“I think it's okay,” Stella said, almost too softly for them to hear.

“We're getting-KUK our first periods,” Celia said.

“All together?” Felice asked, squeaking.

Someone in another bunk heard and giggled.

“Shh,”Stella insisted, wrinkling her face in warning. She sat up and looked along the rows of bunks. Some of the younger girls—a year or more younger—were still asleep. Then, her back tingling, Stella looked up at the video cameras mounted in the rafters. Moonlight reflected from the linoleum floor glinted in their tiny plastic eyes.

Four girls left their bunks and padded into the bathroom, walking bowlegged.

Useless to hide it,Stella thought. They're going to know.

And they would be even more frightened. She could predict that easily and with assurance. Everything different frightened the humans, and this was going to be very different.

25

OREGON

Eileen set the Coleman lantern on a metal table and laid out the cold dinner: a nearly frozen loaf of white bread, Oscar Meyer bologna in a squat, rubbery cylinder, American cheese, and a chilled, half-eaten tin of Spam. A Tupperware box, yellow with age, contained cut celery stalks. She positioned two apples, three tangerines, and two cans of Coors beside this assortment. “Want to see the wine list?” she asked.

“Beer will do. Breakfast of diggers,” Mitch said. The plastic roof of the hut over the long reach of the L-shaped excavation rattled in the wind rolling down the old riverbed.

Eileen sat in the canvas seat of her camp chair and let out her breath in a sigh that was halfway to a shriek. But for them and the still-hidden bones, the excavation was empty. It was almost midnight. “I am dead,” she proclaimed. “I can't take this anymore. Dig ‘em out, don't dig ‘em out, keep your cool when the academics start to scrap about emergence violations. The whole goddamned human race is so primitive.”

Mitch cracked his can and tossed back a long gulp. The beer, almost tasteless but for a prolonged fizz, satisfied him intensely. He put down the can and picked up a slice of cheese, then prepared to peel back the wrapping. He turned it into a grand gesture. Eileen watched as he lifted the slice, rotated it on tripod fingers, and then, using his teeth, delicately lifted and pulled off the intercalary paper. He glanced at her with narrowed eyes and raised one thick eyebrow. “Expose ‘em,” he said.

“Think so?” Eileen asked.

“Give me that old-time revelation. I'd rather see them personally than trust future generations to do it better. But that's just me.” The beer and exhaustion both relaxed Mitch and made him philosophical. “Bring them into the light. Rebirth,” he said. “The Indians are right. This is a sacred moment. There should be ceremonies. We should be appeasing their troubled spirits, and our own. Oliver is right. They're here to teach us.”

Eileen sniffed. “Some Indians don't want their theories contradicted,” she said. “They'd rather live with fairy tales.”

“The Indians in Kumash gave us shelter when Kaye was pregnant. They still refuse to hand their SHEVA kids over to Emergency Action. I've become more understanding of anybody the U.S. government has repeatedly lied to.” Mitch raised his beer in toast. “Here's to the Indians.”

Eileen shook her head. “Ignorance is ignorance. We can't afford to hang on to our childhood blankies. We're big boys and girls.”

Mostly girls,Mitch thought. “Are anthropologists any more likely to see what's under their noses?”

Eileen pursed her lips. “Well, no,” she said. “We've already got two in camp who insist these can't possibly be Homo erectus. They're creating a tall, stocky, thick-browed variety of homo sap on their laptops even as we speak. We're having a hell of a time convincing them to keep their mouths shut. Ignorant bitches, both of them. But don't tell anybody I said so.”

“Absolutely,” Mitch said.

Eileen had finished assembling a Spam and American cheese sandwich, with two stalks of celery sticking out like lunate Gumby feet from the pressed layers of perfect crust. She bit into a corner and chewed thoughtfully.

Mitch wasn't particularly hungry, not that he minded the food. He had eaten much worse on previous sites—including a meal of roasted grubs on toast.

“Was it another SHEVA episode?” Eileen mused. “A massive leap between Homo erectusand Homo sapiens?”

“I wouldn't think so,” Mitch said. “A little too radical even for SHEVA.”

Eileen's speculative gaze rose beyond the rattling plastic roof. “Men,” she said. “Men behaving badly.”

“Uh-oh,” Mitch said. “Here it comes.”

“Men raiding other groups, taking prisoners. Not very choosy. Gathering up all the females with the appropriately satisfying orifices. Females only, whomever and whatever they might be.”

“You think our absent males were raiders and rapists?” Mitch asked.

“Would youdate a Homo erectus? I mean, if you weren't at the absolute bottom of any social hierarchy?”

Mitch thought of the mother in the cave in the Alps, more than a lifetime ago, and her loyal husband. “Maybe they were more gentle.”

“Psychic flower children, Mitch?” Eileen asked. “I say these gals were all captives and they were abandoned when the volcano blew. Anything else is pure William Golding bullshit.” Eileen was pushing the matter deliberately, playing both proponent and devil's advocate, trying to clear her head, or possibly his.

“I suppose the Homo erectusmembers of the group might have been slaves or servants—captives,” Mitch said. “But I'm not so sure social life was that sophisticated back then, or that there were such fine gradations of status. My guess is they were traveling together. For protection, maybe, like different species of herd animals on the veldt. As equals. Obviously, they liked each other enough to die in each other's arms.”

“Mixed species band? Does that fit anything in your experience with the higher apes?”

Mitch had to admit it did not. Baboons and chimps played together when they were young, but adult chimps ate baby baboons and monkeys when they could catch them. “Culture matters more than skin color,” he said.

“But thisgap . . . I just don't see it being bridgeable. It's too huge.”

“Maybe we're tainted by recent history. Where were you born, Eileen?”

“Savannah, Georgia. You know that.”

“Kaye and I lived in Virginia.” Mitch let the thought hang there for a moment, trying to find a delicate way to phrase it.

“Plantation propaganda from my slave-owner ancestors, my thrice-great grandpappy, has tainted the entire last three hundred years. Is that what you're suggesting?” Eileen asked, lips curling in a duelist's smile, savoring a swift and jabbing return. “What a goddamned Yankee thing to say.”

“We know so little about what we're capable of,” Mitch continued. “We are creatures of culture. There are other ways to think of this ensemble. If they weren't equals, at least they worked together, respected each other. Maybe they smelled right to each other.”

“It's becoming personal, isn't it, Mitch? Looking for a way to turn this into a realexample. Merton's political bombshell.”

Mitch agreed to that possibility with a sly wink and a nod.

Eileen shook her head. “Women have always hung together,” she said. “Men have always been a sometime thing.”

“Wait till we find the men,” Mitch said, starting to feel defensive.

“What makes you think they stuck around?”

Mitch stared grimly at the plastic roof.

“Even if there weremen nearby,” she said, “what makes you think we'll be lucky enough to find them?”

“Nothing,” he said, and felt hazily that this was a lie.

Eileen finished her sandwich and drank half her can of Coors to chase it down. She had never liked eating very much and did it only to keep body and soul together. She was hungry and deliberate in bed, however. Orgasms allowed her to think more clearly, she had once confessed. Mitch remembered those times well enough, though they had not slept together since he had been twenty-three years old.