Humans (21 page)

Ponter was sitting in a pew. As she approached, Mary was surprised to see that he had an open book in his lap and was flipping through the pages. “Ponter?” she said.

He looked up. “How did it go?” he asked.

“Fine.”

“Do you feel better?”

“Somewhat. But there’s still more I have to do.”

“Whatever is required,” said Ponter. “I will help in any way I can.”

“Are you reading the Bible?” asked Mary, astonished, as she looked at the open book.

“Then I have guessed correctly!” said Ponter. “This
is
your religion’s central text.”

“Yes,” said Mary. “But…but I thought you couldn’t read English.”

“I cannot. Nor can Hak, yet. But Hak is more than capable of recording the images on each page of this book, so that when he does acquire that capability, he can translate it for me.”

“I can get you a talking Bible, you know—either one that uses an electronic device to speak the words, or tapes of an actor reading the words. There’s a great set that James Earl Jones did…”

“I was unaware of such alternatives,” said Ponter, simply.

“I didn’t know you wanted to read the Bible. I, ah, didn’t think it would be of any interest to you.”

“It is important to you,” said Ponter. “Therefore, it is important to me.”

Mary smiled. “I am so lucky to have found you,” she said.

Ponter tried to make a joke of it. “I am easy to spot in a crowd,” he said.

Still smiling, Mary shook her head. “You are indeed.” She looked up at the crucifix above the pulpit, and crossed herself once more. “But, come on, we should get going.”

“Where to now?” asked Ponter.

Mary took a deep breath. “The police station.”

“‘It’s important to you,’” repeated Selgan. “‘Therefore, it’s important to me.’”

Ponter looked at the personality sculptor. “That’s what I said, yes.”

“And was that truly your only motivation in consulting this book?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, was this not the book that contained the supposed historical accounts you mentioned earlier? Was this not the book that held their principal evidence for a life after death?”

“I honestly don’t know,” said Ponter. “It was quite a massive book—not overly thick, but the symbols in it were small, and the paper used was the thinnest I’d yet encountered. It will be quite some time before it is translated.”

“And yet you were moved to examine it?”

“Well, there were many copies in the room I was waiting for Mare in. One in front of each position on the benches, it seemed.”

“Have you consulted an audio version, as Mare suggested?”

Ponter shook his head.

“And so you still wonder about this supposed proof?”

“I am curious, yes.”

“How curious?” asked Selgan. “How important is this issue to you?”

Ponter shrugged. “You accused me before of having a closed mind. But I don’t. If there is truth in this outlandish claim, I want to know it.”

“Why?”

“Just out of curiosity.”

“Is that all?” asked Selgan.

“Of course,” replied Ponter. “Of course.”

The desk sergeant was looking Ponter up and down. “If any of you Neanderthals ever want a new job,” he said, “we could use a hundred of you on the force.” They were at 31 Division headquarters on Norfinch Drive, only a few blocks from York.

Ponter smiled awkwardly, and Mary laughed a little. The cop was indeed one of the strongest-looking
Homo sapiens
males Mary had seen in a long time, but there was no doubt who her money would be on in a fight.

“Now, ma’am, what can I do for you?”

“There was a rape last week at York University,” said Mary. “It was reported in the campus newspaper, the
Excalibur,
and so I assume someone reported it here, as well.”

“That’d be Detective Hobbes’s department,” said the cop. He shouted to somebody else. “Hey, Johnny, can you see if Hobbes is in?”

The other cop shouted back an acknowledgment, and a few moments later, a plainclothes officer—a white man with red hair, perhaps thirty—came forward. “Wassup?” he said. And then, realizing who Ponter was, “Holy cow!”

Ponter smiled wanly.

“The lady here would like to talk to you about the rape at York last week.”

Hobbes gestured down the corridor. “This way,” he said. Mary and Ponter followed him back to a small interrogation room, lit by fluorescent panels in the ceiling. “Hang on a sec; let me get the file.” He returned a moment later with a manila file folder, which he placed on the desk in front of him. He sat down, and then his eyes went wide. “My God,” he said to Ponter, “it wasn’t you, was it? Christ, I’ll have to get in touch with Ottawa…”

“No,” said Mary sharply. “No, it was not Ponter.”

“Do you know who it was?” asked Hobbes.

“No,” said Mary, “but…”

“Yes?”

“But I was also raped at York. Near the same building—the life-sciences building.”

“When?”

“Friday, August 2nd. About 9:30 or 9:35.”

“At night?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me about it.”

Mary tried to bring all her scientific detachment to the task, but by the end of it she had tears running down her cheeks. This apparently wasn’t abnormal for the interrogation room; a box of tissues was at hand, and Hobbes offered them to Mary.

She wiped her eyes and blew her nose. Hobbes made a few more notes on sheets inside the file folder. “All right,” he said. “I’ll let—”

Just then, there was a knock at the door. Hobbes got up and opened it. A uniformed cop was there, and he began to speak to Hobbes in hushed tones.

Suddenly, to Mary’s astonishment, Ponter scooped up the file folder from the desk, and flipped through the pages within it. Hobbes wheeled around, perhaps at a sign from the other cop. “Hey!” he shouted. “You’re not allowed to look at that.”

“My apologies,” said Ponter. “Do not worry, though. I cannot read your language.”

Ponter proffered the folder, and Hobbes grabbed it back.

“What likelihood is there that you will catch the criminal?” asked Ponter.

Hobbes was silent for a moment. “Honestly? I don’t know. We’ve got two reported crimes now, two rapes in pretty much the same location within weeks of each other. We’ll work with the campus police to keep a tighter eye on things. Who knows? We might get lucky.”

Lucky,
thought Mary. He meant yet another person might be attacked.

“Still…” continued Hobbes.

“Yes?”

“Well, if he’s part of the York community, he has to know it’s been written up in the campus paper.”

“You do not anticipate success,” said Ponter, simply.

“We will do what we can,” said Hobbes.

Ponter nodded.

Ponter and Mary returned to her car. She’d left the windows down a bit this time, but it was still hot inside. She turned the key and activated the air conditioner.

“So?” she said.

“Yes?” said Ponter.

“You scanned the file. Anything interesting?”

“I cannot tell.”

“Is there any way to show me what Hak saw?”

“Not here,” said Ponter. “He is recording, of course, and we have added storage capacity to him, so that everything he sees here will be saved. But until we can upload his recordings into my alibi archive in Saldak, there is no way for us to view them, although Hak can describe them.”

Mary looked down at Ponter’s forearm. “Well, Hak?” she said.

The Companion spoke through its external speaker. “There were eleven sheets of white paper in the folder. The ratio between the page height and width was 0.77 to 1. Six of the pages seemed to be preprinted forms, with spaces in which some text had been written in by hand. I am no expert on such things, but it seemed to be the same script Enforcer Hobbes was using to make his notes, although the ink was a different color.”

“But you can’t tell me what the forms said?” asked Mary.

“I
could
describe it to you. You read from left to right, correct?” Mary nodded. “The first word on the first page began with a symbol made by a vertical line topped by a horizontal line. The second symbol was a circle. The third—”

“How many total symbols are there in the report?”

“Fifty-two thousand, four hundred and twelve,” said Hak.

Mary frowned. “Too many to work through a character at a time, even if I taught you the alphabet.” She shrugged. “Well, I’ll be curious to see what it says when we get to your world.” She looked at the dashboard clock. “Anyway, it’s a long trip to Sudbury. We’d better get cracking.”

The last time Mary and Ponter had taken a ride down this metal-cage elevator, Mary had tried to make him understand that she
did
like him—indeed, that she liked him a lot—but that she hadn’t been ready to start a relationship. She’d told Ponter about what had happened to her at York University, making him the only person to that point besides Keisha, the rape-crisis counselor, that Mary had told about it. Ponter’s emotions had mirrored Mary’s own: general confusion plus profound anger aimed at the rapist, whoever he might be. During that trip down, Mary had thought she was about to lose Ponter forever.

As they again made the long, long descent to the Creighton Mine’s sixty-eight-hundred-foot level, Mary couldn’t help recalling all of that, and she supposed the awkward silence from Ponter meant that he was remembering it, too.

There’d been some discussion about installing a new high-speed elevator directly down to the neutrino-observatory chamber, but the logistics were formidable. To sink a new shaft through two kilometers of gabbroic granite would be a major undertaking, and the Inco geologists weren’t sure that the rock could take it.

There’d also been talk about replacing Inco’s old open-cage elevator with a more luxurious, modern one—but that presupposed it would only be used for runs to and from the portal. In fact, the Creighton Mine was an active nickel-harvesting operation, and although Inco had been the soul of cooperation, they still had to move hundreds of miners up and down that shaft each day.

Indeed, unlike the last time, when Mary and Ponter had had the entire car to themselves, they were sharing this ride with six miners, heading down to the fifty-two-hundred-foot level. The group was evenly mixed between those who were politely looking at the muddy metal floor—there was no inside level indicator to watch studiously as one did in an office-building lift—and those who were staring quite openly at Ponter.

The elevator thundered down its rough-hewn shaft, passing the forty-six-hundred-foot level—painted signs outside revealed the location. Having been mined out, that level was now used as an arboretum to grow trees for reforestation projects around Sudbury.

The elevator then shuddered to a stop on the level the miners wanted, and the door rattled up, letting them disembark. Mary watched them depart: men she would have previously thought of as robust specimens, but who had looked positively feeble next to Ponter.

Ponter operated the bell that signaled the lift operator up on the surface, letting him know the miners were clear. The cab rumbled into motion again. It really was too noisy to talk, anyway—the conversation they’d had the last time had been mostly shouted, for all its delicate content.

Finally, the cab arrived at the sixty-eight-hundred-foot level. The temperature here was a constant, stifling forty-one degrees Celsius, and the air pressure was thirty percent above that on the surface.

At least here, the transportation situation had been improved. Instead of having to walk the twelve hundred meters horizontally to the SNO facility, a rather nifty all-terrain vehicle—a kind of dune buggy thing, with a sticker of the SNO logo on its front—was waiting for them. Two more such vehicles were stationed down here now, although the others must have been somewhere else.

Ponter gestured for Mary to take the driver’s seat. Mary suppressed a grin; the big guy knew a lot of things, but how to drive wasn’t one of them. He got in next to her. Mary took a minute to familiarize herself with the dashboard, and read the various warnings and instructions that had been affixed to it. It didn’t really look any more difficult than a golf cart. She turned the key—it was attached to the dashboard with a chain, so that no one could accidentally walk off with it—and they set off down the tunnel, avoiding the railway tracks used for the ore cars. It normally took twenty minutes to walk to the SNO facility from the elevator station; the cart got them there in four.

Ironically, now that it was being used for travel to another world, the SNO facility wasn’t being kept in clean-room conditions anymore. A visit to the shower stalls had been mandatory, and although they were still available for those who felt too grimy after the trip down from the surface, Ponter and Mary just walked right past them. And both doors were propped open to the vacuum chamber that used to suck dirt off of visitors to SNO. Ponter shouldered through, and Mary followed behind him.

They walked past all the Rube Goldberg plumbing contraptions that had once serviced the heavy-water tank, and made their way through the control room—which, as always now, had two armed Canadian Forces guards on hand.

“Hello, Envoy Boddit,” said one of the guards, rising from the chair he’d been sitting in.

“Hello,” said Ponter, speaking for himself; he had acquired a couple of hundred words of English by now, which he could use—assuming he could pronounce them—without Hak’s intervention.

“And you’re Professor Vaughan, aren’t you?” asked the soldier—doubtless, his rank was somehow indicated on his uniform, but Mary had no idea how to read it.

“That’s right,” Mary said.

“I’ve seen you on TV,” said the soldier. “First time through for you, isn’t it, ma’am?”

Mary nodded.

“Well, I’m sure you’ve been briefed on the procedure. I need to see your passport, and we have to take a DNA sample.”

Mary did indeed have a passport. She’d first gotten one when she went to Germany to extract DNA from the Neanderthal type specimen at the
Rheinisches Landesmuseum,
and she’d renewed it since—why did Canadian passports last for only five years, instead of the ten that American passports did? She fished the passport out of her purse and presented it to the man. Ironically, she looked older in the photo than she did in life; it had been taken before she started dyeing her hair to cover the gray.

She then opened her mouth, and let the soldier run a Q-Tip along the inside of her right cheek—the guy’s technique was a little rough, thought Mary; you didn’t have to swipe that hard to get cells to slough off.

“All right, ma’am,” said the soldier. “Have a safe trip.”

Mary let Ponter lead the way out onto the metal deck that formed a roof over the ten-story-tall barrel-shaped cavern that used to house the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory. Instead of having to descend through a hatch just a meter on a side, as she’d done the last time she was here, a large opening had been carved into the decking, and an elevator had been installed—Ponter remarked that it was new since his latest arrival. The elevator had acrylic see-through walls; they’d been made especially for this site by Polycast, the company that had manufactured the acrylic panels of which the now-dismantled heavy-water containment sphere had been composed.

The elevator was the first of many modifications planned for this chamber. If the portal really did stay open for years, the chamber would be filled in with ten stories of facilities, including customs offices, hospital rooms, and even a few hotel suites. Currently, though, the elevator had only two stops: the chamber’s rocky floor, and, three stories above that, the staging area that had been built up around the portal. Ponter and Mary got off at the staging area, a wide wooden platform with yet another couple of soldiers stationed on it. Along one side of the platform were the flags of the United Nations and the three countries that had jointly funded SNO: Canada, the United States, and Great Britain.

And, in front of her, was—

It indeed seemed to have acquired the popular name of “the portal,” but because of the Derkers tube protruding through it, it looked more like a tunnel. Mary’s heart was pounding; she could
see
through it—see the Neanderthal world, and—

My God,
thought Mary.
My God.

A brawny figure had passed by the far end of the tunnel, someone working on the other side.

Another Neanderthal.

Mary had seen much of Ponter and some of Tukana. Still, she had trouble really accepting that there were
millions
of other Neanderthals, but…

But there was another one, down the tunnel.

She took a deep breath, and, since Ponter was gallantly indicating she should go first, Mary Vaughan, citizen of one Earth, started walking down the cylindrical bridge that led to another Earth.

A flat insert had been crafted for the bottom of the Derkers tube, making a smooth walkway. Mary could see the blue ring surrounding the tube, visible through its translucent white walls: the actual portal, the opening, the discontinuity.

She reached the threshold of that discontinuity, and stopped. Yes, Ponter had gone through in both directions now, and, yes, a number of
Homo sapiens
had preceded her in crossing over, but…

Mary broke into a sweat, and not just because of the subterranean heat.

Ponter’s hand landed on her shoulder. For one horrible second, Mary thought he was going to push her through.

But of course he didn’t. “Take your time,” he whispered, in English. “Go when you are comfortable.”

Mary nodded. She took a deep breath and stepped forward.

It felt like a ring of ants crawling over her body from front to back as she stepped across the threshold. She’d started with a slow step, but quickly hopped forward to put an end to the unsettling sensation.

And there she was—centimeters, and tens of thousands of years of divergence, from the world she knew.

She continued down to the end of the tunnel, Ponter’s footfalls heavy behind her. And then she stepped out, into what she knew must be the quantum-computing chamber. Unlike the SNO cavity, which had been co-opted from its original purpose, Ponter’s quantum computer was still fully operational; indeed, Mary was given to understand that without it, the portal would slam shut.

Four Neanderthals stood in front of her, all male. One was wearing a garish silver outfit; the others were wearing sleeveless shirts and the same strange pants with boots attached that Ponter had arrived in. All of them, like Ponter, had their light-colored hair parted precisely in the center; all were hugely muscled, with short limbs; all had undulating browridges; all had massive, potato-like noses.

Ponter’s voice came from behind her, speaking in the Neanderthal language. Mary swung around in surprise. She heard Ponter whisper that language all the time, with Hak translating the words into English at a much-louder volume, but, till now, she’d never heard Ponter speak loudly and clearly in his native tongue. Whatever he’d said must have been a joke of some kind, as all four of the Neanderthals emitted deep, barking laughs.

Mary stepped away from the mouth of the tunnel, letting Ponter pass. And then—

She’d heard Ponter talk frequently about Adikor, of course, and had understood intellectually that Ponter had a male lover, but…

But, despite her liberal leanings, despite all her mental preparations, despite the gay men she knew back on her Earth, she felt her stomach clench as Ponter embraced the Neanderthal who must be Adikor. They hugged long and hard, and Ponter’s broad face pressed against Adikor’s hairy cheek.

Mary realized in an instant what she was feeling, but, God, it had been decades since she’d experienced that particular emotion, and it shamed her. She wasn’t repulsed by the display of same-sex affection; not at all—hell, you couldn’t flip channels on Toronto TV on a Friday night without running into some gay porn. No, she was…

It
was
shameful, and she knew she’d have to get over it fast if she was ever to have a long-term relationship with Ponter.

She was jealous.

Ponter let Adikor go, then he held up his left arm, facing its inside toward Adikor. Adikor raised his arm in a matching gesture, and Mary saw symbols flash across the displays on each man’s Companion implant; Ponter was presumably receiving his accumulated messages from Adikor, to whom they had been forwarded in his absence.

They lowered their arms at the same time, but Ponter only brought his halfway down, and he pivoted his forearm at the elbow to indicate Mary.
“Prisap tah Mare Vonnnn daballita sohl,”
he said, but, since he wasn’t addressing her, Hak provided no translation.

Adikor stepped forward, smiling. He had a kind face, broader than Ponter’s—indeed, as broad as a dinner plate. And his round deep-set eyes were an astonishing teal color. The overall effect was a Flintstones version of the Pillsbury Doughboy.

Ponter’s voice dropped to a whisper, and Hak’s voice provided a normal-volume translation. “Mare, this is my man-mate, Scholar Adikor Huld.”

“Hollow,” said Adikor. Mary was baffled for a moment, then realized that Adikor was trying to say “hello,” but hadn’t quite gotten the vowel sounds right. Still, she was impressed, and touched, that he’d tried to learn some English.

“Hello,” said Mary. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

Adikor tipped his head, presumably listening to a translation through his own Companion’s cochlear implants, and then, in a startlingly normal response, he smiled, and, in his accented English, said, “All good, I hope.”

Mary couldn’t help but laugh. “Oh, yes,” she said.

“And this,” said Hak’s voice, speaking for Ponter, “is an Exhibitionist.”

Mary was taken aback. Ponter was referring to the guy dressed all in silver. She wasn’t quite sure what she’d do if this strange Neanderthal whipped it out in front of her. “Umm, pleased to meet you,” she said.

The stranger didn’t have the trick down of whispering his own words while his Companion translated loudly. Mary had to struggle to separate the Neanderthal noise from the English. “I have learned,” she picked out, “that in your world, I might be called a reporter. I go to interesting places, and let people tune into what my Companion is broadcasting.”

“All Exhibitionists wear silver,” said Ponter, “and nobody else does. If you see someone dressed this way, be warned that many thousands of people are watching you.”

“Ah-hah!” said Mary. “An Exhibitionist. Yes, I remember you telling me about them now.”

Ponter introduced the two other Neanderthals, as well. One was an enforcer, apparently something akin to a cop, and the other was a portly Neanderthal roboticist named Dern.