Humans (22 page)

For half a second, the feminist in Mary was outraged that no women were present in the quantum-computing facility, but of course there would be no women anywhere around here; the mine, she knew, was located beyond Saldak Rim.

Ponter led Mary through the grid of cylinders clamped to the floor, up a short flight of stairs, through a door, and out into the control room. Mary was chilled; the Neanderthals didn’t like heat, and it would naturally have been just as hot this far below the surface here as it had been in Mary’s world. They clearly air-conditioned the rest of the facility; indeed, Mary looked down and was embarrassed to see her nipples pushing out against her top. “How do you keep it cool down here?” she asked.

“Superconductivity heat pumps,” said Ponter. “They work like an established scientific fact.”

Mary looked around the control room. She was surprised at how
strange
the consoles looked. She hadn’t ever thought about the fact that human industrial designers had arbitrarily decided what instrumentation should look like, that their “high-tech” designs were only one possible way to go. Instead of the burnished metal and black and gray colors of so much human equipment, these consoles were mostly a coral pink, had no sharp corners, and seemed to have little control doo-dads that pulled out rather than pushed in. There were no LEDs, no dials, and no toggle switches. Instead, indicators seemed to be reflective, rather than illuminated, and text displays were in dark blue symbols on a soft gray background; she would have thought them preprinted labels, but the strings of characters being shown kept changing.

Ponter moved her quickly through the small room, and they came to the decontamination facility. Before she knew what was happening, Ponter had undone the shoulder clasps on his shirt and pulled it off. A second later, he was removing his pants. He stuffed his clothes into a cylindrical hamper and walked into the chamber, which had a circular floor. Ponter stood still and the floor slowly turned, presenting first his broad back—and all that was below it—and then his broad chest—and all that was below
that
—to her. She could see laser emitters on one side of the chamber, and pinpoints of laser light hitting the opposite side, passing through Ponter’s body as if it were not even there, but, so she understood, zapping foreign biomolecules as they did so.

It took several minutes, and several rotations, for the process to be completed. Mary tried to keep her eyes from dropping down. Ponter was utterly unselfconscious. The previous times she’d seen him naked had been in dim light, but here—

Here he was illuminated with all the intensity of a hardcore porno film. His body was mostly covered with fine blond hair, his abdominal muscles were firm, his pectorals almost made him look buxom, and…

And she looked away; she knew she shouldn’t be staring.

Finally, Ponter was done. He stepped out of the chamber, and gestured for Mary to take her turn.

And suddenly Mary’s heart jumped. She’d been briefed about the decontamination procedure, but…

But it had never occurred to her that Ponter would be watching her as she went through it. Of course, she could simply tell him that that made her uncomfortable, but…

Mary took a deep breath. When in Rome…

She undid her blouse, and put it in the same hamper Ponter had used. She removed her black shoes, and, after a confirming nod from Ponter, put those in the hamper as well. She then removed her pants, and—

And there she was, in cream-colored bra and white panties.

If the lasers could zap bacteria and viruses right through her skin, they should be able to do that through her underwear, too, but…

But her underwear, and all her clothes, her purse, and her luggage, were to be sonically cleaned and exposed to high intensity ultraviolet. The lasers were good at getting microbes; they weren’t nearly powerful enough to get the much larger mites and ticks that could be lurking in the folds of fabric. Everything, Ponter said, would be delivered to them later, after a thorough cleaning.

Mary reached up and unclasped her bra. She remembered back in college when she could pass the pencil test, but those days were long behind her. He breasts flopped down. Mary instinctively crossed her arms over her chest, but she had to lower them to take off her panties. She wasn’t quite sure whether it was more ladylike to face forward or backward as she peeled them off; either way displayed a lot of flesh in unflattering geometry. At last, she turned around, and quickly pulled them down, straightening up as fast as she could.

Ponter was still looking on, smiling encouragingly. If the harsher light here made her any less attractive to him than the dim light in the hotel room, he gave no sign.

Mary put her panties into the hamper and stepped into the chamber, which began its humiliating rotation. Yes, she had looked at Ponter, but her gaze had been admiring—he was, after all, very well muscled, and, not to put too fine a point on it, quite nicely hung, too.

But she was a woman on a collision course with forty, with twenty pounds of fat she didn’t need, with pubic hair that made abundantly plain the fact that she dyed the hair on her head. How in God’s name could Ponter possibly be admiring all that soft whiteness he was seeing?

Mary closed her eyes and waited for the procedure to finish. She didn’t feel a thing; whatever the lasers were doing to her innards was completely painless.

At last, it was over. Mary stepped through to the other side of the chamber, and Ponter led her to another room where they could dress. He indicated a wall full of cubic cubbyholes, each containing clothes. “Try the upper-right,” said Ponter. “They are arranged in ascending order of size; that one should be the smallest.”

The smallest,
thought Mary, and she cheered up a little. In this world, it seemed she’d get to shop in the petite section.

Mary got dressed as quickly as she could, and Ponter led her to the elevator station. Once again, Mary was taken aback by the immediately obvious differences between Gliksin and Barast technology. The elevator cab was circular, with a couple of pedals on the floor to operate it. Ponter stomped on one of them, and the car started going up. How handy that would be when one’s arms were full! Mary had once accidentally dumped all her groceries, including a carton of eggs, onto the floor of the elevator at her condo.

There were four vertical rods equally spaced around the interior. At first Mary thought they were structural columns, but they weren’t. Shortly after they’d started the long ride up—presumably two kilometers, just like on her Earth—Ponter started shimmying his back against one of the poles. It was a back-scratching device, and seemed a good way to make use of the time.

Mary wondered aloud about the idea of a circular cab, though. Wouldn’t it tend to rotate within its shaft?

Ponter nodded his massive head. “That is the idea,” Hak said, translating for him. “The lifting mechanism is in the shaft walls, rather than overhead as in your elevators. The channels that guide the elevator are not perfectly vertical. Rather, they spiral around very gently. In this particular shaft, the elevator starts off facing east at the bottom, but will be facing west by the time we reach the top.”

During the trip up, Mary also had a chance to notice the lighting being used. “My God,” she said, looking up, “is that luciferin?”

A glass tube ran around the upper edge of the cylinder, filled with a liquid that was glowing with greenish blue light.

Hak bleeped.

“Luciferin,” repeated Mary. “It’s the substance that fireflies use to make their tails glow.”

“Ah,” said Ponter. “Yes, this is a similar catalytic reaction. It is our principal source of indoor illumination.”

Mary nodded to herself. Of course the Neanderthals, adapted for a cold environment, wouldn’t like incandescent bulbs that give off more heat than light. The luciferin/luciferase reaction was almost completely efficient, producing light with hardly any heat.

The elevator continued its ascent, the blue-green illumination making Ponter’s pale skin look oddly silverish and his golden brown irises seem almost yellow. There were ventilation holes in the roof and floor of the cab, creating a bit of a breeze, and Mary hugged herself against the chill.

“Sorry,” said Ponter, noting her actions.

“That’s okay,” said Mary. “I know you like it cold.”

“It is not that,” said Ponter. “Pheromones build up in a closed space like this, and the ride up is a long one. The vents make sure passengers are not overly influenced by each other’s scents.”

Mary shook her head in wonder. She hadn’t even made it out of the mine yet, and she was already overwhelmed by the differences—and she’d known she was heading to another world! Her heart again went out to Ponter, who had originally arrived on her Earth with no warning, but had somehow managed to keep his sanity.

At last the elevator reached the top, and the door opened. Even that, though, happened in an unfamiliar way, with the door, which had appeared seamless, folding out of the way like an accordion.

They were in a square chamber perhaps five meters on a side. Its walls were lime green, and the ceiling was low. Ponter went over to a shelf and brought back a small flat box that seemed to be made of something like blue cardboard. He opened the box and removed a shiny construct of metal and plastic.

“The High Gray Council realizes it has no choice but to let people from your world visit ours,” Ponter said, “but Adikor said they have imposed one condition. You must wear this.” He held up the object, and Mary could see that it was a metal band, with a face on it very much like Hak’s.

“Companions are normally implants,” said Ponter. “But we understand that subjecting a casual visitor to surgery is too much to ask. However, this band is unremovable, except in this facility; that is, the computer within knows its location and will only allow the clasp to reopen here.”

Mary nodded. “I understand.” She held out her right arm.

“It is usual,” said Ponter, “for the Companion to go on the left arm, unless the bearer is left-handed.”

Mary retracted one arm, and extended the other. Ponter busied himself with attaching the Companion. “I’ve been meaning to ask you about that,” said Mary. “Are most Neanderthals right-handed?”

“About ninety percent are, yes.”

“That’s what we thought from the fossil record.”

Ponter’s eyebrow rolled up. “How could you possibly determine handedness from fossils? I do not believe we have any idea what the distribution of hand preferences was among ancient Gliksins on this world.”

Mary smiled, pleased at the ingenuity of her species. “It came from fossil teeth.”

“What have teeth got to do with handedness?”

“A study was done of eighty teeth from twenty individual Neanderthals. See, we figured with those great jaws of yours, you probably used your teeth as clamps, to hold hides in place while you defleshed them. Well, hides are abrasive, and they grind down the front of the teeth, leaving little nicks. In eighteen of the individuals, the nicks angled toward the right—which is what you’d expect if a scraper was being used on the hide with the right hand, pulling the hide in that direction.”

Ponter made what Mary had learned was the Neanderthal “impressed” face, which consisted of a sucking in of the lips, and a bunching toward the center of the eyebrow. “Excellent reasoning,” said Ponter. “In fact, to this day, we hold flensing parties, where hides are cleaned in that manner; of course, there are other, mechanized techniques, but such parties are a social ritual.”

Ponter paused for a moment, then: “Speaking of hides…” He walked to the opposite side of the room, the wall of which was lined with fur coats, hanging, it appeared, from shoulder clamps attached to a horizontal bar. “Please select one,” he said. “Again, those at the right are the smallest.”

Mary pointed at one, and Ponter did something she didn’t catch that caused one of the coats to be released from the clamps. She wasn’t quite sure how to put it on—it seemed to open at the side, rather than the shoulders, but Ponter helped her into it. There was a part of Mary that thought about objecting; she never wore natural fur back home, but this was, of course, a different place.

It certainly wasn’t a luxurious pelt, like mink or sable; it was coarse, and an uneven reddish brown. “What kind of fur is it?” said Mary, as Ponter did up the clasps that sealed her within the jacket.

“Mammoth,” he said.

Mary’s eyes went wide. It might not be as nice as mink, but a mammoth coat would be worth infinitely more on her world.

Ponter didn’t bother with a jacket for himself. He started walking toward the door. This one was more normal, attached to a single vertical tube that let it swing just as though it were on hinges. Ponter opened it, and—

And there they were, on the surface.

And suddenly all the strangeness evaporated.

This
was
Earth—the Earth she knew. The sun, low in the western sky, looked exactly as she was used to seeing it. The sky was blue. The trees were pines and birches and other varieties she recognized.

“It’s cold,” she said. Indeed, it felt about four degrees cooler than the Sudbury surface they’d left behind.

Ponter smiled. “It
is
lovely,” he said.

Suddenly, a sound caught Mary’s attention, and for one brief moment she thought perhaps a mammoth was bearing down on them to avenge its kin. But no, that wasn’t it. It was an air-cushion vehicle of some sort, cubic in shape but with rounded corners, flying across the rocky ground toward them. The sound Mary had heard seemed to be a combination of fans blowing downward that let it hover a small distance above the surface, and a large fan, like one of those on the boats used in the Everglades, blowing to the rear.

“Ah,” said Ponter, “the travel cube I called for.” Mary assumed he’d done it with Hak’s aid, and without the words translated into English. The strange vehicle settled down in front of them, and Mary could see that it had a Neanderthal driver, a hulking male who looked twenty years older than Ponter.

The cube’s clear side swung open, and the driver spoke to Ponter. Again, the words weren’t translated for Mary’s benefit, but she imagined they were the Neanderthal equivalent of “Where to, Mac?”