Factoring Humanity

The sun was bright that afternoon. She squinted against it and wondered again about the aliens who were sending the messages. If nothing else, sunlight like this was something humans shared with the Centaurs — no one knew what the aliens looked like, of course, but political cartoonists had taken to drawing them like their namesakes from Greek mythology. Alpha Centauri A was almost an exact twin for Earth’s sun: both were spectral-class G2V, both had a temperature of 5800 Kelvin — so both shone down on their planets with the same yellow-white light. Yes, cooler, smaller Alpha Centauri B might add an orange hue when it, too, was visible in the sky — but there would be times when only A would be up — and at those times, the Centaurs and the humans would have looked out on identically illuminated landscapes.

She continued on down the street, heading to her office.

We go on, she thought. We go on.

The next morning — Saturday, July 22 — Kyle rode the subway four stops past his usual destination of St. George station, all the way to Osgoode.

Becky’s boyfriend Zack Malkus worked as a clerk at a book-shop on Queen Street West. That much Kyle remembered from what little Becky had said to him over the past year. Which bookshop Kyle didn’t know — but there weren’t many left. During his high-school years, Kyle had often ventured down to Queen on a Saturday afternoon, looking for new science fiction at Bakka, new comics at The Silver Snail, and out-of-print works at the dozen or so used bookstores that had lined the street back then.

But independent bookstores had been having a hard time. Most had either relocated to less-trendy areas, where the rent was more modest, or had simply gone out of business. These days, Queen Street West was home mostly to trendy cafés and bistros, although the rococo headquarters of one of Canada’s broadcasting empires was located near the subway exit at University Avenue. There couldn’t be more than three or four bookstores left, so Kyle decided to simply try them all.

He began with venerable Pages, on the north side. He looked around — unlike Becky, Zack was in university, so he presumably probably did work on weekends, rather than during the week. But there was no sign of Zack’s blond, rangy form. Still, Kyle went up to the cashier, a stunning East Indian woman with eight earrings. “Hello,” he said.

She smiled at him.

“Does Zack Malkus work here?”

“We’ve got a Zack Barboni,” she said.

Kyle felt his eyes widening slightly When he’d been a kid, everyone had had normal names — David, Robert, John, Peter. The only Zack he’d ever heard of was the bumbling Zachary Smith on the old TV series Lost in Space. Now it seemed that every kid he ran into was a Zack or an Odin or a Wing.

“No, that’s not him,” said Kyle. “Thanks anyway.”

He continued west. Panhandlers hit him up for donations along the way; there’d been a time in his youth when panhandlers were so rare in Toronto that he could never bring himself to say no. But they’d become plentiful in downtown, although they always solicited with studied Canadian politeness. Kyle had perfected the straight-ahead Torontonian gaze: jaw set, never meeting the eyes of a beggar, but still making his head swing through a tiny arc of “no” to each request; it would be rude, after all, to completely ignore someone who was talking to you.

Toronto the Good, he thought, recalling an old advertising slogan. Although the beggars today were a mixed group, many were Native Canadians — what Kyle’s father still called “Indians.” In fact, Kyle couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a Native Canadian anywhere except begging on a street corner, although there were doubtless still many on reservations someplace. Several years ago, he’d had a couple of Natives in one of his classes, sent there on a now-defunct government program, but he couldn’t think of a single U of T faculty member — even, ironically, in Native Studies — who was a Canadian aborigine.

Kyle continued on until he came to Bakka. The store had started on Queen West in 1972, had moved away a quarter-century later, and now was back, not far from its original location. Kyle felt sure he’d have remembered — and that Becky would have mentioned it — if Zack worked there. Still…

Painted on the shop’s plate-glass front window was the derivation of the store’s name:

Bakka: noun, myth.; in Fremen legend the weeper who mourns for all mankind.

Bakka must be working overtime these days, thought Kyle.

He entered the store and spoke to the bearded, elfin man behind the counter. But no Zack Malkus worked there, either.

Kyle continued to search. He was wearing a Tilley safari shirt and blue jeans — not much different from what he wore while teaching.

The next store was about a block farther along, on the south side of the street. Kyle waited for a red-and-white streetcar — recently converted to maglev travel — to hum quietly past, then made his way across.