Humans

by neetha Napew

  Ponter shook his head. “That belief is whatcaused this to happen. The only way to honor the dead is by ensuring that no more enter that state prematurely.”

  Mary sounded angry. “All right, then. Go tell them.”

  Ponter turned and looked at the Gliksins and their ebony reflections in the wall. His people almost never took human lives, and Mary’s people did it on such large scales, with such frequency. Surely this belief in God and an afterlife had to be linked to their readiness to kill.

  He took a step forward, but...

  But, right now, these people did not look vicious, did not look bloodthirsty, did not look ready to kill. Right now, they looked sad, so incredibly sad.

  Mary was still upset with him. “Go on,” she said, gesturing with a hand. “What’s the holdup? Go tell them.”

  Ponter thought about how sad he himself had been when Klast had died. And yet...

  And yet, these people-these strange, strange Gliksins-were taking some comfort from their beliefs. He stared at the individuals by the wall, kept away from him by armed agents. No, no, he would not tell these mourners that their loved ones were truly gone. After all, it wasn’t these sad people who had sent them off to die.

  Ponter turned toward Mary. “I understand the belief provides comfort, but...” He shook his head. “But how do you break out of the cycle? God making killing palatable, God providing comfort after the killing is done. How do you keep from repeating it over and over again?”

  “I have no idea,” said Mary.

  “You must dosomething,” Ponter said.

  “I do,” said Mary. “I pray.”

  Ponter looked at her, looked back at the mourners, then turned once more to Mary, and he let his head hang, staring down at the ground in front of him, unable to face her or the thousands of names. “If I thought there was the slightest possibility it would work,” he said softly, “I would join you.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  “Fascinating,” said Jurard Selgan. “Fascinating.”

  “What?” Ponter’s voice was tinged with irritation.

  “Your behavior, while at the memorial wall commemorating those Gliksins who had died in southeast Galasoy.”

  “What about it?” said Ponter. His voice was sharp, like that of someone trying to talk while a scab was being picked off.

  “Well, this was not the first time your beliefs-ourbeliefs, as Barasts-had been in conflict with those of the Gliksins, was it?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Indeed,” said Selgan, “such conflicts must have come up on your first visit there, no?”

  “I guess.”

  “Can you give me an example?” asked Selgan.

  Ponter folded his arms in front of his chest. “All right,” he said, in a smug, I’ll-show-you tone. “I mentioned this to you right at the beginning: the Gliksins have this silly notion that the universe has only existed for a finite time. They’ve completely misconstrued the redshift evidence, thinking it indicates an expanding universe; they don’t understand that mass varies over time. Further, they think the cosmic microwave background radiation is the lingering echo of what they call ‘the big bang’-a vast explosion they believe started the universe.”

  “They seem to like things blowing up,” said Selgan.

  “They certainly do. But, of course, the uniformity of the background radiation is really caused by repeated absorption and emission of electrons trapped in plasma-pinching magnetic-vortex filaments.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” said Selgan, conceding that this wasn’t his territory of expertise.

  “Iamright,” replied Ponter. “But I didn’t fight with them over that issue. During my first visit, Mare said to me, ‘I don’t think you’re going to convince many people that the big bang didn’t happen.’ And I told her that was fine; I said: ‘Feeling a need to convince others that you’re right is something that comes from religion; I’m simply content to know that I amright, even if others don’t know it.’”

  “Ah,” said Selgan. “And do you really feel that way?”

  “Yes. To the Gliksins, knowledge is a battle! A territorial war! Why, to have their equivalent of the title ‘Scholar’ conferred upon you, you have todefenda thesis. That’s the word they use: defend! But science isn’t about defending one’s position against all comers; it’s about flexibility and open-mindedness and valuing the truth, no matter who finds it.”

  “I concur,” said Selgan. He paused for a moment, then: “But you didn’t spend much time looking for any evidence as to whether the Gliksins might have been right in their belief in an afterlife.”

  “That’s not true. I gave Mary every opportunity to demonstrate the validity of that claim.”

  “Before this encounter at the memorial wall, you mean?”

  “Yes. But she had nothing!”

  “And so, as in the case of their finite cosmology, you let the matter go, content to know that you were right?”

  “Yes. Well, I mean...”

  Selgan raised his eyebrow. “Yes?”

  “I mean, all right, sure, I argued with her about this belief in an afterlife. But that was different.”

  “Different from the cosmological question? Why?”

  “Because so much more was at stake.”

  “Doesn’t the cosmological question deal with the ultimate fate of the entire universe?”

  “I mean, it wasn’t just an abstract issue. It was-itis-the heart of everything.”

  “Why?”

  “Because...because-gristle, I don’t know why. It just seems terribly important. It’s what lets them fight all those wars, after all.”

  “I understand. But I also understand that it is fundamental to their beliefs; it was something that surely you must have realized they weren’t going to give up easily.”

  “I suppose.”

  “And yet, you continued to press the point.”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Why?”

  Ponter shrugged.

  “Would you like to hear my guess?” asked Selgan.

  Ponter shrugged again.

  “You were pushing this issue because you wanted to see if therewassome proof of this afterlife. Perhaps Mare, and the other Gliksins, had been holding out on you. Perhaps there was evidence that she would reveal if you kept pushing.”

  “There cannot be evidence for that which does not exist,” said Ponter.

  “Granted,” said Selgan. “But either you were trying to convince them that you were right-or you were trying to force them to convinceyouthat theywere right.”

  Ponter shook his head. “It was pointless,” he said. “It is a ridiculous belief, this notion of souls.”

  “Souls?” said Selgan.

  “The immaterial part of one’s essence that they believe is immortal.”

  “Ah. And you say this is a ridiculous belief?”

  “Of course.”

  “But surely they are entitled to hold it, no?”

  “I guess.”

  “Just as they are entitled to their bizarre cosmological model, no?”

  “I suppose.”

  “And yet, you couldn’t let this question of an afterlife go, could you? Even once you’d left the memorial wall, you still tried to push this point, didn’t you?”

  Ponter looked away.

  With the crisis over the closing of the portal at least temporarily averted-there was no way the Neanderthals would shut it down now with a dozen of their most valuable citizens on this side-Jock Krieger decided to return to the research he’d been doing earlier.

  He left Seabreeze, driving his black BMW to the River Campus of the University of Rochester; the river in question was the Genesee. When he’d been setting up Synergy, a couple of phone calls from the right people was all it had taken to get his entire staff full priority access to the UR Library holdings. Jock parked his car in the Wilmot Lot, and headed into the brown brick Carlson Science & Engineering Library-named for Chester F. Carlson, t
he inventor of xerography. Journals, Jock knew, were on the first floor. He showed his university VIP ID to the librarian, a pudgy black woman with her hair in a red kerchief. He told her what he needed, and she waddled off into the back. Jock, never one to waste time, pulled out his PDA and scanned articles from that day’sNew York Times andWashington Post .

  After about five minutes, the librarian returned, presenting Jock with the three back issues he’d requested-one ofEarth and Planetary Science Letters, and two ofNature -which his Web-searching had shown contained follow-ups to the rapid-magnetic-reversal research by Coe,et al .

  Jock found an unoccupied study carrel and sat down. The first thing he did was remove his HP CapShare from his briefcase-a battery-powered hand-held document scanner. He ran the device over the pages of the articles he was interested in, capturing them at 200 dpi, adequate for OCRing later. Jock smiled at the portrait of Chester Carlson mounted near where he was sitting-he’d have loved this little unit.

  Jock then started reading the actual articles. What was most interesting about the original piece, the one inEarth and Planetary Science Letters, was that the authors freely acknowledged that the results they’d found were at odds with conventional wisdom, which held that magnetic collapses would take thousands of years to occur. That belief though, was apparently based not so much on established facts but rather just a general feeling that the Earth’s magnetic field was a ponderous thing that couldn’t rapidly stand on its head.

  But Coe and Prévot had found evidence of extremely rapid collapses. Their studies were based on lava flows at Steens Mountain in southern Oregon, where a volcano had erupted fifty-six separate times during a magnetic-field reversal, providing time-lapse snapshots of the action. Although they couldn’t determine the intervals between the eruptions, they did know how long the lava in each one must have taken to cool to the Curie Point, where the magnetization of the newly formed rocks would be locked in, matching the current orientation and strength of Earth’s magnetic field. The study suggested the field had collapsed in as little as a few weeks, rather than over a period of millennia.

  Jock read the follow-up article by Coe and company inNature , as well as a critique of it by a man named Ronald T. Merrill, which seemed to amount to nothing more than what Merrill himself referred to as “the principle of least astonishment:” a dogmatic statement that it was simpler to believe that Coe and Prévot were flat-out wrong, rather than to have to accept such a remarkable finding, despite being unable to show any flaw in their work.

  Jock Krieger leaned back in the study carrel’s chair. It seemed what Ponter had told that Canadian-government geologist, Arnold Moore, was likely correct.

  And that, Jock realized, meant there might be no time to waste.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  The Paleoanthropology Society met each year, alternately in conjunction with the Association of American Archeology and the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. This year, it happened to be the former, and the venue was the Crowne Plaza at Franklin Square.

  The format was simple: a single track of programming, consisting of fifteen-minute presentations. There was only occasionally time for questions; John Yellen, the chair of the society, kept things on schedule with Phileas Fogg precision.

  After the first day of papers, many of the paleoanthropologists adjourned to the hotel bar. “I’m sure people would love a chance to get to talk to you informally,” said Mary to Ponter, as they stood in the corridor leading to the bar. “Shall we go in?”

  Standing solemnly near them was an FBI agent, one of their shadows throughout this trip.

  Ponter flared his nostrils. “There are people smoking in that room.”

  Mary nodded. “In a lot of jurisdictions, thank God, bars are theonly place people can still smoke-and Ottawa and some other places have even outlawed it in bars.”

  Ponter frowned. “It is too bad this meeting could not be in Ottawa.”

  “I know. If you can’t stand it, we don’t have to go in.”

  Ponter considered. “I have had many little ideas for inventions while I have been here, mostly adapting Gliksin technology. But I suspect the one that would make the biggest contribution would be developing nasal filters so that my people will not be constantly assaulted by smells here.”

  Mary nodded. “I don’t like the smell of tobacco smoke, either. Still...”

  “We can go in,” said Ponter.

  Mary turned to the FBI agent. “Could you use a drink, Carlos?”

  “I’m on duty, ma’am,” he said crisply. “But whatever you and Envoy Boddit want to do is fine by me.”

  Mary led the way. The room was dark, with wood-paneled walls. A dozen or so scientists were sitting on stools at the bar, and three small groups were clustered around tables. A TV mounted high on one wall was showing aSeinfeld rerun. Mary recognized it at once: the one where Jerry turns out to be a raving anti-dentite. She was about to head farther into the room when she felt Ponter’s hand on her shoulder. “Is that not the symbol of your people?” he said.

  Ponter was pointing with his other hand, and Mary looked where he was indicating: an electric sign was mounted on the wall, advertising Molson Canadian. Ponter couldn’t read the words, she knew, but he’d correctly identified the large red maple leaf. “Ah, yes,” said Mary. “That’s what Canada is most famous for down here. Beer. Fermented grain.”

  Ponter blinked. “You must be very proud.”

  Mary led the way across the room to one of the small groups sitting in bowl-shaped chairs around a circular table. “Carlos, do you mind?” said Mary, turning to the FBI man.

  “I’ll just be over there, ma’am,” he said. “I’ve heard quite enough about fossils for one day.” He moved to the bar, and sat on a stool, but facing them, rather than the bartender.

  Mary turned to the table. “May we join you?”

  The three seated people-two men and a woman-had been engaged in animated conversation, but they all looked up, and immediately recognized Ponter. “My God, yes,” said one of the men. There was one vacant chair already at the table; he quickly grabbed another.

  “To what do we owe the pleasure?” said the other man, as Mary and Ponter sat down.

  Mary thought about telling part of the truth: no one was smoking at or near this table, and the cluster of chairs was situated in such a way that, even though others might wish to do so, there really wasn’t room for anyone else to join their group-she didn’t want Ponter to be overwhelmed. But she had no intention of telling the other part: that Norman Thierry, the pompous self-styled Neanderthal-DNA expert from UCLA, was sitting across the room. He’d be dying to get at Ponter, but wouldn’t be able to do so.

  Instead, Mary simply ignored the question and made introductions. “This is Henry Running Deer,” she said, indicating a Native American man of about forty. “Henry’s at Brown.”

  “Wasat Brown,” corrected Henry. “I’ve moved to the University of Chicago.”

  “Ah,” said Mary. “And this”-she indicated the woman, who was white and perhaps thirty-five-“is Angela Bromley, from the American Museum of Natural History in New York.”

  Angela extended her right hand. “It’s a real pleasure, Dr. Boddit.”

  “Ponter,” said Ponter, who had come to understand that in this society one should not use another’s first name until invited to do so.

  Angela continued. “And this is my husband, Dieter.”

  “Hello,” said Mary and Ponter simultaneously. And, “Are you an anthropologist, too?” asked Mary.

  “No, no, no,” said Dieter. “I’m in aluminum siding.”

  Ponter tipped his head. “You hide it well.”

  The others looked perplexed, but Mary laughed. “You’ll get used to Ponter’s sense of humor,” she said.

  Dieter got up. “Let me get you two something to drink. Mary-wine?”

  “White wine, yes.”

  “And Ponter?”

  Ponter frowned, clearly not know
ing what to ask for. Mary leaned close to him. “Bars always have Coke,” she said.

  “Coke!” said Ponter, with delight. “Yes, please.”

  Dieter disappeared. Mary helped herself to some of the Bits & Bites sitting in a small wooden bowl on the round table.

  “So,” said Angela, to Ponter, “I hope you don’t mind some questions. You’ve been turning our field upside down, you know.”

  “That was not my intention,” said Ponter.

  “Of course not,” said Angela. “But everything we hear about your world challenges something we thought we knew.”

  “For instance?” asked Ponter.

  “Well, it’s said that your people don’t practice agriculture.”

  “True,” said Ponter.

  “We’d always assumed that agriculture was a prerequisite of advanced civilization,” said Angela, taking a sip of whatever mixed drink she was having.

  “Why?” asked Ponter.

  “Well,” said Angela, “see, we thought that only through agriculture could you be guaranteed a secure food supply. That allows people to specialize in other jobs-teacher, engineer, government worker, and so on.”

  Ponter shook his head slowly back and forth, as if he were stunned by what he was hearing. “We have people on my world who choose to live according to the ancient ways. How long do you think it takes one of them to provide sustenance for itself”-Ponter’s language had a gender-neutral third-person pronoun, Mary knew; this was Hak’s attempt to render it-“and its dependents?”

  Angela lifted her shoulders a little. “A lot, I presume.”

  “No,” said Ponter, “it does not-not as long as you keep your number of dependents low. It takes about nine percent of one’s time.” He paused, either calculating for himself or listening to Hak provide a conversion. “About sixty of your hours a month.”

  “Sixty hours amonth,” repeated Angela. “That’s-my God-that’s just fifteen hours a week.”