“In other words,” said Ponter, “humans of your kind behave properly only because they are threatened if they do not.”

Mary tilted her head, conceding the point. “It’s Pascal’s wager,” she said. “See, if you do believe in God, and he doesn’t exist, then you’ve lost very little. But if you don’t, and he does, then you risk eternal torment. Given that, it’s prudent to be a believer.”

“Ah,” said Ponter; the interjection was the same in his language as hers, so no rendering of it was made by Hak.

“But, look,” said Mary, “you still haven’t answered my question about morality. Without a God—without a belief that you will be rewarded or punished after the end of your life—what drives morality among your people? I’ve spent a fair bit of time with you now, Ponter; I know you’re a good person. Where does that goodness come from?”

“I behave as I do because it is right for me to do so.”

“By whose standards?”

“By the standards of my people.”

“But where do those standards come from?”

“From …” And here Ponter’s eyes went wide, great orbs beneath an undulating shelf of bone, as though he’d had an epiphany—in the secular sense of the word, of course. “From our conviction that there is no life after death!” he said triumphantly. “That is why your belief troubles me; I see it now. Our assertion is straightforward and congruent with all observed fact: a person’s life is completely finished at death; there is no possibility of reconciling with them, or making amends after they are gone, and no possibility that, because they lived a moral life, they are now in a paradise, with the cares of this existence forgotten.” He paused, and his eyes flicked left and right across Mary’s face, apparently looking for signs she understood what he was getting at.

“Do you not see?” Ponter went on. “If I wrong someone—if I say something mean to them, or, I do not know, perhaps take something that belongs to them—under your worldview I can console myself with the knowledge that, after they are dead, they can still be contacted; amends can be made. But in my worldview, once a person is gone—which could happen for any of us at any moment, through accident or heart attack or so on—then you who did the wrong must live knowing that that person’s entire existence ended without you ever having made peace with him or her.”

Mary thought about that. Yes, most slave owners had ignored the issue, but surely some people of conscience, caught up in a society driven by bought-and-sold human beings, must have had qualms … and yet had they consoled themselves with the knowledge that the people they were mistreating would be rewarded for their suffering after death? Yes, the Nazi leaders were pure evil, but how many of the rank and file, following orders to exterminate Jews, had managed to sleep at night by believing the freshly dead were now in paradise?

Nor did it have to be anything so grandiose. God was the great compensator: if you were wronged in life, it would be made up for in death—the fundamental principle that had allowed parents to send their children off to die in war after countless war. Indeed, it didn’t really matter if you ruined someone else’s life, because that person might well go to Heaven. Oh, you yourself might be dispatched to Hell, but nothing you did to anyone else really hurt them in the long run. This existence was mere prologue; eternal life was yet to come.

And, indeed, in that infinite existence, God would make up for whatever had been done to … to her.

And that bastard, that bastard who had attacked her, would burn.

No, it didn’t matter if she never reported the crime; there was no way he could escape his ultimate judge.

But … but … “But what about your world? What happens to criminals there?”

Bleep.

“People who break laws,” said Mary. “People who intentionally hurt others.”

“Ah,” said Ponter. “We have little problem with that anymore, having cleansed most bad genes from our gene pool generations ago.”

“What?” exclaimed Mary.

“Serious crimes were punished by sterilization of not just the offender but also anyone who shared fifty percent of the offender’s genetic material: brothers and sisters, parents, offspring. The effect was twofold. First, it cleansed those bad genes from our society, and—”

“How would nonagriculturalists stumble onto genetics? I mean, we figured it out through plant cultivation and animal husbandry.”

“We may not have bred animals or plants for food, but we did domesticate wolves to help us in hunting. I have a dog named Pabo that I am very fond of. Wolves were quite susceptible to controlled breeding; the results were obvious.”

Mary nodded; that sounded reasonable enough. “You said the sterilization had a twofold effect on your society?”

“Oh, yes. Besides directly eliminating the faulty genes, it gave families a strong incentive to make sure none of their own members ran seriously afoul of society.”

“I suppose it would at that,” said Mary.

“It did indeed,” said Ponter. “You, as a geneticist, surely know that the only immortality that really exists is genetic. Life is driven by genes wanting to ensure their own reproduction, or to protect existing copies of themselves. So our justice was aimed at genes, not at people. Our society is mostly free of crime now because our justice system directly targeted that which really drives all life: not individuals, not circumstances, but genes. We made it so that the best survival strategy for genes is to obey the law.”

“Richard Dawkins would approve, I imagine,” said Mary. “But you were speaking of this … this sterilization practice in the past tense. Has it ended?”

“No, but there is little modern need.”

“You were that successful? No one commits serious crimes anymore?”

“Hardly anyone does so because of genetic disorders. There are, of course, also biochemical disorders that cause antisocial behavior, but those are eminently treatable with drugs. Only rarely does sterilization still need to be invoked.”

“A society without crime,” said Mary, shaking her head slowly in amazement. “That must be …” She paused, wondering how much she wanted to let her guard down, then: “That must be fabulous.” But she frowned. “Surely, though, a lot of crime must go unsolved. I mean, if you can’t figure out who did something, then the perpetrator must go unpunished—or, if he had a biochemical disorder, untreated.”

Ponter blinked. “Unsolved crimes?”

“Yes, you know: crimes for which the police”—bleep–“or whatever you have for law enforcement, can’t figure out who did it.”

“There are no such crimes.”

Mary’s back stiffened. Like most Canadians, she was against capital punishment—precisely because it was possible to execute the wrong person. All Canadians lived with the shame of the wrongful imprisonment of Guy Paul Morin, who had spent ten years rotting in jail for a murder he didn’t commit; of Donald Marshall, Jr., who spent eleven years incarcerated for a murder he, too, didn’t commit; of David Milgaard, who spent twenty-three years jailed for a rape-murder he also was innocent of. Castration was the least of the punishments Mary would like to see her own rapist subjected to—but if, in her quest for vengeance, she had it done to the wrong person, how could she live with herself? And what about the Marshall case? No, it wasn’t all Canadians who lived with the shame of that; it was white Canadians. Marshall was a Mi’kmaq Indian whose protestations of innocence in a white court, it seemed, weren’t believed simply because he was an Indian.

Still, maybe she was thinking now more like an atheist than a true believer. A believer should hold that Milgaard, Morin, and Marshall were eventually going to receive their just, heavenly reward, making up for whatever they’d endured here on Earth. After all, God’s own son had been executed unfairly, even by the standards of Rome; Pontius Pilate didn’t think Christ guilty of the crime with which he’d been charged.