Robert Sawyer - Hybrids

“Well, if he ever does,” said Keisha, smiling, “I want an autographed copy.”

“No problem,” said Mary. And she realized she meant it. She would never be over her rape-nor, she suspected, would Keisha ever be over her own-but the fact that they could joke about a man posing nude for the enjoyment of women meant that they’d both come a long way.

“You asked how I’m doing,” said Mary. She paused. “Better,” she said with a smile, reaching out and patting the back of Keisha’s hand. “Better every day.”

Once they’d finished their drinks, Mary hurried off to the bookstore, quickly bought four paperbacks, and then hustled back to room C002B to collect Ponter. They headed up to the ground floor, then out into the parking lot. It was a crisp fall day, and here, four hundred kilometers north of Toronto, the leaves had mostly turned.

“ Dran! ” exclaimed Ponter, and “Astonishment!” translated Hak, through his external speaker.

“What?” said Mary.

“What is that? ” said the Neanderthal, pointing.

Mary looked ahead, trying to fathom what had caught Ponter’s eye, then she burst out laughing. “It’s a dog,” she said.

“My Pabo is a dog!” declared Ponter. “And I have encountered other doglike creatures here. But this! This is like nothing I have ever seen before.” The dog and its owner were coming toward them. Ponter bent down, hands on knees, to examine the small animal, at the end of a leather leash being held by an attractive young white woman. “It looks like a sausage!” declared Ponter.

“It’s a dachshund,” said the woman, sounding miffed. She was doing a great job, Mary thought, of being unflustered in the presence of what she must know was a Neanderthal.

“Is it-” began Ponter. “Forgive me, is it a birth defect?”

The woman sounded even more put out. “No, he’s supposed to be like that.”

“But his legs! His ears! His body!” Ponter rose and shook his head. “A dog is a hunter,” he declared, as if the animal before him represented an affront to all propriety.

“Dachshunds are hunting animals,” said the young woman sharply. “They were bred in Germany to hunt badgers; Dachs is German for ‘badger.’ See? Their shape lets them follow the badger down the burrow.”

“Oh,” said Ponter. “Ah, um, my apologies.”

The woman seemed mollified. “Now, poodles,” she said with a contemptuous sniff, “those are dumb-looking dogs.”

As time passed, Cornelius Ruskin couldn’t deny that he was feeling different-and a whole lot faster than he would have thought possible. Sitting in his penthouse in the slums, he pumped keywords into Google; his results improved after he stumbled on the fact that the medical term for castration was “orchiectomy,” and he started specifically excluding the terms “dog,” “cat,” and “horse.”

He quickly found a chart on the University of Plymouth’s web site entitled “Effect of Castration and Testosterone Replacement on Male Sexual Behaviour,” showing an immediate drop-off in such behavior in castrated guinea pigs But Cornelius was a man, not an animal! Surely what applied to rodents didn’t Twirling the scroll wheel on his mouse took him farther down the same page, to a study by researchers named Heim and Hursch that showed that over 50 percent of castrated rapists “stopped exhibiting sexual behavior shortly after castration-similar to the effect in rats.”

Of course, when he’d been an undergrad, the feminist rhetoric had been that rape was a crime of violence, not sex. But no. Cornelius, having more than a passing interest in the subject, had read Thornhill and Palmer’s A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion when it came out in2000. That book made the case, based on evolutionary psychology, that rape was indeed a reproductive strategy-a sexual strategy-for…

Cornelius hated to think of himself as such, but it was true; he knew it was: for males who lacked the power and status to reproduce in the normal way. It made no difference that he’d been unfairly denied that status; the fact was that he didn’t have it, and couldn’t get it-not in the world of academe.

He still hated the policies that had held him back. He was as much an expert on ancient DNA as Mary Vaughan was-he’d been with the Ancient Biomolecules Centre at Oxford, for Christ’s sake!

It was unfair, totally and completely-like goddamned “slave reparations,” people who never did anything wrong themselves being asked to cough up huge amounts of cash for people whose long-dead ancestors had been wronged. Why should Cornelius suffer for the sexist hiring policies of generations gone by?

He had spent years being livid over this.

But now…

Now…

Now, he was just angry: an anger that, for the first time in as long as he could remember, seemed to be under control.

There was no doubt why he was feeling so much less furious. Or was there? After all, it hadn’t been that long since Ponter had cut off his balls. Was it really reasonable for Cornelius to be feeling different so quickly?

The answer, apparently, was yes. As he continued searching the web, he found an article from the New Times in San Louis Obispo, interviewing Bruce Clotfelter, who had spent two decades jailed for child molestation before undergoing surgical castration. “‘It was like a miracle,’ Clotfelter said. ‘The next morning, I realized I had gone through the night without those horrible sexual dreams for the first time in years.’ ”

The next morning…

Jesus Christ, just what was the half-life of testosterone, anyway? A few keystrokes, a couple of mouse clicks, and Cornelius had the answer: “The half-life of free testosterone in the blood is only a few minutes,” said one site; another pegged the figure at ten minutes.

Some more spelunking took him to the Geocities page of a person born male who underwent castration, with no hormonal treatments before or for years after. He reported: “Four days after my castration…it seemed that waiting for traffic lights and other little annoyances did not bother me so much…

“Six days post castration I returned to work. This workday was unusually hectic…and yet I still felt so calm when the day was all over. I was definitely feeling the effects of castration and most certainly felt better all the time without testosterone.

“Ten days post castration I felt as a feather floating around everywhere. I just kept feeling better and better. For me the serenity was the strongest of the castration effects, followed by the decrease in libido.”

Immediate change.

Overnight change.

Change in a matter of days.

Cornelius knew- knew! — he should be furious about what Ponter had done to him.

But he was finding it difficult to be furious about anything…

“ It was that questing spirit that caused others to bravely sail boats over the horizon, finding new lands in Australia and Polynesia…”

There was a very good reason for wanting to establish a new interuniversal portal at United Nations headquarters. The existing portal was located two kilometers underground, 1.2 kilometers horizontally from the nearest elevator on the Gliksin side, and three kilometers from the nearest elevator on the Barast side.

It would take Mary and Ponter a couple of hours to get from the surface in her world to the surface in his. They began by donning hardhats and safety boots, and riding down the mining elevator at Inco’s Creighton Mine. The hardhats had built-in lamps, and hearing-protection cups that could be swung over the ears if needed.

Mary had brought two suitcases, and Ponter was effortlessly carrying them for her, one in each hand.

Five miners rode most of the way down with them, getting off one level above where Mary and Ponter were to exit. That was just fine by Mary; she was always uncomfortable in this lift. It reminded her of the awkward journey she’d had in it once before with Ponter, explaining why, back then, despite his obvious attraction to her, and hers to him, she’d been unable to respond to his touch.