“We?”
Cat’s father nodded. “Finn and I.”
Richard peeled more skin off his chicken. Outside, the wind picked up, and the tree branches tapped against the windows.
“I didn’t know that,” said Cat. “That you were both working on the lunar station.” When she spoke, she spoke to Finn.
“I didn’t think you were interested,” said Finn.
“So what do you think of those activist groups out on the coast?” Richard leaned toward Cat’s father. “I’m guessing that’s why you got out of the field. I don’t blame you. Lot of tension.”
“Yes. Tension.”
The windows illuminated and went dark.
“Is the storm going to be a bad one?” Cat tugged at the greasy napkin lying in her lap. She was still looking at Finn.
“Yeah,” said Richard. “I mean, I mostly agree with them, but some of the wording in that legislation is pretty strong.”
Cat wound her napkin around her fingers. She said Richard’s name so softly it was nothing but an exhalation.
“Take Finn here,” Richard said. “He helps you out, but you can’t pay him.”
“Right,” said Cat’s father. “Finn’s my lab assistant, yes . . .”
Richard grinned so wide he showed all his teeth, and outside the trees beat against the walls of the house. The rain still hadn’t started.
“Exactly! You don’t have to pay him, you don’t have to worry about him getting hurt . . .”
Finn stared at Cat from across the table.
“Where are you going with this?” Cat’s father wrapped his hand around the neck of his beer bottle.
“All I’m saying is, there are benefits to having a bot do a human’s job, yeah? But those activist groups are saying it’s slavery, right, so you gotta find a way around the whole sentience question.” He glanced at Finn. “I’m sorry to phrase it that way. I really don’t want to suggest—”
“Richard,” said Cat. Finn was still staring at her, his eyes refracting silver. “Richard, please, let’s talk about something else—”
“No,” said Cat’s father. “I’m curious what he’s building up to.”
Richard laughed. “This is what SynLodge’s been working on. That sweet spot between intelligence and sentience. You can have one without the other. Then you can get around that moral question of whether or not it’s slavery. Plus, those laws are all going to pass eventually, so you get around them, too.”
For the first time all dinner, Finn’s eyes moved off Cat.
He stared at Richard, unblinking, unmoving.
Cat’s father sipped his beer. “I certainly hope they pass.”
“So do I,” Richard said.
“I do offer Finn recompense,” Cat’s father said. “Not that it’s any of your business.”
Richard paused. “I’m sorry.” He sounded sincere. “I would never suggest enslaving sentient bots is a good thing. I’m just saying, maybe there are some problems with sentience. Not always, but sometimes.” He leaned back in his chair. “You know, like what happened with Ishiguro and McHugh—”
“I’m familiar with the case,” said Cat’s father.
“As am I,” said Finn. “There were extenuating circumstances.”
Richard grinned and threw out one arm toward Finn. “Look at that! That’s exactly what I’m talking about.”
“I don’t understand,” said Finn.
“Neither do I,” said Cat.
“That’s because you’re an artist, sweetheart,” said Richard.
“Cat understands the nature of consciousness,” said Finn. “I read her thesis.”
“You did?” Cat’s breath caught in her throat. She and Finn stared at each other from across the table. She could feel Richard watching her. Finn nodded.
“When?”
“I’m sure it was a brilliant paper,” said Richard. “But it’s not what I’m talking about. Nobody’s denying Finn has consciousness, or saying he shouldn’t have rights because of it. What I’m saying is—people don’t want consciousness in a bot. That’s really the basis for all the protests, right? I mean, those bot-rights activists still want intelligent computers. I’m just saying, you get rid of sentience, you get rid of the whole slavery issue entirely.”
“Richard,” said Cat. “Please shut up.”
She was answered by a trio of clicks, then a long, low whomp as though the house had sighed. The lights flickered once and went dark.
Cat’s father cursed. The silvery glow in Finn’s eyes brightened, casting enough light that Cat could see the outline of his fingers pressing against the table. “I can fix this,” he said. His illuminated eyes pushed backward and then rose up.
“That really isn’t necessary,” said Cat’s father. “We can wait till the storm’s over at least. Cat, there are still some candles left over from last year—”
“It’s no problem,” said Finn. “I don’t mind.”
Lightning flickered across the windows, and in that sudden flash of whiteness Cat saw Richard scowling. She pushed away from the table in disgust and felt her way out of the dining room and into the kitchen. Trees thrashed against the window above the sink, water sluicing over the glass. Finn followed her, cutting across the kitchen to the screened door.
“Finn, I’m sorry.”
But he was already outside.
Cat opened and then slammed shut one drawer after another until she found a pair of half-melted orange-scented candles and an old disposable lighter. She lit both candles and carried them into the dining room. In the gloomy light, Richard and her father sat at their seats, not looking at each other. Cat sat down beside Richard, pushed aside her uneaten fried chicken, and watched the candle flames dance and hop in the darkness, the spicy scent of orange curling into the air.
Five minutes passed. Cat’s father sipped his beer. Richard drummed his fingers against the table. Cat tried very hard not to think about anything in particular.
The lights came back on.
“You can thank Finn for that,” Cat’s father said.
“I really am sorry. I know I can get worked up sometimes, and I shouldn’t have . . .” But Richard’s apology was met with a glare. Cat didn’t bother to blow out the candles. She waited for Finn to come slamming through the kitchen door, water dripping off his clothes and his hair. She wanted to ask him when he had read her thesis. How he’d read it. She wanted to apologize on behalf of Richard, again.
But the storm raged on and Finn never came back inside.
* * * *
Cat wheeled her old bicycle out of the storage shed. The world glimmered silvery wet from the storm, which had passed through as Cat and her father and Richard sat eating the last of the congealing chicken. Now dinner was over and the sun was setting behind the leftover storm clouds. After he had helped her dump the chicken bones in the trash, Richard disappeared upstairs to take a video conference with Ella Halfast on his computer: Cat could see his silhouette in the window, pacing back and forth across the square of yellow light, hands gesturing wildly. For a moment, she stood on the driveway and leaned on her bicycle, watching him. Her anger with him had faded; he was like a little kid sometimes, getting so excited about his work that he didn’t understand when he was putting off the people around him. And he really was trying to help people with SynLodge. She knew he found the idea of exploiting sentient robots distasteful, even if he wasn’t the best at getting his point across.
Besides, his views lined up with the rest of the world’s. He was the normal one here. Not her, not her father.
Cat rode her bike down the muddy road to the cemetery where her mother was buried, the breeze cool across her face. She jumped off the bike and left it lying in a patch of damp grass next to the gate. She hadn’t been back to her mother’s grave for so long. She used to come regularly, every few months, whenever the stress of faking normalcy became too much of a burden. Every few months she’d drive down to her father’s house, she’d collapse into the comfort
of Finn’s arms, she’d ride her bike to the cemetery.
“Mom,” she said when she walked up to the sleek black gravestone, glistening with rainwater. “Mom, I’m engaged.” No response but the whispering of the trees in the forest, the insects in the trees.
“It’s Richard. I told you about him? He owns his own company? Well, he asked me to marry him during the spring freeze. I don’t know if you knew about the spring freeze, did you? I don’t think the ground froze that far down, but well—there was the freak freeze in April. Everything glassed over.”
Cat stopped. She lowered herself into the wet grass, draping over the headstone of Mrs. Patty Longbotham, dead at eighty-five a hundred years ago, and once dearly loved, dearly missed.
“Can I tell you a secret, Mom?”
The storm clouds had dissipated and already Cat could see the pinprick of stars against the black sky, the moon hanging like a thin-lipped smile in the northwest corner.
“I don’t want to marry him.”
All the insects in the world buzzed and buzzed. “Don’t tell him, okay? Don’t send him any . . . portents. But I mean . . .” Cat looked at the grasses shimmering in the starlit wind.
“It’s a business arrangement,” she said finally. “An acquisition. He’s very sweet but he sees everything in terms of business, you know? But he’s . . . It would be secure. And I won’t have to work anymore. I know you don’t like me being a vice girl.”
Cat leaned her head against Mrs. Longbotham’s gravestone. She twirled a piece of her hair around her finger and stared at her mother’s grave. The flat ground was covered with a pelt of dried-out grass. During the two weeks of spring, black-eyed Susans grew there, an enormous clump of them, their heads nodding against the slightest hint of a breeze.
“I love you,” said Cat. “I’m sorry my life isn’t what you wanted it to be. But I really am trying.”
She stood up, wiped the mud from the back of her pants. Her bike waited for her in the grass outside the gate, and she rode home in the darkness, mud splattering up along her spine from the rear wheel. Crickets chirped and lightning bugs blinked on and off in the distance. By the time Cat pulled up to the storage shed, she was coated with a splatter of mud and a thin sheen of sweat from the storm’s humidity. She put her bike away and scraped at the filthy residue coating her skin. Richard was still in her bedroom, pacing back and forth in front of the window. She had always found Finn after visiting her mother’s grave, because afterward she felt empty, and Finn’s touch filled her up again.
Tonight, she wanted a bath.
Cat slipped into the downstairs bathroom, the big, airy one with the window that looked out over her mother’s old garden—the garden her father had let go to seed after her mother’s death. She pulled her old silk bathrobe out of the linen closet and draped it over the sink. Turned on the water. Dropped in a spongy capsule of lavender oil. The tub was ancient: claw-footed, the porcelain patchy and worn thin. The surrounding tiles were stained from years of dripping bathwater.
Cat took off her clothes, dropping them into piles on the floor. She took off her engagement ring. While the water filled up the tub, she opened the window, breathed in the woodsy, rainy scent from the garden. Then she slipped into the bath, dropping down until her head was completely submerged, her knees poking out of the silky, lavender-scented water. She opened her eyes. The antique light fixture overhead wavered like a ghost.
Cat exhaled a long stream of bubbles. When she pushed herself up out of the water, it was only because she needed to breathe.
Finn stood in the doorway.
Cat stared at him. Water streamed through her hair, over the sides of her face, into the crevice of her collarbone. She didn’t know what to say so she slid back into the water, kicking up one leg and then the other.
Finn didn’t move except for his eyes, following the motion of her body as she straightened up and leaned over the side of the tub.
“I missed you at dinner,” she said.
“Did you?”
“You know I did.”
“You’re getting married.”
Cat hesitated. “Why didn’t you come back from the storm?”
He didn’t answer right away. His irises vibrated. Then: “I felt that my presence made Mr. Feversham uncomfortable.”
“No,” said Cat. “His presence made you uncomfortable.” She held her breath.
“I can’t experience discomfort.”
“Oh. Right.” Cat sighed and slid back into the water. “I forgot.”
“I wanted to tell you,” said Finn, “that I found your thesis fascinating. Remarkable, even.”
Her thesis.
“Oh?” she said. “How’d you even get a copy of it?”
Finn smiled. “I have access to all networked computers in the house. I found a copy.”
“Jesus, I forgot I put it on there.” Why had she put it on the network anyway? Maybe she’d wanted him to find it.
“It doesn’t bother you, does it?”
Cat shook her head, tilting her gaze to her abdomen. She skimmed her hands across the top of the water. “As long as you thought it was fascinating.”
“I did. You approached something I hadn’t previously considered.” He paused. “There are some points I disagree with, of course. I don’t think it would be possible for you to be wholly accurate regarding my condition, but—” He stopped. His eyes vibrated. “It’s difficult for me to express what I’m trying to say.”
Cat leaned forward in the water, listening.
“There is nothing else like me in the entire world,” said Finn. “That’s what you wrote. I’m the only one.”
“I know.”
“I can’t tell you what it means to be the only one of my kind,” he said. “I can’t . . . There is a lack in myself. But your thesis almost filled it in. It was . . . a start.”
“You’re lonely,” said Cat. As soon as she spoke, she knew it was true.
“I . . . I am not sure.”
Finn stared at her from his place in the doorway. Cat was aware of her nakedness. She wondered what Richard would do if he wandered back downstairs, went looking for the bathroom.
“I guess you couldn’t wait to tell me all this,” she said, her voice shaking, “when I wasn’t in the tub.”
A pause so long time lost all meaning. “Would you like me to be honest?”
“I thought you were incapable of dishonesty.”
“I’m capable.” Finn’s eyes whirred. “I wanted to watch you.”
Cat’s heart thrummed. “Watch me take a bath?”
“Yes.”
All the skin on Cat’s body tingled. She lifted up her arm. She watched the water fall in a line across her breasts. So did Finn.
A warm wind blew in through the open window, tousling Finn’s hair.
Cat thought about Richard’s shadow, pacing back and forth in front of the yellow light of her bedroom window.
“Close the door,” she said.
“Of course,” said Finn.
He slid the lock into place.
Cat stood up. Water rushed over her body and into the bath. Finn didn’t move. Cat took one step out of the tub, then another and another. Water pooled on the floor. She left a trail of shining footprints behind her.
“You’re lonely,” Cat said. “So you came to find me.” She put one hand on his chest. He slid his arm around the small of her back.
Outside, the wind picked up, damp with rainwater, and blew through the screen in the window, bringing inside the wild, overgrown scent of the garden.
“I came to find you,” said Finn.
NINE
The day of Cat’s wedding the sky was cloudless and so blue it sagged beneath the weight of its color.
At the chapel, the sunlight illuminated clouds of golden dust that lifted up in bursts off the statues of saints. She dressed in the choir room, Lucy and Miguel and Felix hovering around her like bees. The bodice of her dress was encrusted with fake jewels and pressed
tight against the bones of her chest. It felt as though it weighed a hundred pounds. Richard had picked out the dress a few months earlier, using his preferred tactic of purchasing the most expensive item in the store. Cat found something endearing about that, the way he believed in capitalism so much he extended it to personal relationships. She admired anyone who could navigate the world with that much self-assurance. She certainly couldn’t.
Cat barely recognized her reflection in the full-length mirror. The bodice flickered and blinked in the sunlight, but all the color in her skin had drained away hours ago.
“Are you sure that hair’s secure?” Felix asked. He held a tiny bottle of hair spray at his hip, cocked and ready, like a gun.
“If you spray that one more time I’m smashing your potting wheel,” said Lucy. “I’m not even joking.”
“Stop bickering, the two of you.” Miguel offered the veil to Cat, and Cat flipped it over and rested it on top of her head. “Are you nervous?” Miguel asked, his voice low.
Cat nodded. She hadn’t eaten anything for nearly thirteen hours. Her cheekbones looked hollow from the blush Lucy had applied earlier; her eyes were bigger than usual and fever-bright from the eyeliner and the mascara. “It’ll be fine,” Miguel said. There was a disapproving tightness in the skin around his eyes. “You’ll be beautiful, if nothing else.”
“Yeah, you look really amazing.” Felix tossed the hair spray aside. Lucy nodded in agreement.
Someone knocked on the door. All four heads turned toward it. The door slid open. Richard, in his sleek black tuxedo. He smiled at Cat and threw his arms out wide.
“You aren’t supposed to be in here!” Lucy said. But Richard ignored her.
“Let’s do this thing,” he said.
And Cat’s world turned to mist.
The wedding ceremony had all the logic of a dream. Cat walked for ten hours down that never-ending faded pink carpet. Roses and baby’s breath grew out of the wooden church pews. For half a second her father appeared, his face looming in close to hers. He was smiling; he was crying. She smiled back at him. Then he kissed her cheek and disappeared. Up in their alcoves, the statues shifted and whispered among themselves as Cat recited her vows. She heard only sounds as she spoke, guttural and ancient.