Hybrids

Chapter Thirty-three

“Hello, Jock,” said Mary Vaughan as she came into his office at the Synergy Group.

“Mary!” Jock exclaimed. “Welcome back!” He got up out of his Aeron chair, crossed in front of his desk, and shook her hand. “Welcome back.”

“It’s good to see you.” She motioned outside the door, and her two traveling companions stepped into view. “Jock, you remember Envoy Ponter Boddit. And this is Scholar Adikor Huld.”

Jock’s bushy gray eyebrows shot up toward his pompadour. “My goodness!” he said. “This is a surprise.”

“You didn’t know we were coming?”

Jock shook his head. “I’ve been wrapped up with…other matters. I get reports on all Neanderthal comings and goings, but I’m behind in looking at them.”

Mary thought briefly of an old joke: the bad news is that the CIA reads all your e-mail; the good news is that the CIA reads all your e-mail.

“Anyway,” said Jock, moving in and shaking Ponter’s hand, “welcome back.” He then shook Adikor’s hand. “Welcome, Dr. Huld, to the United States of America.”

“Thank you,” said Adikor. “It is…overwhelming.”

Jock managed a thin smile. “That it is.”

Mary indicated the two Barasts. “Lonwis Trob asked for Ponter to return, and this time to bring Adikor with him.”

Ponter smiled. “I’m sure that I’m too much of a theoretician for Lonwis’s tastes. But Adikor actually knows how to build things.”

“Speaking of Neanderthal ingenuity,” said Mary, pointing at a worktable that had been set up in a corner of Jock’s office, “I see you’ve been examining the codon writer.”

“Yes, indeed,” said Jock. “It’s an astonishing piece of equipment.”

“That it is,” said Mary. She looked at Jock, wondering whether to tell him. Then, too excited not to, she said, “It’s going to allow Ponter and me to have a baby, despite our differing chromosome counts.”

Jock sat up straight in his Aeron chair. “Really? My…goodness. I didn’t…I didn’t think that would be possible.”

“Well, it is!” said Mary, beaming.

“Um, well, ah, congratulations,” said Jock. “And to you, too, of course, Ponter. Congratulations!”

“Thank you,” said Ponter.

Suddenly Jock frowned, as if something important had occurred to him. “A hybrid between Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis,” he said. “Will it have twenty-three pairs of chromosomes or twenty-four?”

“You mean, will it be Gliksin or Barast, according to the test I worked out?” asked Mary.

Jock nodded. “Just—you know—an idle curiosity.”

“We talked about that a lot. We finally decided to give it twenty-three pairs of chromosomes. It’ll appear as a Gliksin—a Homo sapiens —at that level.”

“I see,” said Jock. He seemed slightly displeased at the notion.

“Given that the embryo is going to be placed in my womb”—she patted her belly—“we’re trying to avoid triggering any immunological responses there.”

Jock glanced down. “You’re not pregnant now, are you?”

“No, no. Not yet. Generation 149 won’t be conceived until next year.”

Jock blinked. “So the child is going to live in the Neanderthal world? Does that mean you’re going to move there permanently?”

Mary looked over at Ponter and Adikor. She hadn’t expected to get into this just yet. “Actually,” she said slowly, “I’m going to mostly stay in this world…”

“It sounds like there’s a ‘but’ coming,” said Jock.

Mary nodded. “There is. You know I finished the task you hired me for here at Synergy much faster than we’d originally anticipated. I’m thinking it’s time I moved on. I’ve been offered a full-time tenured position in the genetics department at Laurentian.”

“Laurentian?” said Jock. “Where’s that?”

“It’s in Sudbury—you know, where the portal is. Laurentian is a small university, but it’s got a great genetics department—and it does DNA forensic work for the RCMP.” She paused. “I find myself interested in that area these days.”

Jock smiled. “Who’d have thought ‘location, location, location’ would ever apply to Sudbury?”

“Hello, Mary.”

Mary dropped the mug she was holding. It shattered, and coffee laced with chocolate milk splattered across the floor of her office. “I’ll scream,” said Mary. “I’ll call for Ponter.”

Cornelius Ruskin closed the door behind him. “There’s no need for that.”

Mary’s heart was pounding. She looked around for anything she could use as a weapon. “What the hell are you doing here?”

Cornelius managed a small smile. “I work here. I’m your replacement.”

“We’ll see about that,” said Mary. She scooped up the handset of her desk phone.

Cornelius moved closer.

“Don’t you touch me!” said Mary. “Don’t you dare!”

“Mary—”

“Get out! Get out! Get out!”

“Just give me two minutes, Mary—that’s all I ask.”

“I’ll call the police!”

“You can’t do that. You know you can’t, not after what Ponter did to me, and—”

Suddenly Cornelius stopped talking. Mary’s heart was pounding furiously, and her face must have betrayed something that Cornelius detected.

“You don’t know!” he said, his blue eyes wide. “You don’t know, do you? He never told you!”

“Told me what?” said Mary.

Cornelius’s lean form went limp, as if his limbs were only loosely connected to his body. “It never occurred to me that you weren’t involved in planning it, that you didn’t know…”

“Know what?” demanded Mary.

Cornelius backed away. “I won’t hurt you, Mary. I can’t hurt you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Do you know that Ponter came to see me, at my apartment?”

“What? You’re lying.”

“No, I’m not.”

“When?”

“Back in September. Late at night…”

“You are lying. He never—”

“Oh, yes he did.”

“He would have told me,” said Mary.

“So I would have thought,” agreed Cornelius with a philosophical shrug. “But apparently he didn’t.”

“Look,” said Mary. “I don’t care about any of that. Just get the hell out of here. I came down here to get away from you! I’m going to call the police.”

“You don’t want to do that,” said Cornelius.

“Just watch me—and if you come one step closer, I’ll scream.”

“Mary—”

“Don’t come any closer.”

“Mary, Ponter castrated me.”

Mary felt her jaw drop. “You’re lying,” she said. “You’re making that up.”

“I’ll show you, if you like…”

“No!” Mary almost vomited, the notion of seeing his naked flesh again too much to bear.

“It’s true. He came to my apartment, maybe two in the morning, and he—”

“Ponter would never do that. Not without telling me.”

Cornelius moved a hand to his zipper. “Like I said, I can prove it.”

“No!” Mary was gasping for air now.

“Qaiser Remtulla told me you’d gone native—moving permanently to the other side. I never would have come down here otherwise, but…” He shrugged again. “I need this job, Mary,” said Cornelius. “York was a dead end for me—for any white male of my generation. You know that.”

Mary was close to hyperventilating. “I can’t work with you. I can’t even be in the same room as you.”

“I’ll stay out of your way. I promise.” His voice softened. “Damn it, Mary, do you think I like seeing you? It reminds me of”—he paused, and his voice cracked, just a little—“of what I used to be.”

“I hate you,” hissed Mary.

“I know you do.” He shrugged a little. “I—I can’t say that I blame you, either. But if you spill the beans about me to Krieger, or anyone else, it will be game over for Ponter Boddit. He’ll go to jail for what he did to me.”

“God damn you,” said Mary.

Cornelius just nodded. “No doubt he will.”

“Ponter!” said Mary, storming into the room at Synergy where he was working with Adikor Huld and Lonwis Trob. “Come with me!”

“Hello, Mare,” said Ponter. “What’s wrong?”

“Now!” snapped Mary. “Right now!”

Ponter turned to the other two Neanderthals, but Christine continued to translate. “If you’ll excuse me for a moment…”

Lonwis nodded, and made a crack to Adikor that it must be Last Five. Mary marched out of the room, and Ponter followed.

“Outside! ” snapped Mary, and without looking back, she headed down the mansion’s carpeted main-floor corridor, took her coat from the rack, and went out the front door.

Ponter followed, taking no coat. Mary marched across the brown lawn and crossed the road, until they were at the boardwalk of the deserted marina. She wheeled on Ponter. “Cornelius Ruskin is here,” she said.

“No,” said Ponter. “I would have smelled him if—”

“Maybe slicing off his balls has changed his scent,” snapped Mary.

“Ah,” said Ponter, and then: “Oh.”

“That’s it?” demanded Mary. “That’s all you’ve got to say?”

“I—um, well…”

“Why the hell didn’t you tell me?”

“You wouldn’t have approved,” said Ponter, looking down at the sidewalk, which was half-blanketed with dead leaves.

“You’re damn right I wouldn’t have! Ponter, how could you do something like that? For Christ’s sake…”

“Christ,” Ponter repeated softly. “Christ taught that forgiveness was the greatest of virtues. But…”

“Yes?” snapped Mary.

“But I am not Christ,” he said, his voice sounding very sad indeed. “I could not forgive.”

“You told me you wouldn’t hurt him,” said Mary. A seagull wheeled overhead.

“I told you I would not kill him,” said Ponter. “And I did not, but…” He shrugged his massive shoulders. “My honest intention had been simply to warn him that I had identified him as the rapist, so that he would never commit that crime again. But when I saw him, when I smelled him, smelled the stench of him, the stench he’d left on his latest victim’s clothing, I could not help myself…”

“Jesus, Ponter. You know what this means: he’s got the upper hand. Anytime he wants, he could blow the whistle on you. The issue of whether he was guilty of rape wouldn’t even figure in your trial, I suspect.”

“But he is guilty! And I couldn’t stand the thought of him getting away with his crime.” And then, perhaps to defend himself even more, he repeated the last word in the plural—“Crimes,” reminding Mary that she had not been Cornelius Ruskin’s only victim, and that the second rape had happened because Mary had failed to report her own.

“His relatives,” said Mary, the moment the thought came to her. “His brothers, sisters. Parents. My God, you didn’t do anything to them, did you?”

Ponter hung his head, and Mary thought he was going to admit further attacks. But that wasn’t the cause of his shame. “No,” he said. “No, I have done nothing about any other copies of the genes that made him what he was. I wanted to punish him —to hurt him, for hurting you.”

“But now he can hurt you,” said Mary.

“Don’t worry,” said Ponter. “He won’t ever reveal what I did.”

“How can you be sure of that?”

“To accuse me would mean that his own crimes would come to light. Perhaps not at my own trial—but in separate proceedings, no? Surely the enforcers here wouldn’t let the matter drop.”

“I suppose,” said Mary, still furious. “But a judge might rule that he’d already been punished enough by you. After all, Canadian law considers castration too great a penalty even for rape. So, if he’d already been punished to that level, a judge might deem it pointless to impose the lesser, legal penalty of imprisonment. If that’s the case, he would have nothing to lose by seeing to it that you were jailed for what you did to him.”

“Regardless, it would become public knowledge that he had been a rapist. Surely there would be social consequences of that which he would not risk.”

“You should have talked to me first!”

“As I said, I had not intended to exact this…this…”

“Revenge,” said Mary, but the word came out in a plain tone, as if she were merely providing another bit of vocabulary. She shook her head slowly back and forth. “You should not have done this.”

“I know.”

“And to do it, but then not tell me! Damn it, Ponter—we’re not supposed to have secrets! Why the hell didn’t you tell me?”

Ponter looked out at the marina, at the cold gray water. “I’m sure I am safe from repercussions in this world,” he said, “for, as I said, Ruskin will never reveal what I did to him. But in my world…”

“What about it?” snapped Mary.

“Don’t you see? If it were to become known in my world what I’d done, I’d be judged excessively violent.”

“You trust bloody Ruskin to keep a secret, but not me!”

“It’s not that. It’s not that at all. But everything is recorded. There would be a record in my alibi archive of me telling you, and there would be a record in yours of the same thing. Even if neither of us ever let the matter slip out, there would always be a chance that the courts might order access to your archives or mine, and then…”

“What? What?”

“And then not only I would be punished, but so would Mega and Jasmel.”

Oh, Christ, thought Mary. It comes full circle.

“I am sorry,” said Ponter. “I really am—about what I did to Ruskin, and about not letting you know.” He sought out her eyes. “Believe me, it has not been an easy burden to bear.”

Suddenly Mary got it. “The personality sculptor!”

“Yes, this is why I saw Jurard Selgan.”

“Not because of my rape…” said Mary slowly.

“No, not directly.”

“…but because of what you’d done about my rape.”

“Exactly.”

Mary let out a long sigh, anger—and much else—exiting her body. He hadn’t thought less of her because she’d been raped…“Ponter,” she said softly. “Ponter, Ponter…”

“I do love you, Mare.”

She shook her head slowly back and forth, wondering what to do next.