Keeper of Dreams (21 page)

“It senses your vision automatically,” Father explained. “Just look and it will come into focus.”

“Bacana,” I said. I looked.

There was a lot of dry grassy land, interspersed with drier, sagebrushy land. In one direction there were some trees. That must be where the water was.

“Spotted them yet?” Mother asked.

“To the left of the trees?” asked Father.

“There, too?”

“Where did you see them?”

“In the shade of that rock.”

I searched and finally found what they were looking at.

Men and women. Long-haired. Filthy. Naked.

My strait-laced parents brought me here to see naked people?

Then I looked again, more closely. They weren’t exactly people after all.

“Neanderthals,” I said.

“Homo neanderthalensis,”
said Father.

“They’ve been extinct forever!”

“For about twenty thousand years, most conservative guess,” said Father. “Maybe longer.”

“But there they are,” I said.

“There was a long debate,” said Father. “About how the neanderthals died out.”

“I thought that
Homo sapiens
wiped them out.”

“It wasn’t so simple. There was plain evidence of communities of
sapiens
and
neanderthalensis
living in close proximity for centuries. It wasn’t just a case of kill-the-monsters. So there were several theories. One was that the two species interbred, but neanderthal traits were disprized to such a degree that they faded out. Like round eyes in China.”

“How could they interbreed?” I asked. I was proud of my scientific erudition, as only eleven-year-olds can be. “Look at how different they are from humans.”

“Not so different,” said Mother. “They had rudimentary language. Not the complicated grammars we have now—basically just imperative verbs and labeling nouns. But they could call out to each other across a large expanse and give warning. They could greet each other by name.”

“I was talking about how they look.”

“But I was talking about brain function,” said Mother. “Which is much more to the point, don’t you think?”

“Another theory,” said Father, “was that
Homo sapiens
evolved from the neanderthals. That one was discredited and then revived several times. It turns out it was the closest one to being right.”

“You know, none of this explains why there are neanderthals out here in the North American Wild Animal Park.”

“You surprise me, son,” said my father. “I thought you would have leapt to at least some conclusion. Instead you seem to be passively awaiting our explanation.”

I hated it when Father patronized me. He knew that, so he did it whenever he wanted to goad me into thinking. It always worked. I hated that, too.

“You brought me here because of the way I reacted to Elizio’s death,” I said. “And because you’re famous scientists yourselves, you got to pull strings and get me a special tour. Not everybody sees this, right?”

“Actually, anybody can, but few want to,” said Father.

“And the biohazard stuff, that suggests some kind of disease agent. What you said about the evolved-from-neanderthals scenario being close to correct suggests—there’s some disease loose in the wild here that causes regular people to turn into cavemen?”

Father smiled wanly at Mother. “Smart boy,” he said.

I looked at Mother. She was crying.

“Just tell me,” I demanded. “No more guessing games.”

Father sighed and put his arm around Mother and began to talk. It didn’t take long to explain.

“The greatest breakthrough in the medical treatment of disease was the germ theory, but it took an astonishingly long time for doctors to realize that almost all human ailments were caused by infectious agents. A few were genetic—hemophilia, cystic fibrosis, sickle-cell anemia—but those all seemed to be recessive genes that conferred a benefit when you had one of them, and only killed you if you had two. All the others—heart disease, dementia, schizophrenia, strokes, nontraumatic cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, most cancers, even some
crimes
—all were actually diseases. What disguised them from researchers for so long was the fact that these diseases were passed along in the womb, across the placenta, mostly by disease agents composed of proteins smaller than DNA. Some were passed along in the ovum. So we had no way to compare a clean, healthy organism with an infected one until we finished mapping the human genetic code and realized that these diseases weren’t there. When we finally tracked them down as loose proteins in the cells, we—”

“We?”
I asked.

“I speak of our forebears, of course,” said Father. “Our predecessors.”

“You aren’t in medical research.”

“Our colleagues in science,” said Father. “We’ve come a long way to have you quibble about my choice of pronouns. And anthropology is the science of which medicine is merely a subset.”

I had a snappy retort about how nobody ever asks if there’s an anthropologist in the house, but I kept it to myself, mostly because I didn’t want to win points here, I wanted to hear the story.

“How do you inoculate an organism against in-utero infection?” asked Mother rhetorically. “How do you cleanse an ovum that has already been infected?”

“What we developed,” Father began, then interrupted himself. “What
was
developed.”

“What emerged from the development process,” said Mother helpfully.

“Was,”
said Father, “an elegant little counter-infection. Learning from the way these protein bits worked, the researchers came up with a protein complex that hijacked the cell’s DNA just the way these infectious agents did, only instead of slowly—or rapidly—destroying the host cell, our little counter-infection caused the human DNA to check aggressively inside the cell for proteins that didn’t belong there. There are already mechanisms that do bits and parts of that, but this one worked damn near perfectly. Nothing was in that cell that didn’t belong there. It even detected and threw out the wrong-handed proteins that caused spongiform encephalopathies.”

“Now you’re showing off, my love,” said Mother.

“It was perfect,” said Father. “And best of all, self-replicating yet nondestructive. Once you introduced it into a mother, it was in every egg in her body after a matter of days. Any child she bore would have this protection within it.”

“It was perfect,” said Mother. “The early tests showed that it not only prevented diseases, it cured all but the most advanced cases. It was the ultimate panacea.”

“But they hadn’t tested it for very long,” said Father.

“There was enormous pressure,” said Mother. “Not from outside,
from
inside
the research community. When you have a cure for everything, how can you withhold it from the human race for ten years of longitudinal studies, while people die or have their lives wrecked by diseases that could be prevented with a simple inoculation.”

“It had side effects,” I said, guessing the end.

“Technically, no,” said Father. “It did exactly what it was supposed to do. It eradicated diseases with smaller-than-bacteria agents. Period. Nothing else. The only reason that they didn’t immediately spread the counter-infection throughout the world to save as many lives as possible was because of the one foreseeable hitch. Can you think of it? It’s obvious, really.”

I thought. I wish I could say I came up with it quickly, but my parents were nothing if not patient. And I did come up with it after a few false tries, which I can’t remember now. The correct answer: “Aging is a disease. You get this counter-infection, you don’t die.”

“We were concerned about a population explosion,” said Mother. “Even if people completely stopped having children, we weren’t sure that the existing ecosphere could sustain a population in which all the existing children grew up to be adults while none of the adults died off to make room for them. Imagine all the children entering the workforce, while the older generation, newly vigorous and extremely unlikely to die, refused to retire. It was a nightmare. So, by the mercy of God, the counter-infection was restricted to a large longitudinal study centered on Manhattan, a smallish college town in Kansas.”

“There was a quarantine, of sorts,” said Father. “The participants accepted the rules—no physical contact with anyone outside the city during the two years of the study. In exchange, nobody dies of any kind of disease. They jumped at it.”

“The counter-infection got loose!” I said.

“No. Everybody kept to the rules. This was science, not the movies,” said Father. “But in the Manhattan Project, as we inevitably called it, for the first time the test included infants, newborns, children born after the study began, children
conceived
after the study began. We were so interested in the result with the aging population that it had never crossed our minds that . . . well, it
did
cure aging. The people who have it would never die of old age. The trouble was, the children were born—”

“As neanderthals,” I said, making the obvious guess.

“And over time,” said Father, “as cells were replaced, the adult bodies also tried to reshape themselves. It was fatal for them. You can’t take an existing body and make it into something else like that. You had a few years of perfect health, and then your bones destroyed themselves in the frantic effort to grow into new shapes. The little ones, the ones who were changed in the womb, only they survived.”

“And that’s who I’m seeing out there,” I said.

“It took fifteen years to find a way to sterilize them all without our counter-infection undoing the sterilization. By then there were so many of them that to keep them all in their natural habitat required a vast reserve. It really wasn’t all that hard to get the citizens of this area to evacuate. Nobody wanted to be anywhere near Manhattan, Kansas. So once again,
Homo neanderthalensis
has a plot of ground here on Earth.
Homo neanderthalensis
, the most intelligent toolmaking species ever to evolve naturally.”

“But how could the counter-agent cause us to revert to an earlier stage of evolution?” I asked.

“You weren’t listening,” said Father.

I thought for a moment. “
Homo neanderthalensis
isn’t an earlier stage,” I said. “There was no more evolution after that.”

“Only a disease,” said Father.

It seemed too incredible to me, as an eleven-year-old who prided himself on understanding the world. “Human intelligence is an
infection
?”

“Passed from mother to child through the ovum,” said Mother. “By a disease agent that alters the DNA in order to replicate itself. We should have realized it from the fact that in-utero development recapitulates evolution, but there is no stage in which the fetus passes through a habiline form. We didn’t evolve past it. The DNA is hijacked and we are born prematurely, grossly deformed by the disease. Neotonous, erect-standing, language-mad, lacking in sense of smell, too feeble to survive on our own even as adults, in need of clothing and shelter and community to a degree that the neanderthals never were. But . . . smart.”

“So now,” said Father, “do you understand why medical science has to rely on inoculation to fight off cancer, so that a small percentage—far smaller than ever before in human history, but not zero—a small percentage
dies? Elizio died because the only alternative we’ve found is for this race of perfectly healthy, immortal, dimwitted beings to inherit the Earth.”

I stood there for a long time in silence, watching the neanderthals, trying to see how their behavior was different from ours. In the years since then I have come to realize that there was no important difference. Being smarter hasn’t made us
act
any differently from the neanderthals. We make better tools. We have a longer, more thorough collective memory in the form of libraries. We can talk much more fluently about the things we do. But we still do basically the same things. We
are
neanderthals, at heart.

But I did not understand this at the time. I was, after all, only eleven. I had a much more practical—and heartless—question.

“Why do we keep this park at all?” I asked. “I mean, they’re going to live forever. And all the time they’re alive, they pose a danger of this counter-infection getting loose outside the fence. Why haven’t they all been killed and their bodies nuked or something so that the counter-agent is eliminated?”

Mother looked appalled at my ruthlessness, but Father only patted her arm and said, “Of course he thought of that, my love.”

“But so young, to be so—”

“Practical?” prompted Father. “There was a long debate over exactly this issue, and it resurfaced from time to time, though not for decades now. The ones who argued for keeping the Park talked about the necessity of studying our ancestors, and some people talked about the rights of these citizens who, after all, can’t help their medical condition and have committed no crime, but it was all a smokescreen. The real reason we didn’t destroy them all, as you suggested, was because we didn’t have the heart.”

“They were our children,” said Mother, crying again.

“At first,” said Father. “And later, when they weren’t children anymore, we still couldn’t kill them. Because they had become our ancient parents.”