Antediluvian

by Wil McCarthy

  The ostrich egg was hardest, though, and required many days of travel to find a freshly laid nest. Once he found it he chased the furious mother away from it, and selected the strongest of the eggs, and brought it to a woman in a neighboring development who was expert at punching round holes in fresh eggs and washing the goo goo out of them. He went to another woman who was expert at fashioning wooden corks, to seal an ostrich egg when it was filled with water. He went to a third woman who was expert at fashioning pouches to carry things, with a loop of cord so that they could hang from the shaft of a spear.

  However, he did not roll in the dust with any of these women, or with any other women he encountered on these journeys, even when they called out to him. Sometimes they called him out by name, for his face and his bead necklace and his red-and-black loincloth had become well known. But he did not go to these women who called to him, only saying instead, “Actions have consequences. Tik-Tik fears to act in this matter. Tik-Tik wishes everyone pleasant days.”

  He lived alone for a time in the house he had built, and then he finally began to feel lonely, and to feel a pressure of speech building up inside him. And so he visited the homes of his neighbors, bringing them rabbits and miniature goats, and birds and even jackals to eat. And he sat by their fires at night, listening to their stories, and attempting, finally, for the first time, to tell his own story, which was the story of Father and Mother and Stepfather and Grandmother, and even the Grandfather who had taught him to shape stones and then died.

  And then his restless belly began to long for a different sort of journey, and although this earth was by no means exhausted, and there was no need to move or split the people, he began to say, “Tik-Tik wishes to find a new earth and create a new development. Tik-Tik has made many mistakes here. Tik-Tik has made mistakes everywhere. Tik-Tik does not believe Tik-Tik should live among people thus harmed, and wishes to begin again, with knowledge, and to do better.”

  At first such comments had little effect, for Tik-Tik was known as a man of fickle tastes and moods. But Tik-Tik persisted, and over time people began to realize he was serious. People began to realize he was asking if anyone wanted to come with him, to start their own lives again, with knowledge.

  The first to agree was a Mute woman, who as a child had become friends with the double-click sound that meant “come here,” believing it to be her name. Her birth name was Maya, but she could barely pronounce it, and no one called her that anyway. And so her name was Come Here, which brought much laughter to the people around her.

  “Come here, Come Here,” they would say, and she understood the joke and would laugh right along with them.

  The second to agree was a Talking boy on the edge of manhood, whose Father had left and whose Mother had died. “There is no family here,” he said. “Memories here are bad. There is no reason to stay.”

  The third was a Talking woman in the midst of an unhappy divorce, who said, “Dow-Dow thinks he owns wife, like spear or axe. Nobody owns. Nobody is owned.”

  Next was a childhood acquaintance of Tik-Tik’s who at one time had been the strongest boy in the development. Even today, he was one of the strongest men.

  After that, there were many, and one day they all left the housing development and moved to an earth many days’ travel away, beside a big watering hole.

  Life was not so easy there: hippos and crocodiles made the water dangerous, and antelopes (while excellent game animals and tasty meals) sometimes attracted hyenas that had to be killed or chased away. There were mongongo nut trees, but no longer any apples or figs, and the sky rained less often, so there were fewer yams to dig, and less grass for thatch. The people often complained to Tik-Tik, as though he were responsible for the weather here, and people sometimes expressed a desire to return to the old housing development.

  “No one holds you here,” Tik-Tik told them. “But going home again does not work like you think. Already, home is not same place. People move and die and marry and give birth. People change. How can home be the same? Home is in stories told beside fireplaces. Home is in here.” He touched his belly, which for the Talking People was the seat of consciousness and the home of the soul, as they dimly conceived it.

  As life became more established in the new housing development, Tik-Tik and Come Here were married in a simple ceremony, and in time she bore him several sons, and he learned that he was still capable of love—so much love!—for living people.

  In the new development, each family had its own house, but there was also one big house where they would gather every evening to eat and sing and tell stories. And here Tik-Tik began telling not only his own story, but also retelling that of Talking Woman. And because his belly had never really settled over !Ey-!Ey, he frequently told her story as well. And having finally found his voice, he became known as a great storyteller, just as he’d once been known as a great toolmaker, and before that a great lover of women, and before that, the fiercest of boys. And he told the stories of both women so compellingly that in future generations they would twist together until nearly all the facts were lost, and the people remembered only that a woman who was mother to them all, had also been the first among them to speak, and that a snake in an apple tree had bitten her. And also that a man had failed to protect her, but had also loved her, in his own imperfect way, from a place of exile.

  Foothills Hospital

  Boulder, Colorado

  Present Day

  As Harv slept or seized or whatever was going on back there in the ER, Tara did hold Patel’s hand. They were in the waiting room, sitting in uncomfortable vinyl chairs with uncomfortable wooden arms, with paper magazines strewn all around.

  “I’m sure he’s going to be fine,” Patel told her, based on nothing at all.

  “I know,” she answered, just as pointlessly.

  His hand felt good in hers, and although she couldn’t bring herself to let go, she was aware of how ridiculous it must look to him. She was a walking cliché, a female postdoc who’d fallen for an older male professor. Would she now complete the cliché by flirting with the boys her own age? Aiyo, what a fool America had made of her.

  Patel was the son of mustard-farm sharecroppers in rural Madhya Pradesh, the landlocked center of India. Hindu and yet Urdu-speaking, probably descended from the Sudra caste, he seemed on the surface to have little in common with a modern urban girl from Chennai. That her own childhood home had a swimming pool and three servants didn’t make her anything more than middle class, but it was a world of difference nonetheless. She had no idea how Patel had found his way to CU, or how his education back home had been paid for, or anything else about him. And it didn’t matter, because here in Boulder he was an academic, a sort of larval-stage Brahmin doing groundbreaking work. Here in Boulder the two of them were both simply Indian—all their differences collapsed and compressed into that single word, as if they’d come from the same small town.

  “This day’s going to define the rest of our lives,” she said to him.

  “Nobel Prize,” he said, giving her hand a squeeze.

  “Maybe. It’s going to be hard, though. Nobody’s going to believe him.”

  “Mmm. Do you?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “You?”

  “Yes, indeed. I know every part of that machine. I know what it should do, and I always thought Harv was underestimating the effect it would have, to write the information straight into the hippocampus. That’s the same thing as remembering it. He recruited me because I studied quantum mechanics and neuroanatomy, but he rarely asks me any questions.”

  “Mmm.”

  In his slow voice, Patel said, “He’s an impulsive person, Tara, but his theory is sound. It always was. Do you think I’d wreck my life, chaining myself to a crazy person? He graduates his students much faster than a lot of professors; I’d have no time to recover. Just three years of crazy, and then my PhD in craziness. No, thank you.

  “The hard part is going to be finding anyone willing to r
eplicate the results. I have to admit, this is not a promising beginning. Publication is not that big a thing; if we break it up into several papers, we can dole the shock factor out a little at a time. That should make it easier for people to accept. Yes, the Y chromosome is a quantum storage device. Yes, its contents can be read. Yes, its contents can be transferred into a human brain, with difficulty. Then we hit them with the details, with Manu and all that. It’s doable. Harv will even let us be first author on some of the papers. He’ll insist on it.

  “But replication is another matter, Tara. It seems like we can’t slam an entire quantome into somebody’s brain like this. We need to find a way to divide it into digestible fragments, and even then it’s pretty scary, given what’s happened here. Also, when I think about the entanglements, it makes me think no one else is ever getting the same memories. No one else will be able to corroborate, you see? Even if two researchers share the same ancestral line, the wave function can only collapse at two different points in time.”

  “The past and the present?”

  “Now they’re both in the past, but yes. The hyperdimensional space can only connect that way, through…basically through a wormhole. One cave man links to one researcher, and that’s it. But it’s a shame that these memories came to somebody who wasn’t trained to evaluate them. I never really thought about that. We should have set up the experiment quite differently.”

  Tara did her best to absorb that. She let go of Patel’s hand, and rubbed her eyes. It was barely lunchtime, and she was already as tired as she’d ever been in her life.

  “So all of this is real?” she asked.

  “That’s my opinion, yes.”

  After a pause, she said, “That doesn’t make it easier, what happens next.”

  “No, of course not. But I have a crazy uncle, and he doesn’t talk like that. Harv’s statements are mutually consistent, and we’ve got the math and the biology to back them up.”

  “We’ll need archeology, too,” she said. “Someone to collaborate on the papers, and point out where to look for corroboration.”

  “Yes, anything to strengthen the case. When Isaac Newton published his theory of gravity, he wrote an entire book that answered every objection.”

  “Hmm.”

  For a while they said nothing. Finally she gave in to her fears and said, “These seizures are getting longer.”

  “For the moment, yes.”

  “That can’t be good for him.”

  “No, but he got treatment early. I think they’re giving him the right drugs to calm it down. Those brain scans are going to show inflammation around the hippocampus, as the brain tries to rewire itself, but the nurse said they’re giving him corticosteroids. So it should all begin to improve soon.”

  Eventually, a dark-haired female nurse came and got them, saying, “He’s awake again, and asking for you.”

  “Oh, thank God. Is he all right?”

  “He’s disoriented,” the nurse answered.

  “Is that normal?”

  “It can be, but I’ll let the doctor give you the details.”

  Through the double doors, around a corner and through a set of curtains, they found Harv with the young female doctor standing over him. She was Caucasian, with brown hair and pale green eyes, and over a cerulean blue sweater she wore a lab coat embroidered with the name “Dr. Steph.” The overhead lights were off.

  “It sounded like babytalk,” Harv was saying. “The birth of language. I think it was literally Eden.”

  “Push five milligrams of diazepam,” the doctor said to the nurse beside them.

  “How is he?” Tara asked, ignoring Harv’s rambling for the moment.

  The doctor shook Tara’s hand and answered, “Hi. Yeah, he’s in what we call a postictal state, which just means post-seizure. He’s exhibiting confusion and nausea, and he asked us to turn down the lights. That’s all relatively normal. It usually lasts less than thirty minutes, although it can be longer with these kinds of protracted atonal seizures. Atypically, he was presenting with rapid eye movement for most of the event, almost as though he was dreaming. We don’t normally see that.”

  “What does it mean?”

  The doctor spread her hands. “I wish I knew. The brain can be a funny place.”

  “But he asked for us?”

  “He has moments of lucidity, yes.”

  “Is he going to be all right?”

  Here the doctor switched on a warm, professional smile. “We’re doing everything we can. I’ve written a scrip for an anticonvulsant, which you can pick up at the pharmacy on the west side of the building. It could take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks to build up in his system, but it should limit further attacks, with minimal side effects. In the meantime he’ll take sedatives, which I’ve also put in the pharma orders.”

  Then the smile drained out of her face, and she asked, “What exactly happened to him? He’s got no sign of trauma, and no history of seizures.”

  Behind Tara, Patel answered, “He’s a professor of electrical engineering, and he was experimenting on his hippocampus with a TMS rig, trying to implant memories.”

  “Hmm. Wow. That’s troubling. It’s consistent with our findings, though: microscopic hippocampal lesions. Do you know what the field strength was?”

  “Four tesla.”

  “Ouch. That’s quite high.”

  “You need that to reach the center,” Patel said. “Where memories are formed.”

  Doctor Steph took a few seconds to contemplate that. Finally, she asked, “Did he succeed?”

  “We think so, yes.”

  “Y-chromosome Adam was a player,” Harv said, nodding. “That boy got some tail.”

  “Do you have any idea what he’s talking about?” the doctor wanted to know. “Is it related to your research?”

  “We think so,” Patel acknowledged. “It will take some time to be sure.”

  “Implanted memories?”

  “So it would appear.”

  “Hmm. Hmm. I had no idea that was possible. I mean, is it actually? It doesn’t seem to agree with him.” She’d been looking mostly at Harv while she spoke, but now she leveled her gaze squarely at Patel and said, “Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to suspend any further research. It’s hospital policy to notify the police in cases of workplace injury, of which this certainly counts.”

  “Of course,” Patel agreed. “We’re working under an NSF grant, so we’ll have to notify them as well. Any adverse event.”

  Finally, Tara said, “Will you two take it outside, please?” She pointed to a gap in the curtain. Then she settled down next to Harv on a chair identical to the ones in the waiting room, and took his hand.

  “How’re you doing, Baby?” She’d never called him that before.

  “Going places,” he said, meeting her gaze. “I saw a woman eating an apple, at the dawn of human language. I think it was Mitochondrial Eve.”

  Gently she said, “Mitochondrial Eve and Y-Chromosome Adam lived a hundred thousand years apart.”

  “Well, whatever. There was a serpent in the garden. How much more do you need?”

  “Okay, Baby. Okay.” She no longer knew any way to distinguish between facts, speculation, and pure bullshit.

  “Tara, what if all our legends are true? I’ve met trolls, and seen the bones of a dragon. I’ve seen the Great Flood, and the Antediluvian ages that came before it. The voice of God, before the deluge. The people were just learning to speak in complete sentences. It was spreading to their children, like a mutation.”

  Tara felt a chill, because complex language had started with a mutation, in a gene called FOXP2. It controlled, among other things, the development of the left parietal lobe, where the language centers were located. Mice implanted with the human form of the gene could sing like birds.

  “The birth of our species,” he said to her.

  And that wasn’t right, either; depending on definitions, Homo sapiens might be as much as three or four times o
lder than that. But she knew what he meant, and she feared (yes, feared) that he was right.

  “Do you want something to write with?” she asked.

  “How about a voice recorder?”

  Obligingly, she got out her phone and opened the Record app, setting the handset down on the table next to his head.

  And he began telling her a story that was too detailed, too jumpy, too jarringly consistent to be a dream or hallucination or on-the-spot fabrication. If this were a hoax, he’d been planning it for years. And Patel would have to be in on it. But the machine and the NSF grant were real. The seizures were real, and the brain inflammation in the exact right spot was real, so Occam’s Razor left not much refuge for her doubts. This was really happening.

  Time travel.

  Time travel that mirrored the traveling of a Y chromosome to different points around the globe, its genome handed down intact from one generation to the next. That meant Tara was the expert from this point forward, and was going to have to get large portions of their story straight. The paleogenetics had to line up, or the whole thing fell apart! And the work promised to be challenging, to say the least. She hadn’t had time to catch the details of Harv’s last seizure, but if he was claiming to have been a Neandertal, then there was literally no way the puzzle was going to fit together. Neandertal Y chromosomes had never been found in any live human or excavated H. sapiens skeleton. The Neandertal haplogroups were all extinct in the modern world. Harv was a member of D-M174—very definitely a modern human haplogroup.

  But it sounded more like he’d experienced memories from one of the European Early Modern Humans who’d been around at that same time—EEMH’s as they were known on Tara’s side of campus. Harv had several times used the term “Cro-Magnon,” which was popular but had no formal taxonomic status, because it referred to a single dig site in France. But okay, the EEMH vector was still a problem, because it meant Harv’s paternal line had to get from somewhere in Africa (which he was presently describing to her), to somewhere in central Asia where the haplogroup’s defining mutations had occurred, and then to Europe, and then to somewhere in India or Pakistan, and then back to Europe again. It sounded absurd even to her, because ancient peoples simply hadn’t moved around that much. Or if some of them had, the genetic signature of it was mostly overwhelmed by the vast majority who hadn’t.