CRO-MAGNON (41 page)

“
Yes, I can. I need to scan all three prehistoric brains.”

Damn!
One smuggled head was bad enough. He cast around for a way to scotch the idea.

“
You said the gene has to do with pronunciation.”

“
That’s right. It—”

“
Then just scanning the brains won’t tell you anything, because you won’t have the brain-body interaction.”

Another foot-stamp. “You’re missing the point. I’ve decided to clone the bodies and upload the brains’ contents.”

He jerked around. “Clone?”

“
My team and I will need live specimens. It’s the only way to see what we’ve got and how it can benefit mankind. And I don’t mean just with FOXP2.”

He searched her face.
“Specimens?”

“
All right, bad choice. I need the Neanderthal man, the Cro-Magnon woman, and the hybrid child.”

He gaped. “You want to resurrect people who lived thirty thousand years ago?”

“
Not resurrect. Extract their identities, replicate their bodies, and reassemble the individuals.”

“
Sounds like resurrecting to me.” He stared at her. “Who do you think you are, God?”

Her slightly snubbed nose lifted.
“‘
God is in the details’—Mies van der Rohe. We need all three heads.”

“‘
The devil is in the details’—Hyman Rickover.” He shook his head. “I don’t know who frightens me more—Salomon or you.”

“
Salomon is after money, even though he has more than he could ever need. I’m out to help my fellow man.”

“
By tinkering with peoples’ DNA.”

“
Have you ever heard that you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs?”

“
Have you heard that most of the evil in the world is committed by people who think they’re doing good?” He gestured. “Adolf Hitler thought he was the savior of Europe.”

“
I asked you before not to compare me with monsters.” She swept her arm. “They’re going to manipulate the genome whether we like it or not. Take your choice: scientists like me or profit-mongers like Salomon.”

“
Wonderful. I’m paired with someone who puts science above human values. What if—”

The outboard engine sputtered, roared and steadied. Zinchenko beckoned, and Calder and Blaine stepped into the boat and sat on the thwart. Zinchenko opened the throttle, backed the boat around, and hovered over the controls as it picked up speed.

As the square prow parted the choppy water, Blaine glared at her dive partner. “Are you going to help me or not?”

“
I need to think.” Calder met her eyes. “To be honest, I wonder if the altitude is starving your brain. I don’t even believe that what you’ve outlined is possible.”

She returned his gaze. “What, specifically?”

“
Scanning a brain for thought patterns, recording them, and uploading them into a cloned body. That’s what you’re proposing, isn’t it?”

“
Yes.”

“
Sounds like ‘Flash Gordon meets the twenty-first century.
’
”

“
What if I told you I’ve already done it?”

“
I’d suspect you were gulling me.” He sighed. “Look, Caitlin, I consider it my responsibility to see that the expedition operates in the real world. This thing you’re proposing, it’s—”

“
My team and I have succeeded in mapping the synapses—altered transmission sites that store electromagnetic thought patterns on a network of neurons—of a mouse brain. We Fourier-transform them into digital form, run a parity check for internal consistency against the Mouse Brain Library data base, and store the results on optical disks.”

Calder watched the icy mountain loom as the opposite shore approached. “That doesn’t mean you can regenerate the actual—”

“
We’ve cloned a new mouse, uploaded the stored brain contents via the optic nerve, and induced consciousness with an electric shock.”

Her sheer hubris amazed him. Thought patterns. Fourier transforms. Parity checks. A scientific chimera, bound to break down in the real world. He stared at her, trying to gauge the extent of her delusion.

“
And created a cross-eyed mouse that drools, I suppose.”

She regarded him earnestly, with no trace of her former anger. “Its brain remembered how to negotiate mazes that it learned in its previous life.”

Calder sensed he was on a slippery slope. Once he conferred the slightest credence on her bizarre scheme . . .

“
You must be years, if not decades, away from doing that with a human. Why, even to clone one—”

“
There are reports of babies already having been cloned. Clonaid and others—”

“
Physically perhaps, although the reports may be premature. I understand there’s a barrier—”

“
That has now been addressed. Shoukhrat Mitalipov of the Oregon National Primate Research Center has achieved somatic cell nuclear transfer.” She folded her arms and regarded Calder in triumph.

“
What’s that . . . never mind. Have you presented this idea to Salomon Industries?”

“
Last week. To Laszlo Salomon.”

“
Is he technically qualified to—?”

“
No. But my two principal staff members—Henrik Volker and Peter Golub—are eminently, as you put it, ‘qualified.’”

“
But if Salomon has his own ideas about what use to put it to . . .”

“
SI is not the only biotech company in the world. Once people see what I’ve done, what I can do . . .”

Calder didn’t like where this cloud-cuckoo-land notion was leading. It was way beyond their mandate and could wind up getting them killed. It needed to be stopped. Caitlin had to be shown some sense.

He tried to look conciliatory. “Caitlin, I want to be cooperative. But as a scientist, I have a responsibility both to stay within the possible and to avoid anything that might open Pandora’s box.”

“
Jar.”

“
What?”

“
I believe the original container was a jar,” she said.

“
Please don’t dissemble. We’re talking about the future of humanity.”

“
Talking about improving it.”

“
And I believe our own lives are at stake here. The situation is way too critical for us to—”

Zinchenko cut the throttle and the blunt prow clinked against the icy shore.

“
This is our last day,” Caitlin said. “Our final chance to do something worthwhile.”

“
Worth whose while? You’re crossing a line.”

“
Science crosses lines, Ian. That’s what it’s about.”

“
More than a line. A Rubicon. If Salomon catches us . . .”

She swiveled on the seat and he felt the pull of her blue eyes. “Just consider the idea, Ian. That’s all I ask.”

#

The tunnel was even more silt-clogged than yesterday, Blaine thought. Had there been another tremor? Approaching the first jog, she saw that it had narrowed. She hoped Calder’s claustrophobia didn’t kick in.

Dismounting her tank and thrusting it ahead, she managed to squirm through. But could Calder? And even if he could, would he?

Finning toward the cave, she was relieved to see his light behind her. For all his old-maid reservations, he was proving a good partner.

The second jog had not narrowed further, and she reached the cave without incident. She hoped that swimming out would go as smoothly.

Inside, she saw that another panel of paintings had been de-iced. She felt that she could smell the carbon monoxide the catalytic heater must have given off, though she knew that would really be the accompanying fumes. Being careful to breathe only through the regulator, she remounted her air tank, hunched it into a more comfortable position, and traipsed to the right-hand wall. Calder joined her and they crouched before the four red, brown, yellow, off-white, and black drawings. Ian’s flashlight scanned the quartet, imparting life to the figures.

The first painting depicted the Cro-Magnon woman crouched inside a torch-lit cavern. Blaine wondered what mix of pigments the artist had used to get the orange-red color. There seemed no end to her ingenuity.

The young woman seemed to be spying on the gaunt older man of the previous panel, who pranced before a frieze of prehistoric animals as two adolescent-looking boys watched, one holding a cattail torch. The figures represented large game animals, and Blaine marveled at the woman’s sophisticated use of perspective. The painting looked worthy of any modern gallery.

Next came a mural of a peopled landscape, depicting an ambush of bison. Blaine noticed that the painter had used the contours of the cave wall to depict a valley with a brush corral. The herd was stampeding out the mouth of the valley, with a ragtag group of javelin-carrying men lagging behind, the ambiance suggesting that the hunt had failed.

So much for shamans’ cave paintings capturing animal spirits, Blaine thought. Someone had neglected to close the corral gate.

The third picture was a close-up of the Cro-Magnon chief talking to the young woman with the baby, the shaman looking on. Their faces made it clear that the woman was being chastised.

In the final painting the artist had skipped time and distance to show the broken-nosed Neanderthal and his ponytailed elder brother chasing a wooly rhino across frozen tundra, the younger man in the lead, the brother’s carriage suggesting exhaustion.

Blaine voiced her thought: “I wonder if the young woman meant to suggest a cause-and-effect link between spying on the shaman and the breakdown of the bison hunt.”

“
I imagine she did. When present-day hunter-gatherer societies experience failure or disease, the medicine man is sometimes slain in favor of someone new.”

Blaine nodded. “So, the shaman couldn’t afford to look bad.”

“
That’s the way I read it. He probably welcomed a chance to blame the failure on a sacrilege and eliminate a troublesome nonconformist at the same time.”

“
I’m puzzled why the artist switched to the Neanderthals’ hunt in the final frame,” she said.

Calder bent forward, and Blaine was aware of his cheek close to hers. “She may have wanted to make a statement about the two hunting methods. Notice in the first two pictures that the woman’s people practiced rituals and organized large-scale hunts, while the fourth pic shows her Neanderthal friend and his brother hunting alone.”

“
So?”

He turned and peered into her face mask. “That could shed light on what happened to the two groups of humans. Maybe that was her intent.”

“
What do you mean?”

Calder turned away and stepped to the body of the Neanderthal. “Later. I need to take more measurements, or I won’t have enough for the regression analysis.”

Blaine hitched her tank again and toddled to the small body near the fire pit. “I’ll start detaching the boy’s head.”

“
Now, there’s a well-chosen word. One might almost think you weren’t going to hack it off.”

As soon as she started to cut, Blaine saw that her steel blade would have trouble slicing through the oak-hard flesh of the boy’s throat. Bracing her shoulders, she bore down.

After a stint of diligent sawing with moderate progress, she began to grow bored. She glanced at Calder, who was working his calipers, a diver’s slate strapped to his knee.

“
What did you mean, the hunting methods could shed light? If you’re talking about Out-of-Africa versus Multiregional Evolution, it seems quite clear that—”

“
The Cro-Magnons must have developed their hunting techniques under tropical conditions,” Calder said. “Even in the cold of Central Asia, they obviously followed game animals seasonally, mounted large-scale hunts, and dispatched the animals from a distance.”

That tended to verify her thesis, not his, Blaine thought.

“
The Neanderthals, who had lived in the North since their evolution from Heidelbergensis, stayed close to home.” Calder maneuvered to measure the Neanderthal’s skull from front to rear, his voice growing enthusiastic. “Over time, they probably experienced repeated population busts as glaciated periods came and went. Here, we see a clan that’s down to two-man hunts.”

Case proven,
she thought
.
“So, eventually the Cro-Magnons completely replaced the Neanderthals.”

“
They didn’t ‘replace’ them.” Calder jotted the measurement on his slate. “The Cro-Magnons, having built a large population under benevolent conditions, probably arrived in Europe and Western Asia while the Neanderthals were at a low point from the previous glaciation, and effectively swamped them in the competition for resources. But probably not without interbreeding.”

“
One would think the Cro-Magnon men would have interbred with Neanderthal women, if anything, and not the other way around.”

“
Not exclusively, as we see from the woman’s story. The Neanderthal group, under r-selection pressure from an unstable environment, was willing to take on a Cro-Magnon woman. Although, in this case, their society proved unable to assimilate her.”

Blaine mounted a thin smile. “You’re twisting the picture to support your MRE hypothesis, when anyone with half a brain can see—”