Hybrids

Chapter Seventeen

Mary Vaughan was settling into a routine: spending days studying Neanderthal genetics with Lurt or other experts, and spending nights being very comfortable at Bandra’s house.

Mary had always thought her own hips too wide, but the average Neanderthal pelvis was even wider. Indeed, she remembered Erik Trinkaus’s old suggestion that Neanderthals might have had an eleven-or twelve-month gestation period, since their wider hips would have accommodated a bigger baby. But that theory had been abandoned when later work showed that the differently shaped Neanderthal pelvis was just related to their style of walking. It had been suggested they had a rolling gait, like Old West gunslingers—a fact now very much confirmed observationally.

Anyway, Mary found Neanderthal saddle-seats uncomfortable and, because most Neanderthals had shorter lower legs than upper legs, bench-type Barast chairs were a bit too low to the ground for her tastes. So she’d asked Lurt’s carpenter friend to make her a new chair: a frame of knotty pine with generous cushions lashed to its back and seat.

Bandra had gotten home before Mary did that day, and was off in her bedroom. But she emerged just after Mary came in the front door. “Hi, Mare,” she said. “I thought I smelled you.”

Mary smiled wanly. She was getting used to it all; really she was.

“Look!” declared Bandra, pointing. “Your chair has arrived! You must try it out.”

Mary did so, lowering herself onto its cushioned seat.

“Well? Well?”

“It’s wonderful!” said Mary, after shifting around in it. “Really. Very comfortable.”

“Just what the doctor ordered!” declared Bandra, and then she astonished Mary by making a thumbs-up sign.

Mary laughed. “Exactly.”

“Right on the money! The perfect thing!”

“All of that, yes,” said Mary.

“Yes!” repeated Bandra, who was enjoying herself immensely. “Bingo! Exactamundo!” Bandra beamed at Mary, and Mary smiled warmly back.

Later that evening, Mary gave her new chair a longer test, curling up in it with one of the books she’d bought at the Laurentian University bookstore.

For her part, Bandra had been working on a new bird painting, but evidently decided it was time to take a break. She crossed the room and stood behind Mary. “What are you reading?”

Mary instinctively showed Bandra the book’s cover before she realized Bandra couldn’t possibly read the title—although with her delight in English, she doubted it would be long before Bandra tackled learning to read it. “It’s called The Man of Property,” said Mary, “by a writer named John Galsworthy. He won my world’s top writing award, the Nobel Prize for Literature.” Colm had been recommending Galsworthy for years, but Mary had only finally decided to read him after her sister Christine had raved about the new BBC adaptation of The Forsyte Saga, of which The Man of Property was the first volume.

“What’s it about?” asked Bandra.

“A rich lawyer married to a beautiful woman. He hires an architect to build a country house for them, but the woman is having an affair with the architect.”

Bandra said, “Ah,” and Mary looked up at her and smiled. She tried again: “It’s about the complexities of interpersonal relationships among Gliksins.”

“Would you read some of it to me?” asked Bandra.

Mary was surprised but pleased by the request. “Sure.” Bandra straddled a saddle-seat facing Mary, arms folded in her lap. Mary softly spoke the words on the page, and let Christine translate them into the Neanderthal tongue.

“Interesting,” said Bandra, when Mary eventually paused.

Mary laughed. “I’m sure you’re just being polite. It must be gibberish to you.”

“No,” said Bandra. “No, I think I understand. This man—Soames, right?—he lives with this woman, this…”

“Irene,” supplied Mary.

“Yes. But there is no warmth in their relationship. He wants much more intimacy than she does.”

Mary nodded, impressed. “Exactly.”

“I suspect such concerns are universal,” said Bandra.

“I guess they are,” said Mary. “I actually identify with Irene. She married Soames not knowing what she really wanted. Just like me with Colm.”

“But you know what you want now?”

“I know I want Ponter.”

“But he does not come in isolation,” said Bandra. “He has Adikor and his daughters.”

Mary folded down her page and closed the book. “I know,” she said softly.

Bandra perhaps felt she had upset Mary. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m going to have something to drink. Would you like anything?”

Mary would have killed for some wine, but the Neanderthals didn’t have such things. Still, she’d brought a kilo tin of instant coffee with her from the other side. She normally didn’t drink coffee in the evening, but Neanderthal room temperature was sixteen degrees—their scale and hers were the same; the gap between the melting point and boiling point of water divided into a hundred parts. Mary preferred twenty or twenty-one degrees; a nice drinking bowl of coffee would warm her up. “Let me help,” said Mary, and the two of them headed over to the food-preparation area.

Back on her version of Earth, Mary kept a liter of chocolate milk on hand to mix into her coffee. She couldn’t get that here, but she’d brought along canisters of coffee whitener and hot-chocolate mix; combining them into her Maxwell House gave a reasonable enough approximation of her favorite potion.

They returned to the living room, crossing over the moss-covered floor. Bandra sat down on one of the gently curving couches that was built into the wall of the room. Mary was about to return to her own chair, but realized that she wouldn’t have any place to set down her drinking bowl there. She fetched her paperback—Colm would have hated the way she’d creased the book’s spine and dog-eared its pages—and took a seat at the other end of the couch, setting the drinking bowl on the pine table in front of it.

“You lived alone in your world,” said Bandra. It wasn’t a question; she already knew that.

“Yes,” said Mary. “I have what we call a condominium apartment—a private suite of rooms in a large building that I jointly own with a couple of hundred other people.”

“A couple of hundred!” said Bandra. “How big is this building?”

“It’s twenty-two stories high; twenty-two levels. I’m on the seventeenth floor.”

“The view must be magnificent!”

“It is indeed.” But that was a reflex response, Mary knew. Her view had been of concrete and glass, of buildings and highways. It had seemed wonderful when she’d lived there, but her tastes were changing.

“What is the status of that place?” asked Bandra.

“I still own it. Once Ponter and I decide what we’re doing on a permanent basis, I’ll figure out what to do with it. We may want to keep it.”

“And what are you and Ponter going to do on a permanent basis?”

“I wish I knew,” said Mary. She picked up her drinking bowl and took a sip. “Like you said before, Ponter doesn’t come in isolation.”

“Nor should you,” said Bandra, looking down, not meeting Mary’s eyes.

“Pardon?” said Mary.

“Nor should you. If you are to become part of this world, you should not be alone at any time of the month.”

“Um,” said Mary. “On my world, most people are attracted only to individuals of the opposite sex.”

Bandra looked up briefly, then dropped her gaze again. “There are no relations between women?”

“Well, sure, sometimes. But usually women involved in such relationships don’t have male partners.”

“That is not the way it is here,” said Bandra.

Mary’s voice was soft. “I know.”

“I—we—you and I, we have been getting along well,” said Bandra.

Mary felt her whole body tightening. “We have, yes,” she said.

“Here, two women living together who like each other and are not genetically related would”—suddenly Bandra’s large hand was on Mary’s knee—“would be close.”

Mary looked down at the hand. Over the years, she’d plucked the odd man’s hand off her knee, but…

But she didn’t want to give offense. After all, this woman had been kind enough to take her in. “Bandra, I…I’m not attracted to women.”

“Perhaps…perhaps that is merely…” She sought a phrase. “Merely cultural conditioning.”

Mary frowned, considering this. Perhaps it was—but that didn’t make any difference. Oh, Mary had kissed girls when she was thirteen or fourteen—but she’d just been practicing for eventually kissing boys, she and her friends being terrified that they might be no good at it.

At least, that’s what they’d told each other, but—

But it had been fun, in its own way.

Still…

“I’m sorry, Bandra. I don’t mean to be rude. But I’m really not interested.”

“You know,” said Bandra, meeting Mary’s eyes, then looking away, “no one understands how to please a woman like another woman.”

Mary felt her heart flutter. “I—I’m sure that’s true, but…” She gently reached down and removed Bandra’s hand. “But it’s not for me.”

Bandra nodded several times. “If you change your mind…” she said, letting the thought hang in the air, then, after a moment, she added, “It can get awfully lonely between times of Two becoming One.”

That much is certainly true, Mary thought, but she said nothing.

“Well,” said Bandra, at last, “I’m going to bed. Um—‘sweet dreams’ is your phrase, isn’t it?”

Mary managed a smile. “Yes, it is. Good night, Bandra.” She watched the Neanderthal woman pass through the doorway into her sleeping chamber; Mary had her own room, the one that used to belong to Bandra’s younger daughter Dranna. She thought about calling it a day herself, but decided to read some more, in hopes of clearing her head of what had just transpired.

She picked up The Man of Property and opened it to the turned-down page. Galsworthy employed a mocking, ironic tone; it wasn’t just Neanderthals who found fault with Gliksins, after all. She read along, enjoying his splendid re-creation of upper-middle-class Victorian England. He certainly had a way with words, and—

Oh, my God…

Mary slammed the book shut, her heart racing.

My God.

She took a deep breath, let it out, inhaled again, exhaled.

Soames had…

Mary’s heart was pounding.

Maybe she’d misread it. After all, the language wasn’t explicit. Surely it was just her own state of mind…

She opened the book, gingerly, carefully, the way Colm would have, and found her place again, letting her eyes race over the cramped typesetting, and—

No, there could be no doubt. Soames Forsyte, the Man of Property, had just demonstrated that he considered his wife Irene to be nothing more than that. Despite her lack of interest in him, and in their marriage bed, he had raped her.

Mary had been enjoying the book to this point, especially the furtive, secret romance between Irene and the architect Bosinney—for it had reminded her a bit of her own strange, forbidden relationship with Ponter. But—

A rape.

A goddamned rape.

And yet she could not blame Galsworthy. It was precisely what Soames would have done.

Precisely what a man would have done.

Mary put down the book next to her now-cold bowl of coffee. She found herself looking at the closed door to Bandra’s room, staring endlessly. After God only knew how long, Mary finally got up from the couch, and made her way into her own room, into loneliness, into darkness.