Hominids (35 page)

Having a keen olfactory sense certainly had its advantages, although Lurt had heard it said that the reason people ate so few plants, while other primates thrived on them, was that the acute sensitivity to odors made it hard to tolerate the flatulence that went with a diet heavy in vegetation. Anyway, this was just what the doctor had ordered—even if that doctor was a physicist trying to keep from going under the knife.

Lurt thought she smelled it first, before anyone else, even though her viewing room was hardly the closest to the corridor where she’d left the device. Then again, she’d been waiting for it, doubtlessly dilating her nostrils in anticipation. But she refused to be the first one to react. She sat until she heard others running about, then left her room, trying not to gag at the horrendous stench. A big, burly fellow came out of one of the other viewing chambers, holding a hand over his nose. Lurt thought perhaps he was the enforcer monitoring Adikor’s transmissions, and that was confirmed when, as she herself exited, she caught sight of the holo-bubble the man had been watching, which showed Jasmel and Adikor leaving Adikor’s house.

“What is that awful smell?” said a wincing Dabdalb, the Keeper of Alibis, as Lurt passed her.

“It’s horrible!” said another patron, hustling through the lobby.

“Open the windows! Open the windows!” shouted a third.

Lurt joined the small crowd hurrying out into the clean, open air outside the building. It would be at least a quarter of a day, Lurt knew, before the smell would dissipate enough to make going back indoors possible.

She hoped that would be enough time for Adikor to accomplish what he was trying to do.

Mary went to Laurentian University the next morning, having finally managed to get rid of the reporters waiting in the lobby of the Ramada. They’d been disappointed that Ponter hadn’t turned out to be staying there, as well. Apparently Reuben had implied to the journalists that he might be—presumably as a way of putting them off Ponter’s trail; Mary had returned him to Reuben’s house last night, which, as far as she knew, was where he’d stayed.

At 10:30 A.M., Mary was surprised to run into Louise Benoit in the corridor outside the Laurentian genetics lab. Louise was wearing tight-fitting denim cutoffs and a white T-shirt tied in a knot over her flat midriff. Well, thought Mary, it
was
blisteringly hot today, but
really
—she looks like she’s
asking
for it …

Mary cursed herself; she knew better than that. No matter how a woman dressed, she was entitled to safety, entitled to be able to walk around without being molested.

Mary decided to be friendly and trotted out her few words of French.
“Bonjour,”
she said, as she got closer to Louise.
“Comment sa va?”

“I’m fine,” replied Louise. “And you?”

“Fine. What brings you here?”

Louise pointed down the hall. “I was visiting some guys I know in the physics department. There’s not much for me to do at SNO right now. They’ve finished draining the detector chamber, and a team from the original manufacturer is just beginning work on reassembling the sphere, although that will take weeks. So I thought I’d talk over an idea with a couple of the people here—see if they could shoot any holes in it.”

Mary was heading toward the vending machines, looking to get a bag of Miss Vickie’s sea-salt-and-malt-vinegar kettle chips—an indulgence she could only afford in a monetary sense, but it had long been traditional for her to start each work week with a 43-gram bag.

“And did they?” Mary asked. “Shoot any holes in it, I mean?”

Louise shook her head and fell in beside Mary as she continued on down to the lounge.

“Well, that’s the best kind of idea, isn’t it?” Mary said.

“I suppose,” said Louise. Once they reached the lounge, Mary fished in her purse for some change. She pulled out a loonie and a quarter, and fed them into one of the vending machines. Louise, meanwhile, got herself a cup of coffee from another machine.

“Remember that meeting we had in the Inco conference room?” said Louise. “Well, as I said then, the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics states that whenever a quantum event can go two ways, it
does
go two ways.”

“A splitting of the timeline,” said Mary, leaning her bum against the arm of a vinyl-padded chair in the lounge.

“Oui,”
said Louise. “Well, I spent some time talking to Ponter about this.”

“Ponter mentioned that,” said Mary. “I must have missed it.”

“It was late at night, and—”

“You went into Ponter’s room again after we’d finished the language lessons?” Mary was astonished by the rush of—of, my God, of
jealousy
—she felt.

“Sure. I like to be up at night; you know that. I wanted to learn more about the Neanderthal view of physics.”

“And?” said Mary, trying to keep her tone even.

“Well, it’s interesting,” said Louise. She took a sip of her coffee. “Here in this world, we’ve got two major interpretations for quantum mechanics: the Copenhagen interpretation and Everett’s Many-Worlds interpretation. The former postulates a special role for the observer—that consciousness actually influences reality. Well, that idea makes some physicists very uncomfortable; it’s seen as a return to vitalism. Everett’s Many-Worlds interpretation was an attempt to work around that. It says that quantum phenomena cause new universes to split off constantly, with each possible outcome of a quantum interaction occurring, but in a separate universe. No observers are required to shape reality; instead, every reality that
can
conceivably exist is automatically created.”

“Okay,” said Mary, not because she really understood, but because the alternative seemed to be an even longer lecture.

“Well, Ponter’s people have a
single
theory of quantum mechanics that’s sort of a synthesis of our two theories. It allows for many worlds—that is, for parallel universes—but the creation of such universes doesn’t result from random quantum events. Rather, it only happens through the
actions of conscious observers
.”

“Why don’t we have the same single theory, then?” asked Mary, munching on a particularly large chip.

“Partly because there’s a lot of math that seems irreconcilable between the two interpretations,” said Louise. “And, of course, there’s that old problem of politics in science: those physicists who favor the Copenhagen interpretation have devoted their careers to proving that it’s right; same thing for the guys on Everett’s side. For them all to sit down and say, ‘Maybe we’re both partly right—and both partly wrong’ just isn’t going to happen.”

“Ah,” said Mary. “It’s like the Regional Continuity versus Replacement debate in anthropology.”

Louise nodded. “If you say so. But suppose the Neanderthal synthesis of quantum physics is actually correct. It implies that consciousness—human volition—has the power to spin off new universes. Well, that raises a significant question. Presumably in the beginning, at the moment of the big bang, there must have been only
one
universe. Sometime later, it started splitting.”

“I thought Ponter didn’t believe in the big bang?” said Mary.

“Yes, apparently Neanderthal scientists think the universe has always existed. They believe that on large scales, redshifts—which are our principal evidence for an expanding universe—are proportional to age, rather than distance; that is, that mass varies over time. And they think the gross structure of galaxies and galactic clusters are caused by monopoles and plasma-pinching magnetic vortex filaments. Ponter says the cosmic microwave background—which we take as the residue of the big-bang fireball—is really the result of electrons trapped in these strong magnetic fields absorbing and emitting microwaves. Repeated absorption and emission by billions of galaxies smoothed out the effect, he says, producing the uniform background we detect now.”

“Does that seem possible to you?” asked Mary.

Louise shrugged. “I’m going to have to look into it.” She took another sip of coffee. “But, you know, after telling me all that, Ponter said the most astonishing thing.”

“What?” asked Mary.

“I guess you showed him a church service, right?”

“Yes. On TV.”

Louise took a seat on one of the other vinyl-covered chairs. “Well,” she said, “apparently he spent some time that night watching Vision TV, soaking up more religious thought. He said our story of the universe having an origin is just a creation myth, like from the Bible. ‘In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth …’ and all that. ‘Even your science,’ Ponter said, ‘is contaminated by this error of religion.’”

Mary sat down properly as well. “You know … I mean, physics is your field, not mine, but maybe he’s right. I mentioned Regional Continuity versus Replacement a moment ago; sometimes that’s called Multiregionalism versus Out-of-Africa. Anyway, there are those who’ve observed that Replacement, which is what I and other geneticists favor, is also basically a biblical position: humanity came full-blown out of Africa, ejected from a garden, and there’s a hard-and-fast line between us and everything else in the animal kingdom, including even other contemporaneous members of the genus
Homo
.”

“It’s an interesting point of view,” said Louise.

“And you can argue that the other side is fighting for a biblical interpretation, too: the parallels between Multi-regionalism and the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel are pretty blatant. Beyond that, there’s the whole ‘mitochondrial Eve’ hypothesis—that all modern humans trace their origin to one woman who lived hundreds of thousands of years ago. Even the theory’s name—Eve!—screams that it’s being pushed more because of biblical resonances than because it’s good science.” Mary paused. “Anyway, sorry, you were talking about the Neanderthal version of quantum physics …”

“Right, right,” said Louise. “Well, my thought was, suppose they are correct about how parallel universes are spun off, but wrong about this universe having existed forever. If the universe
did
have a beginning, then when did that first split occur?”

Mary frowned. “Well, umm, I don’t know. I guess the first time somebody made a decision.”

“Exactly! I think that’s exactly right! And when was the first decision made?” Louise paused. “You know, it
is
interesting what Ponter says about how our scientific worldview is always, down deep, trying to say the same things our creation myths say—the big bang and your model of hominid evolution both being modern retellings of Genesis. Well, maybe I’m being guilty of the same kind of thinking here. After all, in the Bible, the first decision made by anyone other than God is when Eve decided to take the apple—the original sin—and, well, one could think of that as having split the universe. In one timeline, the one we’re supposedly in, humanity was cast out of paradise. In another, we weren’t. In fact, it’s even a bit like Ponter’s own case, with a being crossing over from one version of reality to the other.”

Mary was completely lost. “How do you mean?”

“I’m talking about Mary—not you, Professor Vaughan; Mary, the mother of Jesus. You’re a Catholic, aren’t you?”

Mary nodded.

“I noticed your crucifix.” Mary looked down, self-conscious. “I’m Catholic, too,” continued Louise. “Anyway, as a Catholic, you probably don’t make the same mistake lots of other people do. The doctrine of the immaculate conception—a lot of people think that’s a fancy term for Christ’s virgin birth, but it isn’t, is it?”

“No,” said Mary. “No, it refers to the conception of Mary herself. The reason she was able to give birth to the son of God was that she herself was conceived devoid of original sin—it was
her
conception that was immaculate.”

“Exactly. Well, how do you get a person without original sin in a world in which everyone is descended from Adam and Eve?”

“I have no idea,” said Mary, truthfully.

“Don’t you see?” said Louise. “It’s as if Mary was shifted into this universe from the other timeline, from the one in which Eve never took the apple, the one in which Man never fell, the one in which people live without the taint of original sin.”

Mary nodded dubiously. “One
could
argue that.”

Louise smiled. “Well, you’ll see the parallel between Ponter and the Virgin Mary in a second. Let me get back to my earlier question: I said if he’s right, and the universe does split every time a decision is made, when did the universe first split? And you said the first time someone made a decision. But when was that? Not in the Bible, but, well, in reality …?”

Mary fished out another potato chip. “Gee, I don’t know. The first time a trilobite decided to go left instead of right?”

Louise put her cardboard coffee cup down on a little table. “No, I don’t think so. Trilobites have no volition; they, and all other primitive forms of life, are just chemical machines. Stephen Jay Gould keeps talking about rewinding the tape of life in his books and getting a different outcome, and when he says that, he thinks he’s making an allusion to chaos theory. But he’s wrong. No matter how many times you placed a trilobite at the same fork in the road, it will go the same way. A trilobite doesn’t think; it doesn’t have consciousness. It just processes the inputs of its senses and does what they dictate. No choice is made. Gould is right—sort of—that if the initial conditions were changed, the outcome could be radically different, but rewinding the tape of life and playing it again no more gives a different outcome than rewinding a tape of
Gone with the Wind
and playing it again results in an ending in which Rhett and Scarlett stay together. I don’t think real decisions—real choices, real
consciousness
—emerged until much, much later. I think
we
—
Homo sapiens
—were the first conscious beings on this planet.”