Mary leaned back against the wall and slid down to the concrete sidewalk, her knees coming up to her chin. She hated herself for the wracking sobs that escaped from her.
After a while, she put a hand down between her legs, then pulled it away and looked at it to see if she was bleeding; she wasn’t, thank God.
She waited for her breathing to calm down, and for her stomach to settle enough that she thought she could rise to her feet without vomiting. And then she did get up, painfully, slowly. She could hear voices—women’s voices—off in the distance, two students chatting and laughing as they went along. Part of her wanted to call out to them, but she couldn’t force the sound out of her throat.
She knew it was maybe twenty-five Celsius out, but she felt cold, colder than she’d ever been in her life. She rubbed her arms, warming herself.
It took—who knew? Five minutes? Five hours?—for her to recover her wits. She should find a phone, dial 911, call the Toronto police … or the campus police, or—she knew about it, had read about it in campus handbooks—the York University rape-crisis center, but …
But she didn’t want to talk to anyone, to see anyone—to … to have anyone see her like this.
Mary closed her pants, took a deep breath, and started walking. It was a few moments before she was conscious of the fact that she wasn’t heading on toward her car, but rather was going back toward the Farquharson Life Sciences Building.
Once she got there, she held the banister all the way up the four half flights of stairs, afraid of letting go, afraid of losing her balance. Fortunately, the corridor was just as deserted as it had been before. She made it back into her lab without being seen by anyone, the fluorescents spluttering to life.
She didn’t have to worry about being pregnant. She’d been on the Pill—not a sin in her view, but certainly one in her mother’s—ever since she’d married Colm, and, well, after the separation, she’d kept it up, although there had turned out to be little reason. But she would find a clinic and get an AIDS test, just to be on the safe side.
Mary wasn’t going to report it; she had already made up her mind about that. How many times had she cursed those she’d read about who had failed to report a rape? They were betraying other women, letting a monster get away, giving him a chance to do it again to someone else, to—to her, now, but—
But it was easy to curse when it wasn’t you, when you hadn’t been there.
She knew what happened to women who accused men of rape; she’d seen it on TV countless times. They’d try to establish that it was her fault, that she wasn’t a credible witness, that somehow she had consented, that her morals were loose.
“So, you say you’re a good Catholic, Mrs. O’Casey—oh, I’m sorry, you don’t go by that name anymore, do you? Not since you left your husband Colm. No, it’s Ms. Vaughan now, isn’t it? But you and Professor O’Casey are still legally married, aren’t you? Tell the court, please, have you slept with other men since you abandoned your husband?”
Justice, she knew, was rarely found in a courtroom. She would be torn apart and reassembled into someone she herself wouldn’t recognize.
And, in the end, nothing would likely change. The monster would get away.
Mary took a deep breath. Maybe she’d change her mind at some point. But the only thing that was really important right now was the physical evidence, and she, Professor Mary Vaughan, was at least as competent as any policewoman with a rape kit at collecting that.
The door to her lab had a window in it; she moved so that she couldn’t possibly be seen by anyone passing by in the corridor. And then she undid her pants, the sound of her own zipper causing her heart to jump. She then got a glass specimen container and some cotton swabs, and, blinking back tears, she collected the filth that was within her.
When she was done, she sealed the specimen jar, wrote the date on it in red ink, and labeled it “Vaughan 666,” her name and the appropriate number for such a monster. She then sealed her panties in an opaque specimen container, labeled it with the same date and designation, and put both containers in the fridge in which biological specimens were stored, placing them alongside DNA taken from a passenger pigeon and an Egyptian mummy and a woolly mammoth.
Chapter 7
“Where am I?” Ponter knew his voice sounded panicky, but, try as he might, he couldn’t control it. He was still seated in the odd chair that rolled on hoops, which was a good thing, because he doubted he’d be very steady on his feet.
“Calm down, Ponter,” said his Companion implant. “Your pulse is up to—”
“Calm down!” snapped Ponter, as if Hak had suggested a ridiculous impossibility. “Where am I?”
“I’m not sure,” said the Companion. “I’m picking up no signals from the positioning towers. In addition, I’m cut off entirely from the planetary information network, and am receiving no acknowledgment from the alibi archives.”
“You’re not malfunctioning?”
“No.”
“Then—then this can’t be Earth, can it? You’d be getting signals if—”
“I’m sure it is Earth,” said Hak. “Did you notice the sun while they brought you over to that white vehicle?”
“What about it?”
“Its color temperature was 5,200 degrees, and it subtended one-seven-hundredth of the celestial sphere—just like Sol as seen from Earth’s orbit. Also, I recognized most of the trees and plants I saw. No, this is clearly the surface of the Earth.”
“But the stench! The air is foul!”
“I’ll have to take your word for that,” said Hak. “Could we have—could we have traveled in time?”
“That seems unlikely,” replied the Companion. “But if I can see the constellations tonight, I will be able to tell if we’ve moved forward or backward an appreciable amount. And if I can spot some of the other planets and the phase of the moon, I should be able to figure the exact date.”
“But how do we get back home? How do we—”
“Again, Ponter, I must exhort you to calm down. You are close to hyperventilating. Take a deep breath. There. Now let it out slowly. That’s right. Relax. Another breath—”
“What are those creatures?” Ponter asked, waving a hand at the scrawny figure with dark brown skin and no hair and the other scrawny figure with lighter skin and a wrapping of fabric around his head.
“My best guess?” said Hak. “They are Gliksins.”
“Gliksins!” exclaimed Ponter, loud enough that the two strange figures turned to look at him. He lowered his voice. “Gliksins? Oh, come on …”
“Look at those skull images over there.” Hak was speaking to Ponter through a pair of cochlear implants, but by changing the left-right balance of his voice he could indicate a direction as surely as if he had pointed. Ponter got up—shakily—and crossed the room, heading away from the strange beings and approaching an illuminated panel like the one they were looking at, with several deepviews of skulls clipped to it.
“Green meat!” said Ponter, looking at the strange skulls. “They are Gliksins—aren’t they?”
“I would say so. No other primate has that lack of browridge, or that projection from the front of the lower jaw.”
“Gliksins! But they’ve been extinct for—well, for how long?”
“Perhaps 400,000 months,” said Hak.
“But this can’t possibly be Earth of that long ago,” said Ponter. “I mean, there’s no way the civilization we’ve seen would have failed to leave traces in the archeological record. At best, Gliksins chipped stone into crude choppers, right?”