CRO-MAGNON (52 page)

“
Henrik and Peter think the thalamus shuffles qubits, via entangled particles, until—”

“
Qubits?”

“
Quantum bits of information. The thalamus appears to shuffle them until a consistent order is reached, then convert from virtual to real.”

“
Didn’t Einstein pooh-pooh quantum action-at-a-distance as ‘spooky’?”

“
Even Albert wasn’t correct about everything. Just because we don’t fully understand the correspondence between relativistic causality and objective reality doesn’t mean that virtual quantum entanglement is not real.”

Calder snorted. “Relativistic. Virtual. Quantum.”

She shot him a sober glance that he knew was meant to be reassuring. “Since the process is not time-dependent, we don’t need a supercomputer or even a mainframe. We can use a top-of-the-line desktop.”

“
For mice, you mean.”

“
Except for the cortex, there’s no functional difference between mouse brains and human brains. It would just take longer. Weeks, perhaps, instead of hours.”

Ahead, the mountainside loomed. Calder searched for signs of a tremor-induced avalanche, but didn’t see any. He still felt that his expedition partner was overconfident and that this was his last chance to introduce a modicum of common sense.

“
Listen to what you’re saying, Caitlin. You’re planning to upload human memories, and you don’t even know how the brain stores information in retrievable form?”

“
It just does.” She waved impatiently. “We did it with mice and they remembered their mazes.”

Calder searched for something to say as Zinchenko cut the throttle. The boat drifted above the entrance to the tunnel, ninety-five feet below, and the camp master tossed the flanged anchor overboard where it crashed through the ice.

“
Trust me,” Blaine said, “We do mice just fine and we’ll do likewise with those people in the cave.” She plunked her rounded rump onto the gunnel and poised there in her tight-fitting dry suit with the mountain a soaring citadel behind her, a picture Calder would carry forever.

“
We could abort the mission,” he said in one last attempt at good sense. “Teague might leave us alone.”

“
Maybe. Until Salomon finds out I foisted bad samples again.” She hitched her weight belt. “I need those heads, Ian. Science needs them.”

“
I’m just not sure the reward justifies the risk. We could leave right now and let Salomon send another team. He’d probably just write us off.”

“
If we let him have his way, he’ll probably clone legions of Neanderthals and brainwash them into mindless killing machines.”

“
Maybe so,” Calder said. “But is that really our problem?”

“
Think My Lai,” she said. “Think Rwanda. Think Kurds. Multiply by ten thousand.”

Calder realized it
was
their problem.

“
Or, we can improve mankind’s health and mental abilities and help bootstrap the race into a viable future.” Behind the faceplate, her dimly seen eyes beseeched him. “Just give me the chance, Ian.”

“
What about cost” he said. “Isn’t your brain-scanning project prohibitively expensive for anyone except a large corporation?”

“
Rolf Mathiessen said he’d work on that.”

“
With Rolf probably gone, who knows whether IHE would even back your project, much less try to find funding.”

He thought about possible improvements in human cognition, but he also thought about eugenics and Nazi medical experiments. Knowledge was not always used the way the scientists planned, and results did not always follow the “rules.”

Where did his duty lie?

And what about his own situation? He visualized his sterile apartment back at Iowa City, recalled room 27 of Macbride Hall, once again experienced Hannah Lamb’s not-so-latent hostility. Imagined Alec Diesen in the paleoanthropology chair.

And curiously, felt no anguish.

But those thoughts were essentially irrelevant, because Caitlin was right: the situation was bigger than the two of them. He thought some more. Did this quandary turn on the greater of two goods or the lesser of two evils? Did Caitlin really know what she was doing, or was she obsessed to the point of delusion?

He turned to her. “I have one more question. I want an honest answer.”

“
Shoot.” She covered her mouth. “Oops.”

“
How much of your drive to resurrect”—he held up his hand to forestall her objection to the term—“the prehistoric people is based on your desire to help—and not hurt—mankind, how much is based on your fascination with prehistorics as people, and how much on your drive to develop a new science?”

“
I know so much about them now that I think of them as friends; I won’t deny that. And of course, people like to help their friends.”

“
That’s what I’m afraid of,” he said. “I like them, too. But our own lives, and maybe Fedor’s and Murzo’s—”

“
I also admit that when I first thought about scanning the brains, egoism may have been a factor.” She met his eyes. “But I can now tell you absolutely that even if I didn’t know these people, even if a professional coup was not in the offing, I would still go ahead. Even if I had to sacrifice my life for it.”

“
You may be doing just that, along with mine.”

“
I know, Ian. You’ve come this far, and I appreciate it more than you can know.” Behind the faceplate, her eyes searched his face. “Walk with me a little farther.”

Calder bowed his head. He knew that in his own profession he had allowed his pursuit of knowledge to take a back seat to his quest for academic tenure. But Caitlin had just admitted that semi-personal issues had affected her thinking.

True, he’d come this far with her. But how much of that had also been personal, an attempt to keep someone he had come to love—yes, love—from self-destructing? If he went along, would he now be failing her in that respect? He watched her slip on her mask, check her regulator and harness, and poise her body on the gunnel.

“
I’m going for the heads,” she said, her voice muffled by the dive gear. “Are you coming?”

With a sigh, he turned to Zinchenko. “Fedor, watch for Teague. Remember that Caitlin’s life and mine are as much at risk as your own. If we surface and a hit man is waiting . . .””

“
Da.”
Zinchenko pushed up his sleeve and glanced at his watch. He pulled out a white handkerchief. “When time for you come up, if think okay, raise anchor line three meters, tie cloth, lower line.”

“
Good idea.” Calder held up his wrist and fingered the time bevel on his underwater watch. “Let’s agree on a time.”

He heard Blaine sigh. “You guys,” she said, and Calder could hear relief in her voice that both he and Zinchenko were with her.

“
What?” he said.

“
Suppose you saw Fedor’s signal, what would you do?”

“
I dunno. Swim away underwater, like he suggested?”

“
We’ll be almost out of air,” she said. “Our regulators give off bubbles, and you said Teague’s gun is a special target model.”

“
So?”

“
We’d never make it out of range.”

Calder knew this was a final reminder to him and Zinchenko that they were risking their lives by helping her. She was giving them a now-or-never chance to back out, and he respected her for it. He started to joke that distance was relative, but she clamped her faceplate, drew a rattling breath, and back-flipped off the gunnel.

#

Blaine squinted, trying to see more than a body-length ahead in the beam of her flashlight. Silt obscured the passage, the waterborne motes forming a reflective curtain. Calder’s light, shining from behind, only worsened the haze. This afternoon’s tremor had caused this, she knew. What else might it have it done?

With both nature and Teague conspiring against her and Ian, she didn’t blame her companion for questioning the advisability of this last dive, but she didn’t agree. In fact, his ambivalence was what had caused her to go first. Shaking off an insistent foreboding, she clamped her mouthpiece and finned forward.

At the first offset she saw that the tremblor had all but closed the passage. She hung in the water, assessing the damage. The vertical jog was no more than two feet wide. Her apprehension grew worse. Suppose another tremor struck while she and Ian were in the cave? Not withstanding the radon gas, was the air in the cave even breathable after the fumes given off by the catalytic heater? If they didn’t return, would Teague alert Salomon to mount a rescue operation?

Not likely. They would join the three headless bodies in the cave, probably for eternity.

Or suppose they completed the dive, but found Teague waiting instead of Zinchenko? Their next destination would be the bottom of the lake.

And if she was nervous about these things, what must Ian be feeling?

She felt him tug her right flipper. Knowing that he was suggesting they turn back, she rolled sideways, dismounted her tank, and pushed it into the offset. It clanked against the granite wall and then jammed. Squirming in the narrow confines, she rocked it free. Thrusting it farther overhead, her air hose stretching, she finned a yard upward. The tank clanked against the ceiling and she hesitated again.

What if she got stuck trying to squirm through? What if she couldn’t back out, or the tank jammed for good?
She’d drown, that’s what.

Calder tugged her flipper again and she squirmed upward, scraping the shoulders of her dry suit against the rock surface—how much would it take to breach the material, when she’d probably freeze?—and eeled into the upper passage. Moving along the tunnel with small fin-strokes, pushing the tank before her, she crooked her neck and glanced back.

Darkness. Although Ian had said nothing more about his claustrophobia, she knew from his previous actions in the tunnel that it was still with him. Would he overcome his fear one last time? And if he did, would his larger body get through the tightened strictures?

She heard clanking. After what seemed forever, the beam from his flashlight bloomed, and she felt thankful and apprehensive at the same time. One down and one to go. What if the second offset was unnavigable and they couldn’t turn around? What if Ian panicked?

But the second stricture proved unchanged, and she wriggled through and finned ahead to the cave. Inside, she remounted her tank and snugged her face mask, careful not to breathe the cave air. Shucking out of her flippers, she plodded to the rear and she checked the motion gauge. A shiver went up her spine as she saw that it had barely recorded this afternoon’s tremor. Ian was right to be concerned. If a minor quake had narrowed the tunnel this much, what might a large one do?

They’d better hurry.

As she padded back toward the three bodies, Calder’s beam lit the cave, dispersing the shadows. She played her own flash over the three severed heads and then at the quartet of heavily iced wall paintings. Although Ian had placed the heater as close as he dared, the ice was thicker here and had not fully melted. She could make out only vague shapes.

Calder waddled up, hunching under the weight of his tank, his breath rattling his regulator. “It’s almost defrosted.”

“
We won’t be here long. Can you do anything?”

“
I’ll move the heater closer and keep an eye on it,” he said, his face mask garbling his diction.

“
What about that other panel?” She played her beam over an area of tinted ice toward the rear. “Looks like it might be the last one.”

“
We’ll have to let it go. Let’s string the three heads, take pictures of the latest panel, and get out. Even if they’re blurry, we can use computer-aided—”

“
I want the wolf’s head,” Blaine said.

“
What?”

“
You heard me. I want to study its degree of domestication.”

He stared at her. “Its degree—”

“
Obviously, the fourteen-thousand-year estimate for domestication is wrong. Wolves started to become man’s best friend long before that. I want to see if Wayne’s group had the right—”

Calder gripped her arm. “Caitlin, if there’s another tremblor we could be trapped. We’ve gotta get out of here!”

She edged away, hitching her air tank higher and trundling toward the rear.

“
I’m taking the wolf,” she said over her shoulder, the final word reverberating in the closed chamber, reminding her of an old dictum about automation.

Nothing can go wrong . . . can go wrong . . . can go wrong . . .

She pushed the thought away. “You get the others ready.”

“
I don’t think you’re concerned about his domestication at all.”

Crouching some yards away by the yellow-ruffed animal where it lay across the lion’s chest, she had to guess at the word
domestication.
“Of course I am.”

“
Scanning the animal’s brain is not going to tell you anything.”

Blaine had already started to saw. She didn’t reply.

“
I think you’re letting empathy sway your judgment,” he said.

“
I’m not.”

“
The wolf tried to protect the woman in the Neanderthal camp and again in the Cro-Magnon longhouse,” he said. “He almost died getting to her Neanderthal friend.”