As Megan walked past a black-and-white diorama showing U.S. spy-plane photos, she wondered what the world would have been like if the Germans had developed a bomb. Hitler had driven many German scientists out of the country before the war, but enough remained so that they could have built one, had resources and will been available. Jill said that was what killed Germany in the end—no more oil.
Megan thought about a recent observation in primatology.
Chimps were notoriously violent. In every chimp group, a hierarchy of dominant males raped, bullied, and murdered at a constant low rumble.
In one recent recorded instance, though, the dominant males all went off to exploit the succulent pickings at a garbage dump, excluding the subordinate males and the females so they could have it all to themselves.
The dominant males, subsequently, all got food poisoning and died.
When the subordinate males consequently moved into dominance, the profile of violence changed. Perhaps it changed because the social parameters had changed so suddenly.
Whatever the reason, a new society was born—one more civil, with much less aggression and rape, and had remained so through subsequent generations.
It was easy to suppose that if someone could figure out how to wipe out, disable, or change the top, aggressive males, the ones who insisted that war be omnipresent, the future might be breathtakingly different than the past. She’d just read a book about that very thing,
Sex and War,
written by physicians—men, in fact—which painstakingly documented that, in their opinion, several defining characteristics of maleness were responsible for human war.
But could war be eliminated as if it were a virus, like smallpox? Humans weren’t just one small isolated tribe, like most chimp groups. They were spread out across the earth, living quite literally atop one another, many-layered and complex. Not only that, they were not chimps; there was that incredibly small, yet powerfully telling, one-percent genetic difference that made humans capable of long-term planning, nuanced language, record-keeping, and complex storytelling. Any characteristic observed in chimps were removed from human characteristics and behavior by millennia and those few crucial genes. The winds of power in humans simply favored those, male or female, who struggled and connived, people convinced of their need to be in control of others. Absolutely the kind of people whose power-managing skills had been sharply honed by competition. Now, if there was some mechanism in place to choose the most peaceful folk to be in power … not that they wanted to be in power. They would run and hide from power. They wanted to read the funnies every morning, and enjoy life. So maybe everyone would be forced to take turns at dealing with governmental issues.
Megan was not, at any rate, a primatologist or an anthropologist. It was amazing, though, how many humans believed that the present systems of behavior were set in stone—and, what was worse, that it was “unnatural” to try to change such behaviors, when evolution was constant and omnipresent in every living system.
She stared into a representative fallout shelter, where a “nuclear family,” life-sized plastic figures, lived in a tiny space with their water distiller, dried food, and emergency flashlights—much like, she supposed, the backyard shelter in which her friend Karen, a thousand miles to the north and a few decades ago, had spent a week.
As she tried to imagine what such a life might be like, Megan hoped that the woman she’d met today might truly have the neurological silver bullet that could lead to human altruism. Perhaps some kind of genetic alteration was possible. Slight, but powerful. Or perhaps just a removal of warfare from the human landscape, like smallpox, polio, and, just lately, many cancers had been removed. A few years earlier a truly terrible virus had emerged, called AIDS, but it had been quickly and effectively eliminated via international cutting-edge research. Sometimes human cooperation truly could bring about results that seemed little short of miraculous. HIV/AIDS was a scourge that they would never have to deal with.
Megan emerged from the shaded displays and walked out into the hot sunshine. The brick pathway wound through rows of royal palms back to the bus. She passed gentle waterfalls and pools full of koi, surrounded by formal gardens.
Peace,
breathed big-leaved, white-flowered ginger, elegant heliconia with their birdlike beaks, and lush bird’s-nest ferns beneath manicured bougainvillea trees. All manner of lizards zipped and paused; zipped and paused. Beneath the shadow of a tall intercontinental ballistic missile, she read a multilingual sign that explained it lacked its former nuclear warhead.
That woman—what was her name? Megan pulled out her card. Dr. Hadntz. She had been talking about adult brain plasticity. It seemed that if more intense plasticity were available to adults … if they could then take some kind of course devoted to understanding peace, to replicating peace …
Megan felt a brief jolt of intense intellectual hope, the like of which she had not felt for a while: the power of the new, the unexpected, the expansion of possibilities. That which lay just over the horizon. Perhaps, a whole new world.
She smiled at herself. That was precisely what teenagers felt, because a whole new world
was
just over the horizon, for them.
Maybe Dr. Hadntz had slipped her some certified plasticity, grade A, somehow. A nice fantasy. How wonderful that would be.
She hoped Jim was back at the hotel. She was ready for her mojito. Brian and Jill weren’t here to feign astonishment.
She might even have two.
* * *
After returning from Cuba, Megan was in her lab just a few mornings later when her Q beeped. She ceased mindlessly watching a centrifuge, which would turn off when programmed to do so.
She opened her mail. It was from Eliani Hadntz.
Her article, published in an obscure French journal, had been translated into English.
It referenced songbird research that showed in painstaking detail the brain changes that took place, seasonally, in songbirds learning the new season’s songs.
Gradually, it segued into analogs of this research in humans, most of it confirmed by super-precise FMRI’s of learning taking place in real time.
It then showed how various biochemical composites could deliver the same changes—the same openness to change—that took place in active learning. These drugs mimicked and enhanced the learning process. Out of five human subjects who spoke only English, three had learned to write, read, and speak Japanese, without an accent, in a month. This, however, was in a Hadntz addendum, and to Megan, the research protocol seemed doubtful.
Still, as she read, Megan tried to tamp down her excitement. She grabbed her notebook and added some molecules here and there. A mouse generation, two, ten, stretched out before her.
And yet, she was so sure. Damn another time-consuming, expensive iteration, for which she had no money. Her requests for grant extensions had been denied; a new round would take at least a year to realize.
If she made this, she could take it herself.
Everything she had ever learned and practiced as a scientist shouted “NO!” And added to that “NO!” was Abbie.
Added to what sounded like an “Everlasting Yea” was a powerful urgency the like of which Megan had never felt—as if she stood on the shore of a beautiful world and had only to step off the boat.
Nuts.
Then she was irritated. If this Eliani Hadntz was so sure of herself, why wasn’t this drug in tests, in production?
And then, Megan saw her note at the bottom: “It works. See table 7.4.”
Megan had rather glossed over that table, and flipped back to it. Perused it.
The studies were actually very, very good; she could find no flaws in their setup, and she peer-reviewed and discarded studies constantly.
The studies had taken place in ten countries, and the volunteers were from all kinds of backgrounds. PhDs from many countries; even a few names she recognized. Volunteers from mental health institutes. Age groups, beginning with twenty-one to one hundred and one. A woman in Kenya who had just begun to write a very remarkable history of the life she had previously forgotten, corroborated by experts. So why had she not heard of all this earlier?
Further analysis. She Q’d for a country she did not recognize, Seychelles. Okay, okay. It was off the coast of Africa, very tiny. Andalusia: mostly Spanish. This went on for a bit; she realized that nations were fluid, forming and re-forming constantly, and the extent of her geographical knowledge was embarrassingly tiny.
She recognized a name: Paul Wentworth, a British colleague, and Q’d him. He answered instantly, saying that, indeed, he had participated and by the way (slightly irritated in that British manner) had she not noticed that his name was being kited about for the Nobel Prize? Hearty enthusiasm for the drug, no hesitation at all about it, wondering why she had not heard about it earlier, and wasn’t Hadntz a rather odd duck? But brilliant, absolutely brilliant, although impossible to find when one had a question or three, a living testimony to the efficacy of the stuff. Seemed to have no proprietary interest, how did she ever expect it to catch on without slick Q advertising, all that.
She realized: Hadntz had taken this herself.
The magic bullet?
She spent an hour schlepping funding sources about, set up the experiment, and green-lighted it for immediate initiation.
But—where in the world had this mysterious Dr. Hadntz come from? Why, wondered Megan, did she slip
me
this information? What was her background, where did she go to school?
And finally, Megan narrowed it down to her universal obsession: her parents.
Hours passed. During those hours, she came to a stunning conclusion.
Hadntz, her new scientist friend, was deeply connected, somehow, with the origins of Q.
Had she ever met Bette Elegante, or Sam Dance?
Brian
BRIAN PRACTICES
June 12
A
FEW DAYS AFTER
he’d taken the saxophone from the attic, Brian jumped from his double-parked truck and hustled into Reed & Case on C Street.
Bells jingled as the door closed behind him. S. J. Williamson looked up from behind his glass counter, where he was perched on a stool perusing a catalog. “Hey! It’s the Sax Man.”
The shop was full of used clarinets, saxophones, oboes, and a few shiny new instruments as well. Brian had come here with his dad when he was a kid a few times, and Sam would sit down with S.J. and talk about the times they’d seen the Prez, Bird, and, later, Trane. They’d talk about technique and about Sam’s new infatuation, Paul Desmond, while Brian drifted around the tiny, crowded place, where shelves laden to the ceiling looked like they might pull the walls down on top of everything. He browsed music books, examined amps, picked up the fine gold-plated tenor sax that S.J. kept in the window and fingered its keys, which opened and closed in a marvel of sweet smoothness.
Brian had once aspired to be as good a sax player as his dad.
Or better. Good enough to satisfy his desire to use the saxophone as another voice, one that could say things that his speaking voice could not say. A voice that did not speak in nouns, verbs, and tenses, but which spoke in emotion—warm, cool, and everything in between.
Now, when he opened the refurbished case S.J. brought out from the back, the smells—plush new padding, a new leather lid for the reed and mouthpiece compartment, the smell of polish, wound into his brain and brought back the days when he’d tried, and tried hard, to emulate Paul Desmond, when his dad kept busting him back to practicing scales, scales, scales, and working on his fingering, and transposing from one key to another.
He’d hated the hard work then, but now he hoped that at least a trace remained in his fingers and in his brain.
“Try it out,” S.J. urged. His large, dark face, always topped by a fedora that seemed ancient in the early sixties, held his easy smile. “Go on.”
Brian lifted it out. “The case looks new.”
“A lot of it is. Nobody took care of it.”
“It was in the attic for years.” Brian lifted out the saxophone. “You took out some of the dents.”
“The big ones, anyway. What’d you do, throw it off the Washington Monument?”
“It got banged around during the war, I think.”
“Don’t give me that crap—I’ve worked on this baby since the sixties, remember? Reed’s new. I soaked it. So, go.”
Brian coaxed a warm, mellow tone from the sax in his first try; rushed up and down a scale and had to redo the second scale he tried.
“All right! Sounds good, doesn’t it?”
“Didn’t know it would make such a difference. S.J., you’re a genius.”
“Tell my wife.”
“What do I owe you?”
“After your deposit, another $72.48.”
When he looked out the window, Brian saw that he was getting another parking ticket to add to the one he’d gotten last week. “What is it—do they just assign one officer to follow me around all day?”
“Good luck, son,” said S.J. “Here—take this. I got the names of some cats who want to jam, if you need any. Little place on Fourteenth Street.”
“Thanks, man.” Brian grabbed the scrap of paper and rushed out the door for another fruitless argument with a cop.
* * *
Cindy proved not to be a fan of his halting work. She disliked it even more than she disliked what he did on his electric guitar—squalling, squealing amped-up pieces that felt like epiphanies to him, and sounded like garbage to her. He didn’t know where they came from.
At any rate, he had taken the saxophone to his trailer, and put it in the closet, next to his electric guitar, his amp, and his wah-wah pedal.
Now, in the wake of another visit from the Fire Marshal, he unfolded the flimsy closet door, removed the saxophone case, and opened it up.
He was the first to admit that he was no damned good, but that wasn’t the point. The point was moving the fingers in a certain way, faster and faster, until the piece flowed on its own, until it poured out of the horn’s broad bell like his own voice. The strange rhythms of bebop emerged from the deep places in his memory. Sometimes he wished that he was good enough to hang out with jazz players, to slide in and out of bluesy piano riffs, to take a solo and expand on a theme. So he practiced, but fitfully, because it seemed as if he didn’t really have time to do it. His business kept him busy from dawn till dusk. Like exercise (what—waste time running when there were five job sites to visit?), eating sensibly (his truck floor, full of empty potato chip bags, candy bar wrappers, and soda cans, attested to his eating habits), and keeping his checkbook balanced (wasn’t that what the accountant was for?), practicing was something that he had a hard time doing regularly. He was surprised at how well he remembered how to coax a good sound from the beast, and that he could still read music. Sometimes, as he drove around town, a melody would pop into his head and he’d make a voice memo. He stored them all for “later,” the time when he would read the infinity of unread books he’d bought, and watch all the good movies that had ever been made.