Factoring Humanity

  “Of course we could; Cheetah uses several speech-processing routines that aren’t based on any human models but rather are simple brute-force engineering solutions.”

  “Oh, sure, if there’s some minor variation that makes no gross difference, meaning can still be conveyed. But on a subtle level, you and I both agree, even if Cheetah might not, that ‘big yellow ball’ is a proper construction, while ‘yellow big ball’ is, if not out-and-out improper, certainly not normal—and yet neither of us were ever taught in school that size is more important than color. We—all people speaking the same language—agree on very minute points of syntax and structure, without ever having been taught those things. And Chomsky says that every one of the five thousand different languages currently spoken, plus all the languages that existed in the past, follow essentially the same rules. He’s probably right—we do acquire and use language with extraordinary ease, so much so that it must be innate. But it can’t be genetically innate—as Lieberman points out, that would violate basic biology, which allows for, and indeed is driven evolutionarily by, the concept of individual variation. Besides, the Human Genome Project failed to find any gene or combination of genes that coded for Chomsky’s supposed language organ. Which begs the question: if it’s innate, and it’s not genetic, where does it come from?”

  “And you think it’s from your proposed overmind?”

  Heather spread her arms. “It makes sense, doesn’t it? And it’s not just language that seems to be hardwired. Symbols are shared, too, across individuals and across cultures. It’s what Jung called ‘the collective unconscious.’ ”

  “Surely Jung meant that as a metaphor.”

  Heather nodded. “At the outset, yes. But it does seem that we do share a rich background of symbols and ideas. You know Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces? I use it in one of my courses. Mythologies are the same even across cultures that have been isolated from one another. How do you explain that? Coincidence? If not coincidence, then what?”

  “The overmind again, you think. But, geez, that’s such a big leap.”

  “Is it? Is it really? Occam’s razor says you should prefer the solution that has the fewest elements. Positing one thing—the overmind—solves all sorts of problems in linguistics, comparative mythology, psychology, and even parapsychology. It is a simple solution, and—”

  The clock on the mantle made its quarter-hour chime.

  “Oh!” said Heather. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to go on so long, and— Damn, look there’s no time to explain it all now. We’ve got a visitor coming.”

  “Who?”

  “Becky.”

  Kyle visibly stiffened. “I’m not sure I want to see her.” He paused. “Damn it, why didn’t you tell me she was coming?”

  Heather spread her arms. “Because I wanted to be sure you would come over. Look, it’s going to be okay and—”

  The sound of the door bolt disengaging; Becky was operating the lock herself, instead of ringing the bell.

  The front door swung open. Becky stood in the entryway, stark against the darkness.

  Kyle, now standing by the living-room window, held his breath.

  Becky came up into the living room. She was quiet for a moment. Through the open window, Kyle could hear a skimmer whizzing by and the sound of a group of boys yakking away as they walked down the sidewalk.

  “Dad,” Becky said.

  It was the first time in over a year that Kyle had heard that word from her. He didn’t know what to do. He stood frozen.

  “Dad,” she said again. “I am so sorry.”

  Kyle’s heart was pounding. “I would never hurt you,” he said.

  “I know that,” said Becky. She closed some of the distance between them. “I’m so very sorry, Dad. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  Kyle didn’t trust his voice. There was still so much anger and resentment in him.

  “What changed your mind?” he asked.

  Becky looked at her mother, then down at the ground. “I—I realized you couldn’t possibly do anything like that.”

  “You were sure enough before.” The words, harsh, were out before Kyle could stop himself.

  Becky nodded slightly “I know. I know. But . . . but I’ve looked into what my therapist did, at the techniques she used. I . . . I never knew memories could be manufactured.” She briefly met her father’s gaze, then looked back at the carpet.

  “That bitch,” said Kyle. “The trouble she’s caused.”

  Becky looked at her mother again; something was passing between the two of them, but Kyle couldn’t tell what.

  “Let’s not worry about her now,” said Becky. “Please. The important thing is that this is over . . . or at least it is if you’ll forgive me.”

  She looked up at her father again, with her large brown eyes. Kyle knew that his face was impassive; he didn’t know how to react. He’d been torn apart, reviled, shunned—and now it was all supposed to be over, just like that?

  Surely there should be more than just an apology. Surely the wounds would take years—decades—to heal.

  And yet—

  And yet, more than anything, he’d wanted this. He hadn’t prayed, of course, but if there had been one thing that he would have prayed for, it would have been for his daughter to realize her mistake.

  “You’re sure now?” said Kyle. “You won’t change your mind again. I couldn’t take it if—”

  “I won’t, Daddy I promise.”

  Was it really over? Had the nightmare really come to an end? How many nights he’d wished the clock could be turned back—and now she was apparently offering, in essence, just that.

  He thought about poor Stone, standing outside his office, meeting with female students in hallways.

  Becky stood still for a while longer, then took a small step closer. Kyle hesitated a moment more, then opened his arms, and Becky stepped into them. Suddenly she collapsed against his shoulder, crying.

  “I am so very sorry,” she said between sobs.

  Kyle couldn’t find any words; the anger couldn’t be turned off like a switch.

  He held her for a long time. He hadn’t hugged her—God, maybe not since her sixteenth birthday. His shoulder was wet; Becky’s tears had soaked through his shirt. He hesitated for a moment—damn it all, but he would probably hesitate for the rest of his life—then brought his hand up to stroke her shoulder-length black hair.

  They were quiet for a long time. Finally, Becky pulled away a little bit and looked up at her father. “I love you,” she said, wiping her eyes.

  Kyle didn’t know how he felt, but he said the words anyway: “I love you too, Becky.”

  She shook her head a little.

  Kyle hesitated for another moment, then gently lifted her chin with his finger. “What?”

  “Not ‘Becky,’ ” said his daughter. She managed a red-eyed smile. “Pumpkin.”

  Tears escaped from Kyle’s eyes now. He swept his daughter back up in his arms, and this time he meant every syllable: “I love you, too—Pumpkin.”

  33

  Becky stayed for a joyous two hours, but at last she had to leave. She lived downtown and had to be up early to open the store Wednesday morning.

  When she was gone, Kyle sat back down on the couch.

  Heather looked at him for a long time.

  He was such a complicated man—more complicated than she’d ever known. And he was, when all was said and done, a basically good man.

  But not a perfect one, of course. Indeed, Heather had been shocked and disappointed by some of what she’d discovered while plumbing his memories. He had his dark side, his shoddy parts; he could be petty and selfish and unpleasant.

  No, there was no such thing as the perfect man—but then, she’d known that even before she’d left Vegreville to come to Toronto. Kyle was both deeply great and deeply flawed—peaks and valleys, more and less than she’d ever thought he was.

  But, she realized, whatever he was now, she could accep
t it; the fit between them wasn’t ideal, and probably never would be. But she knew in her heart that it was better than it could be with anyone else. And perhaps acknowledging that was as good a definition of love as any.

  Heather crossed the room and stood over him. He looked up at her with brown puppy-dog eye’s, like Becky’s.

  She reached out a hand. He took it. And she led him across the room, to the stairs, and up to the bedroom.

  It had been a year since they’d last made love.

  But it was worth waiting for.

  She didn’t tense at all.

  When they were done, when they lay holding each other, Heather spoke the only words to pass between them that night after Becky’s departure. “Welcome home.”

  They fell asleep in each other’s arms.

  The next morning: Wednesday, August 16.

  As she reached the bottom of the staircase, Heather looked over at Kyle. He seemed to be staring into space, his gaze resting on a blank spot on the wall between a Robert Bateman painting of bighorn sheep and an Ansel Adams photoprint of the Arizona desert.

  Heather moved into the room. On an adjacent wall was their wedding photo, now almost a quarter-century old. She could see the toll all of this had taken on her husband. Until recently his hair had been much the same dark brown it had been on the day they’d married, with only tiny incursions of gray and his high forehead had been relatively line-free. But now—now there were permanent creases in his brow, and his rusty beard and dark hair were streaked through with silver.

  He seemed physically diminished, too. Oh, doubtless he was still a hundred and seventy-seven centimeters, but he sat on the couch hunched over, collapsed in on himself. And there was the paunch—he’d fought so hard to lose it after his heart attack. True, it wasn’t back to its former proportions, but Heather could clearly see that he’d let himself go. She’d hoped that now that Kyle had made his peace with Becky, that he’d snap out of his malaise, but despite the joys of last night, it seemed that he hadn’t.

  Heather continued into the room. Kyle looked briefly up at her; his face was angry.

  “We’ve got to stop her,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “The therapist.”

  “Gurdjieff,” said Heather.

  “Yes. We’ve got to stop her.” Kyle looked at Heather. “She could do the same thing to somebody else—ruin another family.”

  Heather sat down next to him on the couch. “What do you suggest?”

  “Get her disbarred—or whatever the psychiatric equivalent is.”

  “Get her license revoked, you mean. But she’s not a psychiatrist, or a psychologist. She didn’t even call herself a therapist anywhere that I could see when I visited her; that was Becky’s word. She called herself a ‘counselor,’ and, well, you don’t have to be licensed to be a counselor in Ontario.”

  “Then we should sue her. Sue her for malpractice. We’ve got to make sure she never attempts to treat anyone again.”

  Heather didn’t know what to say. She’d been trying to come to grips with the ramifications of her discovery; surely once she went public, once the whole human race had access to psychospace, surely there would be no way a fraud like Gurdjieff could continue to have any influence—surely the problem would take care of itself.

  “I understand what you’re saying,” said Heather, “but really, can’t we let it be over?”

  “It’s not over,” said Kyle.

  Heather made her tone soft. “But Becky has for—”

  She stopped herself. She’d almost said “has forgiven you,” as if there were anything to forgive. Maybe Kyle was right—maybe the stigma never does go away. Of all people, Heather should be convinced beyond any doubt of Kyle’s innocence, and yet, without thinking, for the briefest moment, her unconscious had started a sentence that suggested something had happened.

  Kyle let air out.

  “I mean, she understands now that nothing happened,” said Heather, trying to extract the verbal knife. “She knows you never hurt her.”

  Kyle was silent for a long time. Heather watched his rounded shoulders rise and fall with each breath he took.

  “It’s not Becky,” said Kyle at last.

  Heather felt her heart sink. She’d done more than he could possibly know to help him—but perhaps in the end it had not been enough. She knew that many marriages crumbled after a crisis was over.

  She opened her mouth to say, “I’m sorry” but Kyle spoke before her words were free. “It’s not Becky,” he said again. “It’s Mary.”

  Heather felt her eyes go wide. “Mary?” she repeated. She so rarely spoke the name aloud, it sounded almost foreign to her. “What about her?”

  “She thinks I hurt her.” Present tense; the inability to accept what had happened.

  Heather fell back on what she’d originally intended to say. “I’m sorry.”

  “She’ll never know the truth,” said Kyle.

  To her surprise, Heather found herself waxing religious. “She knows,” she said.

  Kyle grunted and dropped his gaze to the hardwood floor. They were both silent for half a minute. “I know I didn’t do anything,” said Kyle, “but . . .” He trailed off. Heather looked at him expectantly. “But,” he continued, “she thinks I did. She went to her grave”—he paused, either choking on the word, or just reflecting for a moment on its relation to his own last name—“thinking her father was a monster.” He lifted his head, looked at Heather. His eyes were moist.

  Heather leaned back into the couch, her mind racing. It was supposed to be over, dammit. It was all supposed to be over now.

  She looked up at the ceiling. The walls were beige, but the ceiling was pure white plaster with a roughened texture. Little points, projecting through.

  “There may be a way,” she said at last, closing her eyes.

  Kyle was quiet for a moment. “What?” he said, as if he hadn’t heard clearly.

  Heather breathed out. She opened her eyes and looked at him. “There may be a way,” she said. “A way for you to—well, not talk to Mary of course. But still, perhaps a way for you to make your peace with her.” She paused. “And a way for you to understand why we don’t have to do anything about Gurdjieff.”

  Kyle narrowed his eyes, baffled. “What?” he said again.

  Heather looked away trying to think of how to explain it all.

  “I was going to tell you soon,” she said, needing to build her defense from the outset. “Really, I was.”

  But that wasn’t true—or at least, it wasn’t certain. She’d been wrestling with it for days now, unsure of how—or if—to proceed. Yes, she’d told Becky, but she’d also sworn Becky to secrecy. She wasn’t proud of the way she’d been acting; yes, there was great science at stake; yes, there were fundamental truths to be shared. But, well, it was so much—how was one supposed to react? How did one deal with a discovery of this magnitude?

  Heather turned back to face Kyle. He was still looking at her quizzically

  “I figured out what the alien messages are all about,” she said softly.

  His eyes widened.

  Heather raised a hand. “Not everything, you understand—but enough.”

  “Enough for what?”

  “To build the machine.”

  “What machine?”

  She opened her mouth slightly, then exhaled, feeling her cheeks puff out as she did so. “A machine to access . . . the overmind.”

  Kyle tilted his head, stunned.

  “The aliens—that was what they were trying to tell us. Individuality is an illusion; we’re all part of a greater whole.”

  “Theoretically,” said Kyle tentatively.

  “No. No. In reality It’s true—all the theories we talked about yesterday are true. I know—know it for a fact. The messages, they were a kind of blueprint for a four-dimensional device that . . .”

  “That what?”

  Heather closed her eyes again. “That lets an individual plug into the
human collective unconscious—into the actual, literal shared mind of humanity.”

  Kyle slid his lower lip behind his upper teeth, but said nothing for several seconds. Then: “How could you build such a thing?”

  “I couldn’t of course—not personally But a friend in Mechanical Engineering helped.”

  “And it works?”

  Heather nodded. “It works.”

  Kyle was quiet for a moment. “And you—you’ve what? Connected to the overmind?”

  “More than that. I’ve sailed it.”

  “ ‘Sailed,’ ” said Kyle, as though he couldn’t understand the word in this context.

  Heather nodded again.

  Kyle was quiet for another moment. Then: “This has been a difficult time for all of us,” he said. “I hadn’t—I’m sorry honey—I hadn’t realized what a toll it had taken on you.”

  Heather smiled despite herself. Like father, like daughter. “You don’t believe me.”

  “I—well, I . . .”

  Heather’s smile faded. She kicked herself for not thinking to bring home the videotape of the tesseract folding up. “I’ll show you. I’ll show you today. The equipment is in my office at the university.”

  “Who else knows about this?”

  “No one but me and Becky.”

  Kyle still looked unconvinced.

  “I know I should have told you before. I was going to; I really think I was going to last night. But—but it’s like nothing you can imagine. It’ll change everything, this technology. Personal privacy ceases to exist.”

  “What?”

  “I can access anyone—find their memories, their personality, the archives of what they are. I . . .”