Hybrids

Chapter Sixteen

Mary found Bandra’s home much more comfortable than Lurt’s, even though it wasn’t any bigger. For one thing, the furniture was more to Mary’s taste. And for another, it turned out that Bandra was both a bird-watcher and a wonderful artist: she had covered the wooden interior walls and ceilings with Audubon-quality paintings of local birds, including, of course, passenger pigeons. Mary loved birds herself: that had been why she’d been working on passenger-pigeon DNA back at York while her grad student, Daria, had had the seemingly more sexy assignment of recovering genetic material from an Egyptian mummy.

Mary found it strange to come home before Bandra did—and even stranger just to walk in the front door. But, of course, Neanderthals didn’t lock their homes; they didn’t have to.

Bandra had a household robot—many Barasts did. It was a spindly, insectlike being. It regarded Mary with blue mechanical eyes—not unlike those Lonwis had—but went puttering along, cleaning and dusting.

Although Mary knew she couldn’t see Ponter until Two next became One, there was no reason she couldn’t call him—her shiny new Companion could connect to his Companion, or any other, without difficulty.

And so Mary made herself comfortable—lying down on the couch in Bandra’s living room, staring up at the beautiful mural on the ceiling—and had Christine call up Hak.

“Hi, sweetie,” she said—which was even worse than “honey” as far as being an endearment that couldn’t be reproduced by Ponter, but all he would have heard was the translation Christine provided.

“Mare!” Ponter’s voice was full of excitement. “How good to hear from you!”

“I miss you,” Mary said. She felt like she was eighteen again, talking to her boyfriend Donny from her bedroom at her parents’ house.

“I miss you, too.”

“Where are you?”

“I am taking Pabo for a walk. We can both use the exercise.”

“Is Adikor with you?”

“No, he’s at home. So, what’s new?”

It was astonishing after all this time to hear Ponter using contractions—which led to Mary starting by telling him all about the installation of her permanent Companion. She went on to talk about moving into Bandra’s house, and then: “Lurt said something very intriguing. She said there’s a banned device that could help us have a child.”

“Really?” said Ponter. “What is it?”

“She said it was the invention of someone named Vissan Lennet.”

“Oh!” said Ponter. “I recall her now; I saw it on my Voyeur. She removed her Companion, and went to live in the wilderness. Some sort of conflict with the High Grays over an invention.”

“Exactly!” said Mary. “She’d invented a device called a codon writer that could produce any DNA strings one might want—which is exactly what we need in order to have a baby. Lurt thinks Vissan probably still has her prototype.”

“Perhaps so,” said Ponter. “But if she does—excuse me. Good dog! Good dog! Here, there you go! Fetch! Fetch! Sorry, I was saying, if it does exist, it’s still banned.”

“That’s right,” said Mary. “In this world. But if we took it back to my world…”

“That’s brilliant!” said Ponter. “But how do we get it?”

“I figure we find Vissan and simply ask her for it. What have we got to lose?”

“And how do we find her? She doesn’t have a Companion.”

“Well, Lurt said she used to live in a town called Kraldak. Do you know where that is?”

“Sure. It’s just north of Lake Duranlan —Lake Erie. Kraldak is about where Detroit is in your world.”

“Well, if she’s living in the wilderness, she can’t have gone too far from there, can she?”

“I suppose. She certainly couldn’t use any form of transit without a Companion.”

“And Lurt said she’s probably built a cabin.”

“That makes sense.”

“So we could search satellite photos for a new cabin—one that isn’t on maps that are more than four months old.”

“You’re forgetting where you are, my love,” said Ponter. “Barasts have no satellites.”

“Right. Damn. What about aerial reconnaissance? You know—pictures taken from airplanes?”

“No airplanes, either—although we’ve got helicopters.”

“Well, would there be any helicopter surveys done since she left?”

“How long ago was that again?”

“Lurt said about four months.”

“Well, then, yes, sure. Forest fires are a problem in summer, of course—both those caused by lightning and by human error. Aerial photographs are taken to track them.”

“Can we access them?”

“Hak?”

Hak’s voice came into Mary’s head. “I am accessing them, even as we speak,” the Companion said. “According to the alibi archives, Vissan Lennet’s Companion went off-line on 148/101/17, and there have been three aerial surveys of Kraldak and environs since then. But although a cabin might be easily visible in winter, when the deciduous trees have lost their leaves, spotting such a thing through the summertime canopy will be difficult.”

“But you’ll try?” asked Mary.

“Of course.”

“It’s probably pointless, though,” said Mary with a sigh. “Surely others have tried to track her down, if what Lurt said about Vissan’s codon writer is true.”

“Why?”

“Well, you know: sterilized individuals, looking to circumvent the sanction that had been imposed on them.”

“Perhaps,” replied Ponter, “but it’s not been that long since Vissan chose to leave society, and there are not that many sterilized people. And, after all, no one on this world is looking to conceive prior to next summer, so—”

“Excuse me,” said Hak. “I have found it.”

“What?” said Mary.

“The cabin—or, at least, a cabin that is not on any of the older maps. It is approximately thirty-five kilometers due west of Kraldak.” Hak translated the Neanderthal units for Mary, although Ponter had probably heard something like “70,000 armspans” through his cochlear implants.

“Wonderful!” exclaimed Mary. “Ponter, we have to go see her!”

“Certainly,” he said.

“Can you go tomorrow?”

Ponter’s voice was heavy. “Mare…”

“What? Oh, I know. I know, Two are not One but…”

“Yes?”

Mary sighed. “No, you’re right. Well, then, can we go when Two are next One?”

“Of course, my love. We can do whatever you want then.”

“All right,” said Mary. “It’s a date.”

Bandra and Mary seemed very simpatico—a word Bandra relished using. They both liked to spend quiet evenings at home, and although they had an endless array of scientific things to discuss, they also touched on more personal matters.

It reminded Mary of her first days with Ponter, quarantined at Reuben Montego’s house. Sharing opinions and ideas with Bandra was intellectually and emotionally stimulating, and the female Neanderthal had a wonderfully warm way about her, kind and funny.

Still, as they sat in the living room of Bandra’s house, the topics sometimes got, if not heated, at least quite pointed.

“You know,” said Bandra, sitting at the opposite end of a couch from Mary, “this excessive desire for privacy must be fueled by your religions. At first I thought it was just because certain appealing behaviors were forbidden, and so people required privacy to indulge in them. And, doubtless, that’s part of it. But, now that you’ve told me about your multiplicity of belief systems, it seems that even just wanting to practice a minority belief required privacy. Early practitioners of your system, Christianity, hid their meetings from others, isn’t that so?”

“That’s true,” said Mary. “In fact, our most important holy day is Christmas, commemorating the annual anniversary of Jesus’ birth. We celebrate it on December 25—in winter—but Jesus was born in the spring. We know that because the Bible says it happened when the shepherds watched over their flocks by night, which only happens in the spring, when new lambs are born.” Mary smiled. “Hey, you guys are like that: you like to give birth in the spring, too.”

“Probably for the same reason: to give the offspring the best chance to grow before having to face winter.”

But the simile had stuck in Mary’s mind, and she ventured forward tentatively. “You Barasts are like sheep in other ways, too. You’re so peaceful.”

“Does it seem that way?” said Bandra.

“You don’t have wars. And from what I’ve seen, you don’t have much societal violence. Although…” She stopped herself, before she mentioned the shattering of Ponter’s jaw, an unfortunate event from years ago.

“I suppose. We still hunt our own food—not all the time, of course, unless that happens to be one’s particular contribution. But often enough that it provides an outlet for violent impulses. How do you say it? It gets it out of our systems.”

“Catharsis,” said Mary. “A purging of pent-up feeling.”

“Catharsis! Oooh, another great word! Yes, indeed: smash in a few animal skulls, or tear flesh from bone, and you feel wonderfully peaceful afterward.”

Mary stopped to think if she’d ever killed an animal, for food or any other purpose. Except for swatting mosquitoes, the answer was no. “We don’t do that.”

“I know,” said Bandra. “You consider it uncivilized. But we consider it to be part of what makes civilization possible.”

“Still, your lack of privacy—doesn’t it give rise to abuses? Couldn’t someone be clandestinely—secretly—watching what you’re doing, by compromising the security of the alibi archives?”

“Why would anyone want to do that?”

“Well, to prevent an overthrow of the government, say.”

“Why would someone want to overthrow the government? Why not just vote it out of office?”

“Well, today, yes. But surely you haven’t had democracy since the dawn of time?”

“What else might we have had?”

“Tribal chieftains? Warlords? God-emperors? No, scratch that last one. But, well…” Mary frowned. Well, what? Without agriculture, there were no small-scale defensible territories. Oh, primitive farmers could doubtless defend a few hundred acres, but the tens or hundreds of square miles that represented a hunting forest were beyond the abilities of small groups to protect.

And, indeed, why bother defending them? A raid on farmlands produced immediate results: plant food and fiber, stolen from the field or taken from the granary. But, as Ponter had pointed out time and again, hunting and gathering were based on knowledge: no one could just enter a new territory and profitably exploit it. They wouldn’t know where the animals came to drink, where the birds laid their eggs, where the most bountiful fruit trees grew. No, such a lifestyle would engender peaceful trade, since it was far less work for a traveler to bring something of value along to swap for freshly captured game rather than to try to hunt the game himself.

Nonetheless, if push came to shove, most Neanderthals were probably robust enough to forage for themselves—just as apparently this Vissan was now doing. Besides, with a cap on population size—and the Neanderthals had had that for hundreds of years—there was plenty of unused territory for anyone who wished to strike out on their own.

“Still,” said Mary, “there must have been times when people didn’t like their elected officials, and wanted to get rid of them.”

“Oh, yes, indeed. Yes, indeed.”

“What happened then?”

“In the old days? Before the purging of our gene pool? Assassination.”

“Well, there!” said Mary. “That’s a reason for compromising other people’s privacy: to thwart assassination attempts. If someone was plotting to assassinate you, you’d want to keep an eye on them, to prevent them from pulling it off.”

“An assassination doesn’t require any plotting,” said Bandra, her eyebrow lifted. “You just walk up to the person you want to be rid of and smash their skull in. Believe me, that provides a wonderful incentive for elected officials to keep their constituents happy.”

Mary laughed in spite of herself. “Still, surely even if the majority are happy, there will always be discontented individuals.”

Bandra nodded. “Which is why we long ago saw the necessity of purging the gene pool of those who might act in an antisocial manner.”

“But this purging of the gene pool…” Mary was trying not to be judgmental, but her tone betrayed her. “I’ve tried to talk to Ponter about this, but it’s difficult; he’s so blindly in favor of it. But even more than your lack of privacy, that notion is what creeps my people out the most.”

“‘Creeps them out’! Oooh, that’s a classic!”

“I’m serious, Bandra. We’ve attempted such things in the past, and…it’s never gone well. I mean, we don’t believe that sort of thing can be done without corruption. We’ve had people try to wipe out specific ethnic groups.”

A bleep.

“Groups that have distinctive characteristics, based on their geographic origin.”

“But diversity is of great value genetically,” said Bandra. “Surely you, as a life chemist, know that.”

“Yes, but—well, I mean, we have tried…my people, I mean…well, not my people, but bad people, bad members of my species, have tried to perform…we call it ‘genocide,’ wiping out whole other races of people, and—”

God damn it, thought Mary. Why couldn’t she just chat with a Neanderthal about the weather, instead of always getting into these horrible topics? If only she could learn to keep her mouth shut.

“Genocide,” repeated Bandra, but without her usual relish. She didn’t have to say that her own kind, Homo neanderthalensis, had been the first victim of Homo sapiens genocide.

“But,” said Mary, “I mean, how do you decide which traits to try to eliminate?”

“Isn’t it obvious? Excessive violence. Excessive selfishness. A tendency to mistreat children. Mental retardation. Predisposition to genetic diseases.”

Mary shook her head; she was still bothered by her aborted conversation on this topic with Ponter. “We believe everyone has the right to breed.”

“Why?” said Bandra.

Mary frowned. “It’s—it’s a human right.”

“It’s a human desire,” said Bandra. “But a right? Evolution is driven by only some members of a population reproducing.”

“I guess we believe that superseding the brutality of natural selection is the hallmark of civilization.”

“But surely,” said Bandra, “the society as a whole is more important than any individual.”

“Fundamentally, I guess my people don’t share that view. We put an enormous value on individual rights and liberties.”

“An enormous value? Or an enormous cost?” Bandra shook her head. “I’ve heard of all the security precautions you require at transportation terminals, all the enforcers you require throughout your cities. You claim not to want war, but you devote a huge proportion of your resources to preparing for it and waging it. You have terrorists, and those who exist by addicting others to chemicals, and a plague of child abuse, and—if you will forgive me—an average intelligence that is much lower than it need be.”

“We’ve never found a way to measure intelligence that isn’t culturally biased.”

Bandra blinked. “How can intelligence be culturally biased?”

“Well,” said Mary, “if you ask a rich child of normal intelligence what word goes with cup, he’ll say ‘saucer’; saucers are little plates we put underneath the cups we drink coffee—hot beverages—from. But if you ask a poor kid with normal intelligence, he might not know the answer, because his family might not be able to afford saucers.”

“Intelligence is not a trivia game,” said Bandra. “There are better ways to assess its strength. We look at the number of neural connections that have grown in the brain; a tally of them is a good objective indicator.”

“But surely those who were denied the right to breed because of their low intelligence…surely they were upset by that.”

“Yes. But, by definition, they were not difficult to outwit.”

Mary shuddered. “Still…”

“Remember how our democracies are constituted: we don’t let people vote until they have seen at least 600 moons—two-thirds of the traditional 900-month lifetime. That’s…Delka?”

“Forty-eight years old,” said Delka, Bandra’s Companion.

Bandra continued. “That’s past the age of possible reproduction for most females, and past the usual reproductive age for men. So those voting on the issue no longer had to be concerned about it themselves.”

“It’s not really democracy if only a minority get to vote.”

Bandra frowned, as if trying to comprehend Mary’s comment. “Everybody gets to vote—just not at every point in their lives. And unlike in your world, we have never denied anyone of sufficient age the right to vote just because of gender or dermal coloration.”

“But surely,” said Mary, “those who did vote must have been worried on behalf of their adult children, who were at reproductive age, but couldn’t vote themselves.”

Bandra hesitated, and Mary wondered why; she’d been on quite a roll until now. “Of course hoping for our children’s happy futures is of great importance,” she said finally. “But the vote was taken before the intelligence tests were administered. Do you see? The decision was to bar the bottom five percent of the population from reproducing for ten consecutive generations. Try to find a parent who thinks his or her own child is in the bottom five percent—it’s impossible! The voters doubtless assumed none of their own children would be affected.”

“But some were.”

“Yes. Some were.” Bandra lifted her shoulders, a small shrug. “It was for the good of society, you see.”

Mary shook her head. “My people would never countenance such a thing.”

“We don’t have to worry much about our gene pool anymore, although there are some exceptions. Still, after ten generations of restricted breeding, we relaxed the rules. Most genetic diseases were gone for good, most violence was gone, and the average intelligence was much higher. It still falls on a bell curve, of course, but we ended up with—what do you call it? We have a concept in statistics: the square root of the mean of the squares of the deviations from the arithmetic mean of the distribution.”

“A standard deviation,” said Mary.

“Ah. Well, after ten generations, the average intelligence had shifted one standard deviation to the left.”

Mary was about to say “to the right, you mean,” but remembered that Neanderthals read from right to left, not left to right. But she did add, “Really? That much of a change?”

“Yes. Our stupid people are now as intelligent as our average people used to be.”

Mary shook her head. “I just don’t see any way my people would ever be comfortable with limiting who had the right to breed.”

“I don’t defend our way,” said Bandra. “As one of your very best sayings goes, ‘to each his own.’ ” She smiled her wide, warm smile. “But, come, Mare, enough of this seriousness. It’s a beautiful evening! Let’s go for a walk. Then you can tell me all about yourself.”

“What would you like to know?”

“Everything. The whole ball of wax. The whole shebang. The whole nine yards. The whole enchilada. The—”

Mary laughed. “I get the idea,” she said, rising to her feet.