Factoring Humanity (20 page)

It was intoxicating, this access to another. There was a sexual connotation to it, even without the sexual thoughts—a voyeurism that permeated it.

It was thrilling and fascinating.

But she knew she had to disengage.

She felt an immediate pang of sadness. She now knew Ideko better than she knew almost anyone; she’d seen through his eyes, felt his thoughts.

And now, after this brief, deep, joining, she would likely never encounter him again.

But she did have to press on.

The truth was out there.

The undeniable truth.

The truth about the past.

The truth about Kyle and their daughters.

A truth Heather had to find.

25

After his lunch with Stone, Kyle had three hours free until he had to teach a class. He decided to leave the university altogether, riding the subway down the University Avenue line, around by Union Station, and up to the penultimate stop on the Yonge line, North York Centre. He exited the station, walking through the concrete blight of Mel Lastman Square, and headed over to Beecroft Avenue, one block west of Yonge.

On the east side of Beecroft, filling the space between it and Yonge, was the Ford Centre for the Performing Arts. Kyle remembered the first play that had been presented there:
Showboat.
It had had its initial run here before going to Broadway. That was—what?—almost twenty-five years ago. Kyle had gone to that one—he still fondly remembered Michel Bell’s rendition of “Ol’ Man River”—and to every production since, although, since he and Heather had separated, he hadn’t yet been to see the current blockbuster, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical version of
Dracula.

The west side of Beecroft also held powerful memories. There had been vacant lots here in his youth, and he’d played football with little Jimmy Korematsu, the Haskins twins, and—what was his name? The bully with the misshapen head. Calvino, that was it. Kyle had never been much of an athlete; he played the game to fit in, but his mind was always wandering elsewhere. Once, when he’d actually caught the ball and kept from fumbling it, he’d run—oh, it must have been eighty meters, no, eighty
yards
(this was the 1980s, after all)—all the way into the imaginary end zone, its perimeter marked by a Haskins’s dropped sweatshirt.

All the way into the
wrong
end zone.

He’d thought he’d never live that down.

The fields were just the right size for football games, and at their margins were wooded areas.

Those held fonder memories.

He’d made out there, often, with his high-school girlfriend Lisa, after movies at the Willow or dinners out at the Crock & Block.

Now, though, the fields were paved over—parking lots for the Ford Centre.

But behind them, as it had been since before he was born, was York Cemetery, one of Toronto’s largest.

Some of his schoolmates had made out in the cemetery—there was a wooded strip, perhaps fifteen meters thick, running along its north edge so that the houses on Park Home Avenue didn’t have to look out at tombstones. But Kyle could never bring himself to do it there.

He walked into the cemetery, following the curving road. The grounds were beautifully kept. In the distance, just before the cemetery was bisected by Senlac Road, he could see the giant concrete cenotaph, looking like an Egyptian obelisk, honoring the Canadians who had died in the World Wars.

A pair of black squirrels—ubiquitous in Toronto—scampered across the road in front of him. Once when he was driving, he’d hit a squirrel. Mary had been in the car; she was four, maybe five years old then.

It had been an accident of course, but she wouldn’t talk to him for weeks.

He was a monster in her eyes then.

Then, and now.

Many of the graves had flowers on them, but not Mary’s. He’d meant to visit more often. When she’d died, he’d told himself he’d come every weekend.

It had been three months since his last visit.

But now he didn’t know where else to go, how else to speak to her.

Kyle stepped off the roadway, onto the grass. A man riding a power mower was passing by. He averted his eyes from Kyle—perhaps just indifference, perhaps not knowing what to say to a mourner. To him, doubtless this was just a job; surely he never stopped to think about why the grass grew so luxuriously.

Kyle shoved his hands into his pockets and made his way over to his daughter’s grave.

He passed four tombstones before he realized his mistake. He was in the wrong row; Mary’s plot was one row farther along. He felt a pang of guilt. For Christ’s sake, he didn’t even know where his own daughter was buried!

Kyle had walked across graves often enough in his life, but he couldn’t bring himself to cut over to the next row that way. Not here; not this close to Mary.

He retraced his steps down the path, walked along the road, and made his way down the proper row.

Mary’s stone was made of polished red granite. The flecks of mica flared in the sunlight.

He read the words, wondering if someday they would be as illegible as those on the worn marble slabs he’d seen in old churchyards:

MARY LORRAINE GRAVES

BELOVED DAUGHTER, BELOVED SISTER

2 NOVEMBER 1996 — 23 MARCH 2016

AT PEACE NOW

It had seemed an appropriate epitaph at the time. They’d had no idea why Mary had killed herself. The note she’d left, written in red pen on lined paper, had said simply, “This is the only way I can stay silent.” At the time, none of them had known what it meant.

Kyle reread the last line on the stone again.
At Peace Now.

He hoped that was true.

But how could it be?

If what Becky said was true, Mary had killed herself convinced that her father had molested her. What peace could she have?

The only way I can stay silent.

A sacrifice—but surely not to protect Kyle. No, she must have seen it as being for her mother’s sake—to protect Heather, to save her from the horror, the guilt.

Kyle looked down at the grave. The wound in the landscape had healed, of course. There was no rectangular discontinuity, no scar of dirt between the old ground and the sod laid overtop of it once the hole had been filled in.

He lifted his gaze back to the stone.

“Mary,” he said out loud. He felt self-conscious. The riding mower was far away now, its sound having diminished to almost nothing.

He wanted to say more—so much more—but he didn’t know where to begin. He became conscious that his head was shaking slowly back and forth, and he stopped it with an effort.

He was quiet for several minutes, then he said his daughter’s name once more—softly, the sound almost lost against the background noise of birds, a passing skimmer, and the mower, which was now slowly returning, cutting another swath through the lush lawn.

Kyle tried to read the headstone again and found that he couldn’t. He blinked the tears away.

He thought,
I’m so sorry,
but never gave the words voice.

26

Heather decided to pull out, to disentangle herself from Ideko.

But how?

Suddenly, she found herself flummoxed.

Of course she could revisualize the Centauri construct, then open the cubic door; surely that would sever the link.

But how brutal would the severing be? A psychic amputation? Would part of her be left here, inside Ideko, while the rest—her autonomic self, perhaps—was discarded back in Toronto?

She felt her heart pounding, felt sweat beading on her forehead; she had at least that much connection to her body back in her office.

How to separate? The tools must be there; there must be a way. But it was like suddenly being able to see for the first time. The brain experienced the color, the light, but couldn’t make sense of what it was seeing, couldn’t resolve images.

Or it was like being an amputee—that metaphor again, reflecting her anxiety about the upcoming separation. An amputee, fitted with a prosthetic arm. At first it would be just dead metal and plastic, hanging off the stump. The mind had to learn to control it, to activate it. A new concordance had to be established:
this
thought caused
that
movement.

If the flesh-and-blood brain could learn to interpret light, to move steel, to contract nylon tendons through Teflon pulleys, surely it could learn to work in this realm, too. The human mind was nothing if not adaptable. Resilience was its stock-in-trade.

And so Heather fought to calm herself, fought to think rationally, systematically.

She visualized what she wanted to do—as well as she could, anyway. Her brain was connected to Ideko’s; she visualized severing that connection.

But she was still here, inside him, his strobing view through the subway’s windows fading in and out of prominence as his imagination—ever lusty, our Ideko—came to the fore, then was fought down.

She tried a different image: a solution in a beaker—Ideko’s mind with hers dissolved into it, a faint difference in the refraction of light marking clear streamers of her in transparent him. She imagined herself precipitating out, white crystals—hexagonal in cross section, echoing the wall of minds—filtering down to the bottom of the beaker.

That did it!

The Tokyo subway tunnel faded.

The babble of Ideko’s thoughts faded.

The chatter of Japanese voices faded.

But no—

No!

Nothing replaced them; it was all darkness. She had left Ideko but had not returned to herself.

Perhaps she should escape the construct. She still had some control over her body, or thought she had. She willed her hand up to where she thought the stop button was.

But was her hand really moving? She felt panic growing within her again. Maybe she was imagining her hand, the way amputees imagined phantom limbs, or the way chronic-pain sufferers learned to imagine a switch inside their heads, a switch they could throw with an effort of will, suppressing the agony for at least a few moments.

To continue the process, to exit psychospace, would confirm or deny whether she did have control over her physical body.

But first—dammit all!—she had to contain the panic, fight it back. She had disconnected from Ideko; she was halfway home.

Solvent precipitating out of solute.

Crystals lying at the bottom of the beaker—

—in a haphazard pile; no order, no structure.

She needed to impose order on her rescued self.

The crystals danced, forming a matrix of white diamonds.

It wasn’t working, it wasn’t helping, it—

Suddenly, gloriously, she was home, inside her own perceptions.

The physical Heather breathed a giant sigh of relief. She was still in psychospace, facing the great wall of hexagons.

Her finger had pulled back a centimeter or so from the Ideko keycap.

Of course, it was all conceptualization, all interpretation. Surely there was no real Ideko key; surely psychospace, whatever it was, took some other form. But she knew now the mental gymnastics that would free her from another’s mind. She knew how to exit, and how to reintegrate.

And she desperately wanted to try again.

But in her mental construct of the index to minds, how were things arranged? That was Ideko’s button there. What about the six that abutted it? His parents? His children? His spouse—or perhaps not his spouse, for she would share no genetic material with him.

But it couldn’t be as simple as that, or as constraining. No orderly packing of humans based on simple blood relationships was possible; there were too many permutations, too many variations in family size and composition.

Still, perhaps she was in the Japanese zone of the wall; perhaps all these hexagons represented people from that culture. Or perhaps they were all people with the same birthday, scattered across the four corners of the globe.

Or perhaps she’d been drawn to this spot instinctively. Maybe Kyle’s own hexagon was that one right there: she’d almost touched that one instead of Ideko’s, but had changed her mind at the very last moment, just as in school she’d always shrunk away from her first, best answer and instead, made the wrong choice, forever muttering when someone else gave the correct reply, “I was going to say that.”

Seven
billion
buttons.

She tried the button she’d originally intended to touch, bringing her finger closer and—

Contact!

As staggering the second time as the first.

An amazing sensation.

Contact with a different mind.

This person at least was possessed of full color vision. But the colors were a bit off; the flesh looked too green.

Perhaps everyone perceived color slightly differently; perhaps even people with normal vision had different interpretations. Color
was
a psychological construct, after all. There was no such thing as “red” in the real world; it was simply the way the mind chose to interpret wavelengths ranging from 630 to 750 nanometers. Indeed, the seven colors of the rainbow—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet—were Newton’s arbitrary designations; the quantity was chosen because Sir Isaac liked the idea of there being a prime number of colors, but Heather had never really been able to make out the supposed “indigo” between blue and violet.

Soon Heather’s attention was arrested by something other than the mere colors she was seeing.

The person she was inhabiting—male again, or at least that’s how it felt in some ineffable, slightly aggressive way—was highly agitated about something.

He was in a store. A convenience store. But the brands were mostly unfamiliar to Heather. And the prices—

Ah, the pound symbol.

She was in Britain. It was a newsagent’s, not a convenience store.

And this British—this British
boy,
she felt sure—was looking at the candy rack.

There’d been a language barrier between her and Ideko, but there was none here—at least, not a significant one. “Young man!” she called out. “Young man!”