Hominids (3 page)

“What language is that?” Paul asked Louise.

Louise shrugged. “Ojibwa?” she said. There was an Ojibwa reserve not far from the mine.

“No,” Reuben said, shaking his head.

“Monta has palap ko,”
said the man.

“We don’t understand you,” said Louise to the stranger. “Do you speak English?” Nothing.
“Parlez-vous franсais?”
Still nothing.

Paul said
“Nihongo ga dekimasu ka?”
which Louise assumed meant’, “Do you speak Japanese?”

The man looked at each of them in turn, eyes still wide, but he made no reply.

Reuben rose, then extended a hand down toward the man. He stared at it for a second, then took it in his own, which was huge, with fingers like sausages and an extraordinarily long thumb. He let Reuben pull him to his feet. Reuben then put an arm around the man’s broad back, helping to hold him up. The man must have outweighed Reuben by thirty kilos, all of it muscle. Paul moved to the man’s other side and used an arm to help support the stranger as well. Louise went ahead of the three of them, holding open the door to the control room, which had closed automatically after Reuben had entered.

Inside the control room, Louise put on her safety boots and hardhat, and Paul did the same; the hats had built-in lamps and hearing-protection cups that could be swung down when needed. They also put on safety glasses. Reuben was still wearing his own hardhat. Paul found another one on top of a metal locker and proffered it to the injured man, but before he could respond the doctor waved the hat away. “I don’t want any pressure on his skull until we’ve done those x-rays,” he said. “All right, let’s get him up to the surface. I called for an ambulance on my way over.”

The four of them left the control room, headed down a corridor, and walked into the arrival area for the SNO facility. SNO maintained clean-room conditions—not that it mattered much anymore, Louise thought ruefully. They walked past the vacuuming chamber, a shower stall-like affair that sucked dust and dirt off those entering SNO. Then they passed a row of real shower stalls; everyone had to wash before entering SNO, but that, too, wasn’t necessary on the way out. There was a first-aid station here, and Louise saw Reuben looking briefly at the locker labeled “Stretcher.” But the man was walking well enough, so the doctor motioned for them to continue out into the drift.

They turned on their hardhat lights and began trudging the kilometer and a quarter down the dim dirt-floored tunnel. The rough-hewn walls were peppered with steel rods and covered over with wire mesh; this far beneath Earth’s surface, with the weight of two kilometers of crust pressing down on them, unreinforced rock walls would burst into any open space.

As they walked along the drift, occasionally coming across muddy patches, the man began to take more of his own weight; he was clearly recovering from his ordeal.

Paul and Dr. Montego were engaged in an animated discussion about how this man could have possibly gotten into the sealed chamber. For her part, Louise was lost in thought about the ruined neutrino detector—and what that was going to do to her research funding. Air blew into their faces all the way along the drift; giant fans constantly pumped atmosphere down from the surface.

Finally, they reached the elevator station. Reuben had ordered the lift cage locked off here, on the 6,800-foot level—the mine’s signage predated Canada’s switch to the metric system. It was still waiting for them, no doubt to the chagrin of miners who wanted to come down or go up.

They entered the cage, and Reuben repeatedly activated the buzzer that would let the hoist operator on the surface know it was time to start the winch. The lift shuddered into motion. The cage had no internal lighting, and Reuben, Louise, and Paul had turned off their hardhat lamps rather than blind each other with their glare. The only illumination came in flashes from fixtures in the tunnels they passed every 200 feet, visible through the open front of the cage. In the weird, strobing light, Louise caught repeated glimpses of the strange man’s angular features and his deep-set eyes.

As they went higher and higher, Louise felt her ears pop several times. They soon passed the 4,600-foot level, Louise’s favorite. Inco grew trees there for reforestation projects around Sudbury. The temperature was a constant twenty degrees; adding artificial light turned it into a fabulous greenhouse.

Crazy thoughts occurred to Louise, weird
X-Files
notions about how the man could have gotten inside the sphere with the trapdoor still bolted shut. But she kept them to herself; if Paul and Reuben were having similar flights of fancy, they were also too embarrassed to give them voice. There
had
to be a rational explanation, Louise told herself. There had to be.

The cage continued its long ascent, and the man seemed to take stock of himself. His strange clothes were still somewhat wet, although the blowing air in the tunnels had done much to dry them. He tried wringing out his shirt, a few drops falling on the yellow-painted metal floor of the elevator cage. He then used his large hand to brush his wet hair off his forehead revealing, to Louise’s astonishment—she gasped, although the sound surely was inaudible over the clanging of the rising car—a prodigious ridge arching above each eye, like a squashed version of the McDonald’s logo.

At last the elevator shuddered to a halt. Paul, Louise, Dr. Montego, and the stranger disembarked, passing a small group of perplexed and irritated miners who were waiting to go down. The four of them headed up the ramp into the large room where workers hung their outdoor clothes each day, swapping them for coveralls. Two ambulance attendants were waiting. “I’m Reuben Montego,” said Reuben, “the mine-site doctor. This man nearly drowned, and he’s suffered a cranial trauma …” The two attendants and the doctor continued to discuss the man’s condition as they hustled him out of the building and into the hot summer day.

Paul and Louise followed, watching as the doctor, the injured man, and the attendants entered the ambulance and sped away on the gravel road.

“Now what?” said Paul.

Louise frowned. “I have to call Dr. Mah,” she said. Bonnie Jean Mah was SNO’s director. Her office was at Carle-ton University in Ottawa, almost 500 kilometers away. She was rarely seen at the actual observatory site; the day-to-day operations were left to postdocs and grad students, like Louise and Paul.

“What are you going to tell her?” asked Paul.

Louise looked in the direction of the departing ambulance, with its impossible passenger.
“Je ne sais pas,”
she said, shaking her head slowly.

It had started
much
more serenely. “Healthy day,” Ponter Boddit had said softly, propping his jaw up with a crooked arm as he looked over at Adikor Huld, who was standing by the washbasin.

“Hey, sleepyhead,” said Adikor, turning now and leaning his muscular back against the scratching post. He shimmied left and right. “Healthy day.”

Ponter smiled back at Adikor. He liked watching Adikor move, liked watching the muscles in his chest work. Ponter didn’t know how he would have survived the loss of his woman-mate Klast without Adikor’s support—although there were still some lonely times. When Two became One—the latest occurrence of which had just ended—Adikor went in to be with his own woman-mate and their child. But Ponter’s daughters were getting older, and he’d hardly seen them this time. Of course, there were plenty of elderly women whose men had died, but women so full of experience and wisdom—women old enough to vote!—would want nothing to do with one as young as Ponter, who had seen only 447 moons.

Still, even if they didn’t have much time for him, Ponter had enjoyed seeing his daughters, although—

It depended on the light. But sometimes, when the sun was behind her, and she tilted her head just so, Jasmel was the absolute image of her mother. It took Ponter’s breath away; he missed Klast more than he could say.

Across the room, Adikor was now filling the pool. He was bent over, operating the nozzle, his back to Ponter. Ponter lowered his head onto the disk-shaped pillow and watched.

Some people had cautioned Ponter against moving in with Adikor, and, Ponter was sure, a few of Adikor’s friends had probably expressed a similar concern to him. It had nothing to do with what had transpired at the Academy; it was simply that working
and
living together could be an awkward combination. But although Saldak was a large city (its population was over twenty-five thousand, split between Rim and Center), there were only six physicists in it, and three of those were female. Ponter and Adikor both enjoyed talking about their work and debating new theories, and both appreciated having someone who really understood what they were saying.

Besides, they made a good pair in other ways. Adikor was a morning person; he hit the day running and enjoyed drawing the bath. Ponter rallied as the day progressed; he always looked after preparing the evening meal.

Water continued to spray from the nozzle; Ponter liked the sound, a raucous white noise. He let out a contented sigh and climbed out of the bed, the moss growing on the floor tickling his feet. He stepped over to the window and grasped the handles attached to the sheet-metal panel, pulling the shutter off the magnetic window frame. He then reached over his head, placing the shutter in its daytime position, adhering to a metal panel set in the ceiling.

The sun was rising through the trees; it stung Ponter’s eyes, and he tilted his head down, bringing the front of his jaw to his chest, letting his browridge shade his vision. Outside, a deer was drinking from the brook three hundred paces away. Ponter hunted occasionally, but never in the residential areas; these deer knew they had nothing to fear—not here, not from any of the humans. Off in the distance, Ponter could see the glint of the solar panels spread along the ground by the next house.

Ponter spoke into the air. “Hak,” he said, calling his Companion implant by the name he’d given it, “what’s the forecast?”

“Quite lovely,” said the Companion. “The high today: sixteen degrees; the low tonight, nine.” The Companion used a feminine voice. Ponter had recently—and, he now realized, stupidly—reprogrammed it to use recordings of Klast’s voice, taken from her alibi archive, as the basis for the way it spoke. He’d thought hearing the sound of her voice would make him feel less lonely, but instead it tugged at his heart every time his implant talked to him.

“No chance of rain,” continued his Companion. “Winds from twenty-percent deasil, at eighteen thousand paces per daytenth.”

Ponter nodded; the implant’s scanners could easily detect him doing that.

“Bath’s ready,” said Adikor from behind him. Ponter turned and saw Adikor slipping into the circular pool recessed into the floor. He started the agitator, and the water roiled around him. Ponter—naked, like Adikor—walked over to the pool and slipped in as well. Adikor preferred his water warmer than Ponter did; they’d eventually settled on a compromise temperature of thirty-seven degrees—the same as body temperature.

Ponter used a
golbas
brush and his hands to clean the parts of Adikor that Adikor himself couldn’t reach, or preferred to have Ponter do. Then Adikor helped clean Ponter.

There was much moisture in the air; Ponter breathed deeply, letting it humidify his sinus cavities. Pabo, Ponter’s large reddish brown dog, came into the room. She didn’t like to get wet, so she stayed several paces from the pool. But she clearly wanted to be fed.

Ponter gave Adikor a “what can you do?” look and hauled himself out of the bath, dripping on the blanket of moss. “All right, girl,” he said. “Just let me get dressed.”

Satisfied that her message had been delivered, Pabo padded out of the bedroom. Ponter moved over to the washbasin and selected a drying cord. He gripped the two handles and rolled it from side to side across his back; he then chomped down on one of the cord’s handles while he dried off his arms and legs. Ponter looked at himself in the square mirror above the washbasin, and used splayed fingers to make sure his hair was deployed properly on either side of his central part.

There was a pile of clean clothes in a corner of the room. Ponter walked over and surveyed the selection. He normally didn’t think much about clothing, but if Adikor and he were successful today, one of the Exhibitionists might come look at them. He picked out a charcoal gray shirt, pulled it on, and did up the clasps at the tops of the shoulders, closing the wide gaps. This shirt was a good choice, he thought—it had been a gift from Klast.

He selected a pant and put it on, slipping his feet into the baggy pouches at the end of each leg. He then cinched the leather ankle and instep ties, producing a comfortable snugness.

Adikor was getting out of the pool now. Ponter glanced at him, then looked down at the display on his own Companion. They really did have to get going; the hover-bus would be along shortly.

Ponter headed out into the main room of the house. Pabo immediately bounded over to him. Ponter reached down and scratched the top of the dog’s head. “Don’t worry, girl,” he said. “I haven’t forgotten you.”

He opened the vacuum box and pulled out a large, meaty bison bone, saved from last night’s dinner. He then set it on the floor—the moss overlain with glass sheets here to make cleanups easier—and Pabo began to gnaw at it. Adikor joined Ponter in the kitchen and set about fixing breakfast. He took two slabs of elk meat out of the vacuum box and put them in the laser cooker, which filled with steam to remoisturize the meat. Ponter glanced over, looking through the cooker’s window, watching the ruby beams crisscrossing in intricate patterns, perfectly grilling every part of the steaks. Adikor filled a bowl with pine nuts and set out mugs of diluted maple syrup, then fetched the now-done steaks.

Ponter turned on the Voyeur, the square wall-mounted panel springing instantly to life. The screen was divided into four smaller squares, one showing transmissions from Hawst’s enhanced Companion; another, those from Talok’s; the lower-left, pictures of Gawlt’s life; and the lower-right, images of Lulasm’s. Adikor, Ponter knew, was a Hawst fan, so he told the Voyeur to expand that image to fill the entire screen. Ponter had to admit that Hawst was always up to something interesting—this morning, he’d headed to the outskirts of Saldak where five people had been buried alive by a rockslide. Still, if an Exhibitionist did come by the mineshaft entrance today, Ponter hoped it would be Lulasm; Ponter thought she usually asked the most insightful questions.