The Pacific Mystery by Stephen Baxter

Author:Stephen Baxter [Baxter, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-04-09T00:56:43+00:00

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Day 15. Today, a jaunt in a chariot. What fun!

We passed over yet another group of islands, this one larger than most, dark basaltic cones blanketed by greenery and lapped by the pale blue of coral reefs. Observers in the blisters, armed with binoculars and telescopes, claimed to see movement at the fringes of these scattered fragments of jungle. So the captain ordered the chariots to go down and take a shuftie.

There were four of us in our chariot, myself, Jack, Ciliax, and a crewman who piloted us, a squat young chap called “Klaus” whom I rather like. Both the Germans wore sidearms; Jack and I did not. The chariot is a stubby-winged seaplane, well equipped to land on the back of the Beast; a tough little bugger.

We skimmed low over clearings where lions ran and immense bears growled. Things like elephants, covered in brown hair and with long curling tusks, lifted their trunks as we passed, as if in protest at our engines’ clatter. “Christ,” Jack said. “What I wouldn’t give to be down among `em with a shotgun.” Ciliax and I took photographs and cine-films and made notes and spoke commentaries into tape recorders.

And we thought we saw signs of people: threads of smoke rose from the beaches.

“Extraordinary,” Ciliax said. “Cave bears. What looked like sabre-toothed cats. Mammoths. This is a fauna that has not been seen in Europe or America since the ice retreated.”

Jack asked, “What happened to `em?”

“We hunted them to death,” I said. “Probably.”

“What with, machine guns?”

I shrugged. “Stone axes and flint arrowheads are enough, given time.”

“So,” Jack asked practically, “how did they get here?”

“Sea levels fall and rise,” Ciliax said. “When the ice comes, it locks up the world’s water. Perhaps that is true even of this monstrous world ocean. Perhaps the lower waters expose dry land now submerged, or archipelagos along which one can raft.”

“So in the Ice Age,” I said, “we hunted the mammoths and the giant sloths until we drove them off the continents. But they kept running, and a few of them made it to one island or another, and now they just continue fleeing, heading ever east.” And in this immense ocean, I thought, there was room to keep running and running and running. Nothing need ever go extinct.

“But there are people here,” Jack pointed out. “We saw fires.”

We buzzed along the beach. We dipped low over a kind of campsite, a mean sort of affair centred on a scrappy hearth. The people, naked, came running out of the forest at our noise—and when they saw us, most of them went running back again. But we got a good look at them, and fired off photographs.

They were people, sort of. They had fat squat bodies, and big chests, and brows like bags of walnuts. I think it was obvious to us all what they were, even to Jack.

“Neanderthals.” Ciliax said it first; it is a German name. “Another species of—well, animal—which we humans chased out of Africa and Europe and Asia.

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