Humans (23 page)

Ponter gestured for Mary to precede him into the car. “Now,” he said, “let me show you my world.”

“This is your house?” asked Mary.

Ponter nodded. They had spent a couple of hours touring some public buildings, but it was now well into the evening.

Mary was astonished. Ponter’s home wasn’t made of brick or stone. Rather, it was made mostly of wood. Of course, Mary had seen many wooden houses before—although the building code actually banned them in many parts of Ontario—but she’d never seen one like
this
. Ponter’s home seemed to have been
grown
. It was as if a very thick, but very short, tree trunk had expanded to fill every part of a giant mold shaped into room-sized cubes and cylinders, and then the mold had been removed, leaving behind the tree, the interior of which had subsequently somehow been partially hollowed out without actually killing it. The house’s surface was still covered with dark brown bark, and the tree itself was apparently still alive, although the leaves on the branches extending up from its central, shaped body had started to change color for the autumn.

Some carpentry had clearly been performed, though. Windows were perfectly square, presumably cut through the wood. Also, a deck extending on one side of the house had been built from planks.

“It’s…” Adjectives were warring for supremacy in Mary’s mind—
bizarre, wonderful, odd, fascinating
—but the one that won out was, “…beautiful.”

Ponter nodded. One of Mary’s people would have said “thank you” in response to a compliment like that, but Mary had learned that the Neanderthals didn’t routinely acknowledge praise for things they weren’t personally responsible for. Early on, she’d remarked that one of Ponter’s shoulder-closing shirts was quite attractive, and he had looked at her perplexed, as if wondering why anyone would choose to wear something that
wasn’t
attractive.

Mary gestured to a large black square on the ground next to the house; it measured perhaps twenty meters on a side. “What’s that? A landing pad?”

“Only incidentally. It is really a solar collector. It converts sunlight into electricity.”

Mary smiled. “I guess you have to shovel snow off it in winter,” she said.

But Ponter shook his head. “No. The hover-bus that takes us to work lands there and uses its jets to blast the snow clear as it does so.”

Her hatred of shoveling snow had been one of the reasons Mary opted for an apartment after she and Colm split up. She rather suspected that in her world, the TTC would balk at sending a bus with a plow on its front around to everyone’s home after each snowfall.

“Come on,” said Ponter, walking toward the house. “Let us go in.”

The door to Ponter’s house swung in. The interior walls were polished wood—the actual substance of the tree around them. Mary had seen hundreds of wood-paneled rooms before, but never one where the grain made one continuous pattern right around the room. If she hadn’t seen the house first from the outside, she would have been absolutely baffled about how it had been accomplished. Little niches had been carved into the walls at various points, and they contained small sculptures and bric-a-brac.

At first Mary thought the floor was carpeted with green fabric, but she quickly realized it was actually moss. She seemed to be in what corresponded to a living room. There were a couple of freestanding oddly shaped chairs, and there were two couches protruding from the walls. There was no framed art, but the entire roof had been painted in a complex mural, and—

And suddenly Mary’s blood ran cold.

There was a wolf inside the house.

Mary froze, her heart pounding.

The wolf began its charge, rushing toward Ponter.

“Look out!”
shouted Mary.

Ponter turned and fell backward onto one of the couches.

The wolf was upon him, its jaws opening wide, and—

And Ponter laughed as the wolf licked his face.

Ponter was repeating a handful of words over and over in his own language, but Hak wasn’t translating them. Still, Ponter’s tone was one of affectionate amusement.

After a moment, he pushed the wolf off him and rose to his feet. The creature turned toward Mary.

“Mare,” said Ponter, “this is my dog, Pabo.”

“Dog!” exclaimed Mary. The animal was completely lupine, as far as she could tell: savage, ravenous, predatory.

Pabo crouched down next to Ponter, and, lifting her muzzle high, let out a long, loud howl.

“Pabo!” Ponter said, his tone remonstrative. And his next word must have been the Neanderthal for “Behave!” He smiled apologetically at Mary. “She has never seen a Gliksin before.”

Ponter led Pabo over to Mary. Mary felt her back go stiff, and she tried not to tremble, as the toothy animal, which must have weighed at least a hundred pounds, sniffed her up and down.

Ponter spoke to the dog for a few moments, his words untranslated, in the same lilting tone people from Mary’s world used when talking to their pets.

At that moment, Adikor entered through an archway, coming from another room. “Hello, Mare,” he said. “Did you enjoy your tour?”

“Very much so.”

Ponter moved over to Adikor and drew him into a hug. Mary looked away for a moment, but, when she looked back, they were standing side by side, holding hands.

Mary again felt pangs of jealousy, but—

No, no. Surely that was unseemly. Surely Ponter and Adikor were just behaving as they always did, plain in their affection for each other.

And yet—

And yet, had it been Adikor who had initiated the hug? Or Ponter? She honestly couldn’t tell. And the clasping of hands had occurred while she wasn’t looking; she couldn’t say who had reached out for whom. Maybe Adikor was staking out his territory, making a show for Mary’s sake of his relationship with Ponter.

Pabo, apparently now satisfied that Mary wasn’t some sort of monster, padded away and jumped up on one of the couches growing—quite literally—out of the wall.

“Would you like to see the rest of the house?” asked Ponter.

“Sure,” said Mary.

She was led into an area—not really a separate room—that must have been the kitchen. A sheet of glass covered the mossy floor. Mary didn’t recognize any of the appliances, but she assumed the small cube might be something akin to a microwave oven, and the large unit, consisting of two identical blue cubes, one atop the other, might be a refrigerator of some sort. She gave voice to these guesses, and Adikor laughed.

“Actually, that is a laser cooker,” he said, pointing at the small unit. “It uses the same rotating of frequencies we employ in the sterilizer you went through, but this time so it can cook the meat evenly inside and out. And we do not use refrigeration to store food much anymore, although we used to. That is a vacuum box.”

“Ah,” said Mary. She turned, and was taken aback. One wall was filled with four perfectly square, flat monitor screens, each showing a completely different view of the Neanderthal world. She’d been concerned from the beginning about the Orwellian aspects of Neanderthal society, but hadn’t expected Ponter to be involved in monitoring his neighbors.

“That’s the Voyeur,” said Adikor, coming over to join them. “It’s how we monitor the Exhibitionists. He stepped over to the quartet of monitors and made an adjustment. Suddenly the four separate squares merged into one large one, with a magnified view of the Exhibitionist who had been in the lower-right. “That one is my favorite,” said Adikor. “Hawst is always up to something interesting.” He took in the view for a second. “Ah, he is at a
daybatol
game.”

“Come
on,
” said Ponter, motioning for them both to follow. His tone suggested that once Adikor started watching a
daybatol
match, it was hard to get him away from the Voyeur.

Mary followed him, as did Adikor. The next room was clearly their bedroom/bathroom. It had a large window looking out over a brook, and a recessed square pit filled with square cushions, forming a large sleeping surface. On top were a few disk-shaped pillows. At the side of the room was a circular pit, again recessed into the ground. “Is that the bath?” asked Mary.

Ponter nodded. “You are welcome to use it, if you wish.”

Mary shook her head. “Maybe later.” Her gaze fell back on the bed, pictures of a naked Ponter and Adikor entwined in sexual acts forming in her mind.

“And that is it,” said Ponter. “That is our home.”

“Come,” said Adikor. “Let us go back into the living room.”

They did so, Ponter leading the way. Adikor shooed Pabo off one of the couches and lay down on his back upon it. Ponter indicated that Mary could take the other couch. Perhaps being recumbent was the normal leisure posture for Neanderthals; certainly it would be the best way to look at ceiling murals.

Mary did indeed take the other couch, thinking that Ponter would sit next to her. But instead he moved over to where Adikor was lying down and gave him an affectionate rap on the top of his head. Adikor sat up for a moment. Mary expected him to swing his feet around, sitting properly on the couch, but as soon as Ponter had sat down at the end of the couch, Adikor lowered himself, placing his head in Ponter’s lap.

Mary felt a knotting in her stomach. Still, Ponter had probably never entertained a female he was romantically involved with in his house before.

“So,” said Ponter, “what do you think of our world so far?”

Mary took the opportunity to look away from Ponter and Adikor, as if she needed to visualize all that she’d seen already in her mind’s eye. “It’s…” She shrugged. “Different.” And then, realizing that might sound offensive, she quickly added, “But nice. Very nice.” She paused. “Clean.”

Her own comment made Mary laugh a bit on the inside.
Clean.
That’s what Americans always said when they visited Toronto.
What a clean city you have!

But Toronto was a pigsty compared to what Mary had seen of Saldak. She’d always thought it economically impossible for a large population of humans to not have a devastating effect on the environment, but…

But it wasn’t a
large
population that did such things. Rather, it was a constantly growing population. With their discrete generations, it seemed that the Neanderthals had enjoyed zero population growth for centuries.

“We like it,” said the recumbent Adikor, apparently trying to move the conversation along. “Which, of course, is why it is the way it is.”

Ponter stroked Adikor’s hair. “Their world has its charms, too.”

“I understand your cities are much bigger,” said Adikor.

“Oh, yes,” said Mary. “Many have millions of people; Toronto, where I’m from, has almost three million.”

Adikor shook his head, rotating it back and forth in Ponter’s lap. “Astonishing,” he said.

“We will take you into the Center after dinner,” said Ponter. “Things are more compacted there; buildings are only a few tens of paces apart.”

“Is that where the bonding ceremony will be held?” asked Mary.

“No, that will occur halfway between Center and Rim.”

A thought suddenly occurred to Mary. “I—I didn’t bring anything fancy to wear.”

Ponter laughed. “Do not worry. No one will be able to tell which Gliksin clothes are normal and which are for special occasions. They
all
look strange to us.” Ponter then tipped his head down, looking at Adikor’s face. “Speaking of which, you have a meeting tomorrow with Fluxatan Consortium, do you not? What are you going to wear for that?” Rather than cut Mary off from the conversation, Hak continued to translate.

“I do not know,” Adikor said.

“What about the green jerkin?” said Ponter. “I like the way it shows off your biceps, and—”

Suddenly, Mary could take no more. She shot to her feet and made a beeline for the front door. “I’m sorry,” she said, trying to catch her breath, trying to calm down. “I am so sorry.”

And she stepped outside into the dark.

Ponter followed Mary out, closing the door behind him. Mary was shivering. Ponter didn’t seem the least disturbed by the evening air, but he was clearly aware of Mary’s reaction to it. He moved closer to her, as if to encircle her in his massive arms, but Mary shrugged her shoulders violently, rejecting his touch, and turned away from him, looking out at the countryside.

“What is wrong?” asked Ponter.

Mary took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Nothing,” she said. She knew she sounded petulant, and she hated herself for it. What
was
wrong? She’d
known
Ponter had a male lover, but—

But it was one thing to be aware of it as an abstract fact; it was another to see it in the flesh.

Mary was astonished at herself. She’d felt more jealous just now than she had been when she’d first seen Colm with his new girlfriend after he and Mary had split up.

“Nothing,” said Mary again.

Ponter spoke in his own tongue in a voice that sounded both confused and sad. Hak’s translation had a more neutral tone. “I am sorry if I offended you…somehow.”

Mary looked up at the dark sky. “It’s not that I’m offended,” she said. “It’s just that…” She paused. “This is going to take some getting used to.”

“I know our world is different from yours. Was my home too dim for you? Too cool?”

“It’s not that,” said Mary, and she slowly turned around “It’s…Adikor.”

Ponter’s eyebrow rolled up his browridge. “Do you not like him?”

Mary shook her head. “No, no. It isn’t that. He seems nice enough.” She sighed again. “The problem isn’t with Adikor. It’s
you
and Adikor. It’s seeing the two of you together.”

“He is my man-mate,” said Ponter, simply.

“In my world, people have only one mate. I don’t care whether it’s someone of the opposite sex, or someone of the same sex.” She was about to add, “Really, I don’t”—but was afraid she would be protesting too much. “But for us to be—well, whatever it is that you and I are—while you are involved with someone else is…” She trailed off, then lifted her shoulders. “…is difficult. And to have to watch the two of you being affectionate…”

“Ah,” said Ponter, and then, as if the first utterance hadn’t been sufficient, “Ah,” he said again. He was quiet for a time. “I do not know what to tell you. I love Adikor, and he loves me.”

Mary wanted to ask him what his feelings were for her—but this wasn’t the time: she’d probably repelled him with her narrow-mindedness.

“Besides,” said Ponter, “within a family, there is no ill feeling. Surely you would not feel hurt if I were showing affection to my brother or my daughters or my parents.”

Mary considered that in silence, and, after a few moments, Ponter went on. “Perhaps it is trite, but we have a saying: love is like intestines—there is always plenty to go around.”

Mary had to laugh, despite herself. But it was an uncomfortable honking laugh that caused tears to escape from her eyes. “But you haven’t touched me since we came here.”

Ponter’s eyes went wide. “Two are not One.”

Mary was quiet for a long time. “I—Gliksin women…and Gliksin men, too—we need affection all the time, not just four days a month.”

Ponter took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Normally…”

He trailed off, and the word hung between them. Mary felt her pulse increasing. Normally, a person here would have two mates, one male and one female. A Neanderthal woman didn’t lack for affection—but for most of the month it came from her woman-mate. “I know,” said Mary, closing her eyes. “I know.”

“Perhaps this was a mistake,” said Ponter, as much, it seemed, to himself as to Mary, although Hak dutifully translated his words. “Perhaps I should not have brought you here.”

“No,” said Mary. “No, I wanted to come, and I’m glad to be here.” She looked at him, staring into his golden eyes. “How long is it until Two next become One?” she asked.

“Three days,” said Ponter. “But…” he paused, and Mary blinked. “But,” he continued, “I suppose it cannot hurt anything for me to show affection to you before then.”

He opened his massive arms, and, after a moment, Mary stepped into them.

Mary, of course, could not stay with Ponter, for Ponter lived out in the Rim, which was the exclusive province of males. Adikor suggested the perfect solution: having Mary stay with his woman-mate, Lurt Fradlo. After all, she was a chemist, as Neanderthals defined the term—one who worked with molecules. And Mary, by that definition, was a specialized sort of chemist, focusing on deoxyribonucleic acid.

Lurt had agreed at once—and what scientist of either world wouldn’t leap at the chance to host one from the other? And so, Ponter had Hak summon a travel cube, and Mary headed into the Center.

The driver happened to be a female—or maybe Hak had requested that; after all, the artificial intelligence knew everything about Mary’s rape that Ponter did. Mary’s removable Companion had had Hak’s database transferred into it, and Mary made use of that fact now, conversing with the driver during the trip out.

“Why are your cars shaped like cubes?” Mary asked. “It doesn’t seem very aerodynamic.”

“What shape should they be?” asked the driver, who had a voice almost as low as Ponter’s and as resonant as Michel Bell’s when singing “Ol’ Man River.”

“Well, on my world they are rounded, and—” she thought briefly of
Monty Python
—“they’re thin at one end, thick in the middle, and thin again at the other end.”

The driver had short hair that was the darkest Mary had yet seen on a Neanderthal, meaning it was the color of milk chocolate. She shook her head. “Then how do you stack them?”

“
Stack
them?” repeated Mary.

“Yes. You know, when they are not being used. We stack them one on top of the other, and fit the stacks together side by side. It cuts down on the amount of space that has to be set aside to accommodate them.”

Mary thought of all the land her world wasted on parking lots. “But—but how do you get at your own car when you need it, if it’s at the bottom of the stack?”

“My own car?” echoed the driver.

“Yes. You know, the one that belongs to you.”

“The cars all belong to the city,” said the driver. “Why would I want to own one?”

“Well, I don’t know…”

“I mean, they are costly to manufacture, at least here.”

Mary thought about her monthly car payments. “They are in my world, too.”

She looked out at the countryside. Off in the distance, another travel cube was flying along, going in the opposite direction. Mary wondered what Henry Ford would have thought if someone had told him that, within a century of releasing the Model T, half the surface area in cities would be devoted to accommodating the movement or storage of cars, that accidents with them would be the leading cause of death of men under the age of twenty-five, that they would put more pollution into the air than all the factories and furnaces in the world combined.

“Then why own a car?” asked the female Neanderthal.

Mary shrugged a little. “We like to own things.”

“So do we,” she said. “But you cannot use a car ten tenths a day.”

“Don’t you worry about the guy who used the car before you having, well, left it a mess?”

The driver operated the control sticks she was holding, turning the cube so that it would avoid a group of trees ahead. And then she simply silently held up her left arm, as if that explained it all.

And, thought Mary, she guessed it did. No one would leave behind garbage, or damage a public vehicle, if they knew that a complete visual record of what they’d done was being automatically transmitted to the alibi archives. No one could steal a car, or use a car to commit a crime. And the Companion implants probably kept track of everything you’d brought with you into the car; there would be little possibility of accidentally leaving your hat behind and having to track down the same car you’d used before.

It had grown very dark. Mary was astonished to realize that the car was no longer passing through barren countryside, but was now in the thick of Saldak Center. There were almost no artificial lights; Mary saw that the driver wasn’t looking out the transparent front of the travel cube, but rather was driving by consulting a square infrared monitor set into the panel in front of her.

The car settled to the ground, and one side folded away, opening the interior to the chilly night air. “Here you are,” said the driver. “It’s that house, there.” She pointed at an oddly shaped structure dimly visible a dozen meters away.

Mary thanked the driver and got out. She had planned to make a beeline for the house, finding it rather disconcerting to be out in the open at night on this strange world, but she stopped dead in her tracks and looked up.

The stars overhead were glorious, the Milky Way clearly visible. What had Ponter called it that night back in Sudbury? “The Night River,” that was it.

And there, there was the Big Dipper; the Head of the Mammoth. Mary drew an imaginary line from the pointer stars, and quickly located Polaris, which meant that she was facing due north. She fished into her purse for the compass she’d brought with her at Jock Krieger’s request, but it was too dark to make out its face. So, after taking in her fill of the gorgeous heavens, Mary walked over to Lurt’s house and asked her Companion to let the occupant know that she’d arrived.

A moment later, the door opened, and there was another female Neanderthal. “Healthy day,” said the woman, or, at least, that’s how Mary’s unit translated the sounds she made.

“Hello,” said Mary. “Uh, just a sec…” There was plenty of light spilling out through the open door. Mary glanced down at the compass needle, and felt her eyebrows lifting in astonishment. The colored end of the needle—metallic blue, as opposed to the naked silver of the other end—was pointing toward Polaris, just as it would have on Mary’s side of the portal. Despite what Jock had said, it seemed this version of Earth hadn’t yet undergone a magnetic-field reversal.

Mary spent a pleasant night at Lurt’s home, meeting Adikor’s young son Dab, and the rest of Lurt’s family. The only truly awkward moment came when she needed to use the bathroom. Lurt showed her the chamber, but Mary was absolutely flummoxed by the unit in front of her. After staring dumbly at it for most of a minute, she reemerged from the chamber, and called Lurt over.

“I’m sorry,” Mary said, “but…well, it’s nothing like a toilet in my world. I don’t have any idea how to…”

Lurt laughed. “I am sorry!” she said. “Here. You place your feet in these stirrups, and you grab these overhead rings like this…”

Mary realized she’d have to completely remove her pants to make it work, but there was a hook on the wall that seemed designed to hold them. It actually was quite comfortable, although she yelped in surprise when a moist sponge like thing came in of its own accord to clean her when she was done.

Mary did notice that there was no reading matter in the bathroom. Her own, back home in Toronto, had the latest copies of
The Atlantic Monthly, Canadian Geographic, Utne Reader, Country Music,
and
World of Crosswords
on the toilet tank. But, even with great plumbing, she supposed that Neanderthals, because of their acute senses of smell, would never dally in the bathroom.

Mary slept that night on a pile of cushions arranged on the floor. At first, she found it uncomfortable: she was used to a more uniformly flat surface, but Lurt showed her how to arrange the pillows just so, providing neck and back support, separating her knees, and so on. Despite all the strangeness, Mary fell rapidly to sleep, absolutely exhausted.

The next morning, Mary went with Lurt to her work place, which, unlike most of the buildings in the Center, was made entirely of stone—to contain fire or explosion should some experiment go wrong, Lurt explained.

It seemed that Lurt worked with six other female chemists, and Mary was already falling into the habit of classifying them into generations, although instead of calling them 146s, 145s, 144s, 143s, and 142s, as Ponter did, referring to the number of decades since the dawn of the modern era, Mary thought of them as women who were pushing thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, and seventy years old, respectively. And although Neanderthal women didn’t age quite the same way as
Homo sapiens
females did—something about the way the browridge pulled on the skin of the forehead seemed to prevent pronounced wrinkling there—Mary had no trouble telling who belonged to which group. Indeed, with generations born in discrete bunches at ten-year intervals, the idea of trying to be coy about one’s age doubtless never even occurred to a female Neanderthal.

Still, it didn’t take long for Mary to stop thinking of the people at Lurt’s lab as Neanderthals and to start thinking of them as just women. Yes, their appearance was startling—women who looked like linebackers, women with hairy faces—but their mien was decidedly…well, not
feminine,
Mary thought; that word came loaded with too many expectations. But certainly
female:
pleasant, cooperative, chatty, collegial instead of competitive, and, all in all, just a whole heck of a lot of fun to be around.

Of course, Mary was of a generation—hopefully, the last such in her world—in which far fewer women worked in the sciences than men. She’d never been in a department where women were the majority—although it was getting close to that at York—let alone held all the positions. Perhaps in such circumstances, the working environment would be like this on her Earth, too. Mary had grown up in Ontario, which, for historical reasons, had two separate government-funded school boards, one “public”—in the American, not the British, sense—and the other Catholic. Since religious education was only allowed in religious institutions, many Catholic parents had sent their children to the Catholic schools, but Mary’s parents—mostly at her father’s insistence—had opted for the public system. Still, there’d been some talk when she was fourteen about sending her to a Catholic girls’ school. Mary had been struggling back then in math; her father and mother had been told she might do better in an environment without boys. But ultimately her parents had decided to keep her in the public system, since, as her father said, she’d have to deal with men after high school, and so she might as well get used to it. And so Mary’s high school years were spent at East York Collegiate Institute, instead of nearby St. Teresa’s. And although Mary had eventually overcome her mathematical difficulties, despite the co-ed learning, she did sometimes wonder about the benefits of all-girl schools. Certainly, some of the best science students she’d taught at York had come up through such institutions.