Factoring Humanity

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.