There was a sneer in Bolbay’s voice. “Did you need your fancy quantum computer to figure that out?”
“And Ponter,” said Adikor, nodding slowly, “Ponter was without a woman-mate. You and he had loved the same woman, after all, and you were already tabant for his two children, so you thought …”
“You and my father?” said Jasmel. She didn’t sound shocked by the notion, merely surprised.
“And why not?” said Bolbay, defiantly. “I’d known him almost as long as you had, Adikor, and he and I had always gotten along.”
“But now he’s gone, too,” said Adikor. “That was my first thought, you know: that you were simply inconsolable over the loss of him, and so were snapping teeth at me. But you must see, Daklar, that you’re wrong to be doing that. I loved Ponter, and certainly wouldn’t have interfered with his choice of a new woman-mate, so—”
“That has nothing to do with it,” said Bolbay, shaking her head. “Nothing.”
“Then why do you hate me so?”
“I don’t hate you because of what happened to Ponter,” she said.
“But you do hate me.”
Bolbay was silent. Jasmel was looking at the floor.
“Why?” said Adikor. “I’ve never done anything to you.”
“But you hit Ponter,” snapped Bolbay.
“Ages ago. And he forgave me.”
“And so you got to stay whole,” she said. “You got to have a child of your own. You got away with it.”
“With what?”
“With your crime! With trying to kill Ponter!”
“I wasn’t trying to kill him.”
“You were violent, a monster. You should have been sterilized. But my Pelbon …”
“Who is Pelbon?” said Adikor.
Bolbay fell silent again.
“Her man-mate,” said Jasmel, softly.
“What happened to Pelbon?” asked Adikor.
“You don’t know what it’s like,” said Bolbay, looking away. “You have no idea. You wake up one morning to find two enforcers waiting for you, and they take your man-mate away, and—”
“And what?” said Adikor.
“And they castrate him,” said Bolbay.
“Why?” asked Adikor. “What did he do?”
“He didn’t do anything,” said Bolbay. “He didn’t do a single thing.”
“Then why …” started Adikor. But then it hit him. “Oh. One of his relatives …”
Bolbay nodded but didn’t meet Adikor’s eyes. “His brother had assaulted someone, and so his brother was ordered sterilized along with—”
“Along with everyone who shared fifty percent of his genetic material,” finished Adikor.
“He didn’t do anything, my Pelbon,” said Bolbay. “He didn’t do anything to anyone, and he was punished, I was punished. But you! You almost killed a man, and you got away with it! They should have castrated you, not my poor Pelbon!”
“Daklar,” said Adikor. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry …”
“Get out,” said Bolbay firmly. “Just leave me alone.”
“I—”
“Get out!”
Chapter 38
Ponter finished his hamburger, then looked at Louise, Reuben, and Mary in turn. “I do not wish to complain,” he said, “but I am getting tired of this—this cow, do you call it? Is there a chance we might ask the people outside to bring us something else for tonight?”
“Like what?” asked Reuben.
“Oh, anything,” said Ponter. “Maybe some mammoth steaks.”
“What?” said Reuben.
“Mammoth?” said Mary, stunned.
“Is Hak incorrectly rendering what I am saying?” asked Ponter. “Mammoth. You know—a hairy elephant of northern climes.”
“Yes, yes, yes,” said Mary. “We know what a mammoth is, but …”
“But what?” asked Ponter, eyebrow lifted.
“But, well, I mean … mammoths are extinct,” said Mary.
“Extinct?” repeated Ponter, surprised. “Come to think of it, I have not seen any here, but, well, I assumed they did not like coming close to this massive city.”
“No, no, they’re extinct,” said Louise. “All over the world. They’ve been extinct for thousands of years.”
“Why?” asked Ponter. “Was it illness?”
Everyone fell silent. Mary slowly exhaled the air in her lungs, trying to decide how to present this. “No, that’s not why,” she said, at last. “Umm, you see, we—our kind, our ancestors—we hunted mammoths to extinction.”
Ponter’s eyes went wide. “You did what?”
Mary felt nauseous; she hated having her version of humanity come up so short. “We killed them for food, and, well, we kept on killing them until there were none left.”
“Oh,” said Ponter, softly. He looked out the window, at the large backyard to Reuben’s house. “I am fond of mammoths,” he said. “Not just their meat—which is delicious—but as animals, as part of the landscape. There is a small herd of them that lives near my home. I enjoy seeing them.”
“We have their skeletons,” said Mary, “and their tusks, and every once in a while a frozen one is found in Siberia, but …”
“All of them,” said Ponter, shaking his head back and forth slowly, sadly. “You killed all of them …”
Mary felt like protesting, “Not me personally,” but that would be disingenuous; the blood of the mammoths was indeed on her house. Still, she needed to make some defense, feeble though it was: “It happened a long time ago.”
Ponter looked queasy. “I am almost afraid to ask,” said Ponter, “but there are other large animals I am used to seeing in this part of the world on my version of Earth. Again, I had assumed they were just avoiding this city of yours, but …”
Reuben shook his shaven head. “No, that’s not it.”
Mary closed her eyes briefly. “I’m sorry, Ponter. We wiped out just about all the megafauna—here, and in Europe … and in Australia”—she felt a knot in her stomach as the litany grew—“and in New Zealand, and in South America. The only continent that has many really big animals left is Africa, and most of those are endangered.”
Bleep.
“On the verge of extinction,” said Louise.
Ponter’s tone was one of betrayal. “But you said this had all happened long ago.”
Mary looked down at her empty plate. “We stopped killing mammoths long ago, because, well, we ran out of mammoths to kill. And we stopped killing Irish elk, and the big cats that used to populate North America, and woolly rhinoceroses, and all the others, because there were none left to kill.”
“To kill every member of a species …” said Ponter. He shook his massive head slowly back and forth.
“We’ve learned better,” Mary said. “We now have programs to protect endangered species, and we’ve had some real successes. The whooping crane was once almost gone; so was the bald eagle. And the buffalo. They’ve all come back.”
Ponter’s voice was cold. “Because you stopped hunting them to extremes.”
Mary thought about protesting that it wasn’t all the result of hunting; much of it had to do with the destruction by humans of the natural habitats of these creatures—but somehow that didn’t seem any better.
“What … what other species are still endangered?” asked Ponter.
Mary shrugged a little. “Lots of kinds of birds. Giant tortoises. Panda bears. Sperm whales. Chim …”
“Chim?” said Ponter. “What are—?” He tilted his head, perhaps listening to Hak providing its best guess at the word Mary had started to say. “Oh, no. No. Chimpanzees? But … but these are our cousins. You hunt our cousins?”
Mary felt all of two feet tall. How could she tell him that chimps were killed for food, that gorillas were murdered so their hands could be made into exotic ashtrays?
“They are invaluable,” continued Ponter. “Surely you, as a geneticist, must know that. They are the only close living relatives we have; we can learn much about ourselves by studying them in the wild, by examining their DNA.”