Robert J. Sawyer - Neanderthal Parallax 1 - Hominids

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The Neanderthal Parallax, Book One - Hominids

Books by Robert J. Sawyer

NOVELS

Golden Fleece*

End of an Era*

The Terminal Experiment

Starplex

Frameshift*

Illegal Alien

Factoring Humanity*

Flashforward*

Calculating God*

Hominids*

THE QUINTAGLIO ASCENSION

Far-Seer

Fossil Hunter

Foreigner

SHORT-STORY COLLECTION

Iterations and Other Stories

ANTHOLOGIES

Tesseracts 6 (with Carolyn Clink)

Crossing the Line (with David Skene-Melvin)

Over the Edge (with Peter Sellers)

*published by Tor Books

(Readers’ group guides available at www.sfwriter.com)

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The Neanderthal Parallax, Book One - Hominids

A Tom Doherty Associates Book

Author’s Note: The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, the Creighton Mine, Laurentian University, and York University all

really exist. However, all the characters in this novel are entirely the product of my imagination. They are not meant to bear

any resemblance to the actual people who hold or have held positions with these or any other organizations.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

HOMINIDS

This novel was serialized in the January through April 2002 issues of Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

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The Neanderthal Parallax, Book One - Hominids

Edited by David G. Hartwell Book design by Angela Arapovic

A Tor Book Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

175 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10010

www.tor.com

Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sawyer, Robert J.

Hominids / Robert J. Sawyer.—1st ed.

p. cm.

“A Tom Doherty Associates book.”

ISBN 0-312-87692-0 (acid-free paper)

1. Neanderthals—Fiction. 2. Prehistoric peoples—Fiction. I. Title

PO9199.3.S2533 H66 2022

813’.54—dc21

2001059650

First Edition: May 2002

Printed in the United States of America

0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For

Marcel Gagné

And

Sally Tomasevic

Dude

and

The Other Dude

Great People,

Great Friends

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The Neanderthal Parallax, Book One - Hominids
Contents
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note: A -tal Tale
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
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The Neanderthal Parallax, Book One - Hominids
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Chapter Forty-two
Chapter Forty-three
Chapter Forty-four
Chapter Forty-five
Chapter Forty-six
Chapter Forty-seven
Appendix
Further Reading
About the Author
About the e-Book
  
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The Neanderthal Parallax, Book One - Hominids

Acknowledgments

For anthropological and paleontological advice, I thank: Jim Ahren, Ph.D.,

University of Wyoming; Shara E. Bailey, Arizona State University; Miguel

Bombin, M.D., Ph.D., Laurentian University; Michael K. Brett-Surman, Ph.D.,

and Rick Potts, Ph.D., both of the National Museum of Natural History,

Smithsonian Institution; John D. Hawks, Ph.D., University of Utah; Christopher

Kuzawa, Emory University; Philip Lieberman, Ph.D., Brown University; Jakov

Radovcic, Ph.D., Croatian Natural History Museum; Robin Ridington, Ph.D.,

Professor Emeritus, University of British Columbia; Gary J. Sawyer [no relation]

and Ian Tattersall, Ph.D., both of the American Museum of Natural History; Anne-

marie Tillier, Ph.D., Université de Bordeaux; Erik Trinkaus, Ph.D., Washington

University in St. Louis; and Milford H. Wolpoff, Ph.D., University of Michigan.

Special thanks to: Art McDonald, Ph.D., Director, Sudbury Neutrino Observatory

Institute, and J. Duncan Hepburn, Ph.D., site manager, Sudbury Neutrino

Observatory; David Gotlib, M.D., Medical Director, Crisis Team, St. Joseph’s

Health Centre, Toronto; the Rev. Paul Fayter, historian of science and theology,

York University, Toronto; and Andrew Stok, Photonics Group, University of

Toronto.

[10] Huge thanks to my lovely wife, Carolyn Clink; my editor, David G. Hartwell,

and his associate, Moshe Feder; my agent, Ralph Vicinanza, and his associates,

Christopher Lotts and Vince Gerardis; Tom Doherty, Linda Quinton, Jennifer

Marcus, Aimee Crump, and everyone else at Tor Books; Harold and Sylvia Fenn,

Robert Howard, Heidi Winter, and everyone else at H. B. Fenn and Company; Dr.

Stanley Schmidt, Sheila Williams, Trevor Quachri, and Brian Bieniowski of

Analog Science Fiction and Fact; Melissa Beckett; Megan Beckett; Marv Gold;

Terence M. Green; Andrew Zimmerman Jones; Joe and Sharon Karpierz; Chris

and Donna Krejlgaard; Donald Maass; Pete Rawlik; Joyce Schmidt; Tim Slater;

and David G. Smith.

As always, I’m grateful to those friends and colleagues who commented on this

book’s manuscript: Asbed Bedrossian, Ted Bleaney, Michael A. Burstein, David

Livingstone Clink, John Douglas, Marcel Gagné, James Alan Gardner, Richard

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The Neanderthal Parallax, Book One - Hominids

Gotlib, Peter Halasz, Howard Miller, Laura Osborn, Dr. Ariel Reich, Alan B.

Sawyer, Sally Tomasevic, Edo van Belkom, Andrew Weiner, and David

Widdicombe.

Some of this novel was written while I was Writer-in-Residence at the Richmond

Hill (Ontario) Public Library. Sincere thanks to librarian extraordinaire Cameron

Knight, the Richmond Hill Public Library Board, and the Canada Council for the

Arts.

Parts of this book were written at John A. Sawyer’s vacation home on

Canandaigua Lake, New York; at Mary Stanton’s vacation home in West Palm

Beach, Florida; and at Robin and Jillian Ridington’s guest cottage on Retreat

Island, British Columbia. I thank them all for their extraordinary generosity and

hospitality.

Author’s Note: A -tal Tale

So is it Neanderthal or Neandertal?

Both spellings are correct, and both are in common usage, even among

paleoanthropologists.

The fossil this type of hominid is named for was found in 1856, in a valley near

Dûsseldorf. The place was then called Neanderthal—thal meaning “valley,” and

“Neander” being a Greek version of “Neumann,” the surname of the fellow after

whom the valley was named.

Early in the twentieth century, the German government regularized spelling across

all parts of their nation, and “thal” and “tal,” both of which were in use up to that

time in various parts of the country, became just “tal.” So it’s clear that the place

that used to be called Neanderthal is now only correctly spelled Neandertal.

But what about the fossil hominid? Should we therefore rename it Neandertal, as

well?

Some say yes. But there’s a problem: scientific names are cast in stone once

coined and, for all time, this type of hominid will be known in technical literature

with a “th” spelling, either as Homo neanderthalensis or Homo sapiens

neanderthalensis (depending on whether one classifies it as a separate species

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The Neanderthal Parallax, Book One - Hominids

from us, or merely a subspecies). It does [12] seem awkward to spell the

“neanderthal” part differently in the scientific and English names.

Meanwhile, those who favor the use of the spelling “Neandertal man” are notably

silent when the topic of Peking man comes up; there’s no movement to change

that name to “Beijing man,” even though the city’s name is always spelled Beijing

in English these days.

I checked the latest editions of six major English-language dictionaries: The

American Heritage English Dictionary, The Encarta World English Dictionary,

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (Tor’s house standard), The Oxford

English Dictionary, Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, and

Webster’s New World Dictionary. All accept both spellings.

And what about pronunciation? Some purists contend that regardless of whether

you spell it -tal or -thal, you should pronounce it with a hard-T sound, since both t

and th have always denoted that in German.

Maybe so, but I’ve heard many paleoanthropologists say it with an English th

sound (as in thought). And of the six dictionaries I checked, all of them except the

OED allow both pronunciations (with the OED accepting only -tal). The argument

that English speakers should pronounce it the way German speakers do seems to

imply that we should also call the capital of France “par-ee,” rather than “pair-is,”

and yet doing so would be considered pretentious in most contexts.

Ultimately, it comes down to personal choice. In the extensive collection of

research materials I consulted in creating this book, the -thal spelling outnumbers

the -tal by better than two-to-one (even in recent technical literature), so I’ve

settled on the original spelling, Neanderthal—which you may pronounce

whichever way you wish.

The southern forests provide the message that it didn’t have to be this

way, that there is room on the earth for a species biologically committed

to the moral aspects of what, ironically, we like to call “humanity”:

respect for others, personal restraint, and turning aside from violence as

a solution to conflicting interests. The appearance of these traits in

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The Neanderthal Parallax, Book One - Hominids

bonobos hints at what might have been among Homo sapiens, if

evolutionary history had been just slightly different.

—RICHARD WRANGHAM AND DALE PETERSON

Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence

You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.

—SCOTT MCNEALY

Chief Executive Officer

Sun Microsystems

Chapter One

DAY ONE

FRIDAY, AUGUST 2

148/118/24

The blackness was absolute.

Watching over it was Louise Benoît, twenty-eight, a statuesque postdoc from

Montreal with a mane of thick brown hair stuffed, as required here, into a hair net.

She kept her vigil in a cramped control room, buried two kilometers—“a mile an’

a quarder,” as she sometimes explained for American visitors in an accent that

charmed them—beneath the Earth’s surface.

The control room was next to the deck above the vast, unilluminated cavern

housing the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory. Suspended in the center of that cavern

was the world’s largest acrylic sphere, twelve meters—“almost fordy

feet”—across. The sphere was filled with eleven hundred tonnes of heavy water

on loan from Atomic Energy of Canada Limited.

Enveloping that transparent globe was a geodesic array of stainless-steel struts,

supporting 9,600 photomultiplier tubes, each cupped in a reflective parabola, each

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The Neanderthal Parallax, Book One - Hominids

aimed in toward the sphere. All of this—the heavy water, the acrylic globe that

contained it, and the enveloping geodesic shell—was housed in a ten-story-tall

barrel-shaped cavern, excavated from the surrounding norite rock. And that [16]

gargantuan cavern was filled almost to the top with ultrapure regular water.

The two kilometers of Canadian shield overhead, Louise knew, protected the

heavy water from cosmic rays. And the shell of regular water absorbed the natural

background radiation from the small quantities of uranium and thorium in the

surrounding rock, preventing that, too, from reaching the heavy water. Indeed,

nothing could penetrate into the heavy water except neutrinos, those infinitesimal

subatomic particles that were the subject of Louise’s research. Trillions of

neutrinos passed right through the Earth every second; in fact, a neutrino could

travel through a block of lead a light-year thick with only a fifty-percent chance of

hitting something.

Still, neutrinos poured out of the sun in such vast profusion that collisions did

occasionally occur—and heavy water was an ideal target for such collisions. The

hydrogen nuclei in heavy water each contain a proton—the normal constituent of a

hydrogen nucleus—plus a neutron, as well. And when a neutrino did chance to hit

a neutron, the neutron decayed, releasing a proton of its own, an electron, and a

flash of light that could be detected by the photomultiplier tubes.

At first, Louise’s dark, arching eyebrows did not rise when she heard the neutrino-

detection alarm go ping, the alarm sounded briefly about a dozen times a day, and

although it was normally the most exciting thing to happen down here, it still

didn’t merit looking up from her copy of Cosmopolitan.

But then the alarm sounded again, and yet again, and [17] then it stayed on, a solid,

unending electric bleep like a dying man’s EKG.

Louise got up from her desk and walked over to the detector console. On top of it

was a framed picture of Stephen Hawking—not signed, of course. Hawking had

visited the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory for its grand opening a few years ago, in

1998. Louise tapped on the alarm’s speaker, in case it was on the fritz, but the

keening continued.

Paul Kiriyama, a scrawny grad student, dashed into the control room, arriving

from elsewhere in the vast, underground facility. Paul was, Louise knew, usually

quite flustered around her, but this time he wasn’t at a loss for words. “What the

heck’s going on?” he asked. There was a grid of ninety-eight by ninety-eight

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