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fourteen

With the crisis apparently over, Dr. Kuroda had said good-bye and gone back to bed. Caitlin and her mother were settling in to spend more time with Webmind when the doorbell rang. Back in Texas, the rule had been that Caitlin didn’t answer the door unless she was expecting someone. Out of habit, her mother started to get up, but Caitlin smiled, and said, “I can do it, you know.” She headed down the stairs, a curious Schrödinger tagging along. It was Caitlin’s first time using the peephole, and—

Holy cow!

It looked like Bashira, but her face was distorted, like the reflection Caitlin had seen of herself in the back of the spoon. “Bash?” she called out tentatively.

“It’s me,” came the muffled reply. Caitlin opened the door and—

Ah, that was a relief! Bashira looked entirely normal. She was wearing a blue headscarf today, and was holding a multicolored box.

“Happy birthday, babe!” Bashira said.

“Oh, my God!” said Caitlin. She reached for it and for the first time understood what the expression “heavier than it looks” meant; it weighed a ton. “Come in, come in.”

Bashira did so and immediately began taking off her shoes—which was, Caitlin had discovered to her embarrassment, a Canadian custom; she’d blithely entered people’s houses without removing hers several times before someone had gently set her straight.

Caitlin’s mom had appeared at the top of the stairs. “Hello, Bashira.”

“Hi, Dr. Decter. Hope you don’t mind me stopping by. I brought Cait a present.”

Caitlin was torn. She looked up at her mom, wondering what to do about Webmind. But her mother said, “That’s fine, Bashira. Caitlin, don’t worry—I’ll, um, look after things up here.”

Caitlin smiled. “Okay.” She could have led Bashira into the living room, but her mother would have been able to hear them there; instead, they headed down to the basement. It wasn’t the most comfortable place—bare cement floor, bare walls with insulation showing, an old TV, a couple of worktables, and two comfortable swivel chairs her father had—ahem—borrowed from the Perimeter Institute. Kuroda had worked down here while he’d been staying with them.

Caitlin put the gift package on one of the tables.

“Go ahead,” Bashira said. “Open it.”

She did. It took several seconds for her to figure out what she was seeing: a boxed set of hardcovers of the Harry Potter novels. “These are,” Bashira announced, “like, the best books ever. You said you’d never read them, and now that you’re learning to read normal printed books, these are the ones to start with.” She pointed at the spine of the first one. “And these are the Canadian editions—none of that Sorcerer’s Stone crap for us.”

Caitlin hugged Bashira. “Thank you! But—but they must have cost a lot of money.”

“Hey,” said Bashira, sitting down on one of the swivel chairs, “your parents were paying me to help you get around school when you couldn’t see, you know. I’m sure your mom would be pleased that I’m stimulating the economy.”

Caitlin sat as well, facing her. She was still getting used to Bashira’s appearance. It was funny, she knew: she was looking at her as if Bash had been the one who’d changed. “So, is your dad at PI today, too?” Caitlin asked.

“Totally,” said Bashira. “He wouldn’t miss a moment with Professor Hawking.”

“Have you met him?”

“Oh, yeah.” She imitated his mechanical voice. “Even—people—who—claim—every thing—is—predestined—look—before—they—cross—the—road.”

“Cool!” said Caitlin. “I’d love to meet him.”

“Well, he’s here for a month; I’m sure you’ll get your chance. And, yes, my dear, ‘Caitlin Hawking’ does have a nice ring to it.”

“Har har,” said Caitlin. “He’s practically British royalty; he probably can’t marry outside the Anglican Church.”

Bash smiled. “I guess. You Christians all look alike to us.”

“I’m not Christian,” said Caitlin.

“You’re—you’re not? What are you?”

“Nothing, really.”

“Well, what are your parents?”

“My mom’s a Unitarian, and my dad’s a Jew.”

Bashira’s eyebrows shot up. “He is?” She’d heard that tone before: You’re Jewish? I mean, not that there’s anything wrong with that…

“Well, he doesn’t practice, and we don’t keep kosher.”

“But you’re Jewish?”

“Under Jewish law, you are what your mother is, but… yeah, sure. Decter is an Israeli name.”

“Oh. You always looked, I dunno, Polish or something to me. I thought your name was a shortening of something longer.”

“Well, it used to be Decterpithecus, but we changed that about five million years ago.”

Caitlin had hoped for a laugh, but Bashira’s tone was earnest. “And your mother’s a Unitarian?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Which is… what?”

Caitlin shrugged a little. “To tell you the truth, I don’t actually know. She doesn’t talk about it much. But I know it’s popular with academics and intellectuals.”

“And you—you said you’re ‘nothing.’ Don’t you believe in God?”

Caitlin shifted in her chair. “I’m not large on the big G, no.”

“I don’t know how you can’t believe in him,” Bash said. “I see him all around us, in a thousand details every day.”

She thought about that. There were things in math that she saw when others didn’t—things that were so very clear to her but that her classmates couldn’t see. Could God be like that? Could Bashira really be detecting something that, for whatever reason, Caitlin just wasn’t wired to see? Hell, for most of her life, she hadn’t been wired to see anything—but she’d had no trouble accepting that others did see; she never for a moment thought it was all some big con job, some lie or delusion. It never occurred to her to say to Stacy, “Oh, yeah, sure you see the moon, Stace. And can you see the monkeys flying out of my butt?”

But she knew in her bones that Bashira was wrong about this. And yet, Bash was bright, and so were her parents. “Does your dad believe in God?” Caitlin asked.

“Sure, of course. Prays facing Mecca five times a day.”

Caitlin still wasn’t good at mental pictures, but the thought of Dr. Hameed doing that at the Perimeter Institute did strike her as incongruous.

“In fact…” said Bashira, but then she stopped.

“Yes?”

Bashira tipped her head. “Well, we left Pakistan for a reason, you know. My dad worked for the government there.”

“A civil-servant physicist?” said Caitlin. “You mean he was at a public university?”

“No,” said Bashira softly. “The government. The military. He worked on nuclear weapons.”

Caitlin’s voice was suddenly soft, too. “Oh.”

“And he couldn’t keep doing that. The Qur’an says, ‘Fight in the Way of God against those who fight you, but do not go beyond the limits. God does not love those who go beyond the limits.’ ”

Caitlin considered this. “I’ve often thought that if the people with the highest IQs stopped doing what those with the lowest IQs wanted them to do, the world would be in a lot better shape. Nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, Zyklon B…” She paused, then said, “If God existed, we’d know it. But, instead, we have things like the Holocaust.”

Bashira made an expression Caitlin hadn’t yet seen on any other face—but she guessed it was what a person must look like when tiptoeing through a minefield. “But, Cait, God can’t interfere in Man’s doings; if he did, there’d be no such thing as free will, right?”

“There are times,” Caitlin said quietly, “when free will isn’t the most important thing.”

Bashira frowned but didn’t reply.

Caitlin took off her glasses; sometimes it was easier for her to think when everything was a blur instead of a distracting mess of visual details. “And,” she said, “even setting aside free will, what about natural disasters, then? Like earthquakes or hurricanes? Or that outbreak of bird flu in China? Those weren’t Man’s doing; they were God’s doing—or, at least, if he didn’t actively cause them, surely, if the God you’re talking about exists, he could have stopped them, right? But he didn’t. So… so… do you guys read Mark Twain here in Canada?”

“Not much,” said Bashira. “There’s this old Canadian humorist named Stephen Leacock. We read him in English class instead.”

In Caitlin’s admittedly brief experience living here, anyone labeled as “Canada’s answer to…” followed by the name of an American was bound to disappoint. “Well, Twain said, ‘If there is a God, he is a malign thug.’ That stuff in China—or New Orleans, or Mexico City, or…” And now she felt her facial muscles moving, and she imagined she’d adopted that tiptoeing look Bashira had had a moment ago. “…or in Pakistan.”

Bashira looked like she was about to object again, but Caitlin pushed on, finishing her point. “No, if God existed, we’d know it: the world would be a better place.”

But then she paused and took a breath. It was time, she knew, to shift the conversation to something less volatile. She gestured at the present Bashira had given her. “So, um, speaking of books, what do you think of that new one we just started in English class?”

“It’s okay, I guess,” Bash said.

Caitlin nodded and put her glasses back on; they weighed less than the sunglasses she’d worn when she’d been blind. She’d read electronic copies of all the assigned books for the coming year over the summer. The class was doing dystopias just now; Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four would be followed by Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Mrs. Zed had spent the whole class yesterday drawing parallels between what Orwell wrote about and the modern world, comparing Big Brother to our “surveillance society,” as she kept calling it.

“I thought Mrs. Zed made a good point,” Bashira continued, rotating her chair a little. “Everyone being watched all the time, everything being recorded and tracked. Webcams, security cameras, phone records, cell phones with GPSs, all of that.” She looked at Caitlin. “Did you know that Gmail retains your deleted email messages?”

Caitlin shook her head, but it didn’t surprise her. Storage was dirt cheap.

Bashira went on. “She might be right. The Web might be Big Brother incarnate.”

“Mrs. Zehetoffer is old,” Caitlin said.

Bashira nodded. “Yeah, she must be in her forties. But I still think she might be right. I don’t want everything I say and do to be tracked.”

“I don’t know,” said Caitlin. “When I was blind, it was comforting to know there were security cameras in public areas. I mean, they were like magic to me; I didn’t have any sense of what vision was, but knowing that I was being watched over was relaxing.”

“Yeah, but you are—you were—a special case. And Mrs. Zehetoffer thinks we’re very close to having Big Brother, if he isn’t here already.”

“So?” Caitlin said—and she surprised herself with how sarcastic she sounded.

“Hey, Cait… chill.”

“I’m just saying,” said Caitlin sharply.

“It’s just a book, babe.”

But it wasn’t, Caitlin realized. Nineteen Eighty-Four was not just a novel but rather what Richard Dawkins called a meme—or a series of memes: ideas that spread and survived like genes, through reproduction and natural selection. And Orwell’s meme that surveillance is evil, that it inevitably leads to totalitarianism, that it invades privacy, that it constrains normal behavior, and that it is fundamentally corrupt, had won out over every other possible take on those issues. It was impossible to discuss such matters without people almost immediately invoking Big Brother, confident that merely raising the specter of Orwell’s world would be enough to win any argument.

“Big Brother got a bum rap,” Caitlin said.

“What?”

“You know, I never had one—a big brother—but my friend Stacy does. And he always looks after her. There’s nothing inherently wrong with someone knowing everything, some caring person keeping tabs on you and making sure you’re safe.”

“But if he’s corrupt—”

“He doesn’t have to be corrupt,” Caitlin said.

Bashira looked at her. Caitlin supposed other people had always looked at her while thinking of what to say next, but it was disconcerting; she averted her eyes, understanding, for a moment, what her dad must feel all the time.

“ ‘Power corrupts,’ ” Bashira said gently. “ ‘And absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ ”

“It doesn’t have to turn out that way,” Caitlin said.

“Of course it does,” said Bashira. “Humans are imperfect and subject to corruption. The only thing that isn’t imperfect is the divine, and you said it yourself, my beloved infidel friend: you don’t believe in the divine.”