Early the next morning, after taking care not to be seen en route, Ponter and Dr. Montego rendezvoused with Mary in the lab at Laurentian. It was time to analyze Ponter’s DNA, to answer the big question.

Sequencing 379 nucleotides took meticulous work. Mary sat hunched over a milky white plastic desktop, the surface illuminated by fluorescent tubes beneath it. She’d placed the autorad film on the desktop and, with a felt-tip marker, wrote out the letters of the genetic alphabet for the string in question: G-G-C—one of the triplets that coded for the amino acid glycine; T-A-T, the code for tyrosine; A-T-A, which in mitochondrial DNA, as opposed to nuclear DNA, specified methionine; A-A-A, the recipe for lysine …

At last she was done: all 379 bases from a specific part of Ponter’s control region were identified. Mary’s notebook computer had a little DNA-analysis program on it. She started by typing in the 379 letters she’d just written on the film, and then she asked Reuben to type them in again, just to make sure they’d been entered correctly.

The computer immediately reported three differences between what Mary had entered and what Reuben had, noting—it was an intelligent little program—a frameshift caused by Mary accidentally leaving off a T at one point; the other two errors were typos by Reuben. When she was sure they had all 379 letters entered correctly, she had the program compare Ponter’s sequence to the one she’d extracted from the Neanderthal type specimen at the Rheinisches Landesmuseum.

“Well?” said Reuben. “What’s the verdict?”

Mary leaned back in her chair, astonished. “The DNA I took from Ponter,” she said, “differs in seven places from the DNA recovered from the Neanderthal fossil.” She raised a hand. “Now, some individual variation was to be expected, and naturally there’d be some genetic drift over time, but …”

“Yes?” said Reuben.

Mary lifted her shoulders. “He’s a Neanderthal, all right.”

“Wow,” said Reuben, looking at Ponter as if seeing him for the first time. “Wow. A living Neanderthal.”

Ponter spoke a bit in his own language, and his implant interpreted: “My kind gone?” said the male voice.

“From here?” asked Mary. “Yes, your kind is gone from here—for at least 27,000 years.”

Ponter lowered his head, contemplating this.

Mary contemplated it, too. Until Ponter had shown up, the nearest living relatives Homo sapiens had were the two members of genus Pan: the chimpanzee and the bonobo. Both were equally closely related to humans, sharing about 98.5 percent of humanity’s DNA. Mary was nowhere near finished with her studies on Ponter’s DNA, but she guessed he shared as much as 99.5 percent with her kind of H. sapiens.

And that 0.5 percent accounted for all the differences. If he was a typical Neanderthal, his braincase probably was larger than a normal man’s. And he was better muscled than just about any human Mary had ever met: his arms were as thick around as most men’s thighs. Plus, his eyes were an incredible golden brown; she wondered if there was any eye-color variation among his kind.

He was also quite hairy, although it seemed less so because of its light color. His forearms, and, she presumed, his back and chest, were well thatched. And he had a beard, and a full head of hair, parted in the center.

It hit her then: where she’d seen that sort of part before. Bonobos, those lithe apes sometimes called pygmy chimpanzees, all sported the same’do. Fascinating. She wondered whether all his people had hair like that or if it was just a style he cultivated.

Ponter spoke again in his own language, his voice low, perhaps really just talking to himself, but the implant rendered the words in English anyway: “My kind gone.”

Mary made her tone as gentle as she could. “Yes. I’m sorry.”

More syllables spilled from Ponter’s lips, and his Companion said, “I … no others. I … all …” He shook his head, and spoke again. The Companion switched to its female voice, speaking for itself. “I do not have the vocabulary to translate what Ponter is saying.”

Mary nodded slowly, sadly. “The word you’re looking for,” she said gently, “is ‘alone.’”

Adikor Huld’s dooslarm basadlarm was held in the Gray Council building, on the periphery of the Center. Males could get to it without crossing deep into female territory; females could enter it without technically leaving their land. Adikor wasn’t sure what having the preliminary inquiry during Last Five would do for his chances, but the adjudicator, a woman named Komel Sard, looked to be from generation 142, and so would be long past menopause.

Adikor’s accuser, Daklar Bolbay, was now holding forth in the large square chamber. Fans blew air from the chamber’s north side to its south, and Adjudicator Sard sat at the south end, watching the action unfold with a neutral expression on her lined, wise face. The blowing air served a double purpose: it brought pheromones to her from the accused, which could often convey as much meaning as the words being spoken, and it kept her own pheromones—which might have betrayed which arguments were impressing her—from being detectable by the accuser or the accused, both of whom were positioned on the north side.

Adikor had met Klast many times, and had always gotten along well with her; her man-mate, after all, had been Ponter. But Bolbay, who had been Klast’s woman-mate, seemed to have none of Klast’s warmth or easy humor.

Bolbay was wearing a dark orange pant and a dark orange top; orange had always been the color of the accuser. For his part, Adikor wore blue, the color of the accused. Hundreds of spectators, equally split between male and female, sat on either side of the room; a dooslarm basadlarm for murder was clearly considered well worth seeing. Jasmel Ket was there, as was her young sister, Megameg Bek. Adikor’s own woman-mate, Lurt, was present as well; she’d given him a big hug when she’d arrived. Seated next to Lurt was Adikor’s son Dab, the same age as little Megameg.

And, of course, almost all of Saldak’s Exhibitionists were present; there was no more interesting event going on right now than this hearing. Despite his current situation, Adikor was pleased to see Hawst in the flesh, having used his Voyeur to look in on so much of his life in the past. He also recognized Lulasm, who had been Ponter’s favorite, and Gawlt and Talok and Repeth and a couple of others. The Exhibitionists were easy to spot: they had to wear silver clothes, signaling to everyone around them that their implant broadcasts were publicly accessible.

Adikor was sitting on a stool; there was plenty of room on all sides of it for Bolbay to circle him as she spoke, and she did so with great theatrical relish: “So tell us, Scholar Huld, did your experiment succeed? Did you successfully factor your target number?”

Adikor shook his head. “No.”

“So doing it beneath the surface did not help,” said Bolbay. “Whose idea was it to perform this factoring experiment far underground?” Her voice was low for a female’s, a deep rumbling sound.

“Ponter and I jointly agreed to it.”

“Yes, yes, but who initially suggested the idea? You, or Scholar Boddit?”

“I’m not sure.”

“It was you, wasn’t it?”

Adikor shrugged. “It might have been.”

Bolbay was now in front of him; Adikor refused to acknowledge her presence by shifting his gaze to her. “Now, Scholar Huld, tell us all why you chose this location.”

“I didn’t say I chose it. I said I might have.”

“Fine. Tell us, then, why this location was selected for your work.”

Adikor frowned, thinking about how much detail was appropriate. “Earth,” he said at last, “is constantly bombarded by cosmic rays.”