The Neanderthal Parallax, Book One - Hominids

by Robert J. Sawyer

  “Ponter,” said the stranger, in a deep, sonorous voice.

  Of course, the stranger might be taking “Reuben” to be the term for Montego’s kind of humanity, and “Ponter” might be the stranger’s word for Neanderthal.

  Singh moved over to join them. “Naonihal,” he said—revealing what the N stood for on his nametag. “My name is Naonihal.”

  “Ponter,” repeated the stranger. Other interpretations were still possible, thought Reuben, but it did seem likely that was the man’s name.

  Reuben nodded at the Sikh. “Thank you for your help.” He then turned to Ponter and motioned for him to follow. “Come on.”

  The man moved toward the wheelchair.

  “No,” said Reuben. “No, you’re fine.”

  He gestured again for him to follow, and the man did so, on foot. Singh undipped the x-rays, put them in a large envelope, and walked out with them, heading back to Emergency Admitting.

  Frosted glass doors blocked the way ahead. As Singh stepped on the rubber mat in front of the doors, they slid aside, and—

  Electronic flashes exploded in their faces.

  “Is this the guy who blew up SNO?” called a male voice.

  “What charges are Inco going to lay?” asked a female one.

  “Is he injured?” called another male.

  It took a few moments for Reuben to digest the scene. [74] He recognized one man as a correspondent for the local CBC station, and another was the mining-affairs reporter for the Sudbury Star. The dozen other people crowding around he didn’t know, but they were shoving microphones forward that bore the logos of Global Television, CTV, and Newsworld, and the call letters of local radio stations. Reuben looked at Singh and sighed, but he supposed this had been inevitable.

  “What’s the suspect’s name?” shouted another reporter.

  “Does he have any prior record?”

  The reporters continued to snap pictures of Ponter, who was making no effort to hide his face. At that moment, two RCMP officers entered from outside, wearing dark blue police uniforms. “Is this the terrorist?”

  “Terrorist?” said Reuben. “There’s no evidence of that.”

  “You’re the mine-site doctor, aren’t you?” said one of the cops.

  Reuben nodded. “Reuben Montego. But I don’t believe this man is a terrorist.”

  “But he blew up the neutrino observatory!” declared a reporter.

  “The observatory was damaged, yes,” said Reuben, “and he was there when it happened, but I don’t believe he intended it. After all, he almost drowned himself.”

  “Irregardless,” said the cop, causing Montego to immediately lower his opinion of him, “he will have to come with us.”

  Reuben looked at Ponter, at the reporters, then back at Singh. “You know what happens in cases like this,” he [75] said softly to the Sikh. “If the authorities take Ponter away, no one will ever see him again.”

  Singh nodded slowly. “So one might assume.”

  Reuben chewed his lower lip, thinking. Then he took a deep breath and spoke loudly. “I don’t know where he came from,” said Reuben, putting an arm now around Ponter’s massive shoulders, “and I’m not sure how he got here, but this man’s name is Ponter, and—”

  Reuben stopped. Singh looked at him. Reuben knew he could conclude with that; yes, the man’s name was known. He didn’t have to say anything more. He could stop now, and no one would think him crazy. But if he went on—

  If he went on, all hell would break loose.

  “Can you spell that?” called a reporter.

  Reuben closed his eyes, summoning strength from within. “Only phonetically,” he said, now looking at the journalist. “P-O-N-T-E-R. But whichever of you jotted that down the fastest is, I’m sure, the first person ever to render that name in the English alphabet.” He paused again, looked once more at Singh for encouragement, then pressed on. “This gentleman here, we are beginning to suspect, is not Homo sapiens sapiens. He may be—well, I think anthropologists are still arguing about what the proper designation for this kind of hominid is, aren’t they? He seems to be what they call either Homo neanderthalensis or Homo sapiens neanderthalensis—at any rate, he’s apparently a Neanderthal.”

  “What?” said one of the reporters.

  Another just snorted derisively.

  And a third—the mining reporter from the Sudbury [76] Star—pursed his lips. Reuben knew that reporter had a bachelor’s in geology; doubtless he’d taken a paleo course or two as part of his studies. “What makes you say that?” he asked skeptically.

  “I’ve seen x-rays of his skull. Dr. Singh here was quite sure of the identification.”

  “What does a Neanderthal have to do with the destruction of SNO?” asked a reporter.

  Reuben shrugged, acknowledging that that was a very good question. “We don’t know.”

  “This has got to be a hoax,” said the mining reporter. “It’s got to be.”

  “If it is, I’ve been hoodwinked, and so has Dr. Singh.”

  “Dr. Singh,” called a reporter, “is this—this person here—is he a caveman?”

  “I’m sorry,” said Singh, “but I cannot discuss a patient except with other involved physicians.”

  Reuben looked at Singh, agog. “Dr. Singh, please ...”

  “No,” said Singh. “There are rules ...”

  Reuben looked down for a moment, thinking. He then turned to Ponter with pleading eyes. “It’s up to you,” he said.

  Ponter surely didn’t understand the words, but apparently he grasped the significance of the situation. Indeed, it occurred to Reuben that Ponter might have a good shot at making a run for it, if he were so inclined; although not particularly tall, he was burlier by far than either of the cops. But Ponter’s eyes soon swung in the direction of Singh—and, as Reuben followed the Neanderthal’s line of sight, he realized that Ponter was actually looking at the manila envelope Singh was clutching tightly.

  [77] Ponter strode over to Singh. Reuben saw one of the cops put his hand on his holster; he evidently assumed Ponter was going to attack the doctor. But Ponter stopped short, right in front of Singh, and held out a beefy hand, palm up, in a gesture that transcended cultures.

  Singh seemed to hesitate for a second, then he relinquished the envelope. There was no illuminated viewing plate in the room, and it was now well after dark. But there was a large window, with light from a lamp in the parking lot streaming in. Ponter moved to the window; he perhaps knew that the cops would have tried to restrain him if he’d gone instead for the glass doors leading outside. He then held one of the x-rays, the side view, up against the glass so that everyone could see it. Camcorders were instantly trained on it, and more still pictures were taken. Ponter then gestured for Singh to come over. The Sikh did so, and Reuben followed. Ponter tapped on the x-ray, then pointed at Singh. He repeated the sequence two or three times, and then opened and closed his left hand with fingers held straight, the—apparently universal—gesture for “talk.”

  Dr. Singh cleared his throat, looked around the lobby surveying the faces, then shrugged a little. “It, ah, it seems I have my patient’s permission to discuss his x-rays.” He pulled a pen out of his lab coat’s breast pocket and used it as a pointer. “Do you all see this rounded protrusion at the back of the skull? Paleoanthropologists call that the occipital bun ...”

  Chapter Eight

  Mary Vaughan had slowly driven the ten kilometers to her apartment in Richmond Hill. She lived on Observatory Lane, near the David Dunlap Observatory, once—briefly, and a long time ago—home of the world’s largest optical telescope, now reduced to little more than a teaching facility because of the lights from Toronto.

  Mary had bought the condominium here in part because of its security. As she drove up the driveway, the guard in the gatehouse waved at her, although Mary couldn’t meet his—or anyone’s—eyes yet. She drove along, past the manicured lawn and large pines, around back, and down into the underground gara
ge. Her parking spot was a long walk from the elevators, but she’d never felt unsafe doing it, no matter how late it was. Cameras hung from the ceiling, between the sewer and water pipes and the sprinklers poking down like the snouts of star-nosed moles. She was watched every step of the way to the elevators, although tonight—this one hellish night—she wished that no one could see her.

  Was she betraying anything by how she walked? By the quickness of her step? By her bowed head, by the way she clutched the front of her jacket as though the buttons were [80] somehow failing to provide enough security, enough closure?

  Closure. No, there was surely no way she could ever have that.

  She entered the P2 elevator lobby, pushing first one door then the other open in front of her. She then pressed the single call button—there was nowhere to go from here but up—and waited for one of the three cars to come. Normally, when she waited, she looked at the various notices put up by management or other residents. But tonight Mary kept her eyes firmly on the floor, on the scuffed, stippled tiles. There were no floor-number indicators to watch above the closed doors, as there were two levels up in the main lobby, and although the up button would go dark a few seconds before one of the doors would rumble open, she chose not to watch for that, either. Oh, she was eager to be home, but after one initial glance, she couldn’t bring herself to look at the glowing upward-pointing arrow ...

  Finally, the farthest of the doors yawned. She entered and pushed the button for the fourteenth floor—really the thirteenth, of course, but that designation was considered unlucky. Above the panel of numbers was a glass frame that contained a laser-printed notice saying, “Have a Nice Day—From Your Board of Directors.”

  The elevator made its ascent. When it stopped, the door shuddered to one side, and Mary headed down the corridor—recently recarpeted by order of the same Board of Directors in a hideous cream-of-tomato-soup shade—and came to her apartment door. She fished in her purse for her keys, found them, pulled them out, and—

  [81] —and stared at them, tears welling in her eyes, vision blurring, her heart pounding again.

  She had a small key chain, and on its end, a gift a dozen years ago from her ever-practical then-mother-in-law, was a yellow plastic rape whistle.

  There had never been a chance to use it—not until it was too late. Oh, she could have blown it after the attack, but ...

  ... but rape was a crime of violence, and she had survived it. A knife had been held to her throat, been pressed against her cheek, and yet she hadn’t been cut, hadn’t been disfigured. But if she’d sounded the alarm, he might have come back, might have killed her.

  There was a gentle chime; another elevator had arrived. One of her neighbors would be in the corridor within a second. Mary fumbled the key into the lock, the whistle dangling, and quickly entered her dark apartment.

  She hit the switch, the lights came on, and she turned around and closed the door, cranking over the lever that caused the deadbolt to clunk into place.

  Mary removed her shoes and passed through the living room, with its peach-colored walls, noting, but not caring, that the red eye on the answering machine was winking at her. She entered her bedroom and took off her clothes—clothes that she knew she would throw out, clothes that she could never wear again, clothes that could never come clean no matter how many times they were washed. She then entered the en suite bathroom, but didn’t turn on the light in there; she made do with the illumination spilling in from the Tiffany lamps on her night tables. She climbed into the shower and, in the semidarkness, she scrubbed [82] and scrubbed and scrubbed until her skin felt raw, and then she got out her heavy flannel pajamas—the ones she saved for the coldest winter nights, the ones that covered her most completely—and she put them on, and she crawled into bed, hugging herself and shivering and crying some more and finally, finally, finally, after hours of trying, falling into a fitful sleep punctuated by dreams of being chased and dreams of fighting and dreams of being cut with knives.

  Reuben Montego had never met his ultimate boss, the president of Inco, and the doctor was actually surprised to find he had a listed number. With considerable trepidation, Reuben called him.

  Reuben was proud of his employer. Inco had started, like so many Canadian companies, as a subsidiary of an American firm: in 1916, it had been created as the Canadian arm of the International Nickel Company, a New Jersey mining concern. But twelve years later, in 1928, the Canadian subsidiary became the parent company through an exchange of shares.

  Inco’s principal mining operations were in and around the meteor crater here in Sudbury where, 1.8 billion years ago, an asteroid between one and three kilometers wide had slammed into the ground at fifteen klicks per second.

  Inco’s fortunes rose and fell along with the worldwide demand for nickel; the company provided a third of the world’s supply. But during it all, Inco really did strive to be a good corporate citizen. And when Herbert Chen of [83] the University of California had proposed, in 1984, that the depth of Inco’s Creighton Mine, its low natural radioactivity, and the availability of large amounts of heavy water stockpiled for use in Canada’s CANDU reactors, made Sudbury the ideal location for the world’s most advanced neutrino detector, Inco had enthusiastically agreed to make the site available for free, and to do the additional excavation for the ten-story-tall detector chamber, and the 1,200-meter drift leading to it, at cost.

  And although the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory was a joint project of five Canadian universities, two American ones, Oxford, and America’s Los Alamos, Lawrence Berkeley, and Brookhaven National Laboratories, any trespassing charges against this Neanderthal, this Ponter, would have to be laid by the site’s owner. And that was Inco.

  “Hello, sir,” Reuben said, when the president answered the phone. “Please forgive me for disturbing you at home. This is Reuben Montego. I’m the site doc—”

  “I know who you are,” said the cultured, deep voice.

  That flustered Reuben, but he pressed on. “Sir, I’d like you to call the RCMP and tell them that Inco is not going to press any charges against the man found inside the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I’ve managed to convince the hospital not to discharge the man. Massive heavy-water ingestion can be fatal, according to the Material Safety Data Sheet. It upsets the osmotic pressure across cell boundaries. Now, the man couldn’t possibly have taken in enough to do real damage, but we’re using that as a pretext to keep him from being [84] discharged. Otherwise, he’d be in the slammer right now.”

  “ ‘The slammer,’ ” repeated the president, sounding amused.

  Reuben felt even more discombobulated. “Anyway, like I said, I don’t think he belongs in prison.”

  “Tell me why,” said the voice.

  And Reuben did just that.

  The president of Inco was a decisive man. “I’ll make the call,” he said.

  Ponter was lying on a—well, it was a bed, he supposed, but it wasn’t recessed to be flush with the floor; instead it was raised up by a harsh-looking metal frame. And the pillow was an amorphous bag stuffed with—he wasn’t sure what, but it certainly wasn’t dried pine nuts, like his pillow back home.

  The bald man—Ponter had now seen that there was a stubble against his dark scalp, so the baldness must be an affectation, not a congenital condition—had left the room. Ponter had interlaced his fingers behind his own head, giving some firmer support for his skull. It wasn’t rude to Hak. His Companion’s scanners perceived everything within a couple of paces; it only needed its directional lens uncovered when looking at an object outside its scanning range.

  “It’s clearly nighttime,” said Ponter, into the air.

  “Yes,” said Hak. Ponter could feel the cochlear implants vibrate slightly as his head pressed back against his arms.

  “But it’s not dark out. There’s a window in this room, [85] but they seem to have flooded the outdoors with artificial light.”

/>   “I wonder why?” said Hak.

  Ponter got up—so strange to dangle one’s feet over the side of the bed in order to rise—and hurried to the window. It was too bright to see stars, but—

  “It’s there,” said Ponter, facing his wrist out through the glass so Hak could see.

  “That’s Earth’s moon, all right,” said Hak. “And its phase—a waning crescent—is exactly right for today’s date of 148/118/24.”

  Ponter shook his head and moved back to the strange, elevated bed. He sat on the edge of it; it was uncomfortable to do so, what with no back support. He then touched the side of his head, which had been bandaged by the man with the wrapped head; Ponter wondered if that man’s bandages were because of a massive head wound of his own. “I hurt my head,” Ponter said, into the air.

  “Yes,” replied Hak, “but you saw the deepviews they took of you; there was no serious damage done.”

  “But I almost drowned, too.”

  “That’s certainly true.”

  “So ... so maybe my brain was injured. Anoxia, and all that ...”

  “You think you’re hallucinating?” asked Hak.

  “Well,” said Ponter, lifting his right arm, and gesturing at the bizarre room around him, “how else to explain all this?”

  Hak was silent for a moment. “If you are hallucinating,” the Companion said, “then my telling you that you are not could just be part of that hallucination. So there’s really [86] no point in me trying to disabuse you of that notion, is there?”

  Ponter lay back down on the bed and stared up at the ceiling, which was devoid of timepieces and artwork.

  “You really should try to get some sleep,” said Hak. “Maybe things will make more sense in the morning.”

  Ponter nodded slightly. “White noise,” he said. Hak complied, playing a soft, soothing hiss through the cochlear implants, but still it seemed to Ponter to be a long time before he fell asleep.

  Chapter Nine

  DAY TWO