Factoring Humanity (8 page)

“Oh, sure. Guys from our generation, guys who grew up in the twentieth century. But kids today—they’ve got no culture. No shared background.” He took another sip of beer. “Marshall was wrong, you know.” Marshall McLuhan had been dead for thirty-seven years, but many members of the U of T community still referred to him as “Marshall,” the prof who put U of T on the worldwide map. “He said the new media were remaking the world into a global village. Well, the global village has been balkanized.” Stone looked at Kyle. “Your wife, she teaches Jung, right? So she’s into archetypes and all that shit? Well, nobody shares anything anymore. And without shared culture, civilization is doomed.”

“Maybe,” said Kyle.

“It’s true,” said Stone. He took another sip of beer. “You know what really bugs me, though?”

Kyle lifted his eyebrows again.

“Quincy’s first name. That’s what bugs me.”

“Quincy?”

“You know—from the TV series:
Quincy, M.E.
Remember it? Jack Klugman was in it, after
The Odd Couple.
Played a coroner in L.A.”

“Sure. A&E had it on every bloody day when I was in university.”

“What was Quincy’s first name?”

“He didn’t have one.”

“ ’Course he did. Everybody has one. I’m Stone, you’re Kyle.”

“Actually, Kyle’s my middle name. My first name is Brian—Brian Kyle Graves.”

“No shit? Well, it doesn’t matter. Point is, you
do
have a first name—and so must Quincy.”

“I don’t recall them ever mentioning it in the TV series.”

“Oh, yes they did. Every time someone called him ‘Quince’—that’s not a shortening of his last name. That’s a shortening of his first name.”

“You’re saying his name was Quincy Quincy? What kind of a name is that?”

“A perfectly good one.”

“You’re just guessing.”

“No. No, I can prove it. In the final episode, Quincy gets married. You know what the minister says who’s performing the service? ‘Do you, Quincy, take . . .’ Ain’t no way he’d say that if it wasn’t the guy’s
first
name.”

“Yeah, but who has the same first and last name?”

“You’re not thinking, Kyle. Biggest hit TV series of all time, one of the main characters had the same first and last name.”

“Spock Spock?” said Kyle, deadpan.

“No, no, no.
I Love Lucy.”

“Lucy’s last name was Ricardo.” And then Kyle brightened. “And her maiden name was McGillicuddy.” He folded his arms, quite pleased with himself.

“But what about her husband?”

“Who? Ricky?”

“Ricky Ricardo.”

“That’s not—”

“Oh, yes it is. No way his real first name was Ricky. He was Cuban; his first name had to be Ricardo: Ricardo Ricardo.”

“Oh, come on. Surely, then, ‘Ricky’ was a nickname based on his last name—like calling a guy named John MacTavish ‘Mac.’ ”

“No, it was his first name. Remember, even though they had separate beds, Lucy and Ricky still managed to have a baby They named him after his father—‘Little Ricky,’ they called him. Well, nobody calls a baby ‘Little Mac.’ The father was Ricardo Ricardo, and the kid had to be Ricardo Ricardo, Jr.”

Kyle shook his head. “You think about the damnedest stuff, Stone.”

Stone frowned. “You gotta think about stuff, Kyle. If you don’t keep your mind busy, the shit takes over.”

Kyle was quiet for several seconds. “Yeah,” he said, then signaled the server to bring him another drink.

More time passed; more alcohol was consumed.

“You think
that’s
weird,” Kyle said. “You want to hear weird? I lived in a house with three women—my wife, my two daughters. And you know, they ended up
synchronized.
I tell ya, Stone, that can be brutal. It was like walking on eggshells for a week out of every month.”

Stone laughed. “Must have been rough.”

“It’s strange, though. I mean, how does that happen? It’s like—I dunno—it’s like they communicate somehow, on a higher level, in a way we can’t see.”

“It’s probably pheromones,” said Stone, frowning sagely.

“It’s spooky, whatever it is. Like something right out of
Star Trek.”

“Star Trek,”
said Stone dismissively. He polished off his fourth beer. “Don’t talk to me about
Star Trek!”

“It was better than fucking
Quincy,”
said Kyle.

“ ’Course it was, but it was never consistent. Now, if all the writers had been women and they’d all lived together, maybe everything would have been in sync.”

“What’re you talking about? I’ve got lots of the background stuff—models, blueprints, tech manuals; I was quite a Trekker right up through my university years. I’ve never seen such attempts at making things consistent.”

“Yeah, but they ignored stuff all the time.”

“Like what?”

“Well, let’s see. What’s your single favorite incarnation of
Trek?”

“I dunno. The movie
Wrath of Khan,
I suppose.”

“Good choice. That’s Ricardo Montalban’s real chest, you know.”

“No way,” said Kyle.

“It is, honest. Great pecs for a man his age. Anyway, let’s set aside the obvious stuff—like Khan recognizing Chekov, even though Chekov wasn’t in the TV series at the time that Khan was introduced. No, let’s poke holes in your vaunted tech manuals. On the upper and lower faces of the movie
Enterprise’s
saucer section, there are little yellow patches near the rim. The blueprints say those are attitude-control thrusters. Well, near the end of the film, Shatner orders the ship to drop ‘zee minus ten thousand meters’—God, I hate to hear a good Canadian boy saying ‘zee’ instead of ‘zed.’ Anyway, the ship does just that—but the thrusters never light up.”

“Oh, I’m sure they wouldn’t make a mistake like that,” said Kyle. “They were very careful.”

“Check it yourself. Do you have the chip?”

“Yeah, my daughter Mary gave me a boxed set of the original
Trek
films a few years ago for Christmas.”

“Go ahead, check. You’ll see.”

The next day—Tuesday, August 1, 2017—Kyle called Heather and got her permission to come by the house that night.

When he arrived, Heather let him in. He went straight to the living room and started scanning the bookshelves.

“What on earth are you looking for?” asked Heather.

“My copy of
Star Trek II.”

“Is that the one with the whales?”

“No, that’s
IV—II
is the one with Khan.”

“Oh, yeah.” Heather held her fist in front of her face, as if gripping a communicator, and shouted in her best imitation of William Shatner,
“Khannnnn!”
She pointed. “It’s in the bookcase over there.”

Kyle sprinted across the room and found the DVC he was looking for. “Do you mind?” he said, indicating the TV hanging on the wall. Heather shook her head, and he slipped the chip into the player, then sat down on the couch opposite the screen. He found the remote and jammed his finger against the fast-forward button.

“What are you looking for?” asked Heather.

“This guy I know in Anthropology said there’s a mistake in the film: a shot where some thrusters should be firing but they don’t actually light up.”

Heather smiled indulgently. “Let me get this straight. You bought that bit about the Genesis Wave that can turn a lifeless hunk of rock into a fully formed ecosystem in a matter of hours, but you’re bothered by whether the
thrusters
light up?”

“Shh,”
said Kyle. “We’re almost there.”

The bridge doors hiss open. Chekov walks in, with a bandage on his ear. The crew looks at him precisely the way you should look at someone who recently had an alien parasite crawl out of his head. He takes the weapons station. The pan following Chekov reveals Uhura, Sulu, Saavik, Kirk, and Spock—all wearing those red serge uniforms that make them look like Mounties. Kirk leaves his central chair and moves over to Spock’s station. They’re being pursued through the Mutara nebula by Khan Noonien Singh, who has hijacked a Federation starship.

“He won’t break off now,” says Kirk, looking at the main viewscreen, filled with static caused by the nebula. “He followed me this far. He’ll be back. But from where?”

Spock looks up from his scanner. “He’s intelligent, but not experienced. His pattern indicates two-dimensional thinking.” He raises his upswept eyebrows as he says “two dimensional,” and he and Kirk exchange a meaningful glance, then a tight little grin appears on Kirk’s face. He moves back to his command chair and points at Sulu. “Full stop.”

Sulu touches controls. “Full stop, sir.”

Kirk to Sulu: “Zee minus ten thousand meters.” And to Chekov: “Stand by photon torpedoes.”

And there it was: a shot from directly above, looking down on the
Enterprise.
Kyle had always admired the way the ships in the classic
Star Trek
movies were self-illuminating—a spotlight from the central, raised part of the saucer was lighting up the registration number NCC-1701. Directly beneath the ship was a swirling purple-and-pink maelstrom, part of the Mutara nebula.

For a second, Kyle thought Stone had been wrong—there
were
lights flashing on the edge of the saucer. But they were precisely positioned at the bow and directly to port: running lights. The starboard one wasn’t working, which Kyle thought
was
admirable attention to detail, since that side of the ship had been damaged earlier in battle.

But—damn, Stone was right. The four clusters of ACS thrusters were clearly visible on the upper surface of the saucer section, each one offset forty-five degrees from the center line. And they weren’t firing at all.

If his original set of Pocket Books’
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
blueprints wasn’t worth twelve hundred bucks on the collector’s market, why, he’d demand his money back.

Heather was leaning against the wall, watching Kyle as he watched the movie. She was amused by it all. Her husband, she knew, thought that William Shatner was a marvelous actor—there was something endearing about Kyle’s utter lack of taste. Then again, she thought, he also thinks
I’m
beautiful. One shouldn’t be too quick to elevate another’s standards.

She’d been drinking white wine while Kyle watched the movie through to the end.

“I always liked Khan,” said Heather with a smile, moving now to sit on the couch. “A guy who goes absolutely nuts when his wife dies—just the way it should be.”

Kyle smiled back at her.

He’d lived on his own for a year now, but it was never supposed to be permanent. Just for a few weeks; give them each some space, some time, some privacy.

And then suddenly, Becky, too, had moved out.

And Heather was alone.

And, somehow, there seemed to be less drawing Kyle back—less a sense that the family had to be restored.

The family—it had never even had a name. It wasn’t the Graveses; it wasn’t the Davises. It had just
been.

Heather looked now at Kyle, the wine having warmed her. She did love him. It had never been like that romp with Josh Huneker. With Kyle, it had always been deeper, more important, more satisfying on a dozen different levels. Even if he was, in so many ways, still just a little boy—his fondness for
Star Trek
and a million other things simultaneously amusing her and melting her heart.

She reached out, put her hand on top of his.

And he responded, placing his other hand on top of hers.

He smiled.

She smiled.

And they leaned together in a kiss.

There had been perfunctory kisses over the past year, but this one lingered. Their tongues touched.

The lights had dimmed automatically when the wall TV had been turned on. Kyle and Heather moved even closer together.

It was like old times. They kissed some more, then he nibbled on her earlobe and ran his tongue around the curves of her ear.

And then his hand found her breast, rolling her nipple through the fabric of her shirt between thumb and forefinger.

She felt warm—the wine, the pent-up desire, the summer’s night.

His hand wandered down, flittering across her belly, sliding along her thigh toward her crotch.

Just like it had so many times before.

Suddenly she tensed, the muscles in her thighs bunching.

Kyle lifted his hand. “What’s wrong?”

She looked into his eyes.

If only she could know. If only she could know for sure.

She dropped her gaze.

Kyle sighed. “I guess I should be going,” he said.

Heather closed her eyes and didn’t stop him from leaving.

12

It was one of those moments of hazy semiconsciousness. Heather was dreaming—and
knew
that she was dreaming. And, like a good Jungian, she was trying to interpret the dream as it went along.

There was a cross in the dream. That in itself was unusual; Heather wasn’t given to religious symbolism.

But it wasn’t a wooden cross; rather, it was made of crystal. And it wasn’t a practical rendition—you couldn’t actually crucify a man on it. The arms were much, much thicker than they needed to be, and were rather stubby.

As she watched, the crystal cross began to rotate around its long axis. But as soon as it did so, it became apparent that it wasn’t really a cross. In addition to the protrusion at either side, there were identical protrusions front and back.

Her perspective was moving closer. She could see seams now; the object was made up of eight transparent cubes: a stack of them four high, and then four more arranged around the faces of the third cube from the top. It spun faster and faster, light glinting off its glassy surface.

An unfolded hypercube.

And, as she came even closer, she heard a voice.

Deep, masculine, resonant.

A strong voice.

The voice of God?

No, no—a superior being, but not God.