“Have I changed?”
“Yes. You don’t talk the same way. Aren’t you aware of it?”
“I know about that. But me. Everything that makes me Rachel. Has that changed?”
He was silent for a long time. Finally he looked away from her, and the pain in his eyes was nearly unbearable. “I don’t know, Rache. I honestly don’t know.”
She felt herself on the verge of tears. She didn’t want to be understood.
She wanted to be held. She wanted him to wrap his arms around her, tell her it was okay, tell her he still loved her.
Voice trembling, indignant, she could only manage: “I’m not different.”
Not inside, she meant. Not where it counted.
On the day Rachel turned four years old, Matt had caught her drawing on the living room wall with her birthday crayons—big lime-green loops and whorls. The wall had been painted two weeks previously, and it must have looked to Rachel like a big blank sheet of paper.
Matt had paid for the painting the same week the car insurance came up for renewal. The household budget had bottomed out; Celeste was cooking Kraft Dinner instead of steak. Rachel’s tricycle, which she had ignored since this morning, had pushed their VISA card to the credit limit.
He went a little crazy when he saw the wall.
He grabbed the crayon out of her clenched fist and pushed her back. “Bad,” he said, “bad, Rachel, bad, bad!”
Her legs went out from under her. She sat down hard and her face clouded instantly.
Almost as immediately, Mart’s remorse began to flush away the anger. Rachel stammered through tears: “I’m… not… bad!”
He thought it was a cogent moral point. He also thought he wanted to shoot himself.
He picked up his daughter and held her. “You’re right, Rachel. You’re not bad. But it was a bad thing to do. Even good people do bad things sometimes. That’s what I meant to say. It’s a bad thing to draw on the wall. But you’re not bad.”
It was the way she phrased her objection in Old Quarry Park that convinced Matt he still had a daughter—at least for the time being.
I’m NOT different.
He felt those old father tears well up.
“Ah, Rache,” he said. “This is all… so confusing.”
She came around the picnic table to him. He stood up and barked his knee on the pineboard tabletop. It was an awkward ballet, but the hug went on a long time.
After a while, she went to a swing and asked him to push. A little bit of old times, Matt supposed. Maybe it was good for her to be ten years old for a few minutes. Maybe it was good for him.
He pushed her, she laughed, the sky was blue.
After that they walked the short trail that looped into the forest, but the track was muddy after all the rain. When they emerged into the sunlight, Rachel said, “We should have packed a lunch.”
“I have a better idea. Lunch at Dos Aguilas.”
“Really?”
“My treat.” He added, “If it’s open.”
“I think it is,” Rachel said… and he wondered how she knew.
Dos Aguilas was a Mexican restaurant at the bayshore. Matt recalled that Celeste had once classified it as a “linen-tablecloth” restaurant, as opposed to the plastic-booth kind at the malls. It had a cook, not a controlled-portion dispensing machine.
Arturo, the manager, had inherited the business from his father. The restaurant itself had been here since 1963. A landmark. It was still open for business. Empty, but open.
Arturo welcomed them in, and Matt nodded to him, but he understood by the glance that passed between Arturo and Rachel that they were of the same tribe now; Matt was the outsider here.
He chose a table by the window where they could watch the sunlit water lap the pier.
“It means Two Eagles,’” Matt said.
Rachel opened a menu over her cutlery. “What?”
“Dos Aguilas. It means Two Eagles.’ The story is that a pair of harbor eagles have a nest near here. You can have dinner some nights and maybe see them circling over the crab boats, diving for fish.”
“Really?” She gazed out across the water. “Did you ever see them?”
“Nope. Don’t know anybody who ever did. The story’s almost half a century old. But people still look.”
Rachel nodded, smiling at the thought.
Arturo came to the table. He took their order and headed for the kitchen, disappearing into a foliage of decor: sombreros, pistol belts, pottery. Matt said to his daughter, “You knew the restaurant would be open.” She nodded.
“You know things. Not just you. Other people, too.” He told her about the figure Tom Kindle had been quoting, one in ten thousand. “Rachel, how would anyone know that?”
She looked thoughtful. “It’s approximately the right number.”
“Okay. But how do you know?”
“Oh, I just… shift gears.” Tm sorry?”
“Well, that’s what I call it. It has to do with making connections.” A pause. “Daddy, do you want all the details of this?”
“Yes.”
“Because it’s strange.”
“I kind of took that for granted, Rache.”
She gave him a look: Well, okay… if you insist.
“It has to do with the neocytes,” she said. “One of the things they are is a kind of connector. You can think of them as drawing invisible lines—between people, between people and the Artifact.”
“Like telepathy?”
“In a way. But I think that gives the wrong impression. The lines they’re drawing are knowledge lines. The Travellers think there should be as few barriers to knowledge as possible. People’s lives are private, if they want them to be, but knowledge—knowledge is infinitely sharable.”
“What kind of knowledge?”
“More or less any kind.”
“Give me an example.”
“Well… suppose I want to know how to get from here to Chicago. Used to be I’d have to look at a map. Now I can just remember it.”
“Rachel, you’ve never been there.”
“No, but I’m not remembering it from myself, I’m remembering it from somebody else. Anyone who’s ever looked at a road map. It isn’t my knowledge, but I can get to it if I need it.”
“That’s all there is to it? Remembering?”
“That’s hardly all there is to it, but that’s what it feels like. I suppose it’s more like data sharing or something computery like that. But it feels like remembering. You have to actually do it, I mean there’s a mental effort involved—like thinking really hard. Shifting gears. But then you just… remember.”
“What if it’s something complicated? Quantum theory, say. Neurosurgery.”
She frowned, and Matt wondered if she was shifting gears right now, as they spoke.
“You can do that,” she said, “but it has to be orderly. In the Traveller world, knowledge is infinitely available but functionally hierarchic. You have to take the logical steps. What’s the good of knowing, for instance, that you can derive classical probability from the squared modulus of the quantum complex amplitude, if you don’t know what a modulus is, in physical terms, or an amplitude? The knowledge is available, but if you want to understand it you still have to eat it one bite at a time. Like this salad. Thank you, Arturo.”