Hominids

“All set,” said the keeper. “You can use the projector in room four.” Dabdalb turned to go, and Lurt followed her. She entered room four, which was a small chamber with a single chair. Somewhere, in one of the other rooms, Lurt imagined an enforcer was watching Adikor’s transmissions in real time as they were being received and recorded.

But watching as something was recorded was entirely different from trying to record and play back at the same time. Lurt pulled on control buds, selecting a day at random to review, and watched as the holo-bubble in front of her filled with banal pictures of her working in her lab. As the images played on, Lurt left the chamber, ostensibly heading for the washroom. And once she’d passed into a corridor that had no one else in it, she slipped on a pair of dining gloves, fished out the small device she’d brought with her, activated it, and dropped it into a recycling tub. She then removed the gloves.

Bolbay had been wrong, Lurt thought, whistling as she returned to the viewing chamber. Deep underground wasn’t the perfect place to commit an unobserved crime. No, the perfect place was right here in the archive pavilion, when no one else was watching you and your own alibi cube was playing back instead of recording …

Her first thought had been to use hydrogen sulfide, which surely would have had the desired effect. But concentrations greater than 500 parts per million over even a short period could be fatal. She’d then considered polecat musk, but when she’d looked up the formula, it had been complex: trans-2-Butene-l-thiol, 3-Methyl-l-butanethiol, trans-2-Butenyl thioacetate, and more. Finally, she settled on ammonium sulfide, that favorite of prankster children who hadn’t come to grips with the fact that their Companions were recording their actions.

Having a keen olfactory sense certainly had its advantages, although Lurt had heard it said that the reason people ate so few plants, while other primates thrived on them, was that the acute sensitivity to odors made it hard to tolerate the flatulence that went with a diet heavy in vegetation. Anyway, this was just what the doctor had ordered—even if that doctor was a physicist trying to keep from going under the knife.

Lurt thought she smelled it first, before anyone else, even though her viewing room was hardly the closest to the corridor where she’d left the device. Then again, she’d been waiting for it, doubtlessly dilating her nostrils in anticipation. But she refused to be the first one to react. She sat until she heard others ru

“What is that awful smell?” said a wincing Dabdalb, the Keeper of Alibis, as Lurt passed her.

“It’s horrible!” said another patron, hustling through the lobby.

“Open the windows! Open the windows!” shouted a third.

Lurt joined the small crowd hurrying out into the clean, open air outside the building. It would be at least a quarter of a day, Lurt knew, before the smell would dissipate enough to make going back indoors possible.

She hoped that would be enough time for Adikor to accomplish what he was trying to do.

Mary went to Laurentian University the next morning, having finally managed to get rid of the reporters waiting in the lobby of the Ramada. They’d been disappointed that Ponter hadn’t turned out to be staying there, as well. Apparently Reuben had implied to the journalists that he might be—presumably as a way of putting them off Ponter’s trail; Mary had returned him to Reuben’s house last night, which, as far as she knew, was where he’d stayed.

At 10:30 A.M., Mary was surprised to run into Louise Benoit in the corridor outside the Laurentian genetics lab. Louise was wearing tight-fitting denim cutoffs and a white T-shirt tied in a knot over her flat midriff. Well, thought Mary, it was blisteringly hot today, but really–she looks like she’s asking for it …

No.

Mary cursed herself; she knew better than that. No matter how a woman dressed, she was entitled to safety, entitled to be able to walk around without being molested.

Mary decided to be friendly and trotted out her few words of French. “Bonjour,” she said, as she got closer to Louise. “Comment sa va?”

“I’m fine,” replied Louise. “And you?”

“Fine. What brings you here?”

Louise pointed down the hall. “I was visiting some guys I know in the physics department. There’s not much for me to do at SNO right now. They’ve finished draining the detector chamber, and a team from the original manufacturer is just begi

Mary was heading toward the vending machines, looking to get a bag of Miss Vickie’s sea-salt-and-malt-vinegar kettle chips—an indulgence she could only afford in a monetary sense, but it had long been traditional for her to start each work week with a 43-gram bag.

“And did they?” Mary asked. “Shoot any holes in it, I mean?”

Louise shook her head and fell in beside Mary as she continued on down to the lounge.

“Well, that’s the best kind of idea, isn’t it?” Mary said.

“I suppose,” said Louise. Once they reached the lounge, Mary fished in her purse for some change. She pulled out a loonie and a quarter, and fed them into one of the vending machines. Louise, meanwhile, got herself a cup of coffee from another machine.

“Remember that meeting we had in the Inco conference room?” said Louise. “Well, as I said then, the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics states that whenever a quantum event can go two ways, it does go two ways.”

“A splitting of the timeline,” said Mary, leaning her bum against the arm of a vinyl-padded chair in the lounge.

“Oui,” said Louise. “Well, I spent some time talking to Ponter about this.”

“Ponter mentioned that,” said Mary. “I must have missed it.”

“It was late at night, and—”

“You went into Ponter’s room again after we’d finished the language lessons?” Mary was astonished by the rush of—of, my God, of jealousy–she felt.

“Sure. I like to be up at night; you know that. I wanted to learn more about the Neanderthal view of physics.”

“And?” said Mary, trying to keep her tone even.

“Well, it’s interesting,” said Louise. She took a sip of her coffee. “Here in this world, we’ve got two major interpretations for quantum mechanics: the Copenhagen interpretation and Everett’s Many-Worlds interpretation. The former postulates a special role for the observer—that consciousness actually influences reality. Well, that idea makes some physicists very uncomfortable; it’s seen as a return to vitalism. Everett’s Many-Worlds interpretation was an attempt to work around that. It says that quantum phenomena cause new universes to split off constantly, with each possible outcome of a quantum interaction occurring, but in a separate universe. No observers are required to shape reality; instead, every reality that can conceivably exist is automatically created.”

“Okay,” said Mary, not because she really understood, but because the alternative seemed to be an even longer lecture.

“Well, Ponter’s people have a single theory of quantum mechanics that’s sort of a synthesis of our two theories. It allows for many worlds—that is, for parallel universes—but the creation of such universes doesn’t result from random quantum events. Rather, it only happens through the actions of conscious observers.”