Orphan of Creation (34 page)

“Amanda, don’t get into philosophy,” Barbara said, her voice urgent. “Tell me straight, without the grey areas—
how much can she learn?
Is there any chance she can learn enough for meaningful communication?”

“Christ. That takes me back.” Amanda stood up and started walking around the room. “Before I got into this line of work, I used to work teaching special ed—mentally disabled kids—except back then it was okay to call them retarded— deaf kids, bright kids with learning disabilities that meant they couldn’t ever read past the first-grade level. Kids who were brain-damaged in accidents, dying kids. And they all had mothers. Mothers who wanted to know, ‘How much can he learn? Will he ever have a normal life? Can he learn to dress himself and tie his shoes? If we keep trying will he start to remember . . .’ And, except for the parents who finally accepted the reality of their situations, none of them really
wanted
straight answers, would accept straight answers—or even hear the straight answers. They wanted
hope
. They wanted some tiny little shred of a possibility that Timmy might wake up tomorrow and be a normal, perfect kid.

“And the way they
got
that from me, the way they forced me to give that hope, the way they forced me to give them the cruel, unfair, unrealistic hope they
needed,
was to find something unknowable. So, finally, I’d have to admit that yes, the tumor might respond to treatment, or yes, he might regain motor function, or yes, the hearing loss
might
be temporary. After all, they’d tell me, you don’t know what
caused
the problem, so how can you say it will never be cured?

“And now
you
come in here like one of the saddest of those parents, and ask me that. And I know and you know that
any
answer I give you might be wrong, because I
can’t
know for certain. After all, we’re dealing with a whole new
species
here. How
could
I know?”

The hell with it, Amanda thought. She pulled the cigarettes out of her purse and lit up. Filthy habit. “On the other hand. On the other hand. Besides my special-ed work, I’m fresh from Yerkes and all sorts of work on language ability on apes—real hands-on stuff, years of study and experience concerning language and learning among primates. And now I’ve had a month working with Thursday, enough to get a feel for the situation, enough for a reasonable assessment. And that assessment will in large part determine what kind of life Thursday will have, what kind of life she is capable of. Will she be a lab rat or a very rare and special kind of person? If she can demonstrate intelligent use of language, we have no right to treat her as an experimental subject. But if she can’t demonstrate that intelligence . . .” Amanda shrugged. “So do you want the tenth-of-a-percent hope, or the ninety-nine-and-nine-tenths truth?”

Barbara shifted in her seat and didn’t speak.

Amanda grinned. “Yeah. Loaded question. I wouldn’t answer it either. So I’ll tell you the truth anyway. She certainly understands a large number of spoken words, more than any other non-human could. She has some problems with retaining what she has learned, but that shows signs of getting better. I can’t say whether or not she’s got good enough vocal folds or a good enough larynx for forming speech. Her speech apparatus is certainly not like human-normal, but I’ve seen people who learned to talk with worse equipment. However, teaching her to use the vocal equipment she’s got is probably not worth the effort. Forming speech is an extremely complex process, and at best it might take her years of very slow progress to get much past where she is. She tries very hard to speak, yet it’s clearly difficult for her.

“But if she doesn’t know how to use her voice, she
does
know how to use her hands. Simplified ASL is probably the best bet, because hand-signals should be simpler for her to learn. Unfortunately, she seems to have some sort of resistance to learning a signed language, and prefers spoken word-symbols—though that behavior might just be starting to break down. You may have missed it, but she didn’t try to vocalize ‘ball’ the last time she signed it today—which is the first time for that.

“So there is hope that she can learn more words. But can she learn
language
, something that goes past learning responses and parroting them to get a hug or a treat? Rover the dog rolls over and plays dead in order to get a dog-bone. Does that make the roll-over-play-dead movement the doggish word for dog bone? Obviously not—though it took us years to realize that the chimps who learned to ask for a cookie weren’t connecting the sign for ‘cookie’ with the object. Mostly, they had learned that the gesture would be
rewarded
—with a cookie. Just about all of their gestures could be linked to that kind of reward training or pain-avoidance. There’s good evidence that the chimpish language ability past that—chimps inventing words, for example—was really the human researcher imposing his interpretation on what the chimps were doing.

“Can Thursday go past that? I don’t know. I can say for certain that she will never, never, never be as smart as you or I. She will never have a large vocabulary. She just doesn’t have a brain big enough to hold many words. She also doesn’t have the brain structure, the sophisticated language centers we have. In some ways she behaves like a patient with partial aphasia—partial speech loss. She reminds me of patients whose languages centers— Broca’s area, Wernicke’s area, and the smaller speech loci—have all been damaged somehow. Those patients can improve, but they can’t come all the way back.

“Her brain isn’t really built for speech, for language. Can she overcome
that
? I don’t know. Can she get past asking for cookies? Can she express an idea? Someday, she might. Never as well or as clearly or as complexly as we do, but she might do it a little. I don’t know. I really don’t know.
Maybe
she can. And that’s an honest, fifty-fifty chance maybe, not a million-to-one shot.”

Barbara smiled, for what looked like the first time in a long time. “I can’t ask better than that.”

Amanda tried to smile back. But she could see that look, that tragic look of a parent who has found hope—pointless, unfair, unfounded and sustaining hope—in Barbara’s eyes.

<>

GABON APE-MAN EXPEDITION SET TO GO

Walter Pinkman, Boston Globe staff

An expedition to collect more specimens of Australopithecus boisei, the same species as Thursday, the famous so-called ‘ape-woman,’ is making final arrangements for departure from Boston. The expedition, delayed by prolonged negotiations with the Gabonese government, is being led by Dr. William Lowell of Harvard University.

When the evidence for A. boisei surviving to modern times was first reported, Dr. Lowell was prominent in the ranks of scoffers. Now, he has enthusiastically changed his mind. “I can flatly say that I have never been happier to be proved wrong,” Dr. Lowell said. “My chief regret is that I said some very harsh and unfair things about Dr. Grossington and his team when their work was first published. I now understand that the way it was reported was quite outside their control. I have offered my heartfelt apologies to the Grossington/Marchando team, and I am delighted to report they accepted my apologies with great kindness and grace.”

Dr. Lowell still holds some strong opinions on the boiseans, as he calls them. “There have been endless discussions in the media about the ‘rights’ of these creatures, suggestions that they are people, and not simply another type of animal. These are patent nonsense. A boisean has no more—and no less—right to decent treatment than any other animal. They are a precious scientific resource that must be carefully managed, but they are not a fit topic for any discussion of human rights. After all, they aren’t human.”

Dr. Lowell hopes to bring back several breeding pairs to be housed in a facility now under construction near Dracut, Massachusetts. “If a population can be established here, the possibilities for research are endless. Not just animal behavior, but medical, psychological, and product-safety testing as well. Obviously, we are talking about a set of projects for twenty years or more, but I feel that now is the time to pursue this exciting opportunity for the future.”

There is one other mystery Dr. Lowell is interested in solving. Briefly put, the boiseans were found in a place they shouldn’t have been. “All the australopithecines, all the early hominids, were supposed to be savannah-dwellers, living in West African open plainlands,” Dr. Lowell explained. “Now we find them in deep jungle in West Africa, a totally different environment. It could be that our understanding of the early hominids is way off. Maybe they did live in jungle areas as well, but we never found fossils there because it’s tough for fossils to form in jungle, and even tougher to find them in a jungle. Or maybe this population is the only one to migrate into the jungle, which is why they survived. Or maybe the ancestors of the tribesmen who keep them migrated from the east a few hundred or thousand years ago, bringing the boiseans with them. Whatever the answer, we hope to find it out, and bring back some splendid research animals in the process.”

<>

Dr. Grossington glanced at his watch as Livingston slumped into the daily morning meeting. Livingston was ten minutes late, and obviously ill at ease. It was the first meeting Livingston had gotten to for a while, thanks to the fussing about of the biochemists, who wanted to check everything eight times. Liv sidled in around the edge of the meeting room and scooped up a stack of doughnuts and a big cup of coffee. He probably hadn’t had much chance to eat recently.

Dr. Grossington, free for the moment of the endless fund raising he had to do, was chairing the meeting. The original group had grown into practically a whole institute. The newcomers—the behaviorists, the language specialists, the support workers and assistants—had started to refer to the old timers as the “Gang of Four.” Grossington was glad to hear the kidding. Maybe it meant morale was improving.

Pete Ardley had been signed on as press agent, on the theory of better the devil you knew. Besides, he was willing to work cheap, thanks to some book contract he had signed. A few strings had been pulled, and Barbara’s ex-husband had been granted a leave of absence from his hospital, so he was on board too, overseeing the medical procedures done on Thursday—for example, making sure there weren’t so many blood samples taken that she got anemia. Apparently, he and Barbara were back together again.

There was a certain amount of research that couldn’t be done at Saint Elizabeth’s. Analytic stuff for the most part. They farmed out the work to the labs equipped for it. The Saint E’s staff was no doubt glad of that. Thursday and her entourage had already taken over two outbuildings and had designs on a third. But that was the sort of administrative problem he was supposed to solve on his own. He took another sip of his coffee as the various working groups went through the daily progress reports. The team approved the idea of a daily ASL session for the staffers, talked through a half-dozen other ideas, and went over what the outside world was saying about the project. Grossington came around to Livingston last, perhaps noticing that the young man was ill at ease. “If that closes the routine reports, I believe that Livingston Jones has some news for us. Mr. Jones?”

Livingston hesitated for a moment, and then rose from his seat. That in itself was a signal they had gotten some results. Important news required a bit more formality than slouching back in his chair. “Well, as most of you know, I’ve been working with a group of biochemists who have been taking a look at Thursday, examining her at the cellular and molecular level—and they’ve got some news. But before I tell you what it is, I’d better give you some quick background. You’ll all have heard the term molecular anthropology. The idea of M.A. is to compare proteins, antibodies, and DNA between various species of primates, and measure the degree of difference between them.

“It’s been known for some time that there’s sort of a molecular clock, ticking along in our genes. The clock works this way: tiny micro-mutations occur at a pretty constant rate in all our genes, from one generation to the next. It’s of course a random process, so you can’t predict when a
given
mutation when occur, but the overall
rate
of these random mutations
is
measurable, so that you can predict very well how
many
mutations will occur in a given time interval, a time interval on the order of thousands or millions of years.

“What the M.A. people did, some time ago, was measure the degree of difference between human DNA and chimp and gorilla DNA. They discovered that there is only about a one percent difference between ape and human DNA. By taking that amount of change and comparing it to the established ‘clock’ of random microchanges, they could learn how recently we split from the apes, how long ago we had a common ancestor.