Neanderthal Parallax 3 - Hybrids

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Chapter Nine

  “ It was that questing spirit that moved some of us to march thousands of miles across the Bering Land Bridge, which linked Siberia and Alaska during the Ice Age…”

  Mary wanted to take a quick look at the Laurentian University bookstore before they headed down to the portal. She’d forgotten to bring any books from her home in Richmond Hill, and of course wouldn’t be able to find reading matter for herself in the Neanderthal universe.

  Also, truth be told, Mary wanted a few minutes alone to try to digest what had transpired in Veronica Shannon’s lab, so she excused herself, leaving Ponter with Veronica, and was now heading down “the bowling alley”—the long, narrow, glass-walled corridor that connected Laurentian’s Classroom Building and the Great Hall. Coming toward her was an attractive young black woman. Mary had never been good about remembering faces, but she saw in the expression of the other woman a brief reaction of recognition, and then, almost at once, that reaction masked.

  Mary had more or less gotten used to that. She’d been in the media a lot since early August when she’d confirmed the man who had been found half-drowned in the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory was a Neanderthal. She continued walking along, then it hit her—

  “Keisha!” Mary said, rotating on her heel, the black woman now having passed her.

  Keisha turned around and smiled. “Hello, Mary,” she said.

  “I almost didn’t recognize you,” said Mary.

  Keisha looked a bit guilty. “I did recognize you.” She lowered her voice. “But we’re not supposed to acknowledge anyone we met at the Centre, unless they acknowledge us first. That’s part of ensuring privacy…”

  Mary nodded. “The Centre” was the Laurentian University Rape Crisis Centre, where Mary had gone for counseling after what had happened at York.

  “How are you doing, Mary?” asked Keisha.

  Off in the distance there was a Tim Hortons coffee-anddonuts stand. “Do you have a moment?” asked Mary. “I’d love to buy you a coffee.”

  Keisha looked at her watch. “Sure. Or—or do you want to go upstairs, to, you know, the Centre?”

  But Mary shook her head. “No. No, that’s not necessary.” Still, she was silent as they walked the dozens of meters to the Tim Hortons, contemplating Keisha’s question. How was she doing?

  The Tim Hortons chain was one of the few places Mary could sometimes get her favorite brew—coffee with chocolate milk—since they often had open cartons of both chocolate and white milk. She asked for it, and received it. For her part, Keisha requested an apple juice, and Mary paid for them both. They sat at one of the two small tables flush with the corridor’s glass wall—mostly, people got their coffee here and ran off somewhere else.

  “I want to thank you,” said Mary. “You were so kind to me, back then…”

  Keisha had a small jeweled stud in her nose. She tipped her head down, and the jewel caught the sunlight, flashing. “That’s what we’re here for.”

  Mary nodded. “You asked how I was doing,” she said. “There’s a man in my life now.”

  Keisha smiled. “Ponter Boddit,” she said. “I read all about it in People .”

  Mary felt her heart jump. “ People did an article about us?”

  The younger woman nodded. “Last week. Nice photo of you and Ponter at the UN.”

  Good grief , thought Mary. “Well, he’s been very good to me.”

  “Is he going to take up that offer to pose in Playgirl ?”

  Mary smiled. She’d almost forgotten about that; the offer had come during Ponter’s first visit, when they were quarantined. Part of Mary would love to show off the physique of her man to all the bimbo girls she’d endured in high school, the ones who had dated the football players, every one of whom would look scrawny in comparison to Ponter. And another part of her was tickled at the notion that there was no way Colm could resist taking a peek at a newsstand, wondering what this Neanderthal had that he didn’t…

  “I don’t know,” said Mary. “Ponter laughed when the invitation came, and hasn’t mentioned it since.”

  “Well, if he ever does,” said Keisha, smiling, “I want an autographed copy.”

  “No problem,” said Mary. And she realized she meant it. She would never be over her rape—nor, she suspected, would Keisha ever be over her own—but the fact that they could joke about a man posing nude for the enjoyment of women meant that they’d both come a long way.

  “You asked how I’m doing,” said Mary. She paused. “Better,” she said with a smile, reaching out and patting the back of Keisha’s hand. “Better every day.”

  Once they’d finished their drinks, Mary hurried off to the bookstore, quickly bought four paperbacks, and then hustled back to room C002B to collect Ponter. They headed up to the ground floor, then out into the parking lot. It was a crisp fall day, and here, four hundred kilometers north of Toronto, the leaves had mostly turned.

  “ Dran! ” exclaimed Ponter, and “Astonishment!” translated Hak, through his external speaker.

  “What?” said Mary.

  “What is that? ” said the Neanderthal, pointing.

  Mary looked ahead, trying to fathom what had caught Ponter’s eye, then she burst out laughing. “It’s a dog,” she said.

  “My Pabo is a dog!” declared Ponter. “And I have encountered other doglike creatures here. But this! This is like nothing I have ever seen before.” The dog and its owner were coming toward them. Ponter bent down, hands on knees, to examine the small animal, at the end of a leather leash being held by an attractive young white woman. “It looks like a sausage!” declared Ponter.

  “It’s a dachshund,” said the woman, sounding miffed. She was doing a great job, Mary thought, of being unflustered in the presence of what she must know was a Neanderthal.

  “Is it—” began Ponter. “Forgive me, is it a birth defect?”

  The woman sounded even more put out. “No, he’s supposed to be like that.”

  “But his legs! His ears! His body!” Ponter rose and shook his head. “A dog is a hunter,” he declared, as if the animal before him represented an affront to all propriety.

  “Dachshunds are hunting animals,” said the young woman sharply. “They were bred in Germany to hunt badgers; Dachs is German for ‘badger.’ See? Their shape lets them follow the badger down the burrow.”

  “Oh,” said Ponter. “Ah, um, my apologies.”

  The woman seemed mollified. “Now, poodles ,” she said with a contemptuous sniff, “those are dumb-looking dogs.”

  As time passed, Cornelius Ruskin couldn’t deny that he was feeling different—and a whole lot faster than he would have thought possible. Sitting in his penthouse in the slums, he pumped keywords into Google; his results improved after he stumbled on the fact that the medical term for castration was “orchiectomy,” and he started specifically excluding the terms “dog,” “cat,” and “horse.”

  He quickly found a chart on the University of Plymouth’s web site entitled “Effect of Castration and Testosterone Replacement on Male Sexual Behaviour,” showing an immediate drop-off in such behavior in castrated guinea pigs—

  But Cornelius was a man, not an animal! Surely what applied to rodents didn’t—

  Twirling the scroll wheel on his mouse took him farther down the same page, to a study by researchers named Heim and Hursch that showed that over 50 percent of castrated rapists “stopped exhibiting sexual behavior shortly after castration—similar to the effect in rats.”

  Of course, when he’d been an undergrad, the feminist rhetoric had been that rape was a crime of violence, not sex. But no. Cornelius, having more than a passing interest in the subject, had read Thornhill and Palmer’s A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion when it came out in2000. That book made the case, based on evolutionary psychology, that rape was indeed a reproductive strategy—a sexual strategy—for…

  Cornelius hated to think of himself as such, but it was true; he knew it was: for m
ales who lacked the power and status to reproduce in the normal way. It made no difference that he’d been unfairly denied that status; the fact was that he didn’t have it, and couldn’t get it—not in the world of academe.

  He still hated the policies that had held him back. He was as much an expert on ancient DNA as Mary Vaughan was—he’d been with the Ancient Biomolecules Centre at Oxford, for Christ’s sake!

  It was unfair, totally and completely—like goddamned “slave reparations,” people who never did anything wrong themselves being asked to cough up huge amounts of cash for people whose long-dead ancestors had been wronged. Why should Cornelius suffer for the sexist hiring policies of generations gone by?

  He had spent years being livid over this.

  But now…

  Now…

  Now, he was just angry: an anger that, for the first time in as long as he could remember, seemed to be under control.

  There was no doubt why he was feeling so much less furious. Or was there? After all, it hadn’t been that long since Ponter had cut off his balls. Was it really reasonable for Cornelius to be feeling different so quickly?

  The answer, apparently, was yes. As he continued searching the web, he found an article from the New Times in San Louis Obispo, interviewing Bruce Clotfelter, who had spent two decades jailed for child molestation before undergoing surgical castration. “‘It was like a miracle,’ Clotfelter said. ‘The next morning, I realized I had gone through the night without those horrible sexual dreams for the first time in years.’ ”

  The next morning…

  Jesus Christ, just what was the half-life of testosterone, anyway? A few keystrokes, a couple of mouse clicks, and Cornelius had the answer: “The half-life of free testosterone in the blood is only a few minutes,” said one site; another pegged the figure at ten minutes.

  Some more spelunking took him to the Geocities page of a person born male who underwent castration, with no hormonal treatments before or for years after. He reported: “Four days after my castration…it seemed that waiting for traffic lights and other little annoyances did not bother me so much…

  “Six days post castration I returned to work. This workday was unusually hectic…and yet I still felt so calm when the day was all over. I was definitely feeling the effects of castration and most certainly felt better all the time without testosterone.

  “Ten days post castration I felt as a feather floating around everywhere. I just kept feeling better and better. For me the serenity was the strongest of the castration effects, followed by the decrease in libido.”

  Immediate change.

  Overnight change.

  Change in a matter of days.

  Cornelius knew— knew! —he should be furious about what Ponter had done to him.

  But he was finding it difficult to be furious about anything …

  Chapter Ten

  “ It was that questing spirit that caused others to bravely sail boats over the horizon, finding new lands in Australia and Polynesia…”

  There was a very good reason for wanting to establish a new interuniversal portal at United Nations headquarters. The existing portal was located two kilometers underground, 1.2 kilometers horizontally from the nearest elevator on the Gliksin side, and three kilometers from the nearest elevator on the Barast side.

  It would take Mary and Ponter a couple of hours to get from the surface in her world to the surface in his. They began by donning hardhats and safety boots, and riding down the mining elevator at Inco’s Creighton Mine. The hardhats had built-in lamps, and hearing-protection cups that could be swung over the ears if needed.

  Mary had brought two suitcases, and Ponter was effortlessly carrying them for her, one in each hand.

  Five miners rode most of the way down with them, getting off one level above where Mary and Ponter were to exit. That was just fine by Mary; she was always uncomfortable in this lift. It reminded her of the awkward journey she’d had in it once before with Ponter, explaining why, back then, despite his obvious attraction to her, and hers to him, she’d been unable to respond to his touch.

  Once on the 6800-foot level, they began the long trudge out to the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory site. Mary was never a great one for exercise, but it was actually even worse for Ponter, since the temperature this far below the Earth’s surface was a constant forty-one degrees Celsius, much too warm for him.

  “I will be glad to be back home,” said Ponter. “Back to air I can breathe!”

  Mary knew he wasn’t referring to the oppressive air here in the mine. Rather, he was looking forward to being in a world that didn’t burn fossil fuels, the smell of which had assaulted his massive nose most places he went here, although Reuben’s place, out in the country, had been quite tolerable, he’d said.

  Mary was reminded of the theme song to one of her favorite shows when she was a kid:

  Fresh air!

  Times Square!

  You are my wife!

  Goodbye, city life!

  She hoped she would fit in on Ponter’s world better than Lisa Douglas had in Hooterville. But it was more than just leaving the hustle and bustle of a world of six billion souls for one of just a hundred and eighty-five million…million people ; you couldn’t use the word “souls” when tallying Barasts, since they didn’t believe they had any.

  The day before they’d left Rochester, Ponter had been interviewed on the radio; the Neanderthals were very much in demand as guests wherever they happened to be. Mary had listened with interest as Bob Smith had questioned Ponter about Neanderthal beliefs on WXXI, the local PBS station. Smith had spent a fair bit of time on the Neanderthal practice of sterilizing criminals. As they walked down the long muddy tunnel, the topic of the interview came up.

  “Yes,” said Mary, in response to Ponter’s question, “you were fine, but…”

  “But what?”

  “Well, those things you said—about sterilizing people. I…”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m sorry, Ponter, but I really can’t condone that.”

  Ponter looked at her. He was wearing a special orange hardhat that the nickel mine had put together for him, shaped to accommodate his Neanderthal head. “Why not?”

  “It’s…it’s inhuman . And I guess I am using that word advisedly. It’s just not a suitable thing for human beings to do.”

  Ponter was quiet for a time, looking at the drift’s walls, which were covered with wire mesh to prevent rock bursts. “I know there are many on this version of Earth who do not believe in evolution,” he said at last, “but those who do must understand that human evolution has—how would you say it?—ground to a halt. Since medical techniques allow almost every human to live to reproductive age, there is no longer any…any…I am not sure what your phrase is.”

  “‘Natural selection,’ ” said Mary. “Sure, I understand that; without selective survival of genes, no evolution can occur.”

  “Exactly,” said Ponter. “And yet evolution made us what we are, turning the four basic, original lifeforms into the complex, diverse varieties exhibited today.”

  Mary looked over at Ponter. “The four original lifeforms?”

  He blinked. “Yes, of course.”

  “What four?” said Mary, thinking perhaps she’d at last detected a hint of creationism underlying Ponter’s worldview. Could it be Neander-Adam, Neander-Eve, Neander-Adam’s man-mate, and Neander-Eve’s woman-mate?

  “The original plant, animal, fungi, and—I do not know your name—the group that includes slime molds and some algae.”

  “Protists or protoctists,” said Mary, “depending on who you ask.”

  “Yes. Well, each emerged separately from the primordial prebiologic world.”

  “You have proof of that?” said Mary. “We generally hold that life only emerged once on this world, some four billion years ago.”

  “But the four types of life are so different…” said Ponter. And then he shrugged. “Well, you are the geneticist, notI. The poin
t of this trip is to meet our experts in such matters, so you should ask one of them about this. One of you—I do not know which—has a lot to learn from the other.”

  Mary never ceased to be amazed at how Neanderthal science and her own brand of the stuff differed on so many fundamental matters. But she didn’t want to lose track of the more important issue that—

  The more important issue. Interesting, thought Mary, that she considered a moral conundrum more important than a basic scientific truth. “We were talking about the end of evolution. You’re saying that your kind continues to evolve because it consciously weeds out bad genes.”

  “‘Weeds out’?” repeated Ponter, frowning. “Ah—an agricultural metaphor. I think I understand. Yes, you are right. We continue to improve our gene pool by getting rid of undesirable traits.”

  Mary stepped over a large muddy puddle. “I could almost buy that—but you do it not just by sterilizing criminals, but also their close relatives, too.”

  “Of course. Otherwise, the genes might persist.”

  Mary shook her head. “And I just can’t abide that.” Hak bleeped. “ Abide, ” repeated Mary. “Tolerate. Stand.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because…because it’s wrong . Individuals have rights.”

  “Of course they do,” said Ponter, “but so do species. We are protecting and improving the Barast species.”

  Mary tried not to shudder, but Ponter must have detected it regardless. “You react negatively to what I just said.”

  “Well,” said Mary, “it’s just that so often in our past, people here have made the same claim. Back in the 1940s, Adolf Hitler set out to purge our gene pool of Jews.”

  Ponter tipped his head slightly, perhaps listening to Hak remind him through his cochlear implants of who the Jews were. Mary imagined the little computer saying, “You know, the ones who weren’t gullible enough to believe in that Jesus story.”

  “Why did he want to do that?” asked Ponter.

  “Because he hated the Jews, pure and simple,” said Mary. “Don’t you see? Giving someone the power to decide who lives and who dies, or who breeds and who doesn’t, is just playing God.”