‘They’ve also been on my back about your invocation of the privileged-intervention clause of Elegy’s grant,’ he added wearily. ‘In fact, they seem to fear that the whole damn cosmos is going to unravel because you went beyond the bounds of xenological convention in capturing a highly evolved and maybe even self-aware variety of alien. I’m exaggerating Kommthor’s position some, but not much. Worse, their response to our first light-probe communication about the Asadi’s physiological gestalt indicates they may move very soon to invalidate the privileged-intervention clause of grants like Elegy’s. They’d do so on the basis of the Golden Rule provision – suppose intelligent aliens decided to investigate you by means of capture and confinement.
‘As a consequence of recent events,’ Moses concluded, ‘I seem to be in some small danger of early retirement. Relocation of my family and me to, say, Amérsavane or Steppe-Childe isn’t altogether unlikely – not as hard-scrabble pioneers, mind you, but as “esteemed wards and wardens of the community.” That’s still not a prospect I cherish, Ben.’
We sat for a time without saying anything. Occasionally I caught glimpses of Kretzoi in the foliage, eyeing us cryptically from behind a planter or a stone sculpture.
Then, almost himself again, Moses flipped open one of the laminated folders and began running his finger down a double column of figures. ‘Brain volume is 923 cubic centimeters,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘Since Bojangles was a small adult male, the supposition is that Asadi endocranial volume may run as high as 1300 cc’s. That’s well within human parameters. In fact, the two figures pretty closely approximate the range of brain sizes among known specimens of Homo erectus, contemporary humanity’s great-grandparents, so to speak.’ He looked up, glancing first at Elegy and then at me. ‘I’m not sure what significance that has, only that the statistics reveal the similarities.’
‘It may mean the Asadi are self-aware after the fashion of human beings,’ Elegy said. ‘Homo erectus tamed fire and had something approaching a knowledge of the mystical finality of death. They ate the brains of their dead as a means of maintaining spiritual contact with their departed relatives.’
‘Or as a means of incorporating and subjugating the essence of their enemies,’ I added. ‘It’s hard to reconstruct intentions from five-hundred-thousand-year-old skulls with holes near their brain stems.’
Moses looked back down at his folder. ‘The organization of the Asadi brain also appears to have a good deal in common with ours. A triune evolution and structure – but four principal lobes in the neocortex, with a bridge between hemispheres similar to our corpus callosum. Bojangles’s brain, however, has no recognizable counterpart to Broca’s area in its left hemisphere, the specific region in which resides our ability to formulate the symbolic structures of language.’
‘That’s not surprising,’ I said. ‘The Asadi don’t speak – at least not with their tongues.’
‘What they do have,’ Moses went on, ‘is a structure in the right hemisphere of the parietal cortex – or superassociation area – that may have a functional correspondence with Broca’s area even though it controls the muscles of their eyes rather than those of their lips and tongues. Call it “Bojangles’s area,” if you like – that’s how it’s recorded in this white paper.’ Moses tapped the printout. ‘Anyway, Bojangles’s area may act in the Asadi as Broca’s area acts in us. It’s a source and a repository of the structural grammar of the Asadi’s polychromatic optical “language.” It also appears to perform the function of Wernicke’s area in human beings – that is, it stores sensory images, particularly visual ones, and permits the Asadi to communicate with one another in a complex visual code we haven’t yet broken.’
‘This area – Bojangles’s area – exists in the right rather than the left hemisphere of the Asadi neocortex?’ I asked.
‘According to this,’ Moses acknowledged, looking with undisguised awe at the white paper in his hands and riffling its pages. ‘This entire folder has to do with the anatomy and function of the Asadi brain. The whole damn thing.’
‘In human brain lateralization,’ Elegy said, picking up my cue, ‘the left side is the digital computer that formulates the objective personality, the rational self. The right side is the analogue computer that links up the various counterstreaming visions and nightmares of our subconscious self; it’s the residence of our intuitive and more recognizably mystical personality. The ego lives in the left brain, the “not-I” in the right. If the same bicameral correspondences hold in the Asadi brain, then their polychromatic optical language derives much more immediately from “ancestral voices” than does human speech. The implication – isn’t this what you’re driving at, Ben? – is that they communicate with one another on a much more intuitive or even artistic level than do human beings?’
Moses wrapped his feet around the front legs of his chair and leaned back in it like a little boy tempting gravity. He gave a derisive bark and shook his head.
‘What?’ Elegy asked him.
‘What’s “intuitive” or “artistic” about staring contests in a humid jungle clearing?’
‘How can we possibly answer that,’ I asked, ‘until we know what kinds of information they’re exchanging? Even if the Asadi brain superficially resembles ours, the location of Bojangles’s area suggests that their intelligence – their entire neuro-symbolic attunement to the world – may be of a different order of reality from ours. The physical similarities, the anatomical matchups, even the amazing correspondence of the amino-acid sequences may mean nothing at all in the face of the Asadi’s totally alien perception of their place in the Infinite Scheme of Things.’
Moses clumped forward and put his elbows on the table again. ‘That’s Thomas Benedict talking out of his right brain,’ he told Elegy. ‘What the hell is your friend driving
