“You sympathize with them,” Kaye said.
Mitch nodded. “I’ve been having weird dreams about them.”
“ESP?” Kaye asked.
“I doubt it,” Mitch said. “It’s just the way tny mind works, putting things together.”
“You think they were pushed out of their tribe?” Dicken asked. “Persecuted?”
“Someone wanted to kill the woman,” Mitch said. “The man stayed with her, tried to save her. They were different. They had something wrong with their faces. Little flaps of skin around their eyes and nose, like masks.”
“They were shedding skin? I mean, when they were alive?” Kaye asked, and her shoulders shuddered.
“Around the eyes, the face.”
“The bodies near Gordi,” Kaye said.
“What about them?” Dicken asked.
“Some of them had little leathery masks. I thought it might have been…some bizarre product of decay. But I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“We’re getting ahead of ourselves,” Dicken said. “Let’s focus on Mitch’s evidence.”
“That’s all I have,” Mitch said. “Physiological changes substantial enough to place the infant in a different subspecies, all at once. In one generation.”
“This sort of thing had to have been going on for over a hundred thousand years before your mummies,” Dicken said. “So populations of Neandertals were living with or around populations of modern humans.”
“I think so,” Mitch said.
“Do you think the birth was an aberration?” Kaye asked.
Mitch regarded her for several seconds before saying “No.”
“It’s reasonable to conclude that you found something representative, not singular?”
“Possibly.”
Kaye lifted her hands in exasperation.
“Look,” Mitch said. “My instincts are conservative. I feel for the guys in Innsbruck, I really do! This is weird, totally unexpected.”
“Do we have a smooth, gradual fossil record leading from Neandertals to Cro-Magnons?” Dicken asked.
“No, but we do have different stages. The fossil record is usually far from smooth.”
“And…that’s blamed on the fact that we can’t find all the necessary specimens, right?”
“Right,” Mitch said. “But some paleontologists have been at loggerheads with the gradualists for a long time now.”
“Because they keep rinding leaps, not gradual progression,” Kaye said. “Even when the fossil record is better than it is for humans or other large animals.”
They sipped from their glasses reflectively.
“What are we going to do?” Mitch asked. “The mummies had SHEVA. We have SHEVA.”
“This is very complicated,” Kaye said. “Who’s going to go first?”
“Let’s all write down what we believe is actually happening.” Mitch reached into his satchel and brought out three legal pads and three ballpoint pens. He spread them out on the table.
“Like schoolkids?” Dicken asked.
“Mitch is right. Let’s do it,” Kaye said.
Dicken pulled a second bottle of wine from the gift shop bag and uncorked it.
Kaye held the cap of her pen between her lips. They had been writing for ten or fifteen minutes, switching pads and asking questions. The air was getting chilly.
“The party will be over soon,” she said.
“Don’t worry,” Mitch said. “We’ll protect you.”
She smiled ruefully. “Two half-drunk men dizzy with theories?”
“Exactly,” Mitch said.
Kaye had been trying to avoid looking at him. What she was feeling was hardly scientific or professional. Writing down her thoughts was not easy. She had never worked this way before, not even with Saul; they had shared notebooks, but had never looked at each other’s notes in progress, as they were being written.
The wine relaxed her, took away some of the tension, but did not clarify her thinking. She was hitting a block. She had written:
Populations as giant networks of units that both compete and cooperate, sometimes at the same time. Every evidence of communication between individuals in populations. Trees communicate with chemicals. Humans use pheromones. Bacteria exchange plasmids and lysogenic phages.
Kaye looked at Dicken, writing steadily, crossing out entire paragraphs. Plump, yes, but obviously strong and motivated, accomplished; attractive features.
She now wrote:
Ecosystems are networks of species cooperating and competing. Pheromones and other chemicals can cross species. Networks can have the same qualities as brains; human brains are networks of neurons. Creative thinking is possible in any sufficiently complicated functional neural network.
“Let’s take a look at what we’ve got,” Mitch suggested. They exchanged notebooks. Kaye read Mitch’s page:
Signaling molecules and viruses carry information between people. The information is gathered by the individual human in life experience; but is this Lamarckian evolution?
“I think this networking stuff confuses the issue,” Mitch said.
Kaye was reading Dicken’s paper. “It’s how all things in nature work,” she said. Dicken had scratched out most of his page. What remained was:
Chase disease all my life; SHEVA causes complex biological changes, unlike any disease ever seen. Why? What does it gain? What is it trying to do? What is the end result? If it pops up once every ten thousand or hundred thousand years, how can we defend that it is, in any sense, a separate organic concern, a purely pathogenic particle?
“Who’s going to buy that all things in nature function like neurons in a brain?” Mitch asked.
“It answers your question,” Kaye said. “Is this Lamarckian evolution, inheritance of traits acquired by an individual? No.
It’s the result of complex interactions of a network, with emergent thoughtlike properties.”
Mitch shook his head. “Emergent properties confuse me.”
Kaye glared at him for a moment, both challenged and exasperated. “We don’t have to posit self-awareness, conscious thought, to have an organized network that responds to its environment and issues judgments about what its individual nodes should look like,” Kaye said.
“Still sounds like the ghost in the machine to me,” Mitch said, making a sour face.
“Look, trees send out chemical signals when they’re attacked. The signals attract insects that prey on the bugs that attack them. Call the Orkin man. The concept works at all levels, in the ecosystem, in a species, even in a society. All individual creatures are networks of cells. All species are networks of individuals. All ecosystems are networks of species. All interact and communicate with one another to one degree or another, through competition, predation, cooperation. All these interactions are similar to neurotransmitters crossing synapses in the brain, or ants communicating in a colony. The colony changes its overall behavior based on ant interactions. So do we, based on how our neurons talk to each other. And so does all of nature, from top to bottom. It’s all connected.”
But she could see Mitch still wasn’t buying it.
“We have to describe a method,” Dicken said. He looked at Kaye with a small, knowing smile. “Make it simple. You’re the thinker on this one.”
“What packs the punch in punctuated equilibrium?” she asked, still irritated at Mitch’s density.
“All right. If there’s a mind of some sort, where’s the memory?” Mitch asked. “Something that stores up the information on the next model of human being, before it’s turned loose on the reproductive system.”