The Mad Scientist's Daughter

  Cat smiled even though she didn’t feel like it. Her father was so pale he blended in with the white sheets, with the walls, with the impossible light. She couldn’t think about Finn right now.

  “Have you heard from him?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Oh, send it again. It’s just Finn being recalcitrant. We had that receiver buried so deep in there not even STL could muck it up.”

  “If I ever hear anything,” said Cat, “I’ll let you know.”

  That evening, Daniel asked her questions she couldn’t answer.

  “Has Grandpa’s brain stopped working?” He sat at the aluminum table, the same one she had sat at as a child, kicking his feet against the chair legs, the way she used to do. Cat ran cold water over a bowl of pasta. She looked out the window.

  “No,” she said.

  “But if it does, that means he’ll die?”

  “His brain isn’t going to stop working.” Don’t lie to children. Be upfront. “He has a . . . growth, there, that affects the jobs his brain has to do.” She carried the pasta across the kitchen and dumped it in the pot of marinara sauce bubbling on the stove.

  “Do you believe in ghosts, Mama?”

  Cat nearly dropped the pot of spaghetti across the kitchen floor. “Why do you ask?”

  “Well, if you believe in ghosts, then it’s not so scary for someone to die, because you can still see them. You know, they’ll keep on being there.”

  Cat turned from the stove. Daniel stared at her. God, his hair was so dark. It was darker than hers now.

  “Grandpa isn’t going to die,” Cat said sharply, because she was tired, and the steam from dinner was making her head spin. She drew the back of her hand across her forehead. Daniel blinked, recoiled a little, and then turned back to his laptop. Cat immediately regretted losing her temper and telling a lie. She pulled Daniel into a hug and the moist heat in the kitchen masked the tears on her cheeks.

  * * * *

  One afternoon, when her father had been in the hospital for nearly a month, with no change in his health, someone knocked on the front door.

  Daniel was at school and Cat had been smoking a cigarette in the living room, watching through the windows as birds fought one another in the yard. When she heard the knock she dropped the cigarette on the chair’s armrest, burning a small, neat hole into the fabric. Immediately, she thought, Richard, and as she walked into the foyer she picked up any detritus that might suggest a child lived in the house. She shoved all the toys she had gathered into the hall closet and then pulled the door open.

  A young man with lovely dark eyes blinked at her. “I’m, ah, I’m looking for Dr. Novak,” he said.

  Cat dragged on her cigarette.

  “Dr. Novak is in the hospital,” she said. “I’m his daughter.”

  “Oh,” said the young man. “Oh God, I’m sorry.” He held out his hand, and Cat shook it. She stepped out onto the front porch and put out her cigarette in the ashtray.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Maybe.” The young man smoothed his hair back away from his forehead. “My name is AJ. AJ Aziz. I’m a cyberneticist with Selene Technologies. You know, the lunar base.”

  “I know.”

  “I was hoping—” AJ hesitated. “I was hoping to talk to Dr. Novak about his android, George—”

  “Finn,” Cat snapped.

  “Oh, right, of course, sorry, I forgot.” AJ shuffled his feet against the porch. He seemed at a loss. Cat looked at his tiny bullet car parked in the drive, brand-new and shining in the sun. It looked out of place here in the woods.

  “What do you want to know about Finn?” she asked.

  AJ looked at her brightly. “Oh, are you in cybernetics, too? I hope so, because there’s something really weird going on with him up there. Like a signal . . .”

  There was an earnestness in his expression that she found appealing. Also, he called Finn him.

  “Why don’t you sit down,” she said, nodding toward the swing. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Oh, thank you!” AJ grinned. Cat pulled out another cigarette and lit it. AJ sat down on the swing but Cat stayed standing, leaning against the porch railing.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “Okay,” said AJ. “Here’s the deal. I work with Dr. Korchinsky—she’s one of the scientists stationed up at the lunar base. A cyberneticist, like us.” Cat didn’t bother to correct his mistake. “Anyway, Dr. K does all the work on George—I mean, what’s his name? Finn?”

  Cat nodded.

  “Well, she does all the work on Finn up there, and I do all the work down here. A few days ago there was this weird . . . anomaly, I guess, in his circuits. Sort of like his system rebooted. Happened twice. The second time he let off some sparks—from his teeth, I think. Anyway, Dr. K was totally baffled. Said Finn told her nothing had happened. He . . . He lied.”

  “Yes,” said Cat. “He can lie.” She pulled out another cigarette and lit it with her old one.

  AJ didn’t respond. He was too involved with his story, as though he had rehearsed it on the drive out to the house and couldn’t be interrupted by his audience. “So Dr. K tracked the source of the anomaly. It took a while, but she eventually tracked it here.” AJ spread his hands out wide. “Dr. Novak’s residence. Which makes sense. Anyway, she wanted me to get in touch with Dr. Novak to ask about the anomaly. I mean, what is it?” AJ looked at her then.

  “I don’t know.” Cat blew smoke into the air.

  AJ frowned. “Really? I mean, it’s weird that it was sourced from here, don’t you think?”

  “It is weird.” Cat paused. Thoughts churned inside her head. She had no business trying to bullshit a cyberneticist. “It may be some old messaging system. My father may have sent something—from the hospital, I mean. Maybe.”

  “Huh. What kind of message?”

  “I’m not sure.” Cat smoked her cigarette all the way down to the filter and flicked it out into the yard. “Dr. Aziz, is there any way I could talk to Dr. Korchinsky? About Finn?”

  AJ blinked. “About the anomaly, you mean? The message?”

  Cat nodded.

  “I suppose.” AJ paused. “You’d have to come out to our offices. We’ve got the communication hookups and everything. Maybe next week sometime? That would give me a chance to get everything set up.”

  “I could do that.” Cat paused. “It’ll give me a chance to visit my father in the hospital. He knows more about it than I do.”

  “Oh, of course.” AJ pushed back in the swing. “Is Dr. Novak doing . . . all right? I was sort of hoping to meet him. It’s why I drove all the way out here.” He smiled. “He’s kind of my hero.”

  Cat sighed and pulled at her hair. She listened to the pine trees shaking in the wind.

  “He’s dying,” she said.

  AJ stared at her, his eyes wide. “Oh,” he said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t . . . I didn’t know.”

  “It’s okay.” Cat nodded, trying to convince herself that what she said was true. It’s okay.

  “I’ll call you. About coming to talk to Dr. Korchinsky.”

  AJ stood up and shook Cat’s hand again. She forced herself to smile at him. She had no intention of divulging any secrets about the anomaly in Finn’s system. She only thought if she could talk to Dr. Korchinsky, who was on the lunar station, who spoke to Finn every day, she could somehow convince Finn to come home, to see her father before he died.

  * * * *

  Cat set an appointment to drive to the STL offices in the city, to meet with Dr. Kristine Korchinsky. She called Maybelle from the pie shop and told her she needed to go into the city over the weekend. She didn’t offer any details and Maybelle didn’t ask, but that was because everyone in town knew about her father, and the nature of his illness—a wasting disease, the sort of thing you disintegrated from—was noble enough that the suffering of her family endeared them to the gossiping old ladies at the pie shop.

  She drove to the hospital. Her father
slept despite the brightness of the room. She sat and watched him and waited until one of the nurse-bots woke him up, sliding a thin silver needle into one of the veins of his arms. His eyes fluttered open, and he stayed still while the nurse-bot took a sample of his blood.

  “Cat,” he said when the bot had whirred away. He twisted his neck so that he was facing her. “When I was little boy they had actual nurses.” He grinned, and the grin stretched his skin taut across the bones of his face. Cat barely recognized him. “Guess it is my fault, though? The bots? I don’t really mind them.”

  “I’m going to STL this Friday,” Cat said.

  Her father’s eyes widened, and he tried to sit up. Cat pressed her hand against his chest, and it was all she could do not to snatch it away—she felt the bones of his sternum through the flimsy fabric of his gown. “Don’t strain yourself, Daddy.”

  “Why?” her father asked. “Did you hear from Finn?”

  “No, not exactly.” And then she related to him the visit from Dr. Aziz.

  “So I’m going to talk to them,” she said when she had finished. “About Finn.”

  Her father closed his eyes. “Thank you.” She didn’t think he was speaking to her. He had always been an atheist, but maybe in the hospital that didn’t mean anything anymore. His eyes opened. “Maybe you can get him to come back.”

  Cat didn’t say anything.

  “If anyone could get him to come back, it would be you.” He turned to her again. “You do know that?”

  Cat didn’t believe him. She didn’t believe that Finn would come back for her. She wrapped her father’s hand in her own.

  “You should rest,” she said.

  Cat drove home and picked Daniel up at school. After dinner, she took him to the ice cream shop on the interstate. Daniel ate his ice cream cone and regarded her suspiciously. She never bought him ice cream.

  “I’m going away for a few days,” she said.

  Daniel continued to lick at his ice cream. A tiny stream of it melted over his fingers.

  “Why?”

  “I’m going to talk to someone.”

  “Is it my dad?”

  Cat froze. She had never told Daniel, once he was born, about his father. She had never told him about Finn. She had never explained why she spent so much time out under the moon.

  “No,” she said slowly, and she dreaded the inevitable flood of questions—Who is my dad? Can I meet him?—but they didn’t come. Daniel looked down at his ice cream cone.

  “It’s someone I knew a long time ago,” she said. “Someone Grandpa knew. You’re going to stay with Maybelle. Is that all right? From the pie house?”

  “Maybelle smells funny.”

  Cat almost laughed. It was true; Maybelle had that mothball smell she always associated with old women. But she only said, “Now, Daniel, that isn’t kind.”

  He shrugged.

  “She promised you can feed the llamas.”

  Daniel considered this proposition. He scrunched up his brow in concentration. The ice cream dripped onto the table. The llamas belonged to Maybelle’s husband; he kept three of them on the land behind their house. Daniel liked to point them out whenever they drove past them on their way into town.

  “Will they bite me?” he said. Cat had no idea whether llamas bit or not, but she smiled and said, “Of course not.” And then she wiped up the melted ice cream with a handful of napkins.

  Thursday morning she hugged Daniel longer than usual when she dropped him off at school, holding up the line of cars building up behind her. He wiggled out of her arms.

  “Maybelle’ll be at the usual spot,” she said. “And you can call me if there are any problems. And I’ll drop off your suitcase now so it’ll be waiting for you—”

  He nodded and slunk out of the car. She knew he wasn’t happy about her leaving, and part of her wished she could take him with her—but no, he would have questions, and she was not prepared to give him the answers.

  She drove away from the school, taking deep gulping breaths. She drove to Maybelle’s house and rang the doorbell. Maybelle answered, clapped her hands in delight.

  “I’m just dropping off his things,” Cat said. “Thank you so much.”

  “Oh, honey, it’s no problem. We miss having kids around here.”

  Cat nodded. Maybelle’s house was new and full of light. It looked nothing at all like Cat’s house; in fact, it reminded Cat of the glass house, though at least the walls were solid, and Maybelle favored frilly, old-fashioned furniture that was too heavy for all the open spaces and hidden skylights.

  “You’ll be back on Saturday?” Maybelle asked as she led Cat down the hallway to the guest room where Daniel would be staying. The sheets were already turned down. Cat tossed the suitcase on the bed.

  “Absolutely,” she said. “I’ll call if anything changes. And you have my number—”

  “Of course. Don’t you worry about a thing.” She smiled. Cat knew she was generating in her mind all the reasons why Cat would leave, suddenly, in the middle of the week. Cat also knew better than to give her any hints.

  “Thanks again,” Cat said. She walked out Maybelle’s front door to her car. Her own suitcase lay on the backseat. Sunlight fell in shards through the leaves of the trees in Maybelle’s front yard. Maybelle stood in the doorway, watching her.

  And Cat drove away, her palms sweating, her heart racing.

  * * * *

  Friday afternoon came much more quickly than she expected. She stayed in a cheap motel near the STL offices. Everything about it was faded, as though it had been left in the sun too long. Even the complimentary breakfast looked worn out. Cat ate her beige toast and thin eggs and went up to her room to wait. She kept her computer turned on in case AJ needed to talk to her, but she never heard from him; she never heard from anyone.

  An hour before it was time to go, she pulled out her gray Chanel suit—an artifact of her time with Richard, a luxury she had never brought herself to throw away—and dressed. She put on stockings despite the heat and wound her hair around the top of her head. Applied eyeliner and mascara and lipstick. Then she sat on the edge of the bathtub, sliding her stocking feet nervously against the tile, and sent a spoken message to Daniel’s computer.

  “I hope you’re having fun at Maybelle’s. Don’t spend too much time on the Internet. Say hi to the llamas for me.” Her voice echoed off the bathroom walls, and it sounded much more cheerful than she felt. Cat felt like she was going to throw up. She drove to the offices. She parked her car in the visitors’ garage. She went into the lobby and told the receptionist she was there to meet AJ Aziz.

  “You can go on up,” the receptionist said, her eyes not once moving away from the screen of her computer. An enormous monitor was set into the wall behind her, flashing images of the lunar station. Cat lingered for a moment, half hoping to see Finn. She didn’t.

  The elevator was narrow and modern and made of glass, just like the STL offices. As the atrium fell away below her, Cat clutched her handbag a little too tightly. Air-conditioning blew down the back of her neck. The elevator chimed, stopped. The glass doors slid open. Cat stepped out into the empty hallway. Her tall heels clicked against the tiles. She could hear herself breathing. She was so light-headed she almost didn’t think she would make it to AJ’s office.

  “Dr. Novak?”

  His head appeared in one of the doorways. He held out his hand, and she shook it. “Did you get a chance to talk to your father?” he asked.

  Cat nodded dumbly. Dr. Novak. The sound of it made her heart hurt.

  He jerked his head toward the elevators. “Shall we? The conference room is all set up. Do you mind if I sit in?”

  Cat shook her head, and they walked side by side back to the elevator. He pressed the up button. They didn’t say anything to each other while they waited. Another chime. Up they went, so high Cat thought they might take the elevator to the lunar station itself. But then the doors slid open, and AJ led her through a hall identical to
the one they had left. And then through a pair of swinging doors that opened into a cavernous dark room. A long, low table stretched from one end to the other, and a screen was lowered in the front of the room, the STL logo splashed across it, glowing faintly.

  A half second after they entered, the lights flickered on. “Okay.” AJ gestured toward the table. “You can sit right here. I’ll need to test the camera.”

  Cat walked the length of the room. Her legs shook. She slid down in the chair, set her handbag beside her. Folded her hands on the table. AJ pushed a black camera the size of her fist so that it lined up directly with her face. She didn’t move. He looked at the camera and then at his laptop sitting on the table and then at her. His eyes were the same color as Finn’s. He adjusted the camera’s arm.

  “Perfect,” he said. “I think that’s it.” He nodded to himself. “I’m just going to sit back there. I might type a few notes on the tablet. Is that all right?”

  Cat nodded. She wondered what would happen when he learned that she had no interest in explaining the engineering behind the signal.

  AJ tapped the computer. “We’re dialing up now.” He watched the screen. So did Cat. It went black and then went white and then suddenly she was staring at the face of the woman in the video she had watched that sweltering afternoon in the glass house. Kristine Korchinsky. The woman looked more serious now, her hair pulled back in a severe ponytail, the skin around her eyes pale from a lack of makeup.

  “Is everything working?” she said. The movement of her lips didn’t quite match up to the sound of her voice. Cat could see the white walls of the lunar station gleaming behind her. “I don’t see you—oh, there.” She smiled insincerely. “You’re Cat Novak. AJ said you had some information about that anomaly.”

  Cat nodded. She looked at the camera. “Yes,” she said. “Is there any way I can speak to Finn?”

  “Who?” Dr. Korchinsky frowned. Cat opened her mouth to speak but then Dr. Korchinsky said, “Oh, you mean George, don’t you? He did call himself Finn, before flying out here.”