The Mad Scientist's Daughter (10 page)

  Up on screen, a newscaster interviewed a trio of scientists who had worked on the project. Cat thought she recognized one of them, from her parents' dinner parties. A tall, thin man with a puff of brownish-gray hair. The other two were Chinese, subtitles flashing as they spoke. Cat pulled out her comm slate, set it in her lap under the table, and sent a message to Finn:
Are you watching?

  He responded
yes
. Cat smiled to herself. She had spoken to him a few days ago over video chat, sitting in the empty bathtub with her slate propped on top of her knees so Lucinda couldn't listen in.

  "Your father was contracted by the Chinese government to work on the Martian exploration project," he'd told her. "I helped him."

  "Seriously?" asked Cat. "When?"

  "Your sophomore year of high school, I believe."

  "Wait, that's what you were doing back then? I thought you were just repairing the satellites or something. Why didn't you tell me?"

  "I didn't think you were interested."

  "Oh, come on, Finn! Freaking Mars!" She ran her fingers through her hair. She didn't want the conversation to end. "This drunk aeronautical engineering student told me some company's thinking about building a station on the moon. Like, a dwelling. Where people can live. But he also said the moon smells like cordite and I have no idea how he'd know that, so…" She shrugged.

  "I didn't know that about the moon's scent, but your father mentioned the lunar station two months ago. He may accept a contract offer."

  Cat laughed. "Well, I want you to tell me about it this time, OK? If he does decide to do it?"

  Finn smiled a programmable smile and nodded.

  Cat thought about that smile as she sat in the crowded bar. She folded her hand over the screen of her comm slate. Michael leaned over in his chair and looped his thin arm around her shoulders and squeezed.

  "Who were you talking to?" His still-unlit cigarette bounced across his lower lip.

  "No one," Cat said. "Someone I used to know as a kid." She slipped her comm slate into her purse and then set her purse on her lap. Michael smirked at her. He plucked out his cigarette, then leaned forward and kissed her on the mouth.

  All the sound in the bar seemed muffled, as though they were caught in a snowstorm.

  Michael sat back in his chair. Up on the monitor, the shuttle had just landed. She pulled away from Michael, leaned eagerly across the table. Michael shuffled in his seat beside her.

  The video's color was brighter than Cat expected, brighter and laced through with silver veins of static. Both of the astronauts had cameras mounted into their helmets, and the screen was split, one side for each astronaut. They looked at each other: two mirrored helmets, reflecting the other. And then they looked out onto Mars.
Mars
. It looked like pictures Cat had seen of the Midwestern Desert, only rockier, with a dusty yellow sky, and no sad, decaying farmhouses. Nothing moved. Not in the landscape on screen, not in the bar on Earth. Cat held her breath and thought about Finn: he'd made something, some tiny thing – a chip, a jumble of wires, something – that helped propel that shuttle to another planet. But of course her father had taken the credit. He had to.

  Someone sitting a few tables over from Cat and her friends started clapping, and then suddenly everyone was clapping and cheering and hollering. A couple of Cat's friends, despite all their neo-Beat technophobia, lifted their beer glasses up to the air. Even Michael looked pleased with the human race: a rarity for him, Cat had learned in the short time they'd been together. The cameras panned across the ochre landscape. The astronauts spoke to each other in Mandarin, their voices rippling with static. Cat pulled her slate out and wrote,
Everyone's clapping for you.

  Afterward, Cat and Michael and all the others spilled out of the bar into the cool, balmy night to have a smoke. Michael lit Cat's cigarette for her, leaning across the old wooden picnic table the bar had set up on the patio. He dropped his lighter into his shirt pocket and exhaled smoke up toward the starless, light-polluted sky.

  "So there's another planet we can fuck up," he said.

  Cat didn't say anything. She pulled her slate out of her purse. Finn had messaged her:
Why would they clap for me?
Her cigarette dangled from her lower lip as she tried to come up with a witty response.

  "Or they'll build, like, space highways." Everyone laughed.

  Cat wrote,
Because if it weren't for you, they'd never have gotten there!
Hit send. Slid her slate back into her purse.

  "Don't be a slave to the machines," Michael said.

  "Who's a slave?" Cat pretended to blow smoke into his face. He laughed and wrapped his arms around her and pulled her in close to his chest. Cat nearly dropped her cigarette on him in surprise. He was her first boyfriend since she'd come to college, and he was constantly surprising her with unannounced kisses and touches or unpredictable outbursts of emotion. He was nothing like the boys she'd known in high school – he was smarter, wilier, and Cat could never grasp hold of him, or of what he wanted from her.

  He wasn't like Finn, either.

  "You check that fucking slate more than anyone I know," Michael said, his hand pressing into the curve of Cat's waist. Michael didn't even own a comm slate, just a beat-up disposable phone that he folded up in his wallet.

  "It's because I'm more important than you," Cat said.

  Michael laughed, leaned in, kissed her.

 

Later that night, Cat drove Michael back to his apartment. He was drunk from taking whiskey shots with a group of electrical engineers who'd been slumming it down at the bar, and the entire way home he kept leaning his head on her shoulder, singing old folk songs into her ear, songs about death and loss. His two favorite subjects.

  Cat shook her head so that her hair flew across his face. "Stop," she said. "You're making me depressed."

  Michael leaned away from her, against the passenger side door, and laughed. "I don't fuck much with the future." His voice slurred. "You do it too much. That way lies only sorrow."

  Cat fixed her gaze out the window shield. The lights of the city twinkled and flashed as she drove along the misty freeway.

  "Well?" said Michael. "What do you say to that?"

  "I don't know what you're talking about." She drummed her fingers against the steering wheel. They hadn't dated that long but she already knew he got like this whenever he was drunk.

  "Oh, you know. The Disasters were a warning. We let things get out of hand and everything went to seed but we're up to our old tricks again, like we never learn. We're sticking humans on Mars! That's not going to end well. And all the automatons I've seen around town. It's borderline slavery–"

  "You weren't alive for the Disasters," said Cat. She wanted to change the subject. The topic of automatons was not one she ever wanted to discuss with Michael – and she certainly didn't want to discuss it tonight. "How would you know what it was like before?"

  "Let's not fight," Michael said. "I'm just saying there's beauty in analog, is all. You liked that mixed tape I gave you."

  At this, Cat smiled in spite of herself. The damned mixed tape. Michael had shown up at her apartment, the mixed tape in one hand, a bouquet of sunflowers in the other. He'd wrapped the mixed tape in homemade paper – his trademark, she later learned from Lucinda.
Watch out for the homemade paper
, Lucinda had told her
. It means he's trying to get in your pants
. But she let Cat listen to the tape on her restored tape player anyway.

  "You
did
." Michael laughed, kicked his feet up on the dashboard. "I
knew
it."

  "Oh, shut up."

  Michael laughed again and refolded his legs under the seat. Then he leaned across the car and kissed Cat on the neck. She swatted him away. The car swerved between lanes, but there was no one out on the road. The headlights danced across the mist.

  Michael slid back down in his seat and started singing again, softly, under his breath. Cat drove until they came to the exit. She recognized the song. It had been on the mixed tape he made for her: all ancient music, nothing recorded after the 1940s. Another trademark of his.

  The streetlights blinked red and amber. The sky was violet with light pollution. Cat drove Michael back to his apartment, but it was not Michael she thought about.

 

A few days after the Mars landing, Cat went down to the vice stand where she worked as a vice girl. It was fashionable at the time, if you were pretty enough and didn't actually need a job, to work as a vice girl. (Those girls who did need jobs, who didn't have parents who were engineers or corporate CEOs, tended to work in the university archives.) Cat only worked part time. She told her parents she was a receptionist for the philosophy department.

  The vice stand was a little one-room glass building set into a wide, black parking lot that ran up against the Interstate. The back walls were lined with mirrors and rows of overpriced and overtaxed cigarettes. Cat worked at night, and she started her shift as the sun set: on that particular evening the air was charging up for an early summer storm. The palm trees in the parking lot whipped back and forth in the wind. The sky was a peculiar yellowish-purple, and occasionally the entire world whited out for half a second from the sheet lightning.

  Cat didn't feel particularly safe in her little glass box on the Interstate, sitting perched on a stool in the center of the room, wearing a bright, backless dress and a pair of heels. She was supposed to roll cigarettes as she waited for a customer to pull up in front of the stand – roll cigarettes and wave at the cars driving by. Instead, the storm churning up outside, she surreptitiously checked the weather report on her slate, holding it underneath the table laid out with canisters of tobacco and rolling papers and elaborate, designer cartons. The storm was expected to pass over the city without doing any major damage, and there was no call for a curfew. Yet.

  By the time the rain began to fall, smearing the freeway lights and the neon across the panes of glass, any nervousness and excitement from the storm had faded away. Working in the vice stands was boring. None of Cat's friends who sat scattered across the city in their own glass boxes talked about this boredom. Cat rolled another cigarette and slid it into a slim cardboard carton, watching the pattern of rain slip and slide down the glass. She let one of her shoes drop off her foot. A car, sleek and black and reflecting the vice stand's bright neon lights, pulled up outside. The customer bell chimed.

  Cat jumped up, felt around with her bare foot for her lost shoe. She picked up the umbrella they kept next to the table and popped it open. The doors slid silently open, and a spray of rainwater splashed across her face. She smiled anyway. The car's driver's side window dropped down, and a man with messy hair, wearing an expensive-looking black suit, leaned out and squinted against the rain. An LCD monitor glowed on his dashboard – it was one of those expensive programmable cars. Completely automated.

  "Pack of Lucky Strikes," the man said, handing over his bank card. "How're you doing this evening? Keeping dry? You look cold."

  Cat smiled. It was colder outside than she expected, and the sound of rain beating against the asphalt much louder. The man smiled back. "I hope to hell you have someone waiting at home to warm you up," he said. "It'd be a shame otherwise."

  "I might." Cat laughed the way she'd seen other girls do it, the way that was becoming more and more natural as time went on: she tossed her hair, flashed her teeth, and made certain her eyes lit up all the while. Otherwise, her laughter sounded forced and fake. And fakeness was the sort of thing the vice stands worked to avoid. When Cat was first hired, her manager sat her down at one of the headquarter offices and said, "If people wanted to buy cigarettes from a machine, we'd save a whole lot of the money we lose off human error, and stock these things with robots. So you better act interested in every fucking customer."

  And Cat had blinked and wrung her hands under the table and wondered what she had gotten herself into.

  The man shooed her back toward the stand. Cat tottered inside, oily rainwater splashing up around her ankles. The dress was so thin it felt as though she wasn't wearing anything at all. She plucked a pack of Lucky Strikes off the shelf, ran his card through the computer, and took a deep, preparatory breath before going back out into the rain. The misty wind blowing off the freeway whipped her hair into her face as she handed the cigarettes and the card over to the man.

  "Thanks, darling." The man fell back against his car seat, slapped the carton against his palm a few times, slid two cigarettes out. Handed one to her. "Hope that keeps you warm till you get home," he said.

  "Thanks," said Cat. "I hope I can light it in this weather." She laughed again and pushed her hair out of her face. It was a stupid joke. She tucked the cigarette behind her ear and went back inside. They always gave her free cigarettes. She kept them in a cheap metal cigarette holder, saving them for when she went out to the bars, so she wouldn't have to pay the exorbitant taxes on a new pack.

  So it was a boring job, but it had its perks.

  Around midnight, Michael's rattling Volvo pulled up outside the stand. The rain still fell steadily across the freeway. Cat had rolled so many cigarettes she could no longer feel her fingers. Honestly, she didn't feel like talking to him right now. It was exhausting, being someone's girlfriend. But his car sat idling in the lot, and for that reason alone she picked up the umbrella and went out into the storm.

  "Working hard?" Michael leaned out into the shimmering neon haze. The lights from the stand smoothed out the gaunt features of his face. He almost looked like Finn, pale and dark-eyed. Cat ruffled his hair.