“Astonishing,” said the Companion. “He has no preputial hood.”

“What?” said Ponter.

“No foreskin.”

“Are all Gliksin males like that, I wonder?” said Ponter.

“It would make them unique among primates,” replied Hak.

“Well,” said Ponter, “it doesn’t affect what I’m going to do…”

Cornelius Ruskin came to sometime the next day; he could tell it was morning by the light streaming in through his apartment’s windows. His head was pounding, his throat was aching, his elbow was aflame, his backside hurt, and it felt as though he’d been kicked in the nuts. He tried to raise his head from the floor, but a wave of nausea overcame him, so he let his head back down onto the hardwood. He tried again a moment later, and this time did manage to raise himself up on one elbow. His shirt and pants were on, and so were his socks and shoes. But the shoelaces were untied.

God damn it, Ruskin thought. God damn it. He’d heard the Neanderthals were gay. Christ, though, he hadn’t been ready for that. He rolled onto his side and placed a hand over the seat of his pants, praying that they wouldn’t be bloody. Vomit crawled up his aching throat, and he fought it back down with a swallow that was excruciating.

“Justice,” Boddit had said. Justice would have been getting a decent job, instead of being passed over by a bunch of underqualified women and minorities…

Ruskin’s head was pounding so much he thought Ponter must still be there, smashing the frying pan into his skull over and over again. Ruskin closed his eyes, trying to gather his strength. There were so many aches, so much pain, he couldn’t focus on anything.

Goddamned ape-man’s idea of poetic justice! Just because he’d put it in Vaughan and Remtulla, showing them who was really boss, Boddit had apparently figured it would be fair play to sodomize him.

And it was doubtless a warning, too: a warning to keep his mouth shut, a warning of what was in store for him if he ever accused Ponter of anything, of what would happen to him in prison if he ever did get sent up for rape…

Ruskin took a massive breath and moved a hand to his throat. He could feel indentations in it, left by the ape-man’s fingers. Christ, it was probably bruised something awful.

Finally, Ruskin’s head stopped swirling enough for him to try to haul himself to his feet. He used the lip on the pass through to steady himself, and stood there, waiting for the flashes of light to die away in his eyes. Rather than bend over to tie the shoelaces, he kicked his shoes off.

He waited another full minute, until his head stopped pounding enough that he thought he wouldn’t keel over if he let go of his support. Then he limped his way down the short corridor to the apartment’s single, dingy bathroom, painted in a sickly green chosen by some previous tenant. He entered and closed the door behind him, revealing a full-length mirror, cracked at one corner where it had been screwed into the door. He undid his belt and lowered his pants, and then turned his back to the mirror, and, steeling himself for what he might see, lowered his underwear.

He’d been worried that the same sort of fingerprint indentations would be in his ass cheeks, but there was nothing, except a large bruise on one side—which, he realized, must have come from when Ponter first knocked him across the room when he broke through the chained door.

Ruskin grabbed one of the cheeks himself, pulling it aside so he could have a look at his sphincter. He had no idea what to expect—blood, maybe?—but there was nothing unusual.

He couldn’t imagine such an attack would leave no mark, but it seemed that had been the case. Indeed, as far as he could tell, nothing at all had been done to his rear end.

Perplexed, he shuffled over to the toilet, his pants and briefs down around his ankles. He faced the porcelain fixture and reached for his penis, got hold of it, took aim, and—

No!

No, no, no!

Jesus H. Christ, no!

Ruskin felt around, bent over, straightened back up, then staggered back to the mirror for a better look.

God, God, God…

He could see himself, see his blue eyes round in absolute horror, see his jaw hanging down, and—

He loomed into the mirror, trying to get a good view of his scrotum. There was a vertical line running along it that looked like—

Could it be?

—like it had been seared shut.

He felt around again, probing the loose, wrinkled sack, hoping that somehow he’d been mistaken the first time.

But he wasn’t.

For the love of God, he wasn’t.

Ruskin staggered back against the sink and let out a long, piercing howl.

His testicles were gone.

Jurard Selgan was quiet for several moments. Of course, what Ponter had told him was absolutely confidential. Discussions between a patient and his or her personality sculptor were time coded. Selgan would never dream of revealing what any patient had told him, and no one could unlock either his or his patients’ alibi archives for the time spent in therapy sessions. Still, what Ponter had done….

“We don’t take the law into our own hands,” Selgan said.

Ponter nodded. “As I said at the outset, I’m not proud of what I did.”

Selgan’s tone was soft. “You also said you would do it again, if given the chance.”

“What he was doing was wrong,” said Ponter. “Much more wrong than what I did to him.” He spread his arms, as if searching for a way to justify his behavior. “He had hurt women, and he was going to go on hurting women. But I put a stop to that. Not just because he now knew I could identify him by his smell, but for the same reason we’ve always sterilized violent males in that particular way. We aren’t just preventing their genes from being passed on, after all. By eliminating their testicles, we cause their testosterone levels to fall dramatically, making their aggression abate.”

“And you felt if you did not act, no one would?” said Selgan.

“Exactly! He would have gotten away with it! Mare Vaughan thought she had the upper hand originally, that the rapist didn’t know what he was dealing with, attacking a geneticist. But she was wrong. He knew precisely what he was dealing with. He knew how to make sure that he would never be convicted of his crimes.”

“Just as,” said Selgan, softly, “you knew that you would never be convicted of your crime in castrating him.”

Ponter said nothing.

“Does Mare know? Have you told her?”

Ponter shook his head.

“Why not?”

“Why not?” repeated Ponter, astonished by the question. “Why not? I’d committed a crime—a grievous assault. I did not want her to become involved in that; I did not want her to have any culpability.”

“Is that all?”

Ponter was silent, and examined the all-encircling wooden wall, with its polished grain.

“Was it?” prodded Selgan.

“Of course, I did not want her to think less of me,” said Ponter.

“She might have thought more of you,” said Selgan. “After all, you did this for her, to protect her, and others like her.”

But Ponter shook his head. “No. No, she would have been angry with me, disappointed in me.”

“Why?”

“She is a Christian,” he said. “The philosopher whose teachings she follows held that forgiveness was the greatest of all virtues.”

Selgan rolled his gray eyebrow up his browridge. “Some things are very difficult to forgive.”

“Don’t you think I know that?” snapped Ponter.

“I did not mean what you did; I mean what he—this Gliksin male—had done to Mare.”