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Authors: Robert J. Sawyer

BOOK: Hominids
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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.
Reuben raised his eyebrows in surprise, and Louise explained. “I was getting confused talking to them, trying to keep straight what was the implant speaking on its own, and what was the implant translating for Ponter. It’s now using a male voice for Ponter’s translated words, and a female voice for its own words.”
“Simpler this way,” said Hak’s familiar female voice.
“Yes,” said Reuben, “it certainly is.”
Louise gingerly used her long fingers to unwrap the foil around her grilled veggies. “Well,” she said, “let’s see what else we can find out.”
And for the next hour Reuben and Louise talked with Ponter and Hak. But by then, the mosquitoes were out in abundance. Reuben lit a citronella candle to drive them away, but the smell made Ponter gag. Reuben extinguished the candle, and they went back into his living room, Ponter sitting in a big easy chair, Louise at one end of the couch with her long legs tucked underneath her body, and Reuben at the other end.
They continued talking for another three hours, slowly piecing together what had happened. And, once the full story had emerged, Reuben sank back into the couch, absolutely amazed.
Chapter 20

Day Three

Sunday, August 4

148/118/26

 

NEWS SEARCH

Keyword(s):
Neanderthal
Word this morning from Sudbury, Canada, is that marriage proposals are outnumbering death threats two-to-one for the Neanderthal visitor. Twenty-eight women have sent letters or e-mails c/o this newspaper proposing to him, while Sudbury police and the RCMP have recorded only thirteen threats against his life …
USA TODAY
POLL:
• Percentage who believe the so-called Neanderthal is a fake:
54
.
• Who believe he’s really a Neanderthal, but came from somewhere on this Earth:
26
.
• Who believe he came from outer space:
11
.
• Who believe he came from a parallel world:
9
.
Police today defused a bomb left at the entrance to the mineshaft elevator leading down to the cavern containing the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, where the so-called Neanderthal first appeared…
A religious sect in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, is hailing the arrival of the Neanderthal in Canada as the Second Coming of Christ. “Of course he looks like an ancient human,” said the Rev. Hooley Gordwell. “The world is 6,000 years old, and Christ first came among us fully a third of that span ago. We’ve changed a bit, perhaps due to better nutrition, but he hasn’t.” The group is planning a pilgrimage to the mining town of Sudbury, Ontario, where the Neanderthal is currently living.

 

Early the next morning, after taking care not to be seen
en route
, Ponter and Dr. Montego rendezvoused with Mary in the lab at Laurentian. It was time to analyze Ponter’s DNA, to answer the big question.
Sequencing 379 nucleotides took meticulous work. Mary sat hunched over a milky white plastic desktop, the surface illuminated by fluorescent tubes beneath it. She’d placed the autorad film on the desktop and, with a felt-tip marker, wrote out the letters of the genetic alphabet for the string in question: G-G-C—one of the triplets that coded for the amino acid glycine; T-A-T, the code for tyrosine; A-T-A, which in mitochondrial DNA, as opposed to nuclear DNA, specified methionine; A-A-A, the recipe for lysine …
At last she was done: all 379 bases from a specific part of Ponter’s control region were identified. Mary’s notebook computer had a little DNA-analysis program on it. She started by typing in the 379 letters she’d just written on the film, and then she asked Reuben to type them in again, just to make sure they’d been entered correctly.
The computer immediately reported three differences between what Mary had entered and what Reuben had, noting—it was an intelligent little program—a frameshift caused by Mary accidentally leaving off a T at one point; the other two errors were typos by Reuben. When she was sure they had all 379 letters entered correctly, she had the program compare Ponter’s sequence to the one she’d extracted from the Neanderthal type specimen at the
Rheinisches Landesmuseum
.
“Well?” said Reuben. “What’s the verdict?”
Mary leaned back in her chair, astonished. “The DNA I took from Ponter,” she said, “differs in seven places from the DNA recovered from the Neanderthal fossil.” She raised a hand. “Now, some individual variation was to be expected, and naturally there’d be some genetic drift over time, but …”
“Yes?” said Reuben.
Mary lifted her shoulders. “He’s a Neanderthal, all right.”
“Wow,” said Reuben, looking at Ponter as if seeing him for the first time. “Wow. A living Neanderthal.”
Ponter spoke a bit in his own language, and his implant interpreted: “My kind gone?” said the male voice.
“From here?” asked Mary. “Yes, your kind is gone from here—for at least 27,000 years.”
Ponter lowered his head, contemplating this.
Mary contemplated it, too. Until Ponter had shown up, the nearest living relatives
Homo sapiens
had were the two members of genus
Pan
: the chimpanzee and the bonobo. Both were equally closely related to humans, sharing about 98.5 percent of humanity’s DNA. Mary was nowhere near finished with her studies on Ponter’s DNA, but she guessed he shared as much as 99.5 percent with her kind of
H. sapiens
.
And that 0.5 percent accounted for all the differences. If he was a typical Neanderthal, his braincase probably was larger than a normal man’s. And he was better muscled than just about any human Mary had ever met: his arms were as thick around as most men’s thighs. Plus, his eyes were an incredible golden brown; she wondered if there was any eye-color variation among his kind.
He was also quite hairy, although it seemed less so because of its light color. His forearms, and, she presumed, his back and chest, were well thatched. And he had a beard, and a full head of hair, parted in the center.
It hit her then: where she’d seen that sort of part before. Bonobos, those lithe apes sometimes called pygmy chimpanzees, all sported the same’do. Fascinating. She wondered whether all his people had hair like that or if it was just a style he cultivated.
Ponter spoke again in his own language, his voice low, perhaps really just talking to himself, but the implant rendered the words in English anyway: “My kind gone.”
Mary made her tone as gentle as she could. “Yes. I’m sorry.”
More syllables spilled from Ponter’s lips, and his Companion said, “I … no others. I … all …” He shook his head, and spoke again. The Companion switched to its female voice, speaking for itself. “I do not have the vocabulary to translate what Ponter is saying.”
Mary nodded slowly, sadly. “The word you’re looking for,” she said gently, “is ‘alone.’”

 

* * *

 

Adikor Huld’s
dooslarm basadlarm
was held in the Gray Council building, on the periphery of the Center. Males could get to it without crossing deep into female territory; females could enter it without technically leaving their land. Adikor wasn’t sure what having the preliminary inquiry during Last Five would do for his chances, but the adjudicator, a woman named Komel Sard, looked to be from generation 142, and so would be long past menopause.
Adikor’s accuser, Daklar Bolbay, was now holding forth in the large square chamber. Fans blew air from the chamber’s north side to its south, and Adjudicator Sard sat at the south end, watching the action unfold with a neutral expression on her lined, wise face. The blowing air served a double purpose: it brought pheromones to her from the accused, which could often convey as much meaning as the words being spoken, and it kept her own pheromones—which might have betrayed which arguments were impressing her—from being detectable by the accuser or the accused, both of whom were positioned on the north side.
Adikor had met Klast many times, and had always gotten along well with her; her man-mate, after all, had been Ponter. But Bolbay, who had been Klast’s woman-mate, seemed to have none of Klast’s warmth or easy humor.
Bolbay was wearing a dark orange pant and a dark orange top; orange had always been the color of the accuser. For his part, Adikor wore blue, the color of the accused. Hundreds of spectators, equally split between male and female, sat on either side of the room; a
dooslarm basadlarm
for murder was clearly considered well worth seeing. Jasmel Ket was there, as was her young sister, Megameg Bek. Adikor’s own woman-mate, Lurt, was present as well; she’d given him a big hug when she’d arrived. Seated next to Lurt was Adikor’s son Dab, the same age as little Megameg.
And, of course, almost all of Saldak’s Exhibitionists were present; there was no more interesting event going on right now than this hearing. Despite his current situation, Adikor was pleased to see Hawst in the flesh, having used his Voyeur to look in on so much of his life in the past. He also recognized Lulasm, who had been Ponter’s favorite, and Gawlt and Talok and Repeth and a couple of others. The Exhibitionists were easy to spot: they had to wear silver clothes, signaling to everyone around them that their implant broadcasts were publicly accessible.
Adikor was sitting on a stool; there was plenty of room on all sides of it for Bolbay to circle him as she spoke, and she did so with great theatrical relish: “So tell us, Scholar Huld, did your experiment succeed? Did you successfully factor your target number?”
Adikor shook his head. “No.”
“So doing it beneath the surface did not help,” said Bolbay. “Whose idea was it to perform this factoring experiment far underground?” Her voice was low for a female’s, a deep rumbling sound.
“Ponter and I jointly agreed to it.”
“Yes, yes, but who initially suggested the idea? You, or Scholar Boddit?”
“I’m not sure.”
“It was you, wasn’t it?”
Adikor shrugged. “It might have been.”
Bolbay was now in front of him; Adikor refused to acknowledge her presence by shifting his gaze to her. “Now, Scholar Huld, tell us all why you chose this location.”
“I didn’t say I chose it. I said I
might
have.”
“Fine. Tell us, then, why this location was selected for your work.”
Adikor frowned, thinking about how much detail was appropriate. “Earth,” he said at last, “is constantly bombarded by cosmic rays.”
“Which are?”
“Ionizing radiation coming from outer space. A stream of protons, helium nuclei, and other nuclei. When they collide with nuclei in our atmosphere, they produce secondary radiation—mostly pions, muons, electrons, and
dutar
rays.”
“And these are dangerous?”
“Not really—at least, not in the small quantities produced by cosmic rays. But they do interfere with delicate instruments, and so we wanted to set up our equipment somewhere that was shielded from them. And, well, the Debral nickel mine
was
nearby.”
“Couldn’t you have used another facility?”
“Conceivably, I suppose. But Debral is unique not only for its depth—it is the deepest mine in the world—but also for the low background radiation of its rocks. The uranium and other radioactives present in many other mines give off charged particles that would have impaired our instruments.”
“So you were well shielded down there?”
“Yes—from everything except neutrinos, I suppose.” Adikor caught the expression on Adjudicator Sard’s face. “Minuscule particles that stream right through solid matter; nothing can shield against them.”
“Now, weren’t you also shielded against something else down there?” asked Bolbay.
“I don’t understand,” said Adikor
“A thousand armspans of rock between you and the surface. No radiation—not even cosmic-ray particles that had traveled unimpeded for huge distances—could get down to you.”
“Correct.”
“And no radiation could make it up from the surface to where you were working, isn’t that right?”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean,” said Bolbay, “that the signals from your Companions—yours, and Scholar Boddit’s—could not be transmitted out of there to the surface.”
“Yes, that’s true, although I hadn’t really given it any thought until an enforcer mentioned it to me yesterday.”
“Hadn’t given it much thought?” Bolbay’s tone was one of incredulity. “Since the day you were born, you’ve had a personal recording cube in the alibi-archive pavilion adjacent to this very Council building. And it has recorded everything you’ve done, every moment of your life, as transmitted by your Companion. Every moment of your life, that is, except the time you spent far, far below Earth’s surface.”
“I’m no expert on such matters,” said Adikor, somewhat disingenuously. “I really don’t know much about the transmission of data from a Companion.”
“Come now, Scholar Huld. A moment ago you were regaling us with stories of muons and pions, and now you expect us to believe you don’t understand simple radio broadcasting?”

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