The Jonah Kit

by Ian Watson

  “Oh yes. Of course.” She nodded, lamely. “Vital perfusion” sounded such a life-giving phrase, like “blood transfusion”. “Embalming alive” gave off a musty stench.

  “Miss Patton’s basically on the training side,” Flynn remarked disparagingly. “Swimming pools. Fun and games.”

  “Quite,” laughed Kato. “Miss Patton and I are old friends, né?” He gazed at her plump body dreamily, fitting it into a bright flowery kimono.

  Sensing an awkwardness in the situation, Gerry Mercer gallantly produced the plastic toy he’d bought from behind his back.

  “Say, talking of models, I picked this up on the way.”

  “Ah, our old friend the makkô kujira,” giggled Kato, in an access of childish hilarity. “The suspect.” Tears came to his eyes, behind the owlish glasses, at the spectacle of such a toy being seriously flourished inside his Institute. Herb Flynn directed a withering glare at Mercer, who blushed furiously; nevertheless he still stepped forward to offer Georgi Nilin the toy.

  The boy uttered a cry and clutched at it.

  Vindicated, grinning broadly, Gerry handed the whale over.

  But it still had some water in it, unfortunately. As soon as the boy squeezed the whale’s sides it spouted, sprinkling Dr Kato with spray.

  “I’m sorry, sir!” Gerry rushed forward with a handkerchief.

  Kato removed his spectacles and very delicately wiped them dry, using his own handkerchief.

  “Boys will be boys,” he remarked. But who was the boy—Georgi or Gerry? Hard to say.

  “Perhaps you’d be kind enough to show us round, sir?” Pasko suggested, more diplomatically. “As Mr Parr says, something may trigger Nilin.”

  “Da, da, da,” the boy chanted, wagging the black plastic whale at the machine he’d assembled on Kato’s desk. “Kit, kit! Kachalot kit!”

  The boy clutched his new toy fiercely as Mikhail led him out, at a gesture from Dr Kato.

  “Young Georgi’s using that word ‘kit’ in both senses, I’ll swear to it,” muttered Tom Winterburn. “The intonation’s different. Whale, in Russian. Construction set, in English. The whale is a…”

  “Construction set,” nodded Pasko. “And vice versa. Maybe.”

  Tom Winterburn shook his head.

  “No, I think it’s more complicated than that.”

  • • •

  Herb Flynn indicated the dolphin brain model to Chloe Patton impatiently: a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle composed of variously coloured transparent plastic segments, the whole assemblage being enclosed inside a colourless cylinder contoured to represent a section of the animal’s head. A realistic blowhole cut one channel down through it, to the rear of the brain. In front of the blowhole, a second, larger tunnel had been carved down through the plastic representing muscle tissue, to lay bare a dime-sized patch of “skull”, in which a neat hole was drilled.

  “That’s how we do it at San Diego too. Recall, Chloe?” Herb stuck his finger down the second tunnel briefly, then raked his fingernail across the plastic case, ticking off the name tags stencilled inside the model one by one, while Kato looked on benignly.

  “Cerebrum up here… Medulla right at the base. The insulating tube for the electrode goes right down through the brain tissue as far as the top of the cerebellum, here, see? Then you feed the electrode through it. Understand, Chloe? This area is the brain’s control board for voluntary movements. So we can test out motor functions by stimulating it—”

  “Yes,” whispered Chloe distractedly, willing him to move on to the brain models of larger whales, which were less emotive for her.

  “Interesting, né, the cerebellum?” Kato restrained her with a pluck at her plump arm. “It follows the standard mammalian scheme—yet with so many unusual features of its own! The vast size of the paraflocculus, here, né? Then the extreme shrinkage of the flocculo-nodular lobe. But these relate to control of the body shape in swimming, so you might expect it. All this area would have to be left undisturbed—‘on automatic pilot’ as you say—in any mind transfer. And the same applies to our friend the makkô kujira.”

  He led her onward at last, with another pinch of her flesh, towards the next plastic brain: a far larger model labelled in Latin Physeter Catodon.

  “The sperm whale, so. This brain weighs almost nine kilos. Absolute weight means nothing, né? Or the elephant would be a philosopher. Yet if we compare the brain-stem ratios of man and makkô or match the complexity of the cerebrum, makkô seems to be our equal! Privately, I think it is nonsense to imagine makkô as ‘intelligent’ in our human sense. Still, with this degree of complexity, and given this bulk of brain matter, some human intelligence can be printed on to it, perhaps? Look, the cerebral cortex is so extremely convoluted, is it not? The seat of consciousness… Here is where any such printing must occur, I think…”

  He faced Tom Winterburn, keeping Chloe Patton’s arm firmly secured.

  “You ask is it possible?” he sighed. “Ah, such discrepancies between human brain and whale brain! See, a premotor area occupies much of the frontal lobes. In men the area handles conscious planning and foresight. I suspect this may control all the tubes in the whale’s brow. I believe ‘melon’ is the English name. But what has that got to do with intelligent planning? Nothing. So for me this proves a lack of human-style intellect in the whale. Also, the whale’s frontal lobe lacks any association area—another discrepancy! On the other hand, the toothed whales certainly have no sense of smell, so we should expect to find the olfactory centre missing. The hippocampus and mammillary body are absent, yes, but see, here are the amygdaloid nucleus and olfactory tubercle! They are present. Why? What role do they play? Who knows? The Russians?”

  He ran his free hand along the length of the model.

  “See how compressed the whale brain is from front to back, net The whole brain is telescoped and twisted. A question of skull structure. How can we hope to superimpose a map of the human mind on to this? The locations are all displaced, and warped.”

  “Excuse me, sir, but I feel we’re being led astray by your sort of models,” Tom Winterburn broke in. “Sure, they’re beautifully made. But I say they’re misleading in this instance.”

  Bob Pasko groaned inwardly. Kato had only devoted his whole life to producing them! Thank God that dumpy bobby-soxer was here to titillate the old man… He saw the logic of her presence now. At least someone, somewhere—in San Diego presumably—had an idea how to handle people.

  “Your models, sir, suggest taking something apart and putting it together again, in whole units like a jigsaw puzzle. Swapping parts of a kit around—”

  Georgi, who’d been gazing intently at the coloured plastic brain all the while, emitted a tiny cry at the sound of the word…

  “What I’m thinking about is a mathematical model, that can be stored and remodelled mathematically to fit a new shape, without necessarily disturbing the content. A few simplified math models of human brain activity are already available in the West. The 370-185 could eat those for breakfast. And, speaking of maps, sir, did you know there’s a math technique called ‘mapping’ that has nothing to do with drawing representational diagrams? It’s part of Hilbertian mathematics—a way of translating abstract models from one mode into another. Geometrical designs may look very different but they can be ‘mapped’ algebraically and shown to have the same abstract structure. Why not do something of the sort with abstract models of different kinds of brain?”

  Kato shrugged, offended.

  “I am not a mathematician. I am a biologist. Time to look at the embalming tanks, I think.” He nipped Chloe Patton hard enough to make her yelp. She vividly remembered those pictures of curvy girls in the sadomasochistic comics on the quayside stalls.

  “I don’t want to see embalming tanks,” she pouted.

  “But we have a small shachi, my dear. There is also a baby makkô kujira we obtained from the womb, on the point of birth!”

  So they had a sperm whale here, in the flesh!
Pasko thought hastily. Kato had clearly been saving this item up till last. Obviously it was crucial for Georgi to see the whale.

  Go on, Chloe! he willed, realizing how Kato might refuse in pique, if Miss Patton misbehaved, this coming straight upon Tom Winterburn’s derogatory remarks. Wishing fervently that telepathy existed and trying to convey it all by facial language alone, Bob Pasko smiled urgent encouragement. Go and see his lousy embalming tanks, even if they remind you of those lobster husks outside the café. Grab the electrode chopsticks and dig in to the meat! Accept a pinch on the ass, too!

  “Okay,” nodded Chloe after a moment’s thought, “let’s see your baby sperm whale. For little Georgi’s sake,” she added, meeting Pasko’s eyes with a pained expression.

  Full marks, Chloe! the psychiatrist breathed.

  Eighteen

  The unborn sperm whale floating in preservative was four metres long. Its skull had been sectioned open to reveal the naked brain, and its melon drained of spermaceti, leaving the brow cavity a hopeless tangle of collapsed entrail-like tubing. The slim plate of the lower jaw hung slackly open—an upside-down lid for the great tub of the upper jaw…

  Georgi Nilin cried out as soon as he saw the tank, broke free from the Muzhik’s side and ran to it, gesticulating.

  “Daitye radio! Viklyuchitye!”

  “He wants a radio set,” Tom Winterburn translated, puzzled. Chloe Patton hurriedly volunteered to go and fetch one, though she hadn’t the slightest idea where one was to be found.

  “A chauffeur will do that sort of thing,” Kato said peevishly. Duly instructed, one of Enozawa’s drivers trotted off, leather soles clicking into the distance.

  “Autists feel safer with machines,” Pasko commented tactfully. “If he’s just an autist! Predictable responses, you know. On, it’s on. Off, it’s off—”

  “Maybe he wants to repair the beast’s head, symbolically?” Flynn suggested. “Possibly he wants that ‘kit’ he put together in Dr Kato’s room? Maybe that’s his radio?”

  “Shall I fetch it just in case?” Chloe’s body wavered towards the exit.

  “No,” Pasko said brusquely. “I mean, yes, but I’ll fetch it, Miss Patton. I watched how the kid put it together so I know where the weak points are. I’m collecting those models of his, to study.”

  “The other chauffeur,” remarked Enozawa, “is a very dainty man. In his spare time he dwarfs trees. He won’t break your toy.”

  Pasko shrugged. It didn’t much matter to him whether the driver broke the thing or not, so long as Chloe Patton stayed put. So the other chauffeur trotted off too—at a mere nod from Captain Enozawa, Orville Parr observed. Not even keeping up the pretence of telling the man what to do in Japanese, this time! Oh yes, they spoke English all right. They listened to everything. Just as that Nikon camera filmed him, in his own office, over the rooftops!

  Then the first driver came back with a transistor set and Pasko presented it to Georgi Nilin. Instantly the boy was tugging and clamouring to be hoisted up level with the top of the tank. Once there, he directed his Muzhik calmly with swimming notions of his body till he hung poised in space above the cut-away brain.

  The boy switched the radio on.

  A surge of orchestral music filled the hall.

  “Beethoven’s Pastoral,” Kato identified. Chloe Patton couldn’t imagine any music less suitable to the chilly preserving chamber than this golden-grained surge of sounds.

  Georgi flipped forward in a nose dive, and would have plunged right into the fluid if hands less burly than Mikhail’s had been gripping him. As it was, he stuck his arms into the liquid up to his elbows, and carefully balanced the radio on the whale’s broad neck, just to the rear of where it had been sliced open.

  The radio carried on playing, submerged, though what had been a golden surge became a sullen, mooing boom.

  “Sounds like a whale song now, all right!” laughed Flynn.

  “But not a sperm whale song, Herb! That’s the one whale it doesn’t sound like. Sperm whales only click, like Geiger counters. That’s all they do. Clicking. No singing.”

  “Kik,” chanted Georgi. “Ki-ki-ki-kik!”

  “Well, he agrees with you, Tom.”

  “You’re not thinking, Herb! Just supposing it was any other whale they’d used. The Russians could hear its actual voice hundreds of miles away underwater, couldn’t they?”

  The hairy, acne-welted face assented.

  “If it was a humpback, and if it got in between two reflecting layers, and put out a hundred decibels, it’s detectable up to—oh, twenty-five thousand miles away, theoretically—”

  “Come again?” exclaimed Parr incredulously.

  “I said twenty-five thousand miles, under perfect conditions.”

  “Christ. You’ve run out of sea by then—”

  “Or gone right round the globe!” grinned Herb Flynn. “It’s a curved universe for whales, Mr Parr. They shouldn’t have as much trouble with Einsteinian space as we do!”

  Pasko noticed a nervous twitch in Kato’s left eye, at the mention of Einstein and space… And the old man had relinquished Chloe Patton’s arm too. She took prompt advantage of her liberation to scurry round the tank to the other side, pretending an intense interest in something there.

  The second driver had trotted back, by now, with Georgi’s “machine”; but nobody seemed interested in it now, least, of all the boy, whose gaze was locked firmly on the transistor radio still mooing on the whale’s neck. The Japanese stood holding the construction, delicately, between his wooden hands.

  “How far do sperm whale clicks travel, Herb?”

  “Six or seven miles, Tom, that’s all.”

  “So they’d have to communicate with their sperm whale by radio. Which means one must be surgically implanted in its head!”

  “What do they use for signals? Morse code? Sperm whale clicks sound like some sort of morse.” It was a flippant suggestion; however Tom Winterburn took it seriously.

  “Doubt it. You’re assuming there’s a Russian-speaking ‘pilot’ operating the whale. That’s half the trouble with these plastic models of Kato’s. They make you visualize the wrong thing. Problem: how to insert a Russian radio operator? Remove Part A from the whale kit and substitute a corresponding part from your human kit? Oh no! The whale brain simply isn’t built overall to process human language. Even human language in morse code form. It’s still the same language, after all. Human-talk. Some kind of symbolic code would have to be devised that’s compatible with the way the whale processes its own signals. You can’t just imprint a whale with a knowledge of Russian. You might get away with imprinting a fellow human being. We already have a plan for acquiring human languages wired into us. But another species hasn’t. This is a goddam puzzle! Human language and consciousness are so tightly bound up. I don’t see how you can have the second without the first—” He stroked his nose thoughtfully. All his features were azure in this light: a frozen Polar explorer’s.

  “You must admit it would be far simpler training a whale using electrodes in the pain and pleasure centres, now wouldn’t it, Tom? You’re sure we aren’t hunting a red herring?” Flynn cackled briefly. “Or a red whale?”

  Orville Parr nodded vigorous assent; however the Polar figure still insisted:

  “It all depends on what you want your whale to do. If you just want it to divebomb submarines automatically, okay I go along with you. If you want it to spy for you and communicate with you, somehow you’ve got to map ‘humanity’ into the beast. But how on earth can you pack all the information you’d need, into coded radio signals a few clicks long?”

  Chloe Patton popped up briefly from behind the tank.

  “It’s unfair calling the sperm whale noises ‘clicks’, Captain Winterburn. Think of the birds. We hear a single chirrup in the garden, but that chirrup’s made up of a hundred separate sounds at least. And the bird can distinguish them all.”

  “Hang on, Miss Patton, how many separate sounds would yo
u say there are in a whale click?”

  “Oh, I’ve seen oscilloscope photos with dozens of pulses packed into twenty microseconds.”

  “So what we hear as a single click could carry a complicated message? In symbolic code?”

  “Somebody’s done some work on this.” Herb Flynn burrowed irritably in his briefcase. “Rather eccentric speculations, if I remember. Still, I brought it along. Yes, here we are. About decoding Physeter signals and using their code for… God yes, this is the crazy bit. He’s an astronomer, he suggests using whale clicks for coding cosmic messages. The Review of Biological Psychology printed it. That’s eccentrics’ forum. Still, since we’re in the zany ideas lobby anyway, with a humanoid whale…” He broke off, staring at the offprint in his hand. “Sweet Christ! The man who wrote this is on Paul Hammond’s staff. Talk about a madness bug!”

  Kato was sweating faintly now—like the glass of his preserving tank, with so many people breathing on it.

  “I have to know,” the Japanese biologist cut in harshly. “That man’s ideas—do they represent a scientific consensus? The kami no ashioto, né? I have tried so hard not to think about it.”

  “The footfalls of God,” Enozawa translated crisply, his voice tight as a salute.

  “Yes, the nothingness at the core,” the old man murmured. “It seems to be the seppuku of the Western Soul.” He drew his thumb expressively from left to right across his midriff, ending the gesture with a sharp upward twist—turning the key off in the human machine. “Of Science too? We might all be happier to know there is nothing, and that we are nothing. We Japanese have ruined our countryside for the sake of doing like the West. Now there are too many of us to slacken pace. We must march on, but not into light—into darkness!”

  Enozawa stiffened resolutely. To hear the old Director talking of seppuku, calling the deed by its honorific name, instead of the vulgar hara-kiri, how it heartened him! Old values could still be restored.