Alan Dean Foster - Interlopers

INTERLOPERS

Alan Dean Foster

ACE BOOKS, NEW YORK

One

Khuatupec was hungry.

He stirred within the stone. As solid and impermeable as it was beautifully carved, it stood upright alongside

its unformed and uninhabited basaltic kin. No light pene-trated the ancient temple where the stones reposed.

None had entered for hundreds of years. The absence of illu-mination did not matter to Khuatupec. Light

meant noth-ing to him. He and his kind utilized means and methods of perception that did not require its

presence.

Within him boiled The Hunger; a sere, seething whirlpool of dissatisfaction and emptiness. Considering how

long it had been since last he had fed, it was sur-prising the discomfort was not worse. Yet he contented

himself. For the first time in living memory, food was at hand. Something to eat. Something to suck at.

He divined its presence nearby, had been aware of it for some time now. Some days would see it draw

tanta-lizingly close, others would find it moving maddeningly away. There was nothing Khuatupec could do

but wait. In order for him to be able to feed, physical contact with the food was necessary. Because of his

nature, his situ,

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that contact had to be initiated by the food itself. He envied others of his kind who could move about more

freely in search of sustenance. Most of them were much smaller than he, however, and needed less feeding.

His kin were multitudinous and diverse, but there was only one Khu-atupec. He. Him.

Having been patient for so many centuries, he would perforce have to be patient a while longer. But it was

frustrating to have so much fresh food so close at hand yet be unable to taste any of it.

Khuatupec waited within the carved stone, and brooded, and contemplated the ecstasy that was eating.

Soon, he persuaded himself. Soon enough the taste, the pleasure, the exhilaration of feeding would once

more be his. He wondered which of the food would be the first to make contact.

The condor descended in a lazy spiral, great hooked beak and immense black wings inclining in the direction

of something unseen and dead. It reminded Cody of the much smaller turkey vultures that haunted the skies

above the family ranch back home. Wiping perspiration from his forehead, he crouched down and resumed

gently blowing dust from the punctured skull in the center of square N-23.

The hole in the hoary cranium was large enough to admit his little finger. Working carefully within the

de-limitating grid of white cord that was suspended above the soil, he finished cleaning the skull before gently

depositing it in a waiting box padded with bubble paper. Unlike the Incas, for whom considerable evidence of

the primitive surgical procedure existed, there was no record of the Chachapoyans practicing trepanning. If

detailed study of the skull turned out to prove that they had employed the procedure, the results might serve

as the basis

for a formal paper. "Evidence of cranial medical practices among the Chachapoyans circa

A.D.1100-1400-Apachetarimac site, Amazonas Province, northern Peru." An effort suitable for Archaeological

Review, certainly, with a slightly more sensationalized version made available for Discover magazine or

Popular Science.

Pictures-he needed pictures. Straightening, he turned and reached for the rucksack that was lying on the

higher level nearby. On the far side of the excavation, Langois and Kovia were working on their knees on

opposite sides of a cracked monochrome pot. It displayed several of the same designs that decorated the

tawny limestone walls that formed the ancient citadel. Unlike the Incas, whose dark stonework tended to be

smooth and featureless, the Chachapoyans had incorporated an assortment of patterns into the foundations

of their round stone houses and rectangular temples. So far, diamonds, waves, and undulating figures that

suggested serpents had been discovered.

Pots were rare. Apachetarimac was not Tucume or Pacatnamu, ancient cities that had hardly been touched

by archaeologists or tourists. Around their weathering adobe pyramids lay millions upon millions of

potsherds, relics of a thousand years of pottery-making by cultures with magical names: Chimu, Moche,

Lambayeque. The Chachapoyans had not left behind nearly as many clay vessels depicting their lives and

beliefs. Nor were the Calla Calla Mountains as conducive to the preservation of pottery as was the dry coastal

desert. The cracked pot was a fine discovery. Even so, Cody did not envy Langois and Kovia. He was content

with his punctured skull.

After taking several close-ups of the skull as it rested in its box, he removed it and set it on the chest-high

dirt ledge nearby. Checking the position of the sun, he tried to establish what he thought was the most

dramatic angle for another photo. He could shoot up against the sky, but

4

finally decided to use the distant mountains as background. Wearing their blankets of green and soaring to

heights of fourteen thousand feet and more, they would make a colorful backdrop for the dark brown bone.

Apachetarimac, he mused as he clicked off shots on the digital camera and then checked them in the

view-screen. Having conquered and absorbed the Chachapoyans as they had the majority of cultures in

western South America, the Incas had rechristened many of the cities inhabited by their new subjects. They

had left behind few clues as to the reasons for some of their choices. Some, like Machu Picchu and

Ollyantaytambo, were obvious. Apachetarimac, which translated from the Quechua as "sacred talking spot,"

was not. If his skull were capable of speech, it probably could have provided some answers. But the brain that

had once inhabited the weathered, dark brown ovoid had long since become food for worms.

Where it might have made another person queasy to think of it in such a setting, the prospect of the evening

meal set off a mild chain reaction in Cody's stomach. Though tall and lanky of build, he was no more immune

to the pangs of hunger than were his smaller colleagues. A steady diet of physical labor in the thin air at

nearly ten thousand feet worked up ravenous appetites. Frowning slightly, he placed the skull back in its

padded box and wondered if today dinner might be any different from what was expected. He doubted it.

Vizcaria, the camp cook, was nothing if not predictable. Cody would gladly have handed over ten bucks for a

decent chicken-fried steak.

He would have to be satisfied with the thought and the memory. Here in the heights of the Calla Calla

Mountains there were no roads and no restaurants. Choctamal, the nearest town, was three days' hard ride to

the north on the back of a plodding, crotch-splitting mule. The near

est real restaurant was in the provincial capital of Chachapoyas, another four hours' frightening ride down a

narrow, single-lane road boasting some of the longest, steepest drop-offs Cody had ever seen. Coming as he

did from the relatively flat hill country of south-central Texas, he had a harder time than some of his friends

with the thousand-foot precipices that seemed to lie beneath every bend in the lonely dirt track. Frankly, he

preferred the mules to the brake-pad-deprived minibuses and pickups.

"Looking good, Mr. Westcott!" a voice boomed from above. Langois and Kovia glanced up briefly before

returning to their own work. Dr. Harbos would query them in due time.

Martin Harbos, Ph.D., was director of the excavations at Apachetarimac. Five-ten or so, he was half a foot

shorter than the senior graduate student laboring beneath him. A candle or two shy of sixty, he still had more

hair than anyone else on the project, though every strand had long ago turned a startling silvery-white, the

blatant hue of a cheap Santa Claus wig. Rather than being a consequence of normal aging, the network of

deep lines that crevassed his face was inherited from his ancestors. His skin was burned brown from years of

field work, and beneath his shirt and shorts small, corded muscles exploded like caramel popcorn. He had

the bluest eyes Cody had ever seen, a ready sense of humor, and the ability to flay a student naked with a

casual, sometimes off-hand comment.

Today he chose to be complimentary. "Trepanning?" He was crouching at the edge of the excavation, peering

down at the skull in the box.

"I'd like to think so, Dr. Harbos." Though friendly, even jovial, the professor insisted on the honorific.

Fraternizing between officers and enlisted men was limited on Harbos's shift, Cody thought with a hidden

smile. "It'll

6Rlan Dean roster

11TEwl1M S

take lab studies to confirm or deny." He indicated the packaged skull. "The edges of the cavity are pretty

reg-ular, but it could have been made by a weapon."

Harbos nodded. "Or something else." His expression was sympathetic. "It's always frustrating when you find

something potentially exciting in the field and know that it won't be properly identified for months."

Straighten-ing, he moved on, keeping clear of the rim of the straight-sided excavation so as not to knock dirt

or pebbles into the hole.

Pleased with this mildest of compliments, Cody care-fully began to fold the lid of the box closed, bending the

corners of the cardboard so the top would stay shut until it could be reopened in the field lab. Somewhere, a

bird chirped. The paucity of birds in the semi-cloud forest was striking. Unlike elsewhere in the Andes, here

they kept to themselves, as if their boisterous warbling might dis-turb the sleeping mountains.

Except for the condors and the buzzards, of course. Ever on the lookout for harbingers of death, they had a

job to do that required constant patrolling of the translu-cent blue sky. Their occasional appearances

provoked ad-miring comment from those of his fellow students who hailed from the city, which he ignored.

Back home, such aerial visions were common as dirt.

He wondered how many other intact skulls might lie buried and waiting to be found nearby. By the standards

of the remarkable but little-known Chachapoyan culture, Apachetarimac was not a big site, no more than four

hun-dred meters long by ninety wide. Gran Vilaya, for one, boasted far more individual structures, and Cuelap

was more physically imposing. But Apachetarimac remained one of the most impressive, occupying the top

of a forest-clad mountain whose sides fell away sheer on three sides. Walls of cut limestone over a hundred

and twenty feet

high formed the basis of the citadel, with the interior structures rising higher still. Combined with dense

over-growth, its inaccessibility had kept it hidden from the out-side world for the last five hundred years.

Locals whose farms clung with the tenacity of dirty spider webs to the sides of nearby mountains knew of its

existence but had no reason to speak of it to the outside world. While they had made it plain they didn't care

for the busy visitors who delighted in digging in the dirt, nei-ther did they attempt to interfere with the

excavation. The presence of a pair of Peruvian federal policemen, camped on site to prevent looting and ward

off any wandering narcotraficos, also served to keep the superstitious locals from causing any trouble.

"Well, does inspiration strike, have you been bitten by a fer-de-lance, or is this paralysis due to an inability to

decide whether to go forward, back, or simply wait for instructions?"

He turned sharply. The only time Alwydd could look down on him was when he was standing in a hole. Not

that she was particularly short, but he was the tallest per-son in camp. For that matter, he was the tallest

person in this immediate region of Peru, height not being a notable characteristic of the local indios and

mestizos.

Embarrassed, he fumbled for a witty response and, as always, came up with nothing. She was much too

quick for him. Harbos could keep up with her, giving as good as he got, but no one else in camp had her

lightning wit. She was also brilliant, and beautiful, about a year away from her doctorate, and convinced that

she and not Cody ought to be Harbos's first assistant in the field. If not wit, however, Coschocton Westcott

possessed endless reser-voirs of patience. In an archaeologist, that was the far more valued commodity.

Brilliance was cheap.

He had never met so attractive a girl so indifferent to

8

her appearance. From the dirt-streaked baggy bush pants to the equally frumpy beige-toned field shirt, she

looked every inch a bad copy of a silent screen clown after a particularly rough car chase. The limp-brimmed

hat that slumped down around her ears sat atop her head like broccoli on a stalk, rising to unnatural heights

in order to ac-commodate the long hair wound up beneath. A mussed pixie drifting through a khaki

wilderness, he mused. For all that, a most erotic pixie.

Forget it, he told himself firmly. Though he had never asked, and she had not volunteered the information, he

would bet that she wrote regularly to several captivated males back in the States. Dazzling young doctors or

up-and-coming investment bankers, no doubt. Gangly half-breed dirt-grubbers from West Hicksville were not

likely to fit neatly into her definition of potential mate material.

Everyone had tried, he knew. He'd even seen the temptation in Harbos's face. You had to give the good

doctor credit, though. He might brush up against his students every now and then, but he was quick to voice

apologies-even if he didn't feel apologetic. It struck Cody abruptly that she was still standing there, looking

down and waiting for some kind of response.

"I'm just packing Curly here for the trip to the lab." He indicated the skull.

With the agility of a gymnast she hopped down to the mid-level shelf, careful not to kick any dirt into the

excavation. Kneeling while pushing back the brim of her rumpled hat, she scrutinized the vacant-eyed skull

thoughtfully.

"Not exactly the second coming of the Lord of Sipan," she quipped tartly.

"What is?" The great, unlooted tomb of the Moche chieftain that had been discovered near the coast was

unparalleled in the history of South American archaeology.

9

Its gold, silver, and lapidary treasures were the stuff of every field worker's dreams.

"Nothing, I suppose. If this is Curly, where are Manny and Moe?"

"Show a little respect for the dead." He nodded to-ward the silent skull. "That's a cousin of mine. Distant, but

still a relation."

Straightening, she grinned down at him, enjoying the temporary and entirely artificial adjustment to their

re-spective height. "Don't try that politically correct guilt crap on me, Cody Westcott." She tapped the box

with a booted foot. "This dude's about as much your relative as Mary Queen of Scots is mine. It is a dude?"

"I believe so. Kimiko will make the final determina-tion." Kimiko Samms was the group's forensic

anthropologist, a specialty that required her to live in even closer proximity to the long dead than her

colleagues. "I can feel a kinship across the centuries to whoever this person was.

"Funny." Reaching back, she scratched the arch of her behind through the soft bush poplin of her pants. "All I

can feel are chigger bites."

"Salar should have something for that. If he doesn't, I do." Turning away, Cody started toward the steps that

had been cut into the dirt above a nonsensitive corner of the site. Sweat poured down his face, mixing with

accumulated dirt and dust-archaeologist's rouge. Time was passing and he wanted to get the skull to the field

lab and return in time to do some more digging before the daylight shrank too far below the undulating green

hori-zon. The sweat did not bother him. At Apachetarimac's altitude the air began to cool rapidly once the sun

had passed its zenith.

"What's that?"

He almost didn't turn. In addition to her beauty, wit,

"

10

down fast now. It would be dark soon, no time to be bumbling around in the area of active excavation. Aside

from the danger of stumbling into an open pit, a misplaced foot could do irreparable damage to half-seen,

half-exposed relics. Dr. Harbos was an easygoing individual, but not where the work of serious archeology

was concerned. One of his rules required everyone to be back in camp by the scheduled dinnertime. In

addition to preventing damage to the sites by overzealous diggers, this was also a safety measure. Snakes

and uncomfortably large spiders emerged soon after sundown, and in a land of precipitous cliffs and hillsides,

wandering about after dark was not a good idea anyway.

"It's another skull, all right," she murmured. Busy appraising the sunset, he did not look down. "But this one's

weird."

That drew his attention back to his companion. With the sun setting, it was already dark in the bottom of the

pit. "What do you mean, `weird'? That's not acceptable scientific terminology."

Bending over the spot, she blocked his view of the emerging bone. "It's got a hole in it, like the one you're

taking to the lab-but not like the one you're taking to the lab."

"Is that anything like the sense you're not making?" He knelt to have a look for himself, frowning slightly. His

flashlights reposed on the compact field desk back in his tent. At the same time, repressed excitement

surged through him. A second trepanned skull lying close to the first would be a good indication that they had

stumbled on an important ceremonial or medicinal center, perhaps the nearest thing that existed to a

Chachapoyan infirmary.

Sitting back, she continued to work with the two brushes, using the larger to sweep away clumps of earth

and the smaller for cleaning the depressions in the skull.

and intelligence, Kelli Alwydd was renowned in camp for her jokes, not all of them practical. At least, he

mused, she hadn't shouted "snake!" or something equally juvenile. As he paused, he wondered why he was

reacting at all, giving her what she wanted. Maybe, he decided, he was a sucker for clever women. Or maybe

he was just a sucker. Irrespective of the reason, he turned.

She was in the pit, having jumped down from mid-level so softly that he hadn't heard her land. Crouching, she

squinted in the receding light at a portion of grid

square V-9. Only slightly uncomfortable at finding the pose as pretty as it was professional, he ambled over

to join her, affecting an air of studied disinterest.

"Let me guess." He fought to keep a lid on his trade-mark sarcasm. "A solid gold peanut, like those in the

necklace from Sipan? Or is it just silver? Silver-and-turquoise ear ornaments, with articulated figures?"

She did not look up. "No. I think it's another skull." Reaching into one of her many shirt pockets, she brought

out a pair of brushes: one bold, the other fine-haired sable,

and began methodically flicking at the dirt in front of her feet.

He could have knelt to peer over her shoulder, steal-ing a small pleasure from the proximity. Instead, he

walked around to crouch down in front of her, careful to step

cleanly over the white cord that sliced the excavation into neat, easily labeled squares. Her brushwork was

rapid and precise, like the rest of her.

Reminiscent of scorched polystyrene, the smooth curve of a human cranium began to emerge from the soil of

ages in which it lay entombed. It was large, but not out

rageously so. Like the rest of their South American brethren, the Chachapoyans were a people of modest

stature.

With a sigh, Cody straightened. The sun was going

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Immediately, he saw what had inspired her comment. There was indeed a cavity in the new skull, but it was

considerably larger than the one marring the specimen he was going to deliver to the field lab. No only was it

larger, but irregularly shaped, with ragged edges. Even the clumsiest shaman-surgeon could not possibly

have expected to cure any patient by opening such a grievous lesion. Furthermore, it was-weird.

Without waiting for her to finish exposing the base of the skull, he reached down and cupped his long fingers

around it, ignoring her protests as he pulled it from the earth. For the first time in centuries, it was fully

exposed to the air.

"Hey!" she objected, "I haven't finished cleaning that!" "Look at this," he said, holding the osseous discovery

out to her, his right index finger tracing paths across the bone as he spoke. "This isn't weird-it's impossible."

Around the rim of the opening in the roof of the skull, a jagged ridge of bone the diameter of a silver dollar rose

upward, like water rising around a pebble dropped in still water. It stood frozen in time, testament to some

unimaginable cerebral convulsion.

Kelli stared. "That's pretty extreme. It looks like the inside of his head blew up. Some kind of pressure

buildup in the cerebral fluid?" Her tone had turned serious.

"I don't know. I didn't have that much physiology." Straightening, he held the second skull up to the rapidly

fading light. "It sure doesn't look like the result of some intentional medical procedure, no matter how

primitive. What could cause the bone to rise up and solidify in this kind of position?" Carefully, he ran one

finger along the thin, sharp edge of the cranial crater.

She shook her head. "You got me. It's ugly. Samms is going to go crazy when she sees this."

Gently, he knelt once more to replace the skull in the

slight depression from which it had been removed. "I haven't got another suitable box or any more bubble

wrap here, and it's getting dark. We'll come back for it to-morrow."

Her eyebrows rose slightly. "We? This is your dig." She nodded briskly to her left. "Mine's over there, with

Marie-Therese, at the base of the serpent wall."

He protested. "You found this. It's unusual, and you're entitled to the credit."

Her head turned slightly to one side as she gazed up at him, carefully placing her brushes back in her shirt

pocket. "Okay, then. `We' it is. I'll come over early and we can pack it up together."

"Good. That's fair." Her acquiescence pleased him for reasons that he did not elucidate to himself. "Walk

back to camp?"

"We'd better." She scanned the darkening sky specu-latively. "Harbos won't wait five minutes before sending

someone to look for us if we're late. Then we'll get chewed out for wasting camp resources, et cetera."

"Give him credit." Cody's long legs made easy work of earthen steps his companion had to negotiate with

care. "We haven't lost anybody on this dig yet."

"Sometimes I'd like to get lost"

Joining him on the surface, she studied the surrounding mountains. In the distance, smoke rose from the

cooking fires of small, vertically challenged farms. No contrails marred the pristine purpling sky. Northern

Peru did not lie at the intersection of any major transcontinental jet routes, and there was virtually no local air

traffic. A silence that was largely extinct elsewhere in the world stalked the immense mountain valleys like

some vast, nebulous, prehistoric visitant.

"Me too." Together they followed the trail through the grass that led toward camp, dodging around the huge

trees

14

that grew out of the citadel's soil-cloaked foundation. Around them, the circular walls of empty buildings

turned single doorways to the sun, and the rectangular pyramid of the recently identified royal quarters cast

its long, broad shadow on their progress.

The narrow defile, barely wide enough for one person at a time to squeeze through, cut steeply downward

through the hundred-foot-high wall. Where it opened onto the rocky, grass-covered slope it was still just wide

enough for two men to enter abreast. Eminently defensible against an attacking enemy, it made the immense

stone walls that flanked the opening seem even higher and more impressive than they were.

Turning to their right, they followed the trail that had been etched into the slope along the base of the wail,

careful to keep it close at hand. Wander too far away and a thousand-foot drop waited to greet the indifferent.

Ahead, the flicker of lanterns coming to life began to dance within the intensifying darkness. There were more

than twenty tents for the field team, plus additional lean-tos and makeshift shelters for the native help. By far

the largest canopy, a substantial, well-anchored sweep of tough jungle-resistant weave, served as dining

room, lecture hall, library, and recreation area. Another, slightly smaller, housed the field lab.

"Hungry?" he asked her. "I'm always hungry, Cody."

He tripped over the compliment before he realized it. "I've seen you eat, and I wonder where you put it." "Up

here." She tapped the side of her head. "Mental exertion burns a lot of calories." In the twilight, her smile

shimmered like one of the approaching lanterns. "You don't exactly starve yourself."

"When you grow up always hungry, you get in the habit of eating anything and everything that's offered to

you." Espying a long, twisting shape on the trail ahead of them, he hesitated only an instant before resuming

his stride. In this part of the world, a smart hiker was wary even of fallen branches. Anything with multiple

curves demanded a second look.

Her smile faded away and her eyes locked on his as best they could in the gathering darkness. "I don't know

much about you, Cody. You're friendly, you'll stop work to chat with anyone, but you never talk about

yourself." In the creeping shadows her slight shrug was barely perceptible. "This is only my second dig.

Maybe that's the normal condition for more advanced field associates like yourself. I don't know. Or maybe

it's just this place." A casual sweep of one hand encompassed mountains, valleys, and the citadel wall that

towered skyward on their right. "Up here, everyone tends to focus on dead people."

"There's not much to know," he began, and for the next hour proceeded to give the lie to his own claim of

conciseness. Considering how fast her mind and mouth worked, he was astonished in retrospect at how

intently she listened.

Khuatupec was beside himself, literally as well as figu-ratively. The food was moving away! There was nothing

he could do but fume silently, exactly as he had for hundreds of years.

Nor was he alone. Amnu writhed inside her tree as the food almost, but not quite, brushed against one of its

branches. Tsemak twitched below the ground, inexorably wedded to his slice of subsurface stratum. Chakasx

hummed within the stream that served as both home and prison. Throughout the citadel, the mountain, and

the fortresslike slopes that had protected the Chachapoyans of Apachetarimac for centuries, They stirred.

Moved about

15

Ilan lean fester

and were active as they had not been for more than five hundred years.

In that time, other food had come close, though none had been so tasty as this promised to be. Its sheer

virgin delectability was unprecedented in Khuatupec's long ex-perience. To have it pass so close, on so many

occasions, was maddening. There was nothing he or any of the others could do. In order to eat, it was the

food that would have to make proper contact with them. They could not leave their situs to initiate feeding. It

was an infuriating, horrific existence, mitigated only by the fact that Khuatupec's kind were almost impossible

to kill. Yet, he thought furiously, to suffer near immortality in a state of perpetual craving was as much curse

as good fortune.

Even worse than not being able to feed on such delectables was the thought that contact might be made with

another of his kind instead of him. Watching another feed in his place would be almost as intolerable as not

being able to feed himself. Should that occur, there would remain only the hope of snatching up some

carelessly discarded leftovers from the main feeding.

It might not come to that. He could still be the first. Thus far, none had managed to feed on the newly arrived

food, although a week ago Sachuetet had come close. She had been too quick, however, from an eagerness

to eat born of hundreds of years of abstinence. Sensing that something was not right, the food had freed itself

before Sachuetet had been able to begin feeding fully. Her agonized cry of frustration and loss had resounded

throughout the mountain.

From the others she drew no solace. Khuatupec and his kind knew nothing of compassion. They knew only

how to wait, and to eat. The light was vanishing from the mountain as if sucked up by the ground. Light or

dark, day or night, it was all the same to Khuatupec and the

others. They never slept, not in the thousands of years of their existence. As a concept, sleep was known to

them. Food, for example, slept. Trees and rocks and water did not. Khuatupec and Anmu and Tsemak and

the others did not. Even if they had known how to go about initiating the process, it was something they

would have avoided assiduously. Self-evidently, sleeping was dangerous. Sleeping was risky.

Sleep, and you might miss a feeding.

Two

As Coschocton Westcott and Rely Alwydd had suspected it would, the second skull did indeed drive Kimiko

Samms crazy. Struggling with her laptop, supplementing the information stored on her hard drive with disc

after disc of data, the expedition's forensics, expert could find no medical condition compatible with a culture

as ancient as that of the Chachapoyans that might account for the spectac-ular and unsettling hole in the

cloven skull. Such an extensive, presumably violent perforation should have driven the cranial bone inward, or

shattered the surface into small fragments. Due to the age of the subject material, she could not even

determine if whatever had caused the inexplicable calcareous formation was the cause of its owner's death.

"C'mon," Kelli asked her one day, "surely somebody couldn't walk around with a cranial deformation like

that!" The diminutive Samms was noncommittal. "People with far worse deformities have survived. The

Elephant Man, lepers, Asian and African peoples suffering from severe elephantiasis, ancient dwarves and

hunchbacks-you'd be surprised."

19

"It's not the circular bone ridge that makes me wonder, extreme as it is." Standing alongside the

anthropologist, Kelli examined the skull and its inscrutable rupture. "It's the exposure of the brain."

"People can live with that, too." With the delicacy of a surgeon, Samms was using a fine brush to coat the

interior of the skull with a stabilizing preservative. "Maybe not for long, but they can live."

Kelli's gaze drifted to the ingress to the big tent, the outside masked by the protective insect mesh that was

all that presently restricted entry. "Whatever the cause of the initial trauma, it must have been hellishly

painful. The mother of all migraines."

Samms concentrated on her work. "We don't know that. There are people with cranial deficiencies who,

though they have to wear protective headgear all the time, live normal and productive lives." Sitting back, she

rubbed at her eyes, swatted away a mosquito that had slalomed the mesh screen, and smiled speculatively

up at her visitor. In front of her, the laptop glowed insistently.

"Speaking of productive lives, I haven't seen much of your tall, silent-type, warrior chieftain lately."

They shared a mutual chuckle. His ethnic origins notwithstanding, the owlish, workaholic Westcott was about

as far from either woman's image of a warrior chieftain as could be imagined. Or as Samms had put it on a

previous occasion, definitely not romance-novel cover material.

"He's not my warrior chieftain, or anything else." Alwydd's prompt reply was convincing. "But he is the senior

student on site, so everybody has to spend time with him." She fiddled with a can of fixative. "'That is, they

do if they want answers to questions. Harbos is always busy."

"So's Westcott, from what I'm told." The anthropolo

20 21

gist indicated the overflowing folding table that had to serve as lab bench, research facility, and office. "I

wouldn't know, myself." She grinned, a misplaced elf with short black hair, dirt-streaked face, and

impressively elevated IQ. "I don't get out much. People bring me bits of dead folk and from that I'm expected

to explicate entire civi-lizations."

"Easier than trying to explicate Coschocton Westcott. " Alwydd started for the mesh that separated the

sterile, white interior of the tent from the green and brown world of bites and stings that lay in wait outside.

"And he isn't even dead."

"Good luck trying to understand him." Samms snapped her high-powered, self-illuminating magnifying

glasses back down over her eyes. "Me, I'll stick with dead people. Dead men might be full of contradictions,

but at least they're soft-spoken. And more predictable in their habits."

"Cody's predictable." Alwydd drew the mesh aside and stepped out into the stark mountain sunshine. "He

just doesn't know how to relax."

Hunched over instruments and skull, Samms replied without looking up. "Sure you want him to relax?"

Standing outside the tent, her expression scrimmed by the mesh, Alwydd stuck her tongue out at her

seated, pre-occupied colleague. "Funny lady. Stick to your bones." Despite her studied indifference, Alwydd

found herself spending more time in Westcott's company than could simply be justified by the need to know.

Perhaps she was intrigued by his failure to fall all over her, as every other student on the site had already

done. She loved a challenge, be it scientific or social. Or maybe it was because, despite his denials to the

contrary, he was different. Or possibly it was nothing more than the ease with which they worked together.

He was one bright guy, with a genuine insight and intelligence that did not arise solely from the study and

memorization of standard texts. Or maybe she was just bored.

Not with her work. That was more than sufficiently fascinating in its own right. But aside from her studies,

working on her paper, and keeping records, there wasn't much to do at Apachetarimac. Not with the nearest

town days away by mule, and the only city of any consequence another half-day's jarring journey via minibus

or jeep.

So she shadowed him when she could spare the time, admiring his skill with the tools of archaeology, his

persistence and patience with something as insignificant as an unsculpted potsherd. And then one morning,

when she awoke well before dawn, she decided to go and see if he wanted to join her in watching the sun

come up over the east end of the citadel. That was when she found his tent empty, lights out, sleeping bag

neatly zipped and stretched out on its cot. His predawn absence bemused her. Even workaholics at the site,

of which Coschocton Westcott was not the only one, needed their sleep after a hard day of laboring in the

cloud forest. Harbos insisted everyone be back in camp by a certain hour, but there was no monitoring of

those who might want to arise and begin work before breakfast.

She ought to go right back to bed, she knew. But-where the hell was he? Making allowance for a possible

call of nature, she waited outside the tent. Fifteen minutes later he still had not returned. A check of her

watch showed the time: 3:20 A.M.. Even the Peruvian support staff, including those charged with preparing

the morning meal, were not stirring yet.

Where in the name of Atahualpa's ghost had he gone? She had put fresh batteries in her flashlight just a

week before. Thus armed against the night, with light and firm knowledge of the citadel's layout, she still

hesitated. Stumbling around the site in the dark was not a good idea, even for someone like herself who knew

the loca-tion of every pit and preliminary excavation. Curiosity finally overcoming caution, she started out of

camp and up the main trail that led to the citadel.

22

There was no moon that morning, and the stars were far away and little comfort. The beam of illumination that

her flashlight cut through the darkness seemed spare and constricted. Twisting trees heavy with orchids and

other epiphytes pressed close around her. Soft-footed creatures and things with no feet at all rustled in the

brush on either side of the narrow path. Snakes hunted at night, she knew, and wolf spiders as big as

tarantulas, with half-inch-long brown fangs and multiple eyes that gleamed like black mabe pearls. She did

her best to avoid brushing against the suffocating vegetation lest she spook something small and hungry that

might be living among the leaves.

The improbable wall loomed above her, a familiar if not entirely comforting presence she kept on her left as

she made her way to the slender defile that was the main entrance. As she climbed up and into the citadel

proper, the ancient stonework shut out the starlight around her. A quick sideways turn and then she was

through the keyhole and standing atop the artificial stone plateau of the city.

Of Coshocton Westcott, or anyone else, there was no sign. Only muted whispers in the grass and the

sleepily moaning branches of trees indicated that there was anything else alive within the ruins. This is

stupid, she told

herself. Really stupid. It would be more stupid still if in the darkness she tripped and hurt a leg, or worse,

stumbled into one of the excavated pits. Picking her way care-fully along the cleared trails, she made her way

toward the site where she and Westcott had found the two skulls.

It was empty, a dark, brooding maw among the encircling stones. That did it. Turning on one heel, she began

to retrace her steps. It had been a ridiculous idea from the start. Wherever Westcott went wandering before

dawn, it was evidently not among the ruins of the citadel.

Descending back through the narrow entrance, she emerged at the base of the wall and started to turn back

toward camp, when something flickering in the distance caught her attention. It came, not from the vicinity of

the tents nor from within the citadel, but partway down the steep, grass-covered slope of the mountain.

Frowning, she watched it for a long moment before she was sure it was a flashlight. It might still be a local

farmer, hunting for a lost sheep or pig or steer. Domesticated animals occasionally wandered up to the top of

the mountain in search of fresh forage, trailing tired, fussing locals in their wake. But the poor farmers who

populated the slopes and valleys of the Calla Calla could not usually afford flash-lights, much less batteries.

Switching off her own light, she stood motionless and alone in the darkness, the massive limestone wall

Alan Dean Foster - Interlopers

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