Hominids Read online

  Robert J. Sawyer’s SF novels are perennial nominees for the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, or both. Clearly, he must be doing something right, since each novel has been something new and different. What they do have in common is originality, great stories, and unique scientific extrapolation. His latest is no exception.

  A complete and satisfying novel in itself, Hominids is also the first book of The Neanderthal Parallax, a trilogy that will examine two unique species of people. They are alien to each other, yet alike in their never-ending quest for knowledge and essential humanity. We are one of those species, the other is the Neanderthals of a parallel world where they, not Homo sapiens, became the dominant intelligence. In that world, Neanderthal civilization has reached heights of culture and science comparable to our own, but with a radically different history, society, and philosophy.

  During a quantum-computing experiment, Ponter Boddit, a Neanderthal physicist, accidentally pierces the barrier between worlds and is transferred to our universe. He is almost immediately recognized as a Neanderthal, but only much later as a scientist. He is quarantined and studied, alone and bewildered, a stranger in a strange land. But Ponter is also befriended—by a doctor and a physicist who share his questing intelligence and boundless enthusiasm for the world’s strangeness, as well as by Canadian geneticist Mary Vaughan, a woman with whom he develops a special rapport.

  Meanwhile, Ponter’s partner. Adikor Huld, finds himself with a messy lab, a missing body, suspicious people all around, and an explosive murder trial. How can he possibly prove his innocence when he has no idea what actually happened to Ponter?

  Contact between humans and Neanderthals creates a relationship fraught with conflict, philosophical challenge, and the threat to the existence of one species or the other—or both. Yet their meeting is also rich in possibilities for cooperation and growth on many levels, from the practical to the esthetic to the scientific to the spiritual. In short. Robert J. Sawyer has done it again.

  Calculating God

  “A delicious summer read: intelligent, emotionally engaging, peopled with interesting characters, and driven by thoughtful narrative that does not shy away from confronting profound questions.”

  —The Globe and Mail

  Flashforward

  “A creative, soul-searching exploration of fate, free will, and the nature of the universe.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  Factoring Humanity

  “Sawyer’s finest novel to date. Scientifically plausible, fictionally intriguing, and ethically important.”

  —New Scientist

  ROBERT J. SAWYER is the Nebula Award-winning author of The Terminal Experiment. He lives in a suburb of Toronto, Ontario.

  Books by Robert J. Sawyer

  NOVELS

  Golden Fleece*

  End of an Era*

  The Terminal Experiment

  Starplex

  Frameshift*

  Illegal Alien

  Factoring Humanity*

  Flashforward*

  Calculating God*

  Hominids*

  THE QUINTAGLIO ASCENSION

  Far-Seer

  Fossil Hunter

  Foreigner

  SHORT-STORY COLLECTION

  Iterations and Other Stories

  ANTHOLOGIES

  Tesseracts 6 (with Carolyn Clink)

  Crossing the Line (with David Skene-Melvin)

  Over the Edge (with Peter Sellers)

  *published by Tor Books

  (Readers’ group guides available at www.sfwriter.com)

  Author’s Note: The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, the Creighton Mine, Laurentian University, and York University all really exist. However, all the characters in this novel are entirely the product of my imagination. They are not meant to bear any resemblance to the actual people who hold or have held positions with these or any other organizations.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  HOMINIDS

  Copyright © 2002 by Robert J. Sawyer

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  This novel was serialized in the January through April 2002 issues of Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine.

  This book is printed on acid-free paper.

  Edited by David G. Hartwell

  Book design by Angela Arapovic

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Sawyer, Robert J.

  Hominids / Robert J. Sawyer.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “A Tom Doherty Associates book.”

  ISBN 0-312-87692-0 (acid-free paper)

  1. Neanderthals—Fiction. 2. Prehistoric peoples—Fiction. I. Title

  PO9199.3.S2533 H66 2022

  813’.54—dc21

  2001059650

  First Edition: May 2002

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For

  Marcel Gagné

  and

  Sally Tomasevic

  Dude

  and

  The Other Dude

  Great People,

  Great Friends

  Acknowledgments

  For anthropological and paleontological advice, I thank: Jim Ahren, Ph.D., University of Wyoming; Shara E. Bailey, Arizona State University; Miguel Bombin, M.D., Ph.D., Laurentian University; Michael K. Brett-Surman, Ph.D., and Rick Potts, Ph.D., both of the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution; John D. Hawks, Ph.D., University of Utah; Christopher Kuzawa, Emory University; Philip Lieberman, Ph.D., Brown University; Jakov Radovcic, Ph.D., Croatian Natural History Museum; Robin Ridington, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, University of British Columbia; Gary J. Sawyer [no relation] and Ian Tattersall, Ph.D., both of the American Museum of Natural History; Anne-marie Tillier, Ph.D., Université de Bordeaux; Erik Trinkaus, Ph.D., Washington University in St. Louis; and Milford H. Wolpoff, Ph.D., University of Michigan.

  Special thanks to: Art McDonald, Ph.D., Director, Sudbury Neutrino Observatory Institute, and J. Duncan Hepburn, Ph.D., site manager, Sudbury Neutrino Observatory; David Gotlib, M.D., Medical Director, Crisis Team, St. Joseph’s Health Centre, Toronto; the Rev. Paul Fayter, historian of science and theology, York University, Toronto; and Andrew Stok, Photonics Group, University of Toronto.

  Huge thanks to my lovely wife, Carolyn Clink; my editor, David G. Hartwell, and his associate, Moshe Feder; my agent, Ralph Vicinanza, and his associates, Christopher Lotts and Vince Gerardis; Tom Doherty, Linda Quinton, Jennifer Marcus, Aimee Crump, and everyone else at Tor Books; Harold and Sylvia Fenn, Robert Howard, Heidi Winter, and everyone else at H. B. Fenn and Company; Dr. Stanley Schmidt, Sheila Williams, Trevor Quachri, and Brian Bieniowski of Analog Science Fiction and Fact; Melissa Beckett; Megan Beckett; Marv Gold; Terence M. Green; Andrew Zimmerman Jones; Joe and Sharon Karpierz; Chris and Donna Krejlgaard; Donald Maass; Pete Rawlik; Joyce Schmidt; Tim Slater; and David G. Smith.

  As always, I’m grateful to those friends and colleagues who commented on this book’s manuscript: Asbed Bedrossian, Ted Bleaney, Michael A. Burstein, David Livingstone Clink, John Douglas, Marcel Gagné, James Alan Gardner, Richard Gotlib, Peter Halasz, Howard Miller, Laura Osborn, Dr. Ariel Reich, Alan B. Sawyer, Sally Tomasevic, Edo van Belkom, Andrew Weiner, and David Widdicombe.

  Some of this novel was written while I was Writer-in-Residence at the Richmond Hill (Ontar
io) Public Library. Sincere thanks to librarian extraordinaire Cameron Knight, the Richmond Hill Public Library Board, and the Canada Council for the Arts.

  Parts of this book were written at John A. Sawyer’s vacation home on Canandaigua Lake, New York; at Mary Stanton’s vacation home in West Palm Beach, Florida; and at Robin and Jillian Ridington’s guest cottage on Retreat Island, British Columbia. I thank them all for their extraordinary generosity and hospitality.

  Author’s Note: A -Tal Tale

  So is it Neanderthal or Neandertal?

  Both spellings are correct, and both are in common usage, even among paleoanthropologists.

  The fossil this type of hominid is named for was found in 1856, in a valley near Düsseldorf. The place was then called Neanderthal—thal meaning “valley,” and “Neander” being a Greek version of “Neumann,” the surname of the fellow after whom the valley was named.

  Early in the twentieth century, the German government regularized spelling across all parts of their nation, and “thal” and “tal,” both of which were in use up to that time in various parts of the country, became just “tal.” So it’s clear that the place that used to be called Neanderthal is now only correctly spelled Neandertal.

  But what about the fossil hominid? Should we therefore rename it Neandertal, as well?

  Some say yes. But there’s a problem: scientific names are cast in stone once coined and, for all time, this type of hominid will be known in technical literature with a “th” spelling, either as Homo neanderthalensis or Homo sapiens neanderthalensis (depending on whether one classifies it as a separate species from us, or merely a subspecies). It does seem awkward to spell the “neanderthal” part differently in the scientific and English names.

  Meanwhile, those who favor the use of the spelling “Neandertal man” are notably silent when the topic of Peking man comes up; there’s no movement to change that name to “Beijing man,” even though the city’s name is always spelled Beijing in English these days.

  I checked the latest editions of six major English-language dictionaries: The American Heritage English Dictionary, The Encarta World English Dictionary, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (Tor’s house standard), The Oxford English Dictionary, Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, and Webster’s New World Dictionary. All accept both spellings.

  And what about pronunciation? Some purists contend that regardless of whether you spell it -tal or -thal, you should pronounce it with a hard-T sound, since both t and th have always denoted that in German.

  Maybe so, but I’ve heard many paleoanthropologists say it with an English th sound (as in thought). And of the six dictionaries I checked, all of them except the OED allow both pronunciations (with the OED accepting only -tal). The argument that English speakers should pronounce it the way German speakers do seems to imply that we should also call the capital of France “par-ee,” rather than “pair-is,” and yet doing so would be considered pretentious in most contexts.

  Ultimately, it comes down to personal choice. In the extensive collection of research materials I consulted in creating this book, the -thal spelling outnumbers the -tal by better than two-to-one (even in recent technical literature), so I’ve settled on the original spelling, Neanderthal—which you may pronounce whichever way you wish.

  The southern forests provide the message that it didn’t have to be this way, that there is room on the earth for a species biologically committed to the moral aspects of what, ironically, we like to call “humanity”: respect for others, personal restraint, and turning aside from violence as a solution to conflicting interests. The appearance of these traits in bonobos hints at what might have been among Homo sapiens, if evolutionary history had been just slightly different.

  — RICHARD WRANGHAM AND DALE PETERSON

  Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence

  You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.

  — SCOTT MCNEALY

  Chief Executive Officer

  Sun Microsystems

  Contents

  Chapter One / Chapter Two / Chapter Three / Chapter Four / Chapter Five / Chapter Six / Chapter Seven / Chapter Eight / Chapter Nine / Chapter Ten / Chapter Eleven / Chapter Twelve / Chapter Thirteen / Chapter Fourteen / Chapter Fifteen / Chapter Sixteen / Chapter Seventeen / Chapter Eighteen / Chapter Nineteen / Chapter Twenty / Chapter Twenty-one / Chapter Twenty-two / Chapter Twenty-three / Chapter Twenty-four / Chapter Twenty-five / Chapter Twenty-six / Chapter Twenty-seven / Chapter Twenty-eight / Chapter Twenty-nine / Chapter Thirty / Chapter Thirty-one / Chapter Thirty-two / Chapter Thirty-three / Chapter Thirty-four / Chapter Thirty-five / Chapter Thirty-six / Chapter Thirty-seven / Chapter Thirty-eight / Chapter Thirty-nine / Chapter Forty / Chapter Forty-one / Chapter Forty-two / Chapter Forty-three / Chapter Forty-four / Chapter Forty-five / Chapter Forty-six / Chapter Forty-seven

  Appendix

  Further Reading

  Chapter One

  DAY ONE

  FRIDAY, AUGUST 2

  148/118/24

  The blackness was absolute.

  Watching over it was Louise Benoît, twenty-eight, a statuesque postdoc from Montreal with a mane of thick brown hair stuffed, as required here, into a hair net. She kept her vigil in a cramped control room, buried two kilometers—“a mile an’ a quarder,” as she sometimes explained for American visitors in an accent that charmed them—beneath the Earth’s surface.

  The control room was next to the deck above the vast, unilluminated cavern housing the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory. Suspended in the center of that cavern was the world’s largest acrylic sphere, twelve meters—“almost fordy feet”—across. The sphere was filled with eleven hundred tonnes of heavy water on loan from Atomic Energy of Canada Limited.

  Enveloping that transparent globe was a geodesic array of stainless-steel struts, supporting 9,600 photomultiplier tubes, each cupped in a reflective parabola, each aimed in toward the sphere. All of this—the heavy water, the acrylic globe that contained it, and the enveloping geodesic shell—was housed in a ten-story-tall barrel-shaped cavern, excavated from the surrounding norite rock. And that gargantuan cavern was filled almost to the top with ultrapure regular water.

  The two kilometers of Canadian shield overhead, Louise knew, protected the heavy water from cosmic rays. And the shell of regular water absorbed the natural background radiation from the small quantities of uranium and thorium in the surrounding rock, preventing that, too, from reaching the heavy water. Indeed, nothing could penetrate into the heavy water except neutrinos, those infinitesimal subatomic particles that were the subject of Louise’s research. Trillions of neutrinos passed right through the Earth every second; in fact, a neutrino could travel through a block of lead a light-year thick with only a fifty-percent chance of hitting something.

  Still, neutrinos poured out of the sun in such vast profusion that collisions did occasionally occur—and heavy water was an ideal target for such collisions. The hydrogen nuclei in heavy water each contain a proton—the normal constituent of a hydrogen nucleus—plus a neutron, as well. And when a neutrino did chance to hit a neutron, the neutron decayed, releasing a proton of its own, an electron, and a flash of light that could be detected by the photomultiplier tubes.

  At first, Louise’s dark, arching eyebrows did not rise when she heard the neutrino-detection alarm go ping, the alarm sounded briefly about a dozen times a day, and although it was normally the most exciting thing to happen down here, it still didn’t merit looking up from her copy of Cosmopolitan.

  But then the alarm sounded again, and yet again, and then it stayed on, a solid, unending electric bleep like a dying man’s EKG.

  Louise got up from her desk and walked over to the detector console. On top of it was a framed picture of Stephen Hawking—not signed, of course. Hawking had visited the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory for its grand opening a few years ago, in 1998. Louise tapped on the alarm’s speaker, in case it was on the fritz, but the keening continued.
>
  Paul Kiriyama, a scrawny grad student, dashed into the control room, arriving from elsewhere in the vast, underground facility. Paul was, Louise knew, usually quite flustered around her, but this time he wasn’t at a loss for words. “What the heck’s going on?” he asked. There was a grid of ninety-eight by ninety-eight LEDs on the detector panel, representing the 9,600 photomultiplier tubes; every one of them was illuminated.

  “Maybe someone accidentally turned on the lights in the cavern,” said Louise, sounding dubious even to herself.

  The prolonged bleep finally stopped. Paul pressed a couple of buttons, activating five TV monitors slaved to five underwater cameras inside the observatory chamber. Their screens were perfectly black rectangles. “Well, if the lights were on,” he said, “they’re off now. I wonder what—”

  “A supernova!” declared Louise, clapping her long-fingered hands together. “We should contact the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams; establish our priority.” Although SNO had been built to study neutrinos from the sun, it could detect them from anywhere in the universe.

  Paul nodded and plunked himself down in front of a Web browser, clicking on the bookmark for the Bureau’s site. It was worth reporting the event, Louise knew, even if they weren’t yet sure.

  A new series of pings sounded from the detector panel. Louise looked at the LED board; several hundred lights were illuminated all over the grid. Strange, she thought. A supernova should register as a directional source…

  “Maybe something’s wrong with the equipment?” said Paul, clearly reaching the same conclusion. “Or maybe the connection to one of the photomultipliers is shorting out, and the others are picking up the arc.”

  The air split with a creaking, groaning sound, coming from next door—from the deck atop the giant detector chamber itself. “Perhaps we should turn on the chamber lights,” said Louise. The groaning continued, a subterranean beast prowling in the dark.