Hominids Read online

  Adikor looked around the room and helped himself to a seat. The chair was wooden, made by the same carpenter who supplied the ones he and Ponter had had on their deck; the woman had been an acquaintance of Klast.

  Jasmel sat on the opposite side of the room. Behind her, the cleaning robot left, heading into another part of the house.

  “Do you know what will happen if I’m found guilty?” asked Adikor.

  Jasmel closed her eyes, perhaps to forestall them making a quick glance down. “Yes,” she said softly. But then, as if it were a defense: “What difference does it make, though? You’ve already reproduced; you’ve got two children.”

  “No, I don’t,” said Adikor. “I have only one, a 148.”

  “Oh,” said Jasmel softly, perhaps embarrassed that she knew less about her father’s partner than Adikor did about his partner’s daughters.

  “And, besides, it’s not just me. My son Dab will be sterilized, too, and my sister Kelon—everyone who shares fifty percent of my genetic material.”

  Of course, these were no longer the barbaric days of yore; this was the era of genetic testing. Normally, if Kelon or Dab could show that they hadn’t inherited Adikor’s aberrant genes, they would have been entitled to be spared an operation. But although some crimes had single genetic causes that were well understood, a murderous trait had no such simple markers. And, besides, murder was a crime so heinous, no possibility, however remote, of its predisposition being further passed on could be allowed.

  “I’m sorry about that,” said Jasmel. “But…”

  “There are no buts,” said Adikor. “I am innocent.”

  “Then the adjudicator will find you so.”

  Ah, the artlessness of youth, thought Adikor. It would almost be endearing, if it weren’t for what he had on the line. “This is a most unusual case,” Adikor said. “Even I admit that. But there is no reason I would have killed the man I love.”

  “Daklar says it was difficult for you to always be downwind of my father.”

  Adikor felt his back stiffen. “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “I would,” said Jasmel. “My father—let’s be honest—was more intelligent than you. You didn’t like being an adjunct to his genius.”

  “‘We contribute as best we can,’” said Adikor, quoting the Code of Civilization.

  “Indeed we do,” said Jasmel. “And you wanted your contribution to be the principal one. But in your collaboration, it was Ponter’s ideas that were being tested.”

  “That’s no reason to kill him,” snapped Adikor.

  “Isn’t it? My father is gone, and you were the only one with him when he disappeared.”

  “Yes, he’s gone. He’s gone, and—” Adikor felt tears welling at the corners of his eyes, tears of sadness and tears of frustration. “I miss him so much. I say this with my head tilted back: I did not do this. I couldn’t have.”

  Jasmel looked at Adikor. He could see her nostrils dilating, taking in his scent, his pheromones. “Why should I believe you?” she said, crossing her arms in front of her chest.

  Adikor frowned. He’d made his grief plain; he’d tried arguing emotions. But this girl had more than Ponter’s eyes; she had his mind, too—a keen, analytical mind, a mind that prized logic and rationality.

  “All right,” said Adikor. “Consider this: if I am guilty of murdering your father, I will be sentenced. I will lose not just my ability to reproduce, but my position and my holdings. I will be unable to continue my work; the Gray Council will surely demand a more direct and tangible contribution from a convicted killer if I am to remain part of society.”

  “And well they should,” said Jasmel.

  “Ah, but if I’m not guilty—if no one is guilty, if your father is missing, if he’s lost, he needs help. He needs my help; I’m the only one who might be able to…to retrieve him. Without me, your father is gone for sure.” He looked at her golden eyes. “Don’t you see? The sensible position is to believe me: if I am lying, and I did murder Ponter—well, no punishment will bring him back. But if I am telling the truth, and Ponter was not murdered, then the only hope he has is if I can continue to search for him.”

  “The mine has been searched,” said Jasmel, flatly.

  “The mine, yes, but—” Did he dare tell her? It sounded crazy when the words echoed inside his head; he could only imagine how insane they would seem when given voice. “We were working with parallel universes,” said Adikor. “It’s possible—remotely possible, I know, but I refuse to give up on him, on the man who is so very important to both you and me—that he has, well, slipped, somehow, into another of those universes.” He looked at her, imploring. “You must know something of your father’s work. Even if you made little time for him”—he saw those words cut deep—“he must have told you about our work, about his theories.”

  Jasmel nodded. “He told me, yes.”

  “Well, then, there might—just might—be a chance. But I need to get this reeking dooslarm basadlarm over with; I need to get back to work.”

  Jasmel said nothing for a long time. Adikor knew from his own occasional arguments with her father that just letting her consider quietly would be more effective than pressing his point, but he couldn’t help himself. “Please, Jasmel. Please. It’s the only sensible wager to make: assume that I’m not guilty, and there’s a chance that we might get Ponter back. Assume that I am guilty, and he is surely gone for good.”

  Jasmel was silent a while longer, then: “What do you want from me?”

  Adikor blinked. “I, ah, I should have thought it was obvious,” he said. “I want you to speak on my behalf at the dooslarm basadlarm.”

  “Me?” exclaimed Jasmel. “But I’m one of those accusing you of murder!”

  Adikor held up his left wrist. “I’ve carefully reviewed the documents I was given. My accuser is your mother’s woman-mate, Daklar Bolbay, acting on behalf of your mother’s children: you, and Megameg Bek.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But she cannot act on your behalf. You’ve seen 250 moons now; you’re an adult. Yes, you can’t vote yet—neither can I, of course—but you are responsible for yourself. Daklar is still the tabant of young Megameg, but not of you.”

  Jasmel frowned. “I—I hadn’t thought of that. I’ve gotten so used to Daklar looking after my sister and me…”

  “You are your own person under the law now. And no one could better persuade an adjudicator that I did not murder Ponter than his own daughter.”

  Jasmel closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and let it out slowly in a long, shuddery sigh. “All right,” she said at last. “All right. If there’s a chance, any chance at all, that my father still lives, I have to pursue it. I have to.” She nodded once. “Yes, I’ll be the one to speak on your behalf.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  The conference room at the Creighton Mine had wall diagrams showing the network of tunnels and drifts. A hunk of nickel ore sat as a centerpiece on a long wooden table. A Canadian flag stood at one end of the room; the other had a large window overlooking the parking lot and the rough countryside beyond.

  At the head of the table was Bonnie Jean Mah—a white woman with lots of brown hair who was married to a Chinese-Canadian, hence her last name. She was the director of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, and had just flown in from Ottawa.

  Along one side of the table sat Louise Benoît, the tall, beautiful postdoc who’d been down in the SNO control room when the disaster had occurred. And on the other side sat Scott Naylor, an engineer from the company that had manufactured the acrylic sphere at the heart of SNO. Next to him was Albert Shawwanossoway, Inco’s top expert on rock mechanics.

  “All right,” said Bonnie Jean. “Just to bring everyone up to date, they’ve started draining the SNO chamber, before the heavy water gets any more polluted. AECL is going to try to separate the heavy water from the regular water, and, in theory, we should be able to reassemble the sphere and load it up with the recovered heavy water, getting
SNO back on-line.” She looked at the faces in the room. “But I’d still like to know exactly what caused the accident.”

  Naylor, a balding, tubby white man, said, “I’d say the sphere containing the heavy water burst apart because of pressure from the inside.”

  “Could the displacement caused by a man entering the sphere have done that?” asked Bonnie Jean.

  Naylor shook his head. “The sphere held 1,100 tonnes of heavy water; you add a human being, weighing a hundred kilos—one-tenth of a tonne—and you’ve only increased the mass by one ten-thousandth. Human beings have about the same density as water, so the displacement increase would only be about one ten-thousandth, as well. The acrylic could easily handle that.”

  “Then he must have used an explosive of some sort,” said Shawwanossoway, an Ojibwa of about fifty, with long, black hair.

  Naylor shook his head. “We’ve done assays on the water recovered from the tank. There’s no evidence of any explosive—and there aren’t that many that would work soaking wet, anyway.”

  “Then what?” asked Bonnie Jean. “Could there have been, I don’t know, a magma incursion or something, and the water boiled?”

  Shawwanossoway shook his head. “The temperature of SNO, and the whole mine complex, is closely monitored; there was no change. In the observatory cavern, it held steady at its normal value of 105 degrees—Fahrenheit, that is; forty-one Celsius. Hot, but nowhere near boiling. Remember, too, that the mine is a mile and a quarter underground, meaning the air pressure is about thirteen hundred millibars—30 percent above that at sea level. And at higher pressures, of course, the boiling point goes up, not down.”

  “What about the flip side?” asked Bonnie Jean. “What if the heavy water froze?”

  “Well, it would indeed have expanded, just like regular water,” said Naylor. He frowned. “Yes, that would have burst the sphere. But heavy water freezes at 3.82 Celsius. It just couldn’t possibly get that cold that far down.”

  Louise Benoît joined the conversation. “What if more than just the man entered the sphere? How much material would have to be added before it would burst?”

  Naylor thought for a moment. “I’m not sure; it was never specced for that. We always knew exactly how much heavy water AECL was going to loan us.” He paused. “Maybe…I don’t know, maybe 10 percent. A hundred cubic meters, or so.”

  “Which is what?” asked Louise. She looked around the conference room. “This room’s about six meters on a side, isn’t it?”

  “Twenty feet?” said Naylor. “Yeah, I guess.”

  “And it’s got ten-foot ceilings—that’s three meters,” continued Louise. “So you’re talking about a volume of material as big as the contents of this room.”

  “More or less, I suppose.”

  “That’s ridiculous, Louise,” said Bonnie Jean. “All you found down there was one man.”

  Louise nodded, conceding that, but then she lifted her arched eyebrows. “What about air? What if a hundred cubic meters of air were pumped into the sphere?”

  Naylor nodded. “I’d thought about that. I thought maybe a belch of gas had somehow welled up into the sphere, although how it would get inside I have no idea. The water samples we took were somewhat aerated, but…”

  “But what?” asked Louise.

  “Well, they were indeed aerated, with nitrogen, oxygen, and some CO2, as well as some gabbroic rock dust and pollen. In other words, just regular mine air.”

  “Then it couldn’t have come from the SNO facility,” said Bonnie Jean.

  “That’s right, ma’am,” said Naylor. “That air is all filtered; it’s free of rock dust and other pollutants.”

  “But the only parts of the mine connecting to the detector chamber are in the SNO facility,” said Louise.

  Naylor and Shawwanossoway both nodded.

  “Okay, okay,” said Bonnie Jean, steepling her fingers in front of her. “What have we got? The volume of material inside the sphere was increased by, at a guess, 10 percent or more. That might have been caused by an infusion of a hundred cubic meters or more of unfiltered air—although unless the air was pumped in very rapidly, it would have been compressed by the weight of the water, no? And, in any event, we don’t know where the air came from—it certainly wasn’t from SNO—or how it was conveyed into the sphere, right?”

  “That’s about the size of it, ma’am,” said Shawwanossoway.

  “And this man—we don’t know how he got into the sphere, either?” asked Bonnie Jean.

  “No,” said Louise. “The access hatch between the inner heavy-water sphere and the outer regular-water containment tank was sealed tight even after the sphere broke apart.”

  “All right,” said Bonnie Jean, “do we know how this—this Neanderthal, they’re calling him—even got down into the mine?”

  Shawwanossoway was the only one present who actually worked for Inco. He spread his arms. “The mine-security people have reviewed the security-camera tapes and access logs for the forty-eight hours prior to the incident,” he said. “Caprini—that’s our head of security—swears that heads will roll when he finds out who screwed up by letting that guy in, and he says even worse will happen when he finds out who’s been trying to hide it.”

  “What if no one is lying?” said Louise.

  “That’s just not possible, Miss Benoît,” said Shawwanossoway. “No one could get down to SNO without it being recorded.”

  “No one could if he came down by the elevator,” said Louise. “But what if he didn’t come that way?”

  “You think maybe he climbed down two kilometers of vertical air shafts?” said Shawwanossoway, scowling. “Even if he could do that—and it would take nerves of steel—security cameras still would have recorded him.”

  “That’s my point,” said Louise. “He obviously didn’t go down into the mine. As Professor Mah said, they’re calling him a Neanderthal—but he’s a Neanderthal with some sort of high-tech implant on his wrist; I saw that with my own eyes.”

  “So?” said Bonnie Jean.

  “Please!” exclaimed Louise. “You all must be thinking the same things I’m thinking. He didn’t take the elevator. He didn’t go down the ventilation shafts. He materialized inside the sphere—him, and a roomful of air.”

  Naylor whistled the opening notes of the original Star Trek theme.

  Everyone laughed.

  “Come on,” said Bonnie Jean. “Yes, this is a crazy situation, and it might be tempting to jump to crazy conclusions, but let’s stay down to earth.”

  Shawwanossoway could whistle, too. He did the theme to The Twilight Zone.

  “Stop that!” snapped Bonnie Jean.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Mary Vaughan was the only passenger on the Inco Learjet flying from Toronto to Sudbury; she’d noted on boarding that the plane, painted with dark green sides, was labeled “The Nickel Pickle” on its bow.

  Mary used the brief flight time to review research notes on her notebook computer; it had been years since she’d published her study of Neanderthal DNA in Science. As she read through her notes, she twirled the gold chain that held the small, plain cross she always wore around her neck.

  In 1994, Mary had made a name for herself recovering genetic material from a 30,000-year-old bear found frozen in Yukon permafrost. And so, two years later, when the Rheinisches Amt für Bodendenkmalpflege—the agency responsible for archeology in the Rhineland—decided it was time to see whether any DNA could be extracted from the most famous fossil of all, the original Neanderthal man, they called on Mary. She’d been dubious: that specimen was desiccated, having never been frozen, and—opinions varied—it might be as old as 100,000 years, three times the age of the bear. Still, the challenge was irresistible. In June 1996, she’d flown to Bonn, then headed to the Rheinisches Landesmuseum, where the specimen was housed.

  The best-known part—the browridged skullcap—was on public display, but the rest of the bones were kept in a steel box, within a steel cabinet, i
nside a room-sized steel vault. Mary was led into the safe by a German bone preparator named Hans. They wore protective plastic suits and surgeons’ masks; every precaution had to be taken against contaminating the bones with their own modern DNA. Yes, the original discoverers had doubtless contaminated the bones—but after a century and a half, their unprotected DNA on the surface should have degraded completely.

  Mary could only take a very small piece of bone; the priests at Turin guarded their shroud with equal jealousy. Still, it was extraordinarily difficult for both her and Hans—like desecrating a great work of art. Mary found herself wiping away tears as Hans used a goldsmith’s saw to cut a semicircular chunk, just a centimeter wide and weighing only three grams, from the right humerus, the best preserved of all the bones.

  Fortunately, the hard calcium carbonate in the outer layers of the bone should have afforded some protection for any of the original DNA within. Mary took the specimen back to her lab in Toronto and drilled tiny pieces out of it.

  It took five months of painstaking work to extract a 379-nucleotide snippet from the control region of the Neanderthal’s mitochondrial DNA. Mary used the polymerase chain reaction to reproduce millions of copies of the recovered DNA, and she carefully sequenced it. She then checked the corresponding bit of mitochondrial DNA in 1,600 modern humans: Native Canadians, Polynesians, Australians, Africans, Asians, and Europeans. Every one of those 1,600 people had at least 371 nucleotides out of those 379 the same; the maximum deviation was just eight nucleotides.

  But the Neanderthal DNA had an average of only 352 nucleotides in common with the modern specimens; it deviated by a whopping twenty-seven bases. Mary concluded that her kind of human and Neanderthals must have diverged from each other between 550,000 and 690,000 years ago for their DNA to be so different. In contrast, all modern humans probably shared a common ancestor 150,000 or 200,000 years in the past. Although the half-million-year-plus date for the Neanderthal/modern divergence was much more recent than the split between genus Homo and its closest relatives, the chimps and bonobos, which occurred five to eight million years ago, it was still far enough back that Mary felt Neanderthals were probably a fully separate species from modern humans, not just a subspecies: Homo neanderthalensis, not Homo sapiens neanderthalensis.