Robert Sawyer - Humans

“ So your relationship with Mare Vaughan had ended on an unsatisfactory note?” said Selgan, at last returning to his seat.

Ponter nodded.

“ Relationships are often unresolved,” said Selgan. “It would be nice if that weren’t the case, but surely this can’t have been the first time a relationship you were involved in had ended in a disappointing way.”

“ No, it wasn’t,” said Ponter, very softly.

“ You’re thinking of a specific person, aren’t you?” said Selgan. “Tell me.”

“ My woman-mate, Klast Harbin,” said Ponter.

“ Ah. Your relationship with her ended, did it? Who initiated the split?”

“ No one initiated it,” snapped Ponter. “Klast died, twenty months ago.”

“ Oh,” said Selgan. “My condolences. Was she-was she an older woman?”

“ No. She was a 145, same as me.”

Selgan rolled his eyebrow up his browridge. “Was it an accident?”

“ It was cancer of the blood.”

“ Ah,” said Selgan. “A tragedy. But…”

“ Don’t say it, Selgan.” Ponter’s tone was sharp.

“ Don’t say what?” asked the personality sculptor.

“ What you were about to say.”

“ And you think that was…?”

“ That my relationship with Klast was cut off abruptly, just like my relationship with Mare was cut off abruptly.”

“ Is that the way you feel?” asked Selgan.

“ I knew I shouldn’t have come here,” said Ponter. “You personality sculptors think your insights are so profound. But they’re not; they’re simplistic. ‘Relationship Green ended abruptly, and you are reminded of it by the way Relationship Red ended.’” Ponter snorted dismissively.

Selgan was quiet for several beats, perhaps waiting to see if Ponter would say more of his own volition. When it became clear that he would not, Selgan spoke again. “But you did push for the portal between this world and Mare’s world to be reopened.” He let the sentence hang in the air between them for a time, and Ponter finally responded.

“ And you think that’s why I pushed?” Ponter said. “That I didn’t care about the consequences, the ramifications, for this world? That all I was worried about was getting to resolve this unfinished relationship?”

“ You tell me,” said Selgan, gently.

“ It wasn’t like that. Oh, sure, there’s a superficial resemblance between what happened with me and Klast, and what happened with me and Mare. But I’m a scientist.” He fixed Selgan with an angry stare of his golden eyes. “A real scientist. I understand when true symmetry exists-it doesn’t here-and I understand false analogy.”

“ But you did push the High Gray Council. I saw it on my Voyeur, along with thousands of others.”

“ Well, yes, but…”

“ But what? What were you thinking then? What were you trying to accomplish?”

“ Nothing-except what was best for all our people.”

“ Are you sure of that?” asked Selgan.

“Of course I’m sure!” snapped Ponter.

Selgan was quiet, letting Ponter listen to his own words echo off the polished wooden wall.

Ponter Boddit had to admit that nothing he’d ever experienced-indeed, probably nothing that any of his people had ever experienced-had been more frightening than being transported bodily from this world to that bizarre other world, arriving in total darkness and almost drowning in a giant water tank.

But, still, of the things that happened in this world, this universe, few could compare for sheer terror with addressing the High Gray Council. After all, this wasn’t just the local Gray Council; the High Gray Council ran the planet, and its members had come here, to Saldak, specifically to see Ponter and Adikor and the quantum computer they’d used twice now to open a portal to another reality.

No one on the High Gray Council was anything younger than a 143, twenty years Ponter’s senior. The wisdom, the experience, and, yes, when it struck their mood to be so, the sheer cussed orneriness of people that old was formidable in the extreme.

Ponter could have just let the issue drop. Nobody was pushing for him and Adikor to reopen the portal to the other world. Indeed, except maybe for that female group in Evsoy, there was no one who could gainsay them if Ponter and Adikor simply claimed that the opening of the portal had been an irreproducible fluke.

But the possibility of trade between two kinds of humanity was too significant for Ponter to ignore. Information could certainly be swapped: what Ponter’s people knew about superconductivity, say, for what the Gliksins knew about spaceships. But, more than that, cultures could be exchanged: the art of this world for the art of that world, a dibalat iterative epic, perhaps, for a play by this Shakespeare he’d heard of over there; sculptures by the great Kaydas for the work of a Gliksin painter.

Surely, thought Ponter, these noble thoughts were his sole motivation. Surely he had nothing personally to gain by reopening the portal. Yes, there was Mare. Still, doubtless Mare wasn’t really interested in a being so different from herself, a creature who was hairy where males of her kind were smooth, who was stocky when most Gliksins were gracile, a being with a double-crested browridge undulating above his eyes, eyes that were golden instead of Mare’s own blue or the dark brown of so many others of her species.

Ponter had no doubt that Mare had really suffered the trauma she’d spoken of, but surely that was only the most prominent of many reasons for her having rebuffed his advance.

But no.

No, that wasn’t right.

There had been a real, mutual attraction. Across time lines, across species boundaries, it had been real. He was sure of it.

But could things really go better between the two of them if contact were resumed? He cherished his wonderful, beautiful memories of his time with her-and they were only memories, for his Companion implant had been unable to transmit anything to his alibi archive from the other side. Mare existed only in his imagination, in his thoughts and dreams; there was no objective reality to compare her to, except a few brief glimpses caught by the robot that Adikor had dangled through the portal to summon Ponter home.

Surely it was better this way. Further contact would spoil what they’d already had.

And yet And yet it did seem that the portal could be reopened.

Standing in the small anteroom, Ponter looked over at Adikor Huld, his man-mate. Adikor nodded encouragingly. It was time to go into the Council chamber. Ponter picked up the unexpanded Derkers tube he’d brought with him, and the two men walked through the massive doors, ready to face the High Grays.

“The presence here of Scholar Boddit,” said Adikor Huld, gesturing now at Ponter, “is direct proof that a person can pass through to the other universe and return unharmed.”

Ponter looked at the twenty Grays, ten males and ten females, two from each of the world’s ten regional governments. In some forums, males sat on one side of the room and females on the other. But the High Gray Council dealt with matters that affected the entire species, and the males and females who had gathered here from all over the globe alternated in a great circle.

“But,” continued Adikor, “except for Ponter’s daughter Jasmel, who stuck her head through the portal during our rescue operations, no one else from this world has been to that one. When we first created the portal, it was by accident-an unexpected result of our quantum-computing experiments. But we now know that this universe and that one, the one in which Gliksin people dominate, are entangled somehow. The portal from here always opens to that particular one out of the panoply of alternate universes that our physics tells us must exist. And, as far as we can determine from our previous experience, the portal will remain open as long as a solid object is passing through it.”