Robert Sawyer - Factoring Humanity

“Why what?” asked Kyle, sounding as confused as Heather felt.

The clock on the mantelpiece chimed; it did that every quarter-hour.

“Why,” said Becky, raising her eyes again to look at her father, “did you…”

“Say it,” whispered Zack, forcefully.

Becky swallowed, then blurted it all out. “Why did you abuse me?”

Kyle slumped against the couch. The datapad, which had been resting on the couch’s arm, fell to the hardwood floor with a clattering sound. Kyle’s mouth hung open. He looked at his wife.

Heather’s heart was racing. She felt nauseous.

Kyle closed his mouth, then opened it again. “Pumpkin, I never—”

“Don’t deny it,” said Becky. Her voice was quaking with fury; now that the accusation was out, a dam had apparently burst. “Don’t you dare deny it.”

“But, Pumpkin—”

“And don’t call me that. My name is Rebecca.”

Kyle spread his arms. “I’m sorry, Rebecca. I didn’t know it bothered you, my calling you that.”

“Damn you,” she said. “How could you do that to me?”

“I never—”

“Don’t lie! For God’s sake, at least have the guts to admit it.”

“But I never—Rebecca, you’re my daughter. I’d never hurt you.”

“You did hurt me. You ruined me. Me, and Mary.”

Heather rose to her feet. “Becky—”

“And you!” shouted Becky. “You knew what he was doing to us and you didn’t do anything to stop him.”

“Don’t yell at your mother,” said Kyle, his voice sharp. “Becky, I never touched you or Mary—you know that.”

Zack spoke in a normal volume for the first time. “I knew he’d deny it.”

Kyle snapped at the young man. “Damn you—you keep out of this.”

“Don’t raise your voice at him,” said Becky to Kyle.

Kyle fought to be calm. “This is a family matter,” he said. “We don’t need him here.”

Heather looked at her husband, then at her daughter. “Becky,” Heather said, fighting to keep her own voice under control, “I swear to you—”

“Don’t you deny it, too,” Becky said.

Heather took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “Tell me,” she said. “Tell me what you think happened.”

There was silence for a long time as Becky apparently composed her thoughts. “You know what happened,” she said at last, the accusatory tone still in her voice. “He’d slip out of your room after midnight and come to mine or Mary’s.”

“Becky,” said Kyle, “I never—”

Becky looked at her mother, but then closed her eyes. “He’d come into my room, have me remove my top, f-fondle my breasts, and then—” She choked off, opened her eyes and looked again at Heather. “You must have known,” she said. “You must have seen him leaving, seen him come back.” A pause as she took a shuddering breath. “You must have smelled the sweat on him—smelled me on him.”

Heather was shaking her head. “Becky, please.”

“None of that ever happened,” said Kyle.

“There’s no point staying if he’s going to deny it,” said Zack. Becky nodded and reached into her purse. She pulled out a tissue and wiped her eyes, then got to her feet and began walking away. Zack followed her, and so did Heather. Kyle rose as well, but in a matter of moments, Becky and Zack were down the stairs and at the front door.

“Pump—Becky, please,” said Kyle, catching up with them. “I’d never hurt you.”

Becky turned around. Her eyes were red, her face flushed. “I hate you,” she said, and then she and Zack scurried out the door into the night.

Kyle looked at Heather. “Heather, I swear I never touched her.”

Heather didn’t know what to say. She headed back up to the living room, holding the banister for balance. Kyle followed. Heather took a chair, but Kyle went to the liquor cabinet and poured himself some Scotch. He drained it in a gulp and stood leaning against the wall.

“It’s that boyfriend of hers,” said Kyle. “He put her up to this. They’ll be filing a lawsuit, betcha anything—can’t wait for the inheritance.”

“Kyle, please,” said Heather. “It’s your daughter you’re talking about.”

“And it’s her father she’s talking about. I’d never do anything like that. Heather, you know that.”

Heather stared at him.

“Heather,” said Kyle, a note of pleading in his voice now, “you must know it’s not true.”

Something had kept Rebecca away for almost a year. And something before that had—

She hated to think about it, and yet it came to mind every day.

Every hour…

Something had driven Mary to suicide.

“Heather!”

“I’m sorry.” She swallowed, then after a moment, nodded. “I’m sorry. I know you couldn’t do anything like that.” But her voice sounded flat, even to her.

“Of course not.”

“It’s just that…”

“What?” snapped Kyle.

“It’s—no, nothing.”

“What?”

“Well, you did have a habit of getting up, of leaving our room in the middle of the night.”

“I can’t believe you’re saying that,” said Kyle. “I can’t fucking believe it.”

“It’s true. Two, three nights a week sometimes.”

“I have trouble sleeping—you know that. I get up and go watch some TV or maybe do some work on my computer. Christ, I still do that, and I live alone now. I did it last night.”

Heather said nothing.

“I couldn’t sleep. If I’m still awake an hour after I go to bed, I get up—you know that. No bloody point just lying there. Last night I got up and watched—Christ, what was it? I watched The Six Million Dollar Man on Channel 3. It was the one with William Shatner as the guy who could communicate with dolphins. You call the TV station—they’ll tell you that’s the one that was on. And then I sent some e-mail to Jake Montgomery. We can go to my apartment right now— right now —and look at my outbox; you’ll see the time stamp on it. Then I came back to bed around one twenty-five, one-thirty, something like that.”

“Nobody accused you of doing anything wrong last night.”

“But that’s the kind of thing I do every night I get up. Sometimes I watch The Six Million Dollar Man, sometimes The John Pellatt Show. And I look at The Weather Channel, see what it’s going to be like tomorrow. They said it was going to rain today, but it didn’t.”

Oh, yes, it did, thought Heather. It came down in fucking buckets.

The University of Toronto—the self-styled Harvard of the North—was established in 1827. Some fifty thousand full-time students were enrolled there. The main campus was downtown, not surprisingly anchored at the intersection of University Avenue and College Street. But although there was a traditional central campus, U of T also spilled out into the city proper, lining St. George Street and several other roads with a hodgepodge of nineteenth-, twentieth-, and early twenty-first-century architecture.

The university’s most distinctive landmark was the Robarts Library—often called “Fort Book” by students—a massive, complex concrete structure. Kyle Graves had lived in Toronto all of his forty-five years. Still, it was only recently that he’d seen an architect’s model of the campus and realized that the library was shaped like a concrete peacock, with the hooded Thomas Fisher rare-books tower rising up as a beaked neck in front and two vast wings spreading out behind.

Unfortunately, there was no place on campus where you could look down on Robarts to appreciate the design. U of T did have three associated theological colleges—Emmanuel, affiliated with the United Church of Canada; the Presbyterian Knox; and the Anglican Wycliffe. Perhaps the peacock was meant to be seen only by God or visitors from space: sort of a Canadian Plains of Nazca.