Finally, Hak announced that it had amassed a sufficient vocabulary for truly meaningful conversations. Yes, it said, there would be gaps and difficulties, but these could be worked out as they went along.

And so, while Reuben was busy going over more test results on the phone with other doctors, and while Louise, the night owl, was sleeping upstairs, having accepted Ponter’s offer to use the bed when he wasn’t, Mary and Ponter sat in the living room and had their first real chat. Ponter spoke softly, making sounds in his own language, and Hak, using its male voice, provided an English translation: “It is good to talk.”

Mary made a small, nervous laugh. She’d been frustrated by her inability to communicate with Ponter, and now that they could talk, she didn’t know what to say to him. “Yes,” she said. “It’s good to talk.”

“A beautiful day,” said Ponter’s translated voice, looking out the living room’s rear window.

Mary laughed again; heartily, this time. Talking about the weather—a pleasantry that transcended species boundaries. “Yes, it is.”

And then she realized that it wasn’t that she didn’t know what to say to Ponter. Rather, she had so many questions, she didn’t know where to begin. Ponter was a scientist; he must have some sense of what his people knew about genetics, about the split between genus Homo and genus Pan, about …

But no. No. Ponter was a person—first and foremost, he was a person, and one who had gone through a harrowing ordeal. The science could wait. Right now, they would talk about him, about how he was doing. “How do you feel?” Mary asked.

“I am fine,” said the translated voice.

Mary smiled. “I mean really. How are you really doing?”

Ponter seemed to hesitate, and Mary wondered if Neanderthal men shared with males of her kind a reluctance to talk about feelings. But then he exhaled through his mouth, a long, shuddering sigh.

“I am frightened,” he said. “And I miss my family.”

Mary lifted her eyebrows. “Your family?”

“My daughters,” he said. “I have two daughters, Jasmel Ket and Megameg Bek.”

Mary’s jaw dropped slightly. It hadn’t even occurred to her to think about Ponter’s family. “How old are they?”

“The older one,” said Ponter, “is—I know in months, but you reckon time mostly in years, do you not? The older one is—Hak?”

Hak’s female voice chimed in. “Jasmel is nineteen years old; Megameg is nine.”

“My goodness,” said Mary. “Will they be okay? What about their mother?”

“Klast died two tenmonths ago,” said Ponter.

“Twenty months,” added Hak, helpfully. “One-point-eight years.”

“I’m sorry,” said Mary softly.

Ponter nodded slightly. “Her cells, in her blood, they changed …”

“Leukemia,” Mary said, providing the word.

“I miss her every month,” said Ponter.

Mary wondered for a moment if Hak had translated that just right; surely Ponter meant he missed her every day. “To have lost both parents …”

“Yes,” said Ponter. “Of course, Jasmel is an adult now, so …”

“So she can vote, and so forth?” asked Mary.

“No, no, no. Did Hak do the math incorrectly?”

“I most certainly did not,” said Hak’s female voice.

“Jasmel is far too young to vote,” said Ponter. “I am far too young to vote.”

“How old do you have to be in your world to vote?”

“You must have seen at least 667 moons—two-thirds of the traditional thousand-month lifetime.”

Hak, evidently wanting to dispel the notion that it was mathematically challenged, quickly supplied the conversions: “One can vote at the age of fifty-one years; a traditional lifespan averaged seventy-seven years, although many live much longer than that these days.”

“Here, in Ontario, people get to vote when they turn eighteen,” said Mary. “Years, that is.”

“Eighteen!” exclaimed Ponter. “That is madness.”

“I don’t know of any place where the voting age is higher than twenty-one years.”

“This explains much about your world,” says Ponter. “We do not let people shape policy until they have accumulated wisdom and experience.”

“But then if Jasmel can’t vote, what is it that makes her an adult?”

Ponter lifted his shoulders slightly. “I suppose such distinctions are not as significant on my world as they are here. Still, at 250 months, an individual does take legal responsibility for himself or herself, and usually is on the verge of establishing his or her own home.” He shook his head. “I wish I could let Jasmel and Megameg know that I am still alive, and am thinking about them. Even if there is no way I can go home, I would give anything just to get a message to them.”

“And is there really no way for you to go home?” asked Mary.

“I cannot see how I could. Oh, perhaps if a quantum computer could be built here, and the conditions that led to my … transfer … could be precisely duplicated. But I am a theoretical physicist; I have only the vaguest of senses of how one builds a quantum computer. My partner, Adikor, knows how, of course, but I have no way of contacting him.”

“It must be very frustrating,” said Mary.

“I am sorry,” said Ponter. “I did not mean to shift my problems to you.”

“That’s all right,” said Mary. “Is there—is there anything we, any of us, can do to help?”

Ponter said a single, sad-sounding Neanderthal syllable; Hak rendered it as “No.”

Mary wanted to cheer him up. “Well, we shouldn’t be in quarantine too much longer. Maybe after we’re out, you can travel around, see some sights. Sudbury is a small town, but—”

“Small?” said Ponter, deep-set eyes wide. “But there are—I do not know how many. Tens of thousands at least.”

“The Sudbury metropolitan area has 160,000 people in it,” said Mary, having read that in a guidebook in her hotel room.

“One hundred and sixty thousand!” repeated Ponter. “And this is a small town? You, Mare, come from somewhere else, do you not? A different town. How many people live there?”

“The actual city of Toronto is 2.4 million people; greater Toronto—a continuous urban area with Toronto at its heart—is maybe 3.5 million.”

“Three and a half million?” said Ponter, incredulously.

“Give or take.”

“How many people are there?”

“In the whole world?” asked Mary.

“Yes.”

“A little over six billion.”

“A billion is … a thousand times a million?”

“That’s right,” said Mary. “At least here in North America. In Britain—no, forget it. Yes, a billion is a thousand million.”

Ponter sagged in his chair. “That is a … a staggering number of people.”

Mary raised her eyebrows. “How many people are there on your world?”

“One hundred and eighty-five million,” said Ponter.

“Why so few?” asked Mary.

“Why so many?” asked Ponter.

“I don’t know,” replied Mary. “I never thought about it.”

“Do you not—in my world, we know how to prevent pregnancy. I could perhaps teach you …”

Mary smiled. “We have methods, too.”

Ponter lifted his eyebrow. “Perhaps ours work better.”

Mary laughed. “Perhaps.”

“Is there enough food for six billion people?”

“We mostly eat plants. We cultivate”—a bleep; Hak’s convention upon hearing a word that wasn’t yet in its database and that it couldn’t figure out from context—“we grow them deliberately. I’ve noticed you don’t seem to like bread”—another bleep–“um, food from grain, but bread, or rice, is what most of us eat.”

“You manage to comfortably feed six billion people with plants?”

“Well, ah, no,” said Mary. “About half a billion people don’t have enough to eat.”

“That is very bad,” said Ponter, simply.

Mary could not disagree. Still, she realized with a start that Ponter had, to this point, been exposed only to a sanitized view of Earth. He’d seen a little TV, but not enough to really open his eyes. Nonetheless, it did indeed seem that Ponter was going to spend the rest of his life on this Earth. He needed to be told about war, and the crime rate, and pollution, and slavery—the whole bloody smear across time that was human history.