by neetha Napew
“Come then,” said Tukana. “There is a-how do you phrase it?-a reservation for us at an eatery a short walk away.”
Mary was glad to have a coat with her, although Ponter and Tukana seemed quite comfortable in their indoor clothes. They were both wearing the kind of pants Mary had seen Ponter wear before, which ended in pouches covering the feet. Ponter’s were dark green, and Tukana’s were maroon. And they both had on shirts that closed at the shoulders.
Mary took a second to look up at the United Nations tower, a great Kubrickian slab silhouetted against the sun. Besides Mary, the two Neanderthals were accompanied by two American diplomats, and two Canadian ones. The four cops surrounded the little group as it moved across the mall.
Tukana was talking with the diplomats. Ponter and Mary were trailing a little bit behind, chatting.
“How is your family?” asked Mary.
“They are well,” said Ponter. “But you would be astonished to learn what happened in my absence. My man-mate, Adikor, was accused of murdering me.”
“Really?” said Mary. “But why?”
“A long story, as you might say. Fortunately, though, I returned to my world in time to exonerate him.”
“So he’s okay now?”
“Yes, he is fine. I hope you can meet him at some point. He is-“
Three sounds, virtually simultaneous: Ponter going”oof,” one of the police officers shouting, and a loud crack, like a bolt of thunder.
As Ponter crumpled to the ground, Mary realized what had happened. She dropped to her knees next to him, probing his blood-soaked shirt for any sign of the entrance wound so she could stanch the flow of blood.
Thunder?thought Tukana. But no, that was impossible. The sky, although smelly, was clear and cloudless.
She turned and looked at Ponter, who-astonishment!-was prone on the pavement, blood pouring from him. That sound-a projectile weapon-agun, that was the English term-had been fired, and-
And suddenly Tukana herself was pitching forward, slamming face first into the ground, her giant nose smashing against the pavement.
One of the Gliksin enforcers had jumped on Tukana’s back, propelling her to the ground, using his body to shield hers. Noble, yes, but Tukana would have none of it. She reached back, grabbed the enforcer by the upper arm, and flipped him up and forward, so that he landed in front of her on his back, dazed. Tukana surged to her feet, and, despite the blood pouring from her nostrils, she had no trouble picking up the scent of the chemical explosion from the gun. She swung her head left and right, and-
There. A figure running away, and in his hand-
The stinking weapon.
Tukana took off after him, her massive legs pounding into the ground.
“Ponter has been shot in the right shoulder,” said Hak through his external speaker to Mary. “His pulse is rapid, but weak. His blood pressure is falling, as is his body temperature.”
“Shock,” said Mary. Continuing to probe Ponter’s shoulder, she found where the bullet had hit, her finger slipping into the wound up to the second knuckle. “Do you know if the bullet has left his body?”
One of the other cops was hovering over Mary; another was using a radio transceiver clipped to his chest to call for an ambulance. The third cop was hustling the American and Canadian diplomats back indoors.
“I am not sure,” said Hak. “I did not detect its departure.” A pause. “He is losing too much blood. There is a cauterizing laser scalpel in his medical kit. Open the third pouch on the right-hand side.”
Mary extracted a device that looked like a fat green pen. “Is this it?”
“Yes. Rotate the scalpel’s lower body until the symbol with two dots and a bar is lined up with the reference triangle.”
Mary peered at the device, and did as Hak said. “How’s that?” she said, holding the scalpel up to the Companion’s lens.
“Correct,” said Hak. “Now, follow my instructions precisely. Open Ponter’s shirt.”
“How?” said Mary.
“There are closures along the shoulder. They split apart when squeezed simultaneously from both sides.”
Mary tried one, and it did indeed pop open. She continued until she had Ponter’s entire left shoulder and arm exposed. The entrance wound was surrounded by terraces of bright red blood, filling the declivities of his musculature.
“The scalpel is activated by pressing on the blue square-do you see it?”
Mary nodded. “Yes.”
“If you depress the square halfway, the laser will come on, but at low energy, so you can see where its beam is directed. Pressing in all the way will fire the laser at full strength, and it should sear shut the clipped artery.”
“I understand,” said Mary. She used her fingers to open the wound so that she could see within.
“Do you see the artery?” asked Hak.
There was so much blood. “No.”
“Press the activation square halfway in.”
A bright blue dot appeared in the middle of the gore.
“All right,” said Hak. “The damage to the artery is eleven millimeters away from where you are pointing, on a line between your current position and Ponter’s left nipple.”
Mary repositioned the beam, marveling at the perspective Hak’s sensing field gave him.
“A little farther,” said Hak. “There! Stop. Now, use full power.”
The dot flared in brightness, and Mary saw a whiff of smoke go up from the wound.
“Again!” said Hak.
She pressed the square in once more.
“And two millimeters farther along-no, the other way. There! Again!”
She fired the laser.
“Now move an equal distance farther along. Yes. Again!”
She pressed hard on the blue square, and more vaporized tissue assaulted Mary’s nose.
“That should be enough,” said Hak, “until he can be treated by a doctor.”
Ponter’s golden eyes fluttered open. “Hold on,” Mary said, staring into them, and taking his hand. “Help is on its way.” She took off her coat, and placed it over him.
Tukana Prat continued to run after the man. One of the Gliksin enforcers was shouting “Stop!” and it was only belatedly that Tukana realized the imperative was directed at her, not the escaping man. But none of the enforcers could run as fast as Tukana; if she gave up her pursuit, the man with the gun would get away.
Part of Tukana’s mind was trying to analyze the situation. Guns, she was given to understand, could be deadly, but the element of surprise was gone now; it was unlikely the...assailant-that was the word-would turn and fire again. Indeed, he seemed intent solely on getting away, and, given that he was Gliksin, it probably didn’t occur to him that as long as he held on to the recently fired gun, Tukana would have no trouble tracking him.
The street was crowded, but Tukana had little difficulty making her way through the throngs; indeed, these humans seemed quite interested in clearing out of the way of the charging Neanderthal as fast as possible.
The man she was chasing-and it was a man, a male Gliksin-seemed shorter than most of his breed. Tukana was devouring the distance between them rapidly; she could almost reach out and grab him.
The man must have heard the thunderous footfalls behind him. He chanced a look over his shoulder, and swung the arm holding his gun back. “He is aiming at us,” said Tukana’s Companion through her cochlear implants.
Tukana hadn’t even thought about the blood in her nose; the airways were more than big enough to accommodate the huge intake that went with running. Indeed, she could feel the strength surging within her as her muscles became more, not less, oxygenated. She brought her legs down on the ground side by side, then pushed off, leaping forward, crossing the gap between her and the Gliksin. The man did fire, but the projectile went wide, although screams came from the crowd. Tukana fervently hoped they were only screams of terror, not that the bullet intended for her had hit someone else.
Tukana s
lammed into the man, knocking him forward onto the pavement, the two of them skidding ahead several paces. Tukana could hear the footfalls of the enforcers closing up the distance from the rear. The man beneath her tried to twist his spine around and get another shot off. Tukana seized the back of his strangely angular, narrow head in her massive hand, and-
It was her only choice. Surely, it was...
And smashed the man’s head forward, into the artificial stone covering the ground, the skull shattering, the front of his head breaking open like a ripe melon.
Tukana could feel her heart pounding, and she took a moment just to breathe.
Suddenly, she became aware that three of the four enforcers had caught up with them, and were now deployed in front of her, guns out, each held in two hands, aimed at the downed man.
But, as Tukana rose to her feet, she saw the look of horror on one of the Gliksins’ faces.
The enforcer in the middle doubled over and vomited.
And the third enforcer, wide-eyed, said, “Jesus Christ.”
And Tukana looked down at the dead, dead, dead man who had shot Ponter.
And, as she stood there, the sound of sirens grew nearer.
Chapter Eighteen
“Crisis mode!” shouted Jock Krieger as he hustled his way down the halls of the Synergy Group building in Rochester. “Everybody down to the Conference Room!”
Louise Benoît stuck her head out of her lab’s door. “What’s up?” she said.
“Conference Room!” called Jock over his shoulder. “Now!”
It took no more than five minutes to get everyone assembled in what had been the palatial living room, back when people had actually lived in this mansion. “Okay, team,” said Jock. “It’s time to earn those big bucks.”
“What’s happening?” asked Lilly, from the imaging group.
“NP just got shot in New York,” said Jock.
“Ponter shot?” said Louise, her eyes wide.
“That’s right.”
“Is he-“
“He’s alive. That’s all I know about his condition right now.”
“What about the ambassador?” asked Lilly.
“She’s fine,” said Jock. “But she killed the man who shot Ponter.”
“Oh my God,” said Kevin, also from imaging.
“I think you all know my background,” said Jock. “My field is game theory. Well, the stakes just got very, very high.Something is going to happen now, and we’ve got to figure out what, so we can advise the president, and-“
“The president...” said Louise, her brown eyes wide.
“That’s right. Playtime is over. He needs to know what the Neanderthals are going to do in response to this, and then how we should respond to whatever they do. Okay, ladies and gentlemen-we need ideas. Start them coming!”
Tukana Prat looked down at the man she had killed. Hélène Gagné had caught up to her, and now had cupped Tukana’s elbow. She helped the Neanderthal woman walk along, leading her away from the dead body.
“I did not mean to kill him,” said Tukana, softly, dazed.
“I know,” said Hélène, her tone soothing. “I know.”
“He...he tried to kill Ponter. He tried to kill me.”
“Everybody saw it,” said Hélène. “It was self-defense.”
“Yes, but...”
“You had no choice,” said Hélène. “You had to stop him.”
“Tostop him, yes,” said Tukana. “But to...to...”
Hélène swung Tukana around and gripped her upper arms.”It was self-defense, do you hear me? Don’t even hint that it might have been something else.”
“But...”
“Listen to me!This is going to be messy enough as it is.”
“I...I have to speak to my superiors,” said Tukana.
“So do I,” said Hélène, “and-“ Hélène’s cell phone rang. She fished it out and flipped it open.”Allo? Oui. Oui. Je ne sais pas. J’ai-un moment, s’il vous plaît.” She covered the mouthpiece, and spoke to Tukana. “The PMO.”
“What?”
“The Prime Minister’s Office.” She switched back to the handset, and to French.”Non. Non, mais...Oui-beaucoup de sang...No, elle est sein et sauf. D’accord. Non, pas de problème. D’accord. Non, aujourd’hui. Oui, maintenant...Pearson, oui. D’accord, oui. Au revoir.” Hélène closed the phone and put it away. “I’m to take you back to Canada, as soon as the police here are finished questioning you.”
“Questioning?”
“It’s just a formality. Then we’ll get you up to Sudbury, so that you can report back to your people.” Hélène looked at the Neanderthal woman, blood smeared across her face. “What...what do you think your superiors will want to do?”
Tukana Prat looked back at the dead man, then over to where the ambulance attendants were bending over Ponter, who was lying on his back. “I have no idea,” she said.
“All right,” said Jock Krieger, pacing through the opulent living room of the mansion in Seabreeze, “there are only two positions they can take. First, that they, the Neanderthals, are the aggrieved party here. After all, with no provocation, one of our kind put a bullet in one of their kind. Second, thatwe are the aggrieved party. Sure, one of our guys took a shot at one of them, but their guy lived and our guy is dead.”
Louise Benoît shook her head. “I don’t like thinking of a terrorist, or an assassin, or whatever the hell he was, as one of ‘our guys.’”
“Neither do I,” said Jock. “But that’s what it amounts to. The game is Gliksin versus Neanderthal; us versus them. And somebody has to make the next move.”
“We could apologize,” said Kevin Bilodeau, leaning back in the chair he’d taken. “Bend over backward telling them how sorry we are.”
“I say we wait and see what they do,” said Lilly.
“And what if what they do is slam the door?” said Jock, wheeling to face her. “What if they pull the goddamned plug on their quantum computer?” He turned to Louise. “How close are you to replicating their technology?”
Louise made apffft! sound. “Are you kidding? I’ve barely begun.”
“We can’t let them close the portal,” said Kevin.
“What are you suggesting?” sneered one of the sociologists, a heavyset white man of fifty. “That we send over troops to prevent them from shutting down the portal?”
“Maybe weshould do that,” said Jock.
“You can’t be serious!” said Louise.
“Have you got a better idea?” snapped Jock.
“They’re not idiots, you know,” said Louise. “I’m sure they’ve rigged some sort of fail-safe at their end to prevent us from doing precisely that.”
“Maybe,” said Jock. “Maybe not.”
“It would be a diplomatic nightmare to seize the portal,” said Rasmussen, a rough-hewn type whose field was geopolitics; he’d been trying to work out what core political units the Neanderthals might have, given that the geography of their world was the same as that of this one. “The Suez Crisis all over again.”
“Damn it,” said Krieger, kicking over a wastebasket. “God damn it.” He shook his head. “The whole point of game theory is to work out the best realistic outcome for both sides in a conflict. But this isn’t like nuclear brinksmanship-it’s like schoolyard basketball. Unless we do something, the Neanderthals can take the ball and go home, putting an end to everything!”
Tukana Prat had flown Air Canada from JFK to Toronto’s Pearson, and then from there via Air Ontario up to Sudbury, accompanied the whole way by Hélène Gagné. A car was waiting for them at the Sudbury Airport, and it whisked them to the Creighton Mine. The ambassador rode down the elevator, went along the SNO drift to the neutrino-observatory chamber, and headed back through the Derkers tube, across to the other side-toher side.
And now she was meeting in the Alibi Archive Pavilion with High Gray councilor Bedros, who, because the portal was in his region, was looking after all matters related to contact with th
e Gliksins.
The images Tukana’s Companion implant-with its enhanced memory capacity-had recorded on the other side had now been uploaded to her alibi archive, and she and Bedros had watched the whole sorry mess unfold in the holo-bubble floating in front of them.
“There’s really no question about what we should do,” said Bedros. “As soon as he is well enough to leave the Gliksin hospital, we must recall Ponter Boddit. And then we should sever the link with the Gliksin world.”
“I-I don’t know if that’s necessarily the correct response,” said Tukana. “Ponter will be all right, apparently. It is a Gliksin who is dead.”
“Only because he missed,” said Bedros.
“Yes, but-“
“No buts, Ambassador. I’m going to recommend to the Council that we permanently shut the portal as soon as we can get Scholar Boddit back.”
“Please,” said Tukana. “There is an opportunity here that is too valuable to pass up.”
“They have never had a purging of their gene pool,” snapped Bedros. “The most abhorrent, dangerous traits still run rampant throughout their population.”
“I understand that, but nonetheless...”
“And they carry weapons! Not for hunting, but for killing each other. And how many days did it take before such weapons were turned against members of our kind?” Bedros shook his head. “Ponter Boddit told us what happened to our kind on their world-remember, he learned that on his previous trip. They-the Gliksins-exterminated us. Now, think about that, Ambassador Prat. Think about it! Physically, the Gliksins are puny. Weakling stick figures! And yet they managed to wipe us out there, despite our greater strength and our bigger brains. How could they possibly have accomplished that?”
“I have no idea. Besides, Ponter only said that wasone theory about what had happened to us in their world.”
“They wiped us out through treachery,” continued Bedros, as if Tukana hadn’t spoken. “Through deceit. Through unimaginable violence. Swarms of them, armed with rocks and spears, must have poured into our valleys, overwhelming us with sheer numbers, until the blood of our kind soaked the ground and every last one of us was dead.That’s their history.That’s their way. It would be madness for us to leave a portal open between our two worlds.”