Hybrids

Oh, Christ, thought Mary. It comes full circle.

“I am sorry,” said Ponter. “I really am—about what I did to Ruskin, and about not letting you know.” He sought out her eyes. “Believe me, it has not been an easy burden to bear.”

Suddenly Mary got it. “The personality sculptor!”

“Yes, this is why I saw Jurard Selgan.”

“Not because of my rape…” said Mary slowly.

“No, not directly.”

“…but because of what you’d done about my rape.”

“Exactly.”

Mary let out a long sigh, anger—and much else—exiting her body. He hadn’t thought less of her because she’d been raped…“Ponter,” she said softly. “Ponter, Ponter…”

“I do love you, Mare.”

She shook her head slowly back and forth, wondering what to do next.

Chapter Thirty-four

“And that drive will compel us onward and outward…”

Bristol Harbour Village was the dream of a developer named Fred Sarkis: five luxury condominium-apartment buildings perched atop a shale cliff on the shore of Canandaigua Lake. One of upstate New York’s Finger Lakes, Canandaigua was a long, deep gouge in the landscape formed by Ice Age glaciers.

BHV had been built in the early 1970s, before the economies of Rochester, and so many other upstate cities, had gone into the toilet. It was a bizarre artifact of its time, like Habitat from Expo ’67. When Mary first saw it, at Louise Benoît’s recommendation, she’d thought they should film the next Spider-Man movie there: there were all sorts of bridges linking its multilevel outdoor parking garages with the actual apartment buildings that would have been perfect for the web-slinger.

Apparently, though, the development had never quite worked out the way it had been pla

The apartment Mary had rented was a two-bedroom, 1000-square-foot unit split over two levels. It still had what must have been the original god-awful orange shag carpet; Mary hadn’t seen anything like it in decades. Still, the view was beautiful—looking directly across the width of the lake. The upper balcony, off the master bedroom, had an unobstructed panorama; the lower balcony looked out into the top of the tenacious trees that had grown up out of the crumbling cliff face. From either of them, one could see the cement walkway jutting out to the outdoor elevator shaft that dropped the hundreds of feet to the marina and man-made beach below.

“Now, this is an interesting place!” said Ponter as he stood on the lower balcony, clutching the railing with both hands. “Modern conveniences amid nature. I almost think I am back on my world.”

Mary was using an electric grill on the balcony to cook steaks she’d bought at Wegman’s. Ponter continued to look out at the lake, while Adikor seemed more interested in a large spider that was working its way along the railing.

When the steaks were done—just a shade past raw for the boys, medium well for her—Mary served them, and Ponter and Adikor tore into theirs with gloved hands, while Mary carved hers with a knife. Of course, di

“So,” said Adikor, “where shall we sleep?”

Mary took a deep breath, then: “I thought Ponter and I would—”

“No, no, no,” said Adikor. “Two are not One. It’s I who should be sleeping with Ponter now.”

“Yes, but this is my home,” said Mary. “My world.”

“That’s irrelevant. Ponter is my man-mate. You two have not even bonded yet.”

“Please!” said Ponter. “Let’s not fight.” He smiled at Mary, then at Adikor, but said nothing for a few moments. Then, in a tentative voice, he offered, “You know, we could all sleep together…”

“No!” said Adikor, and “No!” said Mary simultaneously. Good grief! thought Mary. A hominid ménage à trois!

“I really think,” continued Mary, “that it makes sense for Ponter and me—”

“That’s gristle,” said Adikor. “It is obvious that—”

“My beloved,” said Ponter, but perhaps since mare was the Neanderthal word for “beloved,” he started again, using a different approach. “My two loves,” he said. “You know how deeply I care about each of you. But Adikor is right—under normal circumstances, I would be with him at this time of month.” He reached out and touched Adikor affectionately. “Mare, you must get used to this. It’s going to be a reality for the rest of my life.”

Mary looked out at the lake. This side was in shade, but sun was still falling on the far shore, a mile and a half off. There were four air-conditioning/heating units in the apartment, Mary knew—one at each end of each floor. She’d been turning on the fan on the one in the master bedroom before going to bed each night, so that the white noise would drown out the cacophony of birds that hailed the dawn. She supposed if she put it on high, it might keep her from hearing any noise coming from the other bedroom…

And Ponter was right. She did have to get used to this.

“All right,” she said, at last, closing her eyes. “But you guys have to make breakfast, then.”

Adikor took Ponter’s hand, and smiled at Mary. “Deal,” he said.

There was already a large safe in Jock’s office, built into the far wall; it had been the first renovation Jock had ordered when the Synergy Group had bought this old mansion. The safe, embedded in concrete, met Department of Defense guidelines for being both secure and fireproof. Jock kept the codon writer in it, only bringing it out for supervised study.

Jock sat at his desk. On one corner of it was the conversion box Lonwis had put together that would allow designs created on Jock’s PC to be downloaded into the codon writer. Jock was looking at one such design. His monitor—a seventeen-inch LCD, with a black bezel—was showing the notes and formulas Cornelius Ruskin had prepared. Of course, Jock had told Cornelius that his interest was purely defensive—wanting to see what a worst-case scenario would be if a device like the codon writer fell into the wrong hands.

Jock knew he should have turned this device over to the Pentagon—but those bastards would want to use it against humans. No, this was his opportunity—his one chance—and he had to seize it. Right now, early on in the contact between the two worlds, it would look like an accident: a nasty bug that had slipped through to the other side. Regrettable, but it would leave Eden uninhabited, and there’d only be one Homo sapiens casualty—Cornelius Ruskin, after he was no longer of any use.

Ruskin, of course, only knew what was necessary. For instance, as far as he, and most of the genetics community, knew, the natural reservoir for the Ebola virus—the place it lurked when not infecting humans—was unknown. But Jock was privy to things Ruskin was not: the U.S. government had isolated the reservoir back in 1998: Balaeniceps rex, the shoe-bill, a tall wading bird found in swamps in eastern tropical Africa. The information had been classified, lest an unfriendly power make use of it.

Ebola was an RNA virus whose genome had been completely sequenced, although, again, Ruskin wouldn’t know that; that information had also been classified, for the same reason. So, presumably as far as Ruskin was aware, the sequence Jock had asked him to manipulate was just a random viral string, not the actual genetic code of Ebola.