Free Hybrids by Robert J. Sawyer Page B

visit, when they were quarantined. Part of Mary would love to show off the physique of her man to all the bimbo girls she’d endured in high school, the ones who had dated the football players, every one of whom would look scrawny in comparison to Ponter. And another part of her was tickled at the notion that there was no way Colm could resist taking a peek at a newsstand, wondering what this Neanderthal had that he didn’t…
    “I don’t know,” said Mary. “Ponter laughed when the invitation came, and hasn’t mentioned it since.”
    “Well, if he ever does,” said Keisha, smiling, “I want an autographed copy.”
    “No problem,” said Mary. And she realized she meant it. She would never be over her rape—nor, she suspected, would Keisha ever be over her own—but the fact that they could joke about a man posing nude for the enjoyment of women meant that they’d both come a long way.
    “You asked how I’m doing,” said Mary. She paused. “Better,” she said with a smile, reaching out and patting the back of Keisha’s hand. “Better every day.”
    * * *
    Once they’d finished their drinks, Mary hurried off to the bookstore, quickly bought four paperbacks, and then hustled back to room C002B to collect Ponter. They headed up to the ground floor, then out into the parking lot. It was a crisp fall day, and here, four hundred kilometers north of Toronto, the leaves had mostly turned.
    “
Dran!
” exclaimed Ponter, and “Astonishment!” translated Hak, through his external speaker.
    “What?” said Mary.
    “What is
that?
” said the Neanderthal, pointing.
    Mary looked ahead, trying to fathom what had caught Ponter’s eye, then she burst out laughing. “It’s a dog,” she said.
    “My Pabo is a dog!” declared Ponter. “And I have encountered other doglike creatures here. But this! This is like nothing I have ever seen before.” The dog and its owner were coming toward them. Ponter bent down, hands on knees, to examine the small animal, at the end of a leather leash being held by an attractive young white woman. “It looks like a sausage!” declared Ponter.
    “It’s a dachshund,” said the woman, sounding miffed. She was doing a great job, Mary thought, of being unflustered in the presence of what she must know was a Neanderthal.
    “Is it—” began Ponter. “Forgive me, is it a birth defect?”
    The woman sounded even more put out. “No, he’s supposed to be like that.”
    “But his legs! His ears! His body!” Ponter rose and shook his head. “A dog is a hunter,” he declared, as if the animal before him represented an affront to all propriety.
    “Dachshunds
are
hunting animals,” said the young woman sharply. “They were bred in Germany to hunt badgers;
Dachs
is German for ‘badger.’ See? Their shape lets them follow the badger down the burrow.”
    “Oh,” said Ponter. “Ah, um, my apologies.”
    The woman seemed mollified. “Now,
poodles
,” she said with a contemptuous sniff, “those are dumb-looking dogs.”

    As time passed, Cornelius Ruskin couldn’t deny that he was feeling different—and a whole lot faster than he would have thought possible. Sitting in his penthouse in the slums, he pumped keywords into Google; his results improved after he stumbled on the fact that the medical term for castration was “orchiectomy,” and he started specifically excluding the terms “dog,” “cat,” and “horse.”
    He quickly found a chart on the University of Plymouth’s web site entitled “Effect of Castration and Testosterone Replacement on Male Sexual Behaviour,” showing an immediate drop-off in such behavior in castrated guinea pigs—
    But Cornelius was a man, not an animal! Surely what applied to rodents didn’t—
    Twirling the scroll wheel on his mouse took him farther down the same page, to a study by researchers named Heim and Hursch that showed that over 50 percent of castrated rapists “stopped exhibiting sexual behavior shortly after