Hybrids np-3

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Ponter nodded.

  “Ready?” said Hak.

  Ponter nodded again.

  “Go!”

  The travel cube lurched violently, but it did rise from the ground.

  “Now, push in the green bud,” said Hak. “Yes. Move the right-hand lever back as far as it will go.”

  The cube sped forward, although it was listing badly to one side. “We’re not level,” said Mary.

  “Do not worry about it,” said Hak. “Ponter, pull the right lever back one-eighth of a turn. Yes, now…”

  It only took a few minutes to get out of Saldak Center, but it was still a long way to the mine—and it was bloody complicated operating a vehicle that could fly. Mary had never believed it on TV shows when ground controllers were able to talk passengers into landing planes after the pilots had passed out, and—

  “No, Ponter!” said Hak, his volume high. “The other way!”

  Ponter pulled the horizontal control toward him, but it was too late. The right side of the travel cube slammed into a tree. Ponter and Mary pitched forward. The control sticks collapsed into the dashboard, like telescopes being put away, apparently a safety feature to prevent them from impaling the driver. The cube tumbled over onto its side.

  “Anybody hurt?” shouted Mary.

  “No,” said Reuben. And, “No,” agreed Louise.

  “Ponter?”

  There was no reply. Mary turned to face him. “Ponter? ”

  Ponter was looking down at the Companion implant on his left forearm. It had obviously smashed into something. He opened Hak’s faceplate, which clearly took some force to do; it had been deformed by the crash.

  Ponter looked up, his deep-set golden eyes moist. “Hak is badly hurt,” he said—Christine providing the translation.

  “We’ve got to get going,” said Mary gently.

  Ponter looked for a few more seconds at his damaged Companion, then nodded. He twisted, then pushed the starfish-shaped door control, and the side of the travel cube popped open. Reuben hauled himself up and out, then dropped to the ground. Louise climbed out next. Ponter easily lifted himself out of the front compartment, then he gave Mary a hand exiting. Then Ponter turned his attention to the exposed underbelly of the travel cube. Mary followed his gaze and could see that the twin fan assemblies were horribly mangled. “It’s not going to fly again, is it?” she asked.

  Ponter shook his head and made a rueful “look at it” gesture with his right arm.

  “How far are we from the Debral mine?” asked Mary.

  “Twenty-one kilometers,” said Christine.

  “And where is the nearest working travel cube?”

  “A moment,” said Christine. “Seven kilometers to the west.”

  “Merde, ” said Louise.

  “All right,” said Mary. “Let’s start walking.”

  It was getting quite dark—and they were out in the middle of the countryside. Mary had seen enough big animals here during the day; she was terrified to think of what creatures might come out at night. They trudged through the snow for perhaps ten kilometers—five hours of walking in these difficult conditions. Louise’s long legs tending to put her out in front.

  Overhead, the stars were out—the circumpolar constellations that the Barasts called the Cracked Ice, and the Head of the Mammoth. They continued on, farther and farther, Mary’s ears feeling numb from the cold, until—

  “Gristle!” said Ponter. Mary turned. He was leaning against Reuben. Ponter held up his hands, and—

  Mary felt her heart flutter, and she heard Louise let out a horrified sound. There was blood on Ponter’s hands, looking black in the moonlight. It was too late; the hemorrhagic fever, with its artificially accelerated incubation time, had taken hold. Mary looked at Ponter’s face, wincing in expectation of what she’d see, but, except for a startled expression, he looked fine.

  Mary moved quickly over to Ponter, and braced his other arm, helping to hold him up. And that’s when she realized that it wasn’t Reuben who was helping Ponter stand; it was Ponter who was helping Reuben.

  In the dim light, and against his dark skin, Mary had missed it at first: blood on Reuben’s face. She hurried over to him, and almost threw up. Blood was seeping out from around Reuben’s eyeballs and ears and running from his nostrils and the corners of his mouth.

  Louise was over to her boyfriend in two long strides, and started wiping the blood away, first with her coat’s sleeve, then with her bare hands, but it was now coming in such profusion that she couldn’t keep up with it. Ponter helped Reuben down onto the snow, and the blood splashed loudly against the whiteness, seeping deeply into it.

  “God,” said Mary softly.

  “Reuben, mon cher…” said Louise, crouching in the snow next to him. She placed a hand gently on the back of his head, no doubt feeling the stubble that had grown today.

  “Lou…eese,” he said softly. “Darling, I—” He coughed, and blood welled out of his mouth. And then, as Mary knew he always did when he said the magic words, Reuben switched to French: “Je t’aime. ”

  Tears began dripping from Louise’s eyes as the weight of Reuben’s head fell backward against her hand. Mary was searching for a pulse on Reuben’s right arm; Ponter was doing the same with his left. They exchanged shakes of their heads.

  Louise’s face contorted, and she cried and cried. Mary moved over to her, kneeling in the snow, an arm around the younger woman, pulling her close. “I’m sorry,” Mary said, over and over again, stroking Louise’s hair. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…”

  After a few moments, Ponter touched Louise’s shoulder gently, and she looked up. “We can’t stay here,” he said, again with Christine translating.

  Mary said, “Ponter’s right, Louise. It’s getting way too cold. We’ve got to start walking.”

  But Louise was still crying, her fists balled tightly. “That bastard,” she said, her whole body shaking. “That bloody monster!”

  “Louise,” said Mary gently. “I—”

  “Don’t you see?” said Louise, looking up at Mary. “Don’t you see what Krieger did? He wasn’t content to kill Neanderthals! He made his virus kill black people, too!” She shook her head. “But…but I didn’t know a virus could work that fast.”

  Mary shrugged. “Most viral infections are caused by just a few individual virus particles, introduced at a single point on the body. Much of the incubation period is spent just amplifying those initial few particles into a large enough population of viruses to do their dirty work. But we were all literally soaked in a fog of virus, inhaling and absorbing billions of virus particles.” She looked at the darkening sky, then back at Louise. “We have to find shelter.”

  “What about Reuben?” asked Louise. “We can’t leave him here.”

  Mary looked at Ponter, pleading with her eyes for him to stay silent. The last thing Louise needed to hear just now was, Reuben is no more.

  “We’ll come back for him tomorrow,” said Mary, “but we’ve got to get indoors.”

  Louise hesitated for several seconds, and Mary had the good sense not to prod her further. Finally, the younger woman nodded, and Mary helped her to her feet.

  A bitter wind was blowing, causing the snow to drift. Still, they could see the tracks they’d made coming out this way. “Christine,” said Mary, “is there any shelter around here?”

  “Let me check,” said Christine, then, a moment later: “According to the central map database, there is a hunting lodge not far from where our travel cube crashed. It’ll be easier to reach than the City Center.”

  “You two head there,” said Ponter. “I’m going to try to make it out to the decontamination facility. Forgive me, but the two of you would just hold me back.”

  Mary’s heart jumped. There were so many things she wanted to say to him, but—

  “I will be fine,” said Ponter. “Don’t worry.”

  Mary took a deep breath, nodded, and let Ponter draw her into a farewell hug, her
body shaking. He released her, then headed off into the cold night. Mary fell in next to Louise, and they trudged ahead, taking directions from Christine.

  After a time, though, Louise stumbled, falling face first into the snow. “Are you okay?” Mary asked, helping her up.

  “Oui, ” said Louise. “I—my mind keeps wandering. He was such a wonderful man…”

  It took most of an hour to get to the hunting lodge, Mary shivering all the way, but finally they came to it. The lodge looked much like Vissan’s cabin, but larger. They went inside, and activated the lighting ribs, filling the interior with a cold green glow. There was a small heating unit, which they eventually figured out how to turn on. Mary looked at her watch and shook her head. Even Ponter couldn’t have made it to the mine’s decontamination facility yet.

  They were both exhausted—physically and emotionally. Louise lay on the one couch, hugging herself, crying softly. Mary lay down on a cushioned part of the floor, and found herself crying as well, heartsick, despondent, overwhelmed by grief and guilt, haunted by the image of a good man weeping blood.

  Chapter Forty-two

  “And if that notion isn’t correct—if this and other universes are, as some scientists and philosophers believe, teeming with intelligent life—then we have another duty when we take our next small steps, and that is to put our best foot forward: to show all the other form s of life the greatness that isHomo sapiens, in all our wonderful and myriad diversity….”

  Mary prayed repeatedly throughout the night, whispering softly, trying not to disturb Louise. “God in heaven, God of grace, save him…”

  And later: “God, please, don’t let Ponter die.”

  And later still: “Damn you, God, you owe me one…”

  Finally, after tossing and turning all night, tormented by dreams of drowning in a sea of blood, Mary became aware of sunlight streaming in through the lodge’s small window, and the kek-kek-kek call of passenger pigeons heralding the dawn.

  Louise was also awake, lying on the couch, staring up at the wooden ceiling.

  There was a vacuum box and a laser cooker in the hunting lodge, presumably powered by solar panels on the roof. Mary opened the vacuum box and found some chops—of what kind of animal, she had no idea—and some roots. She cooked them up, making a simple breakfast for her and Louise.

  The lodge had a small square table with saddle-seats on all four sides. Mary straddled one, and Louise sat opposite her.

  “How are you doing?” asked Mary gently, after they’d finished eating. She’d never seen Louise like this: bedraggled, with dark circles under her eyes.

  “I’m okay,” she said softly, in her accented voice, but she sounded anything but.

  Mary wasn’t sure what to say. She didn’t know whether it was best to bring up the topic of Reuben, or to let it be, in hopes that Louise had somehow put it out of her own mind, at least for a few moments. But then Mary thought of the rape, and her utter inability to stop thinking about it early on. There was no way Louise could be thinking about anything other than her dead boyfriend.

  Mary reached a hand across the table, taking one of Louise’s. “He was a good man,” she said, her own voice breaking as she did so.

  Louise nodded, her brown eyes dry but bloodshot. “We’d talked about moving in together.” Louise shook her head. “He was divorced, and, you know, nobody my age bothers getting married in Québec—the law treats you the same whether you have the piece of paper or not, so why bother? But we’d talked about making things permanent.” She looked away. “It was almost a joke between us. He’d say things like, ‘Well, when we move in together, we’ll have to get a place with big closets,’ because he thought I had too many clothes.” She looked at Mary; her eyes were moist now. “Just joking stuff like that, but…” She shook her head. “But, you know, I thought it was really going to happen. After I finished my work at Synergy, I’d move back up to Sudbury. Or we’d go to Montréal, and Reuben would set himself up in private practice. Or…” She shrugged, apparently realizing it was pointless to go on enumerating options that now could never be.

  Mary squeezed Louise’s hand, and just sat with her for a time. Finally, though, she said, “I want to go find Ponter.” She shook her head. “Damn, I got so used to these Companions letting us keep in touch, but with Hak broken…”

  “Ponter must be okay,” said Louise, realizing, apparently, that it was now her turn to provide comfort. “He wasn’t showing the slightest sign of fever.”

  Mary tried to nod in agreement, but her head didn’t seem to want to move. She was so upset, so nervous, so…

  Suddenly there was a scratching sound at the door. Mary’s heart jumped. She knew she almost certainly had nothing to fear from Neanderthals, but this was prime hunting territory—or else the lodge wouldn’t have been built here. Who knew what sorts of beasts were prowling outside?

  “We can’t go looking for Ponter,” said Louise. “Think about it: the lasers may have zapped the virus that was in him, but that hardly confers immunity, and we’re infected, too, no? It may not do anything to white Gliksins, but we’re carriers. He can’t see us until you and I have been decontaminated, as well.”

  “So, what should we do then?” asked Mary.

  “Get Jock Krieger,” said Louise.

  “What? Why? He can’t hurt anyone where we left him.”

  “No, but if there is an antidote for the virus, or a way to neutralize it on a large scale, he’s the one who would know, right?”

  “What makes you think he’ll tell us?” said Mary.

  Louise’s tone was firm for the first time since Reuben had died. “If he doesn’t, I’ll kill him,” she said simply.

  They waited until it had been many minutes since they’d heard any animal sounds from outside. Then, cautiously, they opened the lodge’s door, snow swirling in.

  It took most of the morning to reach the building near Konbor Square where’d they’d deposited the trussed-up Jock Krieger.

  “I half expect him to be gone,” said Louise as they approached the closed door. “That bastard seems to have no end of tricks up his sleeve…”

  She pushed up the five-pronged control that unlatched the door.

  Jock was not gone.

  He was lying on his side. Pools of dark blood were on the floor around him. His skin was white, waxy.

  Mary turned him over. There was coagulated blood all over Jock’s cheeks and chin, and extending down like wine-colored sideburns from his ears. She glanced down briefly and saw that his pants were also soaked with blood, which had presumably poured out of his lower orifices.

  Mary fought to keep down the tubers and meat she’d eaten for breakfast. She looked over at Louise, who was biting her lower lip. Mary turned away and tried to make sense of it all.

  Two dead Gliksins.

  Two dead male Gliksins…

  It was almost as if…

  Surfer Joe, Mark II.

  But no. No, that was impossible. Impossible! Yes, Mary had doodled a design for a virus that would only kill male Gliksins, but she’d shredded those sheets of paper, and she’d certainly never coded it into Jock’s program. He’d obviously made his virus before Mary had rendered it harmless, then, but…

  But it was behaving like the one Mary had thought of, the one that would kill Homo sapiens who had Y chromosomes.

  Mary hadn’t made that virus. She had not …

  Unless…

  No, no. That was crazy.

  But she’d traveled between universes, and so had Jock. And if, in one version of her reality, she had not made Surfer Joe deadly to male Homo sapiens, then…

  Then, perhaps, in another version of reality she had gone ahead with her fantasy, had mapped out such a virus…

  And this Jock Krieger, the one who had exsanguinated through every natural opening in his body, might have come from that version of reality…

  Mary shook her head. It was all too bizarre. Besides, hadn’t Ponter and Louise said often enough
that the universe Mary called home and the one Ponter called home were entangled? That they were the two original branches that had split apart when consciousness first arose on Earth 40,000 years ago?

  If that was the case…

  If that was the case, then someone other than Mary had modified the virus.

  But who? Why?

  Chapter Forty-three

  “And we are just that: a great and wonderful people. Yes, we have made missteps—but we made them because we are always walking forward, always marching toward our destiny…”

  Cornelius Ruskin tried to control it as he watched the news report, but he couldn’t: his whole body was shaking.

  He’d intended his modification of Jock Krieger’s Surfaris virus as a defensive weapon, not an offensive one—a way of protecting the Neanderthal world from the depredations of…

  …well, of people like him. Like he used to be…

  And now, two men were dead.

  Of course, if all went as he’d expected from now on, no more would die. Male Homo sapiens would stay in their own world, denied nothing except the right to take their evil through the portal.

  Cornelius had found a nice rental house in Rochester, on a tree-lined Leave It to Beaver street; such a wonderful contrast to his old penthouse in the slums. But it didn’t feel comfortable; it felt like hell. He was gripping the arms of his new easy chair, trying to steady himself, as CNN showed the interview with Mary Vaughan, one of the women he’d raped. Not that she was discussing that; rather, she was explaining why male Gliksins had to stay here, in this world, never traveling to the Neanderthal one. Accompanying her, looking hale and hearty, was Ponter Boddit.

  The interview had been done by CBC Newsworld, and picked up by CNN; Mary had apparently stood Newsworld up a few days ago, when she’d raced off to try to stop Jock Krieger, but now she was back here, in this reality.