Mary was in an anteroom on the eighteenth floor of the Secretariat building at the UN, waiting for Ponter to get out of a meeting, so she could at last rendezvous with him. As she sat in a chair, too nervous to read, her stomach churned, and all sorts of thoughts went through her head. Would Ponter even recognize her? He must have seen plenty of late-thirties blondes here in New York; would all similarly colored Gliksins look alike to him? Besides, she’d cut her hair since Sudbury, and, if anything, was a pound or two heavier, God damn it.
And, after all, it had been she who had rejected him last time. Perhaps she was the last person Ponter wanted to see, now that he had returned to this Earth.
But no. No. He had understood that she was still dealing with the aftermath of the rape, that her inability to respond to his advance had nothing to do with him. Yes, surely, he had understood that.
And yet, there was—
Mary’s heart jumped. The door was opening, and the muffled voices within suddenly became distinct. Mary leapt to her feet, her hands clasped nervously in front of her.
“—and I’ll get you those figures,” said an Asian diplomat, talking over his shoulder to a silver-haired female Neanderthal who must be Ambassador Tukana Prat.
Two more H. sap diplomats shouldered through the door, and then—
And then, there was Ponter Boddit, his dark blond hair parted precisely in the center, his arresting golden brown eyes obvious even at this distance. Mary lifted her eyebrows, but Ponter hadn’t caught sight, or wind, of her just yet. He was speaking to one of the other diplomats, saying something about geological surveys, and—
And then his eyes did fall on Mary, and she smiled nervously, and he did a neat little sideways step, bypassing the people in front of him, and his face split into that foot-wide grin Mary knew so well, and he closed the distance between him and her, and swept her into his arms, hugging her close to his massive chest.
“Mare!” exclaimed Ponter, in his own voice, and then, with Hak translating, “How wonderful to see you!”
“Welcome back,” said Mary, her cheek against his. “Welcome back!”
“What are you doing here in New York?” asked Ponter.
Mary could have said that she’d just come in hopes of collecting a DNA sample from Tukana; it was part of the truth, and it afforded an easy out, a face-saving explanation, but…
“I came to see you,” she said simply.
Ponter squeezed her again, then relaxed his grip and stepped back, putting a hand on each of her shoulders, looking her in the face. “I am so glad,” he said.
Mary became uncomfortably aware that the other people in the room were looking at her and Ponter, and, indeed, after a moment, Tukana cleared her throat, just as a Gliksin might.
Ponter turned his head and looked at the ambassador. “Oh,” he said. “Forgive me. This is Mare Vaughan, the geneticist I told you about.”
Mary stepped forward, extending her hand. “Hello, Madam Ambassador.”
Tukana took Mary’s hand and shook it with astonishing strength. Mary reflected that if she’d been sufficiently sneaky, she could have collected a few of Tukana’s cells just in the process of shaking hands. “It is a pleasure to meet you,” said the older Neanderthal. “I am Tukana Prat.”
“Yes, I know,” said Mary, smiling. “I’ve been reading about you in the papers.”
“My feeling,” said Tukana, a sly grin on her wide face, “is that perhaps you and Envoy Boddit would like some time alone together.” Without waiting for an answer, she turned to one of the Gliksin diplomats. “Shall we go to your office and look over those population-dispersal figures?”
The diplomat nodded, and the rest of the party left the room, leaving Mary and Ponter alone.
“So,” said Ponter, sweeping Mary into another hug. “How are you?”
Mary couldn’t tell if it was her heart, or Ponter’s, that was jack hammering. “Now that you’re here,” she said, “I’m fine.”
The General Assembly hall of the United Nations consisted of a series of concentric semicircles facing a central stage. Ponter was baffled at the mix of faces he saw. In Canada, he’d noted a range of skin colors and facial types, and, so far, his experience of the United States had been similar. Here, in this massive chamber, he saw the same wide variety of coloration, which Lurt had told him almost certainly had resulted from prolonged periods of geographic isolation for each color group, assuming, as Mare had asserted, that they were indeed cross fertile.
But here, all the representatives from each country were the same color—even Canada and the United States had only light-skinned representatives at this United Nations.
More: Ponter was used to seeing councils on his world consisting entirely of members of one gender, or councils with exactly equal numbers of males and females. But here there were perhaps ninety-five percent males, with only a smattering of females. Was it possible, wondered Ponter, that there was a hierarchy among the “races,” as Mare had called them, with the light-skinned holding the ultimate power? Likewise, was it conceivable that Gliksin females were accorded lesser status, and only rarely allowed into the most senior circles?
Another thing that surprised Ponter was how young most of the diplomats were. Why, some were even younger than Ponter himself! Mare had once mentioned that she dyed her hair to hide its gray, a notion that was incredible to Ponter; to hide gray was to hide wisdom. Male Gliksins, he’d noticed, were less prone to coloring their hair—perhaps their wisdom was more often in question. But, still, there were few gray hairs in the group he was now seeing.
Ponter’s concerns were allayed a bit when the top official, whose title was the puzzling “amanuensis-high-warrior,” turned out to be a dark-skinned man of at least passable months. Hé-lène Gagné had whispered to Ponter that this man had recently won the Nobel Peace Prize, whatever that might be.
Ponter was seated with the Canadian delegation. Sadly, Mare had been denied a place on the main floor, although she was supposedly watching from a spectators’ gallery high overhead. Above the podium, Ponter saw a giant version of the pale blue United Nations crest. Although intellectually Ponter had accepted the reality of where he was, there was still an emotional part of him that thought this strange world had nothing to do with his Earth. But the crest had at its center a polar-projection map of Earth, looking just like similar maps Ponter had seen in his own world. Surrounding it, though, were branches of some sort of plant. Ponter asked Hélène the significance of the branches; she said they were olive leaves, a sign of peace.
Peace Tower. Peace Prize. Leaves of Peace. For all their warmongering, it seemed peace was very much on the minds of Gliksins, and Ponter was reassured slightly to note that the word for peace contained no more syllables than did the word for war.
After a long opening statement by the amanuensis-high-warrior, it was at last Tukana’s turn to speak. She got to her feet and walked to the podium while the assembled Gliksins did that thing they called “applauding.” Tukana was carrying a small polished-wood box, which she placed on the podium.
The Secretary-General shook her hand and then vacated the stage.
“Hello, peoples of this Earth,” said Tukana’s implant, translating for her; it had taken some doing by Hélène to convey to the Companion the notion of “peoples,” a plural form of a word that already was a plural. “I greet you on behalf of the High Gray Council of my world, and of that world’s people.”