Neanderthal Parallax 1 - Hominids

  “I behave as I do because it is right for me to do so.”

  “By whose standards?”

  “By the standards of my people.”

  “But where do those standards come from?”

  “From ...” And here Ponter’s eyes went wide, great orbs beneath an undulating shelf of bone, as though he’d had an epiphany—in the secular sense of the word, of course. “From our conviction that there is no life after death!” he said triumphantly. “That is why your belief troubles me; I see it now. Our assertion is straightforward and congruent with all observed fact: a person’s life is completely finished at death; there is no possibility of reconciling with them, or making amends after they are gone, and no possibility that, because they lived a moral life, they are now in a paradise, with the cares of this existence forgotten.” He paused, and his eyes flicked left and right across Mary’s face, apparently looking for signs she understood what he was getting at.

  “Do you not see?” Ponter went on. “If I wrong someone—if I say something mean to them, or, I do not know, perhaps take something that belongs to them—under your worldview I can console myself with the knowledge that, after they are dead, they can still be contacted; amends can be made. But in my worldview, once a person is gone—which could happen for any of us at any moment, through accident or heart attack or so on—then you who did the wrong must live knowing that that person’s entire [295] existence ended without you ever having made peace with him or her.”

  Mary thought about that. Yes, most slave owners had ignored the issue, but surely some people of conscience, caught up in a society driven by bought-and-sold human beings, must have had qualms ... and yet had they consoled themselves with the knowledge that the people they were mistreating would be rewarded for their suffering after death? Yes, the Nazi leaders were pure evil, but how many of the rank and file, following orders to exterminate Jews, had managed to sleep at night by believing the freshly dead were now in paradise?

  Nor did it have to be anything so grandiose. God was the great compensator: if you were wronged in life, it would be made up for in death—the fundamental principle that had allowed parents to send their children off to die in war after countless war. Indeed, it didn’t really matter if you ruined someone else’s life, because that person might well go to Heaven. Oh, you yourself might be dispatched to Hell, but nothing you did to anyone else really hurt them in the long run. This existence was mere prologue; eternal life was yet to come.

  And, indeed, in that infinite existence, God would make up for whatever had been done to ... to her.

  And that bastard, that bastard who had attacked her, would burn.

  No, it didn’t matter if she never reported the crime; there was no way he could escape his ultimate judge.

  But ... but ... “But what about your world? What happens to criminals there?”

  Bleep.

  [296] “People who break laws,” said Mary. “People who intentionally hurt others.”

  “Ah,” said Ponter. “We have little problem with that anymore, having cleansed most bad genes from our gene pool generations ago.”

  “What?” exclaimed Mary.

  “Serious crimes were punished by sterilization of not just the offender but also anyone who shared fifty percent of the offender’s genetic material: brothers and sisters, parents, offspring. The effect was twofold. First, it cleansed those bad genes from our society, and—”

  “How would nonagriculturalists stumble onto genetics? I mean, we figured it out through plant cultivation and animal husbandry.”

  “We may not have bred animals or plants for food, but we did domesticate wolves to help us in hunting. I have a dog named Pabo that I am very fond of. Wolves were quite susceptible to controlled breeding; the results were obvious.”

  Mary nodded; that sounded reasonable enough. “You said the sterilization had a twofold effect on your society?”

  “Oh, yes. Besides directly eliminating the faulty genes, it gave families a strong incentive to make sure none of their own members ran seriously afoul of society.”

  “I suppose it would at that,” said Mary.

  “It did indeed,” said Ponter. “You, as a geneticist, surely know that the only immortality that really exists is genetic. Life is driven by genes wanting to ensure their own reproduction, or to protect existing copies of themselves. So our justice was aimed at genes, not at people. Our society is mostly free of crime now because our justice system [297] directly targeted that which really drives all life: not individuals, not circumstances, but genes. We made it so that the best survival strategy for genes is to obey the law.”

  “Richard Dawkins would approve, I imagine,” said Mary. “But you were speaking of this ... this sterilization practice in the past tense. Has it ended?”

  “No, but there is little modern need.”

  “You were that successful? No one commits serious crimes anymore?”

  “Hardly anyone does so because of genetic disorders. There are, of course, also biochemical disorders that cause antisocial behavior, but those are eminently treatable with drugs. Only rarely does sterilization still need to be invoked.”

  “A society without crime,” said Mary, shaking her head slowly in amazement. “That must be ...” She paused, wondering how much she wanted to let her guard down, then: “That must be fabulous.” But she frowned. “Surely, though, a lot of crime must go unsolved. I mean, if you can’t figure out who did something, then the perpetrator must go unpunished—or, if he had a biochemical disorder, untreated.”

  Ponter blinked. “Unsolved crimes?”

  “Yes, you know: crimes for which the police”—bleep—“or whatever you have for law enforcement, can’t figure out who did it.”

  “There are no such crimes.”

  Mary’s back stiffened. Like most Canadians, she was against capital punishment—precisely because it was possible to execute the wrong person. All Canadians lived with the shame of the wrongful imprisonment of Guy Paul [298] Morin, who had spent ten years rotting in jail for a murder he didn’t commit; of Donald Marshall, Jr., who spent eleven years incarcerated for a murder he, too, didn’t commit; of David Milgaard, who spent twenty-three years jailed for a rape-murder he also was innocent of. Castration was the least of the punishments Mary would like to see her own rapist subjected to—but if, in her quest for vengeance, she had it done to the wrong person, how could she live with herself? And what about the Marshall case? No, it wasn’t all Canadians who lived with the shame of that; it was white Canadians. Marshall was a Mi’kmaq Indian whose protestations of innocence in a white court, it seemed, weren’t believed simply because he was an Indian.

  Still, maybe she was thinking now more like an atheist than a true believer. A believer should hold that Milgaard, Morin, and Marshall were eventually going to receive their just, heavenly reward, making up for whatever they’d endured here on Earth. After all, God’s own son had been executed unfairly, even by the standards of Rome; Pontius Pilate didn’t think Christ guilty of the crime with which he’d been charged.

  But Ponter’s world was beginning to sound worse even than Pilate’s court: the brutality of forced sterilizations with an absolute belief that you’d always correctly found the guilty party. Mary suppressed a shudder. “How can you be certain you’ve convicted the right person? More to the point, how can you be sure you haven’t convicted the wrong person?”

  “Because of the alibi archives,” said Ponter, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

  “The what?” said Mary.

  [299] Ponter, still seated next to her on the couch in Reuben’s office, held up his left arm and rotated it so that the inside of his wrist faced toward her. The strange digits on the Companion winked at Mary. “The alibi archives,” he said again. “Hak constantly transmits information about my location, as well as three-dimensional images of exactly what I am doing. Of course, it has been out of touch with its receiver since I came here.”

  This t
ime Mary didn’t suppress the shudder. “You mean you live in a totalitarian society? You’re constantly under surveillance?”

  “Surveillance?” said Ponter, his eyebrow climbing over his browridge. “No, no, no. No one is monitoring the transmitted data.”

  Mary frowned, confused. “Then what’s done with it?”

  “It is recorded in my alibi archive.”

  “And what, exactly, is that?”

  “A computerized memory archive; a block of material onto whose crystalline lattices we imprint unalterable recordings.”

  “But if no one is monitoring it, what’s it for?”

  “Am I misusing your word ‘alibi’?” said Hak, in the female voice it used when talking on its own behalf. “I understood an alibi to be proof that one was somewhere else when an act was committed.”

  “Um, yes,” said Mary. “That’s an alibi.”

  “Well, then,” continued Hak. “Ponter’s archive provides him with an irrefutable alibi for any crime he might be accused of.”

  Mary felt her stomach flutter. “My God—Ponter, is the onus on you to prove your innocence?”

  [300] Ponter blinked, and Hak translated his words with the male voice. “Who else should it be on?”

  “I mean, here, on this Earth, a person is innocent until proven guilty.” As the words came out, Mary realized that there were many places where that, in fact, wasn’t true, but she decided not to amend her comment.

  “And I take it that you have nothing comparable to our alibi archives?” asked Ponter.

  “That’s right. Oh, there are security cameras in some places. But they’re not everywhere, and almost no one has them in their homes.”

  “Then how do you ascertain someone’s guilt? If there is no record of what actually happened, how can you be sure you are going to deal with the appropriate person?”

  “That’s what I meant about unsolved crimes,” said Mary. “If we’re not sure—and often we have no idea at all—then the person gets away with the crime.”

  “That hardly seems a better system,” said Ponter slowly.

  “But our privacy is protected. No one is constantly looking over our shoulders.”

  “Nor is anyone in my world—at least, not unless one is a ... I do not know the word. Somebody who shows all for others to watch.”

  “An exhibitionist?” said Mary, raising her eyebrows in surprise.

  “Yes. Their contribution is to allow others to monitor the transmissions from their Companions. They have enhanced implants that sense at a higher resolution and to a greater distance, and they go to various interesting places so that other people can watch what is happening there.”

  “But surely, in theory, someone could compromise the [301] security of anyone’s transmissions, not just those of an exhibitionist.”

  “Why would anyone want to do that?” asked Ponter.

  “Well—um, I don’t know. Because they can?”

  “I can drink urine,” said Ponter, “but never have I felt the urge to do so.”

  “We have people here who consider it a challenge to compromise security measures—especially those involving computers.”

  “That hardly seems a contribution to society.”

  “Perhaps not,” said Mary. “But, look, what if the person who is accused doesn’t want to unlock his—what did you call it? His alibi archive?”

  “Why would he not?”

  “Well, I don’t know. Just on general principle?”

  Ponter looked perplexed.

  “Or,” said Mary, “because what they were actually doing at the time of the crime was embarrassing?” Bleep. “Embarrassing. You know, something you are ashamed”—bleep—“of.”

  “Perhaps an example would help me get your meaning,” said Ponter.

  Mary pursed her lips, thinking. “Well, um, okay, say I was—say I was, you know, having, um, sex with someone else’s mate; the fact that I was doing that might be my alibi, but I wouldn’t want people to know it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, because we believe adultery”—bleep—“is wrong.”

  “Wrong?” said Ponter, Hak having apparently guessed the meaning of the untranslated word. “How can it be, unless a claim of false paternity results? Who is hurt by it?”

  [302] “Well, um, I don’t know; I mean, we, ah, we consider adultery a sin.” Bleep.

  Mary had expected that bleep, at least. If you had no religion, no list of things that didn’t actually hurt somebody else but were still proscribed behaviors—recreational drug use, masturbation, adultery, watching porno videos—then you might indeed not be so fanatic about privacy. People insisted on it at least in part because there were things they did that they’d be mortified to have others know about. But in a permissive society, an open society, a society where the only crimes are crimes that have specific victims, perhaps it wouldn’t be such a big deal. And, of course, Ponter had shown no nudity taboo—a religious idea, again—and no desire for seclusion while using the bathroom.

  Mary shook her head. All the times she’d been embarrassed and ashamed in her life, all the times she was glad no one could see what she was doing: were they uncomfortable simply because of church-imposed edicts? The shame she felt over leaving Colm; the shame that prevented her from getting a divorce; the shame she felt over dealing with her own drives now that she had no man in her life; the shame she felt because of sin ... Ponter had none of that, it seemed; as long as he was hurting no one else, he never felt uncomfortable over acts that gave him pleasure.

  “I suppose your system might work,” said Mary dubiously.

  “It does,” replied Ponter. “And recall that for serious crimes—those involving assaults on another person—there are usually at least two alibi archives available: that of the [303] victim, and that of the perpetrator. The victim usually introduces his or her own archive of the event as evidence, and most of the time it clearly shows the perpetrator.”

  Mary was simultaneously fascinated and repelled. Still ...

  That night at York ...

  If images had been recorded, could she have brought herself to show them to anyone?

  Yes, she said to herself firmly. Yes. She had done nothing wrong, nothing to be ashamed of. She was the innocent victim. All the pamphlets Keisha had given her at the rape-crisis center said that, and she really, really, really, really tried to believe it.

  But—but even if there were a recording of what she’d seen, could it have been used to catch the monster? He’d been wearing a balaclava; she’d never seen his face—although a thousand different versions of it had haunted her dreams since. Whom would she have accused? Whose alibi archive would the courts have ordered unlocked? Mary had no idea where to begin, no idea whom to suspect.

  She felt her stomach flutter. Maybe that was the real problem—the predicament that Ponter’s people had avoided: having too many possible suspects, too much crowding, too much anonymity, too many vicious, aggressive ... men, she thought. Men. Every academic of her generation had been sensitized to the issue of gender-neutral language. But violent crimes were indeed overwhelmingly caused by males.

  And, yet, she’d spent her life surrounded by good, decent men. Her father; her two brothers; so many supportive colleagues; Father Caldicott, and Father Belfontaine [304] before him; many good friends; a handful of lovers.

  What proportion of men really were the problem? What fraction were violent, angry, unable to control their emotions, unable to resist their impulses? Was it so vast a group that it couldn’t have been—“cleansed” was Ponter’s word, a nurturing word, a hopeful word—from the gene pool generations ago?

  No matter how large or how small the population of violent males was, thought Mary, there were too many. Even one such beast would be too many, and—

  And here she was, thinking like Ponter’s people. The gene pool could indeed use a good cleansing, a therapeutic purging.

  Yes, it surely could.

  Chapter Thirty-four


  Adikor Huld lay in his bed, flush with the ground, staring up at the timepiece mounted on the ceiling. The sun had been up for several daytenths now, but he couldn’t see any reason to rise.

  What had happened that day, down in the quantum-computing lab? What had gone wrong?

  Ponter hadn’t been vaporized; he wasn’t consumed by flame; he didn’t explode. All those things would have left abundant traces.

  No, if he was right, Ponter had been transferred to another universe ... but ...

  But that sounded outlandish even to him; he understood how outrageous it must have seemed to Adjudicator Sard. And yet, what other explanation was there?

  Ponter had disappeared.

  And a large quantity of heavy water had appeared in his place.

  Presumably, thought Adikor, it had been an even exchange—identical masses transposed, but radically different volumes. After all, it wasn’t just Ponter that had disappeared; Adikor had heard the air rushing out of the quantum-computing chamber, as if all of it, too, had been [306] shunted to another place. But even a room’s worth of air had little mass, whereas liquid water—even liquid heavy water—was in the most dense state of that substance, more dense even than the solid, frozen variety.

  So: a large volume of air and one man had disappeared from this universe, and an identical mass, but much smaller volume, of heavy water had come through to replace it from ... from the other side; it was the phraseology that kept coming to Adikor’s mind.

  But ...

  But then that meant that there was heavy water at this location in the other universe. And pure heavy water did not occur naturally.

  Which meant the ... the portal, another word that came unbidden ... must have opened into a storage tank for heavy water. And if heavy water was transferred from there to here, then Ponter was transferred from here to there, meaning ...

  Meaning he’d quite likely drowned.

  Tears filled Adikor’s deep eye sockets, like rainwater gathering in wells.

  Ponter shifted on the couch and looked again at Mary. “The alibi archives do not just solve crimes,” he said. “They have many other uses. For instance, I saw on television yesterday that two campers were lost in Algonquin Park.”