Hominids tnp-1

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Adikor felt anger growing within him, but he fought, fought, fought to conceal it. He knew the Companion-broadcasts from the Exhibitionists were being monitored by countless people.

  For her part, Jasmel was refusing to respond at all, and the Exhibitionists at last left her alone. Eventually, those grilling Adikor had their fill, and they filed out of the chamber, leaving him and Jasmel alone in the vast room. Jasmel met Adikor’s eyes for a moment, then looked away. Adikor wasn’t sure what to say to her; he’d been adept at reading her father’s moods, but Jasmel had much of Klast in her, too. Finally, to fill the silence between them, Adikor said, “I know you did the best you could.”

  Jasmel looked now at the ceiling, with its painted auroras and centrally mounted timepiece. Then she lowered her gaze, facing Adikor. “Did you do it?” she asked.

  “What?” Adikor’s heart pounded. “No, of course not. I love your father.”

  Jasmel closed her eyes. “I never knew it was you who had tried to kill him before.”

  “I wasn’t trying to kill him. I was just angry, that’s all. I thought you understood that; I thought—”

  “You thought because I continued to speak on your behalf that I wasn’t troubled by what I saw? That was my father! I saw him spitting out his own teeth!”

  “It was long ago,” said Adikor, softly. “I, ah, I didn’t remember it as quite so … so bloody. I am sorry you had to see that.” He paused. “Jasmel, don’t you understand? I love your father; I owe everything that I am to him. After that … incident … he could have pressed charges; he could have had me sterilized. But he didn’t. He understood that I had—have—a sickness, an inability sometimes to control my anger. I owe that I am still whole to him; I owe that I have a son, Dab, to him. My overwhelming feeling toward your father is gratitude. I would never hurt him. I couldn’t.”

  “Maybe you got tired of being in his debt.”

  “There was no debt. You’re still young, Jasmel, and you haven’t yet bonded, but soon you will, I know. There is no debt between people who are in love; there is only total forgiveness, and going forward.”

  “People don’t change,” said Jasmel.

  “Yes, they do. I did. And your father knew that.”

  Jasmel was quiet for a long time, then: “Who are you going to have speak for you this time?”

  Adikor had just ignored the question when it had been shouted at him by the Exhibitionists. But now he gave it serious thought. “Lurt is the natural choice,” he said. “She’s a 145, old enough that the adjudicators should respect her. And she said she’d do anything to help.”

  “I hope …” said Jasmel. She continued again a moment later. “I hope she does well for you.”

  “Thank you. What are you going to do now?”

  Jasmel looked directly at Adikor. “For now—for right now—I just need to get away from here … and from you.”

  She turned and walked out of the massive Council chamber, leaving Adikor all alone.

  Chapter 30

  Day Five

  Tuesday, August 6

  148/118/28

  NEWS SEARCH

  Keyword(s): Neanderthal

  An Islamic spiritual leader has denounced the so-called Neanderthal man as clearly the botched product of Western genetic-engineering experiments. The Wilayat al-Faqih in Iran is calling on the Canadian government to admit that Ponter Boddit is the product of a wickedly immoral recombinant-DNA procedure …

  Ottawa is being pressured to grant Canadian citizenship to Ponter Boddit—and the request is coming from an unusual source. U.S. president George W. Bush today asked Prime Minister Jean Chretien to expedite the process by which the Neanderthal is made an official Canadian. Ponter Boddit has indicated that he was born in a location corresponding to Sudbury, Ontario, in his world. “If he was born in Canada,” says Bush, “then he’s a Canadian.”

  The U.S. president is pushing for Boddit to be issued a Canadian passport so the Neanderthal can travel freely to the United States once the quarantine is lifted, thereby ending the debate on Capitol Hill about whether he could be allowed through U.S. Customs.

  Section 5, Paragraph 4, of the Canadian Citizenship Act gives broad discretion, which Bush is urging be invoked: “In order to alleviate cases of special and unusual hardship or to reward services of an exceptional value to Canada, and notwithstanding any other provision of this Act, the Governor in Council may, in his discretion, direct the Minister to grant citizenship to any person …”

  An Internet petition with more than 10,000 names gathered worldwide has been forwarded to Canada’s Minister of Health, demanding that Ponter Boddit be permanently quarantined …

  Inco shares closed today at a fifty-two-week high …

  “It’s a media circus,” said long-time Sudbury Rotarian Bernie Monks. “Northern Ontario hasn’t seen anything like this since the Dionne Quintuplets were born, back in 1934 …”

  Job offers continue to pour in for Ponter Boddit. Japan’s NTT Basic Research Laboratory has offered him a directorship of a new quantum-computing unit. Microsoft and IBM have also offered him contracts, with generous cash/stock packages. MIT, CalTech, and eight other universities have offered him faculty positions. The RAND Corporation has likewise made an overture to him, as has Greenpeace. No word yet from the Neanderthal about whether any of these positions appeal to him …

  A coalition of scientists in France has issued a statement saying that although Ponter Boddit’s arrival on this Earth did indeed take place on Canadian soil, he clearly was not born in that nation, and no Neanderthaler ever lived in North America. His citizenship, they contend, should therefore be French, since the youngest Neanderthal fossils are found in that country …

  Civil-rights advocates on both sides of the border are condemning the forced quarantine of the so-called Neanderthal man, saying there is no evidence he poses a medical threat to anyone …

  Blood test after blood test came back negative. Whatever Ponter had been suffering from seemed to have abated, and there was no evidence that he was carrying anything dangerous to the humans of this world. Still, the LCDC wasn’t ready to cancel the quarantine yet.

  Ponter was wearing his own shirt again today, the one he’d had on when he arrived here. The RCMP had delivered a small wardrobe of additional clothes for him bought at the local Mark’s Work Wearhouse, but they really didn’t fit very well; clothing didn’t seem to come off the rack for a person who looked like a slightly squished version of Mr. Universe.

  Ponter’s—or Hak’s—English was getting remarkably good. The Companion didn’t have the ee phoneme in its preprogrammed repertoire, but it had now recorded both Mary and Reuben saying that sound, and would play back the appropriate version as required to render English words it otherwise couldn’t articulate. But it sounded funny hearing her name said as “Mare-ee,” half in one of Hak’s voices and half in either her own or Reuben’s, so Mary told the Companion not to bother; people periodically called her “Mare,” anyway, and it would be just fine for Hak to continue to do that, too. Louise likewise told Hak it was all right if the Companion went on referring to her as just “Lou.”

  Finally, Hak announced that it had amassed a sufficient vocabulary for truly meaningful conversations. Yes, it said, there would be gaps and difficulties, but these could be worked out as they went along.

  And so, while Reuben was busy going over more test results on the phone with other doctors, and while Louise, the night owl, was sleeping upstairs, having accepted Ponter’s offer to use the bed when he wasn’t, Mary and Ponter sat in the living room and had their first real chat. Ponter spoke softly, making sounds in his own language, and Hak, using its male voice, provided an English translation: “It is good to talk.”

  Mary made a small, nervous laugh. She’d been frustrated by her inability to communicate with Ponter, and now that they could talk, she didn’t know what to say to him. “Yes,” she said. “It’s good to talk.”

  “A beautiful day,” sa
id Ponter’s translated voice, looking out the living room’s rear window.

  Mary laughed again; heartily, this time. Talking about the weather—a pleasantry that transcended species boundaries. “Yes, it is.”

  And then she realized that it wasn’t that she didn’t know what to say to Ponter. Rather, she had so many questions, she didn’t know where to begin. Ponter was a scientist; he must have some sense of what his people knew about genetics, about the split between genus Homo and genus Pan, about …

  But no. No. Ponter was a person—first and foremost, he was a person, and one who had gone through a harrowing ordeal. The science could wait. Right now, they would talk about him, about how he was doing. “How do you feel?” Mary asked.

  “I am fine,” said the translated voice.

  Mary smiled. “I mean really. How are you really doing?”

  Ponter seemed to hesitate, and Mary wondered if Neanderthal men shared with males of her kind a reluctance to talk about feelings. But then he exhaled through his mouth, a long, shuddering sigh.

  “I am frightened,” he said. “And I miss my family.”

  Mary lifted her eyebrows. “Your family?”

  “My daughters,” he said. “I have two daughters, Jasmel Ket and Megameg Bek.”

  Mary’s jaw dropped slightly. It hadn’t even occurred to her to think about Ponter’s family. “How old are they?”

  “The older one,” said Ponter, “is—I know in months, but you reckon time mostly in years, do you not? The older one is—Hak?”

  Hak’s female voice chimed in. “Jasmel is nineteen years old; Megameg is nine.”

  “My goodness,” said Mary. “Will they be okay? What about their mother?”

  “Klast died two tenmonths ago,” said Ponter.

  “Twenty months,” added Hak, helpfully. “One-point-eight years.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Mary softly.

  Ponter nodded slightly. “Her cells, in her blood, they changed …”

  “Leukemia,” Mary said, providing the word.

  “I miss her every month,” said Ponter.

  Mary wondered for a moment if Hak had translated that just right; surely Ponter meant he missed her every day. “To have lost both parents …”

  “Yes,” said Ponter. “Of course, Jasmel is an adult now, so …”

  “So she can vote, and so forth?” asked Mary.

  “No, no, no. Did Hak do the math incorrectly?”

  “I most certainly did not,” said Hak’s female voice.

  “Jasmel is far too young to vote,” said Ponter. “I am far too young to vote.”

  “How old do you have to be in your world to vote?”

  “You must have seen at least 667 moons—two-thirds of the traditional thousand-month lifetime.”

  Hak, evidently wanting to dispel the notion that it was mathematically challenged, quickly supplied the conversions: “One can vote at the age of fifty-one years; a traditional lifespan averaged seventy-seven years, although many live much longer than that these days.”

  “Here, in Ontario, people get to vote when they turn eighteen,” said Mary. “Years, that is.”

  “Eighteen!” exclaimed Ponter. “That is madness.”

  “I don’t know of any place where the voting age is higher than twenty-one years.”

  “This explains much about your world,” says Ponter. “We do not let people shape policy until they have accumulated wisdom and experience.”

  “But then if Jasmel can’t vote, what is it that makes her an adult?”

  Ponter lifted his shoulders slightly. “I suppose such distinctions are not as significant on my world as they are here. Still, at 250 months, an individual does take legal responsibility for himself or herself, and usually is on the verge of establishing his or her own home.” He shook his head. “I wish I could let Jasmel and Megameg know that I am still alive, and am thinking about them. Even if there is no way I can go home, I would give anything just to get a message to them.”

  “And is there really no way for you to go home?” asked Mary.

  “I cannot see how I could. Oh, perhaps if a quantum computer could be built here, and the conditions that led to my … transfer … could be precisely duplicated. But I am a theoretical physicist; I have only the vaguest of senses of how one builds a quantum computer. My partner, Adikor, knows how, of course, but I have no way of contacting him.”

  “It must be very frustrating,” said Mary.

  “I am sorry,” said Ponter. “I did not mean to shift my problems to you.”

  “That’s all right,” said Mary. “Is there—is there anything we, any of us, can do to help?”

  Ponter said a single, sad-sounding Neanderthal syllable; Hak rendered it as “No.”

  Mary wanted to cheer him up. “Well, we shouldn’t be in quarantine too much longer. Maybe after we’re out, you can travel around, see some sights. Sudbury is a small town, but—”

  “Small?” said Ponter, deep-set eyes wide. “But there are—I do not know how many. Tens of thousands at least.”

  “The Sudbury metropolitan area has 160,000 people in it,” said Mary, having read that in a guidebook in her hotel room.

  “One hundred and sixty thousand!” repeated Ponter. “And this is a small town? You, Mare, come from somewhere else, do you not? A different town. How many people live there?”

  “The actual city of Toronto is 2.4 million people; greater Toronto—a continuous urban area with Toronto at its heart—is maybe 3.5 million.”

  “Three and a half million?” said Ponter, incredulously.

  “Give or take.”

  “How many people are there?”

  “In the whole world?” asked Mary.

  “Yes.”

  “A little over six billion.”

  “A billion is … a thousand times a million?”

  “That’s right,” said Mary. “At least here in North America. In Britain—no, forget it. Yes, a billion is a thousand million.”

  Ponter sagged in his chair. “That is a … a staggering number of people.”

  Mary raised her eyebrows. “How many people are there on your world?”

  “One hundred and eighty-five million,” said Ponter.

  “Why so few?” asked Mary.

  “Why so many?” asked Ponter.

  “I don’t know,” replied Mary. “I never thought about it.”

  “Do you not—in my world, we know how to prevent pregnancy. I could perhaps teach you …”

  Mary smiled. “We have methods, too.”

  Ponter lifted his eyebrow. “Perhaps ours work better.”

  Mary laughed. “Perhaps.”

  “Is there enough food for six billion people?”

  “We mostly eat plants. We cultivate”—a bleep; Hak’s convention upon hearing a word that wasn’t yet in its database and that it couldn’t figure out from context—“we grow them deliberately. I’ve noticed you don’t seem to like bread”—another bleep—“um, food from grain, but bread, or rice, is what most of us eat.”

  “You manage to comfortably feed six billion people with plants?”

  “Well, ah, no,” said Mary. “About half a billion people don’t have enough to eat.”

  “That is very bad,” said Ponter, simply.

  Mary could not disagree. Still, she realized with a start that Ponter had, to this point, been exposed only to a sanitized view of Earth. He’d seen a little TV, but not enough to really open his eyes. Nonetheless, it did indeed seem that Ponter was going to spend the rest of his life on this Earth. He needed to be told about war, and the crime rate, and pollution, and slavery—the whole bloody smear across time that was human history.

  “Our world is a complex place,” said Mary, as if that excused the fact that people were starving.

  “So I have seen,” said Ponter. “We have only one species of humanity, although there were more in the past. But you seem to have three or four.”

  Mary shook her head slightly. “What?” she said
.

  “The different types of human. You are obviously of one species, and Reuben is of another. And the male who helped rescue me, he seemed perhaps to be of a third species.”

  Mary smiled. “Those aren’t different species. There’s only one species of humanity here, too: Homo sapiens.”

  “You can all breed with each other?” asked Ponter.

  “Yes,” said Mary.

  “And the offspring are fertile?”

  “Yes.”

  Ponter frowned. “You are the geneticist,” he said, “not I, but … but … if they can all breed with each other, then why the diversity? Would not over time all humans end up looking similar, a mixture of all the possible traits?”

  Mary exhaled noisily. She hadn’t quite expected to get into that particular mess so soon. “Well, umm, in the past—not today, you understand, but …” She swallowed. “Well, not as much today, but in the past, people of one race”—a different bleep; a recognized word that couldn’t be translated in this context—“people of one skin color didn’t have much to do with people of another color.”

  “Why?” said Ponter. A simple question, so simple, really …

  Mary lifted her shoulders slightly. “Well, the coloration differences arose originally because populations were geographically isolated. But after that … after that, limited interaction occurred due to ignorance, stupidity, hatred.”

  “Hatred,” repeated Ponter.

  “Yes, sad to say.” She shrugged a little. “There is much in my species’ past that I’m not proud of.”

  Ponter was quiet for a long moment. “I have,” he said at last, “wondered about this world of yours. I was surprised when I saw the images of skulls at the hospital. I have seen such skulls, but on my world they are known only from our fossil record. It startled me to see flesh on what to this point I had only known as bone.”

  He paused again, looking at Mary as if still disconcerted by her appearance. She shifted slightly in her chair.