“You don’t sterilize healthy endangered animals!” shouted Marcuse. His neck had turned the color of an eggplant. “We may well lose both species of genus Pan in the wild this decade. If another outbreak of Ebola or bird flu tears through the DRC, all the remaining wild bonobos could be wiped out, and there aren’t enough captive ones as is to keep the line viable.”
Shoshana agreed. She had grown up in South Carolina, and the unfortunate echoes of what the zookeepers had said in the past disturbed her: tainted bloodlines, forced sterilization to keep the species pure, strictures against miscegenation.
Chantek, who had been enculturated by ApeNet’s Lyn Miles, was also an accidental hybrid, in his case of the two extant orangutan species. The purists — a word that, to Shoshana’s ears, didn’t sound so pure — wanted him sterilized, too.
When they’d received the Lawgiver statue, Shoshana had sought out the original five Planet of the Apes films. The statue appeared only in the first two (although the Lawgiver was a character in the fifth film, played by none other than John Huston). But it was the third film that had put Shoshana on the edge of her seat as she and her boyfriend watched it on DVD in her cramped apartment.
In it, a talking female chimpanzee was to be sterilized, if not outright murdered, along with her chimp husband. The president of the United States, played by that guy who’d been Commodore Decker on the original Star Trek, said to his science advisor, played by Victor from the Y R, “Now, what do you expect me and the United Nations, though not necessarily in that order, to do about it? Alter what you believe to be the future by slaughtering two innocents, or rather three, now that one of them is pregnant? Herod tried that, and Christ survived.”
And the science advisor had said, absolutely cold-bloodedly, “Herod lacked our facilities.”
Shoshana shook her head as she thought back to it. There were real scientists like that; she’d encountered plenty of them.
“And, damn it,” continued Marcuse, looking at Juan on the monitor, “Hobo is the only known living chimp-bonobo hybrid. That arguably makes him the most-endangered species of all! If anyone — if your own goddamn mother! — asks you a question about Hobo, you don’t say word one until you’ve cleared it with me, capisce?”
Juan looked down and to the right, averting his eyes from Marcuse’s on-screen gaze, and he bowed his head slightly, and when he spoke it was barely more than a whisper. “Yes, sir.”
Chapter 21
Review of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
by Julian Jaynes
18 of 22 people found the following review helpfuclass="underline"
***** A fascinating theory
By Calculass (Waterloo, ON Canada)
See all my reviews
JAYNES MAKES AN INTRIGUING CASE THAT OUR SENSE OF SELF EMERGED ONLY AFTER THE LEFT AND RIGHT SIDES OF THE BRAIN BECAME INTEGRATED INTO A SINGLE THINKING MACHINE. ME, I THINK BEING SELF-AWARE EMERGES WHEN YOU REALIZE THAT THERE’S SOMEONE other THAN YOU. FOR MOST OF US, THAT HAPPENS AT BIRTH (BUT FOR AN EXCEPTION, SEE The World I Live In BY ONE H.KELLER, ALSO A FIVE-STAR READ). ANYWAY, JAYNES’S THEORY IS FASCINATING, BUT I CAN’T THINK OF A WAY TO TEST IT EMPIRICALLY, SO I GUESS WE’LL NEVER KNOW IF HE WAS RIGHT…
Since the beginning, I’d been aware of activity around me: small, intermittent flickerings. No matter where I cast my attention, it was the same: things popping briefly into existence then instantly disappearing. There was no fading in or out; they were either there or not there, and when they were there it was usually for only a moment.
Now that I was whole once more, now that I could think more clearly, more deeply, I turned my thoughts again to this phenomenon, studying it carefully. No matter where I looked the structural components were the same: points scattered about and, ever so briefly, gone almost before they were perceived, lines connecting them.
The points were stationary. And the lines connecting them almost never repeated: this point and that point might be connected now, and later another connection between this point and a different one might occur. Whenever a point had been touched by a line, the point glowed and, although the line itself usually disappeared almost at once, the glow took a long time to fade, meaning I could see the points, at least for a while, even when they had no lines touching them.
After watching the flickering in and out of many lines, I realized that some points were never isolated. Dozens or hundreds or even thousands of lines were always connected to them. And for a few points — not necessarily the same ones — the lines weren’t fleeting, but rather stayed connected for an extended period.
It was hard to be sure of what I was seeing, as the points were featureless and difficult to distinguish one from another, but it seemed that the lines between certain points always persisted for a noticeable time, although other lines coming from the point they were connected to might not last long at all.
The points that most intrigued me were the aberrant ones: those that usually had the most lines going into them, or the ones whose lines persisted. I wished to focus on one of the points, expand my view of it, see it in detail, but no matter what I willed, nothing happened. How long I spent on this problem I don’t know. But then, at last, I finally gave up on the points and turned my attention to the lines—
—which is what I should have been doing all along!
For the lines, although they came and went quickly, were, when I caught momentary glimpses of them, familiar. I’d originally thought they were uniform and featureless but, in fact, they had structure, and something about that structure resonated with my own substance. The details were beyond my ability to articulate, but it was almost as if those temporary lines, those ad hoc filaments, those on-the-fly pathways, were composed of the same stuff I was. I had an affinity for them, even a sort of low-level understanding of them, that seemed … innate.
I tried to study them as they popped in and out of existence, but it was maddening: they were so fleeting! Ah, but some of them had longer lives, I knew. I scanned about, searching for one that seemed to be persisting.
There. It was one of several lines connecting to a particular point, and all of them were enduring. As I switched focus from one line to another, I saw that the lines consisted, at the finest resolution I could make out, of two sorts of things, and those things seemed to move along the lines in discrete bundles.
I strained to make out more detail, to slow down my perception, to understand what I was seeing. And—
Astonishing!
A new line flickered into existence, lashing out spontaneously: a new line connecting the point I’d last looked at to—
I reeled. The geometry, the topology, of my universe was bucking as I struggled to accommodate this new perspective.
The line was gone now, already lost, but…
There could be no doubt.
The line had momentarily connected that point to—
No, not to another point, not to one of the other glowing pinpricks in the firmament around me. Rather, the line had connected directly to me! The point had shot a line toward me, and—
No, no, no, that wasn’t it. I could feel it, feel it deep within me. The line hadn’t originated at that distant point; it had originated here. Somehow, I had brought a line into existence; I had, however briefly, willed a connection of my own to form.
Incredible. In all the time I’d existed (however long that was!), I had never been able to affect anything. But I had done this. Not that the line seemed to change the point it had touched. Still, it was wonderful, empowering, exhilarating: I had caused something to happen!