Instantiation

by Greg Egan

  She put on a plastic suit, gloves, cap and booties, then approached the front door with her notepad in her hand, displaying the path for her to follow.

  The door had been left open, wide enough that Kate didn’t need to touch it. She glanced back and saw a smear of blood on the inside handle. She walked straight down the entrance hall, past the living room, and turned into the kitchen. There were four drawers and three cabinets that the swarm had been unable to infiltrate, and one of the cabinets contained an assortment of over-the-counter painkillers, laxatives, antacids and allergy treatments. But there was no prescription medication, let alone antipsychotics.

  She followed the path through to the bathroom, but the one unexamined cabinet there held nothing but cosmetics, shampoo and shaving cream.

  Suddenly, she heard something slam against the back door of the house, and a dog began barking and whining. Kate spoke into her notepad. “Tim?”

  “Yeah?”

  “There’s a dog out back, going crazy. What’s the best thing I can do?” The drones hadn’t scanned the back yard yet.

  “If you think you can calm it down without letting it into the house, that would be better than having it tearing up the lawn.”

  “Okay.”

  Kate followed her new route on the schematic, walking through the laundry and up to the back door. It needed no key to open from the inside; she unlatched it, and positioned her body to block access as she came out.

  The dog was a golden retriever, waist-high to her. It barked loudly but didn’t attack. As she emerged, closing the door behind her, it started running in circles, making a pitiful sound.

  Kate squatted down, put her notepad on the ground and held out her hands. “Shh. Come here, it’s all right!”

  The dog approached her, wagging its tail and barking. “It’s all right!” Kate repeated soothingly. The dog was wearing a collar; if she could get hold of it, she was fairly sure she could keep the animal still. “Come here!” She took off her gloves and cap and stuffed them down the front of her suit, hoping she’d look more like a human.

  The dog came right up to her and pressed its head against the side of her body, whimpering. “Shh.” She stroked its head and got her hand around the collar. It struggled for a moment, but then gave up and sat, resting its head on her knee.

  Kate was about to call the local animal shelter, but then she had another idea. “Tim?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you ask Diane Grimes if she wants to take the dog for a while?”

  “Will do.”

  Kate looked out across the yard; there was a swing set, an above-ground swimming pool, and in the rear, a veritable forest of fig trees, like some enchanted grove out of a fairy tale. The girls would have been in heaven here.

  She started weeping silently. The dog tried to pull away, then changed its mind and jumped up, licking her face. Kate tugged on the collar and dragged it back down, then got herself under control.

  Tim said, “Yeah, she’ll take it. Bring it round through the side gate on your right, over the concrete path. That’ll do the least damage.”

  2

  As Kate pulled into the driveway, she heard Reza enunciating excitedly, “Look who’s home! Look who’s home! Look. Who. Is. Home!”

  Before she’d opened the car door, he came out onto the porch with Michael, who was peering toward her, unfocused but tentatively smiling. “Say khosh amadi, maamaan!” Reza urged him. “Welcome to our house.”

  Kate said, “Now you’re just being sarcastic.”

  Reza grinned. “Sorry.” Kate kissed him then took Michael in her arms; he flapped his own arms excitedly, then beamed at her and started babbling.

  “Someone still appreciates me.” Kate kissed her son’s cheek three times, as noisily as she could, and Reza held the door open for her as she walked into the hall.

  “Do you want me to take him for a bit while you unwind?” Reza asked her.

  “No, I’m fine.”

  “Okay, I’ll start cooking.”

  Kate sat in the kitchen, gazing into Michael’s face, engrossed by his responses to her monolog of flattering rhetorical questions. “Who is the most beautiful boy? Can you guess who that is?” Sometimes her words seemed to amuse him, sometimes he frowned in puzzlement. But so long as he was content, watching him was like floating in a warm, tranquil pool – and with the scent of herbs frying and the sound of the gentle sizzling of oil, she felt as if she’d been transported into some otherworldly paradise, as remote from the place she’d just left as waking life from a dream.

  After a while, Michael closed his eyes, but Kate let him sleep in her arms until dinner was ready, then she put him down in his cot and joined Reza to eat.

  “I’m glad you could get home before he slept,” Reza said. “Have things quietened down at all?”

  “Yes, though not in a good way. We still haven’t found the missing woman.” Kate didn’t want to talk about the case, or even think about it for the next twelve hours if she could help it. “How was the bundle of joy today?” she asked.

  “Joyous as ever. I think it’s going to take some serious teething before he can be bothered losing his cool.”

  “I don’t know where he gets that equanimity from,” Kate marveled.

  Reza frowned. “There’s only one possibility, surely?”

  Kate wiped her plate clean with the last piece of bread and leaned back in her chair. “That was delicious. Thank you.”

  “Noosheh jaan.” Reza stood up and took her plate, then bent down to kiss her forehead. “I’ve got a favor to ask you.”

  “Sure.”

  “Do you mind if I visit my father tonight?”

  “Of course not.” In truth, Kate had been hoping she could fall asleep on the couch beside him, watching something light-hearted and distracting, but Reza had been stuck in the house for the last six days, and he hadn’t seen his father for a fortnight. “When do visiting hours finish?”

  “Nine.”

  Kate glanced at the clock. “You’d better go right now. I’ll clean up here.”

  He kissed her again, put her plate in the sink, picked up his keys and headed out the door.

  When his car had gone, Kate sat for a while in the silence, then got up and made herself busy with the dishes. When she’d finished, she went to the living room and flicked through the TV’s menu, but none of the sitcoms did it for her when she watched them alone.

  She walked down the hall into Michael’s room, and gazed down at his sleeping form, barely visible in the faint light that came through the curtains from the street lamps. If anyone laid a finger on you, she thought. Anyone. She could feel her heart beating faster. She tried to calm herself, stepping back and scrutinizing her own hyper-vigilance. She had no reason to think that her son was in any danger at all.

  But she stayed in the room, watching over him, until she saw the headlights coming into the driveway.

  Reza didn’t seem to be in a mood to talk, but when they were in bed Kate worked up the courage to ask gently, “How was he?”

  “He thought I was his brother,” Reza replied. “He thought I was Amir.”

  Kate tried to make light of it. “I don’t think you look much like your uncle.”

  Reza smiled. “He had a lot more hair when he was my age. And a different hairstyle every month. One of them must have been a match.”

  “Was he happy to see you anyway?” Kate asked. She knew that Hassan and Amir had been close; better a visit from his brother than from a total stranger.

  “He was happy to have Amir to talk to, but not so happy about where they must have been.”

  “Back in Isfahan?”

  Reza shook his head. “He thinks he’s in immigration detention. Why else would he be locked up by people speaking English?”

  “Jesus. I hope the staff there are nothing like those pricks.” Kate’s most enduring memory of all the stories she’d heard from Hassan had been the time some fresh-faced girl from Port Augusta – proba
bly nineteen or twenty, knowing nothing of life, puffed up with self-importance by her uniform – had told this man who’d seen his parents executed by the mullahs, and who’d spent four years imprisoned in various corners of the Australian desert, that because he was on hunger strike he would be treated like a child, and denied such extravagant privileges as phone calls and visitors, until he learned to grow up.

  “They do their best,” Reza said. “And I don’t think he thinks that all the time.”

  Kate took his hand and squeezed it.

  “I just need to show a makeup artist photos of my grandfather,” Reza mused. “With a few wigs and costumes and the right soundtrack, I bet I could take him back to the days before Khomeini.”

  Kate laughed softly. Then she said, “What if you brought him here?”

  Reza was silent for a while; he must have thought about it many times, but he’d never broached it with her. “It wouldn’t work,” he said finally. “Watching him and Michael at the same time would be impossible.”

  “Okay.” Kate felt a twinge of guilt; she’d only dared ask because she was almost certain of the answer. “But maybe you can talk to the doctor about the best way to make him feel…” She groped for the right word; how could he feel free, when he really couldn’t walk out the door? “Normal.”

  “Yeah. I’ll phone her in the morning.”

  Kate switched off the bedside lamp and lay in the dark. The money they were paying for the nursing home would be enough to pay for some part-time home care; Reza wouldn’t have had to handle everything alone. But she could not have her father-in-law living in the same house as Michael. Nothing she’d seen or heard had ever made her think that he would harbor the slightest ill will for any child, whether or not he was capable of understanding that the boy was his grandson. But once someone lost their grip on reality, it wasn’t safe to make any assumptions at all about what they might do.

  3

  Kate was dragged out of sleep by her phone buzzing, with a tone indicating the kind of alert that wouldn’t leave her in peace until she responded with a suitably lucid acknowledgment. She picked the thing up off the table by the bed and peered at the screen.

  “Copy that,” she intoned hoarsely. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  “What is it?” Reza asked. He sounded more awake than she was.

  “They found the car.”

  When Kate arrived at the riverbank, the tow-truck was still getting into position. Natalie’s station wagon had veered off this quiet road at a point where there were no real barriers between asphalt and water. It had left a trail of minor damage in the grass and reeds; to any passing motorist who’d given it a second thought, it probably looked no more suspicious than someone having tried to use the grass to make a U-turn. But tonight, an ER nurse on her way home from her shift had seen moonlight glinting off the metal bobbing in the reeds, and slowed down to take a closer look.

  The water where the car had ended up wasn’t deep; the two traffic cops who’d come to investigate had reached it in waders. Kate was still waiting for Roma Street to authorize divers, but she doubted they’d find anything. If Natalie had been able to get out of the submerged car at all, she would not have required any superhuman abilities to make it back to the riverbank. This looked more like an attempt to hide the vehicle than an attempt at suicide. If she’d been overcome by remorse, she would have driven off a bridge.

  Kate stood and waited while the traffic cops and the tow-truck operator hooked up the winch and dragged the station wagon out of the water and up onto the back of the truck. Then the truck got bogged in the mud, so they had to put boards under the wheels to free it. By the time the truck was able to maneuver itself back onto solid ground, Kate had lost patience. She put on a pair of gloves and climbed up beside the station wagon, flashlight in hand.

  All the doors were closed, and all the windows open; Natalie might well have been able to squeeze through a window, conscious and unharmed, but it seemed unlikely that her body had just floated out. The interior was full of silty water and vegetation, and anything not fixed that had been on the seats or the dashboard would either be buried in that muck or left behind in the river. Kate reached in and opened the glovebox, which discharged a stream of water carrying a pair of plastic sunglasses and a chapstick. She groped below the dashboard for the manual release for the hood, fought with it against the sludge and grit that was blocking the mechanism, then finally heard a satisfying click.

  When she walked around to the front of the car and peered in, she saw the black box, still intact. The data recorders were meant to be robust enough to survive battery fires, so a few days of immersion would be nothing. She turned and called out to the traffic cops, “Have you got an interface cable?”

  “We should wait until we get to the compound, Sarge,” the older of the two replied.

  “Do you have the cable or not?”

  He stared back at her for a moment, then walked over to his car. Kate jumped down and went to fetch her notepad.

  The data only took a few seconds to transfer, but it was encrypted; Kate sat in her car and fought her way through the process of persuading the manufacturer to send her the key. A magistrate had authorized the decryption on the day the car went missing, and she had a digital certificate attesting to that fact, but it still took three attempts to convince the Toyota web site that she wasn’t a bot or a hacker.

  She started with the plunge into the river. Natalie had shut off the driver supervision features ten minutes before, and while the car’s software fell somewhat short of psychiatric qualifications, up to that point it had not assessed her as being affected by any drug or medical condition: she had not been swerving erratically, or shouting obscenities, or nodding off behind the wheel. The manual override had amounted to telling the car not to trust any of its own systems from then on, so while the black box had dutifully logged her GPS coordinates as she steered off the road, the car itself had become agnostic about the wisdom of this behavior. For all it knew, the driver might have had an honest reason to believe that the car’s sensors were broken and it was liable to kill someone if it didn’t butt out and let a human take over completely.

  But the GPS trace was enough to show that Natalie hadn’t been driving terribly fast at any point. She’d sped up enough to ensure that her momentum would take her over the riverbank and into the water, but she hadn’t slammed her foot down and accelerated wildly, rushing toward oblivion. When the car came to a stop in the water, it hadn’t even triggered the airbags.

  Kate went back to the morning of the killings and followed the car away from the scene. At first, Natalie seemed to be heading straight for her mother’s house, but when she came within a few blocks of it, she changed her mind. She’d turned around and started driving toward her friend Mina’s apartment, only to back out again. Then her brother’s house. Then two other friends. She’d had no phone with her, and all of these people had claimed that they’d heard nothing from Natalie on that day, or since. But apparently, every time she’d made a plan to seek help, she’d given up on the idea without waiting to be rebuffed.

  Kate could understand a woman who’d killed her family in a psychotic fugue snapping out of it and turning in desperation to her mother, only to decide at the last minute that she had no hope of being treated with anything but revulsion. But why would she then imagine that a whole succession of other people might be more forgiving, only to abandon that hope each time it was about to be tested?

  After all the aborted journeys toward familiar faces, Natalie had driven to a shopping mall, far from her own home, and the car had remained parked there for almost three hours. That seemed like a long time to spend gathering provisions for a dash out of town – which she’d turned out to have no intention of doing, unless she’d somehow procured access to another vehicle. She’d taken her bank cards when she fled from the house, but hadn’t used them anywhere; whatever she’d bought in the mall, she must have paid for it with the remnants of her las
t cash withdrawal of three hundred dollars, from a few days before.

  When she left the mall, she’d driven around the city in a wide arc until evening, as if she were simply killing time. She’d stopped at a fast food strip around nine o’clock, and then headed for the river to ditch the car.

  Kate heard birdsong and looked away from her notepad; it was almost dawn. She checked the status of her request for divers; it had been flagged as “on hold” until a forensics team had examined the car itself.

  She sent Reza a message to tell him she wouldn’t be home, then drove off in search of a diner where she could grab breakfast and use the restroom. In the mirror, she looked puffy-eyed and disheveled; she took off her shirt and washed under her arms. Natalie must have been in a much worse state when she waded out of the river, but maybe she’d been carrying a change of clothes in a plastic bag. After six days, three with rain, it was too late to send in dogs to try to pick up her scent from the riverbank.

  Kate sat in a booth in the diner drinking coffee until it was almost seven o’clock, then she drove to the shopping mall where Natalie had parked for three hours. The security cameras covered the whole parking lot, and it wasn’t hard to find the moment in the recordings when Natalie drove in, but when she left the car, carrying two large, empty shopping bags, she walked away, out onto the street. Kate went through all the footage of the pedestrian entrances, but Natalie hadn’t doubled back. Whatever she’d bought in that time, she’d bought somewhere else. There were hundreds of small, free-standing shops within an hour’s walk of the mall.