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A BONE FROM A DRY SEA

Peter Dickinson

Myth in all tongues credits the dolphins with

Making the bays they visit happy, waking

Song in flint cottages that lacked it long.

Man haunts what shores he can.

Then

The child clung to the rock, letting the broken waves of the bay wash over her, cooling the fierce sunlight. She was not afraid. The sea was her home.

Light dazzled off the water, but she kept her head above the surface and gazed steadily toward the mouth of the bay. She was on shark watch. Out on the open shore grown males would keep watch, but a submerged rock shelf barred the entrance to this bay, so it was safe to let the children learn the duty.

She was hungry. For days now the wind had blown hard from the southeast, driving the ocean rollers before it. The tribe used the bay because there were caves in the low cliffs, deep in two of which fresh water trickled down the rock. But food inside the bay was scarce, so normally they would have hunted the rocky inlets beyond for shellfish and shrimp and crabs and the little octopi that hid under boulders.

But with a wind like this the dark green rollers pounded in, hurling their foam to the clifftops and then dragging anything loose back seaward in their weight of water. Anyone who tried to feed out on the open shore would be swept away to where the sharks cruised, or break an arm or leg, or crush a foot. So by now all the tribe were hungry.

A hand touched the child's flank beneath the water. She glanced down, grinned a greeting as her mother rose beside her, and returned to her watch. Her mother had brought her two mussels, barely the size of a fingernail. Her mouth watered as she heard the crack of shells being pounded open, and she was putting her hand down to take them when she froze, pointed, yelled the warning Big wave, and immediately added the snapped-off hoot that meant Shark!

When each roller reached the submerged shelf at the bay's mouth it rose to a wall, ridged with foam, and seemed to hang for an instant before it crashed into the bay. In that moment before wave break the sun lit it from beyond. Now a giant wave, two waves in one perhaps, had come. It seemed to rise as high as the cliffs behind the bay and then poise at the entrance for longer than an ordinary wave. In its green-lit depths hung a darker, curving shadow as big as four grown males. Then it crashed down and its foam creamed over the bay.

The noise was enough to startle even people used to the surprises of the sea, so many of the tribe surfaced to look. The child was standing on the rock now, pointing and yelling. Her mother was racing for the shore. As the wave thunder died and before the next wave crashed in, they heard that the yell was Shark!, but mostly stayed where they were—it was only a child, mistaken, probably, or mischievous. Then the mother reached the shore and joined in the cry, and the whole tribe streamed for safety.

The shark had vanished. It must have been swimming along the shoreline, hunting perhaps for someone desperate enough to go foraging out in the open, when the monster wave had picked it up, a moving mass of water too powerful for it to be able to fight its way against, and so it had been tossed into the bay.

The child yelled again and pointed with her web-fingered hand. She had glimpsed the long shadow gliding beneath the ruffled surface a few paces from her rock. A moment later the dorsal fin broke the surface as the rising sea bed forced the shark upward.

The people yelled. The shark veered along the shoreline through a spatter of hurled rocks, and away down into deeper water. It vanished for a while but circled around by the rock again, and again the child yelled and pointed, and again the fin emerged. This time the people were ready, and larger rocks hailed around it. And again. And again.

At first they were trying to drive it away so that they could return to the water, but soon they realized it was trapped. Except in the moment when a wave came pounding in, the entrance to the bay was too shallow for it to pass. So now the tribe were the hunters and the shark the prey, if they could find a way to kill it. They spread along the shore harrying it on.

The child watched from the rock. Now that her eyes understood what they were seeing she could trace the shark's movements all around the bay, except through the turmoil at the entrance. She turned steadily, one arm raised to point, helping the others follow the track of their enemy. They surged along the shore, leaping from rock to rock, hurling anything they could lift. Cushioned by water few of these missiles can have hurt the shark much, but it grew half mad with fright and began to break from its circuit and make dashes across the bay, sometimes actually rubbing against the rock where the child stood. She kept to her task, unalarmed.

A shark must swim to keep water moving through its gills, or it will die, so this one couldn't lie in the deep center of the bay, out of the tribe's reach. Around and around it had to go, enduring their attack. Now they grew bolder, some dashing into the water as it went by, with rocks in their hands to pound at the passing flank. These blows too did little damage, but the sense of dominance increased, infecting them all. Excited young males ran into the water ahead of it, ready for their attack. The cliffs echoed with the tribe's yells.

On the far side of the bay a male plunged in and followed the shark's path toward the rock. It looked like more bravado, but when he reached the rock he climbed out and stood beside the child. He was her uncle, a senior male, already beginning to challenge the aging leader, and he was taking this chance to increase his prestige by directing the shark hunt. He watched the shark make two more circuits while the child pointed its path, but next time, as soon as it was safely past the rock, he grunted Go away and pushed her into the water. She swam quickly ashore, glad to be out of the sun and free of the ache of pointing all the time.

She didn't join the others along the shoreline, but climbed to a patch of shade beneath an overhang, where she could sit and watch the hunt, while the tribe clashed in and out of the water, screaming and smiting, and beating the surface into gouts of spray. She alone seemed not to be swept up into the frenzy. She wanted to see.

A wild yell rose, on a different note, not rage or excitement, but pain. Those in the water rushed ashore. Two of them dragged a third. Blood streamed down his side. His left arm was missing, almost to the shoulder. The shark had attacked. Hunter and hunted had changed places again.

Sharks can smell blood a long way off. They race toward its source. The odor drives them mad.

All its terror forgotten, the killer threshed around the bay. It sensed the male on the rock and circled below him. It drove its snout into the air almost to his feet. Then it broke off and dashed toward the place where the water reeked most strongly. Though they were safe on shore the tribe scattered before it.

Quietly the child watched. There was no answer, she saw, until either the shark died or escaped. For it to escape there must be a big tide and no wind. But the tribe were also trapped until the wind dropped. And now they couldn't even forage for the scant pickings in the bay. Unless they could kill the shark they would starve before it did.

Out of nowhere the answer came into her mind.

The shark's mad rushes had a pattern. It surged toward the patch of blood-tainted water, found nothing there, sensed the live meat on the shore and slid along beside it, then remembered in its slow brain about the other meat, trapped on the rock, almost in reach, and hurtled out there, circling for a while until a waft of blood smell drew it on another frenzied rush toward the shore.

It had found its victim below and to the left of where the child was sitting. Here a ridge of rock sloped down into the water and became the bar at the mouth of the bay, with a wide shelf running beside it for some distance below the surface. It had caught its prey in the corner between the shelf and the shore. This was the place it made for each time.

Unnoticed the child made her way down to the water's edge and waited, watching the fin circle the rock. The snout nuzzled up toward her uncle. The toothed mouth gaped. Then the fin came slicing through the water toward her. She ran down onto the submerged shelf to meet it.

The tribe screamed. The shark saw her. The fin curved from its path, heading straight at her. At the last instant she flung herself aside.

All her life, since she could paddle, she'd played catch-as-catch-can in and out of the water. She knew what she could do, but hadn't realized the shark's speed and power. If its charge hadn't been slowed by the slope of rock, it would have caught her. As it was she was knocked flat by the rush of its attack, which carried the streamlined body on up the slope right to the water's edge where it lay stranded, its gills in the air, its tail thrashing at the shallows behind it.

Gabbling and calling, the tribe gathered to watch it die. The child's uncle came swimming across to stand with one foot on the still-twitching body, shouting triumph and punching his fists into the air, as if it had been he who'd steered it onto the rock and killed it. The tribe shouted Praise. Gulls gathered above, joining their screams to the racket.

Without tools, apart from the stones they used to break crabs and shellfish open, it took time for the tribe to gnaw and claw their way through the tough skin of the belly, but they did it in the end. Their leader wanted to organize the sharing out of meat, but the child's uncle outfaced him and drove him back, taking the honor himself, allotting big pieces of liver to senior males and the mothers of newborn young. Then the families squabbled around the carcass, but without anger because they could see there was enough for everyone. Even the children slept that night with crammed stomachs.

The child who had watched from the rock got her share. Her mother had cuffed her for her stupidity and she had whimpered Sorry because that was expected of her, but as she lay among the crowded bodies in one of the caves, unable to sleep because of the mass of meat inside her, she relived the adventure. She knew what she had done, and why. She understood that it had not been an accident. She realized too that the others would not understand.

She had no words for this knowledge. Thought and understanding for her were a kind of seeing. She showed herself things in her mind, the rock shelf, the shallow water, the need to lure the shark full tilt onto the slope so that it would force itself out too far, and strand, and die; then her uncle triumphing and her mother scolding and herself cringing while she hugged her knowledge inside her.

Now she seemed to herself to be standing apart in the cave, seeing by the moonlight reflected from the bay one small body curled among the mass of sleepers. A thought which had neither words nor pictures made itself in her mind.

Different.

She's different. Yes, I'm different.

Now: Sunday Morning

The truck wallowed along the gravelly road, if you could call it a road. Often there was nothing to mark it off from the rest of the brown, enormous plain, but Dad knew where he was because then there'd be tire ruts making the truck wallow worse than ever. Vinny clutched the handgrip on the dash to stop herself being thrown around. They'd done two hours from the airport, though it seemed longer, when Dad stopped by a flat-topped tree with a lot of grassy bundles hanging among the branches. Weaver birds, Vinny guessed. She'd seen them on TV.

"Ready for lunch?" he said.

"I'm starving. How much further?"

"We're a bit over halfway. But look." He pointed and Vinny stared through the shimmer of heat. Far off there were blue hills. Much nearer something moved, changed shape, vanished as the wavering air distorted the distance, and then was there again, steady for a moment, three long, slightly arching necks with small heads. She'd known them since she was tiny, from the Noah's Ark frieze around her room.

"Giraffes," she said.

"Right."

"Are there any lions?"

"They'll be resting till it gets a bit cooler. Take a good look. We don't get much wildlife around the camp, because we're on the edge of the badlands."

"Why's it all so flat?"

"Because it was sea until a few million years ago. Those hills used to be the shoreline. In fact the section the camp's on seems to have been an island. Seen enough?"

He drove into the shade of the tree and fetched crates from the back of the truck for them to sit on while Vinny unpacked the lunch. Potato chips, Coke, chicken sandwiches, mangoes, and a Mars bar.

"I hope that's the sort of thing you like," he said.

"I like anything."

She sensed that he was as nervous as she was. They hadn't seen each other for over a year, and never before like this. It had always been London hotels, visits to the zoo or the planetarium, jerky talk about school and her friends and what she liked doing, both of them jumpy with having to watch what they said, because of the anger between him and Mom, still there, still no better, eight years after the split.

He ate in silence. Vinny was ready for this. That was one of the things Mom couldn't cope with, his silences. Whole days sometimes, she'd said. A complete skiing holiday once. The obvious thing was to be silent too, but Mom wouldn't have known how. Mom would be at Grasse by now, she thought, maybe at this very moment carrying the lunch tray out onto the terrace, talking as she came, Colin lounging in the vine shade with a tumbler of wine in his fist, the boys playing their dragon game among the olive trees below ...

The cooling engine clicked. The weaver birds accepted the human presences and began to move and chatter. An ant the size of a button was dragging away a crumb of bread.

"You're not tired?" he said for about the fifth time.

"I'm fine. But listen, Dad—it's going to be all right, me coming. And if it isn't, then it's my fault. It was all my idea."

"So I gathered. Your mother ... "

He didn't try to keep the sourness out of his laugh.

"Colin talked her into it," she said. "It makes going to Grasse a lot easier for them, you see—they don't have to bother about what I want, only them and the boys. You know, Mom was still trying to make me join an Outward Bound course or something till you said we couldn't go on a safari after all because you'd got to go on working, and you thought I'd be bored. That made it all right."

"Because it was a nuisance for me?"

"Not just that. She wouldn't mind so much provided I was bored. Look, Dad, I'll tell you what I think about Mom and then we don't have to talk about it anymore. It's a bit like Grandad and his bad leg—you know, there're things he just can't do because of it, but otherwise he's the same as anyone else. Only with Mom it's inside her. She just can't be sensible about anything to do with you. Apart from that she's the same as my friends' moms. She can be lovely, she can be a pain in the neck, you know? I'm lucky she fell for Colin. I really like him. The boys can be pests, but that's the age they are. But honestly, I'm a lot happier at home than some of the kids I know. You needn't worry—I'm not going to try and sucker on to you from now on."

"You've thought it all out?"

"Yes. I suppose I'm like that."

He grunted and went into another of his silences. Vinny ate the half-melted Mars bar, quite wrong for Africa but she knew he'd got it because she'd asked for one on a bitter winter day in London once. She glanced at him out of the corner of her eyes. Not like a dad, somehow, short, broad-chested, round-faced, dark-haired once but now more than half bald.

"It doesn't always work," he said.

"Uh?"

"Thinking things out. Oy oy—we're going to have to move. This lot are biters."

Out of nowhere troops of shiny orange ants had appeared, obviously intending to carry off not just the crumbs and leavings but the untouched food as well. Vinny helped pack up and climbed into the truck. Dad got in the other side but didn't start the engine.

"That's a good image of yours," he said. "Pop's bum leg, I'm talking about. You've got your head screwed on ... Look, I'd better explain one or two things about the set-up at the camp."

"I thought I'd just keep my mouth shut till I found out."

"Still, it'll be easier if ... Things aren't too good, you see. For a start, we haven't been lucky in our finds. That's always a risk. Any expedition has its ups and downs—you go a few weeks without significant finds and everyone gets short-tempered and bitchy—it's been such an effort to get here and you don't get that many chances, so you feel you're wasting your time, and the food tastes foul and stupid accidents begin to happen. But then someone comes up with something really worthwhile and everybody's on a high, and they start seeing things they'd missed, and meals don't matter ... you understand?"

"You haven't found anything?"

"Not much. Some badly smashed fragments of one skull. Hundreds of pig mandibles which might be useful for dating if we'd found anything else of interest, which we haven't. We've got plenty of material, but almost nothing new. Joe's famous luck seems to have deserted him."

Vinny looked at him. The sour note was back, the one he used when he was talking about Mom. She knew from Dad's letters that Joe was Dr. Hamiska, who was leading the expedition.

"You'd better know," he said. "Joe and I haven't hit it off. Don't worry—he'll turn on the charm for you, all right. But it's different with me. I was afraid this might happen—in fact I was in two minds about joining the expedition in the first place."

"Why did you, then?"

"Partly personal reasons—you'll see. Maybe ... But from a professional point of view it was a terrific opportunity. There's been a civil war going on here for the last twelve years and nobody's been able to get in. This is the obvious next place to look for early hominid remains. Everyone I know has been itching to come, but things aren't really settled down yet and the new government doesn't want a lot of foreign paleontologists poking around, so they have turned everyone down—except, of course, Joe Hamiska. Absolutely typically he had a line to the Minister of the Interior, through an ex-pupil who happened to be the Minister's nephew. You'll meet him. He can't stop talking. So here we are, in one of the hottest, dreariest bits of Africa, with this unique opportunity to increase the sum of human knowledge, and not getting anywhere. Do you understand?"

"I think so. Why's it the obvious place to look?"

"Did you read any of those books I suggested?"

"Oh, yes. All the ones I could find in the library."

"Good for you. Then you'll know there's an enormous gap in the fossil record of human evolution?"

"You'd better remind me."

"Well, about ten million years ago there were apelike creatures, walking on four legs and so on, and just enough to show that they're probably our ancestors, and then there's a huge gap to about three and a half million years ago when there are creatures something like us, with smaller brains than ours but walking on two legs and with jaws much nearer to ours and so on. Between those two points there's one doubtful tooth and one even more doubtful bit of jaw. Now, if you look at a map of Africa and plot the various finds this side of the gap, and their probable dates, you'll find you've got a rough line running northeast. Start at the newer finds, carry on through the older finds and on a bit further, and you finish up here. Right?"

Vinny gazed around the stretching distances.

"There's still an awful lot of places to look," she said.

"That's where Joe's famous luck comes in. There's exactly one Western-educated paleontologist in the country."

"The Minister's nephew?"

"Right. He came to Joe with a bit of pig jaw someone had brought in. Pigs are important, because they evolved in a nice simpleminded way and if you know your stuff you can date their jaws pretty accurately, and then you've got a good idea that anything you find alongside them is likely to be roughly the same date. This bit of jaw turned out to be between four and five million years old. Reports of plenty of other fossils around. You see?"

"I'm not surprised you wanted to come."

"It was touch and go. A lot of good people turned Joe down when he asked them to join."

"And now you wish you had too?"

"Well, it's not entirely Joe's fault. In some ways the place has turned out to be a paleontologist's nightmare. You see those peaks over there? That was a volcano, and so was that, and that."

Vinny looked. She had no idea how far away the mountains were, but there was snow on the cone-shaped summits, white, magical, where the blue range rose to meet the immense and even bluer sky. She'd have known those were volcanoes without his telling her.

"Have you done plate tectonics yet?" he said.

"Last term."

"Well, we're right at the point where the plate carrying Asia moves against the one carrying Africa. In one way this is terrific, because there've been a whole series of eruptions, which have laid down layers of volcanic ash, which in theory you can date by scientific methods. But at the same time the ground has been churned around and shoved to and fro and turned upside down, even, so you get a series of strata in one place, and half a mile away they're the other way up, or whole sections are missing. Joe brought a geologist, but she took one look at the place and told him that any dates she came up with would be give or take a million years each way, and being Joe he tried to teach her her own business, so she said she was sick and pulled out. That was one thing. Then again, being Joe he's quarreled with so many people that he couldn't get any responsible organization to fund him, so we're funded by people no one takes seriously, and that in turn means that a lot of the team are beginners or second-raters. Not that Joe minds. Second-raters are easier to impress. And he hasn't got anyone to run the camp properly and can't be bothered himself, so I'm having to spend half my time sorting things out for him ... Oh, God. I'm sorry."

He sounded ashamed of himself. It had all come bursting out of him, unstoppable, like an eruption from one of the volcanoes he'd pointed out. He was a bottler-up, Vinny guessed. That was what the silences were about, perhaps, anger going around and around inside his head while he tried to tame it, master it. He really needed someone he didn't mind bursting out to. Mom wouldn't have been any use—she'd have been full of suggestions, 1,001 Things to Do, Colin called it. That wasn't what Dad needed.

"It's all right," she said. "It's much easier for me, knowing. I hope there's someone there you like a bit."

He laughed.

"Oh yes, of course. Several of them. In fact ... Well, as I said, you'll see."

Then:

The child who had trapped the shark had no name, nor did the others. As a baby she'd known her mother and had made sucking movements when she came near, and she still sometimes did this, a lip sound, Ma-ma, but it was more an affectionate greeting than a name. Later she'd begun to recognize the others, her mother's sister first, then other close family, then playmates, all as separate people who mattered in different ways to her. By the time of the shark hunt she knew every member of the tribe, and they knew her, but without names.

(I must use names to tell their story. We are looking into our furthest possible past, which is like looking at a group of people far off across a flat, hot plain. The rising air wavers and changes. Light bends as if it were passing through invisible lenses. The people seem to dwindle, stretch, vanish, stand clear for a moment, and distort again. We are looking through lenses of time,, right at the edge of imagination's eyesight. To give the tribe names distorts them, but it's the best I can do from where we're standing. It's said that before Eve there was Lilith, but we are going back far beyond the imaginary Lilith. I shall call the child Li.

The same with her thoughts. We have to imagine them in words, but the tribe were only about halfway toward words. Their ancestors had been apes, who had used calls for alarm and anger and so on, but had mainly communicated by gestures, grimaces, smells, and touch. Then the sea had risen and those ancestors had been cut off on a large offshore island. At the same time Africa had grown hotter and drier, and the forest cover where the ancestors had lived and fed had dried out and almost vanished, so they'd started to forage for the rich pickings along the shore, taking more and more to the water, changing in many ways. Among these were their calls. Smell was no use to them in water, gestures difficult. Except in a dead, flat sea a swimmer can see only a few yards, but a call will still be heard far off.

So the tribe had plenty of calls—Come help, Shark!, Big wave!, Follow me, Good food this way, Praise, Triumph, Have mercy, and so on. And when they came out of their caves in the morning, or rose on one of their roosting ledges to let the rising sun warm their night-chilled bodies, they sang. These were all calls, not words, not sentences. But how can we imagine Li's thoughts without using words? We are looking through the time lens again, distorting what was, then, into something we seem to see, now. It's the best we can do.)

The wind had shifted and the tribe had moved on down the coastline to where an immense sea marsh blocked their way. Once it had been the channel between their island and the shore, but the land had risen and the island was ceasing to be an island. They didn't like the marsh. They were creatures of the coast, of clean rocks and beaches.

Immediately north of the marsh lay a stretch of pure, fine sand where, for a few days at each full moon as the tides came higher, the shallows swarmed with millions upon millions of almost invisible transparent shrimp. The tribe caught them by lacing their cupped hands together with the fingertips just touching the webbing between the lower knuckles of the other hand. When they lifted their hands and let the water drain away a few shrimp might be left wriggling in the trap.

It was slow feeding, but Li was clever at it and had eaten her fill while most of the others were still busy. She felt a need to be alone, out of the crowded shallows. If she swam further from the shore the shark watchers would summon her back. The beach itself was roasting hot, so she climbed the low dunes behind it, looking for shade. In front of her the mountain chain that had formed the island rose steep and barren, but between the shore and the first rocks lay a strip of plain which itself had been beach and shallows until this end of the island had tilted upward. Now it was hard earth, mottled with tussocks of coarse grass, and here and there a tree. One stood, or rather leaned, not far off, so after a wary look around she made for it.

(Suppose for a moment that the time lens lets us see her undistorted, what does she look like, this single, night-black figure crossing the glaring flat? She walks erect, but is still not quite a meter tall. Her body is hairless but her head has a glossy black mane falling over her shoulders. She is plump, roly-poly, from the layer of insulating fat beneath her skin. Her feet are like ours, but webbed between the toes, and her long fingers have webs to the first knuckle. Her head is the shock, tiny to our eyes, with a face more monkey than human. What room can there be in that cramped skull for thoughts, imaginations, questions, wonders, for all that makes us human? Can this be where we came from?)

From the shade of the tree Li studied the plain. She felt excited but tense. She had never been so far from the tribe alone. She didn't know what there was to be afraid of—there could be no sharks out here and she'd never seen a leopard, but the instinct was still there, deep inside. Another instinct made her climb into the crotch of the tree, and on up until she was well above ground level. Now she relaxed a little.

The tree had been flat-topped once, but an earthquake had tilted it so that on one side its branches touched the ground and on the other they lifted enough for her to see out beneath them. She stared, amazed, at the distance. Before her lay the marsh. From the shore it had seemed endless, but now beyond it she saw a wavering line of blue, rising to peaks from two of which thin trails of smoke drifted skyward. She recognized them because there was another such peak at the center of the island. Sometimes it flamed, sometimes it rumbled or groaned, but mostly it merely smoked, peaceful and harmless.

Li stared entranced at the view. The fifty miles or so of island shore which was the tribe's territory was all she had ever known, all the world there was. Now, over there beyond the marshes, she saw another world, immense.

Cramp broke the trance, making her shift her position. Then a flick of movement caught her eye, speed followed by stillness, like a minnow in a pool. It had happened where the spread twigs of the tree swept down to the earth. Inquisitive, she climbed down and crept across to see.

The spider was crouched over its prey, bouncing gently on its springy legs. Spiders were no good to eat. The bug it had caught might have been, but Li wasn't hungry. She wanted to see what the spider would do. She crouched and watched while the spider dragged the bug clear of the insect-size track along which it had been scuttling. It climbed into the twigs above the track and rapidly wove a coarse, loose web, then returned to earth and stretched a couple of threads across the path. It moved into the shadows and waited. So did Li.

Nothing happened. Her absorption dwindled. She became aware of the dry, alien plain around her, and her distance from the tribe. Every insect click, every faint rustle, might be a danger sound. She must go back. But first she needed to know what the spider was up to. There was no reason for the need, no purpose or use in knowing. It was the mere knowledge that mattered.

Moving as carefully as if she'd been stalking a minnow, she pulled a grass stem from a tussock and, starting some distance from the web, trailed the seed head along the path. It moved jerkily, like a crawling bug. As it touched the threads the web tumbled from above, tangling loosely around it, and the spider had leapt and was crouching over it to inspect its prey. Li couldn't see what had triggered the web to fall.

She watched the spider strip the remains of web from the seed head and eat them. The stem was too heavy for it to draw the seed head clear of the path, so it chose a new place, built another web trap and waited. Li peered closely, trying to see how the web was made, but it was too complicated for her. The sense of danger returned, overwhelming her longing for knowledge, so she gave up and returned to the beach.

...