Mary had done nothing wrong. She was the victim.
The Eucharist continued, with the Monsignor reading from Luke: “‘Declare that these two sons of mine will sit one at Your right hand and one at Your left in Your kingdom …’”
Of course, Mary knew the story the priest was reciting of the woman who beseeched Christ on the road to Jerusalem; she knew the context. But the words echoed in her head:
two sons, one at Your right hand and one at Your left …
Could it have been that way? Could two kinds of humanity have lived peacefully side by side? Cain had been an agriculturalist; he grew corn. Abel had been a carnivore, who raised sheep for slaughter. But Cain had slain Abel …
The priest was pouring wine now. “Blessed to You, Lord God of all Creation, through Your goodness we have this wine to offer. Fruit of the vine and the work of human hands, it will become a spiritual drink …
“Pray, brothers and sisters …
“God of power and might, we praise You through Your Son Jesus Christ, who comes in Your name …
“God our Father, we have wandered far from You but, through Your Son, You have brought us back …
“We ask You to sanctify these gifts through the power of Your spirit …
“Take this, all of you, and eat it. This is My body, which will be given up for you …
“Take this, all of you, and drink from it. This is the cup of My blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant. It will be shed for you and for all so that sins may be forgiven …”
Mary wished she could be with the congregation, taking Communion. When the ceremony was done, she crossed herself again and stood up.
And that’s when she saw Ponter Boddit, standing quietly in the doorway, watching, his bearded, chinless jaw agape.
Chapter 33
“What was
that
?” asked Ponter.
“How long have you been there?” demanded Mary.
“A while.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I did not wish to disturb you,” said Ponter. “You seemed …
intent
on what was happening on the screen.”
Well, thought Mary, she had, in a way, usurped his room; the couch where he slept was the one she was now sitting on. Ponter came fully into Reuben’s office and moved toward the couch, presumably to sit next to her. Mary scooted down to the far end, leaning against one of the couch’s padded arms.
“Again,” said Ponter, “what was that?”
Mary lifted her shoulders slightly. “A church service.”
Ponter’s Companion bleeped.
“Church,” said Mary. “A, um, a hall of worship.”
Another bleep.
“Religion. Worshiping God.”
Hak spoke up at this point, using its female voice. “I am sorry, Mare. I do not know the meaning of any of these words.”
“God,” repeated Mary. “The being who created the universe.”
There was a moment during which Ponter’s expression remained neutral. But then, presumably upon hearing Hak’s translation, his golden eyes went wide. He spoke in his language, and Hak translated, using the male voice: “The universe did not have a creator. It has always existed.”
Mary frowned. She suspected Louise—if she ever emerged from the basement—would enjoy explaining big-bang cosmology to Ponter. For her part, Mary simply said, “That’s not our belief.”
Ponter shook his head, but was evidently willing to let that go. Still: “That man,” he said, indicating the TV, “talked of ‘everlasting life.’ Does your kind have the secret of immortality? We have specialists in life-prolongation, and they have long sought that, but—”
“No,” said Mary. “No, no. He’s talking about Heaven.” She raised her hand, palm out, and successfully forestalled Hak’s bleep. “Heaven is a place where we supposedly continue to exist after death.”
“That is oxymoronic.” Mary marveled briefly at Hak’s proficiency. Ponter had actually spoken a dozen words in his own language, presumably saying something like “that’s a contradiction in terms,” but the Companion had realized that there was a more succinct way to express this in English, even if there wasn’t in the Neanderthal tongue.
“Well,” replied Mary, “not everyone on Earth—on this Earth, that is—believes in an afterlife.”
“Do the majority?”
“Well … yes, I guess so.”
“Do you?”
Mary frowned, thinking. “Yes, I suppose I do.”
“Based on what evidence?” asked Ponter. The tone of his Neanderthal words was neutral; he wasn’t trying to be derisive.
“Well, they say that …” She trailed off. Why did she believe it? She was a scientist, a rationalist, a logical thinker. But, of course, her religious indoctrination had occurred long before she’d been trained in biology. Finally, she shrugged a little, knowing her answer would be inadequate. “It’s in the Bible.”
Hak bleeped.
“The Bible,” repeated Mary. “Scriptures.”
Bleep.
“Holy text.”
Bleep.
“A revered book of moral teachings. The first part of it is shared by my people—called Christians—and by another major religion, the Jews. The second part is only believed in by Christians.”
“Why?” asked Ponter. “What happens in the second part?”
“It tells the story of Jesus, the son of God.”
“Ah, yes. That man spoke of him. So—so this … this creator of the universe somehow had a human son? Was God human, then?”
“No. No, he’s incorporeal; without a body.”
“Then how could he …?”
“Jesus’ mother was human, the Virgin Mary.” She paused. “In a roundabout way, I’m named after her.”
Ponter shook his head slightly. “Sorry. Hak has been doing an admirable job, but clearly is failing here. My Companion interpreted something you said as meaning one who has never had sexual intercourse.”
“Virgin, yes,” said Mary.
“But how can a virgin also be a mother?” asked Ponter. “That is another—” and Mary heard him speak the same string of words that Hak had rendered before as “oxymoron.”
“Jesus was conceived without intercourse. God sort of planted him in her womb.”
“And this other faction—Jews, you said?—rejects this story?”
“Yes.”
“They seem … less credulous, shall we say.” He looked at Mary. “Do you believe this? This story of Jesus?”
“I
am
a Christian,” Mary said, confirming it as much for herself as for Ponter. “A follower of Jesus.”
“I see,” said Ponter. “And you also believe in this existence after death?”
“Well, we believe that the real essence of a person is the soul”—
bleep
—“an incorporeal version of the person, and that the soul travels to one of two destinations after death, where that essence will live on. If the person has been good, the soul goes to Heaven—a paradise, in the presence of God. If the person has been bad, the soul goes to Hell”—
bleep
—“and is tortured”—
bleep
—“tormented forever.”
Ponter was silent for a long time, and Mary tried to read his broad features. Finally, he said, “We—my people—do not believe in an afterlife.”
“What do you think happens after death?” asked Mary.
“For the person who has died, absolutely nothing. He or she ceases to be, totally and completely. All that they were is gone forevermore.”
“That’s so sad,” said Mary.
“Is it?” asked Ponter. “Why?”
“Because you have to go on without them.”
“Do you have contact with those who dwell in this afterlife of yours?”
“Well, no. I don’t. Some people say they do, but their claims have never been substantiated.”
“Color me surprised,” said Ponter; Mary wondered where Hak had picked up that expression. “But if you have no way of accessing this afterlife, this realm of the dead, then why give it credence?”
“I’ve never seen the parallel world you came from,” said Mary, “and yet I believe in that. And you can’t see it anymore—but you still believe in it, too.”
Once again, Hak got full marks.
“Touche,”
it said, neatly summarizing a half dozen words uttered by Ponter.
But Ponter’s revelations had intrigued Mary. “We hold that morality comes from religion: from the belief in an absolute good, and from the, well, the fear, I guess, of damnation—of being sent to Hell.”
“In other words,” said Ponter, “humans of your kind behave properly only because they are threatened if they do not.”
Mary tilted her head, conceding the point. “It’s Pascal’s wager,” she said. “See, if you do believe in God, and he doesn’t exist, then you’ve lost very little. But if you don’t, and he does, then you risk eternal torment. Given that, it’s prudent to be a believer.”
“Ah,” said Ponter; the interjection was the same in his language as hers, so no rendering of it was made by Hak.
“But, look,” said Mary, “you still haven’t answered my question about morality. Without a God—without a belief that you will be rewarded or punished after the end of your life—what drives morality among your people? I’ve spent a fair bit of time with you now, Ponter; I know you’re a good person. Where does that goodness come from?”
“I behave as I do because it is right for me to do so.”
“By whose standards?”
“By the standards of my people.”
“But
where
do those standards come from?”
“From …” And here Ponter’s eyes went wide, great orbs beneath an undulating shelf of bone, as though he’d had an epiphany—in the secular sense of the word, of course. “From our conviction that there is
no
life after death!” he said triumphantly. “That is why your belief troubles me; I see it now. Our assertion is straightforward and congruent with all observed fact: a person’s life is completely finished at death; there is no possibility of reconciling with them, or making amends after they are gone, and no possibility that, because they lived a moral life, they are now in a paradise, with the cares of this existence forgotten.” He paused, and his eyes flicked left and right across Mary’s face, apparently looking for signs she understood what he was getting at.
“Do you not see?” Ponter went on. “If I wrong someone—if I say something mean to them, or, I do not know, perhaps take something that belongs to them—under your worldview I can console myself with the knowledge that, after they are dead, they can still be contacted; amends can be made. But in my worldview, once a person is gone—which could happen for any of us at any moment, through accident or heart attack or so on—then you who did the wrong must live knowing that that person’s entire existence ended without you ever having made peace with him or her.”
Mary thought about that. Yes, most slave owners had ignored the issue, but surely some people of conscience, caught up in a society driven by bought-and-sold human beings, must have had qualms … and yet had they consoled themselves with the knowledge that the people they were mistreating would be rewarded for their suffering after death? Yes, the Nazi leaders were pure evil, but how many of the rank and file, following orders to exterminate Jews, had managed to sleep at night by believing the freshly dead were now in paradise?
Nor did it have to be anything so grandiose. God was the great compensator: if you were wronged in life, it would be made up for in death—the fundamental principle that had allowed parents to send their children off to die in war after countless war. Indeed, it didn’t really matter if you ruined someone else’s life, because that person might well go to Heaven. Oh, you yourself might be dispatched to Hell, but nothing you did to anyone else really hurt them in the long run. This existence was mere prologue; eternal life was yet to come.
And, indeed, in that infinite existence, God would make up for whatever had been done to … to
her
.
And that bastard, that bastard who had attacked her, would burn.
No, it didn’t matter if she never reported the crime; there was no way he could escape his ultimate judge.
But … but … “But what about your world? What happens to criminals there?”
Bleep.
“People who break laws,” said Mary. “People who intentionally hurt others.”
“Ah,” said Ponter. “We have little problem with that anymore, having cleansed most bad genes from our gene pool generations ago.”
“What?”
exclaimed Mary.
“Serious crimes were punished by sterilization of not just the offender but also anyone who shared fifty percent of the offender’s genetic material: brothers and sisters, parents, offspring. The effect was twofold. First, it cleansed those bad genes from our society, and—”
“How would nonagriculturalists stumble onto genetics? I mean, we figured it out through plant cultivation and animal husbandry.”
“We may not have bred animals or plants for food, but we did domesticate wolves to help us in hunting. I have a dog named Pabo that I am very fond of. Wolves were quite susceptible to controlled breeding; the results were obvious.”
Mary nodded; that sounded reasonable enough. “You said the sterilization had a twofold effect on your society?”
“Oh, yes. Besides directly eliminating the faulty genes, it gave families a strong incentive to make sure none of their own members ran seriously afoul of society.”
“I suppose it would at that,” said Mary.
“It did indeed,” said Ponter. “You, as a geneticist, surely know that the
only
immortality that really exists is genetic. Life is driven by genes wanting to ensure their own reproduction, or to protect existing copies of themselves. So our justice was aimed at genes, not at people. Our society is mostly free of crime now because our justice system directly targeted that which really drives all life: not individuals, not circumstances, but
genes
. We made it so that the best survival strategy for genes is to obey the law.”
“Richard Dawkins would approve, I imagine,” said Mary. “But you were speaking of this … this sterilization practice in the past tense. Has it ended?”