The Neanderthal Parallax, Book One - Hominids

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Mary shut off the lights in the lab; one of the fluorescents strobed a bit as it died. She then locked the door and made her way down the second-floor corridor, past the Pepsi machine (Pepsi had paid York University two million dollars to become the exclusive soft-drink vendor on campus).

  The corridor was lined with the usual bulletin boards, announcing faculty openings, classroom assignments, club meetings, come-ons for cheap credit cards and magazine subscriptions, and all sorts of items for sale by students and faculty, including one poor clown hoping to get someone to pay him money for an old electric typewriter.

  Mary continued down the corridor, her heels clicking against the tiles. No one else was in the hallway. She did hear the sound of the urinals flushing as she passed the men’s room, but that happened automatically, governed by a timer.

  The door to the stairwell had safety-glass windows, with wire mesh embedded in them. Mary pushed open the door and headed down the four flights of concrete steps, each [61] flight taking her a half story lower. On the ground floor she left the stairwell and continued a short distance down another corridor, this one also empty except for a janitor working at the far end. She walked into the entryway, passing distribution boxes for the campus paper, The Excalibur, and, at last, headed out through the double doors into the warm night air.

  The moon wasn’t up yet. Mary headed along the sidewalk, passing a few students as she did so, although none she recognized. She swatted at the occasional insect, and—

  A hand clamped down over her mouth, and she felt something cold and sharp against her throat. “Don’t make a sound,” said a deep, raspy voice, pulling her backward.

  “Please—” said Mary.

  “Be quiet,” the man said. He was continuing to pull her back, the knife pressing sharply into her throat. Mary’s heart pounded violently. The hand over her mouth came off, and she felt it again a moment later on her left breast, squeezing roughly, painfully.

  He’d pulled her into a small alcove, two concrete walls meeting at a right angle, a large pine blocking most of the view. He then spun her around, pinning her arms against the wall, his left hand still holding the knife even as it also gripped her wrist. She could see him now. He was wearing a black balaclava, but he was clearly a white man—rings of his skin were visible around his blue eyes. Mary tried to bring her knee up into his groin, but he arched backward, and all she managed was a glancing contact.

  “Don’t fight me,” said the voice. She smelled tobacco on his breath, and could feel that his palms were sweaty against her wrists. The man pulled his arm away from the [62] wall, yanking Mary’s with it, then he slammed both their arms back against the concrete so that the knife was closer to Mary’s face. His other hand found the front of his own pants, and Mary could hear the sound of a zipper. She felt acid at the back of her throat.

  “I’ve—I’ve got AIDS,” said Mary, scrunching her eyes closed, trying to shut everything out.

  The man laughed, a sandpapery, humorless sound. “That makes two of us,” he said. Mary’s heart skipped, but he was probably lying, too. How many women had he done this to? How many had tried the same desperate gambit?

  There was a hand now on the waist of her pants, pulling down. Mary felt her zipper parting, and her pants coming down around her hips, and his pelvis and his rock-hard erection grinding against her panties. She let out a yelp and the man’s hand was suddenly on her throat, squeezing, nails biting into her flesh. “Quiet, bitch.”

  Why didn’t someone come by? Why was there no one around? God, why did—

  She felt a hand yank down her panties, then felt his penis against her labia. He rammed it into her vagina. The pain was excruciating; it felt as though things were ripping down there.

  It’s not about sex, thought Mary, even as tears welled from the corners of her eyes. It’s a crime of violence. The small of her back slammed against the concrete wall, as the man smashed his body against hers, ramming himself deep into her, again and again and again, his animal grunts growing louder with each thrust.

  And then, at last, it was over. He pulled out. Mary knew she should look down, look for any identifying details, look [63] even to see whether he was circumcised, anything that might help convict the bastard, but she couldn’t bear to look at it, at him. She tilted her head up at the dark sky, everything blurred through stinging tears.

  “Now, you just stay here,” said the man, tapping her cheek with a flat side of the knife. “You don’t say a word, and you stay here for fifteen minutes.” And then she heard the sound of a zipper going up, and the man’s footfalls as he ran away across the grass-covered ground.

  Mary leaned back against the wall and slid down to the concrete sidewalk, her knees coming up to her chin. She hated herself for the wracking sobs that escaped from her.

  After a while, she put a hand down between her legs, then pulled it away and looked at it to see if she was bleeding; she wasn’t, thank God.

  She waited for her breathing to calm down, and for her stomach to settle enough that she thought she could rise to her feet without vomiting. And then she did get up, painfully, slowly. She could hear voices—women’s voices—off in the distance, two students chatting and laughing as they went along. Part of her wanted to call out to them, but she couldn’t force the sound out of her throat.

  She knew it was maybe twenty-five Celsius out, but she felt cold, colder than she’d ever been in her life. She rubbed her arms, warming herself.

  It took—who knew? Five minutes? Five hours?—for her to recover her wits. She should find a phone, dial 911, call the Toronto police ... or the campus police, or—she knew about it, had read about it in campus handbooks—the York University rape-crisis center, but ...

  But she didn’t want to talk to anyone, to see anyone—to ... to have anyone see her like this.

  [64] Mary closed her pants, took a deep breath, and started walking. It was a few moments before she was conscious of the fact that she wasn’t heading on toward her car, but rather was going back toward the Farquharson Life Sciences Building.

  Once she got there, she held the banister all the way up the four half flights of stairs, afraid of letting go, afraid of losing her balance. Fortunately, the corridor was just as deserted as it had been before. She made it back into her lab without being seen by anyone, the fluorescents spluttering to life.

  She didn’t have to worry about being pregnant. She’d been on the Pill—not a sin in her view, but certainly one in her mother’s—ever since she’d married Colm, and, well, after the separation, she’d kept it up, although there had turned out to be little reason. But she would find a clinic and get an AIDS test, just to be on the safe side.

  Mary wasn’t going to report it; she had already made up her mind about that. How many times had she cursed those she’d read about who had failed to report a rape? They were betraying other women, letting a monster get away, giving him a chance to do it again to someone else, to—to her, now, but—

  But it was easy to curse when it wasn’t you, when you hadn’t been there.

  She knew what happened to women who accused men of rape; she’d seen it on TV countless times. They’d try to establish that it was her fault, that she wasn’t a credible witness, that somehow she had consented, that her morals were loose. “So, you say you’re a good Catholic, Mrs. O’Casey—oh, I’m sorry, you don’t go by that name anymore, do you? Not [65] since you left your husband Colm. No, it’s Ms. Vaughan now, isn’t it? But you and Professor O’Casey are still legally married, aren’t you? Tell the court, please, have you slept with other men since you abandoned your husband?”

  Justice, she knew, was rarely found in a courtroom. She would be torn apart and reassembled into someone she herself wouldn’t recognize.

  And, in the end, nothing would likely change. The monster would get away.

  Mary took a deep breath. Maybe she’d change her mind at some point. But the only thing that was really important right now was the physical evidence, and
she, Professor Mary Vaughan, was at least as competent as any policewoman with a rape kit at collecting that.

  The door to her lab had a window in it; she moved so that she couldn’t possibly be seen by anyone passing by in the corridor. And then she undid her pants, the sound of her own zipper causing her heart to jump. She then got a glass specimen container and some cotton swabs, and, blinking back tears, she collected the filth that was within her.

  When she was done, she sealed the specimen jar, wrote the date on it in red ink, and labeled it “Vaughan 666,” her name and the appropriate number for such a monster. She then sealed her panties in an opaque specimen container, labeled it with the same date and designation, and put both containers in the fridge in which biological specimens were stored, placing them alongside DNA taken from a passenger pigeon and an Egyptian mummy and a woolly mammoth.

  Chapter Seven

  “Where am I?” Ponter knew his voice sounded panicky, but, try as he might, he couldn’t control it. He was still seated in the odd chair that rolled on hoops, which was a good thing, because he doubted he’d be very steady on his feet.

  “Calm down, Ponter,” said his Companion implant. “Your pulse is up to—”

  “Calm down!” snapped Ponter, as if Hak had suggested a ridiculous impossibility. “Where am I?”

  “I’m not sure,” said the Companion. “I’m picking up no signals from the positioning towers. In addition, I’m cut off entirely from the planetary information network, and am receiving no acknowledgment from the alibi archives.”

  “You’re not malfunctioning?”

  “No.”

  “Then—then this can’t be Earth, can it? You’d be getting signals if—”

  “I’m sure it is Earth,” said Hak. “Did you notice the sun while they brought you over to that white vehicle?”

  “What about it?”

  “Its color temperature was 5,200 degrees, and it [68] subtended one-seven-hundredth of the celestial sphere—just like Sol as seen from Earth’s orbit. Also, I recognized most of the trees and plants I saw. No, this is clearly the surface of the Earth.”

  “But the stench! The air is foul!”

  “I’ll have to take your word for that,” said Hak. “Could we have—could we have traveled in time?”

  “That seems unlikely,” replied the Companion. “But if I can see the constellations tonight, I will be able to tell if we’ve moved forward or backward an appreciable amount. And if I can spot some of the other planets and the phase of the moon, I should be able to figure the exact date.”

  “But how do we get back home? How do we—”

  “Again, Ponter, I must exhort you to calm down. You are close to hyperventilating. Take a deep breath. There. Now let it out slowly. That’s right. Relax. Another breath—”

  “What are those creatures?” Ponter asked, waving a hand at the scrawny figure with dark brown skin and no hair and the other scrawny figure with lighter skin and a wrapping of fabric around his head.

  “My best guess?” said Hak. “They are Gliksins.”

  “Gliksins!” exclaimed Ponter, loud enough that the two strange figures turned to look at him. He lowered his voice. “Gliksins? Oh, come on ...”

  “Look at those skull images over there.” Hak was speaking to Ponter through a pair of cochlear implants, but by changing the left-right balance of his voice he could indicate a direction as surely as if he had pointed. Ponter got up—shakily—and crossed the room, heading away from the strange beings and approaching an illuminated panel [69] like the one they were looking at, with several deepviews of skulls clipped to it.

  “Green meat!” said Ponter, looking at the strange skulls. “They are Gliksins—aren’t they?”

  “I would say so. No other primate has that lack of browridge, or that projection from the front of the lower jaw.”

  “Gliksins! But they’ve been extinct for—well, for how long?”

  “Perhaps 400,000 months,” said Hak.

  “But this can’t possibly be Earth of that long ago,” said Ponter. “I mean, there’s no way the civilization we’ve seen would have failed to leave traces in the archeological record. At best, Gliksins chipped stone into crude choppers, right?”

  “Yes.”

  Ponter tried to keep from sounding hysterical. “So, again, where are we?”

  Reuben Montego looked agape at the casualty officer, Dr. Singh. “What do you mean, ‘He appears to be a Neanderthal’?”

  “The skull features are absolutely diagnostic,” said Singh. “Believe me: I’ve got a degree in craniology.”

  “But how can that be, Dr. Singh? Neanderthals have been extinct for millions of years.”

  “Actually, only for 27,000 years or so,” said Singh, “if you accept the validity of some recent finds. If those finds prove spurious, then they died out 35,000 years ago.”

  “But then how ...”

  “That I do not know.” Singh waved his hand at the [70] x-rays clipped to the illuminated panel. “But the suite of characters visible here is unmistakable. One or two might happen in any given modern Homo sapiens skull. But all of them? Never.”

  “What characters?” asked Reuben.

  “The browridge, obviously,” said Singh. “Note that it is unlike other primate browridges: it is doubly arched, and has a sulcus behind it. The way the face is drawn forward. The prognathism—just look at that jaw jut out! The lack of a chin. The retromolar gap”—he pointed to the space behind the last tooth. “And see those triangular projections into the nasal cavity? Those are found in no other mammal, let alone any other primate.” He tapped the image of the skull’s rear. “And see this rounded projection at the back? That is called the occipital bun; again, it’s distinctly Neanderthaloid.”

  “You’re pulling my leg,” said Reuben.

  “This is something I would never do.”

  Reuben looked back at the stranger, who had gotten up out of the wheelchair and was now staring, with astonishment, at a couple of skull x-rays on the other side of the room. Reuben then looked again at the x-ray film in front of him. Both he and Singh had been out of the room when the technician had taken the pictures; it was possible that, for whatever reason, someone had substituted different shots, although—

  Although these were real x-rays, and they were x-rays of a living head, not a fossil: nasal cartilage and the outline of flesh were clearly visible. Still, there was something very strange about the lower jaw. Parts of it showed as a much lighter shade of gray in the x-ray, as if they were made of [71] a less-dense material. And those parts were smooth, featureless, as though the material was uniform in composition.

  “It’s a fake,” said Reuben, pointing to the anomalous part of the jaw. “I mean—he’s a fake; he’s had plastic surgery to make himself look Neanderthal.”

  Singh squinted at the x-ray. “There is reconstructive work here, yes—but only in the mandible. The cranial features all seem to be natural.”

  Reuben glanced at the injured man, who was still looking at other skull x-rays while babbling to himself. The doctor tried to imagine the stranger’s skull beneath his skin. Would it have looked like the one Singh was now showing him?

  “He has several artificial teeth,” said Singh, still studying the x-ray. “But they’re all attached to the section of jaw that has been reconstructed. As for the rest of the teeth, they seem natural, although the roots are taurodontid—another Neanderthaloid trait.”

  Reuben turned back to the x-ray. “No cavities,” he said, absently.

  “That is right,” said Singh. He took a moment to assess the x-rays. “In any event, he seems to have no subdural hematoma, nor any skull fracture. There is no reason to keep him in hospital.”

  Reuben looked at the stranger. Who the hell could he be? He babbled in some strange tongue, and he’d had extensive reconstructive surgery. Could he be a member of some bizarre cult? Was that why he’d broken into the neutrino observatory? It made a certain amount of sense, but—


  [72] But Singh was right; except for the mandibular restoration, what they were seeing in the x-ray was a natural skull. Reuben Montego crossed the room slowly, warily, as if—Reuben realized within a few moments what he was doing: he was approaching the stranger not as one would approach another human being, but rather as one might come near a wild animal. And yet there had been nothing in his manner so far to suggest anything except civility.

  The man clearly heard Reuben approaching. He took his attention away from the x-rays he’d been captivated by and turned to face the doctor.

  Reuben stared at the man. He had noted earlier that his face was strange. The browridge, arching above each eye, was obvious. His hair was parted precisely in the middle, not at either side, and it looked like that was the natural part, not some affectation. And the nose: the nose was huge—but it wasn’t the least bit aquiline. In fact, it wasn’t quite like any other nose Reuben had ever seen before; it completely lacked a bridge.

  Reuben lifted his right hand slowly, fingers gently spread, making sure the gesture looked tentative, not threatening. “May I?” he said, moving his hand closer to the stranger’s face.

  The man might not have understood the words, but the intent of the gesture was obvious. He tilted his head forward, inviting the touch. Reuben ran his fingers along the browridge, over his forehead, along the length of the skull from front to back, feeling the—what had Singh called it?—the occipital bun at the rear, a hard dome of bone beneath the skin. There was no doubt at all: the skull shown in the x-rays belonged to this person.

  [73] “Reuben,” said Dr. Montego, touching his own chest. “Roo-ben.” He then gestured at the stranger with an upturned palm.