“Why would he not?”
“Well, I don’t know. Just on general principle?”
Ponter looked perplexed.
“Or,” said Mary, “because what they were actually doing at the time of the crime was embarrassing?” Bleep. “Embarrassing. You know, something you are ashamed”—bleep–“of.”
“Perhaps an example would help me get your meaning,” said Ponter.
Mary pursed her lips, thinking. “Well, um, okay, say I was—say I was, you know, having, um, sex with someone else’s mate; the fact that I was doing that might be my alibi, but I wouldn’t want people to know it.”
“Why not?”
“Well, because we believe adultery”—bleep–“is wrong.”
“Wrong?” said Ponter, Hak having apparently guessed the meaning of the untranslated word. “How can it be, unless a claim of false paternity results? Who is hurt by it?”
“Well, um, I don’t know; I mean, we, ah, we consider adultery a sin.” Bleep.
Mary had expected that bleep, at least. If you had no religion, no list of things that didn’t actually hurt somebody else but were still proscribed behaviors—recreational drug use, masturbation, adultery, watching porno videos—then you might indeed not be so fanatic about privacy. People insisted on it at least in part because there were things they did that they’d be mortified to have others know about. But in a permissive society, an open society, a society where the only crimes are crimes that have specific victims, perhaps it wouldn’t be such a big deal. And, of course, Ponter had shown no nudity taboo—a religious idea, again—and no desire for seclusion while using the bathroom.
Mary shook her head. All the times she’d been embarrassed and ashamed in her life, all the times she was glad no one could see what she was doing: were they uncomfortable simply because of church-imposed edicts? The shame she felt over leaving Colm; the shame that prevented her from getting a divorce; the shame she felt over dealing with her own drives now that she had no man in her life; the shame she felt because of sin … Ponter had none of that, it seemed; as long as he was hurting no one else, he never felt uncomfortable over acts that gave him pleasure.
“I suppose your system might work,” said Mary dubiously.
“It does,” replied Ponter. “And recall that for serious crimes—those involving assaults on another person—there are usually at least two alibi archives available: that of the victim, and that of the perpetrator. The victim usually introduces his or her own archive of the event as evidence, and most of the time it clearly shows the perpetrator.”
Mary was simultaneously fascinated and repelled. Still …
That night at York …
If images had been recorded, could she have brought herself to show them to anyone?
Yes, she said to herself firmly. Yes. She had done nothing wrong, nothing to be ashamed of. She was the innocent victim. All the pamphlets Keisha had given her at the rape-crisis center said that, and she really, really, really, really tried to believe it.
But—but even if there were a recording of what she’d seen, could it have been used to catch the monster? He’d been wearing a balaclava; she’d never seen his face—although a thousand different versions of it had haunted her dreams since. Whom would she have accused? Whose alibi archive would the courts have ordered unlocked? Mary had no idea where to begin, no idea whom to suspect.
She felt her stomach flutter. Maybe that was the real problem—the predicament that Ponter’s people had avoided: having too many possible suspects, too much crowding, too much anonymity, too many vicious, aggressive … men, she thought. Men. Every academic of her generation had been sensitized to the issue of gender-neutral language. But violent crimes were indeed overwhelmingly caused by males.
And, yet, she’d spent her life surrounded by good, decent men. Her father; her two brothers; so many supportive colleagues; Father Caldicott, and Father Belfontaine before him; many good friends; a handful of lovers.
What proportion of men really were the problem? What fraction were violent, angry, unable to control their emotions, unable to resist their impulses? Was it so vast a group that it couldn’t have been—“cleansed” was Ponter’s word, a nurturing word, a hopeful word—from the gene pool generations ago?
No matter how large or how small the population of violent males was, thought Mary, there were too many. Even one such beast would be too many, and—
And here she was, thinking like Ponter’s people. The gene pool could indeed use a good cleansing, a therapeutic purging.
Yes, it surely could.
Chapter 34
Adikor Huld lay in his bed, flush with the ground, staring up at the timepiece mounted on the ceiling. The sun had been up for several daytenths now, but he couldn’t see any reason to rise.
What had happened that day, down in the quantum-computing lab? What had gone wrong?
Ponter hadn’t been vaporized; he wasn’t consumed by flame; he didn’t explode. All those things would have left abundant traces.
No, if he was right, Ponter had been transferred to another universe … but …
But that sounded outlandish even to him; he understood how outrageous it must have seemed to Adjudicator Sard. And yet, what other explanation was there?
Ponter had disappeared.
And a large quantity of heavy water had appeared in his place.
Presumably, thought Adikor, it had been an even exchange—identical masses transposed, but radically different volumes. After all, it wasn’t just Ponter that had disappeared; Adikor had heard the air rushing out of the quantum-computing chamber, as if all of it, too, had been shunted to another place. But even a room’s worth of air had little mass, whereas liquid water—even liquid heavy water—was in the most dense state of that substance, more dense even than the solid, frozen variety.
So: a large volume of air and one man had disappeared from this universe, and an identical mass, but much smaller volume, of heavy water had come through to replace it from … from the other side; it was the phraseology that kept coming to Adikor’s mind.
But …
But then that meant that there was heavy water at this location in the other universe. And pure heavy water did not occur naturally.
Which meant the … the portal, another word that came unbidden … must have opened into a storage tank for heavy water. And if heavy water was transferred from there to here, then Ponter was transferred from here to there, meaning …
Meaning he’d quite likely drowned.
Tears filled Adikor’s deep eye sockets, like rainwater gathering in wells.
Ponter shifted on the couch and looked again at Mary. “The alibi archives do not just solve crimes,” he said. “They have many other uses. For instance, I saw on television yesterday that two campers were lost in Algonquin Park.”
Mary nodded.
“Being lost like that is impossible in my world. Your Companion triangulates on signals from various mountain-top transmitters to pinpoint your position, and if you are injured or trapped by a rockfall or something, it is easy for the rescue teams to home in on your Companion.” He raised a hand, copying what Mary had done earlier, forestalling the objection he presumably saw coming. “Of course, only an adjudicator can order that you be tracked like that, and only when you request it by sending an emergency signal, or when a family member asks for it.”
Headlines she’d seen all too frequently swirled through Mary’s mind. “Police abandon search.”
“Hunt for missing girl called off.”
“Avalanche victims presumed dead.”
“I guess an emergency signal like that would be useful,” Mary said.