Robert Sawyer - Humans

Like most North American universities, York actually had more female undergraduates than males these days. Still, with over forty thousand full-time students, there were perhaps twenty thousand males who could have been responsible-assuming that the animal had been a York student.

But no, no, that wasn’t right. York was in Toronto, and a more cosmopolitan city would be hard to find. The man who’d raped her had white skin and blue eyes. A large chunk of York’s population didn’t fit that description.

And he’d been a smoker; Mary vividly remembered the reek of tobacco on his breath. Although it pained her every time she saw a student lighting up-these kids, after all, had been born in the 1980s, two decades after U.S. Surgeon General Luther Terry had announced that smoking was deadly-it was true that a minority of women, and even fewer men, smoked.

So the person who had attacked her wasn’t just anyone; he’d been part of a subset of a subset of a subset: males, with blue eyes and white skin, who smoked.

If Mary could ever find him, she could prove his guilt. There weren’t many occasions when being a geneticist turned out to have practical applications in one’s own life, but it had come in handy that horrible night. Mary knew how to preserve samples of the man’s semen, which would contain DNA that could conclusively identify him.

Mary continued to walk across the campus. There were no crowds to fight through yet. But, actually, she’d probably feel safer then. After all, the rape had occurred during the summer holidays, when fewer people were around. Crowds meant safety-whether on the African savannah or here in Toronto.

And now, as she walked along, Mary realized a man was coming toward her. Her pulse accelerated, but she stayed her course; she couldn’t spend the rest of her life veering out of the way every time she was getting near a male. Still…

Still, it was a white man-that much was obvious.

His hair was blondish. She’d not seen her assailant’s hair; he’d worn a ski mask. But blue eyes often went with light hair.

Mary closed her eyes for a second, shutting out the bright sunlight, shutting out her world. Maybe she should have followed Ponter through the gateway to the Neanderthal universe. Certainly that thought had crossed her mind as she’d run across the Laurentian campus, searching for Ponter, rushing to get him down to the bottom of the Creighton Mine before the reopened portal to his reality slammed shut again. After all, at least there she’d have known for sure that her attacker was nowhere around.

The approaching man was now less than a dozen meters away. He was young-probably a summer student-and wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt.

And he was wearing sunglasses. It was a bright summer’s day; Mary herself was wearing her FosterGrants. There was no way to tell what color his eyes were, although they couldn’t be the golden of Ponter’s-she’d never seen any other human with eyes like that.

Mary tensed as the man came closer, and closer still.

Even if he hadn’t been wearing sunglasses, though, Mary wouldn’t have known what color his eyes were. As the man passed by her, she found herself averting her gaze, unable to look at him.

Damn, she thought. God damn.

“ So,” said Jurard Selgan, “despite your…your…”

Ponter shrugged. “My bullying,” he said. “We’re not supposed to be afraid of facing things head on here, are we?”

Selgan tipped his head, accepting Ponter’s assessment. “Very well, then. Despite your bullying, the High Gray Council did not immediately make a decision, did it?”

“ No,” said Ponter. “No, and I suppose it was correct in taking at least a little time to think things through. Two were just about to become One, and so the Council adjourned, reserving its decision until after that was over…”

Two becoming One: so simple a phrase, and yet so fraught with meaning and complexity for Ponter and his people.

Two becoming One: the monthly four-day holiday around which all life was structured.

Two becoming One: the period during which adult males, who normally lived at the city’s Rim, came into the Center to spend time with their women-mates and children.

It was more than just a break from work, more than simply a variation in routine. It was the fire that sustained culture; it was the gut ties that bound families.

A hover-bus settled out front of Ponter and Adikor’s house. The two men entered through the door at the back and found a pair of adjacent saddle-seats upon which to sit. The driver activated the fans, and the bus rose above the ground and started moving on to the next house, off in the distance.

Usually, Ponter gave no thought to something as mundane as a hover-bus, but today he couldn’t help pondering how elegant a solution it was compared to what they’d done about transportation in the Gliksin world. There, vehicles of all sizes rolled on wheels. Everywhere he’d gone on the Gliksin world (admittedly only a few places), he’d seen wide, flattened trails covered with artificial stone to make it easy for those wheels to roll.

And as if that weren’t bad enough, the Gliksins used a chemical reaction to propel their wheeled vehicles-a reaction that gave off a noxious smell. Apparently it wasn’t as irritating to the Gliksins as it had been to Ponter; not surprising, he supposed, given their minuscule noses.

What a wonderful quirk of nature that had been! Ponter knew that his kind had developed their large noses-much bigger than those of any other primate-during the last glacial epoch. According to Doctor Singh, the Gliksin who had looked after him at their hospital, Neanderthals had six times the nasal capacity of Gliksins. The original reason had been to humidify cold air before it was drawn into the sensitive tissues of the lungs. But when the great ice sheets had eventually retreated, the large noses had been retained because they’d provided the beneficial side effect of an excellent sense of smell.

If it hadn’t been for that, maybe Ponter’s kind would have used the same petrochemicals, resulting in the same level of atmospheric pollution. The irony did not escape Ponter: the kind of humans he’d hitherto only known as fossils were poisoning their skies with what they themselves called fossil fuels.

And worse than that: every adult Gliksin seemed to have his or her own personal vehicle. What an unspeakable waste of resources! Most of these cars spent the bulk of each day just sitting. Ponter’s own city of Saldak had some three thousand travel cubes for a population of twenty-five thousand-and Ponter often thought that was too many.

The hover-bus came to rest at the next house. Ponter and Adikor’s neighbors, Torba and Gaddak, as well as Gaddak’s twin sons, came on board. Males left their mothers and moved in with their fathers at the age of ten years. Adikor had only one child, an eight-year-old boy named Dab, who would come live with him and Ponter the year after next. Ponter had two children, but both were girls: Megameg Bek, a 148, also eight years old, and Jasmel Ket, a 147, now eighteen.

Ponter himself, as well as his man-mate Adikor, were members of generation 145, making them both thirty-eight years old. That had been another bizarre thing about the Gliksin world: instead of controlling their breeding cycles, so that children were born only every tenth year, they gave birth constantly, every year. Rather than nice, neat, discrete generations, their world had a smooth continuum of ages. Ponter hadn’t spent enough time there to figure out how they managed the economics of that. Without manufacturers shifting their focus from baby-wear to toddler clothes to young adult garb, in step with the growing of a generation, the Gliksins simultaneously had to produce clothes for people of any age. And they had this ridiculous concept of “fashion,” or so Lou Benoit had told him: perfectly good clothes were discarded for reasons of capricious esthetics.