“I don’t know. I mean, the research I’m doing might even put me in line for a Nobel Prize.”
Cash nodded, as if he had no intention of disputing this. “The current monetary award that accompanies a Nobel Prize is the equivalent of 3.7 million Canadian dollars; I’m empowered to offer you that as a signing bonus.”
“This is crazy,” said Kyle.
“No, Professor Graves. It’s just business.”
“I’ll have to think about this.”
“Of course, of course. Talk it over with your wife Heather.”
Kyle felt his heart jump at the mention of Heather’s name.
Cash smiled a cold smile and held it for several seconds.
“You know my wife?” asked Kyle.
“Not personally, no. But I’ve read full dossiers on both of you. I know she’s two years younger than you; I know you were married September twelfth, nineteen ninety-five; I know you’re currently separated; I know where she works. And, of course, I know all about Rebecca, too.” He smiled again. “Do get back to us quickly, Professor.”
And with that, he was gone.
Heather, floating in psychospace, fought for equilibrium, for sanity, for logic.
It was all so overwhelming, all so incredible.
But how to proceed?
She took a calming breath and decided to try the obvious approach.
“Show me Kyle.”
Nothing happened.
“Kyle Graves,” she said again.
Still nothing.
“Brian Kyle Graves.”
No luck.
Of course not. That would have been too easy.
She tried concentrating on his face, on mental pictures of him.
Bupkes.
She sighed.
Seven billion choices. Even if she could figure out how to access someone, she could spend the rest of her life trying hexagons at random.
The intuitively obvious next step would simply be to move closer to the mosaic, to touch one of the six-sided jewels. She swam with cupped palms, moving herself forward, toward the curving wall of glowing lights.
She could perceive the individual hexagons, even though she was still a goodly distance away from them, even though there were so many that she shouldn’t be able to discern the separate components at all.
A trick of perception.
A way of dealing with the information.
She drew closer, and yet it seemed she wasn’t getting closer at all. The hexagons in the center of her vision shrank proportionately as she came nearer; those outside the center of her vision were a spectral blur.
She drifted, or flew, or was pulled through space, closing the distance.
Closer and closer still.
And, at last, she was at the wall.
Each honeycomb cell was now perhaps a centimeter and a half across, no bigger than a keycap, as if the whole thing was a vast keyboard. As she watched, each of the hexagonal caps drew away slightly, forming a concave surface, inviting the touch of her fingers.
Heather, bunched up in the Centauri construct, inhaled deeply.
Heather, in psychospace, felt a tingling in her projected index finger, as if it were full of energy, waiting to discharge. She moved the finger closer, half-expecting a spark to bridge the gap between her invisible digit and the nearest hexagonal key. But the energy continued to build within her, without release.
Five centimeters, now.
And now four.
Three.
And two.
One.
And, finally…
Contact.
24
Kyle and Stone were having lunch at The Water Hole; during the day, the Tiffany lamps were turned off and the windows were uncovered, making it into more of a restaurant than a bar—although the fare still tended toward pub grub.
“President Pitcairn came to see me today,” said Kyle, working his way through a ploughman’s lunch of bread, cheese, and pickles. “He’s all hyped about the quantum-computing work I’m doing.”
“Pitcairn,” said Stone dismissively. “Guy’s a Neanderthal.” He paused. “Well, not really, of course—but he looks like one, beetle brow and all.”
“Maybe he has some Neanderthal blood in him,” said Kyle. “Isn’t that the theory? That Homo sapiens sapiens in Eastern Europe crossbred with Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, so that at least some modern humans carry Neanderthal genes?”
“Where have you been, Kyle? In a cave?” Stone snorted at his own wit. “We’ve had snippets of Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA for about twenty years, and we recovered a full set of Neanderthal nuclear DNA about eighteen months ago—The Nature of Things did a whole episode about it.”
“Well, like you said, no one watches the same shows anymore.”
Stone harrumphed. “Anyway, that debate’s been solved. There wasn’t ever any such thing as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis—that is, Neanderthal man wasn’t a subspecies of the same species we belong to. Rather, they really were something else: Homo neanderthalensis, a completely different species. Oh, maybe—just maybe—a human and a Neanderthal could have produced a child, but that child would have almost certainly been sterile, like a mule.
“No,” continued Stone, “it was always pretty facile reasoning—this idea that if someone had brow ridges, he must have Neanderthal blood. Brow ridges are just a normal part of the variation among Homo sapiens—like eye color, or prominent webbing between the thumb and index finger. When you look at the more subtle details of Neanderthal anatomy—such as the nasal cavity, which contains two triangular projections jutting in from either side, or the muscle-attachment scars on the limbs, or even the complete lack of a chin—you can see that they are clearly unlike modern humans.” He took a swig of beer. “Neanderthals are wholly and completely extinct. They were lords of creation for maybe a hundred thousand years, but we supplanted them.”
“That’s too bad, in a way,” said Kyle. “I’d always liked the idea that we incorporated them into us.”
“It just doesn’t work like that. Oh, maybe within the same species, it sometimes happens; by the end of this century, there’ll doubtless be more mixed-race people on this planet than there are pure-race people. But most of the time, there’s no peaceful handing over of the baton, no incorporating of the past into the present. You wipe out those who were there before.”
Kyle thought about the beggars he’d seen on Queen Street. “Do you have any Native Canadian students?”
Stone shook his head. “Not a one. Not anymore.”
“Me neither. I don’t think there are even any Natives on faculty, are there?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Not even in Native Studies?”
Stone shook his head.
Kyle took a sip of his drink. “Maybe you’re right.”
“I am right,” said Stone. “ ’Course, Natives still exist, but they’re extremely marginalized. For decades, they’ve had the highest suicide rate, the highest alcoholism rate, the highest poverty rate, the highest infant-mortality rate, and the highest unemployment rate of any demographic group in the country.”
“But I remember when I was going to school here twenty years ago,” said Kyle. “There were a few Natives in the classes.”
“Sure. But it was government money that was doing it—and neither Ottawa nor the provinces spends money like that anymore, unless there are a lot of votes to be had—and, sadly, there aren’t. Hell, there are far more Ukrainians in Canada than Natives, you know.” He paused. “Anyway, government programs like the one that put those students in your class never succeed; I did some work years ago for the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, before they killed it. The Natives didn’t want our culture. And when we decided that their culture was irrelevant to our way of life, we stopped settling their land claims and now we’re letting them die as a people. We Europeans took North America over from the Natives lock, stock, and barrel.”