Ponter finished his hamburger, then looked at Louise, Reuben, and Mary in turn. “I do not wish to complain,” he said, “but I am getting tired of this-this cow, do you call it? Is there a chance we might ask the people outside to bring us something else for tonight?”
“Like what?” asked Reuben.
“Oh, anything,” said Ponter. “Maybe some mammoth steaks.”
“What?” said Reuben.
“Mammoth?” said Mary, stunned.
“Is Hak incorrectly rendering what I am saying?” asked Ponter. “Mammoth. You know-a hairy elephant of northern climes.”
“Yes, yes, yes,” said Mary. “We know what a mammoth is, but…”
“But what?” asked Ponter, eyebrow lifted.
“But, well, I mean… mammoths are extinct,” said Mary.
“Extinct?” repeated Ponter, surprised. “Come to think of it, I have not seen any here, but, well, I assumed they did not like coming close to this massive city.”
“No, no, they’re extinct,” said Louise. “All over the world. They’ve been extinct for thousands of years.”
“Why?” asked Ponter. “Was it illness?”
Everyone fell silent. Mary slowly exhaled the air in her lungs, trying to decide how to present this. “No, that’s not why,” she said, at last. “Umm, you see, we-our kind, our ancestors-we hunted mammoths to extinction.”
Ponter’s eyes went wide. “You did what?”
Mary felt nauseous; she hated having her version of humanity come up so short. “We killed them for food, and, well, we kept on killing them until there were none left.”
“Oh,” said Ponter, softly. He looked out the window, at the large backyard to Reuben’s house. “I am fond of mammoths,” he said. “Not just their meat-which is delicious-but as animals, as part of the landscape. There is a small herd of them that lives near my home. I enjoy seeing them.”
“We have their skeletons,” said Mary, “and their tusks, and every once in a while a frozen one is found in Siberia, but…”
“All of them,” said Ponter, shaking his head back and forth slowly, sadly. “You killed all of them…”
Mary felt like protesting, “Not me personally,” but that would be disingenuous; the blood of the mammoths was indeed on her house. Still, she needed to make some defense, feeble though it was: “It happened a long time ago.”
Ponter looked queasy. “I am almost afraid to ask,” said Ponter, “but there are other large animals I am used to seeing in this part of the world on my version of Earth. Again, I had assumed they were just avoiding this city of yours, but…”
Reuben shook his shaven head. “No, that’s not it.”
Mary closed her eyes briefly. “I’m sorry, Ponter. We wiped out just about all the megafauna-here, and in Europe… and in Australia”-she felt a knot in her stomach as the litany grew-“and in New Zealand, and in South America. The only continent that has many really big animals left is Africa, and most of those are endangered.”
Bleep.
“On the verge of extinction,” said Louise.
Ponter’s tone was one of betrayal. “But you said this had all happened long ago.”
Mary looked down at her empty plate. “We stopped killing mammoths long ago, because, well, we ran out of mammoths to kill. And we stopped killing Irish elk, and the big cats that used to populate North America, and woolly rhinoceroses, and all the others, because there were none left to kill.”
“To kill every member of a species…” said Ponter. He shook his massive head slowly back and forth.
“We’ve learned better,” Mary said. “We now have programs to protect endangered species, and we’ve had some real successes. The whooping crane was once almost gone; so was the bald eagle. And the buffalo. They’ve all come back.”
Ponter’s voice was cold. “Because you stopped hunting them to extremes.”
Mary thought about protesting that it wasn’t all the result of hunting; much of it had to do with the destruction by humans of the natural habitats of these creatures-but somehow that didn’t seem any better.
“What… what other species are still endangered?” asked Ponter.
Mary shrugged a little. “Lots of kinds of birds. Giant tortoises. Panda bears. Sperm whales. Chim…”
“Chim?” said Ponter. “What are-?” He tilted his head, perhaps listening to Hak providing its best guess at the word Mary had started to say. “Oh, no. No. Chimpanzees? But… but these are our cousins. You hunt our cousins?”
Mary felt all of two feet tall. How could she tell him that chimps were killed for food, that gorillas were murdered so their hands could be made into exotic ashtrays?
“They are invaluable,” continued Ponter. “Surely you, as a geneticist, must know that. They are the only close living relatives we have; we can learn much about ourselves by studying them in the wild, by examining their DNA.”
“I know,” said Mary, softly. “I know.”
Ponter looked at Reuben, then at Louise, and then at Mary, sizing them up, it seemed, as if he were seeing them- really seeing them-for the first time.
“You kill with abandon,” he said. “You kill entire species. You even kill other primates.” He paused and looked from face to face again, as if giving them a chance to forestall what he was about to say, to come up with a logical explanation, a mitigating factor. But Mary said nothing, and neither did the other two, and so Ponter went on. “And, on this world, my kind is extinct.”
“Yes,” said Mary, very softly. She knew what had happened. Although not every paleoanthropologist agreed, many shared her view that between 40,000 and 27,000 years ago, Homo sapiens — anatomically modern humans-completed the first of what would be many deliberate or inadvertent genocides, wiping the planet free of the only other extant member of the same genus, a separate, more gentle species that perhaps had been better entitled to the double meaning of the word humanity.
“Did you kill us?” asked Ponter.
“That’s a much-debated question,” said Mary. “Not everyone agrees on the answer.”
“What do you think happened?” asked Ponter, golden eyes locked on Mary’s own.
Mary took a deep breath. “I-yes, yes, that’s what I think happened.”
“You wiped us out,” said Ponter, his own tone, and Hak’s rendition of it, clearly being controlled with difficulty.
Mary nodded. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Really, I am. It happened long ago. We were savages then. We-”
Just then, the phone rang. Reuben, looking relieved at the interruption, jumped up from the table and lifted a handset. “Hello?” he said.
Mary looked up as Reuben’s voice became more excited. “But that’s terrific!” continued the doctor. “That’s wonderful! Yes, no-yes, yes, that’s fine. Thank you! Right. Bye.”
“Well?” said Louise.
Reuben was clearly suppressing a grin. “Ponter has distemper,” he said, replacing the phone’s handset.
“Distemper?” repeated Mary. “But humans don’t get distemper.”
“That’s right,” said Reuben. “We’re naturally immune. But Ponter isn’t, because his kind hasn’t lived with our domesticated animals for generations. To be precise, he’s got the horse version of distemper; vets call it strangles when it happens to a young horse. It’s caused by a [338] bacterium, Streptococcus equii. Fortunately, penicillin is the usual treatment given to horses, and that’s one of the antibiotics I’ve been giving Ponter. He should be fine.”
“So we don’t have to worry about getting sick?” asked Louise.
“Not only that,” said Reuben, smiling broadly now, “but they’re lifting the quarantine! Assuming the final set of cultures-due later tonight-comes back negative, we can leave here tomorrow morning!”
Louise clapped her hands together. Mary was delighted, too. She looked over at Ponter, but he had his head bowed, presumably still thinking about the extinction of his kind on this world.
Mary reached over and touched his arm. “Hey, Ponter,” she said gently. “Isn’t that great news? Tomorrow, you’ll get to go out and see our world!”
Ponter lifted his head slowly and looked at Mary. She was still learning to read the subtleties of his expressions, but the words, “Do I have to?” seemed to fit with his widened eyes and slightly open mouth.
But finally he just nodded, as if in resignation.