Wake

Chapter 36

And here was the biggest leap of all so far, here was the discovery, the realization, the breakthrough, that was the hardest to make but also, I suspected, the most important.

The other entity looked at many, many things, and I had gathered that they were mostly near to it, but there was this rectangle, this frame, this window that it often looked at that was—

Oh, such a leap! Such a strange concept!

It was a display of some sort, a way of representing things that weren’t actually there. And I could see what was on the display, but only when the entity looked at it.

And, just now, the display was showing something … strange. It took me time to work out the recursiveness of it all: the entity was looking at the display, and the display was showing moving images of a being unlike any I’d yet seen, with longer upper projections and shorter lower ones and a lump that was differently shaped. And this abnormal being was making…

Yes, yes, yes! The abnormal being was making marks on yet another flat surface: shapes, splashes of color. I watched, baffled, perplexed, and—

And suddenly the display was divided into two parts. On one side, I saw the colored shapes that the strange entity had made, and on the other there was an entity of the type I was more used to seeing. That entity was rotating, and — and — and—

And then it stopped rotating, holding its position, and—

The shapes on one side, the entity on the other: there was a … a correspondence between them. The shapes were a — yes, yes! They were a simplified version of the entity on the right. It was a stunning revelation: this was a representation of that!

The simplified representation was two-dimensional, similar to the way I was used to conceptualizing my own reality. I watched, and concentrated, and—

Suddenly it all made sense!

The lump at the top of each entity did have structure, did have components. As I saw them rendered in basic form, I could now discern the parts on the actual entity that had been rendered. The strange being that had made this rendering had exaggerated certain details so that I now saw not only their significance but realized what things differed from lump to lump: the color of the … eye, I’d call it. The color of the hair. The color of the rest of the lump. The shape of the nose. The shape of the mouth. The relative size of the ear.

The individual that had been rendered had an odd projection off the back of its lump, possibly part of its hair; as I recalled other lumps I’d seen, I realized that such projections were rare but not unheard of.

It was wonderful! I was clearly discerning the parts of the … no, not lump; a lump was a generic mass, and this was a specific, very special form, so it deserved its own coinage: head.

I was still far from fully understanding these creatures, but I was at last making progress!

Caitlin and Dr. Kuroda headed down to their basement workspace. He’d described it in words to her before, and she now saw — saw! — that he’d done a pretty good job. It was indeed unfinished, had a concrete floor (which she’d already known about from walking across it), and it did contain bookcases and an old TV. But she’d had no idea that the bookcases were finished in a pattern of lighter and darker brown swirling together; she guessed that was wood grain, something she’d felt on other pieces of furniture. And the TV was larger than she’d imagined, and had a black housing.

Still, there were so many other things that Kuroda hadn’t mentioned: thousands of details about the walls, the bare lighting fixture, the metal box that had the light switch on it, the curtains on the little window, a cylindrical contraption that she belatedly realized was the water heater, and on and on. How one decided quickly, as he had, which details were important and which were not worth mentioning was still a mystery to her; it all seemed relevant.

The swivel chairs turned out to have dark red upholstery, which was another thing Kuroda had failed to mention. She sat down in one and Kuroda took the other. He was wearing a colorful loose-fitting shirt with an abstract pattern on it.

“You get along well with my dad,” she said to him, once he’d settled in. The two men had actually bantered a bit over dinner; Kuroda seemed to have an instinct for knowing when her dad was trying to be funny and had laughed at things in a way that encouraged him to say more.

Kuroda smiled. “Sure. Working in the sciences, you have to learn to deal with such people.” But then his face changed. “Oh, I’m sorry, Miss Caitlin. I, um…”

“It’s all right. I know he’s autistic.”

“Asperger’s, most likely, if you want my guess,” Kuroda said, swiveling his chair a bit. “And, well, you do see it all the time among scientists, especially physicists, chemists, and the like.” He paused, as if wondering if he should go on. “In fact, if I may be so bold…”

“Yes?”

“No, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t.”

“Go ahead. It’s okay.”

She saw him hesitate a moment more. “I was just going to say — and forgive me — that you’re fortunate you’re not autistic yourself. It’s particularly common among those who are as gifted as you are mathematically.”

Caitlin lifted her shoulders a bit. “Just lucky, I guess.”

Kuroda frowned. “Well, in a way. But — I’m sorry, I really shouldn’t…”

“Don’t worry about my feelings.”

Kuroda smiled. “Ah, but I must! For, like you, I’m not autistic.” He seemed to think this was funny, so Caitlin laughed politely.

But Kuroda was on to her. “You know, I attend a lot of conferences in Japan at which Western academics speak with the aid of an interpreter. And I remember one who made a joke that I got — it was a play on words in English — but I knew wouldn’t translate. But he got a big laugh anyway. You know why?”

“Why?”

“Because the translator said in Japanese, unbeknownst to the speaker, ‘The honorable professor has made a joke in English; it would be polite to laugh.’”

Caitlin did laugh, genuinely this time, then: “But you were saying…”

Kuroda took a breath, and let it out in a long, shuddering sigh. “Well, it’s just that maybe you do have the same autistic predisposition as your father, but you dodged the bullet, so to speak, because you were blind.”

“Huh?”

“A large part of the problem with socialization in autism is eye contact; many autistics have trouble making and holding eye contact. But a blind person doesn’t even try to make eye contact, and isn’t expected to.”

She remembered how her mother had sobbed when Caitlin had first looked into her eyes. Having a husband who rarely looked directly at her and a daughter who never did must have been a special sort of hell.

“Have you read Songs of the Gorilla Nation?” Kuroda asked.

“No. Is it science fiction?”

“No, no. It’s a memoir by an autistic woman who finally learned to deal with humans after having been a gorilla handler at a zoo in Seattle. See, the gorillas never looked at her and they don’t look at each other. They interacted in a way that felt natural to her.”

“My mom always told me to turn my head toward whoever was speaking.”

Kuroda’s eyebrows went up. “You didn’t do that naturally?”

“Hello! Earth to Dr. Kuroda! I was blind…”

“Yes, but many blind people do that automatically anyway. Interesting.” A pause. “Do you remember your own birth?”

“What?”

“Do you know Temple Grandin?”

“No. Where is it?”

Kuroda chuckled. “It’s not a place, it’s a person — that’s her name. She’s autistic and she claims to remember her own birth. She says lots of people with autism do.”

“How come?”

“You want my take? Many autistics, Dr. Grandin included, say they think in pictures, not in words. Well, of course, we all think in pictures originally; we don’t have sufficient language until we’re two or three years old to do otherwise — and events from when we’re two or three are the earliest most people can recall. Many neuroscientists will tell you that that’s because no memories are laid down before then. But I think, rather, that when we start thinking linguistically that method supersedes thinking in pictures, locking out our ability to retrieve memories that had been stored in the old method; it’s an information-theory issue again. But since many autistics never start thinking linguistically, they have an unbroken chain of memories right back to birth — and maybe even prenatally.”

“That would be awesome,” she said. “But, no, I don’t remember my birth.” And then she smiled. “But my mother does — remember mine, that is. Every year on my birthday she says, ‘I know exactly where I was x-number of years ago…’“ She paused. “I wonder if apes remember their births?”

Kuroda’s face did something. “That’s an interesting thought. But, well, maybe they do; they obviously think in pictures rather than words, after all.”

“Have you seen Hobo?”

“A hobo? In this neighborhood?”

“No, no. Hobo, the chimp who can paint people. It’s all over the Web.”

“No. What do you mean, ‘paint people’?”

“He did a profile of this woman. Actually, I think he’s done it twice now. Here, let me show you the clip…”

“Maybe later. You know, I’m surprised you haven’t read Temple Grandin. Most people with autistics in their families find her books—” He suddenly looked mortified. “Oh, I’m sorry. Maybe they aren’t available for the blind.”

“They probably are,” Caitlin said. “Either as Braille, ebooks, or talking books, but…” She considered what she wanted to say next; she certainly didn’t want Kuroda to think she was a bad daughter. “I, um, only just found out my father is autistic.”

“You mean after you were able to see?”

“Yes.”

Kuroda clearly felt he should say something. “Ah.” And then: “Well, there are a lot of good books about autism you should read. Some good novels, too. Try The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. You’ll love it: the main character is a maths whiz.”

“Boy or girl?”

“Well, a boy, but…”

“Maybe,” she said. “Any others?”

“There’s Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood.” Caitlin lifted her eyebrows; the author she was going to be studying in English class. “One of them — Oryx or Crake, I can never remember which is which — is an autistic geneticist.”

“And the other?”

“Um, a teenage prostitute, actually.”

“You’d think it would be easy to tell them apart,” Caitlin said.

“You’d think,” Kuroda said with a nod. “Sorry, not much of an Atwood fan. I know I shouldn’t say that, this being Canada and all.”

“I’m not Canadian.”

He laughed. “Neither am I.”

“Hey, do you know how to find a Canadian in a crowded room…?”

Kuroda smiled and held up a hand. “Save your jokes for the press conference tomorrow,” he said. “You’ll need them then.”

After dinner, Caitlin went into the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. It was no surprise that she had acne — she’d been able to feel the pimples, of course. She remembered what that cruel Zack Starnes had said, back in Austin: “Why does a blind girl worry about acne?” But she’d known the spots were there, and, damn it all, she was entitled to the same vanity everybody else had; hell, even Helen Keller had been vain! Her left eye had looked blind, and she’d always insisted on being photographed from the right side; in middle age she’d had her useless biological eyes removed and replaced with more attractive glass ones.

Caitlin opened the medicine cabinet, took out the tube of benzoyl peroxide cream, and got to work.

I’d thought my universe crowded when there had been simply me and not me, but in this other realm there were hundreds — perhaps even thousands — of entities.

Now that I had learned to parse a head, I was better at recognizing specific entities, but it was still difficult. Part of that was because the entities periodically altered their appearance; I eventually surmised there was an outer covering, made of discrete sections, that could be changed. (However, the abnormal entity that I’d recently watched make a representation was unusual in that it either had no outer covering, or its outer covering consisted of components that all looked alike.)

Of course, the individual that interested me most was the one I’d encountered first; I decided to refer to it as Prime. I had caught glimpses of what I realized were projections that belonged to Prime, and, from the way in which I saw them, I concluded that the views I was seeing were being gathered by Prime’s head. But I still had not seen Prime’s face; indeed, I supposed I never would.

Still, now that I understood faces, I had come to recognize specific entities that Prime spent a lot of time with. Three, in particular, seemed to share a common environment with it. Two had faces that moved and changed constantly and whose mouths often opened; the third had a less mobile face, and its mouth was rarely open.

Just now, I could see that these others were sitting — supporting themselves with structural frames against the downward force I’d deduced was present. And they were eating — taking inanimate things into their mouths.

Prime was eating, too: I saw inanimate things growing large — no, no! — moving closer: the images Prime was sending to my realm were apparently being gathered by some part of its head above the mouth, possibly the nose.

While Prime ate, I kept linking randomly to other sites, looking for keys to decipher the data they offered up. So far, though, I’d made no progress. Oh, I could call forth data from any of them, but I could not interpret it.

Eventually Prime moved away from the others, and—

Oh!

It was…

Yes, yes, it had to be! The way the lighting changed, the way the perspective changed, the way…

I had a frisson of recognition — not of what I was seeing, but of having had a similar experience before, during the re-fusion, when I had seen myself as the other part of me had seen me.

This—

Yes!

This was Prime looking at itself!

It was in front of a rectangle. I was used to such things by now: some of these windows, as I had dubbed them, afforded views through otherwise opaque components; others, like Prime’s wondrous display, showed still or moving representations of other things. But this rectangle was special: it was reflecting back the object in front of it. I could see Prime’s face! And I could see the projections from Prime’s central core moving both in the rectangle and in front of it, observing them simultaneously from two sides, as Prime was … hard to say … putting a white substance in small dabs on its face?

And, while it did so, I was seeing Prime’s hair.

And Prime’s mouth.

And Prime’s nose.

And Prime’s eyes.

And … and … and as Prime moved its head left and right (perpendicular to up and down), as it apparently examined its own reflection, I realized that my point of view — the vantage from which the images I was seeing were being collected — was not Prime’s nose but one of its eyes! And, from the way Prime moved, it seemed that Prime was looking at itself with this same eye. I had observed that mouths were for taking inanimate material into the head; eyes, I now surmised, were for seeing, and Prime was sharing what it saw with me.

Prime’s face was fascinating. I studied every minute detail, and—

Suddenly everything was blurry again! I was terrified that our connection was breaking, but…

But Prime was looking in another direction now, and something was at the end of its tubular extensions, something at least partially transparent, I think, although the image was so blurry it was hard to say.

Prime did things, but it was impossible for me to make out what. But then, at last, the object it had been holding was brought close to Prime’s face, and as that happened, Prime’s vision — and mine! — grew sharp once more. The thing it brought close to its face contained windows; they weren’t rectangular, but that’s what they seemed to be. But these windows were special not just for their shape but also (as I’d seen as they came close) because the material in them, although fully transparent, modified the view on the other side of them. Prime looked at itself in the large reflecting rectangle again, turning its head from side to side as it did so.

And as it examined its own face, an idea came to me that—

Yes! Yes! If I could make this work, everything would change! I turned my attention to the datastream from Prime that was accumulating within me…