“It was well done,” Maya told him. “It was like John Boone would have done it.”
“It was not,” Jackie said automatically.
“I knew him,” Maya said, giving her a sharp look, “and you didn’t. And I say it was like John would have done it.”
They stood staring at each other, the ancient white-haired beauty and the young black-haired beauty — and it seemed to Nadia there was something primal in the sight, primal, primeval, primate … these are the two witches, she wanted to say to Jackie’s sibs behind her. But then again they no doubt knew that. “No one is like John was,” she said, trying to break the spell. She squeezed Art’s waist. “But it was well done.”
Kasei came splashing up; he had been standing by silently, and Nadia wondered at him a little, the man with the famous father, famous mother, famous daughter… And slowly becoming a power himself, among the Reds and the radical Marsfirsters, out there on the “edge in a splinter movement, as the congress had proved. No, it was hard to tell what Kasei thought of his life. He gave Jackie a glance that was too complex to read — pride, jealousy, some sort of rebuke — and said, “We could use John Boone now.” His father — the first man on Mars — her cheery John, who used to love to swim the butterfly in Underbill, in afternoons that had felt like this ceremony, except that it had been their everyday reality, for a year or so there in the beginning…
“And Arkady,” Nadia said, still trying to defuse things. “And Frank.”
“We can do without Frank Chalmers,” Kasei said bitterly.
“Why do you say that?” Maya exclaimed. “We would be lucky to have him here now! He would know how to handle Fort, and Praxis, and the Swiss and you Reds and the greens, all of it. Frank, Arkady, John — we could use all three of them now.” Her mouth was hard and downturned. She glared at Jackie and Kasei as if daring them to speak; then her lip curled, and she looked away.
Nadia said, “This is why we must avoid another sixty-one.”
“We will,” Art said, and gave her another squeeze.
Nadia shook her head sadly. The peak always passed so fast. “It’s not our choice,” she told him. “It’s not something that is entirely in our hands. So we will see.”
“It will be different this time,” Kasei insisted.
“We will see.”
PART 8
Social Engineering
Where were you born?
Denver.
Where did you grow up?
Rock. Boulder.
What were you like as a child?
I don’t know.
Give me your impressions.
I wanted to know why.
You were curious?
Very curious.
Did you play with science kits?
All of them.
And your friends?
I don’t remember.
Try for anything.
I don’t think I had many friends.
Were you ambidextrous as a child?
I don’t remember.
Think about your science experiments. Did you use both hands when you did them?
I believe it was often necessary.
You wrote with your right hand?
I do now. I did then as well. Yes. As a child.
And did you do anything with your left hand? Brush your teeth, comb your hair, eat, point at things, throw balls?
I did all those things with my right hand. Would it matter ifl hadn’t?
Well, you see, in cases of aphasia, the strong right-handers all conform pretty well to a certain profile. Activities are located, or it is better to say coordinated, at certain places in the brain. When we determine precisely the problems the aphasic is experiencing, we can tell pretty well where the lesions in the brain are located. And vice versa. But with left-handers and ambidextrous people there is no such pattern. One might say that every left-handed and ambidextrous brain is organized differently.
You know most of Hiroko’s ectogene children are left-handed.
Yes, I know. I’ve spoken with her about it, but she claims she doesn’t know why. She says it may be a result of being born on Mars.
Do you find this plausible?
Well, handedness is still poorly understood in any case, and the effects of the lighter gravity … we’ll be sorting those out for centuries, won’t we.
I suppose so.
You don’t like the idea of that, do you?
I would rather get answers.
What if all your questions were answered? Would you be happy then?
I find it hard to imagine such a — state. A fairly small percentage of my questions have answers.
But that’s rather wonderful, don’t you agree?
No. It wouldn’t be scientific to agree.
You conceive of science as nothing more than answers to questions?
As a system for generating answers.
And what is the purpose of that?
… To know.
And what will you do with your knowledge?
… Find out more.
But why?
I don’t know. It’s the way I am.
Shouldn’t some of your questions be directed that way — to finding out why you are the way you are?
I don’t think you can get good answers to questions about — human nature. Better to think of it as a black box. You can’t apply the scientific method. Not well enough to be sure of your answers.
In psychology we believe we have scientifically identified a certain pathology in which a person needs to know everything because he is afraid of not knowing. It’s a pathology of monocausotaxophilia, as Poppel called it, the love of single causes that explain everything. This can become fear of a lack of causes. Because the lack might be dangerous. The knowledge-seeking becomes primarily defensive, in that it is a way of denying fear when one really is afraid. At its worst it isn’t even knowledge-seeking, because when the answers arrive they cease to be of interest, as they are no longer dangerous. So that reality itself doesn’t matter to such a person.
Everyone tries to avoid danger. But motivations are always multiple. And different from action to action. Time to time. Any patterns are a matter of — observer’s speculation.
Psychology is a science in which the observer becomes intimately involved with the subject of observation.
That’s one of the reasons I don’t think it’s a science.
It is certainly a science. One of its tenets is, if you want to know more, care more. Every astronomer loves the stars. Otherwise why study them so?
Because they are mysteries.
What do you care about?
I care about truth.
The truth is not a very good lover.
It isn’t love I’m looking for.
Are you sure?
No surer than anyone else who thinks about — motivations.
You agree we have motivations?
Yes. But science cannot explain them.
So they are part of your great unexplainable.
Yes.
And so you focus your attention on other things.
Yes.
But the motivations are still there.
Oh yes.
What did you read when you were young?
All kinds of things.
What were some of your favorite books?
Sherlock Holmes. Other detective stories. The Thinking Machine. Dr. Thorndyke.
Did your parents punish you if you got upset?
I don’t think so. They didn’t like me making a fuss. But I think they were just ordinary in that respect.
Did you ever see them get upset?
I don’t remember.
Did you ever see them shout, or cry?
I never heard them shout. Sometimes.my mom cried, I think.
Did you know why?
No.
Did you wonder why?
I don’t remember. WouU it matter if I had?
What do you mean?
I mean, if I had had
one kind of past. I could still have turned into any kind of person. Depending on my reaction to the — events. And if I had had another kind of past. The same variations would have followed. So that your line of questioning is useless. In that it has no explanatory rigor. It’s an imitation of the scientific method.
I consider your conception of science to be as parsimonious and reductive as your scientific activities. Essentially you are saying we should not study the human mind in a scientific manner because it is too complex to make the study easy. That’s not very bold of you. The universe outside us is complex too, but you don’t advise avoiding that. Why so with the universe inside?
You can’t isolate factors, you can’t repeat conditions, you can’t set up experiments with controls, you can’t makefalsifiable hypotheses. The whole apparatus of science is unavailable to you.
Think about the first scientists for a while.
The Greeks?
Before that. Prehistory was not just a formless timeless round of the seasons, you know. We tend to think of those people as if they resembled our own unconscious minds, but they were not like that. For a hundred thousand years at least we have been as intellectual as we are now. Probably more like half a million years. And every age has its great scientists, and they all had to work in the context of their times, like we_ do. For the early ones, there were hardly explanations for anything — nature was as whole and complex and mysterious as our own minds are to us now, but what could they do? They had to begin somewhere, eh? This is what you must remember. And it took thousands of years to learn the plants, the animals, the use of fire, rocks, axes, bows and arrows, shelter, clothing. Then pottery, crops, metallurgy. All so slow!}’, with such effort. And all passed along by word of mouth, from one scientist to the next. And all the while there were no doubt people saying, it’s too complex to be sure of anything. Why should we try at all? Galileo said, “The ancients had good reason to think the first scientists among the gods, seeing that common minds have so little curiosity. The small . hints that began the great inventions were part of not a trivial but a superhuman spirit.” Superhuman! Or merely the best parts of ourselves, the bold minds of each generation. The scientists. And over the millennia we have pieced together a model of the world, a paradigm that is quite precise and powerful, yes?
But haven’t we tried just as hard all these years — with little success — to understand ourselves?
Say we have. Maybe it takes longer. But look, we have made quite a bit of progress there too. And not just recently. By observation alone the Greeks discovered the four temperaments, and only recently have we learned enough about the brain to say what the neurological basis of this phenomenon is.
You believe in the four temperaments?
Oh yes. They are confirmable by experiment, if you will. As are so many, many things about the human mind. Perhaps it is not physics, perhaps it will never be physics. It could be that we are simply more complex and unpredictable than the universe.
That hardly seems likely. We are made of atoms after all.
But animated! Driven by the green force, alive with spirit, the great unexplainable!
Chemical reactions …
But why life? It’s more than reactions. There is a drive toward com-plexification that is directly opposed to the physical law of entropy. Why should that be?
I don’t know.
Why do you dislike it so when you can’t say why?
I don’t know.
This mystery of life is a holy thing. It is our freedom. We have shot out of physical reality, we exist now in a kind of godlike freedom, and the mystery is integral to it.
No. We are still physical reality. Atoms in their rounds. Determined on most scales, random on some others.
Ah well. We disagree. But either way, the scientist’s job is to explore everything. No matter the difficulties! To stay open, to accept ambiguity. To attempt to fuse with the object of knowledge. To admit that there are values shot through the whole enterprise. To love it. To work toward discovering the values by which we should live. To work to enact those values in the world. To explore — and more than that — to create!
I’ll have to think about that.
Observation is never enough. Besides it wasn’t their experiment anyway. Desmond came to Dorsa Brevia, and Sax went to find him. “Is Peter still flying?”
“Why yes. He spends a fair amount of time in space, if that’s what you mean.”
“Yes. Can you get me in’touch with him?”
“Sure I can.” Quizzical expression on Desmond’s cracked face. “Your speech is getting better and better, Sax. What have they been doing to you?”
“Gerontological treatments. Also growth hormone, L-dopa, serotonin, other chemicals. Stuff out of starfish.”
“Grew you a new brain, did they?”
“Yes. Parts anyway. Synergic synaptic stimulus. Also a lot of talking with Michel.”
“Uh-oh!”
“It’s still me.”
Desmond’s laugh was an animal noise. “I can see that. Listen, I’ll be off again in a couple days, and I’ll take you to Peter’s airport.”
“Thanks.”
* * *
Grew a new brain. Not an accurate way of putting it. The lesion had been sustained in the posterior third of the inferior frontal convolution. Tissues dead as a result of interruption of focused ultrasound memory-speech stimulation during interrogation. A stroke. Broca’s aphasia. Difficulty with motor apparatus of speech, little melody, difficulty in initiating utterances, reduction to tele-gramese, mostly nouns and simplest forms of verbs. A battery of tests determined that most other cognitive functions were unimpaired. He wasn’t so sure; he had understood people speaking to him, his thinking had been much the same as far as he could tell, and he had had no trouble with the spatial and other nonlinguistic tests. But when he tried to talk, sudden betrayal — in the mouth and in the mind. Things lost their names.
Strangely enough, without names they were still things. He could see them and think about them in terms of shapes, or numbers. Formula of description. Various combinations of conic sections and the six surfaces of revolution symmetrical around an axis, the plane, the sphere, the cylinder, the catenoid, the unduloid, and the nodoid; shapes without the names, but the shapes alone were like names. Spatializing language.
But it turned out that remembering without words was hard. A method had to be borrowed, the palace-of-memory method, spatial to begin with. A space in the mind was established to resemble the inside of the Echus Overlook labs, which he recalled well enough to walk around in in his mind, names or no. And in each place an object. Or another place. On one counter, all the Acheron labs. On top of the refrigerator, Boulder, Colorado. And so he remembered all the shapes he thought by their location in the mental lab.
And then sometimes the name would come. But when he knew the name and tried to say it, it was very possible that the wrong one would come out of his mouth. He had always had a tendency this way. After sessions of his best thinking, when everything had been quite clear to him, it had sometimes been difficult to translate his thoughts onto the plane of language, which did not match well the kind of thinking he had been doing. So that talking had been work. But nothing like this, this halting, erratic, treacherous groping, which usually either failed or betrayed. Frustrating in the extreme. Painful. Although preferable to Wernicke’s aphasia, certainly, in which one babbled volubly, unaware that one was making no sense at all. Just as he had had a premorbid tendency to lose the words for things, there were people who tended towards Wernicke’s without the excuse of brain damage. As Art had noted. Sax preferred his own problem.
Ursula and Vlad had come to him. “Aphasia is different for every person,” Ursula said. “There are patterns, and clusters of symptoms that usually go with certain lesion patterns in right-handed adults. But in extraordinary minds there are a lot of exceptions. Already we see that your cognitive functions have remained very high for someone with your degr
ee of language difficulties. Probably a lot of your thought in math and physics did not take place using language.”
“That’s right.”
“And if it was geometrical thinking rather than analytical, it probably took place in the right hemisphere of the brain rather than the left. And your right hemisphere was spared.”
Sax nodded, not trusting himself to speak.
“So, prospects for recovery vary widely. There is almost always improvement. Children in particular are very adaptable. When they have head injuries even a circumscribed lesion may cause serious problems, but there is almost always recovery. A whole hemisphere of the brain can be removed from a child if a problem makes it necessary, and all the functions be releamed by the remaining half. This is because of the incredible growth in the child’s brain. For adults it is different. Specialization has occurred, so that circumscribed lesions cause a specific limited damage. But once a skill has been destroyed in a mature brain, you don’t often see significant improvement.”
“The treat. The treatment.”
“Exactly. But you see, the brain is precisely one of the places where the gerontological treatment has the most trouble penetrating. We’ve been working on that, however. We’ve designed a stimulus package to be used in concert with the treatment, when faced with cases of brain damage. It may become a regular part of the treatment, if the trials continue to have good results. We haven’t done this in too many human trials yet, you see. The injection increases brain plasticity by stimulating axon and dendritic spine growth, and the sensitivity of Hebb synapses. The corpus callosurn is particularly affected, and the hemisphere opposite to the lesioned side. Learning can build whole new neural networks there.” “Do it,” Sax said.
Destruction is creation. Become as a little child. Language as space, a kind of mathematical notation, geometric locations in the lab of memory. Reading. Maps. Codes, substitutions, the secret names of things. The glorious inrush of a word. The joy of chatter. Every color’s wavelength, by number. That sand is orange, tan, blond, yellow, sienna, umber, burnt umber, ochre. That sky is cerulean, cobalt, lavender, mauve, violet, Prussian, indigo, egglant, midnight. Just to look at color charts with words, the rich intensity of colors, the sounds of the words — he wanted more. A name for every wavelength of the visible spectrum, why not? Why be so stingy? The .59-micron wavelength is so much more blue than .6, and .61 is so much more red… They needed more words for purples, the way Eskimos needed more words for snow. People always used that example, and Eskimos did have about twenty words for snow; but scientists had over three hundred words for snow, and who ever gave scientists credit for paying attention to their world? No two snowflakes alike. Thisness. Buh, buh. Bean, bear, bun, burr, bent, bomb. Buh. That place where my arm bends is my elbow! Mars looks like a pumpkin! The air is cold. And poisoned by carbon dioxide.
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