Hominids

by Robert J. Sawyer

  “I know who you are,” said the security man. “And, yes, you’re on the approved list.”

  “Well, this young lady is with me. She did indeed save Ponter’s life at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory.”

  “Very well,” said the man. “Sorry to be a pain, but we’ve got reporters and curious members of the public trying to sneak in all the time, and—”

  At that moment, Dr. Naonihal Singh walked by, sporting a dark brown turban. “Dr. Singh!” called Reuben.

  “Hello,” said Singh, coming over and shaking Reuben’s hand. “Escaping from the telephone, are we? Mine has been ringing off the hook.”

  Reuben smiled. “Mine, too. Everybody wants to know about our Mr. Ponter, it seems.”

  “You know I’m delighted that he is well,” said Singh, “but, really, I would like to discharge him. We don’t have enough hospital beds as it is, thanks to Mike Harris.”

  Reuben nodded sympathetically. The tightwad former premier of Ontario had closed or amalgamated many hospitals across the province.

  “And,” continued Singh, “not putting too fine a point on it, but if he could be gone from here, perhaps I would stop being pestered by the media.”

  “Where should we take him?” asked Reuben.

  “That I am not knowing,” replied Singh. “But if he is well, he does not belong in a hospital.”

  Reuben nodded. “All right, okay. We’ll take him with us when we leave. Is there a way to sneak him out without the press seeing?”

  “The whole idea,” said Singh, “is for the press to know he is gone.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Reuben. “But we’d like to get him somewhere safe before they realize.”

  “I see,” said Singh. “Take him out via the underground garage. Park in there; take the staff elevator down to B2, and exit through the corridor there. As long as Ponter keeps his head down in your car, no one will see him departing.”

  “Excellent,” said Reuben.

  “Please to take him today,” said Singh.

  Reuben nodded. “I will.”

  “Thank you,” said Singh.

  Reuben and Louise headed upstairs.

  “Hello, Ponter,” said Reuben, as he came into the hospital room. Ponter was sitting up on the bed, wearing the same clothes he’d been found in.

  At first Reuben thought Ponter had been watching TV, but then the doctor noticed the way he was holding up his left arm, with Hak’s glass eye faced toward the monitor. More likely, the Companion had been listening to further language samples, trying to pick up more words from context.

  “Hello, Reuben,” said Hak, presumably on behalf of Ponter. Ponter turned to look at Louise. Reuben noted that he didn’t react the way a normal human male might; there was no smile of delight at the unexpected visit from a gorgeous young woman.

  “Louise,” said Reuben. “Meet Ponter.”

  Louise stepped forward. “Hello, Ponter!” she said. “I’m Louise Benoît.”

  “Louise pulled you out of the water,” Reuben said.

  Ponter now did smile warmly; perhaps everyone here looked the same to him, thought Reuben. “Lou—” said Hak’s voice. Ponter shrugged apologetically.

  “He can’t make the ee sound in your name,” said Reuben.

  Louise smiled. “That’s fine. You can call me Lou; lots of my friends do.”

  “Lou,” repeated Ponter, speaking for himself in his deep voice. “I—you—I…”

  Reuben looked at Louise. “We’re still building up his vocabulary. I’m afraid we haven’t gotten to social niceties yet. I’m sure he’s trying to say thank you for saving his life.”

  “My pleasure,” said Louise. “I’m glad you’re all right.”

  Reuben nodded. “And speaking of being all right,” he said, “Ponter, you from here go.”

  Ponter’s one continuous eyebrow rolled up his browridge. “Yes!” said Hak, speaking again for him. “Where? Where go?”

  Reuben scratched the side of his shaved head. “That’s a good question.”

  “Far,” said Hak. “Far.”

  “You want to go far away?” said Reuben. “Why?”

  “The—the…” Hak trailed off, but Ponter moved a hand up, covering his giant nose—perhaps the Neanderthal equivalent of pinching one’s nostrils.

  “The smell?” said Reuben. He nodded and turned to Louise. “With a honker like that, I’m not surprised that he’s got a keen sense of smell. I hate the smell of hospitals myself, and I spend a lot of time in them.”

  Louise looked at Ponter, but spoke to Reuben. “You still have no idea where he’s from?”

  “No.”

  “I’m thinking parallel world,” said Louise, simply.

  “What?” said Reuben. “Oh, come on!”

  Louise shrugged. “Where else could he be from?”

  “Well, that’s a good question, but…”

  “And if he is from a parallel world,” said Louise, “suppose that world doesn’t have internal-combustion engines, or any of the other things that pollute our air. If you really did have a very sensitive nose, you’d never adopt stinking technologies.”

  “Perhaps, but that hardly means he’s from another universe.”

  “Either way,” said Louise, brushing her long, brown hair out of her eyes, “he probably wants to go somewhere away from civilization. Somewhere where it doesn’t smell as bad.”

  “Well, I can get a leave from Inco,” said Reuben. “The beauty of being the staff physician is that you get to write your own leave authorizations. I’d really like to keep working with him.”

  “I’ve got nothing to do, either,” said Louise, “while they’re draining the SNO facility.”

  Reuben felt his heart pound. Damn, he was still a hound dog! But surely Louise was thinking of coming with them because of her scientific interest in Ponter. Still, it would be lovely to spend more time with her; her accent was incredibly sexy.

  “I wonder if the authorities will try to take him again,” said Reuben.

  “It’s only been a day since he got here,” said Louise, “and I bet no one in Ottawa is really taking it seriously yet. It’s just another crazy National Enquirer-type story. Federal agents and military types don’t show up every time someone claims a UFO has been sighted. I’m sure they haven’t even begun to think this might be real.”

  The smells are indeed awful, thought Ponter, as he looked at Lou and Reuben. They made a stark contrast: him with dark skin and completely bald, and her with skin even paler than Ponter’s own, and with thick, brown hair cascading past her narrow shoulders.

  Ponter was still frightened and confused, but Hak whispered soothing words into his cochlear implants whenever the Companion detected that Ponter’s vital signs were getting too agitated. Without Hak’s aid, Ponter felt sure he would have already gone mad.

  So much had happened in such a short time! Just yesterday, he had awoken in his own bed with Adikor, had fed his dog, had gone to work…

  And now he was here, wherever here might be. Hak was right; this must be Earth. Ponter rather suspected there were other habitable planets in the infinite reaches of space, but he seemed to weigh the same here as he had at home, and the air was breathable—breathable, in the way that his beloved Adikor’s cooking might be said to be edible! There were foul aromas, gaseous smells, fruity smells, chemical smells, smells he couldn’t even begin to identify. But, he had to admit, the air did sustain him, and the food they had given him was (mostly!) chemically compatible with his digestive system.

  So: Earth. And surely not Earth of the past. There were parts of modern Earth, especially in equatorial regions, that were little explored, but, as Hak had pointed out, the vegetation here was largely the same as that in Saldak, meaning it was unlikely that he was on another continent, or in the southern hemisphere. And although it was warm, many of the trees he’d seen were deciduous; this couldn’t be an equatorial area.

  The future, then? But no. If humanity faded from existence, for some
unfathomable reason, it wouldn’t be Gliksins that rose to take its place. Gliksins were extinct; a revival of them would be as unlikely as one of dinosaurs.

  If this was not just Earth, but in fact the same part of Earth Ponter himself had come from, then where were the vast clouds of passenger pigeons? He’d seen not a single one since arriving here. Maybe, thought Ponter, the nauseating smells drove them away.

  But no.

  No.

  This was neither the future, nor the past. It was the present—a parallel world, a world where, incredibly, despite their innate stupidity, the Gliksins had not gone extinct.

  “Ponter,” said Reuben.

  Ponter looked up, a vaguely lost expression on his face, as if a reverie had been broken. “Yes?” he said.

  “Ponter, we will take you somewhere else. I’m not sure where. But, well, for starters, we’ll get you out of here. You, um, you can come stay with me.”

  Ponter tipped his head, listening to Hak’s translation, no doubt. He looked puzzled at a few points; presumably Hak wasn’t quite sure how to render some of the words Reuben had used.

  “Yes,” said Ponter, at last. “Yes. We go from here.”

  Reuben gestured for Ponter to take the lead.

  “Open door,” said Ponter, speaking on his own behalf, with evident delight, as he pulled open the hospital room’s door. “Go through door,” he said, following the words with the appropriate deed. He then waited for Louise and Reuben to exit as well. “Close door,” he said, shutting the door behind them. And then he smiled broadly, and when Ponter smiled broadly, it measured almost a foot from edge to edge. “Ponter out!”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Following Dr. Singh’s instructions, Reuben Montego, Louise Benoît, and Ponter made it safely down to Reuben’s car, which he’d moved to the staff garage. Reuben had a wine-colored SUV, the paint chipped from the gravel roads at the Inco site. Ponter got into the backseat and lay down, covering his head with an opened section of today’s Sudbury Star. Louise—who had walked to the hospital—sat up front with Reuben. She’d accepted Reuben’s invitation to join him and Ponter at his place for dinner; he’d said he’d give her a lift back home later in the evening.

  They drove along, CJMX-FM playing softly on the car’s stereo; the current song was Geri Halliwell’s rendition of “It’s Raining Men.” “So,” said Reuben, looking over at Louise, “make me a believer. Why do you think Ponter came from a parallel universe?”

  Louise pursed her full lips for a moment—God, thought Reuben, she really is lovely—then: “How much physics do you know?”

  “Me?” said Reuben. “Stuff from high school. Oh, and I bought a copy of A Brief History of Time when Stephen Hawking came to Sudbury, but I didn’t get very far into it.”

  “All right,” said Louise, as Reuben made a right-hand turn, “let me ask you a question. If you shoot a single photon at a barrier with two vertical slits in it, and a piece of photographic paper on the other side shows interference patterns, what happened?”

  “I don’t know,” said Reuben, truthfully.

  “Well,” Louise said, “one interpretation is that the single photon turned into a wave of energy, and, as it hit the wall with the slits, each slit created a new wave front, and you got classical interference, with crests and troughs either amplifying each other or canceling each other out.”

  Her words rang a vague bell in Reuben’s mind. “All right.”

  “Well, as I said, that’s one interpretation. Another is that the universe actually splits, briefly becoming two universes. In one, the photon—still a particle—went through the left slit, and in the other, the photon went through the right slit. And, because it doesn’t make any conceivable difference which slit the photon went through in this or the other universe, the two universes collapse back into one, with the interference pattern being the result of the universes rejoining.”

  Reuben nodded, but only because that seemed the right thing to do.

  “So,” said Louise, “we have an experimental physical basis for possibly believing in the temporary existence of parallel universes—those interference patterns really do show up, even if you only send one photon toward a pair of slits. But what if the two universes didn’t collapse back into one? What if, after splitting, they continued to go their separate ways?”

  “Yes?” said Reuben, trying to follow.

  “Well,” said Louise, “imagine the universe splitting into two, who knows, tens of thousands of years ago, back when there were two species of humanity living side by side: our ancestors, which were the Cro-Magnons” (Reuben noted she pronounced it just as a French-speaker should, with no g sound), “and Ponter’s ancestors, ancient Neanderthals. I don’t know how long the two kinds coexisted, but—”

  “From 100,000 years ago until maybe 27,000 years ago,” said Reuben.

  Louise made an impressed face, clearly surprised that Reuben had this tidbit at hand.

  Reuben shrugged. “We’ve got a geneticist up from Toronto named Mary Vaughan. She told me.”

  “Ah. Okay, well, at some point during that time, perhaps a split occurred, and the two universes continued to diverge. In one, our ancestors became dominant. And in the other, Neanderthals went on to become dominant, creating their own civilization and language.”

  Reuben felt his head swimming. “But…but then how did the two universes come back into contact?”

  “Je ne sais pas,” said Louise, shaking her head.

  They exited Sudbury, heading down a country road to the misnamed town of Lively, near where the mine was actually located.

  “Ponter,” said Reuben. “You can probably get up now; we won’t be stuck in traffic anymore.”

  Ponter didn’t move.

  Reuben realized he’d been too complex. “Ponter, up,” he said.

  He heard the sound of newspaper rustling and saw Ponter’s massive head emerge in the rearview mirror. “Up,” confirmed Ponter.

  “Tonight,” said Reuben, “you will stay at my house, understand?”

  After a pause, presumably in which a translation was rendered, Ponter said, “Yes.”

  Hak spoke up. “Ponter must have food.”

  “Yes,” said Reuben. “Yes, we eat soon.”

  They continued to Reuben’s home, arriving there about twenty minutes later. It was a modern two-story house on a couple of acres of land just outside Lively. Ponter, Louise, and Reuben headed indoors, with Ponter watching in fascination as Reuben unlocked the front door then bolted and chained it shut from the inside once they were within.

  Ponter smiled. “Cool,” he said, with delight.

  At first, Reuben thought he was complimenting him on his decor, but then he realized Ponter meant it literally. He was evidently quite pleased to find Reuben’s house to be air conditioned.

  “Well,” said Reuben, smiling at Louise and Ponter, “welcome to my humble abode. Make yourselves comfortable.”

  Louise looked around. “You’re not married?” she asked.

  Reuben wondered at the question; the first, best interpretation was that she was checking on his availability. The second, more likely, interpretation was she had suddenly realized that she had gone out into the country with a man she hardly knew, and was now alone with him and a Neanderthal in an empty house. And the third interpretation, Reuben realized, as he took stock of his own messy living room, with magazines scattered here and there and a plate with the remnants of a pizza crust sitting on the coffee table, was that obviously Reuben lived alone; no woman would have put up with such a mess.

  “No,” said Reuben. “I was, but…”

  Louise nodded. “You’ve got good taste,” she said, looking at the furnishings, a mixture of Caribbean and Canadian, with lots of dark stained wood.

  “My wife did,” said Reuben. “I haven’t changed it much since we split.”

  “Ah,” said Louise. “Can I help you with dinner?”

  “No, I thought I’d just put on some steaks. I’ve got
a barbecue out back.”

  “I’m a vegetarian,” said Louise.

  “Oh. Um, I could grill you some vegetables—and, um, a potato?”

  “That would be great,” said Louise.

  “Okay,” said Reuben. “You keep Ponter company.” He headed off to the bathroom to wash his hands.

  Working on the deck behind the house, Reuben could see Louise and Ponter having an increasingly animated conversation. Presumably, Hak was picking up more words as they went along. Finally, when the steaks were done, Reuben tapped on the glass to get Louise’s and Ponter’s attention, and waved for them to come on out.

  A moment later, they did so. “Dr. Montego,” said Louise, excitedly, “Ponter is a physicist!”

  “He is?” said Reuben.

  “Yes. Yes, indeed. I haven’t got all the details yet, but he’s definitely a physicist—and, I think, actually a quantum physicist.”

  “How did you determine that?” asked Reuben.

  “He said he thinks about the way things work, and I said—guessing he might be an engineer—did he mean big things, and he said, no, no, little things, things too small to be seen. And I drew some diagrams—basic physics stuff—and he recognized them, and said that’s what he did.”

  Reuben looked at Ponter with renewed admiration. The low forehead and the prominent browridge made him look, well, a little dim, but—a physicist! A scientist! “Well, well, well,” said Reuben. He motioned for them to sit at a circular deck table with an umbrella, and he transferred steaks and grilled veggies he’d wrapped in aluminum foil to plates and set them on the table.

  Ponter smiled his wide smile. This, clearly, was real food to him! But then he looked around again, just as Reuben had seen him do this morning, as if something were missing.

  Reuben used his knife to slice a piece off his steak, and brought it to his mouth.

  Ponter, awkwardly, mimicked what Reuben had done, although he sliced off a much bigger piece.

  After Ponter had finished chewing, he made some sounds that must have been words in his language. They were immediately followed by a male voice Reuben hadn’t heard before. “Good,” it said. “Good food.” The voice seemed to have come from Ponter’s implant.