Humans

Chapter Thirty

“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.