The Synopsis Treasury (22 page)

The preliminary hearing of the murder charge against Adikor begins. Daklar Bolbay outlines her case, pointing out that Adikor contrived a situation in which the transmissions from his and Ponter’s Companion implants could not be received by the alibi archives. This, she says, gave Adikor, whom she believes was jealous of Ponter’s greater scientific stature, the perfect opportunity to commit murder.

Daklar then shows recordings that were made of transmissions from Ponter’s Companion implant 19 years previously, when Ponter and Adikor were students together at the Science Academy. During an argument, Adikor who has a history of trouble controlling his temper but who has since been receiving treatment for that, smashes Ponter in the face with his fist—and when a Neanderthal does that, with all his strength behind it, the blow can easily be fatal. Ponter narrowly survives.

Adikor protests that this is unfair evidence to introduce: Ponter forgave Adikor and never pressed charges against him, and so, under Neanderthal law, no crime was committed. But Daklar contends that Adikor’s past violence against Ponter establishes an excellent circumstantial murder case, and says the matter should be sent on to a full trial.

END OF PART TWO

Mary, Dr. Montego, Louise, and Ponter are quarantined in Montego’s house by order of Health Canada. After Ponter’s fever breaks, Mary begins to find herself attracted to the big guy, in a general sort of way. This is actually a relief to her: she’d thought that after the rape, she’d never be able to look at a man in a sexual way again.

Mary and Dr. Montego realize that because Ponter doesn’t come from an agricultural society, he probably didn’t bring anything regular humans are susceptible to from his world; rather, he’s probably suffering from something he caught since arriving on this version of Earth.

Ponter’s Companion has now learned enough English to allow for meaningful conversations. Mary and Ponter talk about the differences between their two worlds. Mary is shocked to learn that Neanderthal society has absolutely no religion or belief in an afterlife. She’s also surprised to learn that the Neanderthals purge their gene pool of aberrant genes.

Still, by this time, even Montego has noticed Mary and Ponter’s growing attraction for one another—which makes all the more shocking Ponter’s revelation that he has a male lover back home. Mary tries to digest the bisexual nature of Neanderthal society.

Ponter’s daughter, Jasmel Ket, presents a defense of Adikor to the preliminary hearing, and Adikor himself tries to introduce the idea that Ponter may have disappeared into a parallel world rather than having being killed. But the adjudicator rejects this seemingly outlandish notion, and Adikor is indeed handed over for a full trial.

Having honored her commitment to speak for Adikor, Jasmel now deserts him, having been appalled by the site of Adikor almost killing her father years before. But after reviewing more of Ponter’s archive recordings, she realizes that her father really did love and trust Adikor, and so she agrees to continue to help him prove his innocence.

Jasmel has now figured out why Daklar is pursuing Adikor with such vengeance, but she won’t tell him the reason, saying he must hear it directly from Daklar.

END OF PART THREE

When confronted, Daklar breaks down and admits the truth: she hates Adikor because he got away with his original violent attack on Ponter, whereas Daklar’s own man-mate was sterilized because his brother, with whom he shares 50% of his DNA, had committed a similar crime.

Adikor figures out a way to circumvent his judicial scrutiny. Neanderthal noses are very sensitive to smells, so Adikor arranges for his woman-mate, the chemist Lurt, to set off a stink bomb in the archive pavilion, driving out the Enforcer who is observing Adikor’s companion transmissions, along with everyone else accessing archive recordings. While his companion is unmonitored, Adikor and Jasmel head down to the quantum-computing lab to attempt to retrieve Ponter.

Mary admits to Ponter that humans on her version of Earth not only wiped out all the megafauna, they almost certainly killed off the Neanderthals here.

Health Canada decides to lift the quarantine, but Mary, Louise, and Dr. Montego conspire to sneak Ponter away from Montego’s home before the press can descend upon him. Mary and Ponter escape to the countryside of Northern Ontario, where, after much searching, they find the spot on which Ponter’s home stands in his version of Earth. By an effort of will, Ponter tries to force himself back to his world—and his beloved Adikor and his two daughters—but of course fails to do so. Ponter cries over his loss, and Mary comforts him, holding him in her arms.

Mary and Ponter stop at a secluded country inn for what turns out to be a rather romantic candle-lit dinner. Afterward, they pull over to the side of a country road so that they can look at the stars, which Mary never gets to see so clearly back in Toronto. While looking up at the night sky, Ponter slips his hand into Mary’s own. Suddenly, Mary freezes, the horrid memory of the rape coming back to haunt her. She moves away from Ponter, and the two of them drive back to Sudbury in silence.

Louise Benoît works out the origin of the two versions of Earth, citing the dawn of consciousness 40,000 years ago as a quantum-mechanical event that split the timeline. In one branch, her kind of humanity went on to be dominant. In the other, Neanderthals did so. The so-called “Great Leap Forward”—the first appearance of art, ceremonial burial of the dead, and personal adornment in the archeological record—marks the point at which the timeline split.

Adikor and Jasmel use a mining robot to stand in the same spot Ponter had occupied the first time Adikor had run the factoring experiment. The robot gets transferred to our world, and Adikor and Jasmel are astonished to see through its cameras the now-drained Sudbury Neutrino Observatory chamber, filled with strange hominids that resemble their world’s long-extinct Gliksin people.

A phone call goes out from SNO to Mary, telling her to find Ponter, who is somewhere on the Laurentian campus. She locates him, and tells him a portal has opened to his world, but no one knows how long it will stay open.

Ponter can run much faster than Mary, but he can’t drive—he needs her with him to make it out to the SNO site. He sweeps her off her feet and runs with her in his muscular arms out to the parking lot. Mary and he drive to the SNO site.

The 2,000-meter elevator ride down to the neutrino observatory takes several minutes. Mary knows she would never forgive herself if she didn’t explain to Ponter why she hadn’t responded to his romantic touch when they were looking at the stars. She tells him about the rape. Ponter is aghast, and wonders why the recordings from Mary’s Companion implant haven’t been used to identify the criminal, but of course Mary has no such implant.

At last they reach the SNO chamber. Mary hugs Ponter, and kisses him on the cheek. She presses into his hand a small crucifix she usually wears, and he scrambles up a ladder and escapes through the portal back to his world.

In the Neanderthal world, Ponter is reunited with Adikor and Jasmel. He then appears in person at the opening of Adikor’s full murder trial, to the astonishment and delight of the spectators.

An engineer friend of Adikor works out a way to keep the portal between the two worlds permanently open. Ponter looks forward to seeing Mary again, and, he hopes, to continuing their relationship as the two kinds of humanity learn to live and work together.

OUTLINE
Neandertal Parallax
A novel proposal by Robert J. Sawyer

Ne·an·der·tal: now the preferred spelling by most English-language paleoanthropologists of the word formerly rendered as Neanderthal, recognizing the official revision of the spelling of the original German place name by the German government.

Par·al·lax: the apparent shifting of an object’s position when seen from a different point of view.

Forty thousand years ago, two distinct species of humanity existed on Earth: Archaic Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis. Both looked out on their world with dull gazes, unable to comprehend it, barely aware of their own existence.

And then an event that would change everything occurred: in the quantum structures of the complex neural tissue packed into the brains of Homo sapiens, consciousness emerged. And with consciousness came art and sophisticated language and science and religion and subtle emotions and planning for the future. Until this time, no truly self-aware lifeform had existed on Earth, no creature lived, primate or otherwise, that was driven by anything other than instinct.

Of course, this newfound awareness enabled Homo sapiens to out-compete the Neandertals; in less than ten thousand years, the Neandertals were extinct.

Or, at least, they were extinct here—in this universe.

But, under quantum physics, the phenomenon of consciousness is intimately tied in with the nature of reality. Indeed, quantum theory predicts that every time an event observed by an intelligent being could have two outcomes, both outcomes do come to pass—but in separate universes. Until the rise of consciousness, there were no branching universes, no parallel realities. But, starting on that crucial day 40,000 years ago when consciousness emerged for the first time, the universe did begin to split into multiple versions.

The very first split—the very first time an alternative universe was spun off from this one—happened because the original emergence of consciousness, a product of quantum fluctuations, could have gone a different way: instead of consciousness first arising in a Homo sapiens mind, it might instead have arisen originally in a Homo neanderthalensis mind, leading to the Neandertals deposing our ancestors, instead of vice versa.

And 40,000 years later, in what in this universe is referred to as the dawn of the 21st century, an artificial portal opens, bridging between our universe and one in which the descendants of Neandertals are the dominant form, allowing small numbers of individuals to pass in either direction.

Many things are the same on both Earths: the sky shows the same patterns of stars, the year is still 365 days long, and is divided into months based on the cycling of the moon’s phases. The gross geography of both worlds—the shapes of the continents, the location of lakes and mountains—is the same. And the flora and fauna is essentially the same (although Neandertals never hunted mammoths or other animals into extinction, and so they still flourish).

But all the details of culture are different. Gender roles, family structures, economic models, morals, ethics, religion, art, vices, and more are unique to each species. In what I hope will be a tour de force of world building, the Neandertal world will be as rich and as human as our own, but different in almost every particular. Although there is much diversity in modern human cultures, many themes recur in almost all of them, themes that can be traced back to our archaic Homo sapiens ancestors of 40,000 years ago: pair-bonding, belief in an afterlife, territorial defense, xenophobia, accumulation of wealth. The modern Neandertal society will have entirely different approaches to these and other issues, based on the their different evolutionary history.

For instance, humans are able to effectively communicate with words alone: language spoken in darkness, printed text, radio, telephone conversations, E-mail—all are possible because we can easily transcribe or transmit spoken sounds, and convey virtually our entire intended meaning with just these sounds. But there is much evidence that Neandertals would have had a substantially reduced vocal range compared to that of archaic humans—possibly meaning they, and their descendants, would have to supplement verbal communication with facial expressions and gestures. If their descendants developed books or telephones at all, they might only be useful for conveying limited kinds of information.

Meanwhile, some fossil sites suggest that only female Neandertals homesteaded, and males lived nomadic existences, interacting with females only to breed. Projected into the present day, such lifestyles might define radically different social arrangements, with most individuals having long-term same-sex partnerships (of two, or possibly more, individuals), and secondary other-sex relationships. Absentee fathers wouldn’t necessarily be bad fathers, though: modern Neandertal society might be built around multiday holidays during which all work stops and rural males come into the cities to be with their offspring.

And, of course, all the background of daily life—here, in our universe, typified by such things as single-family dwellings, nine-to-five jobs, private automobiles, television, contract law, national allegiances, and war—would be completely different in the Neandertal world, a world equally advanced scientifically but in which individuals are much more physically robust, have larger brains (ancient Neandertal brains averaged 10% larger than those of Homo sapiens), are much less interested in colonizing and proselytizing, and are much better suited to living in cold, northern climates: the harsh lands that we know as Alaska, northern Canada, Siberia, Scandinavia, and Iceland—sparsely populated in this universe—might be developed centers in the Neandertal world.

Neandertals and humans differ genetically by only 0.5% (whereas humans and chimpanzees differ by 1.4%); incorporating the latest anthropological research to develop a modern, technological Neandertal culture, the book will illuminate what it means to be human.

The portal between the two universes has been opened accidentally, by the creation not in this world but rather in the Neandertal one of a giant quantum-computing facility (quantum computers—currently in development—access alternate universes to almost instantly solve otherwise intractable mathematical problems).

The contact could not have come at a more propitious time. In both universes, Earth’s magnetic field is collapsing—a prelude to a polarity reversal. Such reversals have happened many times during our planet’s geologic history. They occur without any discernible periodicity, and can last as little as two thousand years or as long as 35 million years (the current normal-polarity period began 780,000 years ago; the preceding period of reversed polarity lasted from 980,000 to 780,000 years ago). The difference between reversed and normal polarity is trivial: compass needles point south during the former and north during the latter. But the transitional period is of great concern: during it, the magnetic field shuts down, and dangerous cosmic-ray particles that are normally deflected are free to bombard the Earth’s surface.