“If it is—if it is
that
transparent, that flimsy—then an adjudicator will dismiss the matter … but not before I have had a chance to question you.”
“Question me? About what?”
“About your motive. About why you are doing this to me.”
Bolbay looked at Jasmel. “This was your idea, wasn’t it?”
“It was also,” said Jasmel, “my idea that we come here first, before Adikor proceeded with the accusation. This is a family matter: you, Daklar, were my mother’s woman-mate, and Adikor here is my father’s man-mate. You have been through a lot, Daklar—we all have—with the loss of my mother.”
“This has nothing to do with Klast!” snapped Bolbay.
“Nothing.”
She looked at Adikor. “It’s about
him
.”
“Why?” said Adikor. “Why is it about me?”
Bolbay shook her head again. “We don’t have anything to talk about.”
“Yes, we do,” said Adikor. “And you will answer my questions here, or you will answer them in front of an adjudicator. But you
will
answer them.”
“You’re bluffing,” said Bolbay.
Adikor raised his left arm, with his wrist facing toward her. “Is your name Daklar Bolbay, and do you reside here in Saldak Center?”
“I won’t accept documents from you.”
“You’re just delaying the inevitable,” said Adikor. “I will get a judicial server—who can upload to your implant whether you pull out the control bud or not.” A pause. “I say again, Are you Daklar Bolbay, and do you reside here in Saldak Center?”
“You would really do this?” said Bolbay. “You would really drag me before an adjudicator?”
“As you have dragged me,” said Adikor.
“Please,” said Jasmel. “Just tell him. It’s better this way—better for you.”
Adikor crossed his arms in front of his chest. “Well?”
“I’ve nothing to say,” Bolbay replied.
Jasmel let out a great, long sigh. “Ask her,” she said softly when it was done, “about
her
man-mate.”
“You don’t know anything about that,” snapped Bolbay.
“Don’t I?” said Jasmel. “How did you learn that Adikor was the one who had hit my father?”
Bolbay said nothing.
“Obviously, Klast told you,” said Jasmel.
“Klast was my woman-mate,” said Bolbay, defiantly. “She didn’t keep secrets from me.”
“And she was my mother,” said Jasmel. “Neither did she keep them from me.”
“But … she … I …” Bolbay trailed off.
“Tell me about your man-mate,” said Adikor. “I—I don’t think I’ve ever met him, have I?”
Bolbay shook her head slowly. “No. He’s been gone for a long time; we separated long ago.”
“And that’s why you don’t have children of your own?” asked Adikor, gently.
“You’re so
smug
,” replied Bolbay. “You think it’s that simple? I couldn’t keep a mate, and so I never reproduced? Is
that
what you think?”
“I don’t think anything,” said Adikor.
“I would have been a good mother,” said Bolbay, perhaps as much to herself as to Adikor. “Ask Jasmel. Ask Megameg. Since Klast died, I’ve looked after them
wonderfully
. Isn’t that so, Jasmel? Isn’t that so?”
Jasmel nodded. “But you’re a 145, just like Ponter and Klast. Just like Adikor. You might still be able to have a child of your own. The dates for Two becoming One will be shifted again next year; you could …”
Adikor’s eyebrow rolled up. “It would be your last chance, wouldn’t it? You’ll be 520 months old—forty years—next year, just like me. You might have a child then, as part of generation 149, but certainly not ten years later, when generation 150 will be born.”
There was a sneer in Bolbay’s voice. “Did you need your fancy quantum computer to figure that out?”
“And Ponter,” said Adikor, nodding slowly, “Ponter was without a woman-mate. You and he had loved the same woman, after all, and you were already
tabant
for his two children, so you thought …”
“You and my father?” said Jasmel. She didn’t sound shocked by the notion, merely surprised.
“And why not?” said Bolbay, defiantly. “I’d known him almost as long as you had, Adikor, and he and I had always gotten along.”
“But now he’s gone, too,” said Adikor. “That
was
my first thought, you know: that you were simply inconsolable over the loss of him, and so were snapping teeth at me. But you must see, Daklar, that you’re wrong to be doing that. I loved Ponter, and certainly wouldn’t have interfered with his choice of a new woman-mate, so—”
“That has
nothing
to do with it,” said Bolbay, shaking her head. “Nothing.”
“Then why do you hate
me
so?”
“I don’t hate you because of what happened to Ponter,” she said.
“But you
do
hate me.”
Bolbay was silent. Jasmel was looking at the floor.
“Why?” said Adikor. “I’ve never done anything to you.”
“But you hit Ponter,” snapped Bolbay.
“Ages ago. And he forgave me.”
“And so you got to stay whole,” she said. “You got to have a child of your own. You
got away
with it.”
“With what?”
“With your crime! With trying to kill Ponter!”
“I
wasn’t
trying to kill him.”
“You were violent, a monster. You
should
have been sterilized. But my Pelbon …”
“Who is Pelbon?” said Adikor.
Bolbay fell silent again.
“Her man-mate,” said Jasmel, softly.
“What happened to Pelbon?” asked Adikor.
“You don’t know what it’s like,” said Bolbay, looking away. “You have no idea. You wake up one morning to find two enforcers waiting for you, and they take your man-mate away, and—”
“And what?” said Adikor.
“And they castrate him,” said Bolbay.
“Why?” asked Adikor. “What did he do?”
“He didn’t do
anything
,” said Bolbay. “He didn’t do a single thing.”
“Then why …” started Adikor. But then it hit him. “Oh. One of his relatives …”
Bolbay nodded but didn’t meet Adikor’s eyes. “His brother had assaulted someone, and so his brother was ordered sterilized along with—”
“Along with everyone who shared fifty percent of his genetic material,” finished Adikor.
“He didn’t do
anything
, my Pelbon,” said Bolbay. “He didn’t do anything to anyone, and he was punished,
I
was punished. But you! You almost killed a man, and you got away with it! They should have castrated you, not my poor Pelbon!”
“Daklar,” said Adikor. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry …”
“Get out,” said Bolbay firmly. “Just leave me alone.”
“I—”
“Get out!”
Chapter 38
Ponter finished his hamburger, then looked at Louise, Reuben, and Mary in turn. “I do not wish to complain,” he said, “but I am getting tired of this—this
cow
, do you call it? Is there a chance we might ask the people outside to bring us something else for tonight?”
“Like what?” asked Reuben.
“Oh, anything,” said Ponter. “Maybe some mammoth steaks.”
“What?”
said Reuben.
“Mammoth?”
said Mary, stunned.
“Is Hak incorrectly rendering what I am saying?” asked Ponter. “Mammoth. You know—a hairy elephant of northern climes.”
“Yes, yes, yes,” said Mary. “We
know
what a mammoth is, but …”
“But what?” asked Ponter, eyebrow lifted.
“But, well, I mean … mammoths are extinct,” said Mary.
“Extinct?” repeated Ponter, surprised. “Come to think of it, I have not seen any here, but, well, I assumed they did not like coming close to this massive city.”
“No, no, they’re extinct,” said Louise. “All over the world. They’ve been extinct for thousands of years.”
“Why?” asked Ponter. “Was it illness?”
Everyone fell silent. Mary slowly exhaled the air in her lungs, trying to decide how to present this. “No, that’s not why,” she said, at last. “Umm, you see, we—our kind, our ancestors—we hunted mammoths to extinction.”
Ponter’s eyes went wide. “You did what?”
Mary felt nauseous; she hated having her version of humanity come up so short. “We killed them for food, and, well, we kept on killing them until there were none left.”
“Oh,” said Ponter, softly. He looked out the window, at the large backyard to Reuben’s house. “I am fond of mammoths,” he said. “Not just their meat—which is delicious—but as animals, as part of the landscape. There is a small herd of them that lives near my home. I enjoy seeing them.”
“We have their skeletons,” said Mary, “and their tusks, and every once in a while a frozen one is found in Siberia, but …”
“All of them,” said Ponter, shaking his head back and forth slowly, sadly. “You killed all of them …”
Mary felt like protesting, “Not me personally,” but that would be disingenuous; the blood of the mammoths was indeed on her house. Still, she needed to make some defense, feeble though it was: “It happened a long time ago.”
Ponter looked queasy. “I am almost afraid to ask,” said Ponter, “but there are other large animals I am used to seeing in this part of the world on my version of Earth. Again, I had assumed they were just avoiding this city of yours, but …”
Reuben shook his shaven head. “No, that’s not it.”
Mary closed her eyes briefly. “I’m sorry, Ponter. We wiped out just about all the megafauna—here, and in Europe … and in Australia”—she felt a knot in her stomach as the litany grew—“and in New Zealand, and in South America. The only continent that has many really big animals left is Africa, and most of those are endangered.”
Bleep.
“On the verge of extinction,” said Louise.
Ponter’s tone was one of betrayal. “But you said this had all happened long ago.”
Mary looked down at her empty plate. “We stopped killing mammoths long ago, because, well, we ran out of mammoths to kill. And we stopped killing Irish elk, and the big cats that used to populate North America, and woolly rhinoceroses, and all the others, because there were none left to kill.”
“To kill every member of a species …” said Ponter. He shook his massive head slowly back and forth.
“We’ve learned better,” Mary said. “We now have programs to protect endangered species, and we’ve had some real successes. The whooping crane was once almost gone; so was the bald eagle. And the buffalo. They’ve all come back.”
Ponter’s voice was cold. “Because you stopped hunting them to extremes.”
Mary thought about protesting that it wasn’t all the result of hunting; much of it had to do with the destruction by humans of the natural habitats of these creatures—but somehow that didn’t seem any better.
“What … what other species are still endangered?” asked Ponter.
Mary shrugged a little. “Lots of kinds of birds. Giant tortoises. Panda bears. Sperm whales. Chim …”
“Chim?” said Ponter. “What are—?” He tilted his head, perhaps listening to Hak providing its best guess at the word Mary had started to say. “Oh, no. No.
Chimpanzees?
But … but these are our
cousins
. You hunt our cousins?”
Mary felt all of two feet tall. How could she tell him that chimps were killed for food, that gorillas were murdered so their hands could be made into exotic ashtrays?
“They are
invaluable
,” continued Ponter. “Surely you, as a geneticist, must know that. They are the only close living relatives we have; we can learn much about ourselves by studying them in the wild, by examining their DNA.”
“I know,” said Mary, softly. “I know.”
Ponter looked at Reuben, then at Louise, and then at Mary, sizing them up, it seemed, as if he were seeing them—
really
seeing them—for the first time.
“You kill with abandon,” he said. “You kill entire species. You even kill other primates.” He paused and looked from face to face again, as if giving them a chance to forestall what he was about to say, to come up with a logical explanation, a mitigating factor. But Mary said nothing, and neither did the other two, and so Ponter went on. “And, on this world, my kind is extinct.”
“Yes,” said Mary, very softly. She knew what had happened. Although not every paleoanthropologist agreed, many shared her view that between 40,000 and 27,000 years ago,
Homo sapiens
—anatomically modern humans—completed the first of what would be many deliberate or inadvertent genocides, wiping the planet free of the only other extant member of the same genus, a separate, more gentle species that perhaps had been better entitled to the double meaning of the word humanity.
“Did you kill us?” asked Ponter.
“That’s a much-debated question,” said Mary. “Not everyone agrees on the answer.”
“What do
you
think happened?” asked Ponter, golden eyes locked on Mary’s own.
Mary took a deep breath. “I—yes, yes, that’s what I think happened.”
“You wiped us out,” said Ponter, his own tone, and Hak’s rendition of it, clearly being controlled with difficulty.
Mary nodded. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Really, I am. It happened long ago. We were savages then. We—”
Just then, the phone rang. Reuben, looking relieved at the interruption, jumped up from the table and lifted a handset. “Hello?” he said.
Mary looked up as Reuben’s voice became more excited. “But that’s terrific!” continued the doctor. “That’s wonderful! Yes, no—yes, yes, that’s fine. Thank you! Right. Bye.”
“Well?” said Louise.
Reuben was clearly suppressing a grin. “Ponter has distemper,” he said, replacing the phone’s handset.
“Distemper?” repeated Mary. “But humans don’t get distemper.”
“That’s right,” said Reuben. “We’re naturally immune. But Ponter isn’t, because his kind hasn’t lived with our domesticated animals for generations. To be precise, he’s got the horse version of distemper; vets call it
strangles
when it happens to a young horse. It’s caused by a bacterium,
Streptococcus equii.
Fortunately, penicillin is the usual treatment given to horses, and that’s one of the antibiotics I’ve been giving Ponter. He should be fine.”