Neanderthal Parallax 1 - Hominids

by Robert J. Sawyer

  “Like what?” asked Reuben.

  “Oh, anything,” said Ponter. “Maybe some mammoth steaks.”

  “What?” said Reuben.

  “Mammoth?” said Mary, stunned.

  “Is Hak incorrectly rendering what I am saying?” asked Ponter. “Mammoth. You know—a hairy elephant of northern climes.”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” said Mary. “We know what a mammoth is, but ...”

  “But what?” asked Ponter, eyebrow lifted.

  “But, well, I mean ... mammoths are extinct,” said Mary.

  “Extinct?” repeated Ponter, surprised. “Come to think of it, I have not seen any here, but, well, I assumed they did not like coming close to this massive city.”

  “No, no, they’re extinct,” said Louise. “All over the [334] world. They’ve been extinct for thousands of years.”

  “Why?” asked Ponter. “Was it illness?”

  Everyone fell silent. Mary slowly exhaled the air in her lungs, trying to decide how to present this. “No, that’s not why,” she said, at last. “Umm, you see, we—our kind, our ancestors—we hunted mammoths to extinction.”

  Ponter’s eyes went wide. “You did what?”

  Mary felt nauseous; she hated having her version of humanity come up so short. “We killed them for food, and, well, we kept on killing them until there were none left.”

  “Oh,” said Ponter, softly. He looked out the window, at the large backyard to Reuben’s house. “I am fond of mammoths,” he said. “Not just their meat—which is delicious—but as animals, as part of the landscape. There is a small herd of them that lives near my home. I enjoy seeing them.”

  “We have their skeletons,” said Mary, “and their tusks, and every once in a while a frozen one is found in Siberia, but ...”

  “All of them,” said Ponter, shaking his head back and forth slowly, sadly. “You killed all of them ...”

  Mary felt like protesting, “Not me personally,” but that would be disingenuous; the blood of the mammoths was indeed on her house. Still, she needed to make some defense, feeble though it was: “It happened a long time ago.”

  Ponter looked queasy. “I am almost afraid to ask,” said Ponter, “but there are other large animals I am used to seeing in this part of the world on my version of Earth. Again, I had assumed they were just avoiding this city of yours, but ...”

  Reuben shook his shaven head. “No, that’s not it.”

  [335] Mary closed her eyes briefly. “I’m sorry, Ponter. We wiped out just about all the megafauna—here, and in Europe ... and in Australia”—she felt a knot in her stomach as the litany grew—“and in New Zealand, and in South America. The only continent that has many really big animals left is Africa, and most of those are endangered.”

  Bleep.

  “On the verge of extinction,” said Louise.

  Ponter’s tone was one of betrayal. “But you said this had all happened long ago.”

  Mary looked down at her empty plate. “We stopped killing mammoths long ago, because, well, we ran out of mammoths to kill. And we stopped killing Irish elk, and the big cats that used to populate North America, and woolly rhinoceroses, and all the others, because there were none left to kill.”

  “To kill every member of a species ...” said Ponter. He shook his massive head slowly back and forth.

  “We’ve learned better,” Mary said. “We now have programs to protect endangered species, and we’ve had some real successes. The whooping crane was once almost gone; so was the bald eagle. And the buffalo. They’ve all come back.”

  Ponter’s voice was cold. “Because you stopped hunting them to extremes.”

  Mary thought about protesting that it wasn’t all the result of hunting; much of it had to do with the destruction by humans of the natural habitats of these creatures—but somehow that didn’t seem any better.

  “What ... what other species are still endangered?” asked Ponter.

  [336] Mary shrugged a little. “Lots of kinds of birds. Giant tortoises. Panda bears. Sperm whales. Chim ...”

  “Chim?” said Ponter. “What are—?” He tilted his head, perhaps listening to Hak providing its best guess at the word Mary had started to say. “Oh, no. No. Chimpanzees? But ... but these are our cousins. You hunt our cousins?”

  Mary felt all of two feet tall. How could she tell him that chimps were killed for food, that gorillas were murdered so their hands could be made into exotic ashtrays?

  “They are invaluable,” continued Ponter. “Surely you, as a geneticist, must know that. They are the only close living relatives we have; we can learn much about ourselves by studying them in the wild, by examining their DNA.”

  “I know,” said Mary, softly. “I know.”

  Ponter looked at Reuben, then at Louise, and then at Mary, sizing them up, it seemed, as if he were seeing them—really seeing them—for the first time.

  “You kill with abandon,” he said. “You kill entire species. You even kill other primates.” He paused and looked from face to face again, as if giving them a chance to forestall what he was about to say, to come up with a logical explanation, a mitigating factor. But Mary said nothing, and neither did the other two, and so Ponter went on. “And, on this world, my kind is extinct.”

  “Yes,” said Mary, very softly. She knew what had happened. Although not every paleoanthropologist agreed, many shared her view that between 40,000 and 27,000 years ago, Homo sapiens—anatomically modern humans—completed the first of what would be many deliberate or inadvertent genocides, wiping the planet free of the only other extant member of the same genus, a separate, more [337] gentle species that perhaps had been better entitled to the double meaning of the word humanity.

  “Did you kill us?” asked Ponter.

  “That’s a much-debated question,” said Mary. “Not everyone agrees on the answer.”

  “What do you think happened?” asked Ponter, golden eyes locked on Mary’s own.

  Mary took a deep breath. “I—yes, yes, that’s what I think happened.”

  “You wiped us out,” said Ponter, his own tone, and Hak’s rendition of it, clearly being controlled with difficulty.

  Mary nodded. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Really, I am. It happened long ago. We were savages then. We—”

  Just then, the phone rang. Reuben, looking relieved at the interruption, jumped up from the table and lifted a handset. “Hello?” he said.

  Mary looked up as Reuben’s voice became more excited. “But that’s terrific!” continued the doctor. “That’s wonderful! Yes, no—yes, yes, that’s fine. Thank you! Right. Bye.”

  “Well?” said Louise.

  Reuben was clearly suppressing a grin. “Ponter has distemper,” he said, replacing the phone’s handset.

  “Distemper?” repeated Mary. “But humans don’t get distemper.”

  “That’s right,” said Reuben. “We’re naturally immune. But Ponter isn’t, because his kind hasn’t lived with our domesticated animals for generations. To be precise, he’s got the horse version of distemper; vets call it strangles when it happens to a young horse. It’s caused by a [338] bacterium, Streptococcus equii. Fortunately, penicillin is the usual treatment given to horses, and that’s one of the antibiotics I’ve been giving Ponter. He should be fine.”

  “So we don’t have to worry about getting sick?” asked Louise.

  “Not only that,” said Reuben, smiling broadly now, “but they’re lifting the quarantine! Assuming the final set of cultures—due later tonight—comes back negative, we can leave here tomorrow morning!”

  Louise clapped her hands together. Mary was delighted, too. She looked over at Ponter, but he had his head bowed, presumably still thinking about the extinction of his kind on this world.

  Mary reached over and touched his arm. “Hey, Ponter,” she said gently. “Isn’t that great news? Tomorrow, you’ll get to go out and see our world!”

  Ponter lifted his head slowly and looked at Mary. She was still learning to read th
e subtleties of his expressions, but the words, “Do I have to?” seemed to fit with his widened eyes and slightly open mouth.

  But finally he just nodded, as if in resignation.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Ponter spent most of the evening alone, just staring out the kitchen window at Reuben’s large backyard, a sad look on his large face.

  Louise and Mary were both sitting in the living room. Mary was sorry she’d left her current book down in Toronto. She’d been in the middle of Scott Turow’s latest and really wanted to get back to it, but had to content herself with leafing through the current Time. President Bush was on the cover this week; Mary thought it possible that Ponter might be on the cover of the next issue. She preferred The Economist herself, but Reuben didn’t subscribe to it. Still, Mary did always enjoy Richard Corliss’s film reviews, even if she had no one to go to the movies with these days.

  Louise, in the adjacent armchair, was writing a letter—in French, Mary had noted—in longhand on a yellow pad. Louise wore track shorts and an INXS T-shirt, her long legs tucked sideways beneath her body.

  Reuben came into the room and crouched down between the two women, addressing them both in hushed tones. “I’m concerned about our boy Ponter,” he said.

  Louise set down her yellow pad. Mary closed her [340] magazine. “Me, too,” said Mary. “He didn’t seem to take that news about the extinction of his kind very well.”

  “No, he didn’t,” said Reuben. “And he’s been under a lot of stress, which is just going to get worse tomorrow. The media will be all over him, not to mention government officials, religious kooks, and more.”

  Louise nodded. “I suppose that’s true.”

  “What can we do about it?” asked Mary.

  Reuben frowned for a time, as if thinking about how to express something. Finally, he said, “There aren’t many people of my color here in Sudbury. Things are better down in Toronto, I’m told, but even there, black men get hassled by the police from time to time. ‘What are you doing here?’ ‘Is this your car?’ ‘Can we see some ID?’ ” Reuben shook his head. “You learn something going through that. You learn you’ve got rights. Ponter isn’t a criminal, and he isn’t a threat to anyone. He’s not at a border station, so no one can legally demand that he prove he should be allowed to be in Canada. The government may want to control him, the police may want to keep him under surveillance—but that doesn’t matter. Ponter’s got rights.”

  “I certainly agree with that,” said Mary.

  “Either of you ever been to Japan?” asked Reuben.

  Mary shook her head. So did Louise.

  “It’s a wonderful country, but there’re almost no non-Japanese there,” said Reuben. “You can go all day without seeing a white face, let alone a black one—I saw precisely two other blacks during the entire week I was there. But I remember walking through downtown Tokyo one day: I must have passed 10,000 people that morning, and they [341] were all Japanese. Then, as I’m walking along, I see this white guy coming toward me. And he smiles at me—he doesn’t know me from Adam, but he sees that I’m a fellow Westerner. And he gives me this smile, like to say I’m so glad to see a brother—a brother! And I suddenly realize that I’m smiling at him, too, and thinking the same thing. I’ve never forgotten that moment.” He looked at Louise, then at Mary. “Well, old Ponter can search all he wants, all over the world, and he’s not going to see a single face that he recognizes as being like him. That white guy and I—and all those Japanese and me—we have much more in common than Ponter does with any of the six billion people on this globe.”

  Mary glanced into the kitchen at Ponter, who was still staring out the window, a balled hand under the middle of his long jaw, propping it up. “What can we do about it?” she asked.

  “He’s been almost a prisoner since he arrived,” said Reuben, “first in the hospital, then here, quarantined. I’m sure he needs time to think, to get some mental equilibrium.” He paused. “Gillian Ricci tipped me off in an e-mail. Apparently the same thought I had earlier has now occurred to the brass—or should I say the nickel?—at Inco. They want to question Ponter at length about any other mining sites in his world that he might know about. I’m sure he’ll be glad to help, but he still needs more time to adjust.”

  “I agree,” said Mary. “But how can we make sure he gets it?”

  “They’re lifting the quarantine tomorrow morning, right?” said Reuben. “Well, Gillian says I can hold another [342] press conference here at 10:00 A.M. Of course, the media will be expecting Ponter to be there—so I think we should get him out before then.”

  “How?” asked Louise. “The RCMP has the place surrounded—supposedly to keep us safe from people who might try to break in, but probably just as much to keep an eye on Ponter.”

  Reuben nodded. “One of us should take him away, out into the country. I’m his doctor; that’s what I prescribe. Rest and relaxation. And that’s what I’ll tell anyone who asks—that he’s on a medical rest leave, ordered by me. We can probably only get away with that for a day or so before suits from Ottawa descend on us, but I really do think Ponter needs it.”

  “I’ll do it,” said Mary, surprising herself. “I’ll take him away.”

  Reuben looked at Louise to see if she wanted to stake a claim herself, but she simply nodded.

  “If we tell the media that the press conference will be at ten, they’ll start showing up at nine,” said Reuben. “But if you and Ponter head out, through my backyard, at, say, eight, you’ll beat them all. There’s a fence at the back, behind all those trees, but you should have no trouble hopping it. Just make sure no one sees you go.”

  “And then what?” said Mary. “We just go walkabout?”

  “You’ll need a car,” said Louise.

  “Well, mine’s back at the Creighton Mine,” said Mary. “But I can’t take yours or Reuben’s. The cops will surely stop us if we try to drive off. As Reuben said, we’ve got to sneak away.”

  [343] “No problem,” said Louise. “I can have a friend meet you tomorrow morning on whatever country road is behind Reuben’s place here. He can drive you to the mine, and you can pick up your car there.”

  Mary blinked. “Really?”

  Louise shrugged a little. “Sure.”

  “I—I don’t know this area at all,” said Mary. “We’ll need some maps.”

  “Oooh!” said Louise. “I know exactly who to call, then—Garth. He’s got one of those Handspring Visor thingies with a GPS module. It’ll give you directions to any place, and keep you from getting lost.”

  “And he’d loan that to me?” said Mary, incredulous. “Aren’t those things expensive?”

  “Well—it’d really be me he’d be doing the favor for,” said Louise. “Here, let me call him and set everything up.” She rose to her feet and headed upstairs. Mary watched her go, fascinated and stunned. She wondered what it was like to be so beautiful that you could ask men to do just about anything and know that they’d almost certainly say yes.

  Ponter, she realized, wasn’t the only one feeling out of place.

  Jasmel and Adikor took a travel cube back out to the Rim, back to the house Adikor had shared with Ponter. They didn’t say much to each other on the trip back, partly, of course, because Adikor was lost in thought about Daklar Bolbay’s revelation, and partly because neither he nor [344] Jasmel liked the idea that someone at the alibi-archive pavilion was monitoring every word they said and everything they did.

  Still, they had a vexing problem. Adikor had to get back down to his subterranean lab; whatever minuscule chance there was that Ponter might be rescued—or, thought Adikor, although he hadn’t shared this thought with Jasmel, that at least his drowned body might be recovered, exonerating Adikor—depended on him getting down there. But how to do that? He looked at his Companion, on the inside of his left wrist. He could gouge it out, he supposed—being careful not to clip his radial artery as he did so. But not only did the Companion rely on Adikor’s o
wn body for its power, it also transmitted his vital signs—and it wouldn’t be able to do that if it were separated from him. Nor could he do a quick transplant onto Jasmel or somebody else; the implant was keyed to Adikor’s particular biometrics.

  The travel cube let them off at the house, and Adikor and Jasmel went inside. Jasmel wandered into the kitchen to find Pabo something to eat, and Adikor sat down, staring across the room at the empty chair that had been Ponter’s favorite spot for reading.

  Getting around the judicial scrutiny was a problem—a problem, Adikor realized, in science. There must be a way to circumvent it, a way to fool his Companion—and whoever was monitoring its output.

  Adikor knew the life story of Lonwis Trob, the creator of the Companion technology; he’d studied his many inventions at the Academy. But that had been long ago, and he remembered few details. Of course, he could simply ask [345] his Companion for the facts he needed; it would access the required information and display it on its little screen or any wall monitor or datapad Adikor selected. But such a request would doubtless catch the attention of the person watching over him.

  Adikor felt himself becoming angry, muscles tensing, heart rate increasing, breathing growing deeper. He thought about trying to mask it, but no—he’d let the person who was watching him know how upset they were making him.

  As clever as Lonwis Trob had been, there had to be a way to accomplish what he wanted—what he needed—to do. And what precisely was that? Define your problem exactly; that was what they’d taught him all those months ago at the Academy. Precisely what needs to be done?

  No, he didn’t have to defeat the Companions—which was a good thing, because he hadn’t come up with a single workable idea for doing so. Indeed, it wasn’t all the Companions he needed to disable—in fact, to do so would be unconscionable; the implants ensured the safety of everyone. He only needed to disable his own Companion, but ...