Hominids (17 page)

“I didn’t say I don’t understand it,” said Adikor. “It’s just that I’ve never thought about the issue that’s been raised.”

Bolbay was behind him again. “Never thought about the fact, that, while down there, for the first time since your birth, there would be no record available of what you were doing?”

“Look,” said Adikor, speaking directly to the adjudicator, before the orbiting Bolbay blocked his line of sight again. “I haven’t had cause to access my own alibi archive for countless months. Sure, the fact that my actions are normally being recorded is something I’m aware of, in an abstract sense, but I just don’t think about it every day.”

“And yet,” said Bolbay, “every day of your life, you enjoy the peace and safety made possible by that very recording.” She looked at the adjudicator. “You know that as you walk at night, the chances of you being the victim of robbery or murder or
lasagklat
are almost zero, because there’s no way to get away with such a crime. If you charged that—well, say, that
I
had attacked you in Peslar Square, and you could convince an adjudicator that your charge was reasonable, the adjudicator could order your alibi archive or mine unlocked for the time span in question, which would prove that I am innocent. But the fact that a crime cannot be committed without a record of it being made lets us all relax.”

Adikor said nothing.

“Except,” said Bolbay, “when someone contrives a situation to secrete himself and his victim in a place—practically the
only
place—in which no record of what happens between them could have been made.”

“That’s preposterous,” said Adikor.

“Is it? The mine was dug long before the beginning of the Companion Era, and, of course, we’ve used robots to do the mining for ages now. It’s almost unheard of for a human to have to go down into that mine, which is why we’ve never addressed the problem of lack of communication between Companions there and the alibi-archive pavilion. But you set up a situation in which you and Scholar Boddit would be in this subterranean hideaway for great spans of time.”

“We didn’t even think about that.”

“No?” said Bolbay. “Do you recognize the name Kobast Gant?”

Adikor’s heart pounded, and his mouth went dry. “He’s an artificial-intelligence researcher.”

“Indeed he is. And he will state that seven months ago he upgraded both your Companion and Scholar Boddit’s, adding sophisticated artificial-intelligence components to them.”

“Yes,” said Adikor. “He did that.”

“Why?”

“Well, um …”

“Why?”

“Because Ponter hadn’t liked being out of touch with the planetary information network. With our Companions cut off from the network down there, he thought it would be handy to have a lot more processing power localized in them, so that they could help us more with our work.”

“And you somehow forgot this?” said Bolbay.

“As you said,” replied Adikor, his tone sharp, “it was done months ago. I’d gotten quite used to having a Companion that was more chatty than usual. After all, I’m sure Kobast Gant will also state that, although these were early versions of his companionable artificial-intelligence software, his intention was to make it available for all those who wanted it. He expected people to find it quite helpful, even if they are never cut off from the network—and he felt people would get used to it quickly, so that it would soon be as natural to them as having a dumber Companion.” Adikor folded his hands in his lap. “Well, I rapidly got used to mine, and, as I said at the outset, I didn’t give much thought to it, or to why it had originally been necessary … but … wait! Wait!”

“Yes?” said Bolbay.

Adikor looked directly at Adjudicator Sard, seated across the room. “My Companion could tell you what happened down there!”

The adjudicator leveled a steady stare at Adikor. “What is your contribution, Scholar Huld?” she asked.

“Me? I’m a physicist.”

“And
a computer programmer, is that not so?” said the adjudicator. “Indeed, you and Scholar Boddit were working on complex computers.”

“Yes, but—”

“So,” said the adjudicator, “I hardly think we can trust anything your Companion might say. It would be a trivial enough matter for one of your expertise to program it to tell us whatever you wanted it to.”

“But I—”

“Thank you, Adjudicator Sard,” said Bolbay. “Now, tell us, Scholar Huld, how many people are normally involved in a scientific experiment?”

“That’s a meaningless question,” said Adikor. “Some projects are undertaken by a single individual, and—”

“—and some are undertaken by tens of researchers, isn’t that true?”

“Sometimes, yes.”

“But your experiment involved just two researchers.”

“That’s not correct,” said Adikor. “Four other people worked on various stages of our project.”

“But none of them were invited down into the mine-shaft. Only the two of you—Ponter Boddit and Adikor Huld—went down there, isn’t that right?”

Adikor nodded.

“And only one of you returned to the surface.”

Adikor was impassive.

“Isn’t that right, Scholar Huld? Only one of you returned to the surface.”

“Yes,” he said, “but, as I’ve explained, Scholar Boddit disappeared.”

“Disappeared,” said Bolbay, as if she’d never heard the word before, as if she were struggling to comprehend its meaning. “You mean he vanished?”

“Yes.”

“Into thin air.”

“That’s right.”

“But there’s absolutely no record of this disappearance.”

Adikor shook his head slightly. Why was Bolbay pursuing him so? He’d never been unpleasant to her, and he couldn’t imagine that Ponter had ever presented him to Bolbay in unfavorable terms. What was motivating her?

“You’ve found no body,” said Adikor, defiantly. “You’ve found no body because there
is
no body.”

“That’s your position, Scholar Huld. But a thousand armspans underground, you could have disposed of the body in any number of places: putting it in an airtight bag to keep its smell from escaping, then throwing it down a fissure, burying it under loose rock, or tossing it into a rock-grinding machine. The mine complex is huge, after all, with tens of thousands of paces’ worth of tunnels and drifts. Surely you could have gotten rid of the body down there.”

“So you say.”

“Yes,” said Adikor, forcing calmness into his tone, “so I say.”

The previous night, at Reuben’s, Louise and Ponter had tried to devise an experiment that could prove to others whether what Ponter had claimed was true: that he came from a parallel world.

Chemical analysis of his clothing fibers might do it. They were synthetic, Ponter had said, and presumably didn’t match any known polymer. Likewise, some of the components of Ponter’s strange Companion implant would almost certainly prove unknown to this world’s science.

A dentist might be able to show that Ponter had never been exposed to fluoridated water. It might even be possible to prove that he’d lived in a world without nuclear weapons, dioxins, or internal-combustion engines.

But, as Reuben had pointed out, all those things would simply demonstrate that Ponter didn’t come from this Earth, not that he came from
another
Earth. He could, after all, be an alien.

Louise had argued that there was no way life from any other planet would so closely resemble the random results evolution had produced here, but she conceded that for some, the idea of aliens was more acceptable, and certainly more familiar, than the notion of parallel universes—a comment that prompted Reuben to say something about Kira Nerys looking better in leather.

Finally, Ponter himself had come up with a suitable test. His implant, he said, contained complete maps of the nickel mine that was supposedly located near here in his version of Earth; after all, this had been the site of the facility where he worked, too. Of course, most of the major ore bodies had been found by both his people and the Inco staff, but, by comparing the Companion’s maps to detailed ones on the Inco web site, Ponter’s implant identified a spot it said contained a rich copper deposit that had eluded Inco’s detection. If true, it was precisely the sort of information that only someone from a parallel universe might have.

So now Ponter Boddit—they had learned his full name—Louise Benoit, Bonnie Jean Mah, Reuben Montego, and a woman Louise was meeting for the first time, a geneticist named Mary Vaughan, were all standing in the middle of dense woods precisely 372 meters away from the SNO surface building. With them were two Inco geologists, who were operating a core-sampling drill. One of them insisted Ponter could not be right about there being copper at this spot.

They drilled down 9.3 meters, just as Hak had said they should, and the sampling tube was drawn back up. Louise was relieved when the diamond-tipped drill finally shut off; the grinding sound had given her a headache.

The group took the wrapped core back to the parking lot, everyone holding on to it at some point along its length. And there, where there was room to do so, the geologists removed its opaque outer membrane. At the core’s top, of course, was humus, and, beneath that, a glacial till of clay, sand, gravel, and pebbles. Below that, said one of the geologists, was Precambrian norite rock.

And beneath that, at precisely the depth Hak had said it would be found at, was—

Louise clapped her hands together in excitement. Reuben Montego was grinning from ear to ear. The doubting geologist was muttering to himself. Professor Mah was shaking her head slowly back and forth in astonishment. And the geneticist, Dr. Vaughan, was staring at Ponter with wide eyes.

It
was
there, precisely where he said it would be: native copper, twisted and bulbous, dull but clearly metallic.

Louise smiled at Ponter as she thought about the verdant, unspoiled world he had described to her the night before. “Pennies from heaven,” she said softly.

Professor Mah came over to Ponter and took his giant hand in hers, shaking it firmly. “I wouldn’t have believed it,” she said, “but welcome to our version of Earth.”

Everyone except the geologists adjourned to a conference room at the Creighton Mine: Mary Vaughan, the geneticist who’d come up from Toronto; Reuben Montego, the Inco doctor; Louise Benoit, the SNO postdoc who had been on hand when the detector had been destroyed; Bonnie Jean Mah, director of the SNO project; and, most important of all, Ponter Boddit, physicist from a parallel world, the only living Neanderthal to be seen on this Earth since at least 27,000 years ago.

Mary had chosen to sit beside Bonnie Jean Mah, the only woman in the room who’d had an empty chair next to her. Holding forth, standing at the front of the room, was Reuben Montego. “Question,” he said in that Jamaican accent Mary found delightful. “Why is there a mining operation on this site?”

Mary herself had no clue, and none of those who obviously did know looked inclined to play games, but at last Bonnie Jean Mah replied. “Because 1.8 billion years ago,” she said, “an asteroid hit here, resulting in huge deposits of nickel.”

“Exactly,” said Reuben. “An event that happened long before there was any multicellular life on Earth, an event both Ponter’s world and ours share in their common pasts.” He looked from face to face, coming at last to Mary’s own. “One has little choice in where mines will be built,” Reuben said. “You put them where the ores are. But what about SNO? Why was it built here?”

“Because,” said Mah, “the two kilometers of rock over top of the mine provide an excellent shield against cosmic rays, making it an ideal location for a neutrino detector.”

“But it’s not just that, is it, ma’am?” said Reuben, who, Mary assumed, had become quite the expert thanks to the help of Louise. “There are deep mines elsewhere on the planet. But this mine also has very low background radiation, right? In fact, this site is uniquely qualified for housing instruments that would be adversely affected by natural radiation.”

This sounded reasonable to Mary, and she noted that Professor Mah nodded once. But then Mah added, “So?”

“So,” said Reuben, “in Ponter’s universe a deep mine was also built on this very spot, to excavate the same nickel deposits. And eventually he himself recognized the value of the site and convinced his government to set up a physics facility underground here.”

“So he would have us believe that there’s a neutrino detector at the same place in the other universe?” asked Mah.

Reuben shook his head. “No,” he said. “No, there isn’t. Remember, the choice of using this facility for a neutrino observatory also had to do with a historical accident: that Canada’s nuclear reactors, unlike those of the U.S. or the U.K. or Japan or Russia, happen to use heavy water as a moderator. That set of circumstances isn’t duplicated in Ponter’s world—in fact, they don’t seem to use nuclear power. But this underground facility is equally good for another very delicate kind of instrument.” He paused and looked from face to face, then he said, “Ponter, where do you work?”

Ponter replied,
“Dusble korbul to kalbtadu.”
And the implant, using its male voice, provided the translation: “In a quantum-computing facility.”

“Quantum computing?” repeated Mary, but feeling uncomfortable doing so; she wasn’t used to being the most ignorant one in the room.

“That’s right,” said Reuben, grinning. “Dr. Benoit?”

Louise got up and nodded at the M.D. “Quantum computing is something we’re just starting to play with ourselves,” she said, pushing hair out of her eyes. “A regular computer can determine the factors of a given number by trying one possible factor to see if it works, then another, then another, then another: brute-force calculation. But if you used a conventional computer to factor a big number—say, one with 512 digits, like those used to encrypt credit-card transactions on the World Wide Web—it would take countless centuries to try all the possible factors one at a time.”