“I know,” said Mary, softly. “I know.”
Ponter looked at Reuben, then at Louise, and then at Mary, sizing them up, it seemed, as if he were seeing them—really seeing them—for the first time.
“You kill with abandon,” he said. “You kill entire species. You even kill other primates.” He paused and looked from face to face again, as if giving them a chance to forestall what he was about to say, to come up with a logical explanation, a mitigating factor. But Mary said nothing, and neither did the other two, and so Ponter went on. “And, on this world, my kind is extinct.”
“Yes,” said Mary, very softly. She knew what had happened. Although not every paleoanthropologist agreed, many shared her view that between 40,000 and 27,000 years ago, Homo sapiens–anatomically modern humans—completed the first of what would be many deliberate or inadvertent genocides, wiping the planet free of the only other extant member of the same genus, a separate, more gentle species that perhaps had been better entitled to the double meaning of the word humanity.
“Did you kill us?” asked Ponter.
“That’s a much-debated question,” said Mary. “Not everyone agrees on the answer.”
“What do you think happened?” asked Ponter, golden eyes locked on Mary’s own.
Mary took a deep breath. “I—yes, yes, that’s what I think happened.”
“You wiped us out,” said Ponter, his own tone, and Hak’s rendition of it, clearly being controlled with difficulty.
Mary nodded. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Really, I am. It happened long ago. We were savages then. We—”
Just then, the phone rang. Reuben, looking relieved at the interruption, jumped up from the table and lifted a handset. “Hello?” he said.
Mary looked up as Reuben’s voice became more excited. “But that’s terrific!” continued the doctor. “That’s wonderful! Yes, no—yes, yes, that’s fine. Thank you! Right. Bye.”
“Well?” said Louise.
Reuben was clearly suppressing a grin. “Ponter has distemper,” he said, replacing the phone’s handset.
“Distemper?” repeated Mary. “But humans don’t get distemper.”
“That’s right,” said Reuben. “We’re naturally immune. But Ponter isn’t, because his kind hasn’t lived with our domesticated animals for generations. To be precise, he’s got the horse version of distemper; vets call it strangles when it happens to a young horse. It’s caused by a bacterium, Streptococcus equii. Fortunately, penicillin is the usual treatment given to horses, and that’s one of the antibiotics I’ve been giving Ponter. He should be fine.”
“So we don’t have to worry about getting sick?” asked Louise.
“Not only that,” said Reuben, smiling broadly now, “but they’re lifting the quarantine! Assuming the final set of cultures—due later tonight—comes back negative, we can leave here tomorrow morning!”
Louise clapped her hands together. Mary was delighted, too. She looked over at Ponter, but he had his head bowed, presumably still thinking about the extinction of his kind on this world.
Mary reached over and touched his arm. “Hey, Ponter,” she said gently. “Isn’t that great news? Tomorrow, you’ll get to go out and see our world!”
Ponter lifted his head slowly and looked at Mary. She was still learning to read the subtleties of his expressions, but the words, “Do I have to?” seemed to fit with his widened eyes and slightly open mouth.
But finally he just nodded, as if in resignation.
Chapter 39
Ponter spent most of the evening alone, just staring out the kitchen window at Reuben’s large backyard, a sad look on his large face.
Louise and Mary were both sitting in the living room. Mary was sorry she’d left her current book down in Toronto. She’d been in the middle of Scott Turow’s latest and really wanted to get back to it, but had to content herself with leafing through the current Time. President Bush was on the cover this week; Mary thought it possible that Ponter might be on the cover of the next issue. She preferred The Economist herself, but Reuben didn’t subscribe to it. Still, Mary did always enjoy Richard Corliss’s film reviews, even if she had no one to go to the movies with these days.
Louise, in the adjacent armchair, was writing a letter—in French, Mary had noted—in longhand on a yellow pad. Louise wore track shorts and an INXS T-shirt, her long legs tucked sideways beneath her body.
Reuben came into the room and crouched down between the two women, addressing them both in hushed tones. “I’m concerned about our boy Ponter,” he said.
Louise set down her yellow pad. Mary closed her magazine. “Me, too,” said Mary. “He didn’t seem to take that news about the extinction of his kind very well.”
“No, he didn’t,” said Reuben. “And he’s been under a lot of stress, which is just going to get worse tomorrow. The media will be all over him, not to mention government officials, religious kooks, and more.”
Louise nodded. “I suppose that’s true.”
“What can we do about it?” asked Mary.
Reuben frowned for a time, as if thinking about how to express something. Finally, he said, “There aren’t many people of my color here in Sudbury. Things are better down in Toronto, I’m told, but even there, black men get hassled by the police from time to time. ‘What are you doing here?’ ‘Is this your car?’ ‘Can we see some ID?’” Reuben shook his head. “You learn something going through that. You learn you’ve got rights. Ponter isn’t a criminal, and he isn’t a threat to anyone. He’s not at a border station, so no one can legally demand that he prove he should be allowed to be in Canada. The government may want to control him, the police may want to keep him under surveillance—but that doesn’t matter. Ponter’s got rights.”
“I certainly agree with that,” said Mary.
“Either of you ever been to Japan?” asked Reuben.
Mary shook her head. So did Louise.
“It’s a wonderful country, but there’re almost no non-Japanese there,” said Reuben. “You can go all day without seeing a white face, let alone a black one—I saw precisely two other blacks during the entire week I was there. But I remember walking through downtown Tokyo one day: I must have passed 10,000 people that morning, and they were all Japanese. Then, as I’m walking along, I see this white guy coming toward me. And he smiles at me—he doesn’t know me from Adam, but he sees that I’m a fellow Westerner. And he gives me this smile, like to say I’m so glad to see a brother—a brother! And I suddenly realize that I’m smiling at him, too, and thinking the same thing. I’ve never forgotten that moment.” He looked at Louise, then at Mary. “Well, old Ponter can search all he wants, all over the world, and he’s not going to see a single face that he recognizes as being like him. That white guy and I—and all those Japanese and me—we have much more in common than Ponter does with any of the six billion people on this globe.”
Mary glanced into the kitchen at Ponter, who was still staring out the window, a balled hand under the middle of his long jaw, propping it up. “What can we do about it?” she asked.
“He’s been almost a prisoner since he arrived,” said Reuben, “first in the hospital, then here, quarantined. I’m sure he needs time to think, to get some mental equilibrium.” He paused. “Gillian Ricci tipped me off in an e-mail. Apparently the same thought I had earlier has now occurred to the brass—or should I say the nickel?—at Inco. They want to question Ponter at length about any other mining sites in his world that he might know about. I’m sure he’ll be glad to help, but he still needs more time to adjust.”