Bandra evidently detected something in Mary’s tone. “Ah,” she said.
“You know we had some…some matters to work out.”
Bandra nodded.
“Ponter proposed a solution—or at least a partial solution.”
“I have been dreading this moment,” Bandra said softly.
“You knew that this situation could not last,” said Mary. “I…I can’t stay here forever.”
“Why not?” said Bandra, her voice plaintive.
“Just yesterday, Jock—my boss—was asking me when I’m coming home. And I do have to go back; I still have to complete the annulment of my marriage to Colm. Besides, I…”
“Yes?”
Mary moved the shoulder that she wasn’t leaning on. “I just can’t take it—being here, in this world, with Ponter so close and yet being unable to see him.”
Bandra closed her eyes. “So what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to return to my world,” said Mary.
“And that’s it? You’re leaving Ponter? You’re leaving me?”
“I’m not leaving Ponter,” said Mary. “I will come back here every month, when Two become One.”
“You will travel back and forth between worlds?”
“Yes. I will finish my contract at the Synergy Group, then try to get a job in Sudbury—that’s where the portal is located in my world. There’s a university there.”
“I see,” said Bandra, and Mary could hear the effort she was making to keep her tone even. “Well, I suppose that makes sense.”
Mary nodded.
“I will miss you, Mare. I will miss you greatly.”
Mary touched Bandra’s arm again. “This doesn’t have to be goodbye,” said Mary.
But Bandra shook her head. “I know what Two becoming One is like. Oh, for a few months, perhaps, you might make a token effort to see me briefly during each trip here, but you will really want to spend all your time with your man-mate.” Bandra raised a hand. “And I understand that. You have a good man, a fine human being. If I had the same…”
“You don’t need a man-mate,” said Mary. “No woman, on either side of the portal, does.”
Bandra’s voice was soft. “But I have a man-mate, so for me there is no alternative.”
Mary smiled. “A funny word, that: alternative.” She closed her eyes briefly, remembering. “I know, in your language, it is habadik. But unlike some words that only translate approximately, that one is an exact counterpart: the choice between two, and only two, possibilities. I have some biologist friends who would argue that the concept of alternatives is ingrained in us because of our body form: on the one hand, you could do this; on the other hand, you could do that. An articulate octopus might have no word for the condition of having only two choices.”
Bandra was staring at Mary. “What are you talking about?” she said at last, clearly exasperated.
“I’m talking about the fact that there are other possibilities for you.”
“I will do nothing to jeopardize my daughters’ ability to reproduce.”
“I know that,” said Mary. “Believe me, that’s the last thing I would want.”
“Then what?”
Mary pushed herself forward on the cushions, closing the distance between her and Bandra, and she kissed Bandra full on the lips. “Come with me,” said Mary, when she was done.
“What? ”
“Come with me, to the other side. To my world. To Sudbury.”
“How would that solve my problem?”
“You would stay in my world when Two become One. You would never have to see Harb again.”
“But my daughters…”
“Are just that: daughters. They will always live in the City Center. They will be safe from him.”
“But I would die if I could never see them again.”
“So come back when Two are separate. Come back when there is no chance of you seeing Harb. Come back and visit your daughters—and their children—as often as you wish.”
Bandra was clearly trying to take it all in. “You mean you and I would both commute between the two worlds, but we would each come back here at different times?”
“Exactly. I’d only come for visits when Two are One—and you’d only come for visits when they aren’t. Work schedules in Canada are five days on, two days off—we call the days off ‘weekends.’ You could come back for each weekend that didn’t happen to fall during Two becoming One.”
“Harb would be furious.”
“Who cares?”
“I would have to travel to the Rim in order to use the portal.”
“So just don’t ever do it alone. Make sure there’s no way he could approach you there.”
Bandra sounded dubious. “I…I suppose it might work.”
“It will,” said Mary firmly. “If he objected, or tried to see you at the wrong times of the month, the truth about him would come out. He may not care about what happens to you or to his daughters, but he doubtless doesn’t wish to be castrated himself.”
“You would do this for me?” said Bandra. “You would make a home with me in your world?”
Mary nodded and hugged her close.
“What would I do there?” asked Bandra.
“Teach, at Laurentian, with me. There’s not a university in my world that would turn down a chance to add a Neanderthal geologist to its faculty.”
“Really?”
“Oh, yes, indeed.”
“So we could live and work together in your world?”
“Yes.”
“But…but you told me that it was not the way of your people. Two women together…”
“It is not the way of most of my people,” said Mary. “But it is of some. And Ontario, where we’ll live, is one of the most understanding places in all my world about such things.”
“But…but would this make you happy?”
Mary smiled. “There are no perfect solutions. But this one comes close.”
Bandra was crying, but they were clearly tears of joy. “Thank you, Mary.”
“No,” said Mary. “Thank you. To you, and to Ponter.”
“Ponter I can understand, but me? Why?”
Mary hugged her again. “You both showed me new ways of being human. And for that, I’ll always be grateful.”
Chapter Thirty-one
“Of course, once we’re there, once we have planted flowers in the rusty sand of the fourth planet from our sun, once we’ve nurtured them with water taken from Mars’ polar caps, we Homo sapiens might again briefly pause to smell those roses…”
“Asshole!”
Jock knew the other driver couldn’t hear him—it was too cold a day for anyone to have their windows down—but he hated it when morons cut him off.
The traffic seemed intolerable today. Of course, Jock reflected, it was probably no worse than any other day driving here in Rochester, but everything seemed unbearable in comparison to the clean, idyllic beauty he’d seen on the other side.
“The other side.” Christ, his mother used to talk about heaven that way. “Things’ll be better on the other side.”
Jock didn’t believe in heaven—or hell, for that matter—but he couldn’t deny the reality of the Neanderthal world. Of course, it was pure dumb luck that they hadn’t made a mess of things. If real humans had noses like that, we probably wouldn’t have been willing to wallow in our own garbage, either.
Jock stopped at a traffic light. A front page from USA Today was blowing across the street. Kids were smoking at the bus stop. There was a McDonald’s a block ahead. Sirens were wailing in the distance, and car horns were honking. A truck next to him belched smoke out of a vertical exhaust pipe. Jock looked left and right, eventually spotting a single tree growing out of a concrete planter half a block away.
The radio newsreader started with a disgruntled man having shot and killed four coworkers at an electronics plant in Illinois. He then gave ten seconds to a suicide bombing in Cairo, a dozen m
ore to what looked like impending war between Pakistan and India, and rounded out his minute with an oil spill in Puget Sound, a train derailment near Dallas, and a bank robbery here in Rochester.
What a mess, Jock thought, tapping his fingers against the steering wheel, waiting for the signal to go. What a goddamned mess.
Jock came in the front door of the Synergy Group mansion. Louise Benoît happened to be in the corridor. “Hey, Jock,” she said. “So is it as beautiful as they say over on the other side?”
Jock nodded.
“I don’t know about that,” said Louise. “You missed the most amazing aurora while you were gone.”
“Here?” said Jock. “This far south?”
Louise nodded. “It was incredible; like nothing I’d ever seen before—and I’m a solar physicist. Earth’s magnetic field is really beginning to act up.”
“You seem to still be conscious,” Jock said wryly.
Louise smiled, and indicated the package he was holding. “I’m going to let that remark pass, since you brought me flowers.”
Jock looked down at the long box Mary Vaughan had given him. “Actually, it’s something Mary wanted me to bring back for her.”
“What is it?”
“That’s what I’m going to find out.”
Jock headed down the corridor to the desk where Mrs. Wallace, who served as receptionist and Jock’s administrative assistant, sat.
“Welcome back, sir!” she said.
Jock nodded. “Any appointments today?”
“Just one. I set it up while you were away; I hope you don’t mind. A geneticist looking for a job. He came very highly recommended.”
Jock grunted.
“He’ll be here at 11:30,” said Mrs. Wallace.
Jock checked his e-mail and voice mail, got himself some black coffee, and then unwrapped the package Mary had given him. It was obvious at a glance that it was alien technology: the textures, the color scheme, the overall appearance—everything was different from what a human would have made. The Neanderthal fondness for squares was very much in evidence: a square cross section, square display, and control buds arranged in squares.
Various controls were labeled—some, to his surprise, in what looked like Neanderthal handwriting. It clearly wasn’t a mass-produced device; maybe it was a prototype of some sort…
Jock picked up his telephone, and dialed an internal number. “Lonwis? It’s Jock. Can you come down to my office, please…”
* * *
Jock’s door opened—no knock first—and in came Lonwis Trob. “What is it, Jock?” said the ancient Neanderthal.
“I’ve got this device here”—he indicated the long contraption sitting on his desktop—“and I was wondering how to turn it on.”
Lonwis moved across the room; Jock could almost hear the Neanderthal’s joints creaking as he did so. He bent over—this time the creak was definitely audible—bringing his blue mechanical eyes closer to the unit. “Here,” he said, pointing to an isolated control bud. He grabbed it between two gnarled fingers, and plucked it out. The unit began to hum softly. “What is it?”
“Mary said it’s a DNA synthesizer.”
Lonwis peered some more at it. “The housing is a standard unit, but I have never seen anything quite like this. Can you pick it up for me?”
“What?” said Jock. “Oh, sure.” He lifted the device off the desktop, and Lonwis stooped to look at its underside. “You will want to hook it up to an external power source, and—yes, good: it has a standard interface port. Dr. Benoît and I have built some units that allow Neanderthal technology to be hooked up to your personal computers. Would you like one of those?”
“Um, sure. Yes.”
“I will have Dr. Benoît attend to it.” Lonwis headed for the door. “Have fun with your new toy.”
Jock spent hours examining the codon writer, and reading over the notes Mary had prepared on it.
The thing could make DNA, that much was clear.
And RNA, too, which Jock knew was another nucleic acid.
It also seemed to be able to produce associated proteins, such as those used to bind deoxyribonucleic acid into chromosomes.
Jock had a cursory understanding of genetics; many of the studies he’d been involved with at RAND concerned bio-warfare. If this device could produce nucleic-acid strings and proteins, then…
Jock steepled his fingers. What the boys at Fort Detrick would give for this!
Nucleic acids. Proteins.
Those were the building blocks of viruses, which were, after all, just scraps of DNA or RNA contained in protein coats.
Jock stared at the machine, thinking.
The phone on Jock’s desk made its distinctive internal-call ring. Jock picked up the handset. “Your 11:30 appointment is here,” said Mrs. Wallace’s voice.
“Right, okay.”
A moment later a thin, blue-eyed man in his mid-thirties came through the door. “Dr. Krieger,” he said, extending his hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“Have a seat.”
The man did so, but first handed Jock a copy of a lengthy curriculum vitae. “As you can see, I have a Ph.D. in genetics from Oxford. I was associated with the Ancient Biomolecules Centre there.”
“Did you do any Neanderthal work?”
“No, not specifically. But lots of other late-Cenozoic stuff.”
“How did you hear about us?”
“I was with York University, where Mary Vaughan used to be, and—”
“We generally do our own recruiting, you know.”
“Oh, I understand that, sir. But I thought, with Mary having gone to the other universe, you might have need of a geneticist.”
Jock glanced at the object on his desktop. “As a matter of fact, Dr. Ruskin, I do.”
Chapter Thirty-two
“But smelling Martian roses will be only a pause, only a brief catching of breath, a moment of reflection, before we will again take up the journey, driving ever outward, farther and farther, learning, discovering, growing, expanding not only our borders but our minds…”
It had been almost three weeks since the United Nations contingent, including Jock, had returned home. Ponter and Adikor were working down in their quantum-computing facility, a thousand armspans below the surface, when the message came through: a courier envelope, passed along the Derkers tube by a Canadian Forces officer.
Ponter himself happened to open the package. The interior envelope bore the bisected-globe logo of the Synergy Group, and so Ponter at first assumed it was for Mare. But it wasn’t. To his astonishment, the inner envelope was addressed to him, in both English letters and Neanderthal glyphs.
Ponter opened the envelope, with his beloved Adikor looking over his shoulder. Inside was a memory bead. Ponter popped it into the player on his control console, and a three-dimensional image of Lonwis Trob appeared, his mechanical blue eyes shining from within. The image was about a third of life-size, and it floated a handspan above the console.
“Healthy day, Scholar Boddit,” said Lonwis. “I need you to return to the Synergy Group headquarters, here on the south side of Lake Jorlant—what the Gliksins still insist on calling Lake Ontario, despite me having corrected them repeatedly. As you know, I am working here with Dr. Benoît on quantum-computing issues, and I have a new idea about preventing decoherence even in surface-level systems, but I require your expertise in quantum computing. Bring your research partner, Scholar Adikor Huld; his expertise would be of considerable utility, too. Be here within three days.”
The image froze, meaning the playback had come to an end. Ponter looked at Adikor. “Would you like to come along?”
“Are you kidding?” asked Adikor. “A chance to meet Lonwis Trob! I’d love to come.”
Ponter smiled. Gliksins said that Barasts lacked the desire to explore new places. Maybe they were right: until now, despite it being his hardware that had made the portal possible, Adikor hadn’t shown any interest in seeing the Gliksi
n world. But now he was going to go over—so he could meet one of his Barast heroes.
“Three days gives us plenty of time to pack,” said Ponter. “It’s not far from here—the here that is there, I mean—to the Synergy Group headquarters.”
“I wonder what Lonwis has behind his ridge?” asked Adikor. “Who knows? But I’m sure it’s brilliant.”
The control room was empty except for Ponter and Adikor, although a Neanderthal technician was working on the computing floor, and a Neanderthal enforcer was seated by the mouth of the portal, just in case.
“I must invite Mare to join us,” said Ponter.
Adikor’s eyes narrowed. “It’s not yet time for Two to become One.”
Ponter nodded. “I know. But that rule doesn’t apply in her world, and she would never forgive me if I went over there and didn’t bring her.”
“Scholar Trob did not ask for her,” said Adikor.
Ponter reached out and touched Adikor’s arm. “I know this has been difficult for you. I’ve spent far too much time with Mare, and far too little with you. You know how much I love you.”
Adikor nodded slowly. “I’m sorry. I’m trying—I really am—not to be petty about Mare and you. I mean, I want you to have a woman-mate; you know that. But I never thought you’d find a woman-mate who would intrude on our time together.”
“It has been…complex,” said Ponter. “I apologize for that. But shortly your son Dab will come to live with us—and then you will have less time for me.”
As soon as he’d said those words, Ponter regretted them. The hurt was obvious on Adikor’s face. “We will raise Dab together,” Adikor said. “That is the way; you know that.”
“I do know. I’m sorry. It’s just that…”
“That this is so rotted awkward,” said Adikor.
“We will resolve it all soon,” said Ponter. “I promise.”
“How?”
“Mare will move to the other side of the portal and live there, in her world, except when Two become One. Things will go back to being normal between you and me, Adikor.”
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