Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [71]
The late summer days were still pretty long, and this was good, because Frank needed the light. He hiked into the park checking in on his FOG phone, getting the latest fixes and hoping he could locate the gibbons, whom he had learned were a family, Bert and May and their kids, or the siamangs; but any of the ferals would do. In the last hour before sundown many of them made their way to the watering hole in the gorge for a last drink for the night, and he often had good luck spotting them. Ostrich, tapir, spider monkey, eland, sitatunga, tamarin, red deer, brown bear; his personal list of sightings kept growing.
His Acheulian hand axe came in the mail at work, and he pulled it out of its bubble wrap and held it up to the light. Instantly it was his favorite rock. It had a lovely weight, and fitted his hand perfectly; it was the classic Acheulian oval, with a sharp tip at its smaller end. Chipped on both sides very expertly, so that it seemed as much a work of sculpture as a tool, a little Andy Goldsworthy sculpture; a petroglyph all by itself, speaking in its heft a whole world. The people who made it. Gray quartzite, slightly translucent, the chipped faces almost as smoothed by patination during their four hundred thousand years of exposure as the browned curve of original core. It was beautiful.
He took it to the park and pulled it from his daypack to show to Spencer and Robin and Robert the next time they ran, and they spontaneously fell to their knees to honor it, crying out wordlessly, like the gibbons. “Ahh! Ahh! Oh my God. Oh God, here it is.” Robin salaamed to it, Spencer inspected every chip and curve, kissing it from time to time. “Look how perfect it is,” he said.
“Look,” Robin said when he held it, “it’s shaped for a left-hander, see? It fits a lot better when you hold it in your left hand.” Robin was left-handed. “Do you think maybe Homo erectus were all left-handed?” he went on. “Like polar bears? Polar bears are all left-handed, did you know that?”
“Only because you’ve told us a thousand times,” Spencer said, taking it from him. “How old did you say?” he asked Frank.
“Four hundred thousand years.”
“Unbelievable. But look, you know—I really hate to say this—but it doesn’t look like it would fly like a frisbee.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“Also, that thing about how it wouldn’t make a very good hand axe, because it’s sharpened all the way around? Actually it seems to me you could hold it almost anywhere and still hit something without cutting your hand. The edge isn’t sharp enough.”
“True.”
“Have you tried throwing it yet?”
“No.”
“Well heck, let’s give it a try.”
“Let’s throw it at a rabbit!”
“Now come on.”
“Hey we have to test this thing, how else are we going to do it? Throw it at one of those tapirs, it’ll bounce right off them.”
“No it won’t.”
“You kill it you eat it.”
“Fine by me!”
They ran the course, and when they came to the meadow near picnic site 14, they stopped and Frank pulled out the axe, and they threw it at a tree (it left an impressive gash) and then at trash bottles set up on a log. Yes, you could break a bottle with it, if you could hit it; and it did tend to spin on its axis, though not necessarily horizontally; in fact it tended to rotate through a spiral as it flew forward.
“You could kill a rabbit if you hit it.”
“True with an ordinary rock though.”
“You could spook a big animal by the watering hole.”
“True with an ordinary rock though.”
“All right, okay.”
“It’d work to skin an animal I guess.”
“That’s true,” Frank said. “But they’ve tried that in South Africa, and they’ve found that they lose their edge really quick, like after one animal.”
“You’re kidding.”
“That’s what they found. That’s why they think there might be so many of them. They think they used to just knap a new one pretty much any time they needed to do something.”
“Hmm, I don’t know. This thing looks pretty perfect for a throwaway. It looks like someone’s favorite tool.”
“His Swiss