by Richard Farr
The scanner stood in its own bay, next to Natazscha’s office door, on which an overburdened metal sign was etched with the words “Professor Natazscha P. Cerenkov, Human Genetics & Epigenetics, Hominin Paleoanthropology, Paleolinguistics.”
“This way,” she said, hurrying us past. She sat down at a desk next to the scanner, motioned for me to sit in what looked like an upscale dentist’s chair, and clipped a heart-rate monitor to my finger.
“I can’t do much without the main computer,” she said. “But I can run enough of this off my local drive to show you how it works and what I discovered.”
“You are being like this is big secret,” Kit said.
Natazscha ignored her to focus on the machine, fiddling with the dials and muttering in Russian. Silent as a feather, a gleaming ceramic helmet on a telescopic arm descended from the ceiling above me.
“Looks like robot’s skull from a comic book, yah?” Kit said. She was right. It was head shaped, but the simple, slightly curved geometry made it look menacingly alien—like something that might be puzzled by its own awareness, puzzled by its own origin, and not sure whether it’s an organism or a machine. Rosko voiced my thoughts: “Balakrishnan’s rivet-jockeys thought they were just making a medical tool,” he said. “But you can kind of tell they were raised on Star Wars. Trust the Force, Luke.”
“Yah,” Kit said. “Or maybe just trust paycheck.”
“I don’t think an actor would be very happy wearing this,” Natazscha said. “The interior is tungsten, which has the same density as gold, and it weighs fifty kilos.” Her fingers attacked the keyboard. The sound was like rain on the fly of a tent. The helmet descended over my head and I heard, or felt, a low hum somewhere around my temples.
“Hold still, Morag. Your head is moving too much.”
“Sorry.”
“I have noticed, she does this head bobble thing when she is worrying,” Kit said. “Right now, she worrying all the time.” Kit had kicked off her bright-yellow running flats and was sitting with you on a small love seat, her long hair swept forward over one shoulder and her long legs tucked neatly beneath her. She’d hooked her arm through yours and put her head against your shoulder, which, ridiculously, I found annoying. But then she caught my eye, and something about her expression melted the emotion. It was like, It’s OK. I’m here. You can rely on me. She slowly pursed her lips into the most delicate suggestion of a kiss, and it was such a perfectly judged gesture that my heart started to thrash around like a fish on a hook.
“What was that, Morag?” Natazscha said, peering in surprise at a readout.
Emotions! So embarrassing!
Um, well, Natazscha, it’s like this. Your daughter showed me an intimate sign of affection, and I wasn’t expecting it, or not right at that moment, so I felt a rush of embarrassment, but also at the same time this intense, warm-as-a-bath, overwhelming happiness. And embarrassment that I could so easily be made so happy, along with annoyance at being so easily manipulated, and puzzlement because I wasn’t sure whether I was annoyed at being manipulated by Kit, or only annoyed at being manipulated by my own emotions about her, and oh, by the way, is that a clear distinction in the first place? And I felt a strong desire to reach out and touch her, but let’s not go there, because you’re her mother and this is embarrassing enough already. I was hesitant about returning Kit’s gesture, so I didn’t, which made me feel bad. And I could tell that I was blushing, and I was annoyed at being unable to control these unconscious somatic responses, which is stupid because, as you of all people must know, you can’t control a mechanism that was installed in the brain stem a hundred million years before the rest of the human cauliflower even evolved. I also thought—for a while, maybe an hour or two, or maybe seventeen thousandths of a second, it’s hard to say—about the strangeness of having all those good but confused feelings in the midst of all my other current feelings of anxiety, dislocation, stress, guilt, fear, and—
“Nothing,” I said. “I’m fine.”
Kit smirked.
I stuck my tongue out at her.
“Look at this,” Natazscha said. A big wall monitor came to life, with a blue-gray image of a brain in the middle of it. The image shimmered and twitched: it was a short video loop, in which waves of colored highlighting drifted and sparked. Beneath, like a caption, there was a long succession of codon triplets—a gene sequence:
TAA AAC TGC TGG AAA AGT
AGT CTT CTC TTC TGT CTG
CTT TAG ATT ACA AAA CTA
TCA CAA ACA TAC AGT GTG
AGA CAA GCC AGA ACA TAC
“That’s me?”
“Not yet. This is only a standard case, for comparison. A typical brain, which for these purposes means someone with no speech or language abnormalities but also no special talents. Not a Babbler.”
“You?”
“No. Carl Bates.”
Rosko pointed to the screen again. “What’s the DNA stuff underneath the image?”
“Segments from chromosome 7 in a gene known as FOXP2.”
“The language gene,” I said. “Isn’t that what they call it?”
“We know FOXP2 has something to do with language, but it’s more complicated than that.” She tapped a key. The image on the screen slid neatly to one side, and a second image came up, with its own block of codons. “This is the brain of a man in London. His family is famous in the research literature. They share a rare defect in FOXP2, and although they have normal general intelligence, they can’t produce or understand words in a normal way. So here’s what I’ve worked out. Babblers appear to have an even more radically mutated FOXP2. It generates an entirely different protein, which I’ve called FOXQ3. And the effect of FOXQ3 on the brain architecture is dramatically novel.”
The faint hum around my temples cut out, both images on the screen slid to the left, and a third appeared on the screen.
“Me at last?”
“You at last.”
The first two images disappeared, and the third one expanded to fill the whole screen. The visualization was amazing. My brain! My everything! My own personal zone of miracles! It was luminous blue gray on the monitor, like spotlit smoke, with a shifting overlay of green, red, and electric turquoise. Natazscha zoomed in toward a point near the center, and it was as if we were falling into the image, accelerating down through cloud layers of neurons: space-troopers fearlessly navigating a dense, mysterious nebula. But eventually we reached a layer of tissue that was solid, palpable, with an infinitely fine grain to its surface. She guided an arrow onto the image and brought it to rest in an area that looked like flakes of pastry.
“This is low resolution compared with what we can do. But we’re now inside your right-side hippocampus. See how it’s larger here, at this side, than in Carl’s scan? This tiny ribbed patch, just a couple of cubic millimeters, is where all those extra languages of yours get stored and processed.”
“Is beautiful,” Kit breathed, silkily.
“Thanks,” I murmured, trying not to move. “It’s the first time you’ve mentioned liking my right-side hippocampus.”
“Never showed it to me before. Shy girl you are. But is like, yah, sure, dead sexy.”
“It’s part of the limbic system,” Natazscha said loudly, as if that would prevent her or anyone else in the room from noticing that the word sexy had been spoken. “Limbic system. Important in memory. The point is, I think FOXQ3 is what makes people Babblers. And, while Derek Partridge and your ancient friend Shul-hura are busy convincing you that language and full consciousness showed up all in a rush seven thousand years ago at Thera, I’ve been working for years on evidence that the Neanderthals had full speech at least forty thousand years earlier.”
“That would mean Professor Partridge’s theory—that this all begins with Thera—can’t be true,” Rosko said.
“Derek is fixated on Thera and the Bronze Age, and I agree with him that something strange happened in that period. But Homo sapiens having language, and ten million o
ther species not having it, that’s the real puzzle. The answer has to go deeper than the Bronze Age.”
“I don’t see why language is such a big deal,” I said, and reeled off all the usual pop-sci about animal cognition. “It’s just a continuum, isn’t it? From fish to crows to dogs to us? Gorillas do sign language. Chimps trick one another. That thing about vervet monkeys have one warning call for snake and a different one for eagle. Elephants checking their bald spots in the mirror.”
Natazscha wasn’t impressed. “Misses the point, Morag. Not a single one of those species can compete verbally with a human two-year-old.”
“So you’re saying animals are stupid. What does that have to do with Partridge?”
“I’m not saying animals are stupid. The point is not that they can’t master language, but that they don’t need to. For millions of years, before we came along and started exterminating them, chimpanzees were hugely successful at being chimpanzees. Without ever using language. So why do we have it? Most people just don’t grasp how incredibly strange it is that language ever showed up.”
“Every species is different.”
She shook her head. “Having language isn’t like having spotted fur or sharp teeth.”
“I don’t see why is big difference,” Kit said.
“Imagine you’re doing research on rain-forest frogs,” Natazscha said. “Some species are bigger or more brightly colored than others, or have extra toes or poisonous skin. You’ve spent years classifying those differences, sorting out order and family and genus and species, the familiar Linnaean dance. Then one day you come into a clearing and discover a species of frog that’s, I don’t know, good at playing chess. Language is like that. We’re so used to it that we can’t see what a fantastical thing it is. It breaks all the rules. It should not exist. Everything about us is driven by evolution: when the creationists say that natural selection can’t explain the eye, they’re just advertising how little biology they know. But language truly is an evolutionary puzzle. It doesn’t make sense. It’s a superpower. Where did it come from?”
“Gift from God,” Kit said. “According to Babel story.”
“Aha, but Morag’s friend Shul-hura says that’s backward, doesn’t he? According to him, God didn’t turn one language into many to prevent us from communicating. We were already speaking many languages, and doing just fine with them, at the point when the Architects arrived. Where did those original languages come from? There has to be a much older origin.”
“But,” Rosko said, “I thought you only had to go back to the Neanderthals for the vocal tract to be the wrong shape for speech?”
“And also Neanderthals is too stupid,” Kit said.
“Yekaterina, you never listen to anything I say. We like to say that early hominins like Homo erectus must have been much less intelligent than we are, because they had smaller brains. But we also want to say that the Neanderthals were too primitive for language, even though their brains were bigger than ours. Apparently we’re so clever that we don’t even have to be consistent. As for their vocal equipment, the jury is still out. But that debate may be irrelevant. Language doesn’t have to be spoken.”
“I don’t understand,” Rosko said. “What else could it be?”
“FOXP2 helps the brain’s centers of perception communicate with the larynx. But in monkeys it helps those same areas connect with the parts of the brain that control the hands. Have you never seen someone gesturing even though they’re talking on the telephone? Have you never seen two people having a conversation in ASL?”
“You’re saying our ancestors could have had sign language before they had speech?” I said.
“For all we know, complete languages could have preceded any spoken language by tens of thousands of years. Who knows? But I haven’t told you the most important part yet. Everyone in the field’s been looking at FOXP2 as the human norm. So, either you have FOXP2 and you’re fine, or you have a damaged version and that’s a terrible disability. The existence of Babblers made me think: What if FOXP2, the norm for our species, is the disability? Maybe FOXP2 is the signature of a terrible handicap in our evolutionary history, like losing the ability to fly or something. And then there would be a reason why we lost it.”
“What are you getting at?” I asked.
“We have complete genomes now for several hundred early Paleolithic humans, a dozen Neanderthals, three Denisovans, and one of the Red Deer Cave people. As far as I can tell, not one of them has FOXP2; they all have FOXQ3. If that’s right, then you and the other Babblers aren’t a new evolutionary development. You’re a remnant of the old ‘normal.’ The rest of us—me, Kit, and more than ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the species—are profoundly mentally disabled.”
Kit rolled her eyes ostentatiously. “That makes me feel great. Before I am just not good at languages, or maybe dumb. Now I get to be ‘mentally disabled.’ Thanks, Matushka.”
“I don’t think Natazscha meant—” I said.
“Yah, Majka, she did meant. And is so totally not fair. You guys, you don’t know what is like. Me, I work hard two years at English, also French, is difficult. Stay up late, give myself headache. But I have wrong gene, so I can’t do it, and I get also like crapshit grades.”
“Two things,” Rosko said. “First, your mother isn’t a Babbler, and as I’ve said before she speaks way better English than you do—”
“Because she study longer.”
“Because I went to Soviet schools,” Natazscha said. “If you didn’t get it right, they screamed at you and humiliated you and called you a capitalist dog. And if that didn’t work, they beat you, which is very effective.”
“And the second thing is,” Rosko said, “it’s either crap or shit. You have to say one or the other. Crapshit is not a word.”
“You think you own the English language or something just because you speak it so good, Rosko Eisler? Crapshit crapshit crapshit! There, see? Word used all time, in fact. Is common. Especially with angry young Russian womens. What I am saying, Natazscha works for years to learn English, and I work hard also, but you Babblers pick up new language like pah.” She clicked her fingers explosively. “Is not fair. Is actually crapshit.”
“Natazscha,” I said, “when would the genetic change have happened? From FOXQ3 being dominant, to what’s normal now?”
“A long time ago. Fifty thousand years? Eighty? Which puts it right at the beginning of the so-called Great Leap Forward. When the first cave art and deliberate burials show up, the first evidence of music and religious ritual, all that sort of thing.”
She pushed a button, and the tungsten helmet floated back to its spot on the ceiling, silent and weightless as before. I shook my head from side to side several times. I felt a strong need to make sure it was still attached.
“I’d like to scan Daniel,” she said. It was only then that we realized you’d walked away.
Kit jumped up and went out to the main lab. “The stairs,” she said, pointing. “There.”
You were almost at the top. Natazscha called out to you. “Daniel. Come down. There’s nothing up there. Just another lab and Mayo’s office.”
“You’re wrong,” you said, and kept going.
CHAPTER 10
√2
At the top of the final flight there was a small landing. It had enough room for a potted palm, fake but plausible, and one of those random space-filler armchairs that you can tell no one’s ever sat in. The landing had one door, opposite the armchair, with a metal touch pad instead of the card reader we’d seen on the other doors. Natazscha punched in a code, swung the door open, and flicked on some lights. The air smelled sour, like uncollected trash.
You’d never been up there before, had you? Not to the fourth floor? Situation normal, as far as I could make out. They’d had public tours of the building and all, part of the university’s PR machine. Docents in their purple shirts waxing lyrical to their flocks of visitors about how ISOC was “bringing cutting-edge cognitive
science to bear on the nature of the human self.” But even Rosko had never been up here; he said the fourth floor always got waved off. “Nothing interesting. The director’s office. Some conference rooms. That’s all.”
Nothing interesting. Carl Bates was one of those docents, and he certainly knew that was a big fat lie, oh goodness, yes.
It was an almost windowless space, a copy of the spaces below. Office doors in blond wood alternated with lab benches around the outside. The sinks looked too clean to have been used. The only experimental setup, in the same position as the scanner downstairs, was on an L-shaped arrangement of tables at the far end. You walked right over to it and examined it with a jeweler’s attention, extravagantly intense, stroking each component as if to verify that it was real.
“What is?” Kit asked Natazscha.
“This is a laser. Probably a quantum computation experiment. It was one of the things Maynard Jones admitted to having a personal interest in.”
“Wow,” Rosko breathed.
“Wow because why?” Kit was making fun of him. Or indulging him. Or both.
“Because, Kit, if you could get a quantum computer to work, it would make that fancy machine downstairs look like an abacus. The logical architecture is based on qubits instead of bits, and they use a quantum superposition of—”
Kit held up the palms of her hands. “Totally enough. I believe everything you say.”
“It’s only theoretical, in any case,” Rosko said, annoyed that she’d cut him off.
One wall near the laser was taken up by a huge glass board. From six feet away, the surface looked clean. Up close we could see a ghostly forest of half-erased mathematical symbols, a handwritten text so dense it reminded me of Shul-hura’s cuneiform. You came and stood in front of the board with me; we were like two children in a fairy tale who’ve discovered the witch’s cottage.
“This angled bracket notation is familiar,” Rosko said. “Quantum mechanics?”