What character in a book can you connect with or relate to the most?
Submitted by Eating A Book.
That would have to be Ponter Boddit, from Robert Sawyer's The Neanderthal Parallax trilogy. Ponter is a physicist, who lives and works with his partner Adikor Huld, a computer scientist. An accident sends him to a parallel world, populated by creatures long extinct where he comes from: humans. Ponter is a homo neanderthalensis, and on his version of Earth, they were the ones that survived the clash with our ancestors many thousands of years ago.
Sawyer's writing isn't always to my taste -- he uses quite a few too many pages of exposition hammering home points that I'd rather he sketched and let develop on their own. I much prefer Samuel Delaney's approach to such things. But the books have compelling characters, and an interesting plot, and there are many small touches of wit and beauty.
Ponter's world is very different from ours. Neanderthals ("Barast", in their language) have migrated across the planet only slowly, and in very small numbers. They never developed large-scale agriculture for food, never domesticated animals, though they have developed some sophisticated technologies. Due to some fairly draconian eugenics measures, crime -- even petty violence -- is virtually unknown. Barast society is divided so that men and women live separately much of the time, except for a once-a-month celebration ("Two Becoming One") where everyone gathers together for a day of togetherness. Because of this arrangement, every adult Barast usually takes two mates, a man and a woman. Ponter's woman-mate is dead, and though he has Adikor, he wrestles with loneliness, especially when Two Become One, and Adikor spends his time with his own woman-mate.
During his stay on our version of Earth, he befrends (and begins to fall in love with) Mary Vaughn, the geneticist recruited to study him. By the second book, Ponter is assigned by his government as an ambassador to our Earth, and he and Mary spend a great deal more time together. In one chapter, Ponter and Mary are walking through the Capitol Mall in Washington, DC., and Mary shows him the Vietnam memorial. This is an excerpt from that chapter.
"We've only got one day here in Washington before the conference begins," said Mary, "and there's so much I want to show you. But I wanted to start with this. Nothing else says more about this country, and about what it means to be human -- my kind of human."
Ponter looked at the strange vista in front of him, not understanding. There was a scar in the grass-covered landscape, a deep welt that ran for eighty paces then met, at an obtuse angle, another similar scar.
"What is it?" asked ponter, staring at the oblong blackness, at their reflections.
"It's a memorial," said Mary. She looked away from the black wall and waved her hand at objects in the distance. "This whole mall is filled with memorials. The pair of walls here point at two of the most important ones. That spire is the Washington Monument, a memorial to the first U.S. president. Over there, that's the Lincoln Memorial, commemorating the president who freed the slaves."
Ponter's translator bleeped.
Mary let out a sigh. Evidently there was still more complexity, more -- what had she called it? -- more dirty linen to be aired.
. . .
"This memorial," said Ponter, sweeping his arm, taking in its two great walls. "What is its purpose?"
Mary's eyebrows climbed again. "To honor the dead."
"No, no," said Ponter. "That may be an incidental effect, I grant you. But surely the purpose of the designer -- the purpose of anyone who designs a memorial -- is to make sure people never forget."
"Yes?" said Mary, sounding irritated by whatever picayune distinction she felt Ponter was making.
"And the reason to not forget the past," said Ponter, "is so that the same mistakes can be avoided."
"Well, yes, of course," said Mary.
"So has this memorial served its purpose? Has the same mistake -- the mistake that led to all these young people dying -- been avoided since?"
Mary thought for a time, then shook her head. "I suppose not. Wars are still fought, and --"
"By America? By the people who built this monument?"
"Yes," said Mary.
"Why?"
"Economics. Ideology. And..."
"Yes?"
Mary lifted her shoulders. "Revenge. Getting even."
"When this country decides to go to war, where is the war declared?"
"Um, in Congress. I'll show you the building later."
"Can this memorial be seen from there?"
"This one? No, I don't think so."
"They should do it right here," said Ponter, flatly. "Their leader -- the president, no? -- he should declare war right here, standing in front of these fifty-eight thousand, two hundred and nine names. Surely that should be the purpose of such a memorial: if a leader can stand and look at the names of all those who died a previous time a president declared war and still call for young people to go off and be killed in another war, then perhaps the war is worth fighting."
Mary tilted her head to one side but said nothing.
. . .
"Do you not see?" said Ponter. "That is what this memorial, this Vietnam veterans' wall, should serve as a reminder of: the pointlessness of death, the error -- the grave error, if I may attempt my own play on words in your language -- of declaring a war in contravention of your most dearly held principles."
Mary was still silent.
"That is the reason why future American wars should be declared here -- right here. Only if the cause stands the test of supporting the most dearly held fundamental principles, then perhaps it is a war that should be fought." Ponter let his eyes run over the wall again, over the black reflection.
Mary said nothing.
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