“It’s a media circus,” said long-time Sudbury Rotarian Bernie Monks. “Northern Ontario hasn’t seen anything like this since the Dionne Quintuplets were born, back in 1934 …”
Job offers continue to pour in for Ponter Boddit. Japan’s NTT Basic Research Laboratory has offered him a directorship of a new quantum-computing unit. Microsoft and IBM have also offered him contracts, with generous cash/stock packages. MIT, CalTech, and eight other universities have offered him faculty positions. The RAND Corporation has likewise made an overture to him, as has Greenpeace. No word yet from the Neanderthal about whether any of these positions appeal to him …
A coalition of scientists in France has issued a statement saying that although Ponter Boddit’s arrival on this Earth did indeed take place on Canadian soil, he clearly was not born in that nation, and no Neanderthaler ever lived in North America. His citizenship, they contend, should therefore be French, since the youngest Neanderthal fossils are found in that country …
Civil-rights advocates on both sides of the border are condemning the forced quarantine of the so-called Neanderthal man, saying there is no evidence he poses a medical threat to anyone …
Blood test after blood test came back negative. Whatever Ponter had been suffering from seemed to have abated, and there was no evidence that he was carrying anything dangerous to the humans of this world. Still, the LCDC wasn’t ready to cancel the quarantine yet.
Ponter was wearing his own shirt again today, the one he’d had on when he arrived here. The RCMP had delivered a small wardrobe of additional clothes for him bought at the local Mark’s Work Wearhouse, but they really didn’t fit very well; clothing didn’t seem to come off the rack for a person who looked like a slightly squished version of Mr. Universe.
Ponter’s—or Hak’s—English was getting remarkably good. The Companion didn’t have the ee phoneme in its preprogrammed repertoire, but it had now recorded both Mary and Reuben saying that sound, and would play back the appropriate version as required to render English words it otherwise couldn’t articulate. But it sounded funny hearing her name said as “Mare-ee,” half in one of Hak’s voices and half in either her own or Reuben’s, so Mary told the Companion not to bother; people periodically called her “Mare,” anyway, and it would be just fine for Hak to continue to do that, too. Louise likewise told Hak it was all right if the Companion went on referring to her as just “Lou.”
Finally, Hak announced that it had amassed a sufficient vocabulary for truly meaningful conversations. Yes, it said, there would be gaps and difficulties, but these could be worked out as they went along.
And so, while Reuben was busy going over more test results on the phone with other doctors, and while Louise, the night owl, was sleeping upstairs, having accepted Ponter’s offer to use the bed when he wasn’t, Mary and Ponter sat in the living room and had their first real chat. Ponter spoke softly, making sounds in his own language, and Hak, using its male voice, provided an English translation: “It is good to talk.”
Mary made a small, nervous laugh. She’d been frustrated by her inability to communicate with Ponter, and now that they could talk, she didn’t know what to say to him. “Yes,” she said. “It’s good to talk.”
“A beautiful day,” said Ponter’s translated voice, looking out the living room’s rear window.
Mary laughed again; heartily, this time. Talking about the weather—a pleasantry that transcended species boundaries. “Yes, it is.”
And then she realized that it wasn’t that she didn’t know what to say to Ponter. Rather, she had so many questions, she didn’t know where to begin. Ponter was a scientist; he must have some sense of what his people knew about genetics, about the split between genus Homo and genus Pan, about …
But no. No. Ponter was a person—first and foremost, he was a person, and one who had gone through a harrowing ordeal. The science could wait. Right now, they would talk about him, about how he was doing. “How do you feel?” Mary asked.
“I am fine,” said the translated voice.
Mary smiled. “I mean really. How are you really doing?”
Ponter seemed to hesitate, and Mary wondered if Neanderthal men shared with males of her kind a reluctance to talk about feelings. But then he exhaled through his mouth, a long, shuddering sigh.
“I am frightened,” he said. “And I miss my family.”
Mary lifted her eyebrows. “Your family?”
“My daughters,” he said. “I have two daughters, Jasmel Ket and Megameg Bek.”
Mary’s jaw dropped slightly. It hadn’t even occurred to her to think about Ponter’s family. “How old are they?”
“The older one,” said Ponter, “is—I know in months, but you reckon time mostly in years, do you not? The older one is—Hak?”
Hak’s female voice chimed in. “Jasmel is nineteen years old; Megameg is nine.”
“My goodness,” said Mary. “Will they be okay? What about their mother?”
“Klast died two tenmonths ago,” said Ponter.
“Twenty months,” added Hak, helpfully. “One-point-eight years.”
“I’m sorry,” said Mary softly.
Ponter nodded slightly. “Her cells, in her blood, they changed …”
“Leukemia,” Mary said, providing the word.
“I miss her every month,” said Ponter.
Mary wondered for a moment if Hak had translated that just right; surely Ponter meant he missed her every day. “To have lost both parents …”
“Yes,” said Ponter. “Of course, Jasmel is an adult now, so …”
“So she can vote, and so forth?” asked Mary.
“No, no, no. Did Hak do the math incorrectly?”
“I most certainly did not,” said Hak’s female voice.
“Jasmel is far too young to vote,” said Ponter. “I am far too young to vote.”
“How old do you have to be in your world to vote?”
“You must have seen at least 667 moons—two-thirds of the traditional thousand-month lifetime.”
Hak, evidently wanting to dispel the notion that it was mathematically challenged, quickly supplied the conversions: “One can vote at the age of fifty-one years; a traditional lifespan averaged seventy-seven years, although many live much longer than that these days.”
“Here, in Ontario, people get to vote when they turn eighteen,” said Mary. “Years, that is.”
“Eighteen!” exclaimed Ponter. “That is madness.”
“I don’t know of any place where the voting age is higher than twenty-one years.”
“This explains much about your world,” says Ponter. “We do not let people shape policy until they have accumulated wisdom and experience.”
“But then if Jasmel can’t vote, what is it that makes her an adult?”
Ponter lifted his shoulders slightly. “I suppose such distinctions are not as significant on my world as they are here. Still, at 250 months, an individual does take legal responsibility for himself or herself, and usually is on the verge of establishing his or her own home.” He shook his head. “I wish I could let Jasmel and Megameg know that I am still alive, and am thinking about them. Even if there is no way I can go home, I would give anything just to get a message to them.”
“And is there really no way for you to go home?” asked Mary.
“I cannot see how I could. Oh, perhaps if a quantum computer could be built here, and the conditions that led to my … transfer … could be precisely duplicated. But I am a theoretical physicist; I have only the vaguest of senses of how one builds a quantum computer. My partner, Adikor, knows how, of course, but I have no way of contacting him.”
“It must be very frustrating,” said Mary.
“I am sorry,” said Ponter. “I did not mean to shift my problems to you.”
“That’s all right,” said Mary. “Is there—is there anything we, any of us, can do to help?”