The Mad Scientist's Daughter (31 page)

  "Shut off." Cat remembered how he looked the first time she kissed him, crumpled up and empty.

  "Yeah, shut off. I didn't understand what I was looking at it. Something like Finn – even now it feels like magic, sometimes. Like something that shouldn't exist. I thought it – he – was some sort of model. I had no idea what she was up to. But then John went over and reached behind Finn's neck and his eyes opened. God, I'll never forget that. Those eyes lighting up. He looked
right at me
." Cat's father bit his lower lip, and Cat had the sudden sense that he wasn't speaking to her anymore.

  She wondered when he had last told this story. If he'd ever told it at all.

  "He sat up and looked around the room. Looked at John. Greeted him, you know how he is.
Hello, Dr Ramirez
. But then–" His voice trembled. "Then he asked how he'd gotten there. He didn't… didn't seem to understand that he'd been switched off. And it bothered me. It bothered me that you could act upon him and him not realize it." He took a deep breath. "God, I hadn't thought about that in so long…" He closed his eyes. "Shit."

  "Daddy?" Cat put her hand on his forearm. He opened his eyes and looked at her like he was surprised to find her sitting there. She asked him if he was all right.

  "I'm sorry, sweetheart," he said. "It was a strange experience."

  "If you don't want to talk about it…" But she wanted him to keep going. She wanted to know everything.

  "There's not much else to tell. Not much else that's important." His eyes flicked away from hers: that tick. He was lying. She didn't push it. He looked too frail in the sallow laboratory lights. "John led him out to the car. Told him 'Mother' was sick and he was going to stay with Dr Ramirez. I realized later he was talking about Judith, but – well, it's not important." He shook his head. "I knew John didn't want to keep him, though. We drove straight on into Texas. John probably shouldn't have been driving but I had to examine him. Talk to him. Learn how he worked."

  "Is this when you brought him home with you?" Cat asked. This part of the story, bringing Finn back to Texas, was as gauzy as lace. But her heart still hammered in her chest because Finn's world had opened up for her a fraction wider.
Judith Condon
. She had a name. Her father shook his head.

  "No, that was a few months later. John told me he couldn't… he couldn't see past all the circuits he'd built. He was afraid he'd get cruel." Cat's father shrugged. "I couldn't imagine it. He was a wonderful father. But I accepted, of course. To be honest, it was too good of an opportunity – scientifically speaking – for me to pass up. Plus, I'd enjoyed speaking with him when we drove back to Texas."

  Cat's father leaned back in his chair. Cat considered asking him if Judith Condon was still alive but she decided against it: he was lying; he always lied to protect her. There was something comforting about it, his lies of omission, and she knew she could learn more on her own.

  When her father stood up, he trembled. Cat leapt up and put her hand on his back. He swatted her away. "I'm fine," he said. "I need to get back to work."

  "Thanks for telling me all that."

  He smiled. "I should have told you sooner. Your mother – she didn't approve."

  "Of Finn? No shit."

  "Well, of the particular combination of you and Finn. Finn by himself, I think she could have managed." He laughed, then took Cat by the chin and looked her in the eye. "It bothered me, when you were younger. Because you were younger. But now–" He stopped. "I could have handled things better. I just wanted… I just wanted you to be happy. Both of you."

  Cat hugged him. Now she had a purpose, a goal: she would find Judith Condon and through her she would find Finn, the part of Finn she had heretofore been much too selfish to even know existed.

 
 

 
 
 

The next afternoon when her father was in the lab, working and wasting away, she went into the dining room and sat down at the computer set into the otherwise unused table. The room was full of dust and sunlight. She brought up the list of all the networked computers in the house and stared at it for a long time, her fingers tapping the table.

  Which computer held the information she wanted? Not the antiquated learning slabs tucked away in boxes in the hall closet, not the cheap laptop where her mother had filed all her recipes. One of the laboratory computers. Maybe the one Finn had kept in his room. Cat scrolled through the list until she found the lab computers, until she found one labeled with nothing but a string of numbers. Finn wouldn't have bothered giving his computer a name.

  She tapped the icon. It was Finn's computer: here was a robotic diagnostic program, here was the video chat program he had used when she went away to college. A folder of unfinished code she only half-understood. A collection of images saved from the Internet: ballet dancers and Barnett Newman paintings, photographs of the city skyline lit up at night, a shot of the band that had played at the Stella rent party, so long ago it may as well have been another lifetime, when Cat made the decision to marry Richard.

  She flicked through the images, each one adding to the others to form a picture of Finn. It was a picture she didn't quite understand.

  Cat closed Finn's computer and began searching methodically through the lab computers. Files for her father's space-exploration contract work. She went back further. Notes on Earth-bound robots – the files used the old word,
automata
. Cat frowned, furrowed her brow. She went back even further, from computer to computer, tracking in reverse the trajectory of her father's career.

  And then she found it. A directory of files labeled "Finn."

  Cat's breath caught. She touched her belly without realizing it and watched the file list load on the dim old monitor. Everything about him in one place.

  She tapped on a file labeled "Schematics," and an entire universe blossomed onto the screen. She leaned closer. The text, amber on black, blurred together. She only understood bits and pieces, left over from her high school engineering classes. She knew enough to know: this was him. This was every part of him, translated, laid out in front of her.

  
I am a machine.

  Cat closed the file. Her hands trembled. She walked over to the window and pulled aside the curtain, the fabric worn thin from moths and sunlight and time. The window looked out into the backyard, out at the tree line of the forest.

  "All right, baby," Cat said. "Do you think I'm doing the right thing?"

  She waited. Movement fluttered through her womb, like butterfly wings dusting across the back of her hand.

  "I'll take that as a yes." She remembered how she used to eavesdrop on her father's video conferences so she could learn bits and pieces of Finn's specifications – the size of his memory processors, the speed of his electronic brain. Scraps of mostly meaningless information that she knitted together and memorized. Now she wanted to cry. Here was an entire directory of files, stored on a computer in the house, not even hidden behind a password, and she hadn't bothered in all this time even to glance at them.

  Cat sat back down at the computer. Schematics was still highlighted. She scrolled down, looking for something she could understand.

  There. "Contact." Cat touched the link.

  The folder was mostly empty. The files were labeled with dates. The first brought up some saved email files, exchanges between her father and Dr Condon.
I need some of that famed Novak genius
, Daniel, Dr Condon wrote.
You didn't win that grant for nothing, did you?

  There were no details. Dr Condon never mentioned the specifics of her project: Only that there was a project, that she had relocated to the desert.

  
I've brought in some artists to do shell work. They love the light out here. They won't stop raving about it. I dunno, I just like the isolation. I need it. Just like I need the artists even though they're pissing me off.

  Cat went to the next file. It was electronic copy of an old magazine article, dated toward the end of the worst of the Disasters.
Dr Judith Condon
, read the article title.
Forerunner in the Automata Revolution.

  There was a black-and-white picture, the lines blurred, the capture grainy. Dr Condon looked young, not much older than Cat, and intense, the dark smudge of her eyes staring straight into the camera, her hair swept away from her face, her mouth unsmiling.

  Cat stared at the picture and something sparked inside her, electricity rushing from one circuit board chip to another, forming a half-second of connection. Here was the woman who made him. Here was the woman who cast him out.

  
Just like I did
. Cat closed the article, wiping the monitor clear.

  One more file. Another set of email exchanges, this time between Cat's father and Dr Ramirez. Cat read through them all, trying to jostle Dr Condon's dark staring eyes out of her memory. Friendly banter, most of them, how-areyous, invitations to dinner. She read for a long time. And then she found something.

  Over twenty-five years ago, Dr Ramirez had sent an email to Cat's father in which he listed the address of Dr Condon's desert laboratory.

  
Per our conversation
, he wrote, as though discussing a business proposition,
Here's the address in case I can't meet you.

  Cat hit print screen. Then she collected the email from the rickety old printer set into the telephone alcove, folded the printout into fourths, and slid it into her pillowcase like a love letter.

 

After Cat found the address, she set about making clandestine preparations to travel into Kansas. Drought had transformed the Midwest into a desert long before Cat was born, and then human innovation had transformed that desert into a source of energy for not just the country but the entire continent. Windmills grew instead of corn. It was not a place people lived. Nor a place they visited – Cat learned she would have to apply for a travel permit if she wanted to go further than the city on the desert's edge.

  It could take months to get approval.

  Still, Cat filled out the form on the website in a flush of excitement. A screen came up after she submitted it, telling her the expected date of her permit's approval; she would be nearly seven months pregnant then. She should still be able to travel.

  After that, she could only wait. She went about her days as best she could, preparing for the baby, cooking meals for herself and her father, working in the garden. She felt the itch to weave again, and so she contacted some of her old clients, one of whom was delighted to commission a new piece from her. She borrowed her father's car and drove into the city for her supplies and began the tapestry that evening. It was an accounting firm, and they gave her free rein to create what she wanted: so she wove the night sky, constellations of stars glittering against an indigo background, the moon stitched in bone-colored silk.

  Because it was coming into winter and the days had cooled to a bearable temperature, she wove in the mornings and relegated her garden work to the afternoon, when weak sunlight slanted through the tree branches. The air was tinged with the cold-weather scent of metal, and Cat scooped up the soil, hard and cold in her fingers, digging up the virulent honeysuckle vines that had grown over the fence. Her fingers turned red but she was warm enough from working that she didn't notice.

  When she finished clearing away the honeysuckle she carried the vines in armfuls to the compost pile set up next to the old air-conditioning unit. She walked back to the garden, which rustled forlornly, and shoved her dirty hands in her pockets. She tried to imagine how it would look when her baby was born: heavy with flowers and greenery, indolent with extra oxygen. Maybe she would plant some vegetables.

  Tires crunched along the driveway. Her father was down in the lab, too involved in his work to leave the house. She walked onto the porch and followed it around the house's perimeter. When she came to the front, her heart stopped.

  Richard's car.

  She recognized it immediately, sleek and dark as a beetle. He sat in the front seat, staring at the porch. He saw her. Cat's entire body prickled with sweat. Out there on the porch, it was as though she were back in the glass house and everything she did was on display.

  The driver's side door swung open, and he stepped out. His hair was longer than she remembered, and he wore a thin black coat that flapped around his knees as he trudged through the yard. He held something in his right hand. A slim, dark brown comm slate, the sort lawyers used.

  "Caterina," he said. "I need to talk to you."

  "No," she whispered. Her hand dropped down to her stomach. She was showing a little, probably not enough for him to realize she was pregnant. She snatched her hand away.
Don't draw attention to it.

  He clomped up the steps to the porch. "Damn, it's cold out here."

  "What do you want?"

  "Don't be like that." He looked her up and down. She curled her hands into fists.

  "You look radiant," he said.

  She didn't respond.

  "Can we go inside?"

  "Why are you here?"

  Richard looked down at the tablet like he couldn't imagine how it had found its way into his hands. He sighed. "You need to sign this. Slap your thumbprint on there. It's not the final papers, so…." His voice trailed off. "Seriously, I'm freezing my ass off. Can we go inside?"

  Of course. The papers. The lawyers still called them that even though nothing was on paper anymore. Vaguely Cat recalled the last conversation she'd had with the lawyer. She always lost track of everything he said, but he had mentioned needing her signature, her thumbprint. Cat sighed, ran her hands through her hair. Cold dirt clung to her scalp.