Then they enjoyed a Neanderthal board game called partanlar that was something like a cross between chess and checkers: the playing pieces were all identical, but how they could move depended upon which squares on the hundred-position grid they landed upon.
Later, they ate at a restaurant run by two old women whose man-mates were no more, enjoying delicious venison, wonderful salads of pine nuts and fern leaves, fried tubers, and boiled duck’s eggs. There, they sat side by side on a padded couch in the restaurant’s rear, wearing Neanderthal dining gloves and taking turns feeding each other.
“I love you,” said Mary, nestling against Ponter.
“And I love you,” Ponter replied. “I love you so very much.”
“I wish…I wish Two could always be One,” said Mary.
“When I am with you, I wish it would never end, either,” said Ponter, stroking Mary’s hair.
“But it must,” said Mary with a sigh. “I don’t know that I’ll ever fit in here.”
“There are no perfect solutions,” said Ponter, “but you could…”
Mary sat up and turned to face him. “What?”
“You could go back to your world.”
Mary felt her heart sink. “Ponter, I—”
“For twenty-five days a month. And you come back here when Two become One. I promise that each time you do, I will give you the four most loving, fun-filled, passionately sexual days possible.”
“I—” Mary frowned. She’d been looking for a solution that would see the two of them together constantly. But it did seem as if that wasn’t possible. Stilclass="underline" “The commute between Toronto and Sudbury would be awkward,” said Mary, “not to mention the decontamination procedures going each way, but…”
“You forget who you are,” said Ponter.
“I…I beg your pardon?”
“You are Mare Vaughan.”
“Yes?”
“You are the Mare Vaughan. Any academy—excuse me, any university —would love to have you on staff.”
“Well, and that’s another problem. I can’t possibly get four days off in a row every month.”
“Again, you underestimate yourself.”
“How?”
“Do I understand your academic schedules correctly? You are in session for eight months a year.”
“September to April, yes. Autumn to spring.”
“So four or five occurrences of Two becoming One will happen when you’re not obligated to the university. Of the remaining eight, a goodly number will partially fall on those first and last days of your seven-day clusters during which you do not work.”
“Still…”
“Still, there would be days you would have to miss being at the university.”
“Exactly. And no one is going to understand that—”
“Forgive me, beloved, but everyone is going to understand. Even before this visit, but especially now, you know more not just about the genetics of Neanderthals than any other Gliksin, but you also know more of what Neanderthals know of genetics than any other Gliksin. You would be an asset to any university, and if a few accommodations have to be made to your special needs, I’m sure that could be arranged.”
“I think you’re underestimating the difficulties.”
“Am I? The way to find out is to try.”
Mary pursed her lips, thinking. He was right; it certainly couldn’t hurt to ask. “Still, it takes most of a day to get from Toronto to Sudbury, especially once you add the time getting down to the portal onto the car trip. Four days could easily become six.”
“If you went back to living in Toronto, yes. But why not make your contribution at Laurentian University in Sudbury? They already know you there from the work you did during my first visit to your world.”
“Laurentian,” said Mary, tasting the word, tasting the idea. It was a lovely, small university, with a first-rate genetics department, and it did all that fascinating forensic work—
Forensics.
The rape. The goddamned rape.
Mary doubted she’d ever be comfortable working at Toronto’s York University again. Not only would she have to face Cornelius Ruskin, but she would also have to work side by side with Qaiser Remtulla, the other woman who had been raped by Ruskin, a rape that might have been prevented if Mary had reported the attack on herself. Every time she thought of Qaiser, Mary was wracked with guilt; working with her would be devastating—and working with Cornelius would be terrifying.
There was a certain elegance to what Ponter was proposing.
Teaching genetics at Laurentian…
Living just a short drive from the Creighton Mine, the threshold to the original interuniversal portal…
And spending even just four days a month with Ponter would be more wonderful, more fabulous, than a 24/7 relationship with any other man she could imagine…
“But what…what about generation 149? What about our child? I couldn’t bear to see my baby only once a month.”
“In our culture, children live with their female parents.”
“But only until they’re ten, if they’re male. Then, like Dab will soon, they go live with their fathers. I wouldn’t be able to let my child leave me after only a decade.”
Ponter nodded. “Whatever solution we find to allowing us to have a child will require manipulation of chromosomes. Surely, in that process, it’s a trivial matter to make sure our child is female. Such a child would live with her mother until she reached her two-hundred-and-twenty-fifth month—over eighteen of your years. Isn’t that a typical age for children to stay with their parents, even in your world?”
Mary’s head was spinning. “You are a brilliant man, Scholar Boddit,” she said, at last.
“I do my best, Scholar Vaughan.”
“It’s not a perfect solution.”
“Such things are rare,” said Ponter.
Mary thought about that, then snuggled closer to Ponter and gave the left side of his face a long, slow lick. “You know,” she said, pressing her face into his furry cheek, “it might just work.”
Chapter Nineteen
“So: it’s perfectly reasonable that we took a hiatus, that we enjoyed the first few decades of post-Cold War prosperity, that we indulged in one of the other things that makes our kind of humanity great: we stopped and smelled the roses…”
After they left the restaurant, Mary and Ponter rendezvoused with Mega, and spent a while playing with her. But soon it was her bedtime, and Mega went home to the house she shared with her tabant, Daklar Bolbay—which made Mary think of a brilliant idea: she and Ponter could go back to Ponter’s house for the night, out at the Rim. After all, Adikor would not be there, and it would let Bandra and Harb have Bandra’s house to themselves. Ponter was startled by the suggestion—it simply wasn’t normal for a woman to come to a man’s house, although, of course, Mary had been to Ponter’s a couple of times now—but after Mary explained her apprehension about making love with someone else at home, Ponter quickly agreed, and they summoned a travel cube to take them out to the Rim.
After some more wonderful sex, Mary was lounging in the circular, recessed bathtub, and Ponter was sitting in a chair. He was pretending to read something on a datapad, but Mary noticed his eyes weren’t tracking left to right—or right to left, for that matter. Pabo was napping quietly by her master’s feet.
Ponter’s posture was somewhat different from what a Homo sapiens male would display: although he had a long (albeit chinless) jaw, he didn’t prop it up with a crooked arm. Of course, the proportions of his arms weren’t quite normal. No, damn it, no; “normal” was the wrong word. Still, maybe it wasn’t comfortable for him to assume the classic Rodin “Thinker” pose. Or—why hadn’t Mary noticed this before? Ponter’s occipital bun gave extra weight to the rear of his head, perfectly counterbalancing his heavy face. Perhaps, when brooding, he didn’t prop up his head because there was no need to.