CRO-MAGNON (26 page)

“
But never all in one individual.”

“
You don’t often see the Cro-Magnons’ narrow skulls, broad faces and sunken eyes together, either. As Wolpoff pointed out, the Neanderthals may have become ‘extinct’ in the same way the original Cro-Magnons were watered down: by mixing with other populations.”

She nodded, not convinced but not wanting to antagonize him. “I’ll work on that when I get back. Right now your discovery that the Neanderthal was left-handed, and the boy apparently ambidextrous, could be more important than anything else.”

Calder frowned. “How can it matter which hand they used? We have more pressing matters—”

“
Handedness has implications for brain function. It could affect how we handle this whole situation.”

Calder looked alarmed. “How?”

“
As soon as I nail down more data, I’ll tell you.”

“
With Salomon breathing down our necks, we don’t have a lot of time. We need to get on with—”

“
Then I’ll have to hurry.” Blaine set her laptop on the table, crowding Calder’s to the edge. “If we stop talking, so I can reprogram my gene sniffer, I should have results tonight.”

Calder squinted. “What did you mean, ‘how we handle’ the situation?”

She powered her computer. “Later.”

#

The scent of frying meat made Calder’s stomach growl. He watched Blaine take out a half-dozen glass vials, edge past Ayni, and deposit them on the floor behind the potbellied stove. The action puzzled him, because the gene sequencer was back at the work trailer, and the genetic samples usually resided in a cardboard box in a pile of snow under the trailer.

“
What are those?” he said.

“
Samples for Salomon to take back tomorrow.” Her chin lifted. “All three specimens, with both nuclear and mitochondrial material, as ordered.”

“
But if you let them thaw, won’t the DNA degrade?”

“
Oh, darn. I never thought of that.” She palm-heeled her forehead, then sat at the table and began to fiddle with her laptop, a small frown wrinkling her brow. “Bad luck!”

Oh-oh.
When Salomon found out, Calder thought, there’d be hell to pay. And with Teague to do his bidding . . .

He looked at Ayni by the stove. “Murzo, we need to warn you to watch out for Teague.”

The tall Tajik turned from the smoking pan, his normally pale face even more so in the glare of the pressure lantern. “I have . . . sensed . . . that Mr. Teague is a man to be reckoned with.” He swung back to the stove. “But why would he be a danger to me?”

“
I don’t know. We think he’s a hatchet man for Laszlo Salomon. Maybe literally.”

“
What do you mean?”

Blaine looked up from her keyboard. “He means that people who have crossed Mr. Salomon have been rumored to disappear.”

“
This thing happens also in my country,” Ayni said, stirring. “But again, why me?”

“
I don’t really know,” Calder said. In view of his developing friendship with the ranger-cum-game warden, he had decided to trust him to a reasonable extent. “But I need to tell you that Dr. Blaine and I are engaged in a little more than just measuring some bones in a cave, although Ms. Fitrat doesn’t know.”

“
That, I have also sensed. But how does it involve me?”

“
It shouldn’t. But there’s a chance that things could go wrong and everyone could get sucked in. Just be on your guard.”

Ayni nodded gravely, and Calder realized that when warnings were given in this corner of the world, they were taken seriously.

“
What about Fedor?” the ranger said.

“
We can’t be sure he’s not in bed with Salomon,” Calder said.

“
In bed?” The ranger looked puzzled.

“
Allied with him. If we think the situation warrants, Caitlin and I will warn him.”

“
Khub.”
Ayni sprinkled something in the bowl and Calder, feeling relieved to have spoken his mind, went back to his regression analysis of the hybrid boy’s long-bone measurements.

The meal was simple but scrumptious: chunks of tender venison wrapped in chewy
non
, a dip of homemade yoghurt, and mutton soup with noodle flakes.

“
Murzo, the soup is out of this world,” Blaine said.

“
Laghmon,”
Ayni said, his dark eyes pleased.

“
What’s in this
non?
” Calder said. “It’s not just wheat bread is it?”

“
The wheat is cracked and mixed with ground chickpea. It forms complete . . . what you say . . .”

“
Protein,” Blaine said.

She took a sip of tea laced with butter, and Calder watched her struggle to avoid making a face. It was a taste that had to be acquired, he thought. Preferably by someone else. He had some good Merlot in his bag, but felt that wine might be inappropriate for a Muslim home.

“
In cold country, one adds fat to one’s
choy,
”
Ayni said
.
He sipped, swallowed, and smacked his lips with gusto. “Good for you. Stick to the ribs,
hah?
”

After supper, Calder cleared the dishes while Blaine sat on the bunk and opened her laptop. Ayni looked at Calder and indicated the shelf holding the chessboard.

Calder nodded. “I’m a sweat hog.” He saw Ayni’s puzzled frown at the application of an animal word to an intellectual contest.
Oh, well.

Calder drew white and they started to play. The taping of Blaine’s keys and the scrape of chess pieces resounded softly in the little cabin.

Twenty minutes later, Blaine said, “Wow.”

Calder looked up from a shaky position against Ayni’s Benko gambit. “What?”

“
He has a different gene.”

“
Who?”

“
The Neanderthal.”

“
What do you mean, different?”

“
I mean, completely unknown. Like, you can’t get there from here.”

Calder glanced at Ayni, then back at the board. He foresaw a queenside assault and suspected he would lose material.

“
Different from what?”

“
From R-G-H-T.”

“
Oh.” He gave an airy wave. “That explains it.”

“
It’s a handedness gene.”

Ayni moved a knight and Calder saw that he was busted. Tipping his king, he looked at Blaine.

“
The boy has a different gene, and that means . . .”

“
Maybe plenty. It’s tied up in how the brain works.”

He sighed. “Lay it on me. But for God’s sake, keep it simple.”

“
I’ll try.” Blaine hesitated.

Uh-oh.
Calder braced for an onslaught of technical jargon.

Blaine said, “A geneticist from the Gene Regulation and Chromosome Lab in Maryland and a psychiatric researcher from the University of Oxford have been working independently on the genetics of handedness. The picture that emerges is that a critical change must have occurred in a gene for cerebral lateralization.” She paused as if to compose her thoughts.

Humor her. Get past this and stay on task.
“A change?”

“
This saltation event is thought to have occurred about a hundred-forty thousand years ago in Africa. So, it applied to the forerunners of Cro-Magnon man. But not to Neanderthals, who were already established in Europe.”

She stopped and looked at Calder.

He sighed again. They were here to examine prehistoric people and their artifacts, not to worry about which hand they used.

“
Go on.”

“
A couple of years ago, the geneticist located this gene on the Y chromosome, in a sequence that had earlier transposed from the X, where it also still resides. He termed it RGHT.”

Calder smiled. “One of those subtle names.”

“
About eighty percent of modern people have the dominant form of the gene and are right-handed. However, RGHT has an alternate form, which is neutral with respect to handedness. In accordance with the laws of chance, only half the people who have the neutral allele turn out to be right-handed.” She stared at Calder.

Geneticists.
“And?”

She regarded him as one might an obtuse student. “This is why ninety percent of modern people are right-handed.”

Calder was alarmed that she would go on a goose hunt at this critical stage of the expedition. He needed to help get it out of her system.

“
So?”

“
My portable sequencer can only unravel a part of RGHT, because of its length.” Her voice sounded ominously enthusiastic. “I set my sniffer to look for a snippet of five hundred base pairs at that locus on the Neanderthal’s Y chromosome. It didn’t find it.”

Calder said, “You wouldn’t, since he was left-handed. From what you’ve told us, I’ll bet Murzo can see that.”

The reserved Tajik, who had been looking from one to the other while gathering the chess pieces, nodded.

“
I did find something else,” Blaine said. “At the same locus I found a snippet of a new gene. It’s not from the non-dominant allele of RGHT.”

“
Even I know that genes often contain nonsense sequences.”

Blaine shook her head, her ash-blond hair brushing her shoulders distractingly. “This is too orderly to be a junk sequence, but it’s not in our modern gene bank.”

“
If you say so.”
Get her back on track.
“But what does that mean for us?”

“
Without more work, I’m not sure. But remember what we discussed this afternoon about brain lateralization and flexibility. We may have discovered a gene, lost to the human race for thirty thousand years, that could have radical implications for human cognition.”

Remembering their discussion of left-dominant and right-dominant brains, Calder began to comprehend her point.

He wasn’t at all sure he liked it. “You’re saying . . .”

#

Blaine sensed that Calder wasn’t happy with the emerging implications of her find. She wasn’t even sure she was. It needed more thought.

“
I’m saying that Neanderthal brains may have been organized to think along different lines than modern brains,” she said carefully. “They may have been more intuitive and less methodical.”

“
We already suspected that, based on paleontological and archaeological findings.”

She leaned forward to catch his eye. “Think what it might mean if a hybrid Cro-Magnon-Neanderthal possessed a copy of each handedness gene.”

“
You mean the person might have the best of both worlds, so to speak?”

“
Yes,” she said. “He might be capable of leaps of intuition, while still possessing strong reasoning ability.”

Calder stared at her. She looked from him to Ayni and back.

“
In other words,” she said, “the stuff of genius.”

Calder glanced at Ayni, and Blaine knew he was gauging how explicit they should be. Instinct suggested that she could trust the ranger. But after all, the man was a Tajik official of sorts, and she knew Calder did not want to expose the fact that they’d found intact bodies.

“
You mean the boy?” he said.

Blaine nodded.

“
Can you find out?”

“
With only the portable equipment, not definitively. But I can get an idea. I need to compare the complete genes. RGHT is several hundred thousand base-pairs long, as the new one probably also is.”

“
And how would that one person’s makeup help the human race?”

She stared at him. “You tell me.”

Calder gaped back. “Unless I’ve misunderstood, you’re talking about introducing new genetic material into the human germ line.”

“
Not new. A gene that has been lost for tens of thousands of years.”

“
As you’ve reminded me a few times, I’m just a bone guy. But I’m not overjoyed at the idea of tinkering with the human genome.”

“
People are going to ‘tinker’ whether I do or not. That’s the purpose of the international Human Gene Project, the European Ensembl browser, and the national Genbank.”

“
Those are tools for manipulating the genome,” Calder said. “But on paper.”

“
And my team will make full use of them before considering anything physical.”

Calder stroked his chin. “I shouldn’t have to remind you of Murphy’s First Law: ‘If anything can go wrong, it will.
’
”

“
I’m talking about providing a beneficial addition, but only if we see that the hybrid boy had a suite of lateralization genes that included both the old and the new. And even then, only after I’ve tested the haplotype on transgenic mice.”

“
Lateralization. Haplotype. Transgenic.” Calder pressed both hands against his head. “I need to think.”

“
Me, too. But think what it might mean for the human race if we could increase the incidence of genius by, say, a factor of five.”