Humans

Chapter Thirty-one

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.

And, indeed, maybe there really was something to be said for extending that notion right into adult life, into the workplace, letting women labor—funny how that word had a double meaning for females, Mary thought—in an environment free of men and their egos.

Although Neanderthal time keeping quite sensibly divided the day into ten equal parts, starting at the point that was dawn on the vernal equinox, Mary still relied on her Swatch, rather than the cryptic display on her Companion band—after all, although she’d traveled to another universe, she was still in the same time zone.

Mary was quite used to the rhythm of morning and afternoon coffee breaks, and an hour off for lunch, but the Neanderthal metabolism didn’t let them go that long without eating. There were two long breaks in the workday, one at about 11:00A. M. , and the other at about 3:00P .M ., and at both of them, great quantities of food were consumed, including raw meat—the same laser technique that killed infections inside people made uncooked meat quite safe to eat, and Neanderthal jaws were more than up to the task. But Mary’s stomach wasn’t; she sat with Lurt and her colleagues while they ate, but tried to keep from looking at their food.

She could have excused herself during the meal breaks, but this was Lurt’s time off, and Mary wanted to talk with her. She was fascinated by what the Neanderthals knew about genetics—and Lurt seemed quite willing to freely share it all.

Indeed, Mary learned so much in her short time with Lurt, she was beginning to think just about anything was possible—especially if there were no men around.