Humans (27 page)

Mary stormed out of the police station, seething. But she didn’t say a word until she and Ponter were back in her car, sitting in the parking lot.

Mary turned to him. “What the hell was that?” she demanded.

“I am sorry,” said Ponter.

“I’ll never get to analyze those specimens now,” said Mary. “Christ, I’m sure the only reason he didn’t charge you was because he’d have to report his own stupidity in letting you get near the evidence.”

“Again, I apologize,” said Ponter.

“What in God’s name were you thinking?”

Ponter was silent.

“Well? Well?”

“I know,” he said simply, “who committed Qaiser’s rape, and presumably yours as well.”

Mary, absolutely stunned, sagged back against the driver’s seat. “Who?”

“Your co-worker—I cannot say his full name properly. It is something like ‘Cor-nuh-luh-us.’”

“Cornelius? Cornelius Ruskin? No, that’s crazy.”

“Why? Does anything in his physical appearance contradict your recollections of that night?”

Mary was still huffing and puffing from shouting. But all the anger was gone from her voice, replaced with astonishment. “Well, no. I mean, sure, Cornelius has blue eyes—but lots of people do. And Cornelius doesn’t smoke.”

“Yes, he does,” said Ponter.

“I’ve never seen him.”

“The odor was on him when we met.”

“He might have been in one of the campus pubs and picked it up there.”

“No. It was on his breath, although he’d apparently tried to mask it with some chemical.”

Mary frowned. She knew a few secret smokers. “I didn’t smell anything.”

Ponter said nothing.

“Besides,” said Mary, “Cornelius wouldn’t hurt me or Qaiser. I mean, we were coworkers, and—”

Mary fell silent. Ponter finally prodded her. “Yes?”

“Well,
I
thought of us as coworkers. But he—he was just a sessional instructor. He had a Ph.D.—from Oxford, for God’s sake. But all he could get was sessional teaching assignments—not a full-time appointment, and certainly not tenure. But Qaiser and I…”

“Yes?” Ponter said again.

“Well, I’m a woman, but Qaiser really won the lottery when it came to tenure-track appointments in the sciences. She’s a woman
and
a visible minority. They say rape isn’t a sexual crime; it’s a crime of violence, of power. And Cornelius clearly felt he had none.”

“He also had access to the specimens refrigerator,” said Ponter, “and, as a geneticist himself, he surely suspected what a female geneticist might do under such circumstances. He would know to look for, and destroy, any evidence.”

“My God,” thought Mary. “But—no. No. It’s all circumstantial.”

“It
was
all circumstantial,” said Ponter, “until I got to examine the physical evidence of Qaiser’s rape—safely stored at the police station, where Ruskin could not get at it. I smelled him when we first met in the corridor outside your lab, and his smell, his scent, is on those specimens.”

“Are you sure?” asked Mary. “Are you absolutely sure?”

“I never forget a smell,” said Ponter.

“My God,” said Mary. “What should we do?”

“We could tell Enforcer Hobbes.”

“Yes, but—”

“What?”

“Well, this isn’t your world,” said Mary. “You can’t just demand that someone produce an alibi. There’s nothing in what you’ve said that would enable the police to require a DNA specimen from Ruskin.” He was no longer “Cornelius.”

“But I could testify about his scent…”

Mary shook her head. “There’s no precedent for accepting such claims, even as a lead. And even if Hobbes bought your assertion, he couldn’t even call Ruskin in for questioning based on it.”

“This world…” said Ponter, shaking his head in disgust.

“You are absolutely certain?” said Mary. “There isn’t a shadow of a doubt in your mind?”

“A shadow of—? Ah, I understand. Yes, I am absolutely certain.”

“Not just beyond a reasonable doubt?” asked Mary. “But beyond all doubt?”

“I have no doubt whatsoever.”

“None?”

“I know your noses are small, but my capability is not remarkable. All members of my species, and many other species, can do it.”

Mary thought about this. Dogs certainly could distinguish people by scent. There really was no reason to think Ponter was mistaken. “What can we do?” she asked.

Ponter was quiet for a long time. Finally, softly, he said, “You told me the reason you did not report the rape was because you feared your treatment at the hands of your judicial system.”

“So?” snapped Mary.

“I do not mean to aggravate,” said Ponter. “I just wanted to make sure I understood you correctly. What would happen to you or to your friend Qaiser if there were a public investigation?”

“Well, even if the DNA evidence were admissible—and it might not be—Ruskin’s attorney would try to prove that Qaiser and I had consented.”

“You should not have to go through that,” said Ponter. “No one should.”

“But if we don’t do something, Ruskin will strike again.”

“No,” said Ponter. “He will not.”

“Ponter, there’s nothing you can do.”

“Please drive me to the university.”

“Ponter, no. No, I won’t.”

“If you will not, I will walk there.”

“You don’t even know where it is.”

“Hak does.”

“Ponter, this is crazy. You can’t just kill him!”

Ponter touched his shoulder, over the bullet wound. “People in this world kill other people all the time.”

“No, Ponter. I won’t let you.”

“I must prevent him from raping again,” said Ponter.

“But—”

“And although you may be able to stop me today, or tomorrow, you will not be able to intercede forever. At some point, I will be able to elude you, return to the campus, and eliminate this problem.” He fixed his golden eyes on her. “The only question is whether that will happen before he rapes again. Do you really wish to delay me?”

Mary closed her eyes for a moment and listened as hard as she ever had in her life for God’s voice, listened to see whether He was going to intervene. But there was nothing.

“I can’t let you do this, Ponter. I can’t let you kill somebody in cold blood. Not even him.”

“He must be stopped.”

“Promise me,” said Mary. “Promise me you won’t.”

“Why do you care so much? He does not deserve to live.”

Mary took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Ponter, I know you think I’m being silly when I talk about an afterlife. But if you kill him, your soul will be punished. And if I let you kill him, my soul will be punished, too. Ruskin already gave me a taste of hell. I don’t want to spend eternity there.”

Ponter frowned. “I want to do this
for
you.”

“Not this. Not killing.”

“All right,” said Ponter at last. “All right. I will not kill him.”

“Do you promise? Do you swear?”

“I promise,” said Ponter. And then, after a moment, “Gristle.”

Mary nodded; that was the only kind of swearing Ponter knew how to do. But then she shook her head. “There’s a possibility you’re not considering,” she said at last.

“And that is?” said Ponter.

“That Qaiser and Cornelius had
consensual
sex
before
she was raped by someone else. It would hardly be the first time a man and a woman who worked together had been getting it on in the office.”

“I would not know,” said Ponter.

“Trust me. It happens all the time. And wouldn’t that leave his smell on—well, on her panties, and so forth?”

Bleep
.

“Panties,” said Mary. “The, um, inner garments. What you saw in the specimen bag.”

“Yes. What you suggest is possible.”

“We have to be certain,” said Mary. “We have to be absolutely sure.”

“You could ask Qaiser,” Ponter said.

“She won’t tell me.”

“Why not? I thought you were friends.”

“We are. But Qaiser is married—bonded—to another man. And, trust me:
that
happens all the time, too.”

“Ah,” said Ponter. “Well…”

“I’m not sure that there’s anything we can do,” said Mary.

“There is much we can do, but you have made me promise not to.”

“That’s right. But…”

“We should let him know that he has been found out,” said Ponter. “That his movements are under surveillance.”

“I couldn’t face him.”

“No, of course not. But we could leave a note for him.”

“I’m not sure what good that would do,” said Mary.

Ponter held up his left hand. “It is the whole philosophy behind the Companion implants. If you know you are being observed, or that your actions are being recorded, then you modify your behavior. It has worked well in my world.”

Mary took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “I suppose…I suppose it couldn’t hurt. What are you thinking of? Just an anonymous note?”

“Yes,” said Ponter.

“You mean, let him know that he’s being watched constantly from now on? That there’s no way he can get away with it again?” Mary considered this. “I suppose he’d have to be an idiot to rape again after he knows someone is on to him.”

“Indeed,” said Ponter.

“I guess a note could be slipped into his box at York.”

“No,” said Ponter. “It should not be left at York. He took steps to destroy evidence there already, after all. I presume he thought you would not return for an entire year, and so he could safely dispose of the specimens you had retained without anyone being able to work out exactly when they had disappeared. No, this note should be left at his dwelling.”

“His dwelling? You mean his home?”

“Yes,” said Ponter.

“I get it,” said Mary. “Nothing’s more threatening than someone knowing where you live.”

Ponter made a perplexed face, but said, “Do you know where his home is.”

“Not far from here,” said Mary. “He doesn’t have a car—he lives by himself, and can’t really afford one. I’ve given him lifts home a few times during snowstorms. It’s an apartment just off Jane Street—but no, wait. I know what
building
he lives in, but I have no idea what his apartment number is.”

“His is a multifamily dwelling, like yours?”

“Yes. Well, not nearly as nice as mine.”

“Will there not be a directory near the entrance identifying which unit houses which person?”

“We don’t do that anymore. We have code numbers and buzzboards—the whole idea is to prevent people from doing what we’re talking about: finding out exactly where someone lives.”

Ponter shook his head, astonished. “The lengths you Gliksins go to to avoid having to have Companion implants…”

“Come on,” said Mary. “Let’s drive by his building on the way back to my place. I’ll know it to see it, and at least we can get the street number.”

“Fine,” said Ponter.

Mary found herself tensing up as they drove along Finch, and turned onto the street that contained Ruskin’s apartment building. It wasn’t that she was afraid of running into him, she realized—although that would certainly freak her out. It was simply thinking about a possible, eventual rape trial.
Do you know where the man you’re accusing lives, Ms. Vaughan? Have you ever been to his home? Really? And yet you say this was nonconsensual?

Driftwood, the area around Jane Street and Finch Avenue West, was not somewhere a sane person wanted to be for long. It was one of Toronto’s—hell, of North America’s—most crime-ridden neighborhoods. Its proximity to York was an embarrassment to the university, and probably, despite years of lobbying, the reason that the Spadina subway line had never been extended to the campus.

But Driftwood had one advantage: rents were cheap. And for someone trying to make ends meet on a sessional instructor’s piecework fees, someone who couldn’t afford a car, it was the only place within walking distance of the university that was affordable.

Ruskin’s apartment building was a white brick tower with rusting balconies filled with junk, and a third of the windows covered by taped-up newspaper or aluminum foil. The building looked to be about fifteen or sixteen stories tall, and—

“Wait!” said Mary.

“What?”

“He lives on the top floor! I remember now: he used to call it his ‘penthouse in the slums.’” She paused. “Of course, we still don’t know what unit number, but he’s lived here for at least two years. I’m sure his letter carrier knows him—we academics tend to get a lot of journals and things like that in the mail.”

“Yes?” said Ponter, clearly not understanding.

“Well, if we mail a letter to ‘Cornelius Ruskin, Ph.D.’ at this address, and simply say ‘Top Floor’ as part of the address, I’m sure it’ll get to him.”

“Ah,” said Ponter. “Good. Then our business here is finished.”

Personality sculptor Selgan regarded Ponter for a time. “You have a flair for the ironic, I see.”

“What do you mean?”

“‘Our business here is finished.’ You told me you committed a crime on the Gliksin world—it is easy enough to guess what it is.”

“Is it? I rather doubt you’ve figured it out.”

Selgan shrugged slightly. “Possibly not. But I have figured out one thing that perhaps
has
eluded you.”

Ponter sounded irritated. “And what is that?”

“Mare suspected you were going to do something to Ruskin.”

“No, no, she is completely innocent.”

“Is she? A woman of her intelligence—and yet she accepted your flimsy excuse for her to show you where Ruskin dwelled?”

“We had every intention of sending a warning letter! Just as we had discussed. Mare is pure, without sin—that is what her name means! She is named for the mother of her God incarnate, a woman who was conceived immaculately, devoid of original sin. I learned this during my first trip to her world. She would never—”

Selgan held up a hand. “Calm down, Ponter. I didn’t mean to give offense. Please, continue with your narrative…”

“Ponter?” said Hak, through Ponter’s cochlear implants.

Ponter moved his head in a tiny nod of acknowledgment.

“Judging by her breathing patterns, Mare is sleeping deeply. You won’t disturb her if you go now.”

Ponter gently got out of Mary’s bed. The glowing red digits on the night-table clock said 1:14. He walked out of the room, down the small corridor to Mary’s living room. As always, he put on his medical belt, and he checked in one of the pouches to make sure that he had the spare card key Mary had given him; he knew he’d need that to get back into her apartment building.

Ponter then opened Mary’s front door, entered the corridor, headed to the elevator, and rode down to the ground floor—he’d learned that sometimes humans wrote the number one as “1” and sometimes as “L”; it was the latter style that was used on the elevator’s control panel.

Ponter walked through the large lobby, then headed out the set of double doors, exiting into the night.

But how unlike the night of his world it was! There was illumination everywhere: from windows, from electric lights hoisted high on vertical poles, from vehicles going by on the road. It would probably have been easier if it were really dark. Although from a distance he knew he didn’t look
that
different from a Gliksin—at least, from a Gliksin weightlifter—he would have much preferred to make this journey in total darkness.

“All right, Hak,” Ponter said softly. “Which way?”

“To your left,” Hak replied, still using the cochlear implants. “Mare usually takes a road designed exclusively for motor vehicles, rather than pedestrians, when coming home from York.”

“The Four-oh-Seven,” said Ponter. “That’s what she calls it.”

“In any event, we will have to find another, safer route that parallels it.”

Ponter started jogging along. It was about five thousand armspans from here to his destination—it shouldn’t take more than a daytenth to get there, if he maintained a decent speed.

The night was cool—wonderfully so. And, indeed, although he’d seen many deciduous leaves that had already changed color back in his world, here they all seemed green—yes, green; even in the middle of the night, there was more than enough illumination to discern colors easily.

Ponter had never thought of killing anyone before in his life, but…

But no one had ever so grievously injured someone he cared so much about before, and…

And, even if someone had, in a
civilized
world that person would have been easily captured and dealt with by the government.

But here! Here, on this mad, mirror Earth…

He
had
to do more than just send an anonymous paper letter. He had to make sure that Ruskin knew not just that he’d been discovered, but
who
it was that had discovered him. He had to be made to understand that there would be no possibility of him ever getting away with such a crime again. Only then, Ponter felt sure, could Mare begin to find the peace that had been eluding her. And only then would he know whether there was any truth to Hak’s earlier suggestion that Mare’s current behavior toward him was atypical for her kind.

Ponter was heading down a street lined with two-story residences, many with trees on their anterior lots of grass. As he continued running along, he saw another person—a Gliksin male, with white skin and hardly any head hair—walking toward him. Ponter jogged across the street, so that he wouldn’t pass close to this person, and he continued on, heading west.

“Turn left here,” said Hak. “There doesn’t seem to be a way out at the end of this block of residences.”

Ponter did so and continued his easy run along the perpendicular street. He went only one block, then Hak had him turn right again, resuming his westward course toward York.

A small cat crossed the street in front of Ponter, its tail sticking up in the air. Ponter was amazed that these humans had chosen to domesticate cats, which were useless for hunting and wouldn’t even fetch a stick.
But,
he thought,
to each his own…
He continued to jog along, his flat feet slapping against the stony road surface.

A short distance later, Ponter saw a large, black dog, padding toward him. Now, dogs as pets he understood! He’d noted that the Gliksins had many different kinds of dogs—apparently created through selective breeding. Some did seem ill suited for hunting, but he assumed their appearance was pleasing to their owners.

Then again, Ponter had heard paleoanthropologists talking at the meeting in Washington about his own appearance. Apparently his features were what were called “classic Neanderthaloid”—and an extreme form, at that. These scholars were surprised that Ponter’s people hadn’t seen a reduction in browridge prominence and nose size, and even the beginning of that preposterous projection from the front of the mandible.

But since the moment true consciousness had flowered in his people and the universe had therefore split, some half-million months ago, it had been deliberate selection of mates that had led to the retention, and, indeed, the amplification, of the features his people found so beautiful.

“Getting tired yet?” asked Hak.

“No.”

“Good. You’re about halfway there.”

Suddenly Ponter was startled by a loud bark. Another dog—large, brown—was coming toward him, and it did not look happy. Ponter knew he couldn’t outrun the quadruped, so he stopped and turned. “There, there,” he said, in his own language, hoping the dog would understand the soothing tone if not the words. “There’s a good doggy.”

The brown beast continued toward Ponter, still barking. A light had gone on in a window on a nearby dwelling’s second floor.

“That’s a nice doggy,” said Ponter, but he could feel himself tensing—which he knew was a dumb thing to be doing. Just like a Barast, a dog could smell fear on another…

Why the dog was barreling toward him, Ponter couldn’t say. He presumed it didn’t attack everyone who came down this street, but just as he could tell a Gliksin from a Barast by scent, so presumably could this beast—and although it had surely never encountered one of Ponter’s people before, it knew when something foreign had come onto its turf.

Ponter was getting ready to try to seize the dog by the neck when the animal crouched and leapt toward him, and—

A flash of light in the semidarkness—

A sound like wet leather hitting ice—

And the dog yelping in pain.

It had leapt at Ponter with enough force to trigger the shield Goosa Kusk had given him. The dog, startled, dazed, and—as Ponter could smell—bleeding from its muzzle, turned tail and ran away as fast as it had approached. Ponter took a deep, calming breath, then resumed his jog.

“All right,” said Hak, after a time. “Here’s where we have to cross over that roadway, the Four-oh-Seven. Head left, and make your way over that bridge, there. Be careful you aren’t hit by a car.”

Ponter did as Hak had asked, and soon he was on the other side of the highway, jogging south. Way, way off in the distance, he could see the blinking lights atop the CN Tower, down at Toronto’s lakeshore. Mare had told him how magnificent the view from it was, but so far, he’d yet to see the structure except from a great distance.

Ponter crossed another wide road, which had cars zipping along, even at this time of night, every few beats. Within a short time, he found himself on the York University campus, and Hak directed him through it, past buildings and parking lots and through open spaces, to the far side.

And, after several hundred armspans of additional jogging, Ponter found himself standing on a small dirty street, near the building that Ruskin lived in. Ponter bent over and placed his hands on his knees, panting to catch his breath.
I guess I
am
getting old…
he thought. A nice wind was blowing directly into his face, cooling him off.

Mare might have awoken by now, and noticed his absence, but she had been, in his brief experience of sharing a bed with her, a very sound sleeper, and it was still most of two daytenths until the sun would come up. He’d be home before then, although not
long
before, and—

“Reach,” hissed a voice from behind Ponter’s back, and he felt something hard stick into his kidney. And suddenly Ponter realized the flaw in Goosa Kusk’s shield design. Oh, sure, it could deflect a bullet fired from some distance away, but it wouldn’t do anything about one discharged into a person from a gun in direct contact with that person.

Still, this
was
Canada—and Mare had said there were few handguns here. But the thought that what was sticking into his kidney was only a knife didn’t really comfort Ponter.

Ponter didn’t know what to do. At the moment, in the dim light, from behind, whoever was accosting him presumably didn’t know that Ponter was a Neanderthal. But if he spoke, even softly, in his own tongue so that Hak could translate, that fact would certainly be given away, and—

“What do you want?” said Hak, in English, taking the initiative.

“Your wallet,” said the voice—male, and sounding, Ponter was disheartened to hear, not the least bit nervous.

“I do not have a wallet,” said Hak.

“Too bad for you,” said the Gliksin. “Either I get money—or I get blood.”

Ponter had no doubt he could beat just about any unarmed Gliksin in hand-to-hand combat, but this one clearly had a weapon. Indeed, at that moment, Hak must have realized that Ponter couldn’t see what the weapon was. “He is holding a steel knife,” he said into Ponter’s cochlear implants, “with a serrated blade about 1.2 handspans long, and a handle whose thermal signature suggests that it is polished hardwood.”

Ponter thought about turning rapidly around, hoping that the sight of his Barast face would be enough to startle the Gliksin, but the last thing he wanted was a witness to his having come to Ruskin’s home.

“He keeps shifting from his left foot to his right,” said Hak through the cochlear implants. “Do you hear it?”

Ponter nodded ever so slightly.

“He’s leaning on the left…now on the right…the left. Have you got the rhythm?”

Another slight nod.

“What’s it going to be?” hissed the Gliksin.

“All right,” said Hak, to Ponter. “When I say ‘now,’ bring your right elbow back and up with all your strength. You should hit the man’s solar plexus, and, at the very least he will stagger backward, meaning that your shield should protect you from any incoming knife thrust.” Hak switched to his external speaker. “I really do not have any money”—and, as he said that, Ponter realized Hak had made a mistake, for the “ee” sounds in “really” and “money” were provided by recordings of a Gliksin voice that didn’t match Hak’s own.

“What the—?” said the Gliksin, clearly puzzled by the sound. “Turn around, you piece of—”

“Now!” said Hak into Ponter’s inner ears.

Ponter jerked his elbow back with all his might, and he could feel it connecting with the Gliksin’s stomach. The Gliksin made an
ooof!
sound as air was forced from his lungs, and Ponter wheeled around to face him.

“Jesus!” said the Gliksin, catching sight of Ponter’s browridged, hairy face. The Gliksin lunged forward, fast enough that Ponter’s shield came up with a flash of light, blocking the knife blade. Ponter shot his own right arm out, and seized the Gliksin by his scrawny neck. The person looked to be about half Ponter’s age. For a brief moment, Ponter thought about closing his fist, crushing the young man’s larynx, but no, he couldn’t do that.

“Drop the knife,” said Ponter. The Gliksin looked down. Ponter did the same, and saw that the knife’s blade was bent from its impact with the shield. Ponter tightened his fingers a bit. The Gliksin’s grip opened as Ponter’s own closed, and the knife fell to the roadway with a clattering sound.

“Now get out of here,” said Ponter, and Hak translated. “Get out of here, and speak to no one of this.”

Ponter let go of the Gliksin, who immediately started gasping for breath. Ponter raised his arm.
“Go!”
he said. The Gliksin nodded and scuttled off, one hand clutching his belly where Ponter’s elbow had hit it.

Ponter wasted no time. He headed up the cracked-concrete walk leading to the apartment building’s entrance.