Robert Sawyer - Factoring Humanity

In February Josh had had to go away. The National Research Council of Canada operated a forty-six-meter radio telescope at Lake Traverse in Algonquin Park, a huge area of untamed forest and Precambrian shield in northern Ontario. Josh was slated to spend a week there, helping monitor the equipment.

And he’d gone. But the other astronomer who was there with him had gotten sick: appendicitis. An air ambulance had taken him from the telescope building to a hospital in Huntsville.

Josh had stayed on, but then snowstorms had prevented anyone from coming up to join him. He’d been alone with the giant telescope for a week, snowed in.

It shouldn’t have been any problem; there’d been food and water enough for two for the entire duration of the planned stay. But when the roads finally were cleared and someone could get up to the observatory from Toronto, they found Josh dead.

He had killed himself.

Heather had had no special status; the police never notified her directly. She’d first learned about it from an article in The Toronto Star.

They said he’d killed himself over quarrels with his lover.

Heather had known that Josh had a roommate. She’d met Barry—a philosophy student with a closely cropped beard—several times.

But she hadn’t realized just how close Josh and Barry had been, or how much of a—well, if not a pawn, certainly a complicating factor in their troubled relationship she’d been.

No, she didn’t often think of that.

But no doubt it had had an impact. Perhaps she was less surprised than most mothers would be when her own daughter had turned out to have hidden demons and undisclosed issues—when her own daughter had taken her life.

And if it hadn’t been a great, unthinkable shock, then she couldn’t have repressed the memories of Mary’s death… regardless of how much she wanted to.

Kilometers away Kyle lay in bed in his one-bedroom apartment, also trying to get to sleep.

False memories.

Or repressed memories.

Was there anything in his life that had been so traumatic, so painful, that if he could, he would have shut out its memory?

Of course there was.

Becky’s accusation.

Mary’s suicide.

The two worst things that had ever happened to him.

Yes, if repression were possible, surely he’d repress those.

Unless—unless, as Heather said, even they weren’t sufficiently unthinkable to trigger the suppression mechanism.

He racked his brain, trying to recall other examples of things he might have suppressed. He was conscious of what an impossible task that was: trying to remember things that he wouldn’t allow himself to remember.

But then it hit him—something from his childhood. Something he’d never conceived of. Something that had cost him his faith in God.

Kyle had been brought up in Canada’s United Church, an easygoing Protestant denomination. But he’d drifted away from it over the years and today was seen in a hall of worship only when weddings or funerals required it. Oh, in moments of quiet reflection, he thought there might be some sort of Creator, but ever since that day when he was fifteen, he had been unable to believe in the benevolent God his church had preached.

Kyle’s parents were out for the evening, and he had decided to stay up as long as he could. He didn’t get to play with the remote when his father was home, but now he was flipping channels madly, hoping for something titillating on late-night TV. Still, when he came across a nature documentary, he paused. You never knew when some topless African woman was going to wander into the scene.

He saw a female lion stalking a herd of zebras beside a water hole. The lion’s tawny hide was almost invisible in the tall yellow grasses. There were hundreds of zebras, but she was interested only in the animals at the margin. The narrator spoke in hushed tones, like the commentator on his dad’s golf shows, as if words added long after the footage was shot could somehow disturb the unfolding of the scene. “The lioness looks for a straggler,” he said. “She wants to pick out a weak member of the herd.”

Kyle sat up; this was much more vivid than the ancient, grainy Wild Kingdom episodes he’d seen before.

The lion continued to stalk. The background noises consisted of zebra hooves falling on baked earth, the rustling of grass, the calls of birds, and the droning of insects. The shadows were short, hugging the animals’ legs like shy toddlers clutching their parents.

Suddenly the lion surged forward, legs pumping, mouth hanging wide open. She leaped onto a zebra’s haunch, biting deeply into it. The other zebras began to gallop away, clouds of dust rising in their wake, the footfalls like thunder. Birds wheeled into flight, squawking loudly.

The attacked animal now had stripes of red running between its black and white ones. It fell to its knees, propelled down by the impact of the lion. The blood mixed with the parched soil, forming a maroon-colored mud. The lion was hungry, or at least thirsty, and it bit deeply into the zebra’s flesh again, scooping out a wet mound of muscle and connective tissue. All the while, the zebra’s head continued to move and its eyelids beat up and down.

The poor thing was alive, thought Kyle. It’s bleeding all over the savannah, it’s about to be eaten, and it’s still alive.

A zebra. Genus Equus, they’d said in science class. Just like a horse.

Kyle had done some riding at summer camp. He knew how intelligent horses were, how sensitive they were, how feeling they were. A zebra couldn’t be that different. The animal had to be in agony, had to be panicked, had to be terrified.

And it hit him. Fifteen years old, it hit him like a ton of bricks.

It wasn’t just this zebra, of course. It was almost all zebras—and Thomson’s gazelles and wildebeests and giraffes.

And it wasn’t just Africa.

It was almost all prey animals anywhere in the world.

Animals didn’t die of old age. They didn’t quietly expire after long, pleasant lives. They didn’t pass on unaided.

No.

They were torn apart, often limb from limb, hemorrhaging severely, usually still conscious, still aware, still sensing.

Death was a horrible, vicious act, almost without exception. Kyle’s grandfather had passed away the year before. Kyle had never really thought about getting old himself, but suddenly the litany of terms he’d heard his parents bat about during Granddad’s illness came back to him.

Heart disease.

Osteoporosis.

Prostate cancer.

Cataracts.

Senility.

Throughout all of history, most people had died horrible deaths, too. Humans had generally not lived long enough to experience old age; evolution, which, as he’d learned in school, had fine-tuned so much of human physiology, had simply had no opportunity to address these problems because almost no one in previous generations had lived long enough to experience them.

The zebra gutted by the lion.

The rat swallowed whole by the snake.

The paralyzed insect that felt itself being eaten alive from within by implanted larvae.

All of them surely aware of what was happening to them.

All of them tortured.

No quick deaths.

No merciful deaths.

Kyle had put down the remote after that, his interest in catching a glimpse of naked breasts gone. He’d gone to bed, but had lain awake for hours.

From that night on, whenever he tried to think of God, he found himself thinking instead of the zebra, its blood staining the water hole.

And to this day, try as he might, he’d been unable to repress that memory.

Heather still wasn’t able to sleep. She got up off the couch, went to the closet in the bedroom and found some old photo albums; for the last ten years or so, she’d taken only filmless electronic photos, but all of her early memories were stored as prints.