“What was that? ” asked Ponter.
“How long have you been there?” demanded Mary.
“A while.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I did not wish to disturb you,” said Ponter. “You seemed… intent on what was happening on the screen.”
Well, thought Mary, she had, in a way, usurped his room; the couch where he slept was the one she was now sitting on. Ponter came fully into Reuben’s office and moved toward the couch, presumably to sit next to her. Mary scooted down to the far end, leaning against one of the couch’s padded arms.
“Again,” said Ponter, “what was that?”
Mary lifted her shoulders slightly. “A church service.”
Ponter’s Companion bleeped.
“Church,” said Mary. “A, um, a hall of worship.”
Another bleep.
“Religion. Worshiping God.”
Hak spoke up at this point, using its female voice. “I am sorry, Mare. I do not know the meaning of any of these words.”
“God,” repeated Mary. “The being who created the universe.”
There was a moment during which Ponter’s expression remained neutral. But then, presumably upon hearing Hak’s translation, his golden eyes went wide. He spoke in his language, and Hak translated, using the male voice: “The universe did not have a creator. It has always existed.”
Mary frowned. She suspected Louise-if she ever emerged from the basement-would enjoy explaining big-bang cosmology to Ponter. For her part, Mary simply said, “That’s not our belief.”
Ponter shook his head, but was evidently willing to let that go. Still: “That man,” he said, indicating the TV, “talked of ‘everlasting life.’ Does your kind have the secret of immortality? We have specialists in life-prolongation, and they have long sought that, but-”
“No,” said Mary. “No, no. He’s talking about Heaven.” She raised her hand, palm out, and successfully forestalled Hak’s bleep. “Heaven is a place where we supposedly continue to exist after death.”
“That is oxymoronic.” Mary marveled briefly at Hak’s proficiency. Ponter had actually spoken a dozen words in his own language, presumably saying something like “that’s a contradiction in terms,” but the Companion had realized that there was a more succinct way to express this in English, even if there wasn’t in the Neanderthal tongue.
“Well,” replied Mary, “not everyone on Earth-on this Earth, that is-believes in an afterlife.”
“Do the majority?”
“Well… yes, I guess so.”
“Do you?”
Mary frowned, thinking. “Yes, I suppose I do.”
“Based on what evidence?” asked Ponter. The tone of his Neanderthal words was neutral; he wasn’t trying to be derisive.
“Well, they say that…” She trailed off. Why did she believe it? She was a scientist, a rationalist, a logical thinker. But, of course, her religious indoctrination had occurred long before she’d been trained in biology. Finally, she shrugged a little, knowing her answer would be inadequate. “It’s in the Bible.”
Hak bleeped.
“The Bible,” repeated Mary. “Scriptures.” Bleep. “Holy text.” Bleep. “A revered book of moral teachings. The first part of it is shared by my people-called Christians-and by another major religion, the Jews. The second part is only believed in by Christians.”
“Why?” asked Ponter. “What happens in the second part?”
“It tells the story of Jesus, the son of God.”
“Ah, yes. That man spoke of him. So-so this… this creator of the universe somehow had a human son? Was God human, then?”
“No. No, he’s incorporeal; without a body.”
“Then how could he…?”
“Jesus’ mother was human, the Virgin Mary.” She paused. “In a roundabout way, I’m named after her.”
Ponter shook his head slightly. “Sorry; Hak has been doing an admirable job, but clearly is failing here. My Companion interpreted something you said as meaning one who has never had sexual intercourse.”
“Virgin, yes,” said Mary.
“But how can a virgin also be a mother?” asked Ponter. “That is another-” and Mary heard him speak the same string of words that Hak had rendered before as “oxymoron.”
“Jesus was conceived without intercourse. God sort of planted him in her womb.”
“And this other faction-Jews, you said? — rejects this story?”
“Yes.”
“They seem… less credulous, shall we say.” He looked at Mary. “Do you believe this? This story of Jesus?”
“I am a Christian,” Mary said, confirming it as much for herself as for Ponter. “A follower of Jesus.”
“I see,” said Ponter. “And you also believe in this existence after death?”
“Well, we believe that the real essence of a person is the soul”bleep — “an incorporeal version of the person, and that the soul travels to one of two destinations after death, where that essence will live on. If the person has been good, the soul goes to Heaven-a paradise, in the presence of God. If the person has been bad, the soul goes to Hell”- bleep — “and is tortured”- bleep — “tormented forever.”
Ponter was silent for a long time, and Mary tried to read his broad features. Finally, he said, “We-my people-do not believe in an afterlife.”
“What do you think happens after death?” asked Mary.
“For the person who has died, absolutely nothing. He or she ceases to be, totally and completely. All that they were is gone forevermore.”
“That’s so sad,” said Mary.
“Is it?” asked Ponter. “Why?”
“Because you have to go on without them.”
“Do you have contact with those who dwell in this afterlife of yours?”
“Well, no. I don’t. Some people say they do, but their claims have never been substantiated.”
“Color me surprised,” said Ponter; Mary wondered where Hak had picked up that expression. “But if you have no way of accessing this afterlife, this realm of the dead, then why give it credence?”
“I’ve never seen the parallel world you came from,” said Mary, “and yet I believe in that. And you can’t see it anymore-but you still believe in it, too.”
Once again, Hak got full marks. “Touche,” it said, neatly summarizing a half dozen words uttered by Ponter.
But Ponter’s revelations had intrigued Mary. “We hold that morality comes from religion: from the belief in an absolute good, and from the, well, the fear, I guess, of damnation-of being sent to Hell.”
“In other words,” said Ponter, “humans of your kind behave properly only because they are threatened if they do not.”
Mary tilted her head, conceding the point. “It’s Pascal’s wager,” she said. “See, if you do believe in God, and he doesn’t exist, then you’ve lost very little. But if you don’t, and he does, then you risk eternal torment. Given that, it’s prudent to be a believer.”
“Ah,” said Ponter; the interjection was the same in his language as hers, so no rendering of it was made by Hak.
“But, look,” said Mary, “you still haven’t answered my question about morality. Without a God-without a belief that you will be rewarded or punished after the end of your life-what drives morality among your people? I’ve spent a fair bit of time with you now, Ponter; I know you’re a good person. Where does that goodness come from?”
“I behave as I do because it is right for me to do so.”
“By whose standards?”
“By the standards of my people.”
“But where do those standards come from?”
“From…” And here Ponter’s eyes went wide, great orbs beneath an undulating shelf of bone, as though he’d had an epiphany-in the secular sense of the word, of course. “From our conviction that there is no life after death!” he said triumphantly. “That is why your belief troubles me; I see it now. Our assertion is straightforward and congruent with all observed fact: a person’s life is completely finished at death; there is no possibility of reconciling with them, or making amends after they are gone, and no possibility that, because they lived a moral life, they are now in a paradise, with the cares of this existence forgotten.” He paused, and his eyes flicked left and right across Mary’s face, apparently looking for signs she understood what he was getting at.
“Do you not see?” Ponter went on. “If I wrong someone-if I say something mean to them, or, I do not know, perhaps take something that belongs to them-under your worldview I can console myself with the knowledge that, after they are dead, they can still be contacted; amends can be made. But in my worldview, once a person is gone-which could happen for any of us at any moment, through accident or heart attack or so on-then you who did the wrong must live knowing that that person’s entire existence ended without you ever having made peace with him or her.”
Mary thought about that. Yes, most slave owners had ignored the issue, but surely some people of conscience, caught up in a society driven by bought-and-sold human beings, must have had qualms… and yet had they consoled themselves with the knowledge that the people they were mistreating would be rewarded for their suffering after death? Yes, the Nazi leaders were pure evil, but how many of the rank and file, following orders to exterminate Jews, had managed to sleep at night by believing the freshly dead were now in paradise?
Nor did it have to be anything so grandiose. God was the great compensator: if you were wronged in life, it would be made up for in death-the fundamental principle that had allowed parents to send their children off to die in war after countless war. Indeed, it didn’t really matter if you ruined someone else’s life, because that person might well go to Heaven. Oh, you yourself might be dispatched to Hell, but nothing you did to anyone else really hurt them in the long run. This existence was mere prologue; eternal life was yet to come.
And, indeed, in that infinite existence, God would make up for whatever had been done to… to her.
And that bastard, that bastard who had attacked her, would burn.
No, it didn’t matter if she never reported the crime; there was no way he could escape his ultimate judge.
But… but… “But what about your world? What happens to criminals there?”
Bleep.
“People who break laws,” said Mary. “People who intentionally hurt others.”
“Ah,” said Ponter. “We have little problem with that anymore, having cleansed most bad genes from our gene pool generations ago.”
“What?” exclaimed Mary.
“Serious crimes were punished by sterilization of not just the offender but also anyone who shared fifty percent of the offender’s genetic material: brothers and sisters, parents, offspring. The effect was twofold. First, it cleansed those bad genes from our society, and-”
“How would nonagriculturalists stumble onto genetics? I mean, we figured it out through plant cultivation and animal husbandry.”
“We may not have bred animals or plants for food, but we did domesticate wolves to help us in hunting. I have a dog named Pabo that I am very fond of. Wolves were quite susceptible to controlled breeding; the results were obvious.”
Mary nodded; that sounded reasonable enough. “You said the sterilization had a twofold effect on your society?”
“Oh, yes. Besides directly eliminating the faulty genes, it gave families a strong incentive to make sure none of their own members ran seriously afoul of society.”
“I suppose it would at that,” said Mary.
“It did indeed,” said Ponter. “You, as a geneticist, surely know that the only immortality that really exists is genetic. Life is driven by genes wanting to ensure their own reproduction, or to protect existing copies of themselves. So our justice was aimed at genes, not at people. Our society is mostly free of crime now because our justice system directly targeted that which really drives all life: not individuals, not circumstances, but genes. We made it so that the best survival strategy for genes is to obey the law.”
“Richard Dawkins would approve, I imagine,” said Mary. “But you were speaking of this… this sterilization practice in the past tense. Has it ended?”
“No, but there is little modern need.”
“You were that successful? No one commits serious crimes anymore?”
“Hardly anyone does so because of genetic disorders. There are, of course, also biochemical disorders that cause antisocial behavior, but those are eminently treatable with drugs. Only rarely does sterilization still need to be invoked.”
“A society without crime,” said Mary, shaking her head slowly in amazement. “That must be…” She paused, wondering how much she wanted to let her guard down, then: “That must be fabulous.” But she frowned. “Surely, though, a lot of crime must go unsolved. I mean, if you can’t figure out who did something, then the perpetrator must go unpunished-or, if he had a biochemical disorder, untreated.”
Ponter blinked. “Unsolved crimes?”
“Yes, you know: crimes for which the police”- bleep — “or whatever you have for law enforcement, can’t figure out who did it.”
“There are no such crimes.”
Mary’s back stiffened. Like most Canadians, she was against capital punishment-precisely because it was possible to execute the wrong person. All Canadians lived with the shame of the wrongful imprisonment of Guy Paul [298] Morin, who had spent ten years rotting in jail for a murder he didn’t commit; of Donald Marshall, Jr., who spent eleven years incarcerated for a murder he, too, didn’t commit; of David Milgaard, who spent twenty-three years jailed for a rape-murder he also was innocent of. Castration was the least of the punishments Mary would like to see her own rapist subjected to-but if, in her quest for vengeance, she had it done to the wrong person, how could she live with herself? And what about the Marshall case? No, it wasn’t all Canadians who lived with the shame of that; it was white Canadians. Marshall was a Mi’kmaq Indian whose protestations of innocence in a white court, it seemed, weren’t believed simply because he was an Indian.
Still, maybe she was thinking now more like an atheist than a true believer. A believer should hold that Milgaard, Morin, and Marshall were eventually going to receive their just, heavenly reward, making up for whatever they’d endured here on Earth. After all, God’s own son had been executed unfairly, even by the standards of Rome; Pontius Pilate didn’t think Christ guilty of the crime with which he’d been charged.
But Ponter’s world was beginning to sound worse even than Pilate’s court: the brutality of forced sterilizations with an absolute belief that you’d always correctly found the guilty party. Mary suppressed a shudder. “How can you be certain you’ve convicted the right person? More to the point, how can you be sure you haven’t convicted the wrong person?”
“Because of the alibi archives,” said Ponter, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
“The what?” said Mary.
Ponter, still seated next to her on the couch in Reuben’s office, held up his left arm and rotated it so that the inside of his wrist faced toward her. The strange digits on the Companion winked at Mary. “The alibi archives,” he said again. “Hak constantly transmits information about my location, as well as three-dimensional images of exactly what I am doing. Of course, it has been out of touch with its receiver since I came here.”
This time Mary didn’t suppress the shudder. “You mean you live in a totalitarian society? You’re constantly under surveillance?”
“Surveillance?” said Ponter, his eyebrow climbing over his browridge. “No, no, no. No one is monitoring the transmitted data.”
Mary frowned, confused. “Then what’s done with it?”
“It is recorded in my alibi archive.”
“And what, exactly, is that?”
“A computerized memory archive; a block of material onto whose crystalline lattices we imprint unalterable recordings.”
“But if no one is monitoring it, what’s it for?”
“Am I misusing your word ‘alibi’?” said Hak, in the female voice it used when talking on its own behalf. “I understood an alibi to be proof that one was somewhere else when an act was committed.”
“Um, yes,” said Mary. “That’s an alibi.”
“Well, then,” continued Hak. “Ponter’s archive provides him with an irrefutable alibi for any crime he might be accused of.”
Mary felt her stomach flutter. “My God-Ponter, is the onus on you to prove your innocence?”
Ponter blinked, and Hak translated his words with the male voice. “Who else should it be on?”
“I mean, here, on this Earth, a person is innocent until proven guilty.” As the words came out, Mary realized that there were many places where that, in fact, wasn’t true, but she decided not to amend her comment.
“And I take it that you have nothing comparable to our alibi archives?” asked Ponter.
“That’s right. Oh, there are security cameras in some places. But they’re not everywhere, and almost no one has them in their homes.”
“Then how do you ascertain someone’s guilt? If there is no record of what actually happened, how can you be sure you are going to deal with the appropriate person?”
“That’s what I meant about unsolved crimes,” said Mary. “If we’re not sure-and often we have no idea at all-then the person gets away with the crime.”
“That hardly seems a better system,” said Ponter slowly.
“But our privacy is protected. No one is constantly looking over our shoulders.”
“Nor is anyone in my world-at least, not unless one is a… I do not know the word. Somebody who shows all for others to watch.”
“An exhibitionist?” said Mary, raising her eyebrows in surprise.
“Yes. Their contribution is to allow others to monitor the transmissions from their Companions. They have enhanced implants that sense at a higher resolution and to a greater distance, and they go to various interesting places so that other people can watch what is happening there.”
“But surely, in theory, someone could compromise the security of anyone’s transmissions, not just those of an exhibitionist.”
“Why would anyone want to do that?” asked Ponter.
“Well-um, I don’t know. Because they can?”
“I can drink urine,” said Ponter, “but never have I felt the urge to do so.”
“We have people here who consider it a challenge to compromise security measures-especially those involving computers.”
“That hardly seems a contribution to society.”
“Perhaps not,” said Mary. “But, look, what if the person who is accused doesn’t want to unlock his-what did you call it? His alibi archive?”
“Why would he not?”
“Well, I don’t know. Just on general principle?”
Ponter looked perplexed.
“Or,” said Mary, “because what they were actually doing at the time of the crime was embarrassing?” Bleep. “Embarrassing. You know, something you are ashamed”- bleep — “of.”
“Perhaps an example would help me get your meaning,” said Ponter.
Mary pursed her lips, thinking. “Well, um, okay, say I was-say I was, you know, having, um, sex with someone else’s mate; the fact that I was doing that might be my alibi, but I wouldn’t want people to know it.”
“Why not?”
“Well, because we believe adultery”- bleep — “is wrong.”
“Wrong?” said Ponter, Hak having apparently guessed the meaning of the untranslated word. “How can it be, unless a claim of false paternity results? Who is hurt by it?”
“Well, um, I don’t know; I mean, we, ah, we consider adultery a sin.” Bleep.
Mary had expected that bleep, at least. If you had no religion, no list of things that didn’t actually hurt somebody else but were still proscribed behaviors-recreational drug use, masturbation, adultery, watching porno videos-then you might indeed not be so fanatic about privacy. People insisted on it at least in part because there were things they did that they’d be mortified to have others know about. But in a permissive society, an open society, a society where the only crimes are crimes that have specific victims, perhaps it wouldn’t be such a big deal. And, of course, Ponter had shown no nudity taboo-a religious idea, again-and no desire for seclusion while using the bathroom.
Mary shook her head. All the times she’d been embarrassed and ashamed in her life, all the times she was glad no one could see what she was doing: were they uncomfortable simply because of church-imposed edicts? The shame she felt over leaving Colm; the shame that prevented her from getting a divorce; the shame she felt over dealing with her own drives now that she had no man in her life; the shame she felt because of sin… Ponter had none of that, it seemed; as long as he was hurting no one else, he never felt uncomfortable over acts that gave him pleasure.
“I suppose your system might work,” said Mary dubiously.
“It does,” replied Ponter. “And recall that for serious crimes-those involving assaults on another person-there are usually at least two alibi archives available: that of the victim, and that of the perpetrator. The victim usually introduces his or her own archive of the event as evidence, and most of the time it clearly shows the perpetrator.”
Mary was simultaneously fascinated and repelled. Still…
That night at York…
If images had been recorded, could she have brought herself to show them to anyone?
Yes, she said to herself firmly. Yes. She had done nothing wrong, nothing to be ashamed of. She was the innocent victim. All the pamphlets Keisha had given her at the rape-crisis center said that, and she really, really, really, really tried to believe it.
But-but even if there were a recording of what she’d seen, could it have been used to catch the monster? He’d been wearing a balaclava; she’d never seen his face-although a thousand different versions of it had haunted her dreams since. Whom would she have accused? Whose alibi archive would the courts have ordered unlocked? Mary had no idea where to begin, no idea whom to suspect.
She felt her stomach flutter. Maybe that was the real problem-the predicament that Ponter’s people had avoided: having too many possible suspects, too much crowding, too much anonymity, too many vicious, aggressive… men, she thought. Men. Every academic of her generation had been sensitized to the issue of gender-neutral language. But violent crimes were indeed overwhelmingly caused by males.
And, yet, she’d spent her life surrounded by good, decent men. Her father; her two brothers; so many supportive colleagues; Father Caldicott, and Father Belfontaine [304] before him; many good friends; a handful of lovers.
What proportion of men really were the problem? What fraction were violent, angry, unable to control their emotions, unable to resist their impulses? Was it so vast a group that it couldn’t have been-“cleansed” was Ponter’s word, a nurturing word, a hopeful word-from the gene pool generations ago?
No matter how large or how small the population of violent males was, thought Mary, there were too many. Even one such beast would be too many, and And here she was, thinking like Ponter’s people. The gene pool could indeed use a good cleansing, a therapeutic purging.
Yes, it surely could.