Everyone was quiet for a time, wary, motionless, waiting to see if She intended to return. But nothing out of the ordinary happened.
Then She Who Knows cried out, "It was the Goddess, yes, and She has taken Skyfire Face!"
"What?"
"He was right here, just behind me, when the light appeared. Now he's gone."
"Gone? Where? How?"
"Look for him!" someone screamed. "Find him! Skyfire Face! Skyfire Face!"
There was a tremendous hubbub. People were scrabbling about, moving without purpose in every direction, movement just for the sake of movement. Goddess Woman heard Silver Cloud calling out for quiet, for calmness. The Mothers were the most excited: their shrill cries rose above everything else, and they ran about weeping and flailing their arms in the air.
For a moment Goddess Woman wasn't able to remember who the actual mother of Skyfire Face was; then she recalled that it was Red Smoke At Sunrise who had given birth to the little boy with the jagged lightning-bolt birthmark, four summers back. But the Mothers raised all the children of the tribe in common, and it made very little difference to them which one of them had brought a particular child into the world; Milky Fountain and Beautiful Snow and Lake Of Green Ice were just as troubled by his bewildering disappearance as was Red Smoke At Sunrise.
"He must have wandered off the path," Broken Mountain said. "I'll go look for him."
"He was right here," said She Who Knows acidly. "That light swallowed him up."
"You saw it, did you?"
"He was behind me when it happened. But not so far behind that he could have strayed. It was the light that took him. It was the light."
All the same, Broken Mountain insisted on going back to look for him. But it was useless. There was no sign of the boy anywhere. An hour's search produced nothing, not even a footprint; and now it was growing very dark.
"We have to move on," Silver Cloud said. "There's no place here for camping."
"But Skyfire Face-"
"Gone," Silver Cloud said inexorably. "Vanished into the Goddess-light."
"The Goddess-light! The Goddess-light!"
They moved along. Goddess Woman felt numb. She had looked right into the shimmering light, and there was still an ache behind her eyes, and when she closed them she saw patterns of floating purple spots. But had it been the Goddess? She couldn't say. She had never seen anything like that light before. She hoped she never saw it again.
"So the Goddess wanted one of our children after all," She Who Knows said. "Well, well, well."
"You know nothing about these matters!" Goddess Woman told her furiously. "Nothing!"
But what if she was right? Goddess Woman wondered. It was altogether possible that she was. Likely, even. So powerful a light could only have been a manifestation of the Goddess.
The Goddess had claimed a child? Why? What sense did that make?
We can never understand Her, Goddess Woman decided, after wrestling with the strange event far into the night. She is the Goddess, and we are only Her creatures. And Skyfire Face is gone. It is beyond all comprehension, but so be it. She remembered now the rumor there had been that Silver Cloud had been planning to sacrifice a child when they reached the Place of the Three Rivers. Well, at least there would be no more talk of such things. They were almost at their destination, and the Goddess had claimed a child without their having had to give it to her. Goddess Woman hoped that She would be content with that. There were not so many children in the tribe that they could afford to let Her have another one just now.
Chapter Three. Discovering
A NEANDERTHAL? A sub-human Neanderthal? Miss Fellowes thought in disbelief and bewilderment, with anger and a keen sense of betrayal rising right afterward. Was that really what the child was? If what Deveney had said was true, her worst fear had been confirmed.
She turned on Hoskins, glaring at him with a kind of controlled ferocity.
"You might have told me, doctor."
"Why? What difference does it make?"
"You said a child, not an animal."
"This is a child, Miss Fellowes. Don't you think so?"
"A Neanderthal child."
Hoskins looked puzzled. "Yes, yes, of course. You know what sort of experimentation Stasis Technologies has been involved in. Certainly you aren't going to tell me that you didn't realize the child would be drawn from a prehistoric era. We discussed all that with you."
"Prehistoric, yes. But Neanderthal? I expected to be looking after a human child."
"Neanderthals were human," Hoskins said, showing some signs of annoyance now. "More or less."
"Were they? Is that true?"
She looked toward Candide Deveney in appeal.
Deveney said, "Well, according to the thinking of most paleoanthropologists over the past sixty or seventy years, the Neanderthals certainly must be considered to be a form of Homo sapiens, Miss Fellowes-an archaic branch of the species, perhaps, or a subspecies, a kind of backwoods cousin, so to speak, but definitely close kin, definitely to be considered human-"
Impatiently Hoskins cut in. "Let that point go for a moment, Deveney. There's another issue to address here. -Miss Fellowes, have you ever had a puppy or a kitten?"
"When I was a young girl, yes. But what does that have to do with-"
"Back when you had this puppy of yours, this kitten, did you care for it? Did you love it?"
"Of course. But-"
"Was it human, Miss Fellowes?"
"It was a pet, doctor. We're not talking about pets now. This is a professional matter. You're asking a highly trained nurse with a considerable background in advanced pediatric medicine to take care of-of-"
"Suppose this child here were a baby chimpanzee," Hoskins asked. "Would you be repelled? If I asked you to care for it, would you do so or would you turn away in disgust? And this isn't a chimpanzee. It isn't any sort of anthropoid ape. It's a young human being."
"A Neanderthal child."
"Just as I said. A young human being. Strange-looking and wild, precisely as I told you it would be. A difficult case. You're an experienced nurse, Miss Fellowes, with a superb record of achievement. Do you shy away from difficult cases? Have you ever refused to take care of a deformed infant?"
Miss Fellowes felt her argument slipping away. She said, with much less vehemence, "You might have told me."
"And you would have refused the position, is that it?"
"Well-"
"You knew we were dealing with a range of thousands of years here."
" 'Thousands' could mean three thousand. It wasn't until this evening, when you and Mr. Deveney were discussing the project and the phrase 'forty thousand years' suddenly entered it, that I began to realize what was really going on here. And even then I didn't fully understand that a Neanderthal would be involved. I'm no expert in- in- What was it you said, paleoanthropology, Mr. Deveney? I'm not familiar with the rime-scale of human evolution the way you people are."
"You haven't answered my question," said Hoskins. "If you had known all the data ahead of time, would you have refused the position or wouldn't you?"
"I'm not sure."
"Do you want to refuse it now? There were other qualified candidates, you know. Is this a resignation?"
Hoskins gazed at her coolly, while Deveney watched from the other side of the room, and the Neanderthal child, having finished the milk and licked the plate dry, looked up at her with a wet face and wide longing eyes.
She stared at the boy. The ugly little boy. She heard her own voice saying, But Neanderthal? I expected to be looking after a human child.
The boy pointed to the milk, and to the plate. And suddenly he burst out in a short series of brusque, harsh sounds repeated over and over: sounds made up of weirdly strangled gutturals and elaborate tongue-clickings. Miss Fellowes said in surprise, "Why, he talks!" "Apparendy he does," said Hoskins. "Or at least he can make A feed me again sound. -Which any cat is capable of doing, of course."
"No-no, he was talking," said Miss Fellowes.
"That's yet to be determined. There's plenty of controversy over whether Neanderthals were capable of true speech. That's one of the things we hope we're going to be able to settle during the span of this experiment."
The child made the clicking, gargling sounds again. Looked at Miss Fellowes. Looked at the milk, and at the empty plate.
"There's your answer," she said. "He's definitely talking!"
"If that's so, then he's human, wouldn't you say, Miss Fellowes?"
She let the question pass without responding. The issue was too complex to consider just now. A hungry child was calling to her. She reached for the milk.
Hoskins caught her by the wrist and pulled her upward so that she was facing him. "Wait a moment, Miss Fellowes. Before we go any further, I have to know whether you're planning to stay on the job."