Fractured: Tales of the Canadian Post-Apocalypse(86)
Before, when Maxim still lived with his parents, when Vancouver was a populous metropolis, Maxim felt more alienation than kinship toward other humans, including his mother and father. He was keenly aware that humans were all different, as he felt similar to no one, not even to his parents. When he first read about the Neanderthal and Denisovan genes present in, respectively, European and Southeast Asian lineages, Maxim grew even more intensely aware of the differences that separated him genetically from everyone else.
Maxim’s mother, Giselle Beaulieu, was a Francophone from the province of Quebec, more precisely from Longueuil, a suburb on the south shore of the Island of Montreal, across the St. Lawrence River. She moved to Vancouver to teach French at the Vancouver School Board. She never mastered the different “th” sounds and never quite grasped the role of emphasis in English pronunciation, but her vocabulary in both languages was extensive. Being of Caucasian European descent, her genes included Neanderthal DNA, thus so did Maxim’s.
Tomoyuki Fujiyama, Maxim’s father, was Japanese. He had come to Canada at age 17 to study biochemistry at the University of British Columbia and ended up staying to become a professor at that same institution. He spoke perfect CBC English and only slipped into Japanese when he drank too much alcohol, which he always did at parties. Sometimes, too much drink would cause him to forget how to express himself in anything but Japanese, although he still understood if people spoke to him in English or French. Under normal circumstances, his spoken French was inconsistent but serviceable. According to the latest findings in genetic anthropology, the Japanese, and most mainland Asians, like most sub-Saharan Africans, had never bred with either Neanderthals or Denisovans, so they are thought to be fully Cro-Magnon.
Maxim, however, doubts that the whole story is quite so simple. Geneticists have been able to identify surviving Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA strains only because they had located and identified the DNA of these other primates. There were likely other species of early humans, as yet unidentified, with whom the Cro-Magnons also interbred, both in their African homeland and as they spread across the globe.
Maxim believes that every ethnic group is genetically distinctive, the result of interbreeding between different species of early humans – several more varieties than merely Cro-Magnons, Neanderthals, and Denisovans. Beyond that, due to emigration patterns and further cross-breeding between racial and cultural groups, every individual possesses a unique blend of Cro-Magnon, Neanderthal, Denisovan, and other hominid DNA. Every individual human is thus differently human compared to other individuals in the population.
Not better nor worse. Not superior nor inferior. But different. Essentially: alien.
If these different species of humans could interbreed, then the line separating species is thin, if it exists at all. Then, the line separating person from nonperson must also be thin, if it exists at all.
In the playground near a side entrance to Granville Island, there’s a family of dogs who has taken up residence. The male is a brown Labrador and the female an uncut Rottweiler, with full ears and tail. They have had at least two litters. Each of their nine pups looks completely different from the other. The adult dogs guard their territory but are not overly aggressive. They allow some other animals passage through the playground and warn off others. Sometimes, they even invite humans among them, wagging their tails as the bipeds approach, and integrate them within their pack’s play. Some humans they growl at, though, baring their teeth. Maxim presumes their senses make them keen observers, and he is convinced their evaluations are not arbitrary but carefully considered, although the adult male and female do not always come to the same conclusion. Contrary to Maxim’s expectations, due to their breed and gender, the female Rottweiler tends to be more trusting and welcoming of visitors, while the male Labrador is more cautious. When Maxim first observed the pack, the female took the pups with her to scavenge for food while the male stayed behind to guard their home; after they came back, he would go scavenge on his own, leaving the rest of his pack home. Sometimes, he returned to find other animals – dogs, cats, humans, coyotes – with his family. After a few such occurrences, he switched roles with the female, rounding up the pups to go with him and growling at his mate to stay behind. Now, if he finds intruders with his mate when the pack returns from scavenging, he and his pups rush in barking and chase them away. When the female leaves to find food on her own, he corrals all the pups and makes them stay with him. He then stands guard vigilantly over his offspring and territory, not letting anyone approach, relaxing only once his mate is back with the pack.
Are these dogs not persons because they are not humans? Regardless of the answer, it would still be too logistically complicated for Maxim to include nonhumans in his survey. His criteria for inclusion and exclusion trouble him, though.
? ?
When Maxim became sick, his parents were still healthy. Maxim dimly remembers the early days of his illness – nothing beyond vague images of his parents nursing him. He remembers, too, that three days before he was affected, all hospitals and clinics across British Columbia had been closed down “for reasons of national security and public safety.” That had been 14 April. All schools and most government services across Canada had been shut down three days earlier than that, with the same uninformative and nondescript reason given. Starting on 3 April, people had been falling sick in Vancouver – and, according to what Maxim gleaned on the Internet, around the planet; making a link between the unexplained epidemic and governments’ secretive security measures worldwide was unavoidable. Rumours flew all over the Web, but no official source gave any clear answers as to what was happening. At least, not before Maxim got sick, and there’s been no way to get news since he recovered.