Indeed, the particular cause of the differences was easy enough to identify: it was neoteny, the retention into adulthood of childhood characteristics. Baby apes, baby Neanderthals, and baby Gliksins all had similar skulls, with vertical, ridgeless foreheads, and no particular protrusion of the lower face. As the other kinds grew, their skull shapes changed. But Mary’s kind alone retained their childlike crania into adulthood.
But Ponter’s people did mature cranially. And the differing chromosome count might be the cause.
Mary pressed her two hands together in front of her face. She had done it! She had found what Jock Krieger wanted, and—
And… my God.
If the chromosome counts differed, then Neanderthals and her flavor of Homo sapiens weren’t just different races, or even just subspecies of the same species. They were fully separate species. No need to double up the “wisdom” part in Homo sapiens sapiens to distinguish Mary’s kind from Ponter’s, for Ponter’s people couldn’t possibly be Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. Rather, they were clearly their own specific tax on, Homo neanderthalensis. Mary could think of some paleoanthropologists who would be thrilled by this news—and others who would be extremely pissed off.
But…
But…
But Ponter belonged to another species! Mary had seen Showboat when it was on stage in Toronto; Cloris Leachman had played Parthy. She knew that miscegenation was once a big issue, but…
But miscegenation wasn’t the appropriate term for a human mating with something from outside her own species—not that Ponter and Mary had done that, of course.
No, the appropriate term was…
My God, thought Mary.
Was bestiality.
But…
No, no.
Ponter wasn’t a beast. The man who had raped her—Mary’s conspecific, a member of Homo sapiens—had been a beast. But Ponter was no animal.
He was a gentleman.
A gentle man.
And, regardless of chromosome count, he was a human being—a human being she was very much looking forward to seeing again.
Chapter Thirteen
Finally, after three days, the specialists from the Laboratory Centre for Disease Control and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—the comparable U.S. agency—agreed that Ambassador Tukana Prat and Envoy Ponter Boddit were free of infection and could leave quarantine.
Ponter and Tukana, accompanied by five soldiers and Dr. Montego, trudged down the mining tunnel to the metal-cage elevator, and made the long ride to the surface. Apparently, word had preceded them that they were on the way up; a large number of miners and other Inco workers had assembled in the huge room up top that contained the elevator station.
“There is a crowd of reporters waiting in the parking lot,” said Hélène Gagné. “Ambassador Prat, you’ll need to make a brief statement, of course.”
Tukana lifted her eyebrow. “What sort of statement?”
“A greeting. You know, the usual diplomatic thing.”
Ponter had no idea what that meant, but, then again, it wasn’t his job. Hélène led Tukana and him out of the large room and through the doors into the Sudbury autumn. It was at least two degrees hotter than the world Ponter had left behind, maybe more, but, of course, three days had passed while they were underground; the difference in temperature didn’t necessarily mean anything.
Still, Ponter shook his head in amazement. He’d never exited this place while conscious before; the only previous time he’d come up from the mine, he’d been knocked out with a head wound. But now he had a chance to really see the giant mining site, the great tear in the ground these humans had made; the huge stretches of land from which all trees had been cleared; the vast—“parking lot,” they called it, covered with hundreds of personal vehicles.
And the smell! He reeled at the overpowering stench of this world, the nauseating reek. Adikor’s woman, Lurt, had explained the likely sources of the odors, based on Ponter’s descriptions of them: nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and other poisons given off by the burning of petrochemicals.
Ponter had warned Tukana about what to expect, and she was discreetly trying to cover her nose with her hand. Still, as much as he fondly remembered the people here, Ponter had forgotten—or suppressed—his memories of what a truly awful job they had done of looking after their version of the planet.
Jock Krieger sat at his desk, surfing the two Webs—the public one, and the vast array of classified government sites, available over dedicated fiber-optic lines, that only those with appropriate security clearance could access.
Jock had never liked it when something came up that he didn’t understand; the only thing that made him feel a lack of control was ignorance. And so he was trying to rectify that by searching for information about geomagnetic collapses, especially with the word from Sudbury that apparently such things happened very quickly.
Jock had expected there to be thousands of Web pages devoted to this topic, and although all the news sites had cobbled together something in the last week, mostly regurgitating the same three or four “expert” opinions, there were really very few concrete studies of this phenomenon. Indeed, about half the hits he found on the World Wide Web were so-called creation scientists trying to explain away the evidence for prehistoric geomagnetic reversals, apparently because the sheer number of them would have taken up too much time if the Earth was only a few thousand years old.
But a citation for one real paper caught Jock’s eye, a 1989 piece from Earth and Planetary Science Letters called “Evidence Suggesting Extremely Rapid Field Variation During a Geomagnetic Reversal.” The authors were listed as Robert S. Coe and Michel Prévot, the former from the University of California at Santa Cruz, and the latter from the Université des Sciences et Techniques at Montpelier—the one in France, Jock presumed, rather than the one in Vermont. UCSC was definitely a legit institution, and the other one—a few clicks of the mouse—yes, it was on the up-and-up, too. But the damn article wasn’t online; like so much of the world’s wisdom pre-1990, apparently no one had bothered to computerize it. Jock sighed. He’d have to go to an actual library to get a copy.
Mary went down the corridor, then down the staircase, to Jock Krieger’s office on the first floor. She knocked, waited for him to call out “Come in,” and then did just as he had said.
“I’ve got it,” said Mary.
“Well, then, keep your distance,” said Jock, closing his Web browser window.
Mary was too excited even to get the joke then, although it came to her later that day. “I’ve figured out how to distinguish Gliksins from Neanderthals.”
Jock rose from his Aeron chair. “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” said Mary. “It’s a piece of cake. Neanderthals have twenty-four pairs of chromosomes, whereas we have only twenty-three. It’s a glaring difference, as big on the genetic level as the difference between male and female.”
Jock’s gray eyebrows arched up toward his pompadour. “If it was that obvious, what took so long?”
Mary explained her misguided preoccupation with mitochondrial DNA.
“Ah,” said Jock, nodding. “Good work. Very good work.”
Mary smiled, but her smile soon faded. “The Paleoanthropology Society is having its annual meeting in a couple of weeks,” she said. “I’d like to present my Neanderthal karyotype there. Someone else is bound to make one sooner or later, but I’d like to get priority.”