Hominids tnp-1

by Robert J. Sawyer

  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 8

  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 garage. 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 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—

  —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 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 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.

&
nbsp; 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 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, 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 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 9

  Day Two

  Saturday, August 3

  148/118/25

  Adikor Huld couldn’t take being inside the house. Everything there reminded him of poor, vanished Ponter. Ponter’s favorite chair, his datapad, the sculptures Ponter had selected—everything. And so he’d gone out back, to sit on the deck, to stare sadly at the countryside. Pabo came out and looked at Adikor for a time; Pabo had been Ponter’s dog—he’d had her long before Adikor and Ponter had begun living together. Adikor would keep her—if only so the house would not be so lonely. Pabo went back inside. She’d be going to the front door, Adikor knew, looking out there to see if Ponter were returning. She’d trekked back and forth, looking through both doors, ever since Adikor had come home yesterday. Adikor had never returned from work without Ponter before; poor Pabo was baffled and clearly very sad.

  Adikor was hugely sad, too. He’d been crying off and on for most of the morning. Not blubbering, not wailing—just crying, sometimes even unaware of it himself until a fat drop splashed down onto his arm or hand.

  Rescue teams had searched exhaustively in the mine, but they’d found no sign of Ponter. They’d used portable equipment to scan for his Companion, but had been unable to detect its transmissions. Humans and dogs had passed through drift after drift, trying to catch the odor of a man who might be unconscious, lying hidden from view.

  But there was nothing. Ponter had vanished utterly and completely, without a trace.

  Adikor shifted his weight in his chair. The chair was made of pine boards with a back that flared out and arms that had wide, flat rests on which a drinking tube could easily be balanced. There was no doubt the chair was useful. Its maker—Adikor forgot the woman’s name, but it was branded on the back of the chair—doubtless felt she contributed sufficiently to society. People needed furniture; Adikor had a table and two cabinets made by the same carpenter.

  But what would Adikor’s contribution be, now that Ponter was gone? Ponter had been the brilliant one of the pair; Adikor recognized that and had accepted it. But how would he contribute now, without Ponter, dear, dear Ponter?

  The quantum-computing work was dead, as far as Adikor could see. With Ponter gone, it couldn’t go on. Others—there was that female group across the ocean in Evsoy, and another male one on the west coast of this continent—would continue work along related lines. He wished them luck, he supposed, but although he would read their reports with interest, part of him would always regret that it was not Ponter and him making the breakthroughs.

  Aspens and birches formed a shady canopy around the deck, and white trilliums bloomed at the trees’ mossy bases. A chipmunk scurried by, and Adikor could hear a woodpecker tapping away at a trunk. He breathed deeply, inhaling pollens and the smells of mulch and soil.

  There was a sound of something moving; occasionally, a large animal would wander this close to a home during the day, and—

  Suddenly, Pabo came tearing out of the back door. She’d detected the arrival, too. Adikor flared his nostrils. It was a person—a man—coming.

  Could it be—?

  Pabo let out a plaintive whimper. The man came into view.

  Not Ponter. Of course not.

  Adikor’s heart hurt. Pabo made her way back into the house, back to the front, to continue her vigil.

  “Healthy day,” said Adikor to the man now coming up on the deck. It was no one he’d ever seen before: a stocky fellow, with reddish hair. He wore a loose-fitting dark blue shirt and a gray pant.

  “Is your name Adikor Huld, and do you reside here in Saldak Rim?”

  “Yes to the former,” said Adikor, “and obviously to the latter.”

  The man held up his left arm, with the inside of his wrist facing Adikor; he clearly wanted to transfer something to Adikor’s Companion.

  Adikor nodded and pulled a control bud on his Companion. He watched the little screen on his unit flash as it received data. He expected it to be a letter of introduction: this perhaps was a relative
visiting the area, or maybe a tradesperson looking for work, transferring his credentials. Adikor could erase the information easily enough if it were of no interest.

  “Adikor Huld,” said the man, “it is my duty to inform you that Daklar Bolbay, acting as tabant of the minor children Jasmel Ket and Megameg Bek, is accusing you of the murder of their father, Ponter Boddit.”

  “What?” said Adikor, looking up. “You’re joking.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “But Daklar is—was—Klast’s woman-mate. She’s known me for ages.”

  “Nonetheless,” said the man. “Please show me your wrist so that I can confirm that the appropriate documents have been transferred.”

  Adikor, stunned, did just that. The man merely glanced at the display—it said “Bolbay charging Huld, transfer complete”—then he looked back at Adikor. “There will be a dooslarm basadlarm”—an old phrase that literally meant “asking small before asking large”—“to determine if you should face a full tribunal for this crime.”

  “There’s been no crime!” said Adikor, fury growing within him. “Ponter is missing. He may be dead—I grant you that—but if so, it was an accident.”

  The man ignored him. “You are free to choose any one person to speak on your behalf. The dooslarm basadlarm has been scheduled for tomorrow morning.”

  “Tomorrow!” Adikor felt his fist clenching. “That’s ridiculous!”

  “Justice postponed is no justice at all,” said the man as he walked away.

  Chapter 10

  Mary needed coffee. She rolled out of her single bed, made her way to the kitchen, and set the coffeemaker to its task. She then stepped into the living room and pushed the play button on her answering machine, an old, reliable silver-and-black Panasonic that made loud clunkings when it started and stopped rewinding its tape.