Factoring Humanity Read Free Page B

sixteen months ago. They’d never known why Becky had been living at home back then; it had been she who had found her sister’s body
    How do you go on?
    What do you do next?
    The year Becky was born, Bill Cosby had lost his son Ennis. Heather, with a newborn sucking at her breast, and a two-year-old bundle of energy racing around the house, had been moved to write a note to Cosby, in care of CBS, expressing sympathy. As a mother, she knew nothing could be more devastating than the loss of a child. Tens of thousands wrote such notes, of course. Cosby—or his staff, at any rate—had replied, thanking her for the concern.
    Somehow, Bill Cosby had gone on.
    At the same time, another father was in the news every night: Fred Goldman, father of Ron Goldman, the man killed alongside Nicole Brown Simpson. Fred was furious with O.J. Simpson, the person he was convinced had slaughtered his boy. Fred’s anger was palpable, exploding from the TV set. The Goldman family published a book, His Name Is Ron. Heather had even gone to meet them when they’d autographed copies at the Chapters superstore down by the university. She knew, of course, that the book would be remaindered a few months later, like all the other flotsam tied into the Simpson trial, but she bought a copy anyway, getting Fred to sign it—showing her support, one parent to another.
    Somehow, Fred Goldman had gone on.
    When Mary had killed herself, Heather had looked to see if the Goldman book was still among their collection. It was indeed, standing on a living-room shelf, next to Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, another hardcover Heather had broken the budget for at about the same time. Heather had taken down the Goldman book and opened it. There were pictures of Fred in it, but all of them were happy, family shots—not the face she remembered, the one seething with fury, all of it directed at Simpson.
    When your child takes his or her own life, where do you direct the anger? At whom do you aim it?
    The answer is no one. You internalize it—and it eats you up from the inside, bit by bit, day by day.
    And the answer is everyone. You lash out, at your husband, your other child, your coworkers.
    Oh, yes. You go on. But you’re never the same.
    But now—
    Now, if Becky was right—
    If Becky was right, there was someone to aim the anger at.
    Kyle. Becky’s father; Heather’s estranged husband.
    As she walked south along St. George Street, she thought about that framed alien radio message on their living-room wall. Heather was a psychologist; she’d spent the last decade trying to decipher the alien messages, trying to plumb the alien mind. She knew that particular message better than anyone else on the planet did—she’d published two papers about it—and yet she still had no idea what it really said; she didn’t really know it at all.
    Heather had known Kyle for almost a quarter of a century.
    But did she really know him at all?
    She tried to clear her mind, tried to set aside the shock of the night before.
    The sun was bright that afternoon. She squinted against it and wondered again about the aliens who were sending the messages. If nothing else, sunlight like this was something humans shared with the Centaurs—no one knew what the aliens looked like, of course, but political cartoonists had taken to drawing them like their namesakes from Greek mythology. Alpha Centauri A was almost an exact twin for Earth’s sun: both were spectral-class G2V, both had a temperature of 5800 Kelvin—so both shone down on their planets with the same yellow-white light. Yes, cooler, smaller Alpha Centauri B might add an orange hue when it, too, was visible in the sky—but there would be times when only A would be up—and at those times, the Centaurs and the humans would have looked out on identically illuminated landscapes.
    She continued on down the street, heading to her office.
    We go on, she thought. We go on.
     
    The next morning—Saturday, July 22—Kyle rode the