The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [556]
“Anyone I know?”
“Bartholomew Stiggins.”
“The neanderthal?”
“Yes.”
“Hope you like beetles. Call me when I exist next. I lo—”
The phone went dead. My wedding ring had gone again, too.
I listened to the dial tone for a moment, tapping the receiver thoughtfully on my forehead. “I love you too, Land,” I said softly.
“Your Welsh contact?” asked Bowden, walking up with a fax from the Karen Blixen Appreciation Society.
“Not exactly.”
“New players for the SuperHoop, then?”
“If only. Goliath and Kaine have frightened every player in the country except Penelope Hrah, who’ll play for food and doesn’t care what anyone says, thinks or does.”
“Didn’t she have a leg torn off during the Newport Strikers v. Dartmoor Wanderers semifinal a few years back?”
“I’m in no position to be choosy, Bowd. If I put her on back-hoop defense, she can just growl at anyone who comes close. Ready for lunch?”
The neanderthal population of Swindon numbered about three hundred, and they all lived in a small village to the west known as the Nation. Because of their tool-using prowess, they were just given six acres of land, water and sewage points and told to get on with it, as if they needed to be asked, which they didn’t.
The neanderthals were not humans nor descendants of ours, but cousins. They had evolved at the same time as us, then been forced into extinction when they failed to compete successfully with the more aggressive human. Brought back to life by Goliath BioEngineering in the late thirties and early forties, they were as much a part of modern life as dodos or mammoths. And since they had been sequenced by Goliath, each individual was actually owned by the corporation. A less-than-generous “buyback” scheme to enable one to purchase oneself hadn’t been well received.
We parked a little way down from the Nation and got out of the car.
“Can’t we just park inside?” asked Bowden.
“They don’t like cars,” I explained. “They don’t see the point in traveling any distance. According to neanderthal logic, anywhere that can’t be reached in a day’s walk isn’t worth visiting. Our neanderthal gardener used to walk the four miles to our house every Tuesday and then walk back again, resisting all offers of a lift. Walking was, he maintained, ‘the only decent way to travel—if you drive, you miss the conversations in the hedgerows.’ ”
“I can see his point,” replied Bowden, “but when I need to be somewhere in a hurry—”
“That’s the difference, Bowd. You’ve got to get off the human way of thinking. To neanderthals nothing is so urgent that it can’t be done another time—or not done at all. By the way, did you remember not to wash this morning?”
He nodded. Because scent is so important to neanderthal communications, the soapy cleanliness of humans reads more like some form of suspicious subterfuge. Speak to a neanderthal while wearing scent and he’ll instantly think you have something to hide.
We walked into the grassy entrance of the Nation and encountered a lone neanderthal sitting on a chair in the middle of the path. He was reading the large-print Neanderthal News. He folded up the paper and sniffed the air delicately before staring at us for a moment or two and then asking, “Whom do you wish to visit?”
“Next and Cable, lunch with Mr. Stiggins.”
The neanderthal stared at us for moment or two, then pointed us towards a house on the other side of a grassed open area that surrounded a totem representing I-don’t-know-what. There were five or six neanderthals playing a game of street croquet on the grass area, and I watched them intently for a while. They weren’t playing in teams, just passing the ball around and hooping where possible. They were excellent, too. I watched one player hoop from at least forty yards away off a roquet. It was a pity neanderthals were aggressively noncompetitive—I could have done with them on the team.
“Notice anything?” I asked as we walked across the grassed area, the croquet players moving past us in a blur of well-coordinated limbs.
“No children?”
“The youngest