Still, brooding was unquestionably what Ponter was doing.
Mary got out of the tub and toweled off, then, still naked, made her way across the room and perched herself on the broad arm of his chair. “A penny for your thoughts,” she said.
Ponter frowned. “I doubt they are worth that much.”
Mary smiled and stroked his muscular upper arm. “You’re upset about something.”
“Upset?” said Ponter, trying on the word. “No. No, that’s not it. I’m simply wondering about something.”
Mary moved her arm around Ponter’s broad shoulders. “Something to do with me?”
“In part, yes.”
“Ponter,” she said, “we decided to try to make this—this relationship of ours—work. But the only way we can do that is if we communicate.”
Ponter looked downright apprehensive, Mary thought, and his face seemed to convey a plaintive Don’t you think I know that?
“Well?” said Mary.
“Remember Veronica Shannon?”
“Of course. The woman at Laurentian.” The woman who made Mary Vaughan see the Virgin Mary.
“There is an…an implication in her work,” said Ponter. “She has identified the suite of structures in the Homo sapiens brain that are responsible for religious impulses.”
Mary took a deep breath. She certainly hadn’t been comfortable with that notion, but the scientist in her couldn’t ignore what Veronica had apparently demonstrated. Still, “I suppose,” is all Mary said, releasing the air she’d taken in.
“Well, if we know what causes religion,” said Ponter, “then…”
“Then what?” said Mary.
“Then perhaps we could cure it.”
Mary felt her heart jump, and she thought she was going to tumble backward off the chair’s arm. “Cure it,” she repeated, as if hearing the words in her own voice would somehow make them more palatable. “Ponter, you can’t cure religion. It’s not a disease.”
Ponter said nothing, but looking down on his head from her perch on the chair’s arm, Mary saw his eyebrow roll up onto his ridge as if to say, Isn’t it?
Mary decided to speak before Ponter filled the void with more things she did not want to hear. “Ponter, it’s part of who I am.”
“But it’s the cause of so much evil in your world.”
“And of much greatness, too,” Mary said.
Ponter tilted his head and turned it sideways so that he could look at her. “You asked me to speak. I was content to keep these thoughts private.”
Mary frowned. If he’d been keeping them totally private, she never would have asked him what was wrong.
Ponter went on: “It should be possible to determine what mutation caused this in Gliksins.”
Mutation. Religion as a mutation. Sweet Jesus. “How do you know that it’s my people who’ve mutated? Maybe ours is the normal state, the ancestral state, and your people are the mutants.”
But Ponter simply shrugged. “Perhaps we are. If so, it wouldn’t be…”
But Mary finished his thought for him, her tone betraying her bitterness. “It wouldn’t be the only improvement since neanderthalensis and sapiens split.”
“Mare…” said Ponter gently.
But Mary wasn’t going to let it go. “See! You don’t have the vocal range we do! We’re the more advanced state.”
Ponter opened his mouth to protest, but then closed it, his thought unspoken. But Mary knew what it probably was: the perfect rejoinder to her comment about vocal range, the fact that Gliksins could choke to death while drinking whereas Neanderthals could not.
“I’m sorry,” said Mary. She moved over to Ponter’s chair, sitting this time in his lap, draping her arms around his shoulders. “I am so sorry. Please forgive me.”
“Of course,” said Ponter.
“It’s just a difficult notion for me. Surely you can understand that. Religion as an accidental mutation. Religion as a detriment. My beliefs as merely a biological response with no basis in any higher reality.”
“I can’t say I understand, for I don’t. I’ve never believed anything in defiance of evidence to the contrary. But…”
“But?”
Ponter fell silent again, and Mary shifted in his lap, leaning back a bit so that she could study his broad, round, bearded face. There was such intelligence in his golden eyes, such kindness.
“Ponter, I’m sorry I reacted the way I did. The last thing I want you to do is clam up—feel intimidated about speaking openly to me. Please, tell me what you were going to say.”
Ponter took a deep breath, and when he did that, it was enough to make Mary feel a breeze. “Remember I told you I had seen a personality sculptor.”
Mary nodded curtly. “About my rape. Yes.”
“That was the proximate cause of my visits to the sculptor, but other…other things, other matters…”
“We call them issues,” said Mary.
“Ah. It turned out I had some other issues to resolve.”
“And?”
Ponter moved in the chair, shifting both himself and Mary with ease. “The personality sculptor is named Jurard Selgan,” said Ponter. An irrelevancy, buying time as he composed his thoughts. “Selgan had a hypothesis about…”
“Yes?”
Ponter shrugged slightly. “About my attraction to you.”
Mary felt her back stiffen. It was bad enough that she was apparently the cause of Ponter’s problems—but to be the subject of theories by someone she’d never met! Her voice was Pleistocene in its coldness. “And what was his hypothesis?”
“You know my woman-mate Klast died of cancer of the blood.”
Mary nodded.
“And so she is no more. Completely and totally devoid of any further existence.”
“Like those commemorated at the Vietnam veterans’ wall,” said Mary, remembering their trip to Washington, and the point Ponter had made so vigorously there.
“Exactly!” said Ponter. “Exactly!”
Mary nodded as she felt pieces fall together in her mind. “You were upset that people at the Vietnam wall were taking comfort in the notion that their loved ones might still exist in some form.”
“Ka, ” said Ponter softly; Christine didn’t bother translating the Neanderthal word for “yes” if that was all a Barast said.
Mary nodded again. “You were…you were jealous of them, of the comfort they had, despite their tragic loss. The comfort that you were denied because you don’t believe in heaven or an afterlife.”
“Ka, ” Ponter said again. But, after a long pause, he continued, with Christine translating: “But Selgan and I didn’t speak of my visit to Washington.”
“Then what?” asked Mary.
“He suggested that…that my attraction to you…”
“Yes?”
Ponter tipped his head up, looking at the ceiling with its painted mural. “I said before that I had never believed anything in defiance of evidence to the contrary. The same might be said about believing things in the absence of any evidence. But Selgan suggested that perhaps I did believe you when you said you had a soul, when you said you would continue to exist in some form, even after death.”
Mary drew her eyebrows together and tilted her head to one side, absolutely baffled. “Yes?”