Factoring Humanity

  “There are also a couple of glass handles in there.” He opened the box and removed one. It was a suction-cup affair with a black handle on it. “You seen these before? They’re used for handling panes of glass, but you might find them useful for maneuvering your big sheets once you assemble them.”

  “Thanks,” Heather said again.

  “Of course you know that a real tesseract has only twenty-four faces.”

  “What?” said Heather. She couldn’t have screwed up in such a fundamental way. “But Kyle said—”

  “Oh, when it’s unfolded, it appears to have forty-eight faces, but when it folds up, each of the faces touches another face, leaving only twenty-four. The one on the bottom folds over to touch the one on the top, the side cubes fold in, and so on. Not that there’s any way to really fold it, of course.” He paused. “Shall we get going?”

  Heather nodded, and they set off, rolling the hand trucks in front of them.

  Of course, once they got back to her office, she could just thank him and let him go, but—

  But twenty-eight hundred tiles! It would take forever to assemble them on her own.

  Paul might be willing to help, and—

  No. No. She couldn’t ask, couldn’t spend more time with him. Things had to be resolved first with Kyle.

  But—

  But how could they ever be? How could she ever know for sure? And if she didn’t know, would she forever tense up every time Kyle’s hand touched her body?

  She looked over at Paul as they made their way up St. George.

  His hands were wrapped around the rubber-coated handles. Nice hands, strong hands. Long fingers.

  “You know,” said Heather, tentatively, “if you’ve got nothing to do, I could sure use a hand snapping all those tiles together.”

  He looked over at her and smiled—and a really nice smile it was, too.

  “Sure,” he said. “I’d love to.”

  Paul and Heather eventually got the boxes across campus, after stopping to rest at a couple of park benches along the way. They came up the wheelchair ramp to the entrance to Sidney Smith Hall. There was a husky student right in front of them wearing a Varsity Blues leather jacket with the name “Kolmex” on the back. Heather thought the guy’s status as a football player must have been very important to his self-image for him to be wearing a leather jacket in the middle of August. She hoped he’d at least hold the door for them, but he let it slam shut, with a clatter of glass, behind him. Paul raised his eyebrows, sharing an expression with Heather, one teacher to another—the caliber of the kids today. He then jockeyed his hand truck so that he could free up one hand long enough to open the door.

  Finally, they both made it down to her office.

  “Ah,” said Paul, looking around as they entered. “You share an office.”

  Heather nodded; even universities had their pecking order. “I’m only an associate prof,” she said. “I took several years off to raise my daughters—I guess I’ve got some catching-up to do. My office mate, Omar Amir, he’s off for the summer.”

  Heather used her foot to push the box off her hand truck’s platform, then collapsed in a chair to catch her breath. She shook her head slightly and looked around the room. They’d have to move Omar’s desk—oh, joy—but if they pushed it against that bookcase, there would be enough room on the low-pile carpeted floor to start assembling the alien jigsaw puzzle.

  Paul was resting, too, using Omar’s chair. After a couple of minutes, though, they both got up and moved the desk. Then she got a hardcopy of the CAD program’s plan for the first panel, opened the first box of tiles, and sat down on the floor, her legs tucked one under the other. Paul sat down a meter away from her. She could smell his sweat a bit; it had been a long time since she’d smelled a man’s sweat.

  They started clicking the tiles together. It was gratifying to see the way the seemingly random patterns on each one connected across tile boundaries.

  As she worked, she kept thinking idly of the kind of joint Paul had said he was employing on the tiles’ edges: tongue and groove. Several really good jokes about it occurred to her, but she kept them all to herself.

  Around 8:30, Paul and Heather ordered in pizza and Cokes; to Heather’s delight, they were able to agree on pizza toppings in a matter of moments; it was always a major negotiating game with Kyle.

  Paul offered his SmartCash card when the delivery boy showed up, but Heather insisted that he was the one doing her the favor, and so she paid. She was pleased that Paul acquiesced with grace.

  It was 10:00 P.M. before they had all forty-eight large squares assembled. Each measured about seventy centimeters on a side. They had leaned each one against the edge of Omar’s desk after its completion.

  Now it was time to build the damn thing. Using the clips and clamps Paul had brought along, they connected the sides. Eventually they had all eight cubes assembled.

  Overall, the paint markings—which glistened slightly, like mica—still didn’t make up a recognizable pattern, but they did flow over the surface of the boxes in an intricate grid-work, reminiscent of printed circuits.

  Using the CAD diagram as a guide, they continued on, assembling the cubes into a greater whole. They couldn’t stand the thing up—the ceiling wasn’t high enough—so they made it horizontally, with the shaft of four cubes running parallel to the floor:

  [Picture B]

  The structure rested on one cube; they supported the end of the shaft that stuck out the farthest with a pile of textbooks. The finished construct rose up most of the way to the ceiling.

  When it was done, Heather and Paul sat back and stared at it. Was it art? An altar? Or something else? It was certainly provocative that it made up a kind of crucifix shape—even now, with it lying on its side, the image was unavoidable—but how could aliens share that particular bit of symbolism? Even if one granted that a putative God might have had putative mortal children on other worlds, surely no one else would have come up with the cross as an execution device—it was geared toward human anatomy, after all. No, no, the resemblance had to be coincidental.

  The whole thing seemed ramshackle. In fact, more than anything, it reminded Heather of something that had happened in kindergarten. Her class had gone in 1979 to see the first-ever landing of a Concorde jet at what was then called Toronto International Airport. After they’d returned, a kindly janitor had made a pretend Concorde for the kids to play in from an old garbage can and some green corrugated cardboard. This thing was about as flimsy as that had been.

  Paul shook his head in wonder. “What do you suppose it is?”

  Heather shrugged. “I haven’t the vaguest idea.”

  She looked at her watch, and Paul looked at his.

  They walked up to the subway station together. Heather had to go east to Yonge; Paul, who lived in a condo at Harbourfront, needed to go south to Union. He came down to the eastbound platform, just to make sure Heather got safely on a train. St. George station was decorated in pale green tiles, not unlike bigger versions of those they’d assembled that evening. The tunnels were quite straight here; Heather could see her train coming up well in advance of its arrival.

  “Thanks, Paul,” she said, smiling warmly. “I really appreciate your help.”

  Paul touched her arm lightly; that was all. Heather wondered what she would have done if he’d tried to kiss her.

  And then her train rumbled into the station, and she headed back home to her empty house.

  Heather had tossed and turned all night, dreaming alternately about the bizarre alien artifact and about Paul.

  Most of the subway trip to work was underground, but at two stretches along the Yonge arm the subway waxed oxymoronic and poked out into the light of day. At both points—around Davisville and Rosedale stations—the sunlight seemed painfully bright to Heather’s sleep-deprived eyes.

  Mercifully, when she finally arrived at her office, the drapes were still closed. She couldn’t work comfortably with the construct m
ade of eight cubes dominating the room. But she sat quietly in the darkness, sipping a coffee she’d bought on the way in from the Second Cup in the lobby, waiting for her head to stop pounding.

  Which, finally, it did. She’d hoped a night’s sleep would have suggested some sort of answer to the puzzle represented by what they had built, but nothing had come to her. And now, looking at the thing, she felt like a fool—what a crazy idea it had been! She was glad that Omar—and just about everyone else—was away on vacation.

  Heather took another sip of coffee and decided she was ready to face the day. She got up, went to the window and pulled the faded drapes. Sunlight streamed in.

  She sat back down, cradling her head with her hands, and—

  What the hell?

  The painted-on markings on the substrate panels were sparkling in the sunlight. They were a film of crystals, so perhaps that wasn’t too surprising, but—

  —they seemed to dance, to shimmer.

  She got up to look at them more closely, stepping across the room, and—

  —and she tripped over a pile of paperite printouts she’d left on the floor. She went tumbling forward, crashing into the structure she’d built.

  She should have ended up smashing it to bits—not just the big square panels, but also snapping many of the connections between the thousands of tiles.

  She should have done that—but she didn’t.

  The structure held. In fact, Heather came close to breaking her arm when she smashed into it.

  Something was holding the panels together. Up close, she could see that the individual square markings on the tiles were flashing separately, refracting like the surface of soap bubbles.

  Yesterday this had been a flimsy construct—jerrybuilt, held together by clamps, propped up by a stack of books.

  But today—

  She went to the far end of the structure, examining it. Then she gave it a good hard rap with her knuckles It was solid, but not completely immobile; the unit shifted slightly. Her fall had pressed one face flush against the wall. Heather used her foot to nudge out the stack of books holding up that end; the volumes cascaded to the floor.

  But the final cube still stood solid. Instead of collapsing under its own weight, the row of cubes stuck straight out into space.

  Maybe the paint acted as a kind of cement after it had time enough to dry? Maybe—

  She looked around the room, saw the light streaming through the window, saw her own shadow on the far wall.

  Could it be solar powered?

  Sunlight. The one energy source any civilization anywhere in the universe might have access to. Not all worlds contained heavy elements, such as uranium, and surely not all had stores of fossil fuels. But every planet in the galaxy had one or more stars around which it circled.

  She got up, closed the drapes.

  The object stayed rigid. She sighed—of course it wouldn’t be that simple. She sat back down at her desk, thinking.

  There was a creaking sound from across the room. As she watched, the construct began to buckle. She leaped to her feet, hurried across the floor and tried to catch the final cube before it fell apart, its two side panels and its bottom and end panels dropping away.

  She tried to support the rest of the structure with one hand while frantically rebuilding her book buttress with the other. Once she had the object secured, she hustled back to the window and opened the blinds again.

  Obviously, the thing had some trifling power-storage capacity. That only made sense in a solar-powered device; you couldn’t have it failing every time someone cast a shadow over it.

  Well, then.

  The first order of business was to make sure the construct was permanently powered; in a couple of hours the sun would no longer be coming through that window. She thought about taking it outside, but that would solve the problem only until evening. Clearly, the energy-efficient office fluorescents hadn’t provided enough illumination to power the construct yesterday, but she could get high-output electric lamps from the Theatre Department, or maybe from Botany.

  She felt adrenaline surging through her. She had no idea yet of what she’d discovered, but she’d clearly made more progress with the alien messages than anyone else had.

  She thought for a second about immediately logging on to the Alien Signal Center homepage and reporting what she’d found. That would be enough to ensure her priority. But it would also mean that in the next few days, hundreds of researchers would replicate what she’d already done—and one of them might take it to the next step, figuring out what the darn thing was for. She had a dozen years of career catching-up to do; discovering the construct’s purpose might be enough to make up for all the lost time . . .

  She went to find some lamps.

  And then she got down to work.

  17

  Kyle entered his lab, the lights coming on automatically as he did so.

  “Good morning, Cheetah.”

  “ ’Morning, Dr. Graves.”

  “Hey, that was good. ‘ ’Morning.’ I like that.”

  “I’m trying,” said Cheetah.

  “You certainly are.”

  “Was that a shot?”

  “Moi?” But then Kyle shrugged and smiled. “Actually, yes it was—good job catching it. You’re making progress.”

  “I certainly hope so. In fact—how’s this?” Cheetah paused, apparently waiting until he had Kyle’s full attention. “Julius Caesar wasn’t just the great-uncle of Augustus—he was also the son of the Wicked Witch of the West, and like the Wicked Witch, he could be killed by water. Well, given that, Cassius and the rest of the republican conspirators decide that they don’t need to off Big Julie with knives—they can do it far more cleanly with squirt guns. So they lay in wait for him, and when he comes down from the capitol, they open fire. Caesar resists, until he sees his best friend also shooting him, and with that, he utters his final words before falling down dead: ‘H2, Brute?’ ” Kyle laughed.

  Cheetah sounded inordinately pleased. “You’re laughing!”

  “Well, it’s pretty good.”

  “Maybe someday I will get the hang of being human,” said Cheetah.

  Kyle sobered. “If you do, be sure to let me know.”

  The stage lights were set up: three big lamps with Fresnel lenses on tripods, and barn doors to limit their beams. They were providing a constant source of power to the alien construct, letting it do whatever it was supposed to do.

  And so far, all that seemed to be was to stay rigid. Heather could think of niche markets for such a product—a thought of Kyle darted through her mind—but she assumed that the aliens wouldn’t have spent ten years just telling her how to make something stay stiff.

  And yet, maybe that was indeed all the aliens had wanted to convey: a way to make materials stand up to great stresses, so that high-speed spaceships could be built. After all, fast voyages between Earth and the Centaur’s world would require substantial accelerations.

  But that didn’t make sense. If the Centaurs had ships capable of even half the speed of light, they could have sent a working model faster than they could have transmitted the plans. Granted, broadcasting information would always be cheaper than shipping physical objects, but it did make her question whether the stiffening was the point of the construct or just a byproduct of what it was really intended to do.

  Heather sat and stared at it, trying to fathom its real purpose. She didn’t like science fiction the way Kyle did, but they both loved the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, and she was haunted now by the final line spoken in that film: “Its origin and purpose,” Heywood Floyd had said of the monolith, “still a total mystery”—although Heather always suspected it was the box the United Nations had come in.

  She kept thinking about the missing data—about how big she should have made the construct. Maybe it was never intended to be built this large. The promised revolution in nanotechnology had never occurred, at least partly because quantum uncertainty made extremely
small machines impossible to control. Perhaps the field generated by the tiles was supposed to overcome that; maybe the Centaurs had intended her to make the construct at a billionth of its current size. She sighed. You’d think they would have said how big the damned thing was supposed to be.

  Unless, she thought again, it was supposed to be a matter of choice. She kept coming back to the idea of scale: a human would naturally build it at one size; an intelligent slug would have made it a smaller size; a sentient sauropod would have constructed it on a grander scale.

  But why make it human-sized? Why would the Centaurs allow the builders, whoever they might be, to construct it at whatever scale they wished?

  Unless, of course, as Paul had suggested, the builders were meant to go inside it.

  A silly thought; it probably had more to do with her memories of that garbage-can Concorde than with the object in front of her. Or maybe it was that darned Freudianism sneaking up again—Why, of course, Mein Frau, zometing always has to go inside ze tunnel.

  It was a crazy notion. How would one go inside? Indeed, where would one go? There were eight cubes, after all.

  In that cube there, she thought at once, mentally pointing at the third one along the shaft, the one with the four additional cubes attached to it. It was the only special cube, the only one with none of its faces exposed.

  That one there.

  She could unclip one of the projecting cubes—removing both of the panels that made up the concealed face—and clamber inside. Of course, if the power to the lamps went off, soon enough the whole construct would collapse and she’d end up on her ass.

  Crazy idea.

  Besides, what did she expect? That the thing would take off, like that Concorde used to do in her imagination? That she’d be whisked across the light-years to Alpha Centauri? Madness.

  Anyway, she probably couldn’t remove one of the cubes with the structural-integrity field active. And with it off, the whole thing would collapse the moment she put any weight on it.