Hominids (29 page)

Headlines she’d seen all too frequently swirled through Mary’s mind. “Police abandon search.”

“Hunt for missing girl called off.”

“Avalanche victims presumed dead.”

“I guess an emergency signal like that
would
be useful,” Mary said.

“It is,” replied Ponter firmly. “And the Companion can issue the signal automatically, if you yourself are unable to. It monitors vital signs, and if you have a heart attack—or even are about to have a heart attack—it can summon aid.”

Mary felt a twinge. Her own father had died of a heart attack, alone, when Mary had been eighteen. She’d found his body upon arriving home from school one day.

Ponter evidently mistook the sadness on Mary’s face for continuing dubiousness. “And just a month before I came here, I misplaced a rain shield that I was very fond of; it had been a gift from Jasmel. I would have been”—
bleep
; devastated?—“had it been lost for good. But I simply visited the archive pavilion where my recordings are stored, and reviewed the last day’s events. I saw exactly where I lost the shield and was able to retrieve it.”

Mary certainly resented the countless hours she’d spent looking for misplaced books and student papers and business cards and house keys and coupons that were about to expire. Maybe you’d resent that even more if you were sure your existence was finite; maybe that knowledge would drive you to do something to avoid such wastes of time. “A personal black box,” Mary said, really to herself, but Ponter responded.

“Actually, the recording material is mostly pink. We use reprocessed granite.”

Mary smiled. “No, no. A black box is what we call a flight recorder: a device aboard an airplane that keeps track of telemetry and cockpit chatter, in case there’s a crash. But the idea of having my own black box had never occurred to me.” She paused. “How are the pictures taken, then?” Mary glanced down at Ponter’s wrist. “Is there a lens on your Companion?”

“Yes, but it is only used to zoom in on things outside the Companion’s normal recording space. The Companion uses sensor fields to record everything surrounding the person, and the person himself, as well.” Ponter made the deep sound that was his chuckle. “After all, it would not be much good if we only recorded what was visible from the Companion’s lens: lots of images of my left thigh or the inside of my hip pouch. This way, when playing back my archive, I can actually view myself from a short distance away.”

“Amazing,” said Mary. “We have
nothing
like that.”

“But I have seen products of your science, your industry,” said Ponter. “Surely, if you had made it a priority to develop such technology …”

Mary frowned. “Well, I suppose. I mean, we went from putting the first object in space to the first man on the moon in less than twelve years, and—”

“I said, when we wanted badly enough to put somebody on the moon—”

“The moon,” repeated Ponter. “You mean
Earth’s
moon?”

Mary blinked. “Uh-huh.”

“But … but … that is fantastic,” Ponter said. “We have never done such a thing.”

“You’ve never been to the moon? I don’t mean you personally; I mean your people. No Neanderthal has ever been to the moon?”

Ponter’s eyes were wide. “No.”

“What about Mars or the other planets?”

“No.”

“Do you have satellites?”

“No, just one, like here.”

“No, I mean
artificial
satellites. Unmanned mechanisms you put into orbit, you know, to help in predicting the weather, for communications, and so on.”

“No,” said Ponter. “We have nothing like that.”

Mary thought for a moment. Without the legacy of the V-2, without the missiles of the Second World War, would humans here have been able to send anything into orbit? “We’ve launched—well, I don’t know—many hundreds of things into space.”

Ponter looked up, as if trying to visualize Luna’s scowling face through the ceiling of Reuben’s house. “How many live on the moon now?”

“None,” said Mary, surprised.

“You do not have a permanent settlement there?”

“No.”

“So people simply go to see the moon, then return to Earth. How many go each month? Is it a popular thing to do?”

“Umm, nobody goes. Nobody has gone for—well, I guess it’s thirty years now. We only ever sent twelve people to the moon’s surface. Six groups of two.”

“Why did you stop?”

“Well, it’s complicated. Money was certainly one factor.”

“I can imagine,” said Ponter.

“And, well, there was the political situation. See, we—” She paused for a moment. “Gee, this is hard to explain. We called it
The Cold War
. There was no actual fighting going on, but the United States and another large nation, the Soviet Union, were in a severe ideological conflict.”

“Over what?”

“Umm, over economic systems, I suppose.”

“Hardly sounds worth fighting about,” said Ponter.

“It seemed very important at the time. But, anyway, the president of the United States, he set the goal in—when was it?—in 1961, I guess, to put a man on the moon by the end of that decade. See, the Russians—the people from the Soviet Union—they’d put the first artificial satellite in space, and then the first man in space, and the U.S. was lagging behind, so, well, it set out to beat them.”

“And did it?”

“Oh, yes. The Russians never managed to put anyone on the moon. But, well, once we’d beaten the Russians, the public pretty much lost interest.”

“That is ridiculous—” began Ponter, but then he stopped. “No, I must apologize. Going to the moon is a magnificent feat, and whether you did it once or a thousand times, it is still praiseworthy.” He paused. “I guess it is simply a question of different priorities.”

Mary and Ponter headed downstairs, looking for something to eat. Just after they got to the kitchen, Reuben Montego and Louise Benoit finally emerged from the basement. Reuben grinned at Ponter. “More barbecue?”

Ponter smiled back at him. “Please. But you must let me help.”

“I’ll show you how,” said Louise. She patted Ponter on the forearm. “Come on, big fella.”

Suddenly, Mary found herself objecting. “I thought you were a vegetarian.”

“I am,” said Louise. “For five years now. But I know how to barbecue.”

Mary had an urge to go with them, as Ponter and Louise headed out through the sliding glass doors onto the deck. But … but … no, that was silly.

Louise slid the glass doors shut behind them, keeping the cooled air inside the house.

Reuben was clearing off the kitchen table. He faked the voice of an old Jewish yenta. “So, vhat have you two kids been talking about?”

Mary was still looking out through the glass, at Louise, laughing and tossing her hair as she explained how the barbecue worked, and at Ponter, hanging on her every word.

“Umm, mostly religion,” said Mary.

Reuben’s voice immediately switched back to normal. “Really?”

“Uh-huh,” said Mary. She tore her eyes away from what was going on outside, and looked at Reuben. “Or more precisely, Neanderthals’ lack of religion.”

“But I thought Neanderthals
did
have religion,” said Reuben, now getting some plain white Corelle plates from a cupboard. “The cult of the cave bear, and all that.”

Mary shook her head. “You’ve been reading old books, Reuben. No one takes that seriously anymore.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Oh, some cave-bear skulls were found in one cave that had indeed been occupied by Neanderthals. But it now looks like the bears had simply died in the cave, probably during hibernation, and the Neanderthals had moved in afterwards.”

“But weren’t the skulls all arranged in patterns?”

“Well,” said Mary, getting a handful of cutlery and laying it out, “the guy who first found them claimed they were in a stone crib or coffin. But no photos were taken, workers supposedly destroyed the coffin, and the only two sketches made by the archeologist—a guy named Bachler—completely contradict each other. No, it seems Bachler simply saw what he wanted to see.”

“Oh,” said Reuben, now rummaging in the fridge for things to make a salad. “But what about Neanderthals burying their dead with stuff the dear departed might need in the afterlife? Surely that’s a sign of religion.”

“Well, it
would
be,” said Mary, “if Neanderthals had really done that. But sites occupied for generations accumulate garbage: bones, old stone tools, and so on. The few examples we thought we had of grave goods at Neanderthal burials turned out to be stuff that had just accidentally been buried with the corpse.”

Reuben was pulling leaves off a head of iceberg lettuce now. “Ah, but doesn’t burial in and of itself imply a belief in the afterlife?”

Mary looked around for something else she could do to help, but there really didn’t seem to be anything. “It might,” she said, “or it might just be a case of trying to keep things neat. Lots of Neanderthal corpses are found in tightly wrapped fetal positions. That
could
be ceremony, or it could just be a desire on the part of the poor slob who had to dig the grave to make the hole as small as possible. Dead bodies attract scavengers, after all, and they get to stinking if you leave them out in the sun.”

Reuben was now chopping up celery. “But … but I read about Neanderthals being, well, the first flower children.”

Mary laughed. “Ah, yes. Shanidar Cave, in Iraq—where Neanderthal bodies were found covered with fossil pollen.”

“That’s right,” said Reuben, nodding. “As if they’d been buried wearing flower garlands, or something.”

“Sorry, but that’s been discredited, too. The pollen was just an accidental intrusion into the grave, brought there by burrowing rodents or groundwater percolating through the sediment.”

“But—wait a minute! What about the Neanderthal flute! That was front-page news all over the world.”

“Yeah,” said Mary. “Ivan Turk found that in Slovenia: a hollowed-out bear bone with four holes in it.”

“Right, right. A flute!”

“’Fraid not,” said Mary, leaning against the side-by-side fridge now. “It turns out that the bone was pierced by carnivore gnawing—probably by a wolf. And, yes, in typical newspaper fashion, that revelation did
not
make the front page.”

“That’s for sure. This is the first I’ve heard of it.”

“I was there at the Paleoanthropology Society meeting in Seattle in ’98, when Nowell and Chase presented their paper discrediting the flute.” Mary paused. “No, it really does look like right until the very end, Neanderthals—at least on this version of Earth—had nothing that we’d call
religion
, or even culture for that matter. Oh, some of the very last specimens show a little variety in the things they did, but most paleoanthropologists think they were just imitating Cro-Magnons who lived nearby; Cro-Magnons were indisputably our direct ancestors.”

“Speaking of Cro-Magnons,” said Reuben, “what about crossbreeding between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons? Didn’t I read that fossils of a hybrid child had been found in, what, oh, maybe 1998?”

“Yeah, Erik Trinkaus is big on that specimen; it’s from Portugal. But, look, he’s a physical anthropologist, and I’m a geneticist. He bases his case entirely on the skeleton of a child that, to him, shows hybrid characteristics. But he doesn’t have the skull—and the skull is the only truly diagnostic part of a Neanderthal. To me, it just looks like a stocky kid.”

“Hmm,” said Reuben. “But, you know, I’ve seen guys who look a fair bit like Ponter, in features if not in coloring. Some Eastern Europeans, for instance, have big noses and prominent browridges. Are you saying those guys don’t have Neanderthal genes in them?”

Mary shrugged. “I know some paleoanthropologists who would argue that they do. But, really, the jury is still out on whether our kind of humans and Neanderthals even could crossbreed.”

“Well,” said Reuben, “if you keep spending so much time with Ponter, maybe you’ll answer that one for us someday.”

Reuben was close enough that she was able to swat him on the arm with an open hand. “Stop that!” she said. She looked into the living room, so that Reuben wouldn’t see the grin growing across her face.

Jasmel Ket showed up at Adikor’s house around noon. Adikor was surprised but pleased to see her. “Healthy day,” he said.

“The same to you,” replied Jasmel, bending down to scratch Pabo’s head.

“Will you have food?” asked Adikor. “Meat? Juice?”

“No, I’m fine,” said Jasmel. “But I’ve been reading more of the law. Have you considered a counterclaim?”

“A counterclaim?” repeated Adikor. “Against whom?”

“Daklar Bolbay.”

Adikor ushered Jasmel into the living room. He took a chair, and she took another. “On what possible charge?” said Adikor. “She has done nothing to me.”

“She has interfered with your grieving for the loss of your man-mate …”

“Yes,” said Adikor. “But surely that is not a crime.”

“Isn’t it?” said Jasmel. “What does the
Code of Civilization
say about disturbing the life of another?”

“It says a lot of things,” said Adikor.

“The part I’m thinking of is, ‘Frivolous actions against another cannot be countenanced; civilization works because we only invoke its power over the individual in egregious cases.’”

“Well, she’s accused me of murder. There’s no more egregious crime.”

“But she has no real evidence against you,” said Jasmel. “That makes her action frivolous—or, at least, it might in the eyes of an adjudicator.”

Adikor shook his head. “I can’t see Sard being impressed by that argument.”

“Ah, but Sard cannot hear the counterclaim; that’s the law. You’d speak in front of a different adjudicator.”