“Here, in Ontario, people get to vote when they turn eighteen,” said Mary. “Years, that is.”
“Eighteen!” exclaimed Ponter. “That is madness.”
“I don’t know of any place where the voting age is higher than twenty-one years.”
“This explains much about your world,” says Ponter. “We do not let people shape policy until they have accumulated wisdom and experience.”
“But then if Jasmel can’t vote, what is it that makes her an adult?”
Ponter lifted his shoulders slightly. “I suppose such distinctions are not as significant on my world as they are here. Still, at 250 months, an individual does take legal responsibility for himself or herself, and usually is on the verge of establishing his or her own home.” He shook his head. “I wish I could let Jasmel and Megameg know that I am still alive, and am thinking about them. Even if there is no way I can go home, I would give anything just to get a message to them.”
“And is there really no way for you to go home?” asked Mary.
“I cannot see how I could. Oh, perhaps if a quantum computer could be built here, and the conditions that led to my … transfer … could be precisely duplicated. But I am a theoretical physicist; I have only the vaguest of senses of how one builds a quantum computer. My partner, Adikor, knows how, of course, but I have no way of contacting him.”
“It must be very frustrating,” said Mary.
“I am sorry,” said Ponter. “I did not mean to shift my problems to you.”
“That’s all right,” said Mary. “Is there—is there anything we, any of us, can do to help?”
Ponter said a single, sad-sounding Neanderthal syllable; Hak rendered it as “No.”
Mary wanted to cheer him up. “Well, we shouldn’t be in quarantine too much longer. Maybe after we’re out, you can travel around, see some sights. Sudbury is a small town, but—”
“Small?”
said Ponter, deep-set eyes wide. “But there are—I do not know how many. Tens of thousands at least.”
“The Sudbury metropolitan area has 160,000 people in it,” said Mary, having read that in a guidebook in her hotel room.
“One hundred and sixty thousand!” repeated Ponter. “And this is a small town? You, Mare, come from somewhere else, do you not? A different town. How many people live there?”
“The actual city of Toronto is 2.4 million people; greater Toronto—a continuous urban area with Toronto at its heart—is maybe 3.5 million.”
“Three and a half million?” said Ponter, incredulously.
“Give or take.”
“How many people are there?”
“In the whole world?” asked Mary.
“Yes.”
“A little over six billion.”
“A billion is … a thousand times a million?”
“That’s right,” said Mary. “At least here in North America. In Britain—no, forget it. Yes, a billion is a thousand million.”
Ponter sagged in his chair. “That is a … a staggering number of people.”
Mary raised her eyebrows. “How many people are there on your world?”
“One hundred and eighty-five million,” said Ponter.
“Why so few?” asked Mary.
“Why so many?” asked Ponter.
“I don’t know,” replied Mary. “I never thought about it.”
“Do you not—in my world, we know how to prevent pregnancy. I could perhaps teach you …”
Mary smiled. “We have methods, too.”
Ponter lifted his eyebrow. “Perhaps ours work better.”
Mary laughed. “Perhaps.”
“Is there enough food for six billion people?”
“We mostly eat plants. We cultivate”—a
bleep
; Hak’s convention upon hearing a word that wasn’t yet in its database and that it couldn’t figure out from context—“we grow them deliberately. I’ve noticed you don’t seem to like bread”—another
bleep
—“um, food from grain, but bread, or rice, is what most of us eat.”
“You manage to comfortably feed six billion people with
plants
?”
“Well, ah, no,” said Mary. “About half a billion people don’t have enough to eat.”
“That is very bad,” said Ponter, simply.
Mary could not disagree. Still, she realized with a start that Ponter had, to this point, been exposed only to a sanitized view of Earth. He’d seen a little TV, but not enough to really open his eyes. Nonetheless, it did indeed seem that Ponter was going to spend the rest of his life on this Earth. He needed to be told about war, and the crime rate, and pollution, and slavery—the whole bloody smear across time that was human history.
“Our world is a complex place,” said Mary, as if that excused the fact that people were starving.
“So I have seen,” said Ponter. “We have only one species of humanity, although there were more in the past. But you seem to have three or four.”
Mary shook her head slightly. “What?” she said.
“The different types of human. You are obviously of one species, and Reuben is of another. And the male who helped rescue me, he seemed perhaps to be of a third species.”
Mary smiled. “Those aren’t different species. There’s only one species of humanity here, too:
Homo sapiens
.”
“You can all breed with each other?” asked Ponter.
“Yes,” said Mary.
“And the offspring are fertile?”
“Yes.”
Ponter frowned. “You are the geneticist,” he said, “not I, but … but … if they can all breed with each other, then why the diversity? Would not over time all humans end up looking similar, a mixture of all the possible traits?”
Mary exhaled noisily. She hadn’t quite expected to get into that particular mess so soon. “Well, umm, in the past—not today, you understand, but …” She swallowed. “Well, not as
much
today, but in the past, people of one race”—a different bleep; a recognized word that couldn’t be translated in this context—“people of one skin color didn’t have much to do with people of another color.”
“Why?” said Ponter. A simple question, so simple, really …
Mary lifted her shoulders slightly. “Well, the coloration differences arose originally because populations were geographically isolated. But after that … after that, limited interaction occurred due to ignorance, stupidity, hatred.”
“Hatred,” repeated Ponter.
“Yes, sad to say.” She shrugged a little. “There is much in my species’ past that I’m not proud of.”
Ponter was quiet for a long moment. “I have,” he said at last, “wondered about this world of yours. I was surprised when I saw the images of skulls at the hospital. I have seen such skulls, but on my world they are known only from our fossil record. It startled me to see flesh on what to this point I had only known as bone.”
He paused again, looking at Mary as if still disconcerted by her appearance. She shifted slightly in her chair.
“We knew nothing of your skin color,” said Ponter, “or the color of your hair. The”—
bleep
; Hak also bleeped as a placeholder when a word was omitted because the English equivalent wasn’t yet in the Companion’s vocabulary—“of my world would be astonished to learn of the variety.”
Mary smiled. “Well, it’s not all natural,” she said. “I mean, my hair isn’t really this color.”
Ponter looked astonished. “What color is it really?”
“Kind of a mousy brown.”
“Why did you alter it?”
Mary shrugged a little. “Self-expression, and—well, I said it was brown, but, actually, it has a fair bit of gray in it. I—many people, actually—dislike gray hair.”
“The hair of my kind turns gray as we age.”
“That’s what happens to us, too; nobody is born with gray hair.”
Ponter frowned again. “In my language, the term for one who has, knowledge that comes with experience and for the color hair turns is the same: ‘Gray.’ I cannot imagine someone wanting to hide that color.”
Mary shrugged once more. “We do a lot of things that don’t make sense.”
“That much is clearly true,” said Ponter. He paused, as if considering whether to go on. “We have often wondered what became of your people … on our world, that is. Forgive me; I do not wish to sound”—
bleep
—“but you must know that your brains are smaller than ours.”
Mary nodded. “About 10 percent smaller, on average, if I remember correctly.”
“And you seemed physically weaker. Judging by attachment scars on your bones, your kind was believed to have had only half our muscle mass.”
“I’d say that’s about right,” said Mary, nodding.
“And,” continued Ponter, “you have spoken of your inability to get along, even with others of your own kind.”
Mary nodded again.
“There is some archeological evidence for this among your kind on my world, too,” said Ponter. “A popular theory is that you wiped each other out … what with being not all that intelligent, you see …” Ponter lowered his head. “I am sorry; again, I do not mean to upset you.”
“That’s all right,” said Mary.
“I am sure there is a better explanation,” said Ponter. “We knew so little about you.”
“In a way,” said Mary, “the knowledge that it could have gone another way—that we didn’t necessarily have to end up surviving—is probably all to the good. It will remind my people of how precious life really is.”
“This is not obvious to them?” asked Ponter, eyes wide in astonishment.
Chapter 31
Adikor finally left the Council chamber, walking slowly and sadly out the door. This was all madness—madness! He’d lost Ponter, and, as if that weren’t devastating enough, now he would have to face a full tribunal. Whatever confidence he’d once had in the judicial system—an entity of which he’d only been vaguely aware to this point—had been shattered. How could an innocent, grieving person be hounded so?
Adikor headed down a long corridor, its walls lined with square portraits of great adjudicators of the past, men and women who had developed the principles of modern law. Had this—this
travesty
—really been what they’d had in mind? He continued along, not paying much attention to the other people he occasionally passed … until a flash of orange caught his eye.
Bolbay
, still wearing the color of the accuser, down at the end of the corridor. She’d tarried in the Council building, perhaps to avoid Exhibitionists, and was now making her own way outside.
Before he’d really given it any thought, Adikor found himself running down the corridor toward her, the moss carpet cushioning his footfalls. Just as she stepped out through the door at the end, exiting into the afternoon sun, he caught up with her. “Daklar!”
Daklar Bolbay turned, startled. “Adikor!” she exclaimed, her eyes wide. She raised her voice. “Whoever is monitoring Adikor Huld for his judicial scrutiny, pay attention! He is now confronting me, his accuser!”
Adikor shook his head slowly. “I’m not here to harm you.”
“I have seen,” said Bolbay, “that your deeds do not always match your intentions.”
“That was
years
ago,” said Adikor, deliberately using the noun that most emphasized the length of time. “I’d never hit anyone before that, and I’ve never hit anyone since.”
“But you
did
do it then,” said Bolbay. “You lost your temper. You lashed out. You tried to kill.”
“No! No, I never wanted to hurt Ponter.”
“It’s inappropriate for us to be speaking,” said Bolbay. “You must excuse me.” She turned.
Adikor’s hand reached out, grabbing hold of Bolbay’s shoulder. “No, wait!”
Her face showed panic as it swung back to look at him, but she quickly changed her expression, staring meaningfully at his hand. Adikor removed it. “Please,” he said. “Please, just tell me
why
. Why are you going after me with such … such
vindictiveness
? In all the time we’ve known each other, I’ve never wronged you. You must know that I loved Ponter, and that he loved me. He wouldn’t possibly want you to pursue me like this.”
“Don’t play the innocent with me,” said Bolbay.
“But I
am
innocent! Why are you doing this?”
She simply shook her head, turned around, and began walking away.
“Why?” Adikor called after her.
“Why?”
* * *
“Maybe we can talk about your people,” Mary said to Ponter. “Until now, we’ve only had Neanderthal fossils to study. There’s been a lot of debate over various things, like, well, for instance, what your prominent browridges are for.”
Ponter blinked. “They shield my eyes from the sun.”
“Really?” said Mary. “I guess that makes sense. But then why don’t my people have them? I mean, Neanderthals evolved in Europe; my ancestors come from Africa, where it’s much sunnier.”
“We wondered that, too,” said Ponter, “when we looked at Gliksin fossils.”
“Gliksin?” repeated Mary.
“The type of fossil hominid from my world you most closely resemble. Gliksins didn’t have browridges, so we had assumed that they were nocturnal.”
Mary smiled. “I guess a lot of what people conclude from looking just at bones is wrong. Tell me: what do you make of this?” She tapped her index finger against her chin.
Ponter looked uncomfortable. “I know now that it is wrong, but …”
“Yes?” said Mary.
Ponter used an open hand to smooth down his beard, showing his chinless jaw. “We do not have such projections, so we assumed …”
“What?” said Mary.
“We assumed it was a drool guard. You have such tiny mouth cavities, we thought saliva was constantly dribbling out. Also, you
do
have smaller brains than we do, and, well, idiots often drool …”
Mary laughed. “Good grief,” she said. “But, say, speaking of jaws, what happened to yours?”
“Nothing,” said Ponter. “It is the same as it was before.”
“I saw the x-rays that were taken of you at the hospital,” said Mary. “Your mandible—your jawbone—shows extensive reconstruction.”
“Oh,
that
,” said Ponter, sounding apologetic. “I got hit in the face a couple of hundred months ago.”