahrattas. That was a regiment that could take its place beside any in the world.

Kernow jerked his mind back to the present. Now that the Minister’s party had left the tarmac, the passengers were being allowed off the jet from Chandigarh. A grubby yellow bus pulled out from the aircraft steps. Kernow walked back to the gates where it would unload. For a moment or two he could not see her. Then, suddenly, there she was, striding through the Indian crowd, looking questioningly towards where he stood at the barrier. He felt his usual twitch of reluctant admiration.

‘Good morning, Harry.’

She was always so unnecessarily formal. He looked at her more closely. Maybe she wasn’t in a very good temper.

‘Hello, Liliane. Good trip?’

She shrugged, smiling. ‘It wasn’t a bad flight. And they were pretty good to me at the Institute—though I think they were disappointed with the specimen. Probably hoping for something more interesting than ancestral mongoose bones.’

He nodded. ‘Well, it’s good to see you, Liliane. Listen … if you want, you could stay overnight on the houseboat, just down the road. We could go on tomorrow. It was raining up above Shalamerg when I left—the weather forecast isn’t good. We could get away early tomorrow—have a quiet evening tonight and get our heads down. Do you good.’

Liliane hesitated for a moment, and then shook her head. ‘No … I want to be out early at Shalamerg tomorrow morning. Has … has Chowdhuri got any further?’

‘Well, he’s pretty keen to see you. You know what he’s like … he doesn’t think it necessary to tell me very much. Something’s getting him excited, though. But I don’t see that a night on the houseboat would—’

‘No, Harry,’ she said decisively. ‘I can’t spare the time. Besides, it would not be proper.’

‘Not proper?’

‘Of course not. You and me—alone on the boat, except for Abdul. And even he sleeps on the bank…’

He looked at her without expression. ‘Do you really mean you think I’m going to try—?’

‘Of course not,’ she said again, impatiently this time. ‘But people talk—you know how they talk. I … we … can’t afford that to happen. You, of all people, should know that.’

God, he thought, why do Anglo-Saxons imagine French women are sexy? Did she seriously think … but no, she’d given the real reason. She was absorbed with her image as leader of this particular little party up at Shalamerg. That was why he hadn’t risked changing the rota when it was her turn to go to Chandigarh. For anybody else—well, he’d have fixed it without a second thought. But not for Liliane. She’d have pushed back that heavy dark hair off her forehead and looked at him and said, ‘When it’s my turn, Harry, I do it.’ She’d said it before, and he wasn’t a man who enjoyed being snubbed. He was always the outsider, anyway, in this little squad of scientists. He couldn’t really accompany them mentally on their trips digging back to Adam and Eve, up there on Beds Two, Three and Four. He simply didn’t talk their academic language. He was the fix-it man, the hired hand, the one who was there because he knew the people and the country … and because twenty years in the Army was supposed to have taught him how to organise life in the wild.

‘Are the others all ri. . .