‘Nice meeting you.’
‘The pleasure was all mine,’ he said. ‘You must let me cook you a meal sometime.’
‘Oh yes, you must,’ said Joanna. ‘Manareet makes the best barium meal in this hospital. Only he calls it a curry. I swear, the one I ate was so hot you could have photographed a perfect outline of my stomach.’
Swift laughed and kept on smiling at Manareet.
‘Ignore her,’ she said. ‘I’d love a curry.’
Joanna inserted the CD in the drawer of her computer, made a choice from the list of browse options on screen, and then waited for the selected VR data to load.
‘Is he cute, or is he cute?’ she said.
‘He’s nice.’
‘It can’t be easy for him right now,’ added Joanna. ‘Given what’s happening in the Punjab. Manareet’s a Sikh. He’s got family there. But if he’s worried about them he doesn’t let on.’
Swift nodded gravely.
‘Does he think there’s going to be a war?’ she asked.
‘He doesn’t refer to it at all. And neither do I. I mean what I said about the curry, though,’ Joanna said, more brightly. ‘Like it was molten magma.’
‘I had a lot of curries when I was at university in England,’ Swift admitted. ‘And some of them were pretty hot.’
‘Maybe that’s why the English are so tight-assed. You picked it up when you had your empire in India. The stiff upper Up. It was just too many hot curries.’
Swift let the assumption that she was English go. Life was too short for her to be forever insisting that she was an Australian. Especially as it was so long since she had been back there.
Joanna’s screen flickered, and the VR image of the pink brain on a bright blue background reappeared, floating inside the monitor like a strange undersea creature.
At first glance the brain did not seem to be very different from that of a human being. It was divided vertically from front to back into left and right hemispheres, and both were separated into four lobes, each of them responsible for different sets of functions, and Swift thought the virtually real brain looked prototypically hominid.
‘Okay,’ said Joanna. ‘Let’s see if we can get a size estimate.’ She tapped a couple of keys and then read out the result. ‘One thousand millilitres. At the extreme lower limit for humans.’
‘But more than twice as large as a gorilla’s.’
‘I guess if you tie that in with the dentition you’ll be able to work out a few life history variables, won’t you?’
‘I already spoke to a dental anthropologist,’ said Swift. ‘A specialist on fossil hominid teeth.’
‘Did she sign your confidentiality thing too?’
‘Of course. She thought these third molars were just erupting when the creature died.’
‘I still don’t know why you’re being so paranoid about this.’
‘Not paranoid. Just careful, that’s all. Now if you were to assume a growth trajectory about halfway between a man and a gorilla, that would mean the owner of the skull was about fifteen years old when he died. That means a first molar at around four or four and a half years old, and a probable life span of about fifty years.’
Swift tapped the VR image on screen with a fingernail, one of the few she had not bitten away with excitement since receiving the skull from Jack.
‘This brain, Joanna. Any left hemispheric dominance there, do you think?’
‘Some,’ allowed the other woman. ‘But not as pronounced as in humans.’ Holding the button down on her mouse she rotated the brain to view it from the other side.
‘Let’s see now. The occipital lobe is larger than a human’s,’ she added. ‘Whereas the temporal and parietal lobes are smaller.’
‘That’s also typically apelike,’ said Swift.
Joanna clicked the mouse and enhanced the frontal lobes on the VR brain.
‘This is quite interesting. These large olfactory bulbs would seem to suggest that the specimen enjoyed a highly developed sense of smell.’
‘Well, that’s something we haven’t found before.’
Joanna viewed the underside of the brain.
‘Now this could be something. The position of the foramen magnum would be unusual in an ape,’ she murmured, becoming more absorbed in the analysis. The foramen magnum was the point at which the spinal cord passed from the brain case into the torso.
‘Yes, you’re right,’ said Swift. ‘It’s much farther forward than a gorilla’s.’
‘That would mean the head was carried much higher up on the shoulders.’
‘And indicate an upright-walking creature rather than a knuckle-walking ape.’
‘Exactly. I’m beginning to see why you were so excited about this skull. Swift.’
Joanna turned the image of the brain to view the left side in close-up.
‘Oh, wait just a moment.’
Her keen eyes had spotted something. She clicked the mouse, magnifying an almost featureless area of the brain, and then pushed the mouse forward across the pad so that the close-up surface image swooped toward the viewer.
Joanna pointed to a small lump, just above a fold in the brain architecture that Swift recognized as the Sylvian fissure.
‘That looks to me like a small but distinct Broca’s area,’ stated Joanna.
Human linguistic ability was usually assumed by neurologists to have something to do with Broca’s area, although it was impossible to say for sure whether or not the faculty of speech was located in or under this insignificant-looking lump.
Swift looked closely at the screen as Joanna tried to gain maximum magnification of this possible language centre in the unknown hominid’s brain organization.
‘There’s something there all right,’ she agreed cautiously.
Joanna altered the angle of magnification so that the lobe appeared very distinctly in profile.
‘Yup. There it is,’ she said.
‘Of course it doesn’t mean the hominid could speak,’ said Swift. ‘But maybe the creature had some extended local abilities. A sophisticated mimic, perhaps.’
‘C’mon, Swift,’ said Joanna. ‘Why the sudden caution? Nobody ever found Broca’s area in a fossilized brain organization before. Am I right?’
Swift nodded.
‘But we’re only dealing with surface features here. There’s no telling for sure where basic linguistic abilities might be hidden in hominid brain organization.’
Joanna turned in her chair and pulled a weary face.
‘In neurology nothing’s for sure. Even with humans. The more I know, the less I know. Come on. Swift. Admit it. Maybe we really found something here. Evidence of language as an early development in human evolution. Wouldn’t that be something?’
Swift was smiling now. But at the same time she remained acutely aware that she could expound no theories regarding the specimen’s place in evolutionary history until Stewart Ray Sacher had come back to her with the results of his geochronological tests. She hardly dared to think what the evidence of her own eyes was beginning to suggest. And before she constructed the theory that was already beckoning to her like some silent phantom, she would have to be as certain of her facts as the most sceptical of sceptics would permit.
Whenever Swift tried to deflect her mind from some preoccupation, she sat down at her baby-grand piano and, with considerable difficulty, strove to play her self-taught way through one of the pieces from Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier. The first prelude, in C-major, with its arpeggiated chords, was her favourite, and she played it well until a fugue took up the theme, as if stating it in another more confident voice. She wondered if she might reach a stage in her own work when uncertainty gave way to such resolution. The minute she thought of the analogy, the fugue collapsed beneath her fingers like snowflakes to the human touch.