Factoring Humanity (24 page)

“I won’t change my mind,” said Kyle.

Chikamatsu nodded and headed for the door.

“What was that all about?” asked Cheetah after she was gone.

Kyle did his best Bogart. “The shtuff that dreams are made of.”

“Pardon?” said Cheetah.

Kyle rolled his eyes. “Kids today,” he said.

30

Heather found all sorts of memories of Becky in Kyle’s mind, but none of them were relevant to Becky’s accusation.

Heather went as long as she could in psychospace between bathroom breaks, but on one of the breaks she watched the videotape through the viewfinder on the camcorder.

To her astonishment, the collection of cubes did shimmer—both the paint and the substrate aglow—and then the components seemed to recede, each constituent cube twisting free as it did so.

And then, incredibly, it was gone.

She fast-forwarded, watched it bloom into existence again out of nothingness.

Amazing.

It really did fold up
kata
or
ana;
it really did transcend to another realm.

Heather kept searching throughout the weekend, encountering many aspects of Kyle. Although she was concentrating on his thoughts about his daughters, she also encountered memories of his work, of their marriage—and of her. Apparently he didn’t always see her with uncritical eyes. Corrugated thighs indeed!

It was illuminating, fascinating, compelling. There was so much more she wanted to learn about him.

But she could not tarry. She was on a mission.

And, finally, at last, on Monday morning, she found what she was looking for.

She was scared, not wanting to go on.

The rape of that anonymous French woman haunted her still, but this—

This, if what she feared were true—

This would haunt her, scar her, disgust her, make her homicidally enraged.

And, she knew, she’d never be able to wash the images from her mind.

But it
was
what she’d been looking for—of that there could be no doubt.

Nighttime. Becky’s bedroom, illuminated by light from the street coming in around the edges of her venetian blinds. On the wall, difficult to make out in the wan illumination, was a holoposter of Cutthroat Jenkins, a rock star Becky had idolized when she was fourteen or so.

The view was from Kyle’s point of view. He was standing on the threshold of the room. The corridor he was in was dark. He could see Becky lying in the bed, beneath the heavy green comforter she’d had then. Becky was awake. She looked up at him. Heather expected to see fear, or revulsion, or even melancholy resignation on her face, but to her shock, Becky smiled: a glint in the night; she’d worn braces back then.

She
smiled.

There was no such thing as consent between a minor and an adult—Heather knew that. But the smile was so warm, so accepting . . .

Kyle closed the distance, and Becky wriggled over to the far side of her small bed, making room for him.

And then she sat up.

Kyle lowered himself down, sitting on the edge of the bed. Becky reached out a hand toward him—

—and took the mug he was offering.

“Just the way you like it,” said Kyle. “With lemon.”

“Thanks, Daddy,” said Becky. Her voice was raw. She used both hands to hold the mug and took a sip.

It came back to Heather. Becky had had a terrible cold five or so years ago. They’d all eventually come down with it.

Kyle reached out a hand and stroked his daughter’s dark hair once. “Nothing’s too good for my little girl,” he said.

Becky smiled again. “Sorry my coughing woke you.”

“I think I was up anyway,” said Kyle. He shrugged a little. “Sometimes I don’t sleep that well.” He then leaned in, kissed her gently on the cheek, and rose to his feet. “I hope you feel better tomorrow, Pumpkin.”

And with that, he left his daughter’s room.

Heather felt terrible. When it came right down to it, she had been ready to believe the most horrible thing possible about her own husband. There’d never been a shred of evidence to support Becky’s charge, and all sorts of reasons to believe it the product of an overzealous therapist—and yet as soon as that memory started unraveling, showing Kyle entering his daughter’s room late at night, she’d expected to see the worst. The mere suggestion of child abuse
was
indeed enough to tar a man. For the first time, Heather felt a real understanding of the horror Kyle had been going through.

And yet—

And yet just because one night’s encounter—one that easily came to the surface—was benign, did it mean that nothing untoward had ever happened? Becky had lived with her parents for eighteen years, which was—what?—six thousand or so nights. So what if Kyle had been the dutiful, loving father on one of those?

She was getting the hang of accessing specific memories; concentrating on an image associated with a desired incident was the key. But the image had to be accurate. It was distasteful in the extreme to try to conjure up an image of Kyle molesting Becky, but it also was pointless. Unless the image exactly matched Kyle’s own recollection—from his point of view, of course—there would be no connection, and the memory would remain locked.

Heather had seen her daughter naked. They had belonged to the same health club on Dufferin Street—indeed, Heather had started taking Becky there as a teenager. She’d never really looked closely at her daughter except to notice, with some envy, that she had a trim, youthful figure, with none of the stretch marks Heather herself had had ever since her first pregnancy. She had noted that Becky’s high, conical breasts hadn’t yet begun to sag, though.

Becky’s breasts.

A rush of memory—but Heather’s own, not Kyle’s.

Becky had come to see her mother when she was fifteen or sixteen, just about the time she’d first started dating. She’d taken off her shirt and her small bra and shown her mother the space between her breasts. She had a large brown mole there, raised like a pencil eraser.

“I hate it,” Becky had said.

Heather had understood the timing: Becky had lived with the mole for years; indeed, three years ago she’d overcome her modesty to ask Dr. Redmond about it, and he’d assured her it was benign. No doubt countless girls had seen it in the locker room at school. But now that she was dating, she was thinking about how a
boy
might react to it. It was all too fast for Heather—her daughter was growing up much too quickly.

Or was she? Heather herself had only been sixteen the first time she’d let Billy Karapedes get his hand up under her shirt. They’d done that in the dark, in his car. He hadn’t
seen
anything—but if Heather had had a mole like Becky’s, he would have felt it. What would his reaction have been?

“I want to have it removed,” said Becky.

Heather had thought before responding. Two of Becky’s high-school friends had already received nose jobs. One had had freckles lasered off. A fourth had even had breast-enlargement surgery. Compared to that, this was nothing: a local anesthetic, a flick of a scalpel, and
voilà!
—a real source of anxiety gone.

“Please,” said Becky when her mother made no reply. She sounded so earnest that for a second, Heather thought Becky was going to say she needed it done by Friday night, but apparently things weren’t moving
that
fast.

“You’d need a stitch or two, I bet.”

Becky considered this. “Maybe I could get it done over spring break,” she said, evidently not wanting to face the locker room with suture protruding from her sternum.

“Sure, if you like,” said Heather, smiling warmly at her daughter. “We’ll get Dr. Redmond to recommend somebody.”

“Thanks, Mom. You’re the best.” She paused. “Don’t tell Daddy, though. I’d die of embarrassment.”

Heather smiled. “Not a word.”

Heather could still picture that mole. She’d seen it twice more before it was removed, and once, even, after the surgery, when it was floating in a small specimen container before it was taken to a lab to be tested—just to be on the safe side—for malignancy. As she’d promised Becky, she’d never said a word about the little bit of plastic surgery to Kyle. The Ontario Health Insurance Plan didn’t cover it—it was, after all, purely cosmetic—but the cost was less than a hundred bucks; Heather had paid by smartcard for it and had taken her much-happier daughter home.

She conjured up an image of her daughter’s breasts, beige, smooth, wine-tipped, with the mole between them. And she plugged that image into the matrix of Kyle’s memories, looking for a match.

Her own memory could have faded—it had been three or so years ago, after all. She tried imagining slightly bigger breasts, different-colored nipples, larger and smaller moles.

But there was no match. Kyle had never seen the mole.

He’d come into my room, have me remove my top, fondle my breasts, and then—

And then, nothing. Kyle had never seen his daughter topless—at least not during any time after puberty, not at any time when she’d had real breasts.

Heather felt her whole body shaking. It had never happened. None of it. There had been no abuse.

Brian Kyle Graves was a good man, a good husband—and a good father. He’d never hurt his daughter. Heather was sure of it. At last, she was sure.

Tears were rolling down her face. She was barely aware of them—the moistness, the salty taste as some slid into her mouth, an intrusion from the outside world.

She’d been wrong—wrong even to suspect her husband. If it had been she who had been accused, he would have stood by her, never once doubting her innocence. But she
had
doubted. She had wronged him terribly. Oh, she had never accused him directly. But the shame of having doubted was almost unbearable.

Heather made the effort of will, extracting herself from psychospace. She removed the cubic door and staggered out into the harsh light of the theatrical lamps.

She wiped her eyes, blew her nose, and sat in her office chair staring at the faded drapes, trying to think of how she would make it up to her husband.

31

The lab’s door chime sounded. Two grad students were working in the lab along with Kyle. One of them went to the door, which opened for him.

“I’d like to see Professor Graves,” said the man who was revealed on the other side of the doorway.

Kyle looked up. “Mr. Cash, isn’t it?” he said, crossing the room, hand extended.

“That’s right. I hope you don’t mind me coming by without an appointment, but—”

“No, no. Not at all.”

“Is there somewhere we can talk?”

“My office,” said Kyle. He turned to one of the grad students. “Pietro, see if you can make some headway on the indeterminacy bug, would you? I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

The student nodded, and Kyle and Cash headed down the curving corridor to Kyle’s wedge of an office. When they entered, Kyle bustled about cleaning off the second chair, while Cash admired the
Allosaurus
poster.

“Sorry about the mess,” said Kyle. Cash folded his angular form into the chair.

“You’ve had a weekend, Professor Graves. I’m hoping you’ve had a chance to consider the Banking Association’s offer.”

Kyle nodded. “I have thought about it, yes.”

Cash waited patiently.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Cash. I really don’t want to leave the university. This place has been very good to me over the years.”

Cash nodded. “I know you met your wife here, and you did all three of your degrees here.”

“Exactly.” He shrugged. “It’s home.”

“I believe the offer I made was very generous,” said Cash.

“It was.”

“But if need be, I can offer more.”

“It’s not a question of money; I was just telling someone else that earlier today. I like it here, and I like doing research that’s going to be published.”

“But the impact on the banking industry—”

“I understand that there are potential problems. Do you think I want to cause chaos? We’re still years away from posing a real threat to smartcard security. Look at it this way: you’ve had a warning that quantum computers are likely coming down the pike; now you can get working on a new encryption solution. You survived Year 2000, and you’re going to survive this.”

“My hope,” said Cash, “was to deal with this situation in the most cost-effective manner possible.”

“By buying me off,” said Kyle.

Cash was quiet. “There is a great deal at stake here, Professor. Name your price.”

“To my rather significant delight, Mr. Cash, I’ve discovered I don’t have one.”

Cash rose. “Everyone does, Professor. Everyone does.” He headed for the office door. “If you change your mind, let me know.”

And with that, he was gone.

Heather needed to convince her only living daughter of the truth. If the family was ever to reconcile, it had to start with Becky.

But that raised a larger question.

When was Heather going to go public with her psychospace discovery?

At first she’d kept it secret because she’d wanted to develop a sufficient theory for publication.

But now she had that—in spades.

And still she hadn’t gone public. All it would take to establish priority would be a preemptive posting to the Alien Signal newsgroup. Peer-reviewed journals would follow later, but she could, this minute, announce her discovery if she wanted to.

Plato had said that an unexamined life is not worth living.

But he was referring to
self
-examination.

Who could live with the knowledge that anyone and everyone might be scrutinizing their own thoughts? What would happen to privacy? To trade secrets? To criminal justice? To interpersonal relationships?

It would change everything—and Heather was not at all sure that it would be for the better.

But no—that wasn’t why she was keeping it a secret. Not some lofty concern about other people’s privacy, although she liked to think she
was
giving that at least some consideration; except for Kyle, she’d refrained from giving in to temptation, staying out of the minds of others she knew personally.