Humans

Chapter Fourteen

Mary had returned to her second-floor lab, and was now sitting in a black leather swivel chair, the kind of lush executive furnishings never found in a professor’s university office. She had swung around, away from her desk, and was looking out the large north-facing window at Lake Ontario. She knew Toronto was opposite Rochester, but even on a clear day she couldn’t see it from here; the far shore was beyond the horizon. The world’s tallest freestanding structure, the CN Tower, was right on Toronto’s lakeshore. She’d half hoped it, at least, would stick up over the curve of the Earth’s surface, but…

But she remembered Ponter saying that it had been a mistake to have his Companion implant, Hak, programmed with his dead wife’s voice. Instead of giving comfort, it had been a painful reminder of things lost. Perhaps it was just as well that Mary couldn’t see any part of Toronto through her window.

Seabreeze had been a delightful place in the summer, she’d been told, but now that fall was beginning, it was getting fairly grim. Mary had become partial to the news on WROC, the local CBS affiliate, but every weather forecast she had heard used the term “lake effect”—something she’d never encountered when she’d lived on the north side of the same lake. Toronto was reasonably snow-free in winter, but apparently Rochester got hammered with the white stuff, thanks to cool air moving down from Canada picking up moisture as it traveled over Lake Ontario.

Mary got a coffee mug, filled it with her favorite potion of Maxwell House laced with chocolate milk, and took a sip. She’d become quite taken with Upstate Dairy’s Extreme Chocolate Milk, which, like the fabulous Heluva Good French Onion Dip, wasn’t available in Toronto. There were, she supposed, a few compensations for being away from home…

Mary’s reverie was broken by the phone on her desk ringing. She put down her coffee mug. There were very few people who had her number here—and it wasn’t an internal Synergy Group call; those were heralded by a different ring.

She picked up the black handset. “Hello?”

“Professor Vaughan?” said a woman’s voice.

“Yes?”

“It’s Daria.”

Mary felt her spirits lifting. Daria Klein—her grad student, back at York University. Of course, Mary had given her new phone number to her old department; after leaving them in the lurch just before the beginning of classes, it had been the least she could do.

“Daria!” exclaimed Mary. “How good to hear from you!” Mary pictured the slim brown-haired girl’s angular, smiling face.

“It’s nice to hear your voice, too,” said Daria. “I hope you don’t mind me phoning. I didn’t just want to send an e-mail about this.” She could practically hear Daria jumping up and down.

“About what?”

“About Ramses!”

Mary’s first thought was to quip, “You know, they’re only ninety-seven percent effective,” but she didn’t. Daria was obviously referring to the ancient Egyptian body whose DNA she’d been working on. “I take it the results are in,” said Mary.

“Yes, yes! It is indeed a member of the Ramses line—presumably Ramses the First! Chalk up another success for the Vaughan Technique!”

Mary probably blushed a bit. “That’s great,” she said. But it was Daria who had done the painstaking sequencing. “Congratulations.”

“Thanks,” said Daria. “The people at Emory are delighted.”

“Wonderful,” said Mary. “Great work. I’m really proud of you.”

“Thanks,” said Daria again.

“So,” said Mary, “how are things at York?”

“Same old same old,” said Daria. “The teaching assistants are talking about going on strike, the Yeomen are getting slaughtered, and the provincial government has announced more cutbacks.”

Mary gave a rueful laugh. “Sorry to hear that.”

“Yeah, well,” said Daria, “you know.” She paused. “The real scary news is that a woman was raped on campus earlier this week. It was written up in the Excalibur.”

Mary’s heart stopped for a second. “My God,” she said. She swiveled her chair back to look out the window again, visualizing York.

“Yeah,” said Daria. “It happened near here, too—near Farquharson.”

“Did they say who the victim was?”

“No. No details were given.”

“Did they catch the rapist?”

“Not yet.”

Mary took a deep breath. “Be careful, Daria. Be very careful.”

“I will,” said Daria. “Josh is meeting me here after work every day.” Josh—Mary never could remember his last name—was Daria’s boyfriend, a law student at Osgoode Hall.

“Good,” said Mary. “That’s good.”

“Anyway,” said Daria, her tone one of determination to move things back to a lighter note, “I just wanted to let you know about Ramses. I’m sure there’s going to be a fair bit of press coverage for it. Someone’s coming by the lab tomorrow from the CBC.”

“That’s great,” said Mary, her mind racing.

“I’m really pumped,” agreed Daria. “This is so cool.”

Mary smiled. It was indeed.

“Anyway, I’ll let you go,” said Daria. “I just wanted to bring you up to date. Talk to you again!”

“’Bye,” said Mary.

“’Bye,” repeated Daria, and the phone went dead.

Mary tried to put down the handset, but her hand was shaking, and she missed the cradle.

Another rape.

But did that mean another rapist?

Or…or…or…

Or was the monster, the animal, the one she had failed to report, striking again?

Mary felt her stomach turning over, as though she were in an airplane locked in a nose dive.

Damn it. God damn it.

If she had reported the rape—if she’d alerted the police, the campus newspaper…

Yes, it had been weeks since she herself had been attacked. There was no reason to think it was the same rapist. But, on the other hand, how long does the thrill, the high, of violating someone last? How long does it take to muster the courage—the awful, soul-destroying courage—to commit such a crime again?

Mary had warned Daria. Not just now, but early on, via e-mail from Sudbury, Ontario. But Daria was only one of thousands of women at York, one of…

Mary had co-taught with the Women’s Studies Department; she knew the correct feminist phraseology was that all adult females were women. But Mary was thirty-nine now—her birthday had come and gone, unremarked by anyone—and frosh at York were as young as eighteen. Oh, they were indeed women…but they were also girls, at least in comparison to Mary, many away from home for the first time, just beginning to find their way in life.

And a beast was preying on them. A beast that, perhaps, she had let get away.

Mary looked out the window again, but this time she was glad she couldn’t see Toronto.

A while later—Mary had no real idea how long—the door to her lab opened, and Louise Benoît stuck her head through. “Hey, Mary, how ’bout some dinner?”

Mary swiveled her leather chair to look at Louise.

“Mon dieu,” exclaimed Louise. “Qu’est-ce qu’il y a de mal?”

Mary knew enough French to understand the question. “Nothing. Why do you ask?”

Louise, switching to English, sounded as though she couldn’t believe Mary’s response. “You’ve been crying.”

Mary absently lifted a hand to her cheek and drew it away. She felt her eyebrows go up in astonishment. “Oh,” she said softly, not knowing what else to fill the quiet with.

“What’s wrong?” asked Louise again.

Mary took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Louise was the closest thing she had to a friend here in the United States. And Keisha, the rape-crisis counselor she’d spoken to in Sudbury, seemed light-years away. But…

But no. She didn’t want to talk about it; didn’t want to give voice to her pain.

Or her guilt.

Still, she had to say something. “It’s nothing,” Mary said at last. “It’s just…” She found a box of Wegman’s tissues on her desk and wiped her cheeks. “It’s just men, ” she said.

Louise nodded sagely, as if Mary was talking about some—what would she call it? Some affaire de coeur that had gone wrong. Louise, Mary suspected, had had a lot of boyfriends over the years. “Men,” agreed Louise, rolling her brown eyes. “You can’t live with them, and you can’t live without them.”

Mary was about to nod agreement, but, well, she had heard that on Ponter’s world what Louise had just said wasn’t true. And, Christ, Mary wasn’t some schoolgirl—not that Louise was, either. “They’re responsible for so many of the world’s problems,” said Mary.

Louise nodded at this, too, and seemed to pick up the change of emphasis. “Well, it certainly isn’t women behind most terrorist attacks.”

Mary had to agree with Louise about that, but…“But it’s not just men in foreign countries. It’s men here—in the U.S., and in Canada.”

Louise’s brow knitted in concern. “What happened?” she asked.

And, finally, Mary answered, at least in part. “I got a phone call from someone at York University. She said there’d been a rape on the campus.”

“Oh my God,” said Louise. “Anybody you know?”

Mary shook her head, although in fact she realized that she didn’t know the answer to that. God, she thought, what if it had been someone she knew—someone who had been one of her students?

“No,” said Mary, as if her headshake had been insufficient to convey her meaning. “But it depressed me.” She looked at Louise—so young, so pretty—then dropped her gaze. “It’s such a terrible crime.”

Louise nodded, and it was that same worldly, sage nod she’d given earlier as if—Mary felt a constriction in her stomach—as if, perhaps, Louise really did know whereof Mary was speaking. But Mary couldn’t explore that further without revealing her own history, and she wasn’t ready to do that—at least not yet. “Men can be so awful,” said Mary. It sounded ditzy, Bridget-Jonesish, but it was true.

God damn it to hell, it was true.