The Mad Scientist's Daughter (32 page)

  "Why didn't you just send it?" she said.

  Richard stared at her. "I wanted to see you. I miss you. Cat–"

  She pushed the front door open so roughly it slammed against the doorstop and bounced back, almost clicking shut again. She caught it with the tip of her toe. "Come in." She looked over her shoulder at him. "You're not staying."

  Richard frowned. The lines in his brow were deeper than she remembered, his eyes paler. She remembered how she used to care for him, how she used to find those transparent eyes compelling. His normalcy had been so appealing: he had been an antidote to Finn, one that failed utterly. Thinking on it made her stomach ache.

  She led him into the dining room. Her father was still in the basement. No need to let him know what was happening. Richard sat down but Cat stayed standing. For a moment he stared at her. She crossed her arms in front of her chest, trying to ward him off.

  "Caterina," he said. "I'm sorry. You have to know that. I didn't mean–"

  "Let's get this over with."

  Richard sighed and handed her the slate. Cat sat down at the table, two seats away from him, and turned it on, blinking at the flash of light from the screen. For a moment she pretended to read over the block of words she was too tired to understand. Then she plucked the stylus off the side of the tablet and carved her name into the electronic signature line. The screen went gray, and Cat saw the ghost of her signature.
Caterina Novak.

  "We don't have to do this," Richard said.

  The screen brightened. It wanted her thumbprint. Cat pressed her right thumb against the glass.

  "You hit me." She handed him the tablet and stood up. "What else is there after that?"

  He stared at her.

  "Please leave."

  "I drove all the way out here–"

  "When you could have just sent it. Don't try to guilt me into letting you stay."

  He shook his head. His eyes had iced over. "You were fucking that robot, weren't you?" he said. "That's why you donated all that money to ADL. It wasn't because you actually cared."

  The room suddenly seemed too small and devoid of air. Of course he'd always known, but hearing him say it out loud, Cat was struck with a flare of anxiety in the center of her chest. She could never be normal because she
wasn't
normal. She had kept Finn secret for so long because of that deviancy. Now she was pregnant. It wouldn't only affect her anymore.

  Cat willed herself to keep her expression blank and dispassionate.

  "I'll take that as a yes. I can't believe this." Richard looked her right in the eye. She held his gaze. "It's sick."

  "What? Donating to ADL?"

  "You know what I'm talking about."

  "You hit me. I don't think you have the right to pass judgment on anyone."

  Richard slid his chair away from the table and stood up. He tucked the tablet under his arm. Cat ran her hand, unthinking, across her stomach and then dropped it to her side. He didn't seem to notice.

  "I came here," he said, "to apologize for that."

  "Fine," said Cat. "Accepted. Now get out."

  Richard's hands curled into fists, and the room jolted. Cat took two steps back. Her fingers went to the spot beneath her right eye that had hurt the most in those weeks that followed. But then Richard let out a muffled grunt and stalked out of the dining room. Cat followed him, keeping her distance. He stopped in the foyer and turned around.

  "Why aren't you keeping anything?" he said.

  "What?"

  "You're so weird," he said. "You don't even want my money, at least?"

  "You
hit
me."

  Richard seemed to recoil, as though a moth had fluttered against the tips of his eyelashes. Then he said, "Ella warned me. She didn't get why I'd marry someone like you. I should have listened to her."

  "You think
I'm
weird because I don't want your money and your horrible fucking house?" Cat laughed. "What, am I supposed to do that? Because I'm a woman? Because you're rich?" Her laughter tinged on hysteria. She was so relieved the conversation had turned to money, to material possession, instead of the fact that she was an ice queen who could only be with a robot. Richard glared at her. He pulled against the door, and a rush of cold air filled the foyer. Cat couldn't stop laughing.

  "You're planning something," he said. "You and that lawyer of yours."

  "I don't want your money, Richard." Tears formed in the corners of her eyes. She hoped he wouldn't notice. "I know that's a difficult concept for you to grasp, but there it is."

  "Bitch."

  He said it almost tenderly, and then he turned away from her, stepped through the door and out to the porch, out to his car, away.

  Cat pushed the door shut and leaned against the cold wall and listened to the sound of his car engine starting up and disappearing down the driveway. When she heard only silence she looked at her hands. Dirt stained the crescents of her nails.

  Ella was right. He should never have married someone like her. She used to think that he was using her in their marriage – as a decoration on his arm, as a test subject for his AI – but she understood now that she had used him, that he had loved her and she never once reciprocated despite claiming otherwise, over and over again. When he gave her the ring that day of the freeze, her thoughts had been with Finn. She should have said no.

  Cat stared through the window at the void where his car had been. She felt as though Richard had pricked her and all her energy had flooded out.

  She left the living room and sat down at the dining room computer, where she pulled up the directory with Finn's information. She opened the schematics file. The schematics reminded her of threads on a loom. She ran her finger across the monitor, tracing the path of one electronic neuron to another. She wished more than anything that she could decipher them completely, that she could understand Finn through the logic of engineering, if nothing else.

  "Cat?"

  Cat jumped and switched off the monitor.

  "What were you looking at?" her father asked.

  "Nothing."

  Her father pulled up a chair beside her and turned the monitor back on. Finn's schematics flared into place.

  "Oh, Cat," he said.

  "There wasn't a password or anything."

  "I know. It isn't that…" Her father rubbed his forehead. His fingers looked like sticks. "I thought I heard talking. Is everything OK?"

  "Yes," said Cat. "Richard came by–"

  "What? He didn't hurt you, did he?"

  "No. He just brought the papers. Or one set of them, anyway. The last set before everything's finalized." She spoke in the direction of the schematics. "It doesn't matter. I'm an adult, I can take care of myself." She turned off the monitor.

  "I know that."

  They sat in silence. Her father ran one hand over his thin hair. Scratched at his arm. Their reflections moved in the darkened screen.

  "This is my fault," he said.

  "I should never have married him."

  Her father shook his head and kept his gaze focused on a spot on the floor, halfway between them. "I'm not talking about Richard." He bit his bottom lip. He still did not look at her. "I know why Finn left."

  Cat's mouth went dry.

  "I did something to him." He took a deep breath. "Do you remember when you were a little girl and you made that scarf for him?"

  She nodded.

  "He kept it, you know. All these years. Strange, huh? Do you remember what I told you, when you came looking for him so you could give it to him?"

  "I don't understand what you're getting at."

  "I told you he was just a program. That he couldn't feel anything."

  "Yes." Cat's heart clenched up.

  "I lied." He laughed, shook his head. "Sort of. He could feel things. I just think he – it – was different. His ability to feel things was… repressed. A protocol that was meant to make him obedient. Like a perfect child. Certain intense emotions were overridden. And so I wanted to…" He stopped and closed his eyes. Leaned back in the chair.

  Cat felt cold. A weight settled at the bottom of her stomach.

  "I wrote a program," her father said, "that erased all that. His programming, his circuitry, it's all extremely complicated. Baroque, really. I figured out a way to hack past some of it, get a few synapses firing that hadn't been firing before. So to speak. Anyway, I'd been working on it for a few years, you know, in my spare time, but after your wedding–"

  "My wedding? What does my wedding…" But she knew.

  Her father looked up at her. "I saw you dancing with him," he said. "I realized it wasn't fair. It wasn't fair to you, and it wasn't fair to him."

  "I don't understand." She clenched her hands around the hem of her skirt, her nails cutting into the skin of her hand.

  "You love him," said her father.

  Love was a word Cat had heard so many times that it no longer held any meaning. Boyfriends had told her they loved her and she had said it back and it was like any number of words. It was like
hello
or
I'm fine
. But here, as she sat on an uncomfortable wooden chair in her father's dining room, the cold northern wind slapping against the glass in the windows, the word
love
sounded like a revelation.

  "No," she said.
Liar.

  "Oh, Cat. I saw the way you looked when the two of you danced. It damn near broke my heart, knowing you couldn't marry him." He leaned forward in his chair. "It's OK," he said, his eyes bright and sincere. "It's OK to love him."

  She couldn't breathe. She thought about Finn staring at her, saying to her,
You're married
. His expression had been cold and she hadn't allowed herself to see it at the time. And when he came to her before he went away to Florida, there had been a change in him, like something inside him had switched on or off. The transformation in how he spoke her name, his sudden sharp movements, the way he wouldn't look her in the eye. She had refused to acknowledge what she saw. All this time, she had blocked it away, this one simple fact:

  Richard wasn't the only man she had used in her life.

  "The program worked," she said flatly.

  "Yes." Her father looked away from her. "He was… upset. Afterward. He went out to the woods and didn't come back for a long time. I actually went out to try and find him. I thought… I don't know. I don't know what I thought. There aren't a lot of precedents for something like this."

  "No," said Cat. "I can't imagine that there are." Her entire body was numb. Her father had given Finn a gift, and she had ruined it by treating him like a machine. She had beaten up Erik Martin in the courtyard of her high school for less than what she did herself.

  "Cat," said her father. She looked at him. He smiled sadly. "I think it was too much for him. To feel everything all at once. He wouldn't tell me, which is strange, you know, he was always so forthcoming, but–" He shook his head. "Nothing we can do. He made his decision."

  "Can you talk to him?"

  "I'm sorry?"

  "At the lunar station. Can you contact him? To, you know, check up on him?"
To apologize to him.

  Her father looked at her strangely. "He belongs to STL now."

  Cat slumped against the couch.

  "I'm so sorry." His voice shook.

  "It's not your fault," she said. "Daddy…" She leaned over and wrapped her arms around his neck, laid her head against his shoulder. He wiped at his eyes. "Thank you for trying."

  "He seemed to give you happiness."

  Cat sat back in her chair, legs shaking. She nodded. He
had
given her happiness; he
had
taken her pain away. But he was not a machine designed to eradicate her sorrow.

  For the first time, she understood why he ran away. For the first time, she didn't blame him at all.

 

That night Cat couldn't sleep. Her thoughts were too heavy. She lay in her bed with her hands resting on her stomach. After a while, she pulled her comm slate off her bedside table and checked the status on her travel visa to the Midwestern Desert. It hadn't gone through yet. Now more than ever she wanted to fly to Kansas and see where he came from, even if it was just an abandoned house in the middle of the desert, coated in dust and infested with snakes and scorpions. She couldn't apologize to him on the moon, but she wanted to find his history, she wanted to learn everything about him.

  She wanted to prove to herself that she could see him completely.

  All the room's shadows were silver. Her closet door hung open, the tapestry glinting in the moonlight. Eventually, she crawled out of bed and put her jacket on over her pajamas. She slipped the tapestry off the closet shelf and crept into the hallway, in the direction of Finn's old room.

  Since moving home, she had pretended that the door leading to the attic stairs opened into a linen closet. That the attic room never existed. Sometimes when she walked past she felt a spark in the hairs of her arm, like static electricity.

  But tonight, she wanted to see the room and breathe the stale dusty air. She wanted to set the tapestry on the foot of his bed and pretend he would find it when he came home from his trip to the moon. She had started the tapestry on a whim but now she knew it was a gift of contrition, recompense for not seeing the emotions lying dormant inside him.

  The attic stairs were covered in dust. She left smeared, indistinct footprints as she walked to the bedroom, her shoulder pressed against the wall to guide her in the watery darkness. A strip of moonlight seeped from beneath the door to the room, a silver fan feathering out across the stairwell. She nudged the door open with her shoulder. Put one bare foot on the cold floor and then another.