Antediluvian

by Wil McCarthy

  Manuah, no longer dreaming, shrugged off a lot of pointless praise from his followers as he looked around, realizing that apart from the hatchets that were part of the standard voyaging equipment, he and his people had no means of making a new town for themselves. Had he rescued any carpenters or stone masons? Any hunters or farmers or thatchers? They were already out of food, and yes, once they got some fires going they could butcher all the birds and goats and eat for another couple of days. But then what?

  The crew and passengers spent the morning truly setting up their camp, arranging meager possessions and expedition equipment, gathering stones, chopping firewood and cutting crude shovels out of the better-formed pieces. Here on land, everyone finally felt purposeful and in control. But for how long?

  Manuah spent the morning walking around, asking each person what they were doing, what they planned to do next, what their skills were. He was not particularly encouraged by the answers. Adrah, for his part, walked around providing spiritual encouragement, telling everyone that they had literally been chosen by the gods to begin the world anew. He really seemed to believe it, too. Emzananti rounded up a group of women to head out and scavenge for food. This sounded improbable to Manuah—what could still be edible around here?—but also harmless enough, because what could be dangerous, either?

  He had completely forgotten about the wildmen, until five of them appeared out of nowhere, striding up the hill just as Emzananti’s crew was getting ready to set off. A few of the women screamed, and were quickly silenced by their peers.

  Manuah had seen wildmen before, but only from a distance. This was a group of three men and two women, dressed all in leather and fur, and yet not so roughly or rudely dressed as he would have imagined. Those boots, those hats, those jackets…although the overall effect was strange, none of the individual pieces—with their clean cuts and tight stitching—would have been particularly out of place in the river towns, or even among the poorer residents of The City itself. Of course, linen and especially wool were preferred, and Kingdomites generally chose sandals over boots, but…

  The men were carrying long wooden spears, and all of them, the wildmen and wildwomen, looked tense and suspicious, even as Manuah’s own people melted away from them.

  “Hello!” Adrah said, moving toward the wildmen, against the tide of bodies.

  No response.

  “We saw your camp yesterday,” Adrah tried.

  Again, no response, until finally one of the wildmen blurted out a string of nervous, nonsense syllables.

  And here the orphan girl Na’elta-a-ma’uk spoke up: “He’s asking what’s happening here, and where we came from. He says everything here was water yesterday.”

  To this Adrah said, “You speak their language?”

  “My mother was half wild.”

  Adrah laughed. “All women are, I find. Very well, tell them that this”—he gestured grandly at Manuah—“is the Great Prophet Manuah Hasis, who was warned by the gods that a flood would come. He rescued all these people from The City, far to the south.”

  Dutifully, Na’elta-a-ma’uk spoke a series of words to the wildmen, then listened back, then spoke again. After quite a long exchange, she asked Adrah, “And the animals, too? He seems quite confused about this.”

  “And the animals, too,” Adrah confirmed.

  * * *

  And here, Harv’s experience of the events seemed to cut off, or rather to blur into years rather than moments. He knew that Manuah’s people went to live with the wildmen, not as conquerors or refugees but as something like lifelong honored guests. The name “Adrah” sounded like “wisdom” in the wildmen language, and “Manuah” sounded all at once like “hand” and “person” and “industry,” and so Manuah and Adrah Hasis became known as the Two Wise Men. Harv couldn’t remember much else about their lives, except that they had mounted two expeditions downriver, and never found a single trace of The Kingdom or its people, or indeed of the coastline they’d always known. It seemed the harbor had finally swallowed The City and merged with the ocean, and the river towns had all washed away, leaving only some vague suggestions of unnatural flatness here and there.

  And Harv knew that he, himself, was descended from Jotholan Hasis, a fourth son born to Manuah two years after the flood, and he knew that this particular tribe of wildmen had grown and prospered and divided, and eventually changed their name to “Humanu Shya,” the children of Manuah, and had refused to build settlements close to water for generation upon generation, a vast stack of unbroken time, until nearly everything about the great flood had been forgotten.

  University of Colorado Engineering Center

  Boulder, Colorado

  Present Day

  When Harv finally opened his eyes, Tara gasped in relief. Thank God. Thank all the gods.

  “Harv? Can you hear me?”

  He blinked at her, and tried but failed to sit up, due (she thought) to the curve and lean of the orange orthodontist’s chair.

  “Harv?”

  “Oh,” he said. “Oh my God.”

  “Harv, will you speak to me, please?”

  Harv was looking around, blinking. Clearly disoriented. He said, “I’m in the lab. My name is Harv Leonel, and I’m in Boulder, Colorado.”

  “She didn’t ask you that,” Patel called out from across the room.

  “How are you feeling?” Tara pressed.

  “What? Strange. Very strange.”

  Angry tears were rolling down her face now. “You just had a seizure. Patel’s on the phone with 911 right now.”

  “Seizure?”

  “Damn it, Harv. Yes, a seizure. You didn’t move, but your EEG went nuts, and the software started blaring out seizure alarms. I didn’t even know it could do that.”

  He looked squarely at her for the first time. “Tara? Tara Mukherjee? Oh, God, I’d forgotten how beautiful you were.”

  “You’re scaring me,” she told him. She’d never actually seen anyone have a seizure before, and didn’t know what was or wasn’t normal. Could he be having a stroke? “Can you feel your fingers and toes?”

  “Um…yes.” He nodded. “Yes.”

  “What happened? What do you remember?”

  “Everything,” he said. He finally did manage to sit up, and then he looked around again, fumbled for the controls, and raised the seat up behind him, lifted one of the armrests and swung his legs over the side. “How long has it been?”

  “What?”

  “How long! How long was I out?”

  “I don’t know. Thirty seconds? That’s not the point. I think you should lie back down until someone gets here.”

  But he didn’t lie down. Instead, he asked, “Is there a river in India called Sarudas Vakti?”

  “What?”

  “Is there?”

  “There’s a Saraswati river in Pakistan, but it’s a dry valley.”

  That seemed to surprise him. “Oh. Wow. It was so big! And are there two sunken cities nearby, off the coast?”

  “What? What? Harv, just calm down.”

  He looked squarely into her eyes now, and said, “I’m calm. I’m very calm. Tara, I’ve just experienced years of someone else’s life.” He slapped the chair underneath him. “This thing worked so much better than we expected.”

  She stared back at him, uncertain what to say.

  Looking across the room, he said: “Patel, hang up the phone.”

  “I’m talking to 911,” Patel said.

  “Tell them I’m fine.” He turned back to Tara. “Are there drowned cities near the mouth of this river? I need you to look it up for me.”

  “Harv—”

  “We’re in the middle of a science experiment,” he reminded her gently, “and this is data. Will you Google it? Please?” And then, when she didn’t move, he added a more tender, more plaintive, “Tara?”

  Sighing, she pulled out her phone and started typing. But she called out over her shoulder, “Do not hang up, Patel. This man needs a full brain sc
an or something.”

  “I’m not hanging up,” Patel assured her.

  Pecking words into her phone, Tara was just humoring her boyfriend-turned-boss, trying to keep him calm. She wanted something to refute him, so he’d slow down and listen, but to her surprise the words “drowned cities off the coat of Pakistan” produced an immediate hit. The discovery of what is believed to be a ten-thousand-year-old city off the coast of India…

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh wow. Harv, I think you might be right.” She then quickly added, “It doesn’t mean anything. You could have heard that somewhere. I need you to calm down and breathe for a minute.”

  “I’m calm,” he assured her once again, then contradicted himself by fist-pumping in the air. “Yes! Yes! I need you to look some other things up, my dear. There was a comet impact, and a huge flood. And a man named Manuah who sailed a big boat to safety.”

  Tara’s blood went cold.

  “Manu? Are you talking about Manu?”

  “That wasn’t his name.”

  “Harv, Manu is a Hindu myth from the Rig Veda.”

  “He wasn’t a myth. He had a brother, and a wife, and three sons who were also sailors. He lived in a city at the mouth of the river. There was a tower. There was a whale. My God, it’s all so clear. Can you bring me something to write with? Please? I need to make some notes while it’s fresh.”

  Tara could feel her tears starting up again, because a lot of those details were straight out of the Vedas, but it didn’t mean anything. Harv wanted this experiment to work. Harv had just done who-knows-what to the memory centers of his brain. Harv had just woken up from a seizure, and was clearly disoriented. It didn’t mean anything. But she brought him a pad of engineering paper and a mechanical pencil.

  “Thanks,” he said, and immediately set about scribbling on the top sheet. A rough map, annotated in hurried words and symbols. Without looking up he said, “It must have been the end of the Ice Age. Sea levels were rising, and then there was a comet impact. I’m thinking it was at least ten thousand years ago, maybe more. Could you look that up, please? A comet impact?”

  Again, she complied to keep him from getting too agitated. Again, she got hits right away with “Neolithic comet impact.” Ancient stone carvings confirm that a comet struck the Earth around 11,000 BC… But it still didn’t mean anything. Neither did the astronomical details she confirmed for him next.

  But when he said, “There were seven boats tied together, loaded with people and farm animals,” Tara’s blood ran cold again, because Manu’s boat from the Rig Veda supposedly had seven decks. She’d seen a thing about it on YouTube.

  “Stacked vertically?” she asked weakly. “A tall wooden ship?”

  “No,” he said, still not looking up from his drawing. “Reed boats, like an Egyptian painting. Seven of them tied together.”

  And that made sense, it made sense, and it wasn’t anything she’d ever heard before. Where would Harv have gotten a detail like that? Her skin shriveled into goosebumps, so that the hairs on her arms stood up.

  “Harv, are you saying we extracted information from a Y chromosome inherited from Manu?”

  “No,” Harv corrected. “I’m not saying that.”

  “Everyone is descended from Manu,” Patel called out from across the room. Then said into his phone handset, “Yes, he’s awake and lucid. He wasn’t unconscious very long. I don’t know, maybe thirty seconds.”

  “Not everyone,” Tara murmured. The whole human population was very definitely not descended from one single Neolithic Pakistani male. However, the Y chromosome’s F haplogroup had started in India, and was ancestral to more than eighty percent of non-African humans. And many Indians were proud of the fact that Indo-European languages—languages that actually originated in the Indus Valley—were spoken throughout Europe and across much of Asia. It meant that sometime in the distant past, people from the Indian Subcontinent had colonized broad swaths of territory, absorbing or edging out nomadic tribes. If Manu had been a real person, there at the beginning of that group-F surge…

  Nobel Prize, whispered a voice inside her head. But no, wait, this wasn’t at all what was supposed to be happening. Not at all. According to Harv’s theories, the TMS would create new structures in his hippocampus that would be detectable in an fMRI scanner and could be traced point-for-point to patterns in the Y-chromosome quantome. These would be “memories” only in the very narrow sense that information would be retained in Harv’s brain. At most, they should prompt what Harv called “scattered bits of generic recognition.” Even a momentary flash of old Scotland was far beyond what they’d been hoping for.

  And even if they’d succeeded in writing a memory, that still wouldn’t prove the chromosome was a computer or a storage device. For that, they would have to hunt for similar patterns in the hippocampi of other men, and then probe their Y chromosomes to prove the exact same patterns existed there. Some genes in the Y chromosome, like DDX3Y, coded for subtleties of gender-specific neural development, and Harv wanted to prove a connection between these genes, the quantum information riding on top of them, and the classical neural networks of the brain itself. Tara had never been entirely sure what that would prove, either, but it would certainly be a momentous discovery.

  Would it mean that only men had quantomes?

  “Not necessarily,” Harv had told her, back on that magical date that had changed the course of her summer, and perhaps her life. “They could be in the mitochondria or the cell membranes, or anywhere, really. If we can figure out where to look, the human body may be full of time machines.”

  Hmm.

  She wanted to tell Harv to keep writing on his pad, to get down every detail. This could all be unspeakably important! But she held her tongue, and simply undid the chin strap on the rubber TMS/EEG cap and slipped it off his head. She ran her fingers through his hair, combing gently through the matted electrolyte gel.

  “It’s going to be okay,” she said to no one in particular.

  Was this his vindication? A discovery even more earth-shattering than the one he’d set out to make? The idea made her angry for some reason. Did he deserve to discover something like this? The way they’d crashed forward, like Brahma bulls, did he deserve to discover anything at all, except perhaps a seizure and a migraine?

  “They had magnifying glasses,” Harv told her absently. “They knew the speed of light. I want to thank you for all your help, Tara. We literally could not have gotten any data out of that thing without… This is amazing.”

  “Okay,” she answered. “I’m going to get you some water.” Her voice sounded warm and chilly and angry and sad, all at the same time, and she knew that was her own fault, that she had in no way prepared herself for what might happen today. Not just the experiment itself, but the fact, the proof, that Professor Harv Leonel had seen her as a means to this end. His young paleogeneticist girlfriend; had she been anything more than that?

  God damn it, Harv.

  She got the steel water bottle out of her backpack and, finding it nearly empty, went upstairs to the drinking fountain to fill it up. Then she used the restroom, because she realized she’d been dying to all morning, and took another moment to stand in the blast of an air conditioning vent, letting it cool the sweat off of her. When she finally got back to the lab, he was still in the chair, scribbling on what looked like his tenth sheet of paper.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked, uncapping the gray steel bottle and handing it to him.

  “Hmm? Oh, not very good.” He took the bottle and drank from it, then took a deep breath and drank again.

  “I’m sorry about this,” he told her then. “I didn’t expect anything so messy.”

  “None of us did,” she assured him. And it was true; her vague forebodings hadn’t meant anything, even to her. They hadn’t stopped anything.

  “I don’t just mean the experiment,” he said, a little sadly. “There’s a power asymmetry between us, you and I. I don’t know. Intellectually
we disdain that. We try to ignore it. We pretend it isn’t there or that it doesn’t matter, or something. But the limbic system has its own ideas, right? Your innocence is romantic. It’s sexy, and I haven’t tried to resist. But should I? Are we fucking with your head?”

  She sighed. “I don’t know, Harv. You’re worried about that now? Right now, really?”

  “What’s wrong with now?” he asked. “Time is full of moments. Overflowing. I watched them moving all around me.” Then: “Oh, I really don’t feel well. I really don’t.”

  Was he delirious? Was his brain swelling or bleeding internally?

  “Paramedics should be here in a few minutes,” Patel said.

  “Okay,” Harv answered, no longer protesting. He drank again from the bottle, and then dropped it clanging onto the floor. And dropped his pad of paper into the spreading puddle. “Okay,” he said again, and collapsed back into the chair.

  PART TWO

  The Monsters

  2.1

  “See? Look at this,” said Argur. And then, when his wife didn’t reply, didn’t turn to look at him, “Dala, look.”

  Now she did turn, favoring him with a look of amused impatience. “What.”

  Their daughter, Dele, turned with her. The two of them were husking wheat for breakfast, fishing it out of a basket, dropping the husks on the hard-packed floor and the kernels of wheat into little hardmud bowls. They sat knees-together on their cut-log benches, the daughter a smaller version of the mother. She held a hardmud figurine of a bear in her lap, and the bear wore a little kerchief of brightly colored linen, and had a little hardmud ball sitting next to it. The toys of a child. And yet she was almost a woman now. Almost old enough to leave the hut and start a family of her own.

  “What?” Dala repeated.

  “I’ve made some hair,” Argur said, shaking free of his thoughts and holding up the oval of bearskin. “See? With a strap to hold it on my head. Ha! I’m young again!”