Hybrids np-3

by Robert J. Sawyer

  This was the case for the defence, and young Jolyon sighed.

  “The core of it all,” he thought, “is property, but there are many people who would not like it put that way. To them it is ‘the sanctity of the marriage tie’; but the sanctity of the marriage tie is dependent on the sanctity of the family, and the sanctity of the family is dependent on the sanctity of property. And yet I imagine all these people are followers of One who never owned anything. It is curious!”

  And again young Jolyon sighed…

  “Interesting,” said Bandra, when Mary eventually paused.

  Mary laughed. “I’m sure you’re just being polite. It must be gibberish to you.”

  “No,” said Bandra. “No, I think I understand. This man—Soames, right?—he lives with this woman, this…”

  “Irene,” supplied Mary.

  “Yes. But there is no warmth in their relationship. He wants much more intimacy than she does.”

  Mary nodded, impressed. “Exactly.”

  “I suspect such concerns are universal,” said Bandra.

  “I guess they are,” said Mary. “I actually identify with Irene. She married Soames not knowing what she really wanted. Just like me with Colm.”

  “But you know what you want now?”

  “I know I want Ponter.”

  “But he does not come in isolation,” said Bandra. “He has Adikor and his daughters.”

  Mary folded down her page and closed the book. “I know,” she said softly.

  Bandra perhaps felt she had upset Mary. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m going to have something to drink. Would you like anything?”

  Mary would have killed for some wine, but the Neanderthals didn’t have such things. Still, she’d brought a kilo tin of instant coffee with her from the other side. She normally didn’t drink coffee in the evening, but Neanderthal room temperature was sixteen degrees—their scale and hers were the same; the gap between the melting point and boiling point of water divided into a hundred parts. Mary preferred twenty or twenty-one degrees; a nice drinking bowl of coffee would warm her up. “Let me help,” said Mary, and the two of them headed over to the food-preparation area.

  Back on her version of Earth, Mary kept a liter of chocolate milk on hand to mix into her coffee. She couldn’t get that here, but she’d brought along canisters of coffee whitener and hot-chocolate mix; combining them into her Maxwell House gave a reasonable enough approximation of her favorite potion.

  They returned to the living room, crossing over the moss-covered floor. Bandra sat down on one of the gently curving couches that was built into the wall of the room. Mary was about to return to her own chair, but realized that she wouldn’t have any place to set down her drinking bowl there. She fetched her paperback—Colm would have hated the way she’d creased the book’s spine and dog-eared its pages—and took a seat at the other end of the couch, setting the drinking bowl on the pine table in front of it.

  “You lived alone in your world,” said Bandra. It wasn’t a question; she already knew that.

  “Yes,” said Mary. “I have what we call a condominium apartment—a private suite of rooms in a large building that I jointly own with a couple of hundred other people.”

  “A couple of hundred!” said Bandra. “How big is this building?”

  “It’s twenty-two stories high; twenty-two levels. I’m on the seventeenth floor.”

  “The view must be magnificent!”

  “It is indeed.” But that was a reflex response, Mary knew. Her view had been of concrete and glass, of buildings and highways. It had seemed wonderful when she’d lived there, but her tastes were changing.

  “What is the status of that place?” asked Bandra.

  “I still own it. Once Ponter and I decide what we’re doing on a permanent basis, I’ll figure out what to do with it. We may want to keep it.”

  “And what are you and Ponter going to do on a permanent basis?”

  “I wish I knew,” said Mary. She picked up her drinking bowl and took a sip. “Like you said before, Ponter doesn’t come in isolation.”

  “Nor should you,” said Bandra, looking down, not meeting Mary’s eyes.

  “Pardon?” said Mary.

  “Nor should you. If you are to become part of this world, you should not be alone at any time of the month.”

  “Um,” said Mary. “On my world, most people are attracted only to individuals of the opposite sex.”

  Bandra looked up briefly, then dropped her gaze again. “There are no relations between women?”

  “Well, sure, sometimes. But usually women involved in such relationships don’t have male partners.”

  “That is not the way it is here,” said Bandra.

  Mary’s voice was soft. “I know.”

  “I—we—you and I, we have been getting along well,” said Bandra.

  Mary felt her whole body tightening. “We have, yes,” she said.

  “Here, two women living together who like each other and are not genetically related would”—suddenly Bandra’s large hand was on Mary’s knee—“would be close.”

  Mary looked down at the hand. Over the years, she’d plucked the odd man’s hand off her knee, but…

  But she didn’t want to give offense. After all, this woman had been kind enough to take her in. “Bandra, I…I’m not attracted to women.”

  “Perhaps…perhaps that is merely…” She sought a phrase. “Merely cultural conditioning.”

  Mary frowned, considering this. Perhaps it was—but that didn’t make any difference. Oh, Mary had kissed girls when she was thirteen or fourteen—but she’d just been practicing for eventually kissing boys, she and her friends being terrified that they might be no good at it.

  At least, that’s what they’d told each other, but—

  But it had been fun, in its own way.

  Still…

  “I’m sorry, Bandra. I don’t mean to be rude. But I’m really not interested.”

  “You know,” said Bandra, meeting Mary’s eyes, then looking away, “no one understands how to please a woman like another woman.”

  Mary felt her heart flutter. “I—I’m sure that’s true, but…” She gently reached down and removed Bandra’s hand. “But it’s not for me.”

  Bandra nodded several times. “If you change your mind…” she said, letting the thought hang in the air, then, after a moment, she added, “It can get awfully lonely between times of Two becoming One.”

  That much is certainly true, Mary thought, but she said nothing.

  “Well,” said Bandra, at last, “I’m going to bed. Um—‘sweet dreams’ is your phrase, isn’t it?”

  Mary managed a smile. “Yes, it is. Good night, Bandra.” She watched the Neanderthal woman pass through the doorway into her sleeping chamber; Mary had her own room, the one that used to belong to Bandra’s younger daughter Dranna. She thought about calling it a day herself, but decided to read some more, in hopes of clearing her head of what had just transpired.

  She picked up The Man of Property and opened it to the turned-down page. Galsworthy employed a mocking, ironic tone; it wasn’t just Neanderthals who found fault with Gliksins, after all. She read along, enjoying his splendid re-creation of upper-middle-class Victorian England. He certainly had a way with words, and—

  Oh, my God…

  Mary slammed the book shut, her heart racing.

  My God.

  She took a deep breath, let it out, inhaled again, exhaled.

  Soames had…

  Mary’s heart was pounding.

  Maybe she’d misread it. After all, the language wasn’t explicit. Surely it was just her own state of mind…

  She opened the book, gingerly, carefully, the way Colm would have, and found her place again, letting her eyes race over the cramped typesetting, and—

  No, there could be no doubt. Soames Forsyte, the Man of Property, had just demonstrated that he considered his wife Irene to be nothing more than that. Despite her lack of int
erest in him, and in their marriage bed, he had raped her.

  Mary had been enjoying the book to this point, especially the furtive, secret romance between Irene and the architect Bosinney—for it had reminded her a bit of her own strange, forbidden relationship with Ponter. But—

  A rape.

  A goddamned rape.

  And yet she could not blame Galsworthy. It was precisely what Soames would have done.

  Precisely what a man would have done.

  Mary put down the book next to her now-cold bowl of coffee. She found herself looking at the closed door to Bandra’s room, staring endlessly. After God only knew how long, Mary finally got up from the couch, and made her way into her own room, into loneliness, into darkness.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “Here in North America, and in India and Japan and Europe and Russia and all across this whole wide wonderful world of ours, things are mostly better than they have ever been—and they’re getting even better all the time…”

  Finally, it was time! Two had become One again. Mary and dozens of other females were waiting in an open field for the men to show up. Lurt was there, along with young Dab, her son by Adikor. Jasmel, Ponter’s elder daughter, was there, too, but she was really waiting, Mary knew, for her own man-mate, Tryon. Mega, Ponter’s younger daughter, was also there, and Mary stood next to her, holding her small hand. Mary was relieved that there was no sign of Daklar Bolbay, young Mega’s guardian; that woman had made enough trouble for Mary, Ponter, and Adikor as it was.

  At last the right hover-bus arrived. Ponter and Adikor came out, and Mary rushed to her man. They hugged and licked each other’s faces. Ponter then hugged both his daughters, and lifted Mega up on his shoulders. Adikor, meanwhile, had already disappeared with his woman-mate and son.

  Ponter had brought the trapezoidal suitcase he usually took on trips to the other Earth. Mary carried it, while he carried Mega.

  They had agreed in another chat over linked Companions to go looking for Vissan on the third of the four days of the Two-becoming-One holiday, since the forecast was for rain in Saldak then but clear skies in Kraldak.

  And so on this morning, Mary, Ponter, and Mega had a fabulous time together. Although it was getting chilly, and the trees had all changed color, the air was still crisp and clean. After lunch, Mega had gone off to play with friends, and Mary and Ponter retired to the house Mary shared with Bandra. Neanderthals were open about sex, but Mary still wasn’t comfortable making love knowing that there was anyone else at home. Fortunately, Bandra had said she would be away until evening with her own man-mate, Harb. And so Ponter and Mary had the run of the place.

  The sex, as always, was fabulous, with Mary climaxing repeatedly. When they were done, they bathed together, each lovingly cleaning the other. Then they lay on the pile of cushions, just chatting and holding each other. Mary wasn’t used to the sound of Ponter speaking with contractions, but of course he was, since Christine was now doing the translating instead of Hak.

  Mary and Ponter spent most of the afternoon cuddling and touching and talking and walking, just enjoying each other’s company. They took in a short comedic play—the Neanderthals loved live theater. Electric fans at the back of the stage blew the performers’ pheromones onto the audience while clearing the audience’s own out of the room.

  Then they enjoyed a Neanderthal board game called partanlar that was something like a cross between chess and checkers: the playing pieces were all identical, but how they could move depended upon which squares on the hundred-position grid they landed upon.

  Later, they ate at a restaurant run by two old women whose man-mates were no more, enjoying delicious venison, wonderful salads of pine nuts and fern leaves, fried tubers, and boiled duck’s eggs. There, they sat side by side on a padded couch in the restaurant’s rear, wearing Neanderthal dining gloves and taking turns feeding each other.

  “I love you,” said Mary, nestling against Ponter.

  “And I love you,” Ponter replied. “I love you so very much.”

  “I wish…I wish Two could always be One,” said Mary.

  “When I am with you, I wish it would never end, either,” said Ponter, stroking Mary’s hair.

  “But it must,” said Mary with a sigh. “I don’t know that I’ll ever fit in here.”

  “There are no perfect solutions,” said Ponter, “but you could…”

  Mary sat up and turned to face him. “What?”

  “You could go back to your world.”

  Mary felt her heart sink. “Ponter, I—”

  “For twenty-five days a month. And you come back here when Two become One. I promise that each time you do, I will give you the four most loving, fun-filled, passionately sexual days possible.”

  “I—” Mary frowned. She’d been looking for a solution that would see the two of them together constantly. But it did seem as if that wasn’t possible. Still: “The commute between Toronto and Sudbury would be awkward,” said Mary, “not to mention the decontamination procedures going each way, but…”

  “You forget who you are,” said Ponter.

  “I…I beg your pardon?”

  “You are Mare Vaughan.”

  “Yes?”

  “You are the Mare Vaughan. Any academy—excuse me, any university —would love to have you on staff.”

  “Well, and that’s another problem. I can’t possibly get four days off in a row every month.”

  “Again, you underestimate yourself.”

  “How?”

  “Do I understand your academic schedules correctly? You are in session for eight months a year.”

  “September to April, yes. Autumn to spring.”

  “So four or five occurrences of Two becoming One will happen when you’re not obligated to the university. Of the remaining eight, a goodly number will partially fall on those first and last days of your seven-day clusters during which you do not work.”

  “Still…”

  “Still, there would be days you would have to miss being at the university.”

  “Exactly. And no one is going to understand that—”

  “Forgive me, beloved, but everyone is going to understand. Even before this visit, but especially now, you know more not just about the genetics of Neanderthals than any other Gliksin, but you also know more of what Neanderthals know of genetics than any other Gliksin. You would be an asset to any university, and if a few accommodations have to be made to your special needs, I’m sure that could be arranged.”

  “I think you’re underestimating the difficulties.”

  “Am I? The way to find out is to try.”

  Mary pursed her lips, thinking. He was right; it certainly couldn’t hurt to ask. “Still, it takes most of a day to get from Toronto to Sudbury, especially once you add the time getting down to the portal onto the car trip. Four days could easily become six.”

  “If you went back to living in Toronto, yes. But why not make your contribution at Laurentian University in Sudbury? They already know you there from the work you did during my first visit to your world.”

  “Laurentian,” said Mary, tasting the word, tasting the idea. It was a lovely, small university, with a first-rate genetics department, and it did all that fascinating forensic work—

  Forensics.

  The rape. The goddamned rape.

  Mary doubted she’d ever be comfortable working at Toronto’s York University again. Not only would she have to face Cornelius Ruskin, but she would also have to work side by side with Qaiser Remtulla, the other woman who had been raped by Ruskin, a rape that might have been prevented if Mary had reported the attack on herself. Every time she thought of Qaiser, Mary was wracked with guilt; working with her would be devastating—and working with Cornelius would be terrifying.

  There was a certain elegance to what Ponter was proposing.

  Teaching genetics at Laurentian…

  Living just a short drive from the Creighton Mine, the threshold to the original interuniversal por
tal…

  And spending even just four days a month with Ponter would be more wonderful, more fabulous, than a 24/7 relationship with any other man she could imagine…

  “But what…what about generation 149? What about our child? I couldn’t bear to see my baby only once a month.”

  “In our culture, children live with their female parents.”

  “But only until they’re ten, if they’re male. Then, like Dab will soon, they go live with their fathers. I wouldn’t be able to let my child leave me after only a decade.”

  Ponter nodded. “Whatever solution we find to allowing us to have a child will require manipulation of chromosomes. Surely, in that process, it’s a trivial matter to make sure our child is female. Such a child would live with her mother until she reached her two-hundred-and-twenty-fifth month—over eighteen of your years. Isn’t that a typical age for children to stay with their parents, even in your world?”

  Mary’s head was spinning. “You are a brilliant man, Scholar Boddit,” she said, at last.

  “I do my best, Scholar Vaughan.”

  “It’s not a perfect solution.”

  “Such things are rare,” said Ponter.

  Mary thought about that, then snuggled closer to Ponter and gave the left side of his face a long, slow lick. “You know,” she said, pressing her face into his furry cheek, “it might just work.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  “So: it’s perfectly reasonable that we took a hiatus, that we enjoyed the first few decades of post-Cold War prosperity, that we indulged in one of the other things that makes our kind of humanity great: we stopped and smelled the roses…”