Lost in Translation Page 0,4

to the other, and then darted inside.

Gone. He stared down at the parking lot, narrowed his eyes, wondering.

He was to meet his interpreter in the hotel restaurant at seven-thirty. He sat down and glanced through the mostly Chinese menu, flush with the thrill of finally being here. It had taken more than a year to make it happen. First studying everything published about China’s northwestern deserts, reading all that was available in English and even scraping together the money to have some of the Chinese stuff translated. Retracing Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s desert expeditions of more than seventy years before. Reviewing the whole career of Father Teilhard, who had been an important paleontologist in his time and then, after his death, become famous for his books of transcendent Christian philosophy. Sifting clues out of his books, his published letters and diaries. All of it sparked by the secret Spencer’s grandfather—in his own youth a well-known geologist, a friend of Teilhard’s—had confided to him, the grandson, shortly before he died. Gradually seeing how the puzzle fit. Then writing the grant proposal. Getting leave from the university. Finding the interpreter.

He was startled by the sound of a chair scraping over the floor, and then: "You’re Dr. Spencer?"

He looked up and swallowed. The red-haired woman.

She was dressed in blue jeans now, and a simple cropped T-shirt, but it was her. Unmistakably. The hair was tucked behind her ears and she had a pleasingly freckled, high-cheeked little face with moss-colored eyes.

"Good morning," she said, and stuck out her hand. "Zaochen hao. I’m Alice Mannegan."

"Adam Spencer." They shook. Her hand felt small and fine-boned. "Sorry, I’m a little surprised." He smiled apologetically. "Because I saw you this morning."

"Saw me?"

"Before dawn. That was you, wasn’t it? Coming back to the hotel on a bicycle?"

She paused and looked at him. Something indecipherable ran across her face. "Yes. That was me."

"Well." He bit back any more questions. "Anyway."

"Anyway." She sat down, beckoned a waitress, and ordered food in rapid Chinese. She centered her plate and dark wood chopsticks on the tablecloth. "Your flight was okay?"

"It was fine. Thanks. It’s great to be in China."

"Oh, yes—I love China." Her face lit; for a moment everything about her seemed to lock happily together. "I love it, the sense of the past, the civilization, the language. And it could hardly be any more different from"—she paused— "America."

"You don’t like America."

She moved her shoulders.

"But you grew up there?"

"That doesn’t mean I liked it. Anyway, welcome." She settled against the back of her chair. "Now tell me about this job."

"Okay. Right." He took out his notebook and set it open on the table, uncapped a cheap ballpoint. "Do you know the work of Teilhard de Chardin?"

"Teilhard de Chardin—yes, a little. The Jesuit. I think it was in college I read The Phenomenon of Man. Actually I haven’t read him in years. Though he did live in China for a long time. I guess you know that."

"Yes." He made a note. "And I guess you know he was a famous paleontologist as well as a theologian. That’s what got him exiled to China. The essays he wrote about evolution were a little too real for the Vatican. Their idea of the origin of man was Adam and Eve. Period."

"Well." Alice smiled slightly. "Teilhard knew too much to go along with that."

"Right. So they sent him off to China. Lucky for archaeology, I guess—because he found some of the first early-man sites in Asia." Spencer leaned back from the table in mock fear as the waitress downloaded a precariously balanced pyramid of steaming dishes. "You order all this?" His face fell open at the shockingly yellow eggs, the soup, and slick green piles of pickled vegetable.

"Don’t worry. It’s cheap. They just devalued the renminbi again." She scooped up fried pea sprouts and a tangle of tiny silvery fish, mounded them on her plate with white pillows of steamed bread. She felt good from the night before. Hungry. Alive. Exalted. Later she knew the feeling of being stuck would creep back, but for now—she flashed the American archaeologist a smile. "So, you were saying. Evolution."

Spencer stared. God, she could really pack it in for someone so tiny. "Yes. Teilhard did some great work here. He found some important Late Paleolithic sites, especially in the far northwest. Then in 1929 he started working with the group that uncovered Peking Man here, outside the city."

"Oh, yes," she said. "Peking Man."

"It was one of the most important Homo erectus