Humans

Chapter Eighteen

“Crisis mode!” shouted Jock Krieger as he hustled his way down the halls of the Synergy Group building in Rochester. “Everybody down to the Conference Room!”

Louise Benoît stuck her head out of her lab’s door. “What’s up?” she said.

“Conference Room!” called Jock over his shoulder. “Now!”

It took no more than five minutes to get everyone assembled in what had been the palatial living room, back when people had actually lived in this mansion. “Okay, team,” said Jock. “It’s time to earn those big bucks.”

“What’s happening?” asked Lilly, from the imaging group.

“NP just got shot in New York,” said Jock.

“Ponter shot?” said Louise, her eyes wide.

“That’s right.”

“Is he—”

“He’s alive. That’s all I know about his condition right now.”

“What about the ambassador?” asked Lilly.

“She’s fine,” said Jock. “But she killed the man who shot Ponter.”

“Oh my God,” said Kevin, also from imaging.

“I think you all know my background,” said Jock. “My field is game theory. Well, the stakes just got very, very high. Something is going to happen now, and we’ve got to figure out what, so we can advise the president, and—”

“The president…” said Louise, her brown eyes wide.

“That’s right. Playtime is over. He needs to know what the Neanderthals are going to do in response to this, and then how we should respond to whatever they do. Okay, ladies and gentlemen—we need ideas. Start them coming!”

Tukana Prat looked down at the man she had killed. Hélène Gagné had caught up to her, and now had cupped Tukana’s elbow. She helped the Neanderthal woman walk along, leading her away from the dead body.

“I did not mean to kill him,” said Tukana, softly, dazed.

“I know,” said Hélène, her tone soothing. “I know.”

“He…he tried to kill Ponter. He tried to kill me.”

“Everybody saw it,” said Hélène. “It was self-defense.”

“Yes, but…”

“You had no choice,” said Hélène. “You had to stop him.”

“To stop him, yes,” said Tukana. “But to…to…”

Hélène swung Tukana around and gripped her upper arms. “It was self-defense, do you hear me? Don’t even hint that it might have been something else.”

“But…”

“Listen to me! This is going to be messy enough as it is.”

“I…I have to speak to my superiors,” said Tukana.

“So do I,” said Hélène, “and—” Hélène’s cell phone rang. She fished it out and flipped it open. “Allo? Oui. Oui. Je ne sais pas. J’ai—un moment, s’il vous plaît.” She covered the mouthpiece, and spoke to Tukana. “The PMO.”

“What?”

“The Prime Minister’s Office.” She switched back to the handset, and to French. “Non. Non, mais…Oui—beaucoup de sang…No, elle est sein et sauf. D’accord. Non, pas de problème. D’accord. Non, aujourd’hui. Oui, maintenant…Pearson, oui. D’accord, oui. Au revoir.” Hélène closed the phone and put it away. “I’m to take you back to Canada, as soon as the police here are finished questioning you.”

“Questioning?”

“It’s just a formality. Then we’ll get you up to Sudbury, so that you can report back to your people.” Hélène looked at the Neanderthal woman, blood smeared across her face. “What…what do you think your superiors will want to do?”

Tukana Prat looked back at the dead man, then over to where the ambulance attendants were bending over Ponter, who was lying on his back. “I have no idea,” she said.

“All right,” said Jock Krieger, pacing through the opulent living room of the mansion in Seabreeze, “there are only two positions they can take. First, that they, the Neanderthals, are the aggrieved party here. After all, with no provocation, one of our kind put a bullet in one of their kind. Second, that we are the aggrieved party. Sure, one of our guys took a shot at one of them, but their guy lived and our guy is dead.”

Louise Benoît shook her head. “I don’t like thinking of a terrorist, or an assassin, or whatever the hell he was, as one of ‘our guys.’”

“Neither do I,” said Jock. “But that’s what it amounts to. The game is Gliksin versus Neanderthal; us versus them. And somebody has to make the next move.”

“We could apologize,” said Kevin Bilodeau, leaning back in the chair he’d taken. “Bend over backward telling them how sorry we are.”

“I say we wait and see what they do,” said Lilly.

“And what if what they do is slam the door?” said Jock, wheeling to face her. “What if they pull the goddamned plug on their quantum computer?” He turned to Louise. “How close are you to replicating their technology?”

Louise made a pffft! sound. “Are you kidding? I’ve barely begun.”

“We can’t let them close the portal,” said Kevin.

“What are you suggesting?” sneered one of the sociologists, a heavyset white man of fifty. “That we send over troops to prevent them from shutting down the portal?”

“Maybe we should do that,” said Jock.

“You can’t be serious!” said Louise.

“Have you got a better idea?” snapped Jock.

“They’re not idiots, you know,” said Louise. “I’m sure they’ve rigged some sort of fail-safe at their end to prevent us from doing precisely that.”

“Maybe,” said Jock. “Maybe not.”

“It would be a diplomatic nightmare to seize the portal,” said Rasmussen, a rough-hewn type whose field was geopolitics; he’d been trying to work out what core political units the Neanderthals might have, given that the geography of their world was the same as that of this one. “The Suez Crisis all over again.”

“Damn it,” said Krieger, kicking over a wastebasket. “God damn it.” He shook his head. “The whole point of game theory is to work out the best realistic outcome for both sides in a conflict. But this isn’t like nuclear brinksmanship—it’s like schoolyard basketball. Unless we do something, the Neanderthals can take the ball and go home, putting an end to everything!”

Tukana Prat had flown Air Canada from JFK to Toronto’s Pearson, and then from there via Air Ontario up to Sudbury, accompanied the whole way by Hélène Gagné. A car was waiting for them at the Sudbury Airport, and it whisked them to the Creighton Mine. The ambassador rode down the elevator, went along the SNO drift to the neutrino-observatory chamber, and headed back through the Derkers tube, across to the other side—to her side.

And now she was meeting in the Alibi Archive Pavilion with High Gray councilor Bedros, who, because the portal was in his region, was looking after all matters related to contact with the Gliksins.

The images Tukana’s Companion implant—with its enhanced memory capacity—had recorded on the other side had now been uploaded to her alibi archive, and she and Bedros had watched the whole sorry mess unfold in the holo-bubble floating in front of them.

“There’s really no question about what we should do,” said Bedros. “As soon as he is well enough to leave the Gliksin hospital, we must recall Ponter Boddit. And then we should sever the link with the Gliksin world.”

“I—I don’t know if that’s necessarily the correct response,” said Tukana. “Ponter will be all right, apparently. It is a Gliksin who is dead.”

“Only because he missed,” said Bedros.

“Yes, but—”

“No buts, Ambassador. I’m going to recommend to the Council that we permanently shut the portal as soon as we can get Scholar Boddit back.”

“Please,” said Tukana. “There is an opportunity here that is too valuable to pass up.”

“They have never had a purging of their gene pool,” snapped Bedros. “The most abhorrent, dangerous traits still run rampant throughout their population.”

“I understand that, but nonetheless…”

“And they carry weapons! Not for hunting, but for killing each other. And how many days did it take before such weapons were turned against members of our kind?” Bedros shook his head. “Ponter Boddit told us what happened to our kind on their world—remember, he learned that on his previous trip. They—the Gliksins—exterminated us. Now, think about that, Ambassador Prat. Think about it! Physically, the Gliksins are puny. Weakling stick figures! And yet they managed to wipe us out there, despite our greater strength and our bigger brains. How could they possibly have accomplished that?”

“I have no idea. Besides, Ponter only said that was one theory about what had happened to us in their world.”

“They wiped us out through treachery,” continued Bedros, as if Tukana hadn’t spoken. “Through deceit. Through unimaginable violence. Swarms of them, armed with rocks and spears, must have poured into our valleys, overwhelming us with sheer numbers, until the blood of our kind soaked the ground and every last one of us was dead. That’s their history. That’s their way. It would be madness for us to leave a portal open between our two worlds.”

“The portal is deep within the rocks, and can accommodate only one or two people traveling through it at a time. I really don’t think we have to worry about—”

“I can hear our ancestors saying the same things, half a million months ago. ‘Oh, look! Another kind of humanity! Well, I’m sure we have nothing to worry about. After all, the entrances to our valleys are narrow.’”

“We don’t know for sure that that’s what happened,” said Tukana.

“Why take the risk?” asked Bedros. “Why risk it, for even one more day?”

Tukana Prat shut off the holo-bubble and paced slowly back and forth. “I learned something difficult in that other world,” she said softly. “I learned that, by their standards, I am not much of a diplomat. I speak too succinctly and too plainly. And yes, I will plainly say that there are many unpleasant things about these people. You are right when you call them violent. And the damage they have done to their environment is beyond calculation. But they have greatness in them, too. Ponter is right when he says they will go to the stars.”

“Good riddance to them,” said Bedros.

“Don’t say that. I saw works of art in their world that were astonishingly beautiful. They are different from us, and there are things by character and temperament that they can do that we cannot—wondrous things.”

“But one of them tried to kill you!”

“One, yes. Out of six billion.” Tukana was silent for a moment. “Do you know what the biggest difference between them and us is?”

Bedros looked like he was about to make a sarcastic remark, but thought better of it. “Tell me,” he said.

“They believe there is a purpose to all this.” Tukana spread her arms, encompassing everything around her. “They believe there is a meaning to life.”

“Because they have deluded themselves into thinking the universe has a guiding intelligence.”

“In part, yes. But it goes deeper than that. Even their atheists—the ones among them who don’t believe in their God—search for meaning, for explanations. We exist—but they live. They seek.”

“We seek, too. We engage in science.”

“But we do it out of practicality. We want a better tool, so we study until we can make one. But they preoccupy themselves with what they themselves call big questions: Why are we here? What is all this for? ”

“Those are meaningless questions.”

“Are they?”

“Of course they are!”

“Perhaps you’re right,” said Tukana Prat. “But perhaps not. Perhaps they are getting close to answering them, close to a new enlightenment.”

“And then they’ll stop trying to kill each other? Then they’ll stop raping their environment?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. There is goodness in them.”

“There is death in them. The only way we will survive contact with them is if they kill themselves off before they manage to kill us.”

Tukana closed her eyes. “I know you mean well, Councilor Bedros, and—”

“Don’t patronize me.”

“I’m not. I understand you have the best interests of our people at heart. But so do I. And my perspective is that of a diplomat.”

“An incompetent diplomat,” snapped Bedros. “Even the Gliksins think so!”

“I—”

“Or do you always kill the natives?”

“Look, Councilor, I am as upset about that as you are, but—”

“Enough!” shouted Bedros. “Enough! We never should have let Boddit push us into doing this in the first place. It’s time for older and wiser heads to prevail.”