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fought; something dead must lie down there in the brush. More circled above the compound, cocking an eye her way each time they banked past.
    She stood at the edge of an immense emptiness. Miles stretched from the tips of her black Blunnies to where the Western Mountains rose purple and lavender, and beyond them the frost-capped heads of the far Mahawayo. She came here when the stupidity and arrogance became too outrageous. She had no patience. Her mother had told her this when she was small. She saw no signs she’d ever changed.
    The gorge was dry, with eroding layers of buff and ruddy sedimentary rock, volcanic ash, and central basin dioctahedral clays. She’d always expected it to yield the bones of tiny protohumans, primordial hairy East African leprechauns, half simian, half hominid. Like Olduvai. Two years ago a small team had come in from Stony Brook, not well funded, and she’d tried to persuade Tim White and Berhane Asfaw to come after that, but they’d refused, said there were no indications. She squinted at the crumbling soil for anything that might be ancient bone. It was supposed to turn almost black, stained with minerals. She was a hydrogeologist, but she’d always wondered about hominids. If you knew where there was water once, wouldn’t that have been where the buggers gathered?
    This desert reassured her it didn’t matter, what human beings did now. What folly and crime. How many millions died, of fever, disease, starvation, war. They’d lived in East Africa for four and a half million years. And they’d still be here long after she was gone.
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    WHEN she went back in an icon pulsed on the screen. She was back online, and she had a message. In a mailbox she didn’t share with Abdiwali, that no one in Ashaara or even at the UN had access to.
    She hesitated, hand on the mouse. Got up, checked that the trailer door was locked, and sat again. “Face the music, O’Shea,” she whispered. Typed in the password, double-clicked, and sucked a breath as the message opened.
    It was from Sweden.
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Ratios of dissolved salts in the four samples submitted were compared. All samples contained a low but consistent content CaSO4 andMgSO4. Ratio of dissolved salts and percentage of sulfate content support the hypothesis of common source.
    Isotope analysis: Deuterium excess from the four samples:
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    Sample A - 21.41
Sample B - 21.38
Sample C - 21.41
Sample D - 21.62
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    All samples fall near the Levant meteoric line confirming original pluvial derivation from within the Mediterranean basin. Conformity of sample confirms sulfate analysis, again supporting the hypothesis of a common source paleowater deposit dating to 30K BCE. However data on supply and recharge rates are not adequate to speculate on size of common recoverable aquifer as proposed in the letter accompanying samples.
    To clarify this further data collection is suggested at the following locations and depths . . .
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    She exhaled, letting tension ooze out of her fingertips, evaporate out of her wet scalp. Stress she’d carried for months. She felt weak, then immensely strong.
    It was there.
    But with the same thought came the knowledge: it was superlatively dangerous.
    She moved to print out the e-mail, then lifted her fingers from the keys. Instead she closed that window and brought up another file.
    A jagged, waist-pinched Ashaara stretched three hundred miles inland from the Red Sea, sticking its elbow deep into Sudan. Just under five hundred miles north to south, it looked like an outline of a human knee, the port of Ashaara City perched at the kneecap. Two river systems bisected it, streaming, at least in good times, toward the Red Sea from the Western Mountains. The red lines of the road network were disappointingly sparse, though not as disappointing as in reality, since whole sections had degenerated into sloughs of mud, dust, or loose stones. The south had been the most fertile