Factoring Humanity (17 page)

But she knew she had to contain herself. This was the breakthrough that could earn her not just a full professorship (and tenure!) at U of T, but at any university she wanted, anywhere in the world. She needed to delay making her announcement until she knew what she was dealing with, but not so long that someone else would scoop her. She’d lived enough years in the world of publish-or-perish to know that tipping one’s hand at the wrong point was the difference between a Nobel Prize and nothing.

Discovering what that strange realm was would be the real breakthrough; that’s what the public would want to know.

She finished in the washroom, then headed out into the corridor. Damn, but she
was
tired. She desperately wanted to take another journey—if “journey” was the right word for a trip that didn’t actually go anywhere.

Or did it? She’d have to get a video camera and record the proceedings; Kyle currently had the camera that belonged jointly to them. Maybe the hypercube did indeed fold up in a spectacular display of special effects—and maybe she really did go where no one had gone before.

But—

Heather was fighting to stifle a yawn, fighting to convince herself that she wasn’t bone tired. But she was still sleep-deprived from yesterday’s late-night session building the construct.

She reentered her office, startled, as always, by how bright and warm it was with the stage lamps on, and taken aback by the green phosphorescence of the paint.

That strange word Paul had used to describe the paint kept running through Heather’s mind: piezoelectric.

It wasn’t just that it was funny-sounding. No, there was more to it than that. She’d heard it once before; of that much she was certain. But where?

It couldn’t have been in a geological context—Heather had never taken a course in that subject, and she had no friends who worked in the Geology Department.

No, she was sure that wherever she’d heard it, it had had something to do with psychology.

She went to her desk, fought back another yawn, and accessed the Web.

And could find nothing at all on the topic. Finally, she consulted an online dictionary and discovered she’d been spelling the word wrong—it was P-I-E-Z-O, not P-Y-E-E-Z-O, although she thought her version came closer to transcribing the sound Paul had made.

Suddenly her screen was filled with references: papers from the United States Geological Survey, reports from various mining firms, even a poem whose author had rhymed “piezoelectricity” with “government duplicity.”

There were also seventeen references related to the alien signals. Of course, Paul Komensky was hardly the first person to notice that one of the chemicals the aliens had provided a formula for was piezoelectric Maybe that was it; she’d doubtless seen references to that fact ten years ago, and had simply forgotten it—she hadn’t given the chemicals much thought in the interim.

But no. No, it had been in another context. Of that she was sure. She kept scrolling through the list, popping from link to link—

And then she found it—the thing she’d half-remembered.

Michael Persinger. An American draft-dodger, as many Canadian academics had been during the final decades of the twentieth century. In the mid 1990s, Persinger had been head of the Environmental Psychophysiology Lab at Laurentian University in northern Ontario; Heather had been there once herself for an APA meeting.

Like the most famous of all Canadian brain researchers, Wilder Penfield, Persinger had started off trying to find electrical cures for such disorders as epilepsy, chronic pain, and depression.

He built a soundproof chamber in his lab, and over the years, put more than five hundred volunteers into it. Inside the chamber, his test subjects donned a specially modified motorcycle helmet, which Persinger had rigged up to deliver rhythmic, low-intensity electric pulses to the brain.

The effect was like nothing anyone could have predicted.

People donning Persinger’s helmet experienced all sorts of strange things—from out-of-body hallucinations to encounters with aliens and angels.

Persinger came to believe that the sense of self-identity was related to language functions, which are normally centered in the brain’s left hemisphere. But his electrical waves caused the connection between left and right hemispheres to break down, making each half of the brain feel as though something or someone else was present. Depending on the psychological predisposition of the individual, and on whether the left brain or the right brain was more affected by the electrical stimulation, the person wearing the helmet perceived either a benign or a malevolent presence—angels and gods on the left; demons and aliens on the right.

And how did piezoelectricity fit into all this? Well, Sudbury, where Laurentian was located, was best known as a mining town; it made its fortune pillaging the remains of an iron-nickel meteor that smacked into the Canadian shield there millions of years ago. So it was perhaps not surprising that Persinger knew more about mineralogy than did most psychologists. He contended that natural piezoelectric discharges, caused by stresses on crystalline rocks, could randomly result in precisely the sort of electrical interference he could reproduce at will in his lab. The alien-abduction experience, he contended, may have more to do with what’s beneath one’s feet than what’s above one’s head.

Well, if piezoelectric discharges could induce psychological experiences—

And if the alien construct was covered with piezoelectric crystalline paint—

Then that could explain what Heather had experienced inside the hypercube.

But if it was just a hallucination, just a psychological response to electrical stimulation of the brain, how could the aliens who designed the machine know that it would work on humans? They presumably had never seen one. Oh, sure, maybe they had detected radio and TV signals from Earth, and maybe they’d even decoded them, but just because you’d seen pictures of human beings, it didn’t mean you knew how their brains worked.

Except—

Except as Kyle had often said, maybe there
wasn’t
more than one way to skin a CAT scan—God, the breakfast-table discussions she’d endured on this topic! Maybe there was only one possible method of achieving true consciousness; maybe there was only one way in all the universe to create thinking, self-aware meat. Perhaps the aliens didn’t need to have seen a human being. Perhaps they knew that their chamber would work for
any
intelligent life form.

But still, it seemed an awful lot of effort to go to for what amounted to a parlor trick.

Unless—

Unless it
wasn’t
a trick.

Unless it had been a real out-of-body experience.

Yes, the construct hadn’t blasted off through Sid Smith’s roof, flying her to the stars. But maybe it had done the next-best thing. Maybe she
could
journey from here to the Centaur’s world without ever stepping outside her office.

She had to know. She had to test it—to find some way to determine if it was a hallucination or if it was real.

Down deep, she knew it
had
to be a hallucination.

Had to be.

Jung had gotten interested in parapsychology before he died, and in her studies of his work, Heather had had to research that topic as well. But everything—every case she’d investigated—was explicable in normal, quotidian terms.

Well, she would put it to the test, find out for sure. She turned around, prepared to enter the construct yet again.

But, dammit, it was now after midnight, and she could barely keep her eyes open—

—meaning, of course, that she’d just keep rematerializing the damned construct around her.

It was too late even to get a subway, and also probably too late to be walking the streets alone. She called a cab and then made her way down to the wide concrete steps in front of Sid Smith to wait for it.

22

Heather sat alone eating breakfast the next day. Despite being dog tired, she still hadn’t slept well, and her dreams had been almost as bizarre as what she’d seen inside the construct.

And now as she sat eating, her mind turned to more mundane concerns. The dining-room table had seemed large with all four of them seated around it; now, with just her, it seemed gigantic.

Heather was eating scrambled eggs and toast.

She and Kyle used to talk constantly over breakfast—about the petty politics of their respective departments, about funding cuts, about troublesome students, about their research.

And, of course, about their kids.

But Mary was dead. And Becky wasn’t talking to them.

The silence was deafening.

Maybe she should call Kyle up—invite him to come to dinner tonight.

But no—no, that wouldn’t do. To try to carry on polite conversation would be a sham. Heather knew it, and she didn’t doubt that Kyle did as well. No matter what the topic, he would have to be thinking about the accusation, and he would know that she must be thinking about it, too.

Heather stabbed her fork into her scrambled eggs. She was angry—that much she was sure of. But at whom? Kyle? If he was guilty she was more than angry—she was furious, betrayed, murderous. And if he wasn’t guilty then she was furious with Becky and Becky’s therapist.

Of course, Lydia Gurdjieff had clearly manipulated the situation. But had she actually implanted memories? Certainly the things she’d suggested couldn’t be true in Heather’s case.

And yet—

And yet, so much of it
rang
true. Not the exact details, of course, but the concept.

Heather
was
empty inside. A part of her was dead—and had been dead for as long as she could remember.

And besides, just because Gurdjieff’s technique had been leading, it didn’t mean that no abuse had ever happened to Heather’s daughters. She’d been thinking of Ron Goldman’s anger again, and that brought back the Simpson case; just because the cops had tried to frame O.J. didn’t mean he hadn’t actually committed murder.

As she brought some toast to her mouth, she realized with a start that her anger
wasn’t
conditional.

She was furious with Becky regardless of whether or not Kyle was guilty. Becky had turned their lives upside down.

It was a terrible thing to think—but ignorance had indeed been bliss.

Heather was rapidly losing her appetite. Damn it, why had this happened to them? To her?

She put down her cutlery and picked up her plate. Then she walked into the kitchen and scraped her breakfast into the garbage bag beneath the sink.

Heather got to the university an hour later. When she entered her office, she found the theatrical lights were off—unplugged actually, since they had no switches.

The damned cleaning staff. Who’d have thought they worked after midnight?

The construct sat in ruins, its panels having separated without benefit of the structural-integrity field.

Whether it had fallen apart while the cleaners were still present or had collapsed later in the night, there was no way to tell. Heather’s heart was racing.

She dropped her purse on the carpet and hurried over to the heap of panels. One of the panels had lost a dozen tiles where it had hit the floor. Thank God Paul had had the foresight to number them; she managed to snap them back into place in short order. She then reassembled the construct. It collapsed once more; it was hard to keep the pieces together. But at last she managed it. She walked gingerly across the room, lest her footfalls send it tumbling again. She fumbled the plugs back into the sockets and heard the surge protector on her desktop computer shriek as she did so. And then she watched in relief and wonder as the construct visibly pulled itself together, all of its angles becoming square.

Heather checked her watch. There was a departmental meeting at two—not that much of the faculty was around in the summer, but that would just make her absence all the more obvious.

She was eager to continue exploring. She wrote two notes in Magic Marker telling the cleaning staff not to turn off the lamps. She stuck the first note on one of the lamp stands (low enough that there was no chance of the light igniting it) and the second directly beside the outlet into which both lamps were plugged.

But, gee, even with the lamps on for a short time, it
was
warm in here; Heather was sweating in her clothes. She locked her door and feeling slightly self-conscious, removed her blouse and slacks, stripping down to bra and panties. She then lifted off the door cube and scrunched herself into the construct’s body. Then she pulled on the suction-cup handle to reattach the door, waited for her eyes to adjust to the semidarkness, and reached forward and pressed the start button.

Her heart was pounding rapidly; it was just as exhilarating, just as terrifying, as yesterday.

But she was relieved to see that her guess had been right: she found herself floating just where she’d left off last time, next to the vast, curving surface of hexagons. Of course, whether that was their actual shape or simply a form given to them by Heather’s own mind, she had no way to know.

Despite the bizarreness, it all seemed far too real to be simply the result of piezoelectric discharges scrambling her brain. And yet, as a psychologist, Heather knew that hallucinations often seemed strikingly real—indeed, they could have a hyperreality, making the real world appear dull by comparison.

She looked at the hexagons, each perhaps two meters across. The only natural thing she could think of that was made of packed hexagons was honeycomb.

No, wait. Another image came to her. The Giant’s Causeway, in Northern Ireland—a vast field made up of hexagonal basalt columns.

Bees or lava? Either way, it was order out of chaos—and this regular arrangement of six-sided structures was the most orderly thing she’d yet encountered here.

The hexagons didn’t cover the entire inner surface of the sphere—there were vast tracts where none were visible. Still, even if they covered a portion of the surface, there must have been millions, if not billions, of them.