It didn’t matter what her brain was telling her.
Her mind knew that this light was something else.
Her soul knew it.
It was Mary, the Mother of Jesus.
And why not? thought Mary Vaughan. Just because she was here, at a university, in a lab, inside a test chamber, that didn’t mean anything.
Part of Mary had been skeptical of modern-day miracles, but if miracles did happen, well, then the Virgin Mary could appear anywhere.
After all, she’d supposedly come to Fatima, Portugal.
She’d supposedly come to Lourdes, France.
And to Guadalupe, Mexico.
And La’Vang, Vietnam.
So why not to Sudbury, Ontario?
Why not to the campus of Laurentian University?
And why not to talk to her?
No. No, humility was what was called for, here in the presence of Our Lady. Humility, following her grand example.
But…
But still, did it make so little sense that the Virgin Mary would visit Mary Vaughan? Mary was traveling to another world, to a world that didn’t know of God the Father, a world that was ignorant of Jesus the Son, a world that had never been touched by the Holy Spirit. Of course, Mary of Nazareth would take an interest in someone who was doing that!
The pure, simple presence was moving to her left now. Not walking, but moving—hovering, never touching the soil.
No. No, there was no soil. She was in the basement of a building. There was no soil.
She was in a lab!
And transcranial magnetic stimulation was affecting her mind.
Mary closed her eyes again, scrunching them tightly shut, but that did nothing. The presence was still there, still perceptible.
The wonderful, wonderful presence…
Mary Vaughan opened her mouth to speak to the Blessed Virgin, and—
And suddenly she was gone.
But Mary felt elated, felt like she hadn’t since her first Eucharist after her confirmation, when, for the one and only time in her life, she’d really felt the spirit of Christ coming into her.
“Well?” said a female voice.
Mary ignored it, a harsh, unwelcome intrusion into her reverie. She wanted to savor the moment, to hold on to it…even as it dissipated, like a dream that she was struggling to transfer into conscious thought before it slipped away…
“Mare,” said another, deeper voice, “are you okay?”
She knew that voice, a voice she’d once longed to hear again, but right now, for this moment, for as long as she could make it last, she wanted nothing but silence.
But the moment was fading fast. And after a few more seconds, the door to the chamber opened, and light—fluorescent, harsh, artificial—spilled in from outside. Veronica Shannon came in, followed by Ponter. The young woman removed the helmet from Mary’s head.
Ponter loomed closer and he brought up a short, broad thumb, and wiped Mary’s cheek with it. He then moved his hand away and showed her that his thumb was wet. “Are you okay?” he said again.
Mary hadn’t been aware of the tears until now. “I’m fine,” she said. And then, realizing that “fine” wasn’t anywhere near sufficient for how she felt, she added, “I’m terrific.”
“The tears…?” said Ponter. “Did you…did you experience something?”
Mary nodded.
“What was it?” Ponter asked.
Mary took a deep breath and looked at Veronica. As much as she had taken a liking to the young woman, Mary didn’t want to share what had happened with this pragmatist, this atheist, who would dismiss it as just the result of suppressed activity in her parietal lobe.
“I…” Mary began, and then she swallowed and tried again. “That’s a remarkable device you have there, Veronica.”
Veronica grinned broadly. “Isn’t it, though?” She turned to Ponter. “Are you ready to try it?”
“Absolutely,” he said. “If I can gain insight into what Mary feels…”
Veronica proffered the helmet to Ponter, and she immediately realized there was a problem. The helmet was designed to accommodate a standard Homo sapiens head with a high forehead, a head that was short front to back, a head with no or negligible browridges, a head, not to put too fine a point on it, that housed a smaller brain.
“It looks like it’s going to be a tight fit,” said Veronica.
“Let me try,” said Ponter. He took the thing, turned it upside down, and looked inside, as if gauging its capacity.
“Maybe if you think humble thoughts,” said Ponter’s Companion, Hak, through its external speaker. Ponter scowled at his left forearm, but Mary laughed. The idea of bigheadedness apparently crossed species lines.
Finally, Ponter decided to make the attempt. He turned the helmet right-way up and pushed it down over his head, wincing as he did so. It was indeed a tight fit, but there was lining inside, and with a final massive push, Ponter got the foam to compress sufficiently to accommodate his occipital bun.
Veronica stood in front of Ponter, appraising him like one of those clerks at LensCrafters fitting new glasses, then adjusted the orientation of the helmet slightly. “That’s fine,” she said at last. “Now, again, as I told Mary, this won’t hurt, and if you want me to stop early, just say so.”
Ponter nodded, but winced again as he did so; the back of the helmet was digging into his thick neck muscles.
Veronica turned to the wall rack full of equipment. She frowned at an oscilloscope display, and adjusted a dial beneath it. “There’s some sort of interference,” she said.
Ponter looked puzzled for a moment, then: “Ah, my cochlear implants. They let my Companion communicate silently with me, when need be.”
“Can you shut them off?”
“Yes,” said Ponter. He flipped open the faceplate on his Companion and made an adjustment to the revealed control buds.
Veronica nodded. “That’s the ticket; the interference is gone.” She looked at Ponter and smiled encouragingly. “Okay, Ponter. Have a seat.”
Mary got out of the way, and Ponter sat down on the padded chair, his broad back to her.
Veronica left the test chamber and motioned for Mary to follow. The chamber had a massive steel door on it, and Veronica had to exert herself to get it to swing shut; Mary noted that someone labeled the door “Veronica’s Closet.” Once it was closed, Veronica moved over to a PC and started darting her mouse pointer about, clicking buttons. Mary watched, fascinated, and after a moment she said, “Well? Is he experiencing anything?”
Veronica lifted her narrow shoulders slightly. “There’s no way to tell, unless he says something.” She pointed at one of the speakers hooked up to the PC. “His mike is open.”
Mary looked at the chamber’s closed door. Part of her hoped Ponter would experience exactly what she had. Even if he dismissed it as an illusion—as doubtless he would—at least he’d be able to understand what had happened to her in there, and what had happened to so many people who had felt the presence of something holy throughout Homo sapiens history.
Of course, maybe he’d be experiencing an extraterrestrial presence. Funny, that: she and Ponter had talked about so many things, but somehow whether or not he believed in aliens had never come up. Maybe to Ponter, to the Neanderthals, the idea of life on other worlds was as silly as the notion of a god. After all, there was a complete absence of credible evidence for extraterrestrial life, at least in Mary’s version of reality. Ponter’s people would say, therefore, that believing in such beings was yet another ridiculous leap of faith…
Mary continued to stare at the sealed door. Surely religion was more than just a neuronal trick, a microelectric self-delusion. Surely it—
“Okay,” said Veronica. “I’m shutting off the current.” She moved over to the steel door and managed to get it open. “You can come out now.”
Ponter’s first order of business was removing the tight-fitting helmet. He brought his massive hands up to each side of
his head and gave what appeared to be a mighty push. The contraption came off, and he handed it to Veronica, then set about rubbing his browridge, as if trying to restore whatever circulation might normally be there.
“Well?” said Mary, when she could wait no longer.
Ponter opened Hak’s faceplate and adjusted some controls, presumably reactivating his cochlear implants.
“ Well? ” repeated Mary.
Ponter shook his head, and for a heartbeat, Mary hoped it was just a further attempt to restore circulation. “Nothing,” he said.
Mary was surprised by how depressed that single word made her feel.
“Nothing?” repeated Veronica, who, for her part, seemed elated by the announcement. “Are you sure?”
Ponter nodded.
“No visual phenomena?” continued Veronica. “No feeling that something was there with you? No sensation of being watched?”
“Nothing at all. Just me, alone with my thoughts.”
“What were you thinking about?” asked Mary. It was possible, after all, that Ponter wouldn’t recognize a religious moment.
“I was thinking about the midday meal,” said Ponter, “wondering what we were going to have. And about the weather, and how soon winter will be here.” He looked at Mary and must have seen the disappointment on her face. “Oh, and you!” said Ponter, quickly, apparently trying to alleviate her pain. “I thought about you, of course!”
Mary smiled wanly and looked away. Surely one test of one Neanderthal didn’t prove anything. Still…
Still, it was provocative that she, a Homo sapiens , had had the deluxe, full-blown experience, and that he, a Homo neanderthalensis , had experienced…
The phrasing came unbidden to her mind, but it was the sad truth.
Ponter Boddit had experienced not a blessed thing.
Chapter Eight
“ It was that questing spirit that led our ancient ancestors to spread throughout the Old World…”
Veronica Shannon was pacing back and forth in her lab. Mary was sitting on one of the office’s two identical chairs; Ponter had found his chair’s width between its metal arms too narrow for his bulk, and so had perched his rear on the edge of Veronica’s surprisingly tidy desk.
“Do you know anything about psychology, Ponter?” asked Veronica, her hands clasped behind her narrow back.
“Some,” Ponter said. “I studied it when I was learning about computer science at the Academy. It was—what would you call it?—something I had to study along with artificial intelligence.”
“A co-requisite,” supplied Mary.
“In every freshman psych course,” said Veronica, “humans here learn about B. F. Skinner.”
Mary nodded; she’d taken an introductory psychology course herself. “Behaviorism, right?”
“Right,” said Veronica. “Operant conditioning; reinforcement and punishment.”
“Like training dogs,” said Ponter.
“Just so,” said Veronica. She stopped pacing. “Now, please, Mary, don’t say a word. I want to hear Ponter’s response to this without any influence from you.”
Mary nodded.
“All right, Ponter,” said Veronica. “Do you remember your psych studies?”
“No, not really.”
The young redhead looked disappointed.
“But I do,” said Hak, through its external speaker, in its synthesized male voice. “Or, more precisely, I have the equivalent of a textbook on psychology loaded into my memory. It helps me to advise Ponter when he is making an idiot of himself.”
Ponter grinned sheepishly.
“Excellent,” said Veronica. “Okay, here’s the question: what’s the best way to ingrain a behavior into a person? Not something you want to extinguish, but something you want to foster.”
“Reward,” said Hak.
“Reward, yes! But what kind of reward?”
“Consistent.”
Veronica looked as though something incredibly significant had just transpired. “Consistent,” she repeated, as if it were the key to everything. “Are you sure? Are you absolutely sure?”
“Yes,” said Hak, sounding as puzzled as he ever got.
“It’s not here, you know,” said Veronica. “Consistent reward is not the best way to ingrain a behavior.”
Mary frowned. She’d doubtless known the right answer at one time, but couldn’t dredge it up after all these years. Fortunately, Ponter himself asked the question Veronica was waiting for. “Well, then, what is the best way to ingrain a behavior among your kind of humans?”
“ Intermittent reward,” said Veronica triumphantly.
Ponter frowned. “You mean sometimes rewarding the desired behavior, and sometimes not?”
“Just so!” said Veronica. “That’s precisely right!”
“But that does not make sense,” said Ponter.
“Of course not,” agreed Veronica, grinning widely. “It’s one of the strangest things about Homo sapiens psychology. But it’s absolutely true. The classic example is gambling: if we always win at a game, the game becomes boring for us. But if we only win some of the time, it can become addictive. Or it’s like kids whining to their parents: ‘Buy me this toy!’ ‘Let me stay up late!’ ‘Drive me to the mall.’ It’s the behavior parents hate the most from their kids, but the kids can’t help themselves—not because the whining always works, but because it sometimes works. The unpredictability makes it irresistible for us.”
“That is crazy,” said Ponter.
“Not here,” said Veronica. “Not by definition: the behavior of the majority is never crazy.”
“But…but surely it is simply irritating not to have a predictable outcome.”
“You’d think,” agreed Veronica amiably. “But, again, it’s not—not for us.”
Mary found herself fascinated. “You’re obviously on to something, Veronica. What is it?”
“Everything we’re doing here at the Neuroscience Research Group has been about explaining the classic religious experience. But there are lots of believers who’ve never had a religious experience, and yet they still believe. That’s the hole in our work, the missing piece in a comprehensive explanation of why Homo sapiens believe in God. But this is the answer—do you see? It’s this psychology of reinforcement—this bit of the way our brains are programmed—that makes us susceptible to belief in God. If there really was a God, a rational species would expect rational, predictable behavior from him. But we don’t get that. Sometimes, it seems as though God protects certain people, and at other times, he’ll let a nun fall down an open elevator shaft. There’s no rhyme or reason to it, and so we say—”
Mary was nodding, and she finished the thought for Veronica. “We say, ‘The Lord works in mysterious ways.’ ”
“Just so!” crowed Veronica. “Prayers aren’t always answered, but people go right on praying. But Ponter’s people aren’t wired like that.” She turned to the Neanderthal. “Are you?”
“No,” said Ponter. “I do not need Hak to tell me that this is not the way we behave. If the result is not predictable—if a pattern cannot be discerned—we discard the behavior as pointless.”
“But we don’t,” said Veronica, rubbing her hands together. Mary could see she had the same “Cover of Science , here I come!” expression Mary herself had worn years ago, when she’d succeeded in extracting DNA from the Neanderthal type specimen in Germany. Veronica beamed at Ponter, then at Mary. “Even if there is no pattern, we convince ourselves that there’s some underlying logic to it all. That’s why we don’t just make up stories about gods; we actually believe them.”
The religious Mary had shifted entirely to the background; this was making the scientist in her have its own peak experience. “Are you sure about this, Veronica? Because if you are—”
“Oh, I am; I am. There’s a famous experiment—I’ll e-mail you the citation. It had two groups of people playing a game on a grid, the rules of which hadn’t been explained to the players. All
they knew in advance was they’d get points for good moves and no points for bad moves. Well, for one set of players, points were given for successfully marking every other space in the lower-right corner of the grid—and, of course, after enough turns, the players easily figured that out, and could win the game every time. But the second set of players were rewarded points randomly: whether they got points or not had no relation to what moves they made. But those players also came up with rules that they said governed the game, and they were convinced that by following those rules, they were likely to do better.”
“Really?” said Ponter. “I would simply lose interest in the game.”
“No doubt you would,” said Veronica, smiling broadly. “But we would find it fascinating.”
“Or irritating,” said Mary.
“Irritating, yes! Meaning it would bug us—because we just can’t accept that there’s no underlying design to things.” Veronica looked at Ponter. “Can I try another little test? Again, Mary, if you don’t mind, please don’t say anything. Ponter, do you know what I mean when I talk about flipping a coin?”
Ponter didn’t, so Veronica demonstrated with a loonie she fished from a pocket of her lab coat. When Ponter nodded that he understood, the skinny redhead went on. “All right, if I flip this coin twenty times, and all twenty times it happens to come up heads, what are the chances it will come up heads again on the twenty-first try?”
Ponter didn’t hesitate. “One-to-one.”
“Just so! Or to put it the way we would, fifty-fifty, right? An even chance.”
Ponter nodded.
“Now, Mary, I’m sure you know that Ponter is absolutely right: it doesn’t matter how many times heads has come up in succession before the current flip, assuming the coin isn’t unbalanced. The odds that the next flip will be heads are always fifty-fifty. But when I ask first-year psych students this question, most of them think the odds must be astronomically against getting yet another heads. At some fundamental level, our brains are wired to impute motivation to random events. That’s why even those who don’t ever have the kind of experience we just manufactured for you, Mary, still see God’s handiwork in what’s really just randomness.”
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