Barnier mouthed a smoke ring as Jake concluded his narrative. Then he spoke up:
“There we have it, that makes it all fit together. Finally! You see, I too have been doing my own thinking, my own investigation, so, with what you have told me — and of course Julia’s decisive conception — I believe we have the total answer.”
“Which is?”
“Let’s, once more, go back in history. Oui? We know that eighty years ago or whenever, Stalin and the Soviets began a long, long campaign to try and create man-animal hybrids, powerful but biddable, strong, guilt-free killers, or robotically servile but very capable workers.” He drank half a shot of whiskey in one gulp, and continued. “These experiments were a bunch of crap. They failed, dismally. And no surprise because, as a zoologist, I know the species barrier is just too big. In the end the Russians gave up their project. However, not everyone was so… gay, as you British say.” Barnier smiled in his bogus way. “The Chinese had been intrigued by the experiments from the start. Madame Mao visited that lab in Abkhazia, the Chinese even bought the data from the lab when it was nearly shut down in the eighties. So we know the Chinese liked the underlying concept—a fucking lot. They just didn’t like the blundering, clumsy Soviet method. Humanzees. Comedy science.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because of the mission. The mission to China and Cambodia. In ’76.”
Julia quietly said, “Please go on.”
“As you know, in 1976 the Chinese government discreetly invited some selected Western academics, historians, scientists — including me — to go to Beijing and Kampuchea for a series of ‘conferences.’” Barnier did two drunken quotation marks in the humid evening air, with his nicotine-stained fingers. “But the Chinese conferences were a farce, at least for the zoologists like me. They showed us the Great Wall, they fed us plenty of abalone and pak choi, but they weren’t really interested in zoology, at least not after the first few days. There was, in short, an… undeclared hierarchy. In the group. Some were more important than others. Pretty soon, I realized that many other people — the neurologists, the archaeologists, the guys like Ghislaine Quoinelles — they were doing… the more significant work, behind closed doors. The many, many, many closed doors of China.”
“So that’s the answer,” said Jake. “The zoology failed, and consequently they tried a second route.”
“Yes, exactly.” Barnier belched smoke. “The Chinese plan was this: they still wanted to create a man without conscience, without guilt, without our species shame, but they realized the zoological method was a pitiful dead end. The man-ape stuff, that was nonsense. That’s why, in time, they ignored people like me.”
“And they went for something more refined, something neurosurgical.”
Barnier’s eyes shone, a hint of mischief amid the liquor and the terror.
“Ah! Well… but wait. To perfectly fit the puzzle together, we must use all the pieces you two have provided. Let’s go back to France. We know from Prunières, Ghislaine’s favorite obscure scientist, that there was a coincidence of trepanation and tribal violence in Lozère, non? How did this happen? Very likely the first trepanations began as a rudimentary Stone Age cure for epilepsy. That theory has been around for a while. Call it letting the demons out, if you like, as that’s maybe what cavemen called it. But anyway, the reason these primitive surgeries endured is ’cause they actually freaking worked. One of the most common forms of epilepsy is frontal-lobe seizures, so-called because they occur in the frontal cortex. So a crude trepanation can, remarkably, be effective after a fashion, if you hit the right spot. But here’s the genius bit!”
Barnier eradicated another cigarette as he continued. “The Chinese invited Ghislaine, the grandson of a great gauchiste scientist in Paris, once an expert on crossbreeding himself, to their conference. However, they invited Ghislaine not just because of his political pedigree, but because of his theories. Ghislaine was the young and coming man, the radical, the soixante-huitard, the scholar who knew all about Prunières, about trepanations and Stone Age violence, and he was the one who had developed these related theories — of human guilt and neural evolution. And listening to all this, to Ghislaine’s ideas, the Chinese must have made the final deduction: that these primitive societies in France had achieved some unexpected results from their archaic brain surgery, and therefore these ancient tribes had begun drilling into healthy brains. Deliberately.”
Jake shook his head.
“What do you mean?”
“Like this. Imagine you trepan some caveman, because he has fits — epileptiform seizures — and you want to get rid of the demons. But when you do the surgery, it turns out, not only do you get rid of the demons, you turn him into a superior fighter, a warrior, a logical brute. Why? Because, quite by accident, you have chopped out some of the higher evolved structures of the frontal cortex, the neural networks responsible for guilt and conscience, the part of the brain that evolved in the Paleolithic, the Great Leap Forward, as Julia so brilliantly confirms.”
The traffic surged, a beggar stared, a ladyboy wiggled her tongue at Jake.
“Ah. Jesus.”
“Exactly. Fucking exactly. So you discover that by drilling brains you can make real nasty, ruthless, guilt-free killers. Like feral gorillas but clever, oui? An inestimable evolutionary advantage.” He vigorously extinguished his eighth cigarette and looked across the table. “So that’s why we see so many trepanations. All over the world. These Stone Age primitives began to do it on purpose, to make themselves more warlike — but maybe these societies then collapsed because they killed too well. They collapsed into tribal violence, ritualized torture, executions, mass suicides, even. And this is what we see in Lozère, and the legends of the Black Khmer on the Plain of Jars. Violence and trepanation and tragedy. Hand in hand in hand.”
Julia interrupted.
“But of course the crucial point is that the Chinese decided to repeat the Stone Age trepanations. To alter the neocortex.”
Barnier accepted his next whiskey, slugged it, and lit yet another Krung Thep cigarette; then he said, “Yes. Using Ghislaine’s ideas and knowledge as a theoretical base — the same ideas you have unearthed, Julia — the Chinese must have established a way of chopping the possibility of conscience and guilt out of the neocortex. And then, when they finally felt ready, they must have started their grisly experiments on the brain, in Phnom Penh, on live subjects.”
Jake said, “But these experiments went wrong. Didn’t they? They turned people into zombies. Like Chemda’s grandmother.”
“Indeed,” said Barnier, “it seems so. Looking back, I can see why. If a guilt module exists it must be delicately interwoven with the frontal cortex and the limbic system, and the hippocampus. You might get lucky and remove most of it, or you might just leave a drooling lobotomy victim. It’s not a question of just neatly spooning a few cubic cc’s of conscience from the top of your head. And their surgery was, I am guessing, desperately crude. This was Cambodia in the seventies. So they lobotomized these poor bastards and turned them into alcoholics, rapists, psychotics. Not that the Commies especially cared: they were feeling their way, these were early experiments. Broken eggs for the omelette, eh?” He smiled, and frowned, and gazed at a Muslim woman in a black shroud with a metal nose mask over her face, like a Norman warrior. The Muslim quarter of Bangkok apparently began just north of the brothels and ladyboys.