Existence

the floor at a slant. Gerald’s hand shot out, grabbing a fistful of wildly braided hair, eliciting a shriek.

“Hey now, Ika. What’s your hurry?”

The girl was short-barely into adolescence-but hardly petite. Stocky and strong, when her hand clenched Gerald’s arm he had a sense that she could snap it. Ika made that point by squeezing, in a playful way that hurt just a bit.

“Cap’n Gerry!” Her pale legs whirled around red-striped shorts, twisting to meet the floor on agile tiptoes. Gerald released her braid, though the child kept her vicelike grip on his arm for a second longer, as her face passed his-somehow looking cute and pixielike, despite almost masculine ridges over hooded eyes. Her voice was deeper than one expected, with an echoing resonance that seemed not quite human.

“Be gentle, oh kind sir,” she said, playfully. “Don’t you know I’m a whole lot older ’n you?”

It was a running joke, and not just between the two of them. Members of the revived species Homo neanderthalensis insisted on being called the “Old Race,” for reasons that had little support in biology or fact.

Well, just so long as they don’t start demanding reparations for a genocide that happened 27,000 years ago. I wasn’t around, so I’m not paying.

“And where’re you rushing in such an all-fired hurry, child?” he asked, phrasing it deliberately as an elderly person (which he was) addressing a mere ten-year-old (though Neanders aged differently).

“We’re on a cobbly hunt!” Ika announced, proudly defiant, taking a step backward and planting both fists on her hips.

“On a… did you say we?”

She nodded toward the nearby side corridor where Gerald now spotted another figure, hanging back in shadows. Lanky and a bit stooped, with close-shaven hair and a nervous expression.

“Oh. Hello, Hiram. How are you today?”

Every autie was unique. Still, you followed some general rules when one of them grew agitated, as Hiram appeared to be right now. Eyes wide and darting, the gangly young man edged slowly outward, flashing quick looks near but never quite upon Ika’s face, or Gerald’s.

“So, Hiram. Why aren’t you two watching the new telescope unfold? It’s half the reason this ship came out here, all this way past Mars.”

Keep the conversation concrete but impersonal. Radiate calm friendliness. And thank the Great Spirit that our ship quotas are still small. Just two Neanders, two autistics, and five metal-people for this voyage.

What next? Will they demand we start taking along dolphins and apes? Gene-mod people with wings and foot-hands? It’s not a sapient civilization-it’s a menagerie!

Or else… another metaphor occurred to Gerald… an ark.

Unlike some auties, Hiram’s goggle-eyed, painfully thin face bore no resemblance to the Neanderthal girl, nearby.

“Were you and Ika… fighting?”

Ika laughed, a rich, bell-like sound that always made Gerald think of snowy forest canyons.

“We was just playing, Hiram!”

“But you-”

“Tell you what. If you promise to believe me, an’ relax, I’ll pay a bribe in our next imVRsive game.”

The wide eyes narrowed. “What bribe?”

“Three mastodon tusks.”

The young autie smirked, calculatingly.

“Three green ones. Four meters and twelve centimeters long. Starting almost straight at the base with a gradually shortening curvature culminating with a radius of one meter at the tip and with an inward thirty degree per meter corkscrew. One of them left-handed and two of them right-handed.”

“What? No deal!” Ika cried out. “Who cares if you relax or not, you space-traveling oddball. Just hold yer breath for all I care and go into a hissy fit!”

No. No, please don’t. Gerald almost stepped forward to intervene. Hiram was a useful member of the crew-no one else had his startling knack at quick-decrypting the holocrystal fragments that ibn Battuta kept scooping up from nearby space. Only at a price. He retained much of the old-style emotional frailty that had thwarted his branch of humanity for thousands of years. Experts on Earth were still figuring out how to get the best of both worlds, unleashing savant skills without the accompanying baggage of disabilities.

But Gerald shouldn’t have worried. Ika’s folk had a talent for relating to auties-who must have appeared more often in tribes of Ice Age Europe. Instead of quailing back from Ika’s outburst, Hiram grinned.

“Okay. Orange ones, then. Want to show the cap’n what’s not a cobbly?”

Gerald blinked at the sudden topic change.

Not… a… cobbly. Then he recalled. Oh, yeah. The mythological nonentities that both Neanders and auties claim to believe in.

“I dunno. Homosaps can be awfully close-minded.” Ika tilted her head, looking archly at Gerald-then brightened suddenly. “On the other hand, he is Cap’n Gerry…”

It seemed in character, even expected of him, to emit a sigh over childish time-wasting. Though, in all honesty, he could spare a few minutes.

“Will you two please get on with it?”

“Okay then.” Ika held out her right hand, palm up. “Give me your attention.”

Gerald used an almost-spoken command to change reality augmentation. Within his percept-view, a narrow cylinder took form, appearing to coalesce above Ika’s hand, then contracting into a convenient symbol of control, shaped like the sort of white baton that an orchestra conductor might wield.

As the girl reached for the animated vrobject, Gerald realized. It also resembles a magic wand.

Uh-oh.

Her percept meshed seamlessly with his, and he sensed Hiram’s presence sliding in alongside. Their generation took this sort of thing for granted, starting at age three or younger. But it would always seem newfangled and creepy to Gerald.

Ika deftly appeared to grip the wand, by sight alone, without feedback gloves to provide sense of touch. Waving realistically, she gave it a flourish, then swiveled suddenly, aiming down the hall as she yelled.

“Expecto simakus cliffordiam!”

Gerald tried not to roll his eyes, or otherwise interfere with Ika’s incantation. Though it always struck him as ironic. Wizards in the past were charlatans. All of them. We spent centuries fighting superstition, applying science, democracy, and reason, coming to terms with objective reality… and subjectivity gets to win, after all! Mystics and fantasy fans only had their arrow of time turned around. Now is the era when charms and mojo- invocations work, wielding servant devices hidden in the walls.

As if responding to Ika’s shouted spell, the hallway seemed to dim around Gerald. The gentle curve of the gravity wheel transformed into a hilly slope, as smooth metal assumed the textures of rough-hewn stone. Plastifoam doorways seemed more like recessed hollows in the trunks of giant trees.

All very nice, Gerald admitted. Evocative. Even artistic. It helped one to imagine how the Pleistocene environment must have felt rich in mystery, wonder, and terror to his own ancestors, and those of Ika. Only with a crucial difference, Homo sapiens tended to respond in a way that was unique in all of nature-by trying to understand and manipulate the world. Well… some humans did that.

Neanderthals, apparently, had a different approach.

But what am I supposed to be looking at?

He felt a twinge. A sense of chiding that came from Ika without words.

No, not looking-at. The whole idea was not-looking. And not-at.

With another sigh, Gerald called up his blind-spot program. It had been all the rage a decade or so ago, when Neanders first appeared in real numbers, enriching the diversity of Earth civilization. All mammalian eyes had a