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  “Last time I checked,” said Jock with a small smile.

  Chapter Two

  “And, as you will see, it is only our future—the future of Homo sapiens—that I will be addressing tonight. And not just because I can only speak as the American president. No, there is more to it than that. For, in this matter, our future and that of the Neanderthals are not intertwined…”

  Cornelius Ruskin was afraid the vivid nightmares would never end: that goddamned caveman coming at him, throwing him down, mutilating him. He awoke each morning soaked with sweat.

  Cornelius had spent most of the day after the horrid discovery painfully lying in bed, hugging himself. The phone had rung on several occasions, at least one of which was doubtless somebody calling from York University to find out where the hell he was. But he couldn’t bring himself to speak to anyone then.

  Late that night, he’d called the genetics department and left a message on Qaiser Remtulla’s voice mail. He’d always hated that woman, and hated her even more now that this had been done to him. But he managed to keep his tone calm, saying that he was ill and wouldn’t be back in for several days.

  Cornelius watched carefully for blood in his urine. Every morning, he felt around the wound for seepage, and took his own temperature repeatedly, to assure himself that he didn’t have a fever—which he didn’t, despite his frequent hot flashes.

  He still had trouble believing it, was still overwhelmed by the very idea. There was pain, but it diminished day by day, and codeine tablets helped—thank God they were available over the counter here in Canada; he always had some 222s on hand, and had initially been taking five at a time, but now had himself down to the normal dose of two.

  Beyond taking painkillers, though, Cornelius had no idea what to do. He certainly couldn’t go see his doctor—or any doctor, for that matter. There was no way his injury could be kept secret if he did that; someone would be bound to talk. And Ponter Boddit had been right: Cornelius couldn’t risk that.

  Finally, when he at last managed to summon enough energy, Cornelius went to his computer. It was an old no-name 90 MHz Pentium that he’d had since his grad-student days. The machine was adequate for word processing and e-mail, but he usually saved web surfing for when he was at work: York had high-speed lines, while all he could afford for home was a dial-up account with a local ISP. But he needed answers now, and so he suffered through the maddeningly slow page-loading.

  It took twenty minutes, but he finally found what he was looking for. Ponter had returned to this Earth wearing a medical belt that included among its tools a cauterizing laser scalpel. That device had been used to save the Neanderthal’s life when he’d been shot outside the United Nations. Surely that was how he had—

  Cornelius felt all his muscles contracting as he thought yet again of what had been done to him.

  His scrotum had been slit open, presumably by the laser, and—

  Cornelius closed his eyes and swallowed hard, trying to keep stomach acid from climbing his esophagus again.

  Somehow—possibly even with his bare hands—Ponter had then wrenched Cornelius’s testicles from his body. And then the laser must have been used again, searing his flesh shut.

  Cornelius had frantically searched his entire apartment for his balls, in hopes that they could be reimplanted. But after a couple of hours, tears of anger and frustration streaming down his face, he’d had to face reality. Ponter had either flushed them down the toilet, or had disappeared into the night with them. Either way, they were gone for good.

  Cornelius was furious. What he’d done had been so wonderfully appropriate: those women—Mary Vaughan and Qaiser Remtulla—had stood in his way. They’d gotten their positions, and their tenure, simply because they were female. He was the one with a Ph.D. from Oxford, for God’s sake, but he’d been passed over for promotion as York “corrected historical gender imbalances” among its various faculties. He’d been shafted by that, so he’d shown them—the department head, that Paki bitch; and Vaughan, who had the job he should have had—what it was really like to get the shaft.

  Damn it, thought Cornelius, feeling once more between his legs. His scrotum was badly swollen—but empty.

  God damn it.

  Jock Krieger went back to his office, which was on the ground floor of the Synergy Group mansion. His large window faced south toward the marina, instead of north toward Lake Ontario; the mansion was on an east–west spit of land in the Rochester community of Seabreeze.

  Jock’s Ph.D. was in game theory; he’d studied under John Nash at Princeton, and had spent three decades at the RAND Corporation. RAND had been the perfect place for Jock. Funded by the Air Force, it had been the principal U.S.-government think tank in the Cold War, carrying out studies of nuclear conflict. To this day, when Jock heard the initialsM.D., he thought of a megadeath —one million civilian casualties—rather than a medical doctor.

  The Pentagon had been furious about the way the initial encounter with Neanderthal Prime—the first Neanderthal to slip into this reality from that one—had gone. The story of a modern caveman appearing in a nickel mine in Northern Ontario had seemed pure tabloid stuff, akin to alien encounters, Bigfoot sightings, and so on. By the time the U.S. government—or the Canadian one, for that matter—was taking things seriously, Neanderthal Prime was out and about among the general public, making it impossible to contain and control the situation.

  And so money had suddenly appeared—some from the INS, but most from the DoD—to create the Synergy Group. That had been some politician’s name for it; Jock would have called it “Barast Encounter-Repetition Emergency Task-force,” or BERET. But the name—and that silly two-worlds-uniting logo—had been set before he was tapped to lead the organization.

  Still, it had been no accident that a game theorist had been selected. It was clear that if contact ever did reopen, the Neanderthals and the humans—Jock still reserved that word, at least privately, for real people—would have different interests, and figuring out the most advantageous outcome that could be reasonably expected in such situations was what game theory was all about.

  “Jock?”

  Jock usually kept his door open—that was good management, wasn’t it? An open-door policy? Still, he was startled to see a Neanderthal face—broad, browridged, bearded—peeking around the jamb. “Yes, Ponter?”

  “Lonwis Trob brought along some communiqués from New York City.” Lonwis and the nine other famous Neanderthals, plus the Neanderthal ambassador, Tukana Prat, had been spending most of their time at the United Nations. “Are you aware of the Corresponding-Points trip?”

  Jock shook his head.

  “Well,” said Ponter, “you know there are plans to open a bigger, permanent, ground-level portal between our worlds. Apparently your United Nations has taken the decision that the portal should be between United Nations headquarters and the corresponding point on my world.”

  Jock frowned. Why the hell was he getting intelligence reports from a bloody Neanderthal? Then again, he hadn’t yet checked his own e-mail today; maybe it was there. Of course, he’d known that the New York City option was being considered. It was a no-brainer, as far as Jock was concerned: obviously the new portal should be on U.S. soil, and putting it at United Nations Plaza—technically international territory—would appease the rest of the world.

  “Lonwis says,” continued Ponter, “that they are planning to take a group of United Nations officials over to the other side—my side. Adikor and I are going to go down to Donakat Island—our version of Manhattan—with them, to survey the site; there are considerable issues related to shielding any large-size quantum computer from solar, cosmic, and terrestrial radiation, lest decoherence occur.”

  “Yes? So?”

  “Well, so, I thought perhaps you might like to come along? You run this institute devoted to establishing good relations with my world, but you have not yet seen it.”

  Jock was taken aback. He found having two Neanderthals here at Syne
rgy just now rather creepy; they looked so much like trolls. He wasn’t sure he wanted to go somewhere where he’d be surrounded by them. “When’s this trip happening?”

  “After the next Two becoming One.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Jock, trying to keep up a pleasant facade. “I believe our Louise’s phrase for that is, ‘Par- tay! ’ ”

  “There is much more to it than that,” said Ponter, “although you will not get to see it on this proposed trip. Anyway, will you join us?”

  “I’ve got a lot of work to do,” said Jock.

  Ponter smiled that sickening foot-wide smile of his. “It is my kind that is supposed to lack the desire to see beyond the next hill, not yours. You should visit the world you are dealing with.”

  Ponter came up to Mary’s office and closed the door behind him. He took Mary in his massive arms, and they hugged tightly. Then he licked her face, and she kissed his. But at last they let each other go, and Ponter’s voice was heavy. “You know I have to return to my world soon.”

  Mary tried to nod solemnly, but she apparently was unable to completely suppress her grin. “Why are you smiling?” asked Ponter.

  “Jock has asked me to go with you!”

  “Really?” said Ponter. “That is wonderful!” He paused. “But of course…”

  Mary nodded and raised a hand. “I know, I know. We will only see each other four days a month.” Males and females lived largely separate lives on Ponter’s world, with females inhabiting the city centers, and males making their homes out at the rims. “But at least we’ll be in the same world—and I’ll have something useful to do. Jock wants me to study Neanderthal biotechnology for a month, learn all that I can.”

  “Excellent,” said Ponter. “The more cultural exchange, the better.” He looked briefly out the window at Lake Ontario, perhaps envisioning the trip he would soon have to take. “We must head up to Sudbury, then.”

  “It’s still ten days until Two become One, isn’t it?”

  Ponter didn’t have to check his Companion; of course he knew the figure. His own woman-mate, Klast, had succumbed to leukemia two years ago, but it was only when Two were One that he got to see his daughters. He nodded. “And after that, I am to head down south again, but in my world—to the site that corresponds to United Nations headquarters.” Ponter never said “UN”; the Neanderthals had never developed a phonetic alphabet, and so the notion of referring to something by initials was completely foreign to them. “The new portal is to be built there.”

  “Ah,” said Mary.

  Ponter raised a hand. “I won’t leave for Donakat until this next Two becoming One is over, of course, and I’ll be back long before Two become One once again.”

  Mary felt some of her enthusiasm draining from her. She’d known intellectually that even if she was in the Neanderthal world, twenty-five days would normally pass between times when she could be in Ponter’s arms, but it was a hard concept to get used to. She wished there was a solution, somewhere, in some world, that would see her and Ponter always together.

  “If you are going back,” said Ponter, “then we can travel to the portal together. I was going to get a lift with Lou, but…”

  “Louise? Is she going over, too?”

  “No, no. But she is going to Sudbury the day after tomorrow to visit Reuben.” Louise Benoît and Reuben Montego had become lovers while they were quarantined together, and their relationship had continued afterward. “Say,” said Ponter, “if all four of us are going to be in Sudbury at the same time, perhaps we can have a meal together. I have been craving Reuben’s barbecues…”

  Mary Vaughan currently had two homes on her version of Earth: she had been renting a unit at Bristol Harbour Village here in upstate New York, and she owned a condominium apartment in Richmond Hill, just north of Toronto. It was to that latter home that she and Ponter were now heading—a three-and-a-half-hour drive from Synergy Group headquarters. Along the way, once they’d gotten off the New York State Thruway in Buffalo, they’d stopped for KFC—Kentucky Fried Chicken. Ponter thought it was the greatest food ever—a sentiment Mary didn’t disagree with, much to her waistline’s detriment. Spices were a product of warm climates, designed to mask the taste of meat that was off; Ponter’s people, who lived in high latitudes, didn’t use much in the way of seasonings, and the combination of eleven different herbs and spices was unlike anything he’d ever had before.

  Mary played CDs on the long drive; it beat constantly hunting for different stations as they moved along. They’d started with Martina McBride’s Greatest Hits, and were now listening to Shania Twain’s Come On Over. Mary liked most of Shania’s songs, but couldn’t stand “The Woman In Me,” which seemed to lack the signature Twain oomph. She supposed she could get ambitious someday and burn her own CD of the album, leaving that song out.

  As they drove along, the music playing, the sun setting—as it did so early at this time of year—Mary’s thoughts wandered. Editing CDs was easy. Editing a life was hard. Granted, there were only a few things in her past that she wished she could edit out. The rape, certainly—had it really only been three months ago? Some financial blunders, to be sure. Plus a handful of misspoken remarks.

  But what about her marriage to Colm O’Casey?

  She knew what Colm wanted: for her to declare, in front of her Church and God, that their marriage had never really existed. That’s what an annulment was, after all: a refutation of the marriage, a denying that it had even happened.

  Surely someday the Roman Catholic Church would end its ban on divorce. Until Mary had met Ponter, there’d been no particular reason to wrap up her relationship with Colm, but now she did want to get it over with. And her choices were either hypocrisy—seeking an annulment—or excommunication, the penalty for getting a divorce.

  Ironic, that: Catholics could get off the hook for any venial sin just by confessing it. But if you’d by chance married the wrong person, there was no easy recourse. The Church wanted it to be until death do you part—unless you were willing to lie about the very fact of the marriage.

  And, damn it all, her marriage to Colm didn’t deserve to be wiped out, to be expunged, to be eradicated from the records.

  Oh, she hadn’t been 100 percent sure when she’d accepted his proposal, and she hadn’t been completely confident when she’d walked down the aisle on her father’s arm. But the marriage had been a good one for its first few years, and when it had gone bad it had only done so through changing interests and goals.

  There had been much talk of late about the Great Leap Forward, when true consciousness had first emerged on this world, 40,000 years ago. Well, Mary had had her own Great Leap Forward, realizing that her desires and career ambitions didn’t have to take a back seat to those of her lawfully wedded husband. And, from that moment on, their lives had diverged—and now they were worlds apart.

  No, she would not deny the marriage.

  And that meant…

  That meant getting a divorce, not an annulment. Yes, there was no law that said a Gliksin—the Neanderthals’ term for a Homo sapiens —who was still legally married to another Gliksin couldn’t undergo the bonding ceremony with a Barast of the opposite sex, but someday, doubtless, there would be such laws. Mary wanted to commit wholeheartedly to Ponter as his woman-mate, and doing that meant bringing a final resolution to her relationship with Colm.

  Mary passed a car, then looked over at Ponter. “Honey?” she said.

  Ponter frowned ever so slightly. It was an endearment that Mary used naturally, but he didn’t like it—because it contained the ee phoneme that his mouth was incapable of making. “Yes?” he said.

  “You know we’re going to spend the night at my place in Richmond Hill, right?”

  Ponter nodded.

  “And, well, you also know that I’m still legally bonded to my…my man-mate here, in this world.”

  Ponter nodded again.

  “I—I would like to see him, if I can, before we head off from Richmond Hi
ll to Sudbury. Maybe have breakfast with him, or an early lunch.”

  “I am curious to meet him,” said Ponter. “To know what sort of Gliksin you chose…”

  The CD changed to a new track: “Is There Life After Love?”

  “No,” said Mary. “I mean, I need to see him alone.”

  She looked over and saw Ponter’s one continuous eyebrow rolling up his browridge. “Oh,” he said, using the English word directly.

  Mary returned her gaze to the road ahead. “It’s time I settled things with him.”

  Chapter Three

  “I said it during my campaign, and I say it again now: a president should be forward-thinking, looking not just to the next election but to decades and generations to come. It is with that longer view in mind that I speak to you tonight…”

  Cornelius Ruskin lay in his sweat-soaked bed. He lived in a top-floor apartment in Toronto’s seedy Driftwood district—his “penthouse in the slums,” as he’d called it back when he’d been in the mood to make jokes. Sunlight was streaming in around the edges of the frayed curtains. Cornelius hadn’t set an alarm—not for the last several days—and he didn’t feel energetic enough to roll over and look at his clock.

  But the real world would soon intrude. He couldn’t remember the exact details of the sick benefits he was entitled to as a sessional instructor—but whatever they were, doubtless, after a certain number of days, the university, the union, the union’s insurer, or all three of them, would require a doctor’s certificate. So, if he didn’t go back to teaching, he wouldn’t get paid, and if he didn’t get paid…

  Well, he had enough to cover the rent for next month, and, of course, he’d had to pay the first and last months’ rent in advance, so he could stay here until the end of the year.

  Cornelius forced himself not to reach down and feel for his balls once more. They were gone; he knew they were gone. He was coming to accept that they were gone.