Robert Sawyer - Hybrids

“I agree, of course, but-”

“But what? Nothing could be a better symbol of the synergy between our worlds-and of our love for each other-than us having a baby together.”

Ponter looked into Mary’s eyes, his golden orbs dancing with excitement. “You are right, my love. You are absolutely right.”

“ It was that questing spirit that made brave men and women like Yuri Gagarin and Valentina Tereshkova and John Glenn ride on pillars of flame into Earth orbit…”

Every week, Jock Krieger reviewed the press coverage of the Neanderthals, both in the hundred and forty magazines Synergy subscribed to and as collected and forwarded by various print, radio, and video clipping services. The current batch of material included a preprint of an interview with Lonwis Trob coming up in Popular Mechanics; a five-part series from the San Francisco Chronicle on what Neanderthal technology was doing to the future of Silicon Valley firms; an appearance by runner Jalsk Lalplun on ABC’s Wide World of Sports; an editorial from the Minneapolis Star Tribune saying Tukana Prat should win the Nobel Peace Prize for finding a way to keep contact between the two worlds open; a CNN special with Craig Ventner interviewing Borl Kadas, who headed the Neanderthal version of the Human Genome Project; an NHK documentary on Neanderthals in fact and fiction; a DVD re-release of Quest for Fire with an audio commentary track by a Neanderthal paleoanthropologist; a new Department of Defense study of security issues related to interdimensional portals; and more.

Louise Benoit had come down to the living room of the old mansion that housed the Synergy Group to have a look through the materials, as well. She was reading an article in New Scientist that questioned why Neanderthals had ever domesticated dogs given that their own sense of smell was at least as good as that possessed by canines, meaning dogs would have added little to their ability to hunt. But she was interrupted when Jock blew out air noisily.

“What’s wrong?” asked Louise, looking over the magazine at him.

“I get sick of this,” Jock said, indicating the pile of magazines, newspaper clippings, audio tapes, and VHS cassettes. “I get sick to death of it. ‘The Neanderthals are more peaceful than we are.’ ‘The Neanderthals are more environmentally conscious than we are.’ ‘The Neanderthals are more enlightened than we are.’ Why the hell should that be?”

“You really want to know?” asked Louise, smiling. She rummaged in the pile of magazines, then plucked out the current Maclean’s. “Did you read the guest editorial in here?”

“Not yet.”

“It says that the Neanderthals are like Canadians, and the Gliksins are like Americans.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Well, the writer says the Neanderthals believe in everything that Canada stands for: socialism, pacifism, environmentalism, humanism.”

“Good grief,” said Jock.

“Oh, come on,” said Louise, her tone teasing. “I overheard you talking to Kevin: you agreed with Pat Buchanan when he said my country should be called ‘Soviet Canuckistan.’ ”

“Canadians are Gliksins, too, Dr. Benoit.”

“Not all of them,” Louise said, still teasing. “After all, Ponter is a Canadian citizen.”

“I hardly think that’s the reason they keep coming off so well in the press. It’s that bloody left-wing journalistic bias.”

“No, I don’t think so,” said Louise, setting down her magazine. “The real reason the Neanderthals keep coming off better than us is that they’ve got bigger brains. Neanderthal cranial capacities are ten percent greater than our own. We’ve got just barely enough brains to think through the first stage of ideas: if we build a better spear, we can kill more animals. But, unless we make a real effort, we don’t see ahead to stage two: if we kill too many animals, there won’t be any left, and we’ll starve. The Neanderthals, it seems, grasped the big picture from day one.”

“Then why did we defeat them here, in the past of this Earth?”

“Because we had consciousness-true self-awareness-and they did not. Remember my theory: the universe split into two when consciousness first emerged. In one branch, we, and only we, had it. In the other, they, and only they, had it. Is it any wonder that, regardless of brain size or physical robustness, it was the truly conscious beings who prevailed in their respective timelines? But now we’re comparing conscious beings with 1400 cc’s of brain to those with over 1500.” She smiled. “We’ve been waiting for the big-brained aliens to show up, and now they have. But they didn’t come from Alpha Centauri; they came from right next door.”

Jock frowned. “A big brain doesn’t necessarily mean more intelligence.”

“Not necessarily, no. Still, the average Homo sapiens has an IQ of 100, by definition. And it’s distributed on a bell curve: for every one of us with an IQ of 130, there’s another with an IQ of 70. But suppose they had an average IQ of 110 instead of 100-even before they purged their gene pool. That might make all the difference.”

“You mentioned the bell curve. I read that book, and-”

“And it was full of crap. IQ simply doesn’t vary between racial groups except when malnutrition has been a factor. You’ve met my boyfriend, Reuben Montego. Well, he’s an M.D., and he’s black. If The Bell Curve was right, he should be an incredible rarity, but of course he’s not. Previous disparities were caused by economic or social barriers to higher education for blacks, not by any inherent inferiority.”

“But you’re saying we are inherently inferior to the Neanderthals?”

Louise shrugged. “There’s no doubt that we are physically inferior. Why should it be so hard to accept that we also are mentally?”

Jock made a disgusted face. “I guess when you put it like that…” But then he shook his head. “Still, I hate it. When I was at RAND, we spent all our time trying to outfox enemies that were our match intellectually. Oh, sometimes they had a hardware advantage, and sometimes we did, but there was no notion of one side being inherently brighter than the other. But here-”

“We’re not trying to outfox the Neanderthals,” said Louise. And then, lifting her eyebrows, she added, “Are we?”

“What? No, no. Of course not. Don’t be silly, young lady.”

“A baby?” said Lurt Fradlo, hands on her broad hips. “You and Ponter want to have a baby?”

Mary nodded timidly. She’d left Ponter at his home, and had journeyed by travel cube to Lurt’s house in Saldak Center. “That’s right.”

Lurt opened her arms and gave Mary a big hug. “Wonderful!” she said. “Absolutely wonderful!”

Mary felt her whole body relaxing. “I didn’t know if you would approve.”

“Why would I not approve?” asked Lurt. “Ponter is a wonderful person, and you are a wonderful person. You will make terrific parents.” She paused. “I cannot tell with you Gliksins. How old are you, my dear?”

“Thirty-nine years,” replied Mary. “About five hundred and twenty months.”

Lurt lowered her voice. “For our kind, it is difficult to conceive by that age.”

“Mine, too, although we have all sorts of drugs and techniques that can help. But there is one little problem…” “Oh?”

“Yes. Barasts, like you and Ponter, have twenty-four pairs of chromosomes. Gliksins like me have only twenty-three.”

Lurt frowned. “That will make fertilization very difficult.”

Mary nodded. “Oh, yes. I doubt we could do it at all just by having sex.”

“Do not give up trying, though!” said Lurt, grinning.

Mary grinned back. “Not a chance. But I was hoping to find a way that we could combine Ponter’s DNA and mine. One of the chromosomes in my kind formed from the union of two of the chromosomes in the common ancestor we both share. Genetically, the actual content of the DNA sequences is very similar, but it happens to all be on one long chromosome in Homo sapiens, instead of two shorter ones in Homo neanderthalensis.”