But before ordering the launch of Pakistan’s missiles. General Khan prayed. And while he waited for an answer, the world covered its eyes.
Hundreds of kilometres away in the Himalayas, no one said very much. There was little that could be said. Everyone was worried.
Swift’s first feelings on the renewed crisis were those of guilt that she had exposed her colleagues to such a risk, but these quickly yielded to a sense and outrage that, in the age of knot theory, laser fusion, space time, gender therapy, and chaos, there were still people who could do such things in the name of the stupid and tyrannical fables of religion.
Some members of the team, however, did hoist a few prayers to the blue sky above the Sanctuary. Others drank a lot and tiled to put the events out of their minds. Mostly they tried to forget what was happening by immersing themselves in the scientific work they had come to do. Boyd sectioned his samples. Jutta nursed Jack. Cody, Swift, and Jameson studied the yetis, and Mac took their photographs. None of them worked harder than Lincoln Warner. But his dedication to the task before him was only partly explained by his desire to forget about being at the centre of a potential nuclear war. He was, quite simply, now the one who had the most with which to occupy himself.
The molecular biologist buried himself in his work on Rebecca’s protein chemistry. Underneath the clamshell, hardly noticing the deteriorating weather, he rarely moved from the small laboratory he had created for himself. Completing separations, isolating DNA, staining gels, analyzing spots and blots, performing optical density calibrations, and compiling data — it all helped to detach him from the horror of what might occur. At the same time the irony of the situation was not lost on him. There he was, devoting himself to the general cause of discovering man’s origins, while not eight hundred kilometres away, man was apparently set on destroying his own future.
He felt grateful for the literal isolation and separateness of what he was doing. Purifying high-quality plasmid DNA to an absolute minimum. Separating DNA from RNA, cellular proteins, and other impurities. There was no doubt about it: Molecules were a great way to keep your head together. And molecular phylogeny, as the drawing of evolutionary family trees from biochemical data was called, was as much of a sanctuary as the glacier on which the clamshell was erected.
Despite the fact that he was working in one of the most inaccessible places on earth, Warner was equipped with the very latest biochemical hardware and software. The techniques he was using were a thousand times more sophisticated than those that had been available to Sarich and Wilson, Berkeley’s two wunderkinds of molecular anthropology, back in the sixties. Warner’s work involved analyzing not just nucleotide sequences but the yeti’s DNA structure itself. He had more faith in the idea that whole genome DNA changed at a uniform average rate than any serum albumins. DNA hybridization was a technique that involved the analysis of not just one blood protein or gene, but all of an organism’s information-carrying genetic material.
Generally speaking, Warner had no argument with the results Sarich and Wilson had found with regard to the DNA differences between apes and human beings. He still remained impressed by the simple fact that the chimpanzee, the gorilla, and man shared ninety-eight-point-four percent of their DNA. But unlike Sarich and Wilson, he assumed a more distant divergence between man and apes, at around seven to nine million years ago. And he had his own view of man’s evolutionary tree.
The standard version in most textbooks depicted the human line as something separate from the common ancestor of the gorilla and the chimpanzee. The molecular evidence as argued by Sarich and Wilson, however, placed man, chimp, and gorilla together, with no human ancestor that was not also an ancestor of the chimp and the gorilla. Lincoln Warner had argued, however, that humans were once possessed of more than one kind of DNA, and that the human species had enjoyed a double origin: African and Asian.
Now, as he faced the UV image of Rebecca’s DNA on the colour monitor, adjusting the brightness, and performing edge enhancement with his mouse, things were looking very different from what he had imagined. So different that at first he thought he must have made a mistake and went back to rim the whole gel documentation program again, to make doubly sure of his results. Satisfied at last with the image, he clicked the mouse, storing the final picture on the hard disk, and then ordered up a thermal print for his notes.
He was going to need a little time to consider the implications of what his DNA analysis had shown. Meanwhile, he fed the data into the Phylogenetic Analysis and Simulation Software program to see what the computer itself might extrapolate from his apparently extraordinary discovery.
The threat of nuclear war seemed to herald a storm as bad as any of the old Himalayan hands — Mac, Jutta, and the sirdar — could remember. The temperature dropped while the wind, reaching speeds of well over a hundred and sixty kilometres per hour, howled through the Sanctuary as if in homage to the larger, man-made energy that might at any time be unleashed upon the whole subcontinent. Even the clamshell groaned and shook under the force of the wind, making its human occupants ever more nervous and irritable.
By the third morning of the storm, in whiteout conditions that made even the shortest walk between the clamshell and the hotels hazardous, relationships among the expedition team were strained to the breaking point.
‘Hoo-hooo-hoooo-hoooo!’
Cody, who was recording all of Rebecca’s sounds, nodded appreciatively and turned off his machine.
‘You know, Swift, Rebecca has over a dozen different kinds of sound,’ he said. ‘And that doesn’t include her vocalizations. If we had another adult we might actually be able to record them all in detail. And if I had a more powerful microphone than the thing on this Walkman, I might be able to pick up some of the noises she makes to Esau.’
Nursing Esau, Rebecca would frequently cuddle him and emit a number of whispered sounds into his face. But sometimes she moved her lips as well in a simulacrum of human speech, and it looked to everyone as if she might be talking to her baby.
‘Jesus, listen to him,’ grumbled Boyd, staring at the game of solitaire he was playing on his laptop computer. He did not find Cody’s enthusiasm for the yetis the least bit infectious. ‘He wants two of these monsters. As if it doesn’t smell bad enough in here already.’