Ponter looked at Adikor briefly; Adikor, after all, was the hardware expert. But Adikor conveyed with an expression that Ponter should go ahead and answer. “At least three hundred, I’d say, and possibly many more.”

Pandaro spread her arms, as if the answer were obvious. “Well, then, there is no rush to deal with this matter. We can take the time to study the issue, and—”

“No!” exclaimed Ponter. Every eye in the chamber fell on him.

“I beg your pardon?” said the president, her tone cool.

“I mean,” said Ponter, “it’s just that—that we don’t know how reproducible this phenomenon is over the long term. Any number of conditions might change, and—”

“I understand your desire to continue your work, Scholar Boddit,” said the president, “but there is the question of disease transfer, of contamination, and—”

“We already have the technology to shield against that,” said Ponter.

“In theory,” said another Councilor, also a female. “But in practice, the Kajak technique has never been used in such a way. We can’t be sure—”

“You are so timid,” snapped Ponter. Adikor was looking at him with shock, but Ponter ignored his partner. “They would not be so frightened. They’ve climbed their world’s highest mountains! They’ve gone far beneath the oceans! They’ve orbited the Earth! They’ve gone to the moon! It wasn’t the cowardice of old men and women that—”

“Scholar Boddit!” The president’s tone thundered through the Council chamber.

Ponter stopped himself. “I—I’m sorry, President. I didn’t mean—”

“I think it’s abundantly clear what you meant,” said Pandaro. “But our role is to be cautious. We have the welfare of the entire world on our shoulders.”

“I know,” said Ponter, trying to keep his voice calm. “I know, but there’s so much at stake here! We can’t wait for endless months. We have to act now. You have to act now.”

Ponter felt Adikor’s hand land gently on his upper arm. “Ponter…” he said softly.

But Ponter twisted free. “We haven’t gone to the moon. We’ll probably never go to the moon—and that means we’ll never go to Mars, or the stars. This parallel Earth is the only other world our people will ever have access to. We can’t let the opportunity slip away!”

It might be apocryphal, but Mary Vaughan had heard the story so often she suspected it was probably true. They said that when Toronto decided to build a second university in the 1960s, the plans for the campus had been bought from an extant university in the southern U.S. It had seemed like an expedient thing to do, but no one had taken into account the climatic differences.

That used to create problems, at least in winter. The campus had originally had lots of spaces between buildings, but those had been filled in over the years with new construction. Now the campus was cluttered: crowded with glass and steel, with brick and concrete.

Still, there were things about the campus that appealed to Mary. Most notable was the name of the business school, which she was now passing: “The Schulich School of Business”—and, yes, Schulich was pronounced “shoe lick.”

It was still a week before classes would begin, and the campus was mostly deserted. Although it was broad daylight, Mary still found herself feeling apprehensive as she walked along, going around corners, passing walls, squeezing through passageways.

This was where it had happened, after all. This was where she’d been raped.

Like most North American universities, York actually had more female undergraduates than males these days. Still, with over forty thousand full-time students, there were perhaps twenty thousand males who could have been responsible—assuming that the animal had been a York student.

But no, no, that wasn’t right. York was in Toronto, and a more cosmopolitan city would be hard to find. The man who’d raped her had white skin and blue eyes. A large chunk of York’s population didn’t fit that description.

And he’d been a smoker; Mary vividly remembered the reek of tobacco on his breath. Although it pained her every time she saw a student lighting up—these kids, after all, had been born in the 1980s, two decades after U.S. Surgeon General Luther Terry had announced that smoking was deadly—it was true that a minority of women, and even fewer men, smoked.

So the person who had attacked her wasn’t just anyone; he’d been part of a subset of a subset of a subset: males, with blue eyes and white skin, who smoked.

If Mary could ever find him, she could prove his guilt. There weren’t many occasions when being a geneticist turned out to have practical applications in one’s own life, but it had come in handy that horrible night. Mary knew how to preserve samples of the man’s semen, which would contain DNA that could conclusively identify him.

Mary continued to walk across the campus. There were no crowds to fight through yet. But, actually, she’d probably feel safer then. After all, the rape had occurred during the summer holidays, when fewer people were around. Crowds meant safety—whether on the African savannah or here in Toronto.

And now, as she walked along, Mary realized a man was coming toward her. Her pulse accelerated, but she stayed her course; she couldn’t spend the rest of her life veering out of the way every time she was getting near a male. Still…

Still, it was a white man—that much was obvious.

His hair was blondish. She’d not seen her assailant’s hair; he’d worn a ski mask. But blue eyes often went with light hair.

Mary closed her eyes for a second, shutting out the bright sunlight, shutting out her world. Maybe she should have followed Ponter through the gateway to the Neanderthal universe. Certainly that thought had crossed her mind as she’d run across the Laurentian campus, searching for Ponter, rushing to get him down to the bottom of the Creighton Mine before the reopened portal to his reality slammed shut again. After all, at least there she’d have known for sure that her attacker was nowhere around.

The approaching man was now less than a dozen meters away. He was young—probably a summer student—and wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt.

And he was wearing sunglasses. It was a bright summer’s day; Mary herself was wearing her FosterGrants. There was no way to tell what color his eyes were, although they couldn’t be the golden of Ponter’s—she’d never seen any other human with eyes like that.

Mary tensed as the man came closer, and closer still.

Even if he hadn’t been wearing sunglasses, though, Mary wouldn’t have known what color his eyes were. As the man passed by her, she found herself averting her gaze, unable to look at him.

Damn, she thought. God damn.

“So,” said Jurard Selgan, “despite your…your…”

Ponter shrugged. “My bullying,” he said. “We’re not supposed to be afraid of facing things head on here, are we?”

Selgan tipped his head, accepting Ponter’s assessment. “Very well, then. Despite your bullying, the High Gray Council did not immediately make a decision, did it?”

“No,” said Ponter. “No, and I suppose it was correct in taking at least a little time to think things through. Two were just about to become One, and so the Council adjourned, reserving its decision until after that was over…”

Two becoming One: so simple a phrase, and yet so fraught with meaning and complexity for Ponter and his people.

Two becoming One: the monthly four-day holiday around which all life was structured.

Two becoming One: the period during which adult males, who normally lived at the city’s Rim, came into the Center to spend time with their women-mates and children.