husband. La ronde. A wonderful circularity. Closure, in current argot. A grapefruit in the puss to you, Stagnaro! Top o’ the world, Ma!
Dalton had fled me down the labyrinthian ways, but now one of us must die. I have promised you that he shall be allowed to strut at least some of his little hour upon the stage before I give him quietus: you and I are in for a long boring evening, aren’t we, as we listen to the speech that will be the final act of his meaningless little commedia.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“‘Not in innocence and not in Asia was mankind born. Our ancestry is firmly rooted in the animal world, and to its subtle, antique ways our hearts are yet pledged…’”
Will Dalton looked almost challengingly around the conference hall. His gaze fell on Dante, leaning against the back wall, held his for a long, ironic moment.
“That is the opening of Robert Ardrey’s seminal work, African Genesis, which caught the popular imagination, discomfited the scientific world, and in the years since 1961 has been dismembered and disemboweled by the pacific-minded with a ferocity that does more to support Ardrey’s beliefs about innate violence in man than anything he ever wrote.
“Until I read African Genesis as a high school senior, I was going to be a paleontologist and solve once and for all the riddle of the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago at the K-T boundary. Ardrey fired me with a new purpose, because he set us squarely in the natural world and then said we are a ‘bad-weather animal’-implying that we forge ourselves in the crucible of disaster, that whatever man has become occurred after a changing environment drove him from the trees out into the savannah. Even then I had a sort of instinctual disagreement with Ardrey on that point-why driven out by bad weather or other animals? Why not adventuring out-because it was a fun and exciting thing to do?
“But even so, Ardrey stole my heart from the dinosaurs and gave it to man. I would become a paleo anthropologist and find the moment our line parted from that of the great apes. It was as a budding paleoanthropologist that I was first invited to Hadar nine years ago, after a hominid conference in Paris.
“One night during dinner-corned beef hash mixed with rice, washed down with Lemon Squash laced with a capful of rum, many here know the gourmet delights of living in the field-a gamin — faced French fellow post-doc introduced me to the vision of a renegade Jesuit named Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. She lent me a book in French of his writings; it was heady reading by lantern light in a white nylon tent on the site where our Institute’s Don Johanson and his team had discovered those multiple Australopithecus afarensis remains they dubbed Lucy and the First Family.
“Heady reading indeed! ‘Everything is the sum of the past,’ Chardin wrote. ‘Nothing is comprehensible except through its history.’ He claimed that man was spiritually as well as mentally evolving. Science couldn’t ask why — it could only ask how. Chardin was asking why; myth and story asked why; suddenly I was suffused with a need to do the same.
“Lucy and the First Family were left to tell the tale, but what tale? Questions concerning their understanding of life would not even be a legitimate scientific inquiry. Only storytellers, artists, and mythmakers could consider such unscientific questions. But I was a scientist.
“From the time of scientism in the nineteenth century, science had been preaching that nothing is real that is not palpable. Well, after all of this concern with the real, with matter, what did we, divorced from our animal nature and at war with our planet, have to show for it?
“We had the facts. Did we have the truth?
“By chance, on our way back from Paris we took a two-day stopover in Boston. At the Museum of Fine Arts I saw the original Gauguin Tahitian painting he called, D’ou venons nous? que sommes nous? ou allon nous?
“All the way back here to San Francisco, I couldn’t get that painting and its title out of my mind.
“‘Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?’
“Science alone couldn’t even ask these questions, let alone answer them. Yet modern man’s nature was bound up inextricably not only with our genetic heritage and the strange twisting ways of extinction and evolution from much earlier times, but also with the myth and ritual of our early Homo sapiens years.
“I was going in the wrong direction, asking the wrong questions. When we parted from the great apes was not nearly so important as what we brought with us. Our carbon-dating and argon-dating techniques for fossil- associated strata had come of age; we had not parted from the chimps 8 or 9 million years ago, the break was less than half that ancient. Our direct ancestry started at least 4 million years ago, not a million.
“The chimpanzee, our closest living relative, was so close we could not call him cousin, but had to think half brother, half sister. Even the baboons, way off on the side as far as direct descent goes, gave us a hierarchical organization that eerily foreshadowed the Zulu impi, the Greek phalanx, the Roman legion, the British infantry square.
“I realized I would have to study not only the stones and bones to learn about our early hominid and human ancestors, but the living creatures that most resemble what we were then. The great apes, who can tell us much about the primate genetic input we get from the ancestors we all have in common.
“So I’ve studied gorillas in Rwanda-Burundi, orangutans in Borneo, and now wild forest chimpanzees in the Kibale Forest. When I accepted the Institute’s invitation to speak on my work, I was still in Uganda doing the ethological field-work and taking the slides I expected to show you tonight. Vital stuff, because any discussion is teleologically, whether stated or not, a prelude to the understanding of Homo sapiens sapiens.
“Well, tonight I have to beg your patience as I reverse the procedure. I want to examine some aspects of human nature as a prelude to our discussion of the Kibale chimps. I want to do this because, as most of you know, shortly before I left for Uganda my wife, Moll, was murdered.”
Dante’s head jerked back in such surprise that he banged it against the wall. He rubbed his hand over the spot, watching the surprised stirring in the audience. This was not what they had come expecting to hear.
“Because of her death, it is perhaps not surprising that I went seeking insights into the chimpanzee’s understanding-if any-of death. Conventional wisdom holds that such knowledge first appeared with Neanderthal, some fifty thousand years ago, but tonight I hope to place it much earlier.
“To do this I’m going to have to ride two horses, because this is not the material of hard science. I don’t scorn science; it is my life. But science has made some mistakes. It has tried to put death and chaos on hold. It has given us permission to explore anything, do anything, take anything, destroy anything, until we have exploded the natural world and strewn its dying guts around us for all to see.
“It has the power to do this. Does it have the right? It can tell us how to make the bang! but not when to make it. Or whether we should make it at all. But it has the facts on its side. A human being exposed to too much radiation will die whether he believes in radiation or not.
“But I want to explore the other side also. If we cannot scorn science, we cannot scorn myth and legend, either. That guy I just mentioned, who is trying to avoid his fatal dose of radiation, stole the fire at which he cooks his meats from angry gods. It is that same fire, nurtured carefully but used carelessly over the millennia, that has gone from catapult to cannon to missile to smart bomb to megaton that will destroy him because he forgot who he is and where he came from.
“The tragedy is not that we want science to tell us what to love and what to hate; it is that science isn’t designed to know the difference between them. So we have to look elsewhere. That is what I want to do here tonight…”
Listening, Dante thought, Love and hate. Life and death. His mind swooped back unbidden to the time when Dalton’s staying alive seemed a day-to-day, even an hour-to-hour thing…
C HAPTER N INE
It was ten days after Moll Dalton’s funeral, and to Dante’s relief her husband was still alive. And about to
