Humans

by neetha Napew

  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 theExcalibur .”

  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 isso 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 werewomen . 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 justmen, “ she said.

  Louise nodded sagely, as if Mary was talking about some-what would she call it? Someaffaire 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 menhere -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 answe
r 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 wastrue .

  God damn it to hell, it was true.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Ponter Boddit and Tukana Prat were made (or reaffirmed as-legal opinions varied) Canadian citizens at Canada’s Parliament Buildings late that afternoon. The ceremony was performed by the Federal Minister for Citizenship and Immigration, with journalists from all over the world in attendance.

  Ponter had done his best with the oath, which he had memorized under Hélène Gagné’s tutelage; he only mispronounced a few words: “I affirm that I will buh faithful and bear true alluh-jance to Her Maj-us-tuh Quen Uh-lizabeth the Second, Quen of Canada, Her Heirs and Successors, and that I will faithful-luh observe the laws of Canada and fulfill my doo-tays as a Can-ad-aye-un citizen.” Hélène Gagné was so pleased with Ponter’s performance that she spontaneously applauded at the end of the speech, earning her a stern look from the minister.

  Tukana had more of a struggle saying the words, but did manage to get them out, as well.

  After the ceremony, there was a wine-and-cheese reception-at which Hélène noted Ponter and Tukana partook of neither. They didn’t drink milk or eat any milk-derived food; nor did they seem to have any interest in things made from grains. Hélène had wisely fed them prior to the ceremony, lest they make short work of the trays of fruit and cold cuts, which were also present. Ponter seemed to particularly like Montreal smoked meat.

  Each of the Neanderthals had been presented not just with a certificate of Canadian citizenship, but also an Ontario health plan card and a passport. Tomorrow, they would fly to the United States. But there was still one more official duty for them to perform in Canada first.

  “Did you enjoy your dinner with the Canadian prime minister?” asked Selgan, sitting on his saddle-seat in his round office.

  Ponter nodded. “Very much so. There were many interesting people there. And we ate great thick steaks of cattle from Alberta-another part of Canada, apparently. And vegetables, too, some of which I recognized, and some I did not.”

  “I should like to try this cattle myself,” said Selgan.

  “It can be very good,” said Ponter, “although it seems to be almost the only mammal meat they eat-that, and a form of boar they have created through selective breeding.”

  “Ah,” said Selgan. “Well, I should like to try that, too, someday.” He paused. “So, let us see where we stand. You had safely returned to the other world, but circumstances had prevented you from seeing Mare yet. Still, you had met with the highest officials of the country you were in. You had eaten well, and you were feeling...what? Contentment?”

  “Yes, I suppose you could say that. But...”

  “But what?” asked Selgan.

  “But the contentment did not last for long.”

  After the dinner at 24 Sussex Drive, Ponter had been driven to the Chateau Laurier hotel, and had retired to his massive suite of rooms. They were-opulentwas the correct English word, he thought; far more ornately decorated than anything back in his world.

  Tukana was off with Hélène Gagné, going over yet again what would be an appropriate presentation to make tomorrow at the United Nations. Ponter didn’t have to say anything there, but nonetheless he spent the evening reading up about that institution.

  Actually, that wasn’t quite true: neither he nor Hak could yet read English, but he was using a clamshell computer provided by the Canadian government, which had some sort of encyclopedia loaded onto it. The encyclopedia had a text-to-speech feature that read in an irritating mechanical tone-certainly Ponter’s people could teach the Gliksins a thing or two about voice synthesis. Anyway, Hak listened to the English words spoken by the computer, and then translated them into the Neanderthal tongue for Ponter.

  Early in the article on the United Nations, there was a reference to the organization’s “Charter,” apparently its founding document. Ponter was horrified by its opening:

  We the Peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind...

  Two wars-within a single human lifetime! There had been wars in the history of Ponter’s world, but the last one was almost twenty thousand months ago. Still, it had been devastating, and the sorrow was certainly not untold (which Hak translated as “not counted”). Rather, every youngster was taught the horrible truth, that fully 719 people had died in that war.

  Such devastating loss of life! And yet these Gliksins had fought not one but two wars in as little as a thousand moons.

  Still, who knew how old this United Nations was? Perhaps the “lifetime” in question had been long ago. Ponter asked Hak to listen to more of the article, and see if he could find a founding date. He did: one-nine-four-five.

  The current year, as the Gliksins tallied them, was two-something, wasn’t it? “Exactly how long ago was that?” asked Ponter.

  Hak told him, and Ponter felt himself sagging against his chair. The lifetime in question-the lifetime in which not one but two wars had ravaged humankind-wasthis lifetime.

  Ponter wanted to know more about Gliksin war. Hélène had opened the encyclopedia to the entry on the United Nations for him before she’d left with Tukana, but Ponter managed slowly to work out the completely nonintuitive interface. “Which one is their word for ‘war?’” he asked.

  Hak did an analysis of the text he’d heard and the words that had been displayed on the computer’s screen. “It is the sixth character-grouping in from the right on the ninth line of text.”

  Ponter used his fingertip to help him find the spot on the flat screen. “That can’t be right,” he said. “That grouping only has three symbols in it.” The Neanderthal word for “war” wasmapartaltapa; Ponter had often wished since coming here that he knew more about linguistics-what a help it would have been!-but one principle he did understand is that you reserved short terms for common concepts.

  “I believe I am correct,” said Hak. “The word is pronounced ‘war.’”

  “But-oh.”

  Ponter looked down at the-keyboard,that was the term. He managed to find a match for the first symbol,w, but couldn’t find any that looked likea orr . “If you select the word,” said Hak, “I believe it can be cross-referenced.”

  Ponter struggled with the touch-sensitive area in front of the keyboard, moving the little pine tree on screen until its apex touched the word, and after some experimentation, he got the word highlighted. On the left side of the screen, a list of topics appeared, and-

  Ponter felt his jaw drop, as Hak read out the names.

  The Gulf War.

  The Korean War.

  The Spanish Civil War.

  The Spanish-American War.

  The Vietnam War.

  The War Between the States.

  The War of 1812.

  The War of the Roses.

  On and on.

  More and more.

  And...

  And...

  Ponter’s heart was fluttering.

  World War I.

  World War II.

  Ponter wanted to swear, but the only epithets he had at his command were the ones his species had come up with: references to the putrefaction of meat, to the elimination of bodily wastes. None of those seemed suitable just now. Until this moment, he hadn’t understood the Gliksin style o
f imprecations that invoked a putative higher power, calling on a superior being to make sense of the follies of man. But that really was the sort of expression needed here. The entire world at war! Ponter was almost afraid to look at the articles, afraid to hear what the death tolls had been. Why, they must have run into the thousands...

  He moved his finger on the touch-sensitive pad, and let the encyclopedia speak to Hak.

  In World War I, ten million soldiers had died.

  And in World War II, fifty-five million people-soldiers and civilians both-had died, from causes variously termed “combat,” “starvation,” “bombing raids,” “epidemics,” “massacres,” and “radiation,”-although what that last could possibly have to do with war, Ponter had no idea.

  Ponter felt physically sick. He got up from his chair, moved over to the hotel room’s window, and looked out at the nighttime panorama of this city, this Ottawa. Hélène had told him the tall edifice he could see from here on Parliament Hill was called the Peace Tower.

  He opened the window as much as it would allow-which was not a lot-and let some of the wonderfully cold exterior air come in. Despite the smell, it calmed his stomach a bit, but he still found himself shaking his head back and forth over and over again.

  He thought about the question his beloved Adikor had asked him upon his return from his first visit to this world:”Are they good people, Ponter?Shouldwe be in contact with them?”

  And Ponter had said yes. The fact that there was any further contact with this race of-ofmurderers, of warriors-was his own doing. But he’d seen so little of their world the first time, and...

  No. He’d seenplenty . He’d seen what they’d done to the environment, how they’d destroyed vast tracts of land, how they bred unchecked. He’d known what they were, even then, but...

  Ponter took another restorative inspiration of the chill air.

  He had wanted to see Mare again. And that desire had blinded him to what he’d known about the Gliksins. His nausea wasn’t caused by the shock of what he’d just learned, he knew. Rather, it was caused by the realization that he’d deliberately suppressed his own best judgment.