Hominids, Page 3

  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.

  Chapter Three

  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.

  Ponter and Adikor both sat and put on dining gloves. Adikor scooped up some pine nuts from the bowl and sprinkled them over his steak, then pounded them into the meat with the palm of his gloved hand. Ponter smiled; it was one of Adikor’s endearing quirks—he’d never met anyone else who did that.

  Ponter picked up his own steak, still sizzling slightly, and bit a hunk off. It had that sharp tang one only tasted in meat that had never been frozen; how had anyone survived before vacuum storage had been invented?

  A short time later, Ponter saw the hover-bus settle to the ground outside the house. He told the Voyeur to shut off, they tossed their dining gloves in the sonic cleanser, Ponter patted Pabo on the head, and he and Adikor went out the door, leaving it open so that Pabo could come and go as she pleased. They entered the hover-bus, greeting the seven other passengers already on board, and headed off to work as if it were just another ordinary day.

  Chapter Four

  Ponter Boddit had grown up in this part of the world; he’d been aware of the nickel mine his whole life. Still, he’d never met anyone who had visited its depths; the mining was done exclusively by robots. But when Klast had been diagnosed with leukemia, Ponter and she had begun to meet with others suffering from cancers—for support, for companionship, and to share information. They met in a kobalant facility, which, of course, was vacant in the evenings.

  Ponter had expected several of the others who were afflicted to have visited the mine. After all, by going deep in the rocks, they surely would have been exposed to abnormally high radioactivity.

  But no one who had gone down into the mine was part of their group. Ponter started asking around and discovered that this was a very unusual nickel mine; the background radiation levels in its ancient granites were extraordinarily low.

  And, because of that, an idea occurred to him. He was a physicist, working with Adikor Huld on building quantum computers. But the quantum registers were enormously sensitive to outside disturbances; they’d had a real problem with cosmic rays provoking decoherence.

  The solution, it seemed, was right beneath their feet. With a thousand armspans of rock over their heads, cosmic rays would no longer pose a problem. At that depth, nothing short of neutrinos could penetrate, and they wouldn’t affect the experiments Ponter and Adikor wanted to run.

  Delag Bowst was Saldak’s chief administrator; the position had been forced upon him by the Grays. But, of course, it was always that way with administrators: no one who would choose such a contribution was suited to make it.

  Ponter had presented his proposal to Bowst: let him build a quantum-computing facility deep inside the mine. And Bowst had convinced the Grays to agree. A technological civilization could not exist without metals, after all, but the mine had not always been friendly to the environment. Any opportunity to do something positive was welcomed.

  And so the computing facility had been built. Ponter and Adikor were still having problems with an unexpected source of decoherence: piezoelectric discharges caused by the stresses on the rocks at such great depths. But Adikor felt he’d now solved that problem, and today they would try again, factoring a number bigger than any ever done before.

  The hover-bus dropped Ponter and Adikor off at the entrance to the mine. It was a beautiful summer day, with a bright blue sky, just as Ponter’s Companion implant had promised. Ponter could smell pollens in the air and hear the plaintive calls of loons on the lake. He picked up a head protector from the storage shed and attached it to his shoulders, the two struts holding a flat shelf above his skull; Adikor put on his own head protector.

  The elevator at the mine entrance was cylindrical. The two physicists got into the car, and Ponter tapped the activation switch with his foot.

  The lift started its long descent.

  Ponter and Adikor left the elevator and headed down the lengthy drift toward the quantum-computing lab; naturally, it had been built in a part of the mine that had yielded no valuable ores. They walked in silence, the easy, companionable silence of two men who had known each other for ages.

  Finally, they rea
ched the quantum-computing facility. It consisted of four rooms. The first was a tiny cubicle for eating; it wasn’t worth taking the time to ride the elevator all the way back up to the surface for meals. The second was a dry toilet facility; there was no plumbing down here, so the waste had to be hauled out at the end of each day. The third was the control room, containing instrument clusters and worktables. And the fourth, the only large room, was the giant computing chamber, bigger than all the rooms combined in the house that Ponter and Adikor shared.

  The usual goal in building computers was to make them as small as possible: that kept delays caused by the speed of light to a minimum. But Ponter and Adikor’s quantum-computer array was based on using quantally entangled protons as registers, and there had to be a way to distinguish between reactions that were occurring simultaneously, because of the entanglement, and those that were occurring as a result of normal speed-of-light communication between two protons. And the simplest way to do that was by putting some distance between each register, so that the time it would take for light to travel between two registers was easily measurable. The protons were therefore held in place inside magnetic-containment columns spaced throughout the chamber.

  Ponter and Adikor removed their head protectors and entered the control room. Adikor was the practical one; he found ways to implement Ponter’s ideas in software and hardware. He settled in at a console and began going through the routines required to initialize the quantum-computing array. “How long until we’re ready?” asked Ponter.

  “Another half-tenth,” said Adikor. “I’m still having trouble stabilizing register 69.”

  “Do you think it’s going to work?” asked Ponter.