Hybrids

by neetha Napew

  Mary and Lurt walked to that door, opened it, and entered.

  “Healthy day, Bandra,” said Lurt.

  A Neanderthal woman’s broad back was facing them. She turned around and smiled. “Lurt Fradlo! Healthy day!” Then her eyes-an arresting wheat color-fell on Mary. “And you must be Scholar Vaughan,” she said. “Lurt said you were coming.” She smiled again and, to Mary’s astonishment, offered her hand.

  Mary took it and shook it firmly. “I-I didn’t think Neanderthals shook hands.”

  “Oh, we don’t,” said Bandra, grinning. “But I have been reading all about you Gliksins. Such a fascinating people!” She let go of Mary’s hand. “Did I do it properly?”

  “Yes,” said Mary. “Just fine.”

  Bandra was beaming. She was a 144, nine years older than Mary-actually, eight and a half, more likely, since Mary had been born in September, and most Neanderthals were born in the spring. Bandra’s facial and body hair was a lovely mixture of copper and silver. “Good, good. Oh, wait! There is another ritual!” She composed her pleasant features into a mock-serious expression. “Howare you?”

  Mary laughed. “I’m fine, thanks. And you?”

  “I am fine, too.” Bandra burst out laughing. “Such wonderful people! So many little pleasantries!” She smiled at Mary. “It really is a treat to meet you, Scholar Vaughan.”

  “You can call me Mary.”

  “No, I can’t,” said Bandra, laughing again. “But I would be delighted to call you ‘Mare.’ “

  Bandra’s lab was filled with mineralogical specimens-rock crystals, polished stones, beautifully prepared geodes, and more. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet a Gliksin,” continued Bandra. “I read everything I can find about you people.”

  “Um, thank you.”

  “So, tell me about yourself. Do you have children?”

  “Not yet,” said Mary.

  “Ah. Well, I have two daughters and a grandson. Would you like to see pictures?”

  “Um, sure.”

  But Bandra laughed once more. “You Gliksins and your complex manners! How wonderfully accommodating you are! I understand I could force you to look for daytenths at images I have recorded while traveling.”

  Mary found herself feeling very relaxed; Bandra’s good humor was infectious.

  “I hope you don’t mind us stopping by,” said Lurt, “but...”

  “But you were in the neighborhood!” said Bandra, grinning broadly at Mary.

  Mary nodded.

  “Out and about,” continued Bandra-saying it as “oot and aboot,” the exaggerated accent that Americans ascribed to Canadians but that Mary had yet to actually hear from any of her compatriots. “Such wonderful turns of phrase you Gliksins have.”

  “Thank you.”

  “So,” said Bandra, “Lurt said you had a favor to ask.” She gestured at the rocks spread out around the room. “I can’t imagine what help a geologist might be to you, but-and this one is one of my favorites-‘I am all ears.’ “ Bandra beamed at Mary.

  “Well, um, I...um, I’m looking for a place to stay, here in Saldak Center.”

  “Really?” said Bandra.

  Mary smiled. “If I’m lying, I’m dying.”

  Bandra roared with laughter. “I hope you’re doing neither!” She paused. “I do have a big old house, and Iam all alone in it now.”

  “So Lurt said. I will only be here for a month or so, but if you’d like to have a housemate...”

  “Iwould , but...” Bandra trailed off.

  Mary wanted to say, “But what?” But she had no right to pry; it was hardly incumbent on Bandra to justify turning Mary down.

  Still, after a moment, Bandra went on. “Only a month, you say? So, you would be here only during the next Two becoming One?”

  “Yes,” said Mary, “but I’ll stay out of your way then, of course.”

  Mary could see emotions warring across Bandra’s wide face-and she certainly could understand that. The Neanderthal woman was doubtless weighing the inconvenience of having a stranger move in against her scientific fascination at getting to spend time with a being from another world.

  “Very well,” said Bandra, at last. “What is your phrase? ‘Your home is my home.’ “

  “I think it’s the other way around,” said Mary.

  “Ah, yes, yes! I’m still learning!”

  Mary smiled. “So am I.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “But it has been three decades since Eugene Cernan became the last person to walk on the moon. The last person! Who would have thought that whole generations would be born after 1972 for whom the notion of humans on other worlds would be nothing but a lesson in history class...?”

  Mary found Bandra’s home much more comfortable than Lurt’s, even though it wasn’t any bigger. For one thing, the furniture was more to Mary’s taste. And for another, it turned out that Bandra was both a bird-watcher and a wonderful artist: she had covered the wooden interior walls and ceilings with Audubon-quality paintings of local birds, including, of course, passenger pigeons. Mary loved birds herself: that had been why she’d been working on passenger-pigeon DNA back at York while her grad student, Daria, had had the seemingly more sexy assignment of recovering genetic material from an Egyptian mummy.

  Mary found it strange to come home before Bandra did-and even stranger just to walk in the front door. But, of course, Neanderthals didn’t lock their homes; they didn’t have to.

  Bandra had a household robot-many Barasts did. It was a spindly, insectlike being. It regarded Mary with blue mechanical eyes-not unlike those Lonwis had-but went puttering along, cleaning and dusting.

  Although Mary knew she couldn’t see Ponter until Two next became One, there was no reason she couldn’t call him-her shiny new Companion could connect to his Companion, or any other, without difficulty.

  And so Mary made herself comfortable-lying down on the couch in Bandra’s living room, staring up at the beautiful mural on the ceiling-and had Christine call up Hak.

  “Hi, sweetie,” she said-which was even worse than “honey” as far as being an endearment that couldn’t be reproduced by Ponter, but all he would have heard was the translation Christine provided.

  “Mare!” Ponter’s voice was full of excitement. “How good to hear from you!”

  “I miss you,” Mary said. She felt like she was eighteen again, talking to her boyfriend Donny from her bedroom at her parents’ house.

  “I miss you, too.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I am taking Pabo for a walk. We can both use the exercise.”

  “Is Adikor with you?”

  “No, he’s at home. So, what’s new?”

  It was astonishing after all this time to hear Ponter using contractions-which led to Mary starting by telling him all about the installation of her permanent Companion. She went on to talk about moving into Bandra’s house, and then: “Lurt said something very intriguing. She said there’s a banned device that could help us have a child.”

  “Really?” said Ponter. “What is it?”

  “She said it was the invention of someone named Vissan Lennet.”

  “Oh!” said Ponter. “I recall her now; I saw it on my Voyeur. She removed her Companion, and went to live in the wilderness. Some sort of conflict with the High Grays over an invention.”

  “Exactly!” said Mary. “She’d invented a device called a codon writer that could produce any DNA strings one might want-which is exactly what we need in order to have a baby. Lurt thinks Vissan probably still has her prototype.”

  “Perhaps so,” said Ponter. “But if she does-excuse me. Good dog! Good dog! Here, there you go! Fetch! Fetch! Sorry, I was saying, if it does exist, it’s still banned.”

  “That’s right,” said Mary. “Inthis world. But if we took it back tomy world...”

  “That’s brilliant!” said Ponter. “But how do we get it?”

  “I figure we find Vissan and simply ask her for it. What have we got to
lose?”

  “And how do we find her? She doesn’t have a Companion.”

  “Well, Lurt said she used to live in a town called Kraldak. Do you know where that is?”

  “Sure. It’s just north of LakeDuranlan -Lake Erie. Kraldak is about where Detroit is in your world.”

  “Well, if she’s living in the wilderness, she can’t have gone too far from there, can she?”

  “I suppose. She certainly couldn’t use any form of transit without a Companion.”

  “And Lurt said she’s probably built a cabin.”

  “That makes sense.”

  “So we could search satellite photos for a new cabin-one that isn’t on maps that are more than four months old.”

  “You’re forgetting where you are, my love,” said Ponter. “Barasts have no satellites.”

  “Right. Damn. What about aerial reconnaissance? You know-pictures taken from airplanes?”

  “No airplanes, either-although we’ve got helicopters.”

  “Well, would there be any helicopter surveys done since she left?”

  “How long ago was that again?”

  “Lurt said about four months.”

  “Well, then, yes, sure. Forest fires are a problem in summer, of course-both those caused by lightning and by human error. Aerial photographs are taken to track them.”

  “Can we access them?”

  “Hak?”

  Hak’s voice came into Mary’s head. “Iam accessing them, even as we speak,” the Companion said. “According to the alibi archives, Vissan Lennet’s Companion went off-line on 148/101/17, and there have been three aerial surveys of Kraldak and environs since then. But although a cabin might be easily visible in winter, when the deciduous trees have lost their leaves, spotting such a thing through the summertime canopy will be difficult.”

  “But you’ll try?” asked Mary.

  “Of course.”

  “It’s probably pointless, though,” said Mary with a sigh. “Surely others have tried to track her down, if what Lurt said about Vissan’s codon writer is true.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, you know: sterilized individuals, looking to circumvent the sanction that had been imposed on them.”

  “Perhaps,” replied Ponter, “but it’s not been that long since Vissan chose to leave society, and there are not that many sterilized people. And, after all, no one on this world is looking to conceive prior to next summer, so-“

  “Excuse me,” said Hak. “I have found it.”

  “What?” said Mary.

  “The cabin-or, at least, a cabin that is not on any of the older maps. It is approximately thirty-five kilometers due west of Kraldak.” Hak translated the Neanderthal units for Mary, although Ponter had probably heard something like “70,000 armspans” through his cochlear implants.

  “Wonderful!” exclaimed Mary. “Ponter, wehave to go see her!”

  “Certainly,” he said.

  “Can you go tomorrow?”

  Ponter’s voice was heavy. “Mare...”

  “What? Oh, I know. I know, Two are not One but...”

  “Yes?”

  Mary sighed. “No, you’re right. Well, then, can we go when Twoare next One?”

  “Of course, my love. We can do whatever you want then.”

  “All right,” said Mary. “It’s a date.”

  Bandra and Mary seemed very simpatico-a word Bandra relished using. They both liked to spend quiet evenings at home, and although they had an endless array of scientific things to discuss, they also touched on more personal matters.

  It reminded Mary of her first days with Ponter, quarantined at Reuben Montego’s house. Sharing opinions and ideas with Bandra was intellectually and emotionally stimulating, and the female Neanderthal had a wonderfully warm way about her, kind and funny.

  Still, as they sat in the living room of Bandra’s house, the topics sometimes got, if not heated, at least quite pointed.

  “You know,” said Bandra, sitting at the opposite end of a couch from Mary, “this excessive desire for privacy must be fueled by your religions. At first I thought it was just because certain appealing behaviors were forbidden, and so people required privacy to indulge in them. And, doubtless, that’s part of it. But, now that you’ve told me about your multiplicity of belief systems, it seems that even justwanting to practice a minority belief required privacy. Early practitioners of your system, Christianity, hid their meetings from others, isn’t that so?”

  “That’s true,” said Mary. “In fact, our most important holy day is Christmas, commemorating the annual anniversary of Jesus’ birth. We celebrate it on December 25-in winter-but Jesus was born in the spring. We know that because the Bible says it happened when the shepherds watched over their flocks by night, which only happens in the spring, when new lambs are born.” Mary smiled. “Hey, you guys are like that: you like to give birth in the spring, too.”

  “Probably for the same reason: to give the offspring the best chance to grow before having to face winter.”

  But the simile had stuck in Mary’s mind, and she ventured forward tentatively. “You Barasts are like sheep in other ways, too. You’re so peaceful.”

  “Does it seem that way?” said Bandra.

  “You don’t have wars. And from what I’ve seen, you don’t have much societal violence. Although...” She stopped herself, before she mentioned the shattering of Ponter’s jaw, an unfortunate event from years ago.

  “I suppose. We still hunt our own food-not all the time, of course, unless that happens to be one’s particular contribution. But often enough that it provides an outlet for violent impulses. How do you say it? It gets it out of our systems.”

  “Catharsis,” said Mary. “A purging of pent-up feeling.”

  “Catharsis! Oooh, another great word! Yes, indeed: smash in a few animal skulls, or tear flesh from bone, and you feel wonderfully peaceful afterward.”

  Mary stopped to think if she’d ever killed an animal, for food or any other purpose. Except for swatting mosquitoes, the answer was no. “We don’t do that.”

  “I know,” said Bandra. “You consider it uncivilized. But we consider it to be part of whatmakes civilization possible.”

  “Still, your lack of privacy-doesn’t it give rise to abuses? Couldn’t someone be clandestinely-secretly-watching what you’re doing, by compromising the security of the alibi archives?”

  “Why would anyone want to do that?”

  “Well, to prevent an overthrow of the government, say.”

  “Why would someone want to overthrow the government? Why not just vote it out of office?”

  “Well,today , yes. But surely you haven’t had democracy since the dawn of time?”

  “What else might we have had?”

  “Tribal chieftains? Warlords? God-emperors? No, scratch that last one. But, well...” Mary frowned.Well, what? Without agriculture, there were no small-scale defensible territories. Oh, primitive farmers could doubtless defend a few hundred acres, but the tens or hundreds of square miles that represented a hunting forest were beyond the abilities of small groups to protect.

  And, indeed, why bother defending them? A raid on farmlands produced immediate results: plant food and fiber, stolen from the field or taken from the granary. But, as Ponter had pointed out time and again, hunting and gathering were based on knowledge: no one could just enter a new territory and profitably exploit it. They wouldn’t know where the animals came to drink, where the birds laid their eggs, where the most bountiful fruit trees grew. No, such a lifestyle would engender peaceful trade, since it was far less work for a traveler to bring something of value along to swap for freshly captured game rather than to try to hunt the game himself.

  Nonetheless, if push came to shove, most Neanderthals were probably robust enough to forage for themselves-just as apparently this Vissan was now doing. Besides, with a cap on population size-and the Neanderthals had had that for hundreds of years-there was plenty of unused territory for anyone who wi
shed to strike out on their own.

  “Still,” said Mary, “there must have been times when people didn’t like their elected officials, and wanted to get rid of them.”

  “Oh, yes, indeed. Yes, indeed.”

  “What happened then?”

  “In the old days? Before the purging of our gene pool? Assassination.”

  “Well, there!” said Mary. “That’s a reason for compromising other people’s privacy: to thwart assassination attempts. If someone was plotting to assassinate you, you’d want to keep an eye on them, to prevent them from pulling it off.”

  “An assassination doesn’t require any plotting,” said Bandra, her eyebrow lifted. “You just walk up to the person you want to be rid of and smash their skull in. Believe me, that provides a wonderful incentive for elected officials to keep their constituents happy.”

  Mary laughed in spite of herself. “Still, surely even if the majority are happy, there will always be discontented individuals.”

  Bandra nodded. “Which is why we long ago saw the necessity of purging the gene pool of those who might act in an antisocial manner.”

  “But this purging of the gene pool...” Mary was trying not to be judgmental, but her tone betrayed her. “I’ve tried to talk to Ponter about this, but it’s difficult; he’s so blindly in favor of it. But even more than your lack of privacy, that notion is what creeps my people out the most.”

  “’Creeps them out’! Oooh, that’s a classic!”

  “I’m serious, Bandra. We’ve attempted such things in the past, and...it’s never gone well. I mean, we don’t believe that sort of thing can be done without corruption. We’ve had people try to wipe out specific ethnic groups.”

  A bleep.

  “Groups that have distinctive characteristics, based on their geographic origin.”