The Mad Scientist's Daughter (4 page)

  "Oh, of course. It was pretty neat. I was actually able to upload a bunch of educational software, using the connection I'd already established in the lab–"

  Cat didn't understand why they were talking about Finn as though he were a computer. It must be a scientist thing. She slid further and further down in her seat, until her mother grabbed her by the arm and jerked her back up.

  "Sit up straight," she said, smiling strangely, her teeth showing.

  Cat ate another bite of turkey. It was too dry. Then she realized she was hearing something strange, a sort of musical plinking against the glass of the dining room windows. She twisted around in her chair and pulled aside the gauzy cream-colored curtains. She saw the reflection of the table in the glass: the poinsettias, the half-eaten turkeys, the guests, her own pale face. But over all of that was a flurry of white powder that struck the window and melted on contact.

  "It's snowing!" she shrieked.

  Everyone stopped talking and looked at her, at the windows. Cat turned to her father. "Can I go outside?"

  "Honey, we're in the middle of dinner," said her mother.

  "So? I'm finished. And Finn can take me. Can't you, Finn? He's never seen snow either."

  "It is true, I have not," he said when everyone looked at him.

  "Will you take me outside, Finn?"

  "Certainly."

  Cat dropped off the edge of her chair and ran over to where Finn sat. Some of the guests tittered uncomfortably. Cat slipped her hand in Finn's, and then her father said, "Be sure to put on your coat, Kitty-Cat."

  "I'll make sure she is appropriately dressed," said Finn.

  "That's amazing," one of the guests said. "I'd never have thought
they
could be so–"

  Cat dragged Finn out of the dining room into the foyer. He helped her put on her coat and then he wound one of her father's old scarves around her neck. Finn didn't put on a coat. Ghosts don't feel the cold.

  Cat ran out the front door. The air was filled with swirls of white, and some of the snow had already stuck to the dark ground in patches, like sugar dusted across the top of a chocolate cake. The cars parked along the drive were fringed with ice, and whenever Cat breathed out she could see her breath like a miniature cloud. She tilted her head back and felt a cold stinging thrill as the snowflakes melted on her tongue.

  Finn walked into the middle of the yard, his hands held out in front of him. The snow piled up along the ridge of his fingers. Cat scooped up a tiny handful of snow and mud. The fabric of her neat little white gloves stuck uncomfortably to her skin, but she shaped the snow into a ball and threw it at Finn. He jumped when it disintegrated across his back and turned around.

  When Cat laughed, he smiled.

  "Do you think any of those old people are going to come out here?" she asked. "I hope not. I don't like them."

  "I believe they wished to finish their meal."

  "They just wanted to keep on talking about you when you weren't there." Cat formed another snowball, not caring that her embroidered gloves were getting wet and dirty. She threw this one at a red car parked on the yard. "They're weird."

  "Do you know how snow is formed?"

  "No, but I bet you do."

  And of course he did. He began to explain the necessary conditions for the existence of snow: the amount of moisture needed in the air, the highest possible temperature. Cat didn't listen to him, just ran through the yard pretending she had transformed into a snowflake that refused to hit the ground and melt. She jumped and pirouetted and flapped her arms until she was out of breath. She ran back up to Finn.

  "Why were they talking about you like you were a computer?" she asked.

  "Because I am a computer," said Finn. "I'm a machine."

  Cat stared at him. She was cold, too cold to enjoy the snow, which had completely enveloped the yard and the spindly gray trees and the frozen, empty garden. The forest was silent and still. She and Finn were the only movable things in the entire world.

  "You don't look like a computer," she said.

  "I know," he said.

  Cat considered this. A computer and a ghost had similar characteristics. Neither required food or air or scarves to keep them warm in the snow. And if he were a computer, it would explain why he didn't disappear that day in the cemetery, why animals were not afraid of him.

  "You're not like the other computers in the house, though," she said. "Or the ones you told me about, that helped build the cities. You look like a person."

  "I believe I'm one of a kind," he said.

  Cat shivered then, from the cold and nothing else. Snow dusted across Finn's black hair, turning it gray. It clung to the fabric of his suit.

  "I thought you were a ghost."

  "Ghosts are not real."

  Cat frowned. She didn't believe that, but she did decide she liked knowing her favorite person in the world wasn't dead.

  "I don't mind that you're a computer." She ran up to him and wrapped her arms around his legs, leaning her head against his hip. He put his hand on her shoulder, and the weight of it seemed to sink straight through her.

  "I'm glad," he said.

  They stayed out for a little longer, as the snow fell thicker and thicker around their feet. Finn helped Cat build a tiny, two-foot snowman. Cat didn't want to go back inside, even though she was shaking and shivering in the cold, even though the light in the windows was golden and warm. She found two thin black sticks and stuck them in the snowman's side and drew a crooked smile on his face. The hem of her dress was soaked. The cold seeped through the bottom of her shoes and burned her feet. But she still didn't want to go in. She didn't trust the grown-ups waiting in the house, the people who knew Finn for what he was the minute they laid eyes on him, the people who called him
it
.

 
 

 
 
 

One Saturday, Cat's parents woke her up early. The sun hadn't even risen yet and they appeared in her bedroom, turning on the lights and yanking down the blankets of her bed.

  Cat slid her head under her pillow.

  "Wake up, Kitty-Cat," said her father. "We've got a surprise for you."

  No surprise could be worth waking up in the dark empty time before dawn.

  "We're taking you into the city."

  Cat pulled her head cautiously out of its hiding place, opening one eye and then the other. The city? She was nearly twelve years old, and they'd never taken her into the city before. The drive was too long, they claimed. She'd get bored. So whenever they went they left her with Mrs Fensworth down on the Farm-to-Market road, whose house always smelled of pralines and mothballs.

  "Why?"

  "I have to run up there for some errands," her father said. "We thought we'd make a family trip of it."

  "Is Finn coming?"

  Her mother and her father looked at each other, a look that had been passing between them more and more frequently in the last few months, an arc of electric current Cat didn't quite know how to define.

  "No," her father said. "He needs to stay behind and do some things for me."

  Cat slid out of bed and blearily dressed. She skipped breakfast – it was too early, and the sight of her mother eating a cereal bar turned her stomach – and they set out as the sun peeked pink and violet over the edge of the horizon. Cat fell asleep in the car after they passed through town, at the place where the road was lined with scrubby rows of cotton.

  When Cat woke up, the car was stopped. She rubbed at an ache in her neck. Her parents laughed in the front seat. Cat pulled herself up and looked out the window, blinking. The sun was high and bright, and they were surrounded on all sides by cars, glinting glass and metal and shimmering waves of exhaust, and then a ring of decaying skyscrapers, their innards wrapped in the steel cast of construction.

  "Why aren't we moving?" Cat said.

  "Traffic jam," her father answered. "We'll be out of it soon."

  Cat craned her neck to look out the window. A pair of impossibly tall cranes swung in tandem across the bleached sky. Everything glittered. Cat rubbed her eyes.

  "Where are we going?" she said. "How far is it?"

  "Not far," her mother said, peering over her shoulder into the backseat. "There are some shops in downtown your father needs to go to. We can stop and get Vietnamese food, too."

  Cat had never eaten Vietnamese food. She sighed and leaned back against her seat. She wished Finn were here. Her parents never talked to her.

  Thirty minutes later, the traffic suddenly cleared away, and Cat's father drove the car into the center of the city. Cat stared out the window, watching as the skyscrapers grew taller and more elaborate. All the signs of construction disappeared – the cranes, the scaffolding – leaving just the city, brand new and shining like the inside of a diamond.

  "It's amazing what they've done," her mother said. "Every time I come back here they've rebuilt more and more." Her father nodded in agreement.

  They parked in an underground garage that seemed to spiral down toward the molten core of the earth, and then rode a narrow, fast-moving elevator back up to the surface. Cat's head spun. When they stepped out onto the street, Cat immediately shrank back against her father. She had never seen so many people in one place. There were forgettable people in gray business suits and beautiful women in bright-colored miniskirts. Teenagers stood in clumps at the light rail stops, gazing vacantly into space, tiny lights blinking at their pupils. Cars slid along the wide road, reflected in the glass of the skyscrapers, which up close looked like the walls of a mirrored maze. And threading through the stomping, rushing feet of all the pedestrians were citystamped worker-bots, sleek as beetles, that sucked up dirty slips of paper and cardboard cups and trails of broken glass.

  Her parents went first to a used electronics shop, the walls festooned with wires and circuit boards, the shelves crammed with ancient, dusty computer shells.
Antique and Current
blinked an LED light hanging above the door. When they stepped inside, Cat's father strode up to the man at the counter, called out a name in greeting – Cat didn't catch it, but from the sound of their friendly, familiar laughter her father and the man knew each other. Cat slunk down the aisles, bored. The old fluorescent lights flickered overhead. Cat made her way to the back of the store. Another LED sign:
Robotics
. A doorway closed off with a black curtain.

  Cat stopped in front of the doorway. She listened to her father's laughter drifting up from the front of the store. Then she wrapped her fingers around the curtain. Tugged it aside. She poked her head in.

  It didn't look that much different from the rest of the store. More old computer parts. The light back here was dim. Cat eased her way past the curtain. Her interest, piqued by the blinking sign, was starting to fade.

  Something tugged at the corner of her vision. She swung her head around: she wasn't alone in the room. A tall, wide figure leaned against the wall opposite, unmoving, gazing at her. Cat stood still while her eyes adjusted to the dimness. It wasn't a person, only a mannequin. Metal. An old robot, like the kind Cat saw occasionally on old Internet shows, the ones made before Cat was born. It didn't even look that much like a person. She didn't know how she could have been fooled.

  Cat took a deep breath, her heart still beating rapidly in her chest. She thought she heard her mother say her name out in the store –
Daniel? Did you see Cat?
Then the curtain's rings scraped against the wooden rod in the doorframe. Light flooded the little room. The robot looked like a toy.

  "I should have known you'd be back here." Cat's mother leaned against the doorway, resting one hand on her hip. "Come on, back outside. There's a lot of expensive stuff in here."

  "I didn't touch anything," Cat said. "I was just looking."

  Her mother murmured in the back of her throat, acknowledging that Cat's claim had been heard, and ushered her out into the flickering light of the main room.

  "That robot didn't look like Finn," Cat said.

  "What? Oh, you mean the automata shell. No, I imagine it didn't." Her mother didn't glance down at her, just walked quickly toward the storefront, away from the back room.

  "Automata," said Cat. She liked the feel of the word on her tongue. It was like a foreign language.

  "Yes," said her mother. "That's what we called them when I was a little girl. They were all over the place. More automata than humans back then."

  Finn had told Cat about that period in history. They brought in robots to help rebuild the cities –
infrastructure
was the word he used. Just until the world had repopulated itself.

  "They don't make them anymore," Cat's mother said.

  Cat and her mother emerged from the maze of the store aisles. Cat's father was still laughing with the man at the counter, his face red.

  "That's not true," said Cat. "Daddy made Finn."

  "Daddy did not make Finn," her mother said sharply. "And Finn's different. The automata were just – factory equipment, really. Finn is…" She stopped, bit her lower lip. Her brow crinkled. "Daniel, are you finished?" She pulled away from Cat, walking in long, purposeful strides.

  
Finn is what?
thought Cat, but her mother was already tugging on her father's arm, was already corralling Cat out in the bright, busy street.

 

They took the light rail to a Hong Kong department store, where all the glass windows sparkled in the sun and the clothes looked like ice cream sundaes. Cat's father needed to be measured for a new suit, and so her mother pointed her in the direction of the girls' clothing section but Cat didn't see anything she liked. She rode the escalators for a while until she found the Japanese grocer in the basement, with its bakery and confectionary shop. She spent the next half-hour looking at the mochi lined up in their neat, rainbow-colored rows, at the elaborate, fancy cakes glistening in the art gallery lights, until her disposable phone rang. Her mother, calling her back up to the men's department.