“Well,” said Director Gavere, “I am sure Epco chose the person most capable of carrying it out, and we are very glad to have you. You’ll have my support, whatever you decide. Just move it along as fast as you can.”
After the meeting, Sara paused in an empty hallway, overwhelmed by the enormity of the trouble she was in. Whatever went wrong, it was going to be blamed on her. And this mission was guaranteed to go wrong.
The truth was, it was already too late for Sri Paul’s concerns. First Contacts were like particle physics: the act of observing changed the thing observed. The explorers’ first step—revealing themselves—forever altered the people they had come to study.
Sara had no ideological qualms about changing other cultures—that was inevitable, and no people wanted to be frozen like flies in amber. Sara had always thought of herself as a prospector, but not for crude resources like minerals or water, which were untransportable anyway. Exoethnologists were after cultural resources—new knowledge and new ideas, the ultimate source of all profit. They took advantage of the fact that, in both biology and culture, isolation created diversity. In a closed information system, divergence took place, and the more different the system became, the more valuable it was. But when the isolation was broken, cultures were like thermodynamic systems—uniformity quickly resulted. There was always a short window of opportunity to document and save the precious information before it was hopelessly contaminated by adaptation. Biologists’ window of opportunity was longer. Culture could change with blinding rapidity.
Iris was more isolated, more different, than any planet yet discovered, and its cultural treasures might be incalculable. Yet Sara would have to resign herself to seeing them lost before her eyes, simply for lack of resources to record it all.
As she approached the clinic, where Moth had spent the night sleeping off the effects of the stun gun, Sara passed two guards dressed in maroon-and-gray Epco uniforms. The first one stared through her as if she were not there. She tested the atmosphere by greeting the second one civilly; he scowled and nodded with a chopping motion of his chin. There was a pugnacious taint in the air.
When she entered the clinic, she found Moth enthroned in an examination chair, wearing a helmet that was scanning her brain activity. “Moth, you gave consent for this, didn’t you?” she exclaimed in alarm.
“Oh, aye!” Moth said brightly. “’Tis right curious.”
“Please give me some credit, Callicot,” David said.
“Sorry, I’ve been talking to ethical Neanderthals.”
Moth’s brain activity was displayed in bright colors in a three-dimensional vitrine. “See anything interesting?” David said.
“Not my field,” Sara admitted.
David rotated the image so the back of Moth’s brain was displayed. “The visual cortex,” he said. “In our brains, it’s what processes visual information.”
It was lit up like a patchwork quilt. “Does that mean it’s active?” Sara said.
“Yes, she’s doing something with that part of her brain; who knows what.”
“Have you checked out her eyes?”
“Yes. I’m no ophthalmologist, but I can’t see anything wrong, and neither can my diagnostic devices. You can help me by watching this display. Tell me if it changes.” He took a light pen and shone it in Moth’s eyes, moving it slowly back and forth. “Moth, tell me if you see anything,” he said.
She didn’t answer, but Sara saw a change in the display of her visual cortex. There was a pattern of activity as if something were moving back and forth across the surface of her brain.
“I’ll be damned,” David said when Sara pointed it out.
“Is that the image of the light pen, projected on her brain?” Sara asked.
“Yes. The input from the retina goes by optic nerve to the thalamus, and then it gets mapped onto the visual cortex, just like a screen. That’s how a headset works. It records the patterns of one person’s visual cortex, and then replicates them in another person’s, by exciting the neurons in the same patterns. Our brains then interpret it as sight.”
“How could the input be getting to her visual cortex, but she still can’t see?”
“It must be a processing problem. The raw visual input goes through a lot of editing and interpretation before we become aware of it. I expect you don’t notice that the image of the world is inverted on your visual cortex, just like a pinhole camera. And you don’t notice that there’s a big blind spot in your visual field where the optic nerve attaches to the retina. Or that your eyes actually move in saccades about four times a second. Our brains edit all that out. We just don’t see it.”
“So you think maybe her brain is editing out too much?”
“Could be. It could also be something like attentional blindness. To see something, you have to be aware of it. When people are paying attention to something else, their brains edit out distractions right in front of them.”
Sara turned to Moth, who was listening. “Moth, look again and tell us if you notice anything.”
David moved the light back and forth in front of her. For a while she didn’t react. At last she said, in a puzzled voice, “Dost thou mean the blotches?”
“Maybe. What do the blotches look—seem—like?”
“Like vapors, unrealities. They come only when I’m not trying to think. They are like unto noise that meaneth naught.”
“All right, concentrate on the blotches, and describe them.”
“Nay, they go awry if I concentrate.”
“Then just relax. See if you can notice anything.”
For a long time nothing happened. Sara had just about given up when she noticed that Moth’s hand was moving back and forth in time with David’s. She gripped David’s shoulder and pointed. “You’re seeing it, Moth!” she exclaimed.
“Nay. Nay, I’m not,” the girl protested.
“You were moving your hand!”
“Oh. ’Twas but a rhythm I thought I heard.”
Sara and David looked at each other. “That is fascinating,” David said. “She was seeing it, but her brain interpreted it as auditory input, not visual.”
An idea came to Sara. “David, you said the headset recorded the patterns of the visual cortex. If we recorded hers, couldn’t one of us experience what she is seeing?”
David looked disturbed. “That’s an ethically slippery idea, Callicot. There is no way she could give informed consent.”
“Oh. Right.” Sara felt embarrassed at her lapse.
“Sorry. I don’t mean to be a prig,” David said.
“No, you’re right. We’ve got to watch each other’s backs.”
She realized now that while David had been absorbed in the experiment, his whole demeanor had changed. He was one of the most urbane men she had ever met outside a city, but his sarcastic wit hid a weariness of spirit. That had vanished when an idea had captured him, and he had become like a boy. Now that he was self-conscious again, it came back. She wondered briefly why he had come on this expedition.
Moth, who had been waiting patiently while they discussed her, finally interrupted. “Well, what say you? Am I worthy of sight?”
“Oh, you’re worthy, Moth,” Sara said, squeezing her arm. “We just can’t figure out why you can’t see now. There’s nothing preventing you. It’s like you never learned.”
“But I could learn now?” she said eagerly.
Sara looked at David. “I don’t know,” he said. “It sure would be interesting to try.”
“Someday, maybe,” Sara said, remembering her own obligations. “First, we have to get you back to Torobe, Moth.”
“Why?” she said, disappointed.
“Your family will be worried about you.”
“Nay, not them. Hanna knows I go a-wending. I would stay here and receive thy teachings.”
There was nothing Sara wanted more than to have some time to learn about Moth’s culture before diving into it. “Well, maybe just a little while,” she said.
* * *
She appropriated a suite of empty rooms next to the clinic for Moth and herself to move into. “It’s meant for chronic patients,” David told her, “but the two of you are as chronic as I’ve got now.”
“Perfect! An Irisian embassy,” Sara said.
And so she started calling it the Embassy. Four bedrooms opened onto a combined dining and lounge area. To Sara, it looked gray and sterile, but when Moth entered, it was transformed from drab to miraculous.
Sara watched Moth explore her new domain. She moved hesitantly at first, but as her confidence grew she adopted a gliding gait that made every gesture a dance. The kitchen fixtures, those marvels of Capellan technology, held no interest for her; it was the walls that drew her attention. She ran her hands across them, following them all around the perimeter of the room, then around the doorway into the next room. “They go on and on!” she marveled.
“Don’t your houses have walls?” Sara asked.
“Nay, not like unto this. At home, the world is all of a piece. Thy world is all divided up into bits.” Sympathetically, she added, “Dost thou not know how to be rid of them?”
“The walls? We don’t want to be rid of them. They give us privacy. Without them, we’d be all heaped in together.”
“Would that be an ill shift?”
“We would have to look at … hear every word everyone else was saying,” Sara said.
Moth frowned a little, troubled by some thought. Sara asked, “What is it?”
“Dost thou not wish to be with thy husband, Sara?”
“What, you mean David? He’s not my husband.”
“Why not? He seems a goodly man.”
“He’s very goodly. But we are colleagues, that is all.”
If the walls had been amazing, the bathroom was a source of endless delight. Moth loved the cool texture of the ceramic, and startled herself into a gale of giggles by turning on the spigot. Since she was conspicuously grubby, Sara suggested an adventure with the bathtub. Without the slightest hesitation, Moth stripped off her clothes, and Sara surreptitiously bagged them to send to the lab for analysis. She explained the various dispensers of soaps and shampoos, and left Moth to her discoveries. Half an hour later, the girl emerged into the common room, glowingly clean and perfectly naked. Sara headed her off into one of the bedrooms, and said, “When you come out where others might see you, you must always wear clothes.”
“Why?” she said.
“Because it’s our custom not to look at each other naked.”
“Oh. Are the workings of thy eyes harmful?”
“No, nothing like that. It just offends people.”
Moth seemed mystified, but Sara didn’t want to get into a discussion of nudity mores just then. She dug out a stretch suit with an Epco logo for the girl to wear. But when she tried to offer slippers, Moth refused. “How should my feet know where they are, if I wrap them in casings?” she argued.
“But what do you do on the plan—in your home? The grass is like razors there.”
“Only the mad go into the grass,” Moth said.
She was surprisingly dexterous at avoiding obstacles. When Sara saw her avoid a door she had been about to smack into, she asked how Moth had known it was there.
“I felt it on my face,” she said.
“What did it feel like?”
“A stillness.”
Later, when Sara mentioned this talent to David, he theorized that she might have some sort of echolocation sense. But when they tested her, they found that her obstacle-detector only worked on massive objects that came near her face. She was still quite capable of tripping over a low table. Sara was actually disappointed when David did some research and found the phenomenon had once been well documented, and called “facial seeing.”
Moth’s hearing turned out to be only marginally more acute than a sighted person’s. She could hear a slightly larger range of frequencies, and distinguish smaller variations in frequency, but the differences were not significant.
“Her hearing seems more acute than mine,” Sara told David on the second day. “She sometimes calls a sound to my attention that I didn’t hear.”
“It may be a matter of skill, not ability,” David suggested. “She notices more. She can make more sense of what she hears than we do, because her attention’s not divided.”
What Moth could not learn was navigation. Even in the small complex of rooms that comprised the Embassy and the clinic, she was continually lost.
“A murrain on thy walls!” she exclaimed. “Why dost thou bear with them?”
“What is your village like?” Sara probed.
“In Torobe, all is texture and detail,” she said. “In thy cavern, all ways are alike. Thy floors do not talk to my feet, and there are no songs in the paths. Thy habitude is ugly.” She stopped herself, and was about to apologize, but Sara laughed.
“Yes, compared with your planet, our habitude is very ugly.” But she knew they meant different things, because all her own concepts of beauty were visual. There was a fundamental wall at the very core of their experience. Sara could never know what Moth meant by a simple word like “ugly.”
“How did thy people find this place?” Moth asked.
“We didn’t find it, we built it.” Seeing Moth’s speechless amazement, she added, “Or rather, our ancestors built it, and sent it away to journey out here. When it found your planet, it called us and we came out to live in it.” Even in her own ears, this explanation sounded bizarre.
“You are very clever folk,” Moth said thoughtfully.
* * *
It was two days before Sara had a chance to take a break. When she finally strolled down the hallway away from the Embassy, she was startled to come upon a security checkpoint staffed by a beefy guard of ambiguous sexual identity, named Sal, who looked strong enough to snap Sara’s neck. “Name?” she demanded as Sara came up, though she surely knew it already.
“What is going on here?” Sara said. Beyond the checkpoint, two uniformed guards were installing a surveillance camera trained on the hallway.
“Just give your name,” Sal advised, consulting a checklist.
“No. I demand to see your boss.”
Sal spoke into her radio, and Atlabatlow arrived so promptly that Sara wondered if he had been lurking nearby in hope of a confrontation.
“This is sheer intimidation,” Sara said hotly.
“We are taking necessary precautions,” he said in a voice that would have stopped glaciers in their tracks.
“Precautions against what? A little blind girl? Does she really scare you so badly?”
The taunt only tightened his control. “We have no idea what abilities she may have. Everything we learn about her makes that clear. Her visual cortex is doing something unknown, her attentional blindness means she is concentrating on something we can’t imagine.”
“You’ve been watching us?” Sara said, feeling her privacy violated.
“You should have expected that,” he said.
“I didn’t know I was under surveillance. I thought we had rights. The right to consent.”
“You didn’t hesitate to propose invading someone else’s mind by headset.”
Stung, Sara said, “But I didn’t do it!”
“Didn’t you?”
He was staring as if to burn her to cinders on the spot. She realized he wasn’t talking about Moth; he was talking about his own headnet recordings. He had found out that she too had dabbled in surveillance.
She returned to the Embassy to think. Moth was with David, performing more tests, so the rooms were empty. In the silence, Sara felt watched. She placed a voice call to Ashok.
“Ashok, come here, I need you.”
There was a pause before he answered cautiously, “What for?”
“I’ll tell you when you get here.”
He came about ten minutes later. “You realize you have gorillas in your hallway?” he said when she let him in.
�
�Yes. That paranoid spook’s got a vendetta against me,” she said.
“I know.”
“Has he gotten to you?”
“Oh, yes.” Ashok managed to look nonchalant, but he was clearly angry. “If we had another pepci technician, I think I’d be on my way back home. But he couldn’t prove anything.”
“He’s probably listening now.”
“I’ve begun to assume that at all times. Hello, Colonel.”
“Can you help me out?”
He understood. “Of course. Let me just fetch a little equipment.”
He returned with a satchel full of handmade bug detectors. “I told your handlers it was a scientific experiment,” he said, stroking his Mephistopheles beard.
Sara watched in admiration as he scanned the room. “Your hidden talents amaze me, Ashok.”
“Someday I’ll tell you about my time in the Balavati underground,” he said, climbing on a chair and raising a ceiling panel.
“What Balavati underground?” Sara said skeptically.
“We don’t reveal it to people who collaborate with our oppressors,” he said, his voice muffled by the ceiling.
“As if you could bear to keep any resistance secret.”
“Aha!” He emerged with a small device trailing antenna wires.
By the time he was through, there was a little pile of microphones and spycams on the table. Looking at them, Sara felt her skin crawl. “That does it,” she said. “I’m moving to Torobe.”
But when she brought up this plan, she met an unexpected obstacle: Moth. “Escher is full of wonders,” the girl said. “Methinks I would stay and earn my sight.”
“But Moth, we’re worried about our friend Thora. We want to make sure she’s all right.”
“I will lead thee to her,” Moth bargained, “if thou will but teach me to see.”
* * *
“How on earth are we supposed to teach someone to see?” Sara asked.
Ashok, Touli, David, and Sara had found a private retreat: the observation bubble where Sara had first met Thora. The room was flooded with Irislight. The three men were floating next to the windows, like daredevils above a three-hundred-mile precipice. Sara kept a solid wall at her back as an anchor.
Dark Orbit Page 13
