The Story of B

by Daniel Quinn

  “No.”

  “What are you after?”

  “I’m after … what the gods have to write about us.”

  B grabbed my pen and held it up. “This is what you’re after. This is the Law of Life.”

  She picked up the ammonite fossil and slipped the pen under the thread that held the film canister in place. “What’s this?” she asked, pointing to the fossil.

  “The community of life on this planet.”

  “And this?”—pointing to the canister.

  “Animism.”

  “And you see that the Law of Life is nestled in between the two, touching both the community of life and animism.”

  “What is the Law of Life?” I asked her.

  “We’ll get to that. That’s our main subject tonight.”

  Science vs. religion

  “Religions like yours, revealed religions, are all perceived to be at odds with scientific knowledge—at odds with or irrelevant to. I wonder if you see why.”

  “I think it’s come to be seen that religion and science are just inherently incompatible.”

  B nodded. “Following the usual Taker pattern: ‘We are humanity, so if our religions are inherently incompatible with scientific knowledge, then religion itself must be inherently incompatible with scientific knowledge.’”

  “That’s right.”

  “But as you’ll see, animism is perfectly at home with scientific knowledge. It’s much more at home with your sciences than with your religions.”

  “Why is that?”

  “What’s that out there?” she asked, making her usual sweeping gesture.

  “That’s the world, the universe.”

  “That’s where the real gods of the universe write what they write, Jared. The gods of your revealed religions write in books.”

  “What does that have to do with animism?”

  “Animism looks for truth in the universe, not in books, revelations, and authorities. Science is the same. Though animism and science read the universe in different ways, both have complete confidence in its truthfulness.”

  She poked around among her building blocks, picked out the cartridge fuse, and held it up for my inspection. “This is science,” she said. “Religions like yours, Jared, are skeptical about it, are afraid to use it. They say, ‘Suppose we use it and it blows up in our face! Better not trust it.’ But animism isn’t worried about anything that can be revealed about the universe, so science belongs right here beside it.” She slid the fuse under the thread holding the film canister to the fossil. Then she asked me to describe what I saw.

  I said, “Animism is flanked by the Law of Life on one side and by science on the other. All three face the community of life.”

  The border

  “Now I want to make sure we don’t lose track of what we set out to do here, Jared. We’re investigating a border between almost-humans on one side and truly-humans on the other. We’re doing this because it’s my notion that we came to humanity as religious beings.”

  “Okay.”

  “Let’s extend our bricolage to include a little mental landscaping of the area around us. Take a stick and draw a circle around us at a distance of a couple paces.”

  I did as she asked and sat down again.

  “That circle represents the border we’re investigating, about three million years in the past, when Australopithecus became Homo. Is that clear?”

  I said it was.

  “I’m sure you understand that this line is imaginary. There was never a day when you would’ve been able to point to one generation of parents and say, ‘These are Australopithecines,’ then point to their children and say, ‘These are humans.’”

  “I understand.”

  “We can’t know how wide the line itself is. It might be two hundred years wide or a thousand years wide or ten thousand years wide. All we know is that on our side of the line there are creatures we feel confident about calling Homo and on the far side of the line there are creatures we don’t feel confident about calling Homo.”

  “I understand.”

  “I don’t know how much you know about all this, so I’ll play it safe and point out that the line doesn’t correspond to tool use. I mean, you don’t have users of tools on this side of the line and nonusers on the far side. You have tool-users on both sides of the line. We can be virtually certain of this, since even chimpanzees are well known tool-users, and Homos immediate predecessors were far beyond chimpanzees.”

  I told her I knew all this but didn’t mind her “playing it safe.”

  The Law of Life: the hologram

  B asked me to describe the state of our work of bricolage. I picked it up and studied it again before beginning. “This fossil shell is the community of life on this planet. The religion you call animism is bound up with this community. Something called the Law of Life is written in the community of life and this too is bound up with animism. Perhaps it’s the work of animism to read the Law of Life that is written in the community of life.”

  “That’s an excellent guess, Jared. Go on.”

  “Animism perceives itself as allied with science, because both seek truth in the universe itself.”

  “Good. Now we’re ready to spend some time on the Law of Life. The Law of Life is like a hologram. Do you know anything about holography?”

  “A bit. I was a photography buff in high school, and holography is basically lensless photography. In ordinary photography, a photographic plate is exposed to light reflected from an object, and an image appears on the plate because a lens intervenes. In holography, a photographic plate is exposed to light reflected from an object, but no image appears on the plate because no lens intervenes. What’s recorded on the plate are patterns of light waves received from every part of the photographed object. This is the hologram. And when the hologram is placed in a beam of light, a three-dimensional image of the photographed object appears in midair where the original object stood. And because every part of it is imprinted with light waves from the whole object, any fragment of the hologram can be used to regenerate the whole image.”

  “This is how the Law of Life is similar to a hologram, Jared: Every fragment of it is imprinted with the whole law.”

  “The Law of Life is what governs life?”

  “No, the Law of Life isn’t what governs life, it’s what fosters life, and anything that fosters life belongs to the law.”

  I told her an example would help.

  “Here’s the Law of Life for newly hatched ducklings: Latch on to the first thing you see that moves, and follow it no matter what. Since the first thing newly hatched ducklings see is ordinarily their mother, they usually latch on to their mother, but they’ll latch on to anything that moves. Since their best hope for survival is latching on to their mother, no matter what, you can see why this is the law that fosters life for ducklings.”

  “Yes, I can see that.”

  “Here’s a generalization that can be made about the Law of Life: Those who follow it tend to become better represented in the gene pool of their species than those who don’t follow it.”

  “So not all individuals follow the law?”

  “The duckling that for one reason or another doesn’t receive or respond to the genetic latching-on-to-mom signal is weeded out. It doesn’t survive long enough to reproduce.”

  “I see.”

  “Obviously the law varies in its details from species to species. In ducks, the law is written for ducklings and it reads, ‘Stick to mom no matter what.’ In goats, the law is written for the mother, and it reads, ‘Suckle only your own.’”

  I thought about that for a bit and asked how “Suckle only your own” fosters life for goats.

  “Let’s say White Goat and Black Goat each have a suckling kid. Black Goat dies, so her kid comes over to White Goat and says, ‘Hey, I’m hungry, how about some lunch?’ The best chance White Goat’s kid has for survival is if its mother says to this stranger, ‘Get lost, kid, you’re not min
e.’ If White Goat says, ‘Okay, sure, pull up a teat,’ she’ll be diminishing her own kid’s chance for survival—which means her own genes’ chance for survival.”

  “Yes, I can see that.”

  “Here’s a more general statement of the law as it’s followed by goats: ‘If your resources are of doubtful sufficiency for two offspring, then you’re better off giving all to one than half to each.’”

  “Not the law of kindness.”

  “I would say rather, ‘Not the law of futile kindness.’ I think most mothers would rather have one live child than any number of dead ones. Nonetheless, it’s certainly true that, if the two are in conflict, the law favors life over kindness. Those who follow the contrary law—the law that favors kindness over life—will tend to lose their representation in the gene pool of their species. This is because their offspring will tend to survive and reproduce less often than the offspring of those who follow the law that favors life.”

  “I understand.”

  “On the subject of kindness … I don’t know if you know David Brower—one of the century’s foremost environmentalists, the founder of the John Muir Institute, Friends of the Earth, and Earth Island Institute. He tells this story of one of his earliest adventures as a naturalist. At the age of eleven he collected some eggs of the western swallowtail butterfly and kept an eye on them as they hatched into caterpillars, which later turned into chrysalides. Finally the first of the chrysalides began to crack open, and what Brower saw was this: The emerging butterfly struggled out, its abdomen distended by some sort of fluid that was pumped out over its wings as it hung upside down on a twig. Half an hour later it was ready to fly, and it took off. As the other chrysalides began to crack, however, Brower decided to make himself useful. He gently eased open the crack to facilitate the butterflies’ emergence, and they promptly slid out, walked around, and one by one dropped dead. He had failed to realize that the exertions he had spared the butterflies were essential to their survival, because they triggered the flow of fluid that had to reach their wings. This experience taught him a lesson he was still talking about seventy years later: What appears to be kind and is meant to be kind can be the reverse of kind.”

  “I understand.”

  “Among goats, it’s the mother that enforces this law: ‘If your resources are of doubtful sufficiency for two, then you’re better off giving all to one than half to each.’ Among eagles (and many other bird species), it’s enforced by the elder of the two offspring. The female will typically produce two eggs a few days apart, which is naturally better survival policy than producing a single egg. But if the first chick survives, it will almost invariably peck or starve the younger chick to death.”

  I said, “I guess it was my impression that infanticide was explained as a reaction to overcrowding.”

  “Yes, it used to be explained that way, but this argues a perception of evolution that ultimately didn’t stand up to close examination—a perception of evolution as promoting what’s ‘good for the species.’ It now seems clear that evolution promotes what’s good for the individual, in the sense of assuring the individual’s reproductive success—what I’ve been calling ‘representation in the gene pool.’”

  I see.

  “In lions and bears, females will often abandon a litter that has only one survivor—even if this one survivor is in perfect health. This isn’t ‘good for the species’ in any way, but it’s good for the individual’s lifetime reproductive success. Her representation in the gene pool will definitely improve if she invests exclusively in litters larger than one.”

  “I have to admit that this is all news to me.”

  “No one can know everything,” she said with a shrug.

  “Show me where we’re going here. I’m feeling lost again.”

  “I can’t teach you the whole of the Law of Life in a single night, Jared. I couldn’t teach you the whole of it if we came here every night for a decade. What I can do in a single night is present you with a few pieces of it, in the manner of a bricoleur. But let’s reach for some pieces in a new direction.”

  The Law of Life: a mouse burial

  She stood up, and I started to follow her example, but she told me to stay put. “Let’s see if I’m lucky tonight,” she said, and ducked into the underbrush straight ahead of us, clearly the huntress in search of a scent. I closed my eyes, grateful for the break. Returning after ten or fifteen minutes from the right, she beckoned me to follow her, which I did with some apprehension. I don’t know whether it’s a guy thing or a people thing, but I don’t like being made to feel like a greenhorn, as I suspected I was going to be. Not more than ten paces in, she stopped, crouched, and invited me to inspect a bare patch of ground the size of a checkerboard. I identified it at a glance: “Dirt.”

  She shook her head impatiently and picked up a twig, which she used as a pointer, showing me something here, there, and everywhere. Looking closely, I spotted clumps of dry grass, twig parts, bits of bark, broken leaves, and more dirt.

  “Don’t do this to me,” I told her. “I’m not Natty Bumppo and never will be.”

  She didn’t argue. Instead, she reached her twig over to raise a branch of a low bush and invited me to have a look under it. What it looked like was a dead mouse being buried like a bather at the beach. Only its head showed, nestled in a little mound of dirt. As I watched, in the dimmest possible light, the ruffle of dirt around its neck bubbled here and there, and the mouse visibly slid back a millimeter, as if literally sinking into the earth.

  “In an hour or so,” B explained, “the mouse will be completely underground and out of sight, the work of burying beetles that are digging the soil out from under it.”

  She lowered the branch, and I asked what she’d been trying to show me in the dirt in front of the bush. She used her twig as a pointer as she tried to show me the signs. “The beetles—I’m pretty sure there are just two of them—found the mouse’s carcass here but evidently didn’t care for this as a burial site, so they carried it to a more sheltered site under that branch.”

  “Two beetles carried the mouse?”

  “What they do is burrow under the carcass then turn over onto their backs and shove it in the direction they want it to go. It’s a very laborious process. Once they have it underground, they harden the chamber around it, and while the corpse rots, the female lays her eggs nearby so the larvae will have easy access to the carrion mass once it’s opened up.”

  “Yum,” I said.

  “Oh, there’s plenty of competition for this mouse, Jared—other insects, microbes, many vertebrate scavengers. The flies are especially bothersome, because they may have laid their eggs in the mouse’s fur before the beetles came along. Fortunately—but not surprisingly—the beetles themselves are supplied with egg-sweepers, mites that make their homes right on the beetles and that live on flies’ eggs. The mouse, the beetles, the mites, and the flies are all inspiring embodiments of the Law of Life.”

  I thought about this last statement as we made our way back to the clearing. “I’m afraid I don’t see what makes these creatures embodiments of the law,” I told her.

  “The Law of Life in a single word is: abundance.” When no more was forthcoming, I asked if she’d elaborate on that a bit.

  “A useful exercise would be for you to go back to the mouse carcass and bring back one of the beetles. Then I’d have you pick off a couple dozen of the beetle’s phoretic mites so you could examine them under a microscope.”

  “What would I learn from that?”

  “You’d learn that each mite—such an inconsiderable creature!—is a work of so much delicacy, perfection, and complexity that it makes a digital computer look like a pair of pliers. Then you’d learn something even more amazing, that, for all their perfection, they aren’t stamped out of a mold. No two of them are alike—no two in all the mighty universe, Jared!”

  “And this would be a demonstration of … abundance?”

  “That’s right. This fantasti
c genetic abundance is life’s very secret of success on this planet.”

  We trooped on. After a few minutes I realized we’d left our clearing far behind. Before long we were back on the public paths.

  B said, “I haven’t done nearly as well as I thought I would tonight, Jared. I haven’t shown you a tenth as much as I hoped. Tomorrow will be better.”

  Friday, May 24 (ten P.M.)

  One of the bad ones

  The hotel dining room was open by the time I finished the previous entry, so I went down for some breakfast, then came back to the room and slept till midafternoon. At the theater everyone was disheartened because they’d failed to get the announcement of B’s talk in today’s paper. It’ll appear tomorrow, but everyone knows this means the turnout will be even more dismal than expected.

  I was frightened looking at B. She was wafer pale, nervous, and visibly shrunken, as if she’d aged ten years overnight. The life had gone out of her hair and her eyes, and I thought I saw a tremor in her left hand. Until then, in truth, I’d never really believed in her illness. Now I thought she should be in a hospital bed—or at least in some bed, with someone bringing cups of tea laced with honey, stoking a small, cheery fire, and reading aloud from The Wind in the Willows.

  Around five o’clock she suggested that we get out of there, and I asked to where. When she said the park, I asked if she really felt up to that. She gave me a sharp look and half of an angry reply, then seemed to realize I hadn’t earned it.

  “I have my good days and my bad days,” she said, with the air of making an admission. “Up to now you’ve only seen the good ones.”

  All the same, we took the Mercedes instead of walking. On the way, B asked if I was a theologian.

  “Me? No way.”

  “That’s too bad,” she said without further explanation. “I know Charles made this point, but I’m going to make it again: When St. Paul brought Christianity into the Roman world, very fundamental ideas were already in place there. The idea of gods as ‘higher beings.’ The idea of personal salvation. The idea of an afterlife. The idea that the gods are involved in our lives, that their help can be invoked, that they’re pleased or offended by things we do, that they can reward and punish. Notions of sacrifice and redemption. These were all things that Paul didn’t have to explain from scratch.”