Neanderthal Parallax 3 - Hybrids

by Robert J. Sawyer

  “‘Playing God,’” repeated Ponter, as if the phrase was appealingly oddball. “Obviously, such a notion would never occur to us.”

  “But the potential for corruption, for unfairness…”

  Ponter spread his arms. “And yet you kill certain criminals.”

  “We don’t,” said Mary. “That is, Canadians don’t. But Americans do, in some states.”

  “So I have learned,” said Ponter. “And, more than that, I have learned there is a racial component to this.” He looked at Mary. “Your various races intrigue me, you know. My people are northern-adapted, so we tend to stay in approximately the same latitudes, no matter where we are in terms of longitude, which I guess is why we all look pretty much alike. Am I correct in understanding that darker skin is an adaptation to more equatorial climes?”

  Mary nodded.

  “And the—what do you call them? On the eyes of those such as Paul Kiriyama?”

  It took a moment for Mary to remember who Paul Kiriyama was—the grad student who, along with Louise Benoît, had saved Ponter from drowning in the heavy-water tank up ahead at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory. Then it took another moment for her to remember the name for what Ponter was referring to. “You mean the skin that covers part of Asian eyes? Epicanthic folds.”

  “Yes. Epicanthic folds. I presume these are to help shield the eyes from glare, but my people have browridges that accomplish much the same thing, so, again, it is a trait we never developed.”

  Mary nodded slowly, more to herself than to Ponter. “There’s been a lot of speculation, you know, on the Internet and in newspapers, about what happened to your other races. People assume that—well, that with your belief in purging the gene pool, that you wiped them out.”

  “There never were any other races. Although we do have some scientists in what you call Africa and Central America, they are hardly permanent residents there.” He raised a hand. “And without races, we obviously have never had racial discrimination. But you do: here, racial characteristics correlate with the likelihood of execution for serious crimes, is that not correct?”

  “Blacks are more frequently sentenced to death than are whites, yes.” Mary decided not to add, Especially when they kill a white.

  “Perhaps because we never had such divisions, the idea of sterilizing a segment of humanity on an arbitrary basis never occurred to us.”

  A couple of miners were approaching them, going the other way. They openly stared at Ponter—although the sight of a woman down here was probably almost as rare, Mary thought. Once they had passed, Mary continued. “But surely, even without visible races, there must have been a desire to favor those who are closely related to you over those who are not. That’s kin selection, and it exists throughout the animal kingdom. I can’t imagine that Neanderthals are exempt.”

  “Exempt? Perhaps not. But remember that our family relations are more…elaborate, shall we say, than yours, or, for that matter, than most other animals. We have a never-ending family chain of man-mates and woman-mates, and because of our system of Two becoming One only temporarily, we do not have the difficulty in determining paternity that concerns your kind so much.” He paused, then smiled. “Anyway, as to the price of tea in China, my people find your notion of execution or decades of imprisonment to be more cruel than our sterilization and judicial scrutiny.”

  It took Mary a moment to remember what “judicial scrutiny” was: the process of viewing the transmissions made by a Companion implant, so that everything an individual said and did could be monitored as it happened. “I don’t know,” said Mary. “I mean, like I said in the car, I practice birth control, which is something that my religion forbids, so I can’t claim that I’m morally opposed to anything that might interfere with conception. But…but to prevent innocent people from reproducing seems wrong.”

  “You would accept the sterilization of the actual perpetrator, but not his or her siblings, parents, and offspring, as an alternative to execution or imprisonment?”

  “Perhaps. I don’t know. Under certain circumstances, maybe. If the convicted person so chose.”

  Ponter’s golden eyes went wide. “You would let the guilty party choose its punishment?”

  Mary felt her heart flutter. Was the choice of “its” Hak’s attempt to render the gender-neutral personal pronoun that existed in the Barast language but not in English, or was it Ponter again dehumanizing a criminal? “Under many circumstances, I would give the criminal a choice of a range of appropriate punishments, yes,” she said, thinking back to Father Caldicott giving her a choice of penances when she’d made her last confession.

  “But certainly in some cases,” said Ponter, “only one punishment is suitable. For instance, in…”

  Ponter stopped cold. “What?” said Mary.

  “No, nothing.”

  Mary frowned. “You’re talking about rape.”

  Ponter was silent for a long time, looking down at the muddy tunnel floor as he walked along. At first, Mary thought she’d offended him by suggesting he’d be so insensitive as to bring up that uncomfortable topic again, but his next words, when he finally did speak, startled her even more. “Actually,” he said, “I am not just talking about rape in general.” He looked at her, then back at the ground, a mishmash of boot prints illuminated by the beam from the headlight on his hardhat. “I am talking about your rape.”

  Mary could feel her heart pounding. “What do you mean?”

  “I—it is our way, among our people, not to have secrets between partners, and yet…”

  “Yes?”

  He turned around and looked back down the drift, making sure they were alone. “There is something I have not told you—something I have not told anyone, except…”

  “Except who? Adikor?”

  But Ponter shook his head. “No. No, he does not know of this, either. The one person who does know is a male of my kind, a man named Jurard Selgan.”

  Mary frowned. “I don’t remember you ever mentioning that name before.”

  “I have not,” said Ponter. “He…he is a personality sculptor.”

  “A what?” said Mary.

  “A—he works with those who wish to modify their…their mental state.”

  “You mean a psychiatrist?”

  Ponter tipped his head, clearly listening to Hak speak to him through his cochlear implants. The Companion was no doubt breaking the term Mary had presented into its etymological root; ironically, “psyche” was the closest approximation to “soul” the Neanderthals had. At last Ponter nodded. “A comparable specialist, yes.”

  Mary’s spine stiffened even as she walked along. “You’ve been seeing a psychiatrist? About my rape?” She’d thought he’d understood, damn it all. Yes, Homo sapiens males were notorious for looking at their spouses differently after they’d been raped, wondering if it had somehow been the woman’s fault, if she’d somehow secretly wanted it—

  But Ponter…

  Ponter was supposed to understand!

  They marched on in silence for a while, their helmet beams lighting the way.

  Reflecting on it, Ponter had seemed desperate to know the details of Mary’s rape. At the police station, Ponter had grabbed the sealed evidence bag containing specimens from Qaiser Remtulla’s rape, ripped it open, and inhaled the scent within, identifying one of Mary’s colleagues, Cornelius Ruskin, as the perpetrator.

  Mary looked over at Ponter, a dark, hulking form against the rock wall. “It wasn’t my fault,” said Mary.

  “What?” said Ponter. “No, I know that.”

  “I didn’t want it. I didn’t ask for it.”

  “Yes, yes, I do understand that.”

  “Then why are you seeing this—this ‘personality sculptor’?”

  “I am not seeing him anymore. It is just that—”

  Ponter stopped, and Mary looked over. He had his head tilted, listening to Hak, and after a moment, he made the smallest of nods, a signal intended for the Companion, not for her.<
br />
  “It’s just what? ” said Mary.

  “Nothing,” said Ponter. “I am sorry I brought the topic up.”

  So am I , thought Mary as they continued on through the darkness.

  Chapter Eleven

  “ It was that questing spirit that led Vikings to come to North America a thousand years ago, that drove the Nin˜a, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria to cross the Atlantic five hundred years ago…”

  At last they reached the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory. Ponter and Mary made their way through the massive facility—all hanging pipes and massive tanks—to the control room. It was deserted now; Ponter’s original arrival had destroyed the observatory’s heavy-water detector tank, and the plans to repair it had been put on hold by the subsequent re-establishment of the portal.

  They came to the room above the detector chamber, went through the trapdoor, and—this was the terrifying part for Mary—backed down the long ladder to the staging area, six meters off the ground. The staging area was at the end of the Derkers tube, a crush-proof tunnel that had been shoved through the portal from the other side.

  Mary stood at the threshold of the Derkers tube and looked into it. The tube was twice as long on the inside as it was on the outside, and at the other end she could see the yellow walls of the quantum-computing chamber over on Ponter’s version of Earth.

  A Canadian Forces guard was there, and they presented their passports to him—Ponter had received one when he’d been made a Canadian citizen.

  “After you,” said Ponter to Mary, a bit of gallantry he’d picked up in Mary’s world. Mary took a deep breath and walked down the tube, which, when one was inside it, measured sixteen meters long and six wide. Coming to the middle, she could see the ring of ragged blue luminosity through the translucent material of the tube’s wall. She could also see the shadows cast by the crisscrossing metal segments that held the tube open. Taking another deep breath, Mary stepped quickly across the discontinuity marked by the blue ring, feeling static electricity crawling over her body from front to back.

  And suddenly she was there —in the Neanderthal world.

  Mary turned around without leaving the tube and watched Ponter come toward her. She could see the blond hair on Ponter’s head ruffle as he came through the discontinuity; like most Neanderthals, his natural part was exactly in the middle of his long skull.

  Once he was through, Mary turned back around and continued on to the end of the tube.

  And there they were, in a world that had diverged from Mary’s own 40,000 years previously. They were inside the quantum-computing chamber she had glimpsed from her side, a vast room filled with a grid of register tanks. The quantum computer, designed by Adikor Huld to run software developed by Ponter Boddit, had been built to factor numbers larger than any that had ever been factored before; piercing into an alternate universe had been entirely accidental.

  “Ponter!” said a deep voice.

  Mary looked up. Adikor—Ponter’s man-mate—came running down the five steps from the control room onto the computing-chamber floor.

  “Adikor!” said Ponter. He ran over to him, and the two men embraced, then licked each other’s faces.

  Mary looked away. Of course, normally—if such a word could ever be applied to her existence in this world—she would rarely see Ponter when he was with Adikor; when Two became One, Adikor would hurry off to spend time with his own woman-mate and young son.

  But Two were not One, and so here, now, Ponter was supposed to be spending time with his man-mate.

  Still, after a few moments, the two males disengaged, and Ponter turned to Mary.

  “Adikor, you remember Mare.”

  “Of course,” said Adikor, smiling what seemed to be a very genuine foot-wide smile. Mary tried to emulate its sincerity, if not its dimensions. “Hello, Adikor,” she said.

  “Mare! It is good to see you!”

  “Thank you.”

  “But what brings you here? Two is not yet One.”

  There it was. A staking of claim; an establishment of turf.

  “I know,” said Mary. “I’ve come on an extended visit. I’m here to learn more about Neanderthal genetics.”

  “Ah,” said Adikor. “Well, I’m sure Lurt will be able to assist you.”

  Mary tilted her head slightly—not that she had a Companion to listen to. Was Adikor just being helpful, or was he making a point of reminding Mary that she would need to seek the assistance of a female Neanderthal, who, of course, would be found in the City Center, far away from Adikor and Ponter.

  “I know,” said Mary. “I’m looking forward to talking with her some more.”

  Ponter looked at Adikor. “I will take Mary briefly to our home,” he said, “and get her a few things she will need for an extended stay. Then I will arrange her transportation into the Center.”

  “Fine,” said Adikor. He looked at Mary, then back at Ponter. “I assume it will be just the two of us for the evening meal?”

  “Of course,” said Ponter. “Of course.”

  Mary stripped naked—she was losing her self-consciousness about nudity in this world that had never had any religion to impose such taboos—and went through the tuned-laser decontamination process, coherent beams at precise wavelengths passing through her flesh to zap foreign molecules within her body. Already, similar devices were being built in Mary’s world to treat many forms of infection. Sadly, though, since tumors were made of the patient’s own cells, this process couldn’t cure cancers, such as the leukemia that had taken Ponter’s wife, Klast, two years ago.

  No—not “taken.” That was a Gliksin term, a euphemism that implied she’d gone somewhere, and at least by the standards of these people, she hadn’t. As Ponter himself would say, she no longer existed.

  And not “Ponter’s wife,” either. The term was yat-dija —“woman-mate.” When in the Neanderthal world, Mary really did try to think in Neanderthal terms; it made it easier to deal with the differences.

  The lasers danced over—and through—Mary’s body until the square light above the door changed color, signaling that she should leave. Mary stepped out and began changing into Neanderthal clothes, while Ponter took his turn in the chamber. He’d fallen ill with equine distemper while in Mary’s world the first time—members of Homo sapiens were immune to it, but Homo neanderthalensis individuals were not. This process made sure they weren’t bringing the Streptococcus equii bacterium, or any other nasty germs or viruses, across with them; everybody who passed through the portal was subjected to it.

  No one who had any choice would live where Cornelius Ruskin did. Driftwood was a rough neighborhood, full of crime and drugs. Its only appeal for Cornelius was that it was an easy walk to the York University campus.

  He took the elevator down the fourteen floors to the grungy lobby of his building. Still, despite everything, he had a certain—well, affection was too strong a word, but a certain gratitude for the place. After all, living within walking distance of York saved him the cost of a car, driver’s insurance, and a university parking permit—or the alternative, the monthly $93.50 for a Toronto Transit Commission Metro-Pass.

  It was a beautiful day with a clear blue sky. Cornelius was wearing a brown suede jacket. He continued up the road, past the convenience shop that had bars on its windows. That seedy little store had a giant rack of porno mags and dusty tin cans of food. It was where Cornelius bought his cigarettes; fortunately he’d had half a carton of du Mauriers in his apartment.

  Cornelius crossed onto the York campus, walking by one of the residence towers. Students were milling about, some still in short sleeves, others wearing sweatshirts. He suspected he might be able to get testosterone supplements at York. Why, he could even devise a genetics project that might require them. That certainly would be an incentive to go back to his old job, but…

  But things had changed in Cornelius. For one thing, the nightmares had finally ended, and he was now sleeping like a rock. Instead of lying awake for an hour or
two, tossing and turning, fuming over all the things that were wrong in his life—all the slights, all his anger at having no one in his life—instead of lying awake, tortured by all that, he’d fall asleep within moments of putting his head to the pillow, sleep soundly through the night, and wake refreshed.

  True, for a while, he hadn’t wanted to get out of bed, but he was over that now. He felt…not energetic, not ready for the daily fight for survival. No, he felt something he hadn’t felt for years, since the summers of his childhood, when he was away from school, away from the bullies, away from the daily beatings-up.

  Cornelius Ruskin felt calm .

  “Hello, Dr. Ruskin,” said a perky male voice.

  Cornelius turned. It was one of his Eukaryotic Genetics students—John, Jim…something like that; the guy wanted to become a genetics prof, he’d said. Cornelius wanted to tell the poor sap to drop out now; there were no decent jobs these days for white men in academe. But instead he just forced a smile and said, “Hello.”

  “Great to have you back!” said the student, heading off in the other direction.

  Cornelius continued along the sidewalk, fields of grass on one side, a parking lot on the other. He knew where he was going, of course: the Farquahrson Life Sciences Building. But he’d never before noticed what a funny-sounding name that was: it now made him think of Charlie Farquahrson, the hick character Toronto’s Don Harron had played for years on CFRB radio and the U.S. TV series Hee Haw . Cornelius shook his head; he’d always been too…too something …when approaching that building to let such a whimsical thought percolate to the surface.

  Walking on autopilot, his feet trod the well-known terrain. But suddenly, with a start, he realized that he’d come to…

  It didn’t have a name, and he’d never even bestowed one upon it in his mind. But this was it: the two retaining walls that met at right angles, far from any lighting standard, shielded by large trees. This was the spot, the place where he’d thrown two different women against the wall. This was where he’d shown Qaiser Remtulla who really was in charge. And this was where he’d rammed it into Mary Vaughan.