Deep Past

by Eugene Linden

  “Well, the Nature letter gives a pretty complete picture of what we can say right now that will pass muster with peer review.”

  “Absolutely, but to properly place it, it would help if I could see for myself. At this point we don’t even know what line this animal came from. Did it derive from Primelephas, or perhaps from some earlier split?”

  Claire knew that he was right, and he would be better than anyone in trying to figure where the animal fit. But then she thought about the last time she had trusted him, and God knew she didn’t want him anywhere near the jadeite. She leaned back in her chair.

  “Those are good questions, Byron, let me think about it.”

  “OK, please do. Thanks. By the way, why did you name it Simpsoniensis?”

  “Long story, Byron. That’s for another conversation.”

  After she hung up, she thought fondly about the discussion that had led to the name. Hayden had earlier and definitively ruled himself out, and following his death, they felt uneasy about going against his wishes. The group had grown used to talking about Bart, and ultimately they decided to go with that. Even Keerbrock seemed amused.

  But Claire’s sense of satisfaction faded almost as soon as she hung up. While evolutionary scholars were justifiably excited about the rewriting of the proboscid family tree, the bones opened up whole new worlds of possibilities that would be greeted with increasing suspicion.

  There was the question of the link between increased speciation and climate change, which Benoit adroitly introduced but left hanging. This was not a new area, but the relationship was not yet the consensus. In consultation with Keerbrock, Claire had decided that this should be the next paper submitted, largely because this was an area of active discussion in the scientific community and she gave high odds that the team could make a meaningful contribution. Then there was the question of the connection between climate stress and brain size, an area in which Benoit had some credibility. There were unknowns to be dealt with here—Benoit and Francisco had a great deal of work to do to get a better understanding of what kind of brain that cranium implied—but, again, it was an area where there was prior work to build upon, and Claire had confidence that the team could produce a paper that would get serious consideration.

  Beyond this were the truly revolutionary issues such as questions about the connection between Bart’s outsized brain, the array, and the jadeite. Why had Bart developed a brain so out of proportion to any animal peer of that time, what was he using it for, and was he endowed with intelligence and language abilities analogous to those of modern humans? Even more preposterous for the mainstream scientific community were the issues raised by the green patch in a generally desiccated region, and the otherworldly power of the stone. Finally, Claire wondered: If their intelligence had enhanced the elephant’s chances of survival during a period of extreme environmental stress, why then did they become extinct?

  She had talked about this with Benoit, and asked if these elephants were so smart and adaptable, why didn’t they migrate to someplace more hospitable? Benoit scoffed, “Look at us—we’re pretty smart, and we’re being done in by climate change as we speak. Why don’t we migrate?”

  For Claire the answer seemed obvious. “With seven billion people on the planet, where can anyone go?” Having said that out loud, she wondered whether something similar had happened millions of years earlier. Inconceivable, she decided.

  During their last conversation, Keerbrock had said that Claire had to accept that they might never be able to publish the most interesting aspects of the find. Claire had asked him, once again, to clarify why.

  “Because, usually for the better, but occasionally for the worse, the empirical method, driven by data, just can’t handle ambiguous, subjective concepts like language and intelligence, even in humans, much less in animals. So scientists try and fail to reduce questions to issues that can be rigorously examined, and thereby eliminate discussion of the very thing you want to investigate.”

  “Doesn’t that bother you?”

  “Not in the least,” Keerbrock had answered. “I’d much rather understand what’s going on than get another paper published. If the world isn’t ready for something, them’s the breaks. One reason I signed on was because discovering the mystery properties of the jadeite—even if it had to remain secret—gave me confidence in the more prosaic assertions the letter made.”

  Claire thought long about that. Having read extensively about the so-called chimp wars over the meaning of the ape language experiments, she knew he was right. While apes happily used sign language to communicate with humans and each other—sometimes for decades—the behavioral science community only grudgingly acknowledged that the animals even knew the meaning of the words they were using. And papers in Science or Nature on animal understanding or use of language were few and far between.

  “As I’ve said, what you’ve stumbled on,” Keerbrock continued, once again failing to notice his lack of tact, “may be a missing piece that connects evolution, intelligence, and climate. Think about it: every species dies out, and climate is often holding the gun that kills them off.” Keerbrock went off on a tangent. “It’s going to happen to us someday, maybe soon … That’s going to be richly ironic since us humans—the smartest guys on the planet—are blindly creating the climate that’s going to kill us off. Anyway, scientists are always asking why a species died out. For me that’s backward. I’m looking at your elephants and wondering how they lasted so long. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and they must have lasted for hundreds of thousands of years—it takes a long time to build a brain case like that cranium.”

  Keerbrock paused. “So, I’ll be content if we solve that puzzle. I’m not on some crusade to bring science someplace where it may not be willing to go. Do you understand?”

  “Oh yes, Dr. Keerbrock,” Claire had replied, but even as she said it, she wondered whether Katie would accept this boundary.

  “Good. We’re getting ahead of ourselves in any event. As I said before, one step at a time. Let’s see what we find, then we can decide what to do with it. By the way, now that we’re coauthors, perhaps you should call me Will.”

  Later, thinking about what Keerbrock had said, Claire realized that he’d gotten one thing wrong. Earlier he had felt that Katie shouldn’t lead this aspect of the investigation because of the wide-ranging skills required as well as her lack of stature in the community. He didn’t know whether Katie’s discovery of the properties had changed his mind, but Claire now realized that if the most interesting part of the investigation was off-limits for publication, Katie, with her stubborn streak, might be the only person willing to take it on.

  67

  It was a crisp, clear day in early October when Claire walked over to the behavioral science building for the meeting. It was approaching peak fall color, and the campus was aflame with various hues of red, brown, and green. It was a morning to enjoy, but Claire was concerned. She understood Keerbrock’s qualms about having Katie lead a study that was inevitably going to involve solid state physics, bioacoustics, and quantum mechanics, but she had not been able to bring herself to tell Katie that she was going to have to relinquish the lead. Claire just couldn’t get past the fact that a promise was a promise, even though the stakes had changed. Her hope was that after a meeting with the formidable Keerbrock, Katie would accept that she was out of her depth.

  They arrived nearly at the same time. Katie was dressed in jeans and a gray sweater and looked cool as a cucumber. Claire appreciated that the girl was trying to look asexual and professional. Claire deemed the effort to be a complete and utter failure.

  Claire and Katie chatted a bit about nothing, and then Katie offered to go down the hall to the coffee machine to get a couple of Americanos. She was just handing Claire her cup when Keerbrock arrived. They all sat at the worktable, which held the jadeite. The three of them looked at the stone. None of them moved to pick it up.

  Claire cleared her throat. “O
K, Katie, this is your show. Why don’t you take us through what you’re thinking.”

  “Sure, boss.” Katie stood up and took a second composing her thoughts. “I’ve got a hypothesis and a proposed plan of action …”

  Claire stole a glance at Keerbrock, who, while composed and silent, looked like an adder getting ready to strike. His quasi-human side, which had brought him to find her, was nowhere in sight.

  “But let me quickly put things in context before I lay it out.” Katie then ticked off how their thinking changed about the significance of the jadeite—the recognition that it was shaped exactly like a yam, the significance of the yam, the mystery of the jadeite’s special properties, and Karil’s discovery of a lush area in the middle of a desert. “So by itself,” she continued, “the jadeite is interesting, but there is a very strong likelihood, as Dr. Keerbrock has noted, that it was purposefully shaped by Bart or his peers, and has some special significance for that species at that time. Obviously, there’s a great deal of work to be done trying to eliminate the possibility that it wasn’t shaped at all, but, clearly the prize will be analyzing the meaning of the stone’s ability to cause a physical response when held. So let’s talk about that. OK?”

  Katie looked at Claire and Claire looked at Keerbrock, who seemed about to say something. Before he could, Katie continued. “Look, I know and agree that there’s a well-defined way to study the properties of the rock.” She paused. “But that’s not why you’re here, right?” she asked, looking directly at Keerbrock.

  If Keerbrock was offended by what bordered on impudence, he didn’t show it. Claire was beginning to enjoy the show.

  Katie smiled. “Right! OK, I did a small stint with Katy Payne’s infrasound project studying low-frequency communication in elephants in Kenya. What we know is that below twenty hertz, humans cannot hear sounds, but they can feel them.” She looked apologetically at Claire. “I know you’re aware of all this from your work. I’m just setting the context.”

  Keerbrock was getting impatient. “Yes, we talked about this when we first tracked Claire down.”

  “So, after touching the rock and feeling that response, I began to think about how simple movement on a spectrum can shift between the senses, from hearing to feeling. Think about stoners listening to a heavy-metal band. They get close to the speakers to feel the sound.”

  Keerbrock still looked impatient, so Katie moved on.

  “Was it within the repertoire of an elephant to create a wave that could cause a feeling? Then, the question becomes how do you capture and preserve that feeling. Waves are transient—they don’t hang around for five million years.”

  Now Keerbrock was truly interested. “Exactly!”

  “We all know that any mineral has a vibratory signature—hence the New Age stuff on healing crystals.”

  Keerbrock winced.

  “And we know that waves can be manipulated to create interference patterns that are stable—e.g., a hologram. So if it’s possible to create a hologram with photons at one end of the frequency spectrum, shouldn’t it be possible to create complicated standing waves with phonons at the other end?”

  Keerbrock gave the slightest of nods; he’d earlier said much the same thing.

  Instead of continuing, Katie went over to the table and picked up the jadeite. Claire started. “What are you doing?”

  Katie held up a finger. “Stay with me.”

  Katie slowly ran her hand over the stone while she kept her gaze on Keerbrock. After several seconds, she shuddered. She still kept moving her hand slowly over the rock. The shudders almost became a seizure. She lurched forward, almost dropping the rock, which she just managed to put down. She sat in her chair, and it seemed an eternity before she could talk. Keerbrock looked at her with a combination of curiosity, alarm—and admiration.

  “I don’t know what would have happened if I hadn’t had to put down the rock, but that little experiment tells me one thing.”

  “Which is?” asked Keerbrock.

  “Which is that whoever endowed this rock with these properties expected that it would be picked up by some creature weighing ten thousand pounds, not a hundred twenty—give or take …”

  “Tell us more about what happened when you held it that long?” asked Claire. Almost immediately on returning, she had insisted on picking up the stone, but could only hold it for a few seconds.

  “First I felt the power, and then some kind of rumbling sound or wave began to intensify. It was a little like whale song.”

  Katie paused and shook her head. “But that brings me to my second point. If I’m right that the jadeite was intended for elephants, if there’s a message in there, we will never get it just by touching it as I did. We simply don’t have the auditory processing capacity. I’m probably just getting a fragment of what’s being conveyed. And the nature of the message could be an image, not just sound. Experiments in cymatics show that sound waves can sort matter into stable patterns. Maybe the rock conjures a diorama for an animal the size of an elephant? How could we determine that?”

  “We do have computers,” offered Keerbrock mildly.

  “Of course, and we could spend months of computer time trying to analyze the patterns, but think about what we’d be doing.”

  Keerbrock clearly wasn’t used to graduate students putting him on the spot.

  “And what would we be doing?”

  “We’d be building a virtual elephant.”

  “And?”

  “So why do that when next week we could bring the rock to a real elephant and see how it reacts?”

  Claire almost gasped. This was pure Katie, bold and, Claire had to admit, brilliant, but so far outside the boundaries of formal scientific investigation that she shuddered in anticipation of a magnitude-eight earthquake that would be coming from Keerbrock. In fact, the professor did jerk his head, but he only looked at Katie and said mildly, “Gee, wish I’d thought of that. But what would we learn?”

  “OK, we wouldn’t learn much about the internal structure of that energy field, but we might learn a lot about its function—and that could point us toward its structure.”

  “Keep going.”

  “Think about what it would be like to live in a world of low-frequency waves.” Katie directly addressed Keerbrock. “I know I’m not qualified to talk about quantum mechanics, but I want to describe something with broad strokes, OK?”

  Again, the slightest of nods.

  “Our—human, that is—thinking is dominated by particles. Think about pixels, think about the pointillist movement in art.” She turned to Keerbrock. “Forgive me for encroaching on your territory, but think about how hard a time Einstein had accepting quantum mechanics, which derived from his own work. We tend to think in terms of localized events—that’s why science can’t countenance things like ESP—even though there’s actually an aspect of quantum mechanics that can explain how an action in one place might simultaneously trigger an action very far away …”

  This elicited another wince from Keerbrock.

  “But imagine if your worldview was oriented to waves. Instead of seeing things localized and discretely, you would be comfortable with and tuned to the distributed and connected. And, assuming you had the mental capacity to do so, and you wanted to leave a record of some important event for posterity, you might create some stable portrait through the interaction of sound waves by using the vibratory properties of the minerals around you.

  “The key is understanding the difference between being naturally biased to thinking about the world as the interaction of particles, as we do, and thinking about the world from the point of view of waves. The easiest analogy I can think of is to compare the jadeite to a solar cell. Imagine if the tables were reversed: that we were the smart creatures five million years ago and the smart elephants were alive today. The smart elephants of today uncover a solar cell and a lightbulb and when they bring this piece of metal and silicon into the sunlight, the lightbulb goes on. All very mystifying, bec
ause there are no moving parts. The solar cell operates because photons knock electrons out of the semiconductor, which are then gathered by an electrical circuit. The elephants, oriented to thinking about waves, might be intrigued by the magnetic waves generated by the solar cell, but might be mystified by the interaction of sun and the silicon because it requires an understanding of the interaction of sunlight and material in a particle mode.”

  Keerbrock interrupted. “This is what I was talking about when we found you, Claire. Everybody knows what an ultrasound machine is, right? It’s just a way of turning sound into an image. So, it’s not such a big step to imagine that an animal with a big brain and huge auditory processing capacity might be able to make an interference pattern to convey a static acoustic image. People have been doing that for decades, exploring the wave properties of various minerals and using them to make acoustic images.” He turned back to Katie. “Go on.”

  “So, if an elephant did respond to the stone, it would certainly save us a lot of time in terms of not chasing down blind alleys.”

  There was silence when she finished.

  Claire looked at Keerbrock. He looked at Claire. “She’s a pistol, this one,” he said as though Katie were not right there in front of him. “There’s a quote I remember from my undergraduate days. I think it’s attributable to George Bernard Shaw, and it goes, ‘Art is the arduous victory of the imagination over reason.’ I think that applies here. We’re in the realm where science becomes art.”

  Then he turned to Katie. “So, keeping in mind that there’s not a chance in hell of publishing what we find, where do we find this elephant?”

  “Oh,” said Katie, cool as cool can be, “I’ve got elephants up the wazoo.”

  68

  Claire, Katie, Keerbrock, and Helen Hayden looked at the herd of elephants. Zoe Taylor, a dark-haired woman in her early forties with an unnerving stare, turned to Claire. “There’s someone here who knows you and wants to say hello.” As they approached the herd, one female’s ears perked up.