Robert Sawyer - Hybrids

Mary was nodding, and she finished the thought for Veronica. “We say, ‘The Lord works in mysterious ways.’ ”

“Just so!” crowed Veronica. “Prayers aren’t always answered, but people go right on praying. But Ponter’s people aren’t wired like that.” She turned to the Neanderthal. “Are you?”

“No,” said Ponter. “I do not need Hak to tell me that this is not the way we behave. If the result is not predictable-if a pattern cannot be discerned-we discard the behavior as pointless.”

“But we don’t,” said Veronica, rubbing her hands together. Mary could see she had the same “Cover of Science, here I come!” expression Mary herself had worn years ago, when she’d succeeded in extracting DNA from the Neanderthal type specimen in Germany. Veronica beamed at Ponter, then at Mary. “Even if there is no pattern, we convince ourselves that there’s some underlying logic to it all. That’s why we don’t just make up stories about gods; we actually believe them.”

The religious Mary had shifted entirely to the background; this was making the scientist in her have its own peak experience. “Are you sure about this, Veronica? Because if you are-”

“Oh, I am; I am. There’s a famous experiment-I’ll e-mail you the citation. It had two groups of people playing a game on a grid, the rules of which hadn’t been explained to the players. All they knew in advance was they’d get points for good moves and no points for bad moves. Well, for one set of players, points were given for successfully marking every other space in the lower-right corner of the grid-and, of course, after enough turns, the players easily figured that out, and could win the game every time. But the second set of players were rewarded points randomly: whether they got points or not had no relation to what moves they made. But those players also came up with rules that they said governed the game, and they were convinced that by following those rules, they were likely to do better.”

“Really?” said Ponter. “I would simply lose interest in the game.”

“No doubt you would,” said Veronica, smiling broadly. “But we would find it fascinating.”

“Or irritating,” said Mary.

“Irritating, yes! Meaning it would bug us-because we just can’t accept that there’s no underlying design to things.” Veronica looked at Ponter. “Can I try another little test? Again, Mary, if you don’t mind, please don’t say anything. Ponter, do you know what I mean when I talk about flipping a coin?”

Ponter didn’t, so Veronica demonstrated with a loonie she fished from a pocket of her lab coat. When Ponter nodded that he understood, the skinny redhead went on. “All right, if I flip this coin twenty times, and all twenty times it happens to come up heads, what are the chances it will come up heads again on the twenty-first try?”

Ponter didn’t hesitate. “One-to-one.”

“Just so! Or to put it the way we would, fifty-fifty, right? An even chance.”

Ponter nodded.

“Now, Mary, I’m sure you know that Ponter is absolutely right: it doesn’t matter how many times heads has come up in succession before the current flip, assuming the coin isn’t unbalanced. The odds that the next flip will be heads are always fifty-fifty. But when I ask first-year psych students this question, most of them think the odds must be astronomically against getting yet another heads. At some fundamental level, our brains are wired to impute motivation to random events. That’s why even those who don’t ever have the kind of experience we just manufactured for you, Mary, still see God’s handiwork in what’s really just randomness.”

“ It was that questing spirit that moved some of us to march thousands of miles across the Bering Land Bridge, which linked Siberia and Alaska during the Ice Age…”

Mary wanted to take a quick look at the Laurentian University bookstore before they headed down to the portal. She’d forgotten to bring any books from her home in Richmond Hill, and of course wouldn’t be able to find reading matter for herself in the Neanderthal universe.

Also, truth be told, Mary wanted a few minutes alone to try to digest what had transpired in Veronica Shannon’s lab, so she excused herself, leaving Ponter with Veronica, and was now heading down “the bowling alley”-the long, narrow, glass-walled corridor that connected Laurentian’s Classroom Building and the Great Hall. Coming toward her was an attractive young black woman. Mary had never been good about remembering faces, but she saw in the expression of the other woman a brief reaction of recognition, and then, almost at once, that reaction masked.

Mary had more or less gotten used to that. She’d been in the media a lot since early August when she’d confirmed the man who had been found half-drowned in the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory was a Neanderthal. She continued walking along, then it hit her “Keisha!” Mary said, rotating on her heel, the black woman now having passed her.

Keisha turned around and smiled. “Hello, Mary,” she said.

“I almost didn’t recognize you,” said Mary.

Keisha looked a bit guilty. “I did recognize you.” She lowered her voice. “But we’re not supposed to acknowledge anyone we met at the Centre, unless they acknowledge us first. That’s part of ensuring privacy…”

Mary nodded. “The Centre” was the Laurentian University Rape Crisis Centre, where Mary had gone for counseling after what had happened at York.

“How are you doing, Mary?” asked Keisha.

Off in the distance there was a Tim Hortons coffee-anddonuts stand. “Do you have a moment?” asked Mary. “I’d love to buy you a coffee.”

Keisha looked at her watch. “Sure. Or-or do you want to go upstairs, to, you know, the Centre?”

But Mary shook her head. “No. No, that’s not necessary.” Still, she was silent as they walked the dozens of meters to the Tim Hortons, contemplating Keisha’s question. How was she doing?

The Tim Hortons chain was one of the few places Mary could sometimes get her favorite brew-coffee with chocolate milk-since they often had open cartons of both chocolate and white milk. She asked for it, and received it. For her part, Keisha requested an apple juice, and Mary paid for them both. They sat at one of the two small tables flush with the corridor’s glass wall-mostly, people got their coffee here and ran off somewhere else.

“I want to thank you,” said Mary. “You were so kind to me, back then…”

Keisha had a small jeweled stud in her nose. She tipped her head down, and the jewel caught the sunlight, flashing. “That’s what we’re here for.”

Mary nodded. “You asked how I was doing,” she said. “There’s a man in my life now.”

Keisha smiled. “Ponter Boddit,” she said. “I read all about it in People.”

Mary felt her heart jump. “ People did an article about us?”

The younger woman nodded. “Last week. Nice photo of you and Ponter at the UN.”

Good grief, thought Mary. “Well, he’s been very good to me.”

“Is he going to take up that offer to pose in Playgirl?”

Mary smiled. She’d almost forgotten about that; the offer had come during Ponter’s first visit, when they were quarantined. Part of Mary would love to show off the physique of her man to all the bimbo girls she’d endured in high school, the ones who had dated the football players, every one of whom would look scrawny in comparison to Ponter. And another part of her was tickled at the notion that there was no way Colm could resist taking a peek at a newsstand, wondering what this Neanderthal had that he didn’t…

“I don’t know,” said Mary. “Ponter laughed when the invitation came, and hasn’t mentioned it since.”