Hominids tnp-1

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Mary nodded slowly, sadly. “The word you’re looking for,” she said gently, “is ‘alone.’”

  * * *

  Adikor Huld’s dooslarm basadlarm was held in the Gray Council building, on the periphery of the Center. Males could get to it without crossing deep into female territory; females could enter it without technically leaving their land. Adikor wasn’t sure what having the preliminary inquiry during Last Five would do for his chances, but the adjudicator, a woman named Komel Sard, looked to be from generation 142, and so would be long past menopause.

  Adikor’s accuser, Daklar Bolbay, was now holding forth in the large square chamber. Fans blew air from the chamber’s north side to its south, and Adjudicator Sard sat at the south end, watching the action unfold with a neutral expression on her lined, wise face. The blowing air served a double purpose: it brought pheromones to her from the accused, which could often convey as much meaning as the words being spoken, and it kept her own pheromones—which might have betrayed which arguments were impressing her—from being detectable by the accuser or the accused, both of whom were positioned on the north side.

  Adikor had met Klast many times, and had always gotten along well with her; her man-mate, after all, had been Ponter. But Bolbay, who had been Klast’s woman-mate, seemed to have none of Klast’s warmth or easy humor.

  Bolbay was wearing a dark orange pant and a dark orange top; orange had always been the color of the accuser. For his part, Adikor wore blue, the color of the accused. Hundreds of spectators, equally split between male and female, sat on either side of the room; a dooslarm basadlarm for murder was clearly considered well worth seeing. Jasmel Ket was there, as was her young sister, Megameg Bek. Adikor’s own woman-mate, Lurt, was present as well; she’d given him a big hug when she’d arrived. Seated next to Lurt was Adikor’s son Dab, the same age as little Megameg.

  And, of course, almost all of Saldak’s Exhibitionists were present; there was no more interesting event going on right now than this hearing. Despite his current situation, Adikor was pleased to see Hawst in the flesh, having used his Voyeur to look in on so much of his life in the past. He also recognized Lulasm, who had been Ponter’s favorite, and Gawlt and Talok and Repeth and a couple of others. The Exhibitionists were easy to spot: they had to wear silver clothes, signaling to everyone around them that their implant broadcasts were publicly accessible.

  Adikor was sitting on a stool; there was plenty of room on all sides of it for Bolbay to circle him as she spoke, and she did so with great theatrical relish: “So tell us, Scholar Huld, did your experiment succeed? Did you successfully factor your target number?”

  Adikor shook his head. “No.”

  “So doing it beneath the surface did not help,” said Bolbay. “Whose idea was it to perform this factoring experiment far underground?” Her voice was low for a female’s, a deep rumbling sound.

  “Ponter and I jointly agreed to it.”

  “Yes, yes, but who initially suggested the idea? You, or Scholar Boddit?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “It was you, wasn’t it?”

  Adikor shrugged. “It might have been.”

  Bolbay was now in front of him; Adikor refused to acknowledge her presence by shifting his gaze to her. “Now, Scholar Huld, tell us all why you chose this location.”

  “I didn’t say I chose it. I said I might have.”

  “Fine. Tell us, then, why this location was selected for your work.”

  Adikor frowned, thinking about how much detail was appropriate. “Earth,” he said at last, “is constantly bombarded by cosmic rays.”

  “Which are?”

  “Ionizing radiation coming from outer space. A stream of protons, helium nuclei, and other nuclei. When they collide with nuclei in our atmosphere, they produce secondary radiation—mostly pions, muons, electrons, and dutar rays.”

  “And these are dangerous?”

  “Not really—at least, not in the small quantities produced by cosmic rays. But they do interfere with delicate instruments, and so we wanted to set up our equipment somewhere that was shielded from them. And, well, the Debral nickel mine was nearby.”

  “Couldn’t you have used another facility?”

  “Conceivably, I suppose. But Debral is unique not only for its depth—it is the deepest mine in the world—but also for the low background radiation of its rocks. The uranium and other radioactives present in many other mines give off charged particles that would have impaired our instruments.”

  “So you were well shielded down there?”

  “Yes—from everything except neutrinos, I suppose.” Adikor caught the expression on Adjudicator Sard’s face. “Minuscule particles that stream right through solid matter; nothing can shield against them.”

  “Now, weren’t you also shielded against something else down there?” asked Bolbay.

  “I don’t understand,” said Adikor

  “A thousand armspans of rock between you and the surface. No radiation—not even cosmic-ray particles that had traveled unimpeded for huge distances—could get down to you.”

  “Correct.”

  “And no radiation could make it up from the surface to where you were working, isn’t that right?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean,” said Bolbay, “that the signals from your Companions—yours, and Scholar Boddit’s—could not be transmitted out of there to the surface.”

  “Yes, that’s true, although I hadn’t really given it any thought until an enforcer mentioned it to me yesterday.”

  “Hadn’t given it much thought?” Bolbay’s tone was one of incredulity. “Since the day you were born, you’ve had a personal recording cube in the alibi-archive pavilion adjacent to this very Council building. And it has recorded everything you’ve done, every moment of your life, as transmitted by your Companion. Every moment of your life, that is, except the time you spent far, far below Earth’s surface.”

  “I’m no expert on such matters,” said Adikor, somewhat disingenuously. “I really don’t know much about the transmission of data from a Companion.”

  “Come now, Scholar Huld. A moment ago you were regaling us with stories of muons and pions, and now you expect us to believe you don’t understand simple radio broadcasting?”

  “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, w
e’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.”

  “But I didn’t.”

  “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.”

  Chapter 21

  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?”