A few minutes later, after Moth had learned “door,” “light,” and “table,” Sara said, “Now touch the cup.”
Confused, Moth said, “I see no cup.”
“Sure you do. It’s on the table.”
“Nay, ’tis not. The cup had a device to represent the handle.”
Sara realized the problem. “You’re just seeing it from a different angle now.” She took Moth’s hand and guided it to the cup, then turned it to reveal the handle.
“Why did thou make it change?” Moth protested.
“I didn’t. You were just seeing a different side of it.”
“Must I memorize all the ways it may appear?”
The question perplexed Sara, so she said to David, “Why do we recognize the cup even when the handle is hidden?”
“The different ways it appears are called object transforms,” David said. “Somehow, we learn to integrate all the transforms into a unitary objecthood in our minds. I don’t know how.”
At that point, Sara decided she couldn’t start with nouns. She first needed to teach Moth some underlying principles, a kind of visual grammar. “Okay, Moth, let’s start over with how to tell where one object ends and another begins.”
“Okay,” Moth said. She was picking up some of their expressions.
So Sara taught Moth to look for contrasts, changes in color, and straight lines. But even this was far from the easy task Sara imagined. Color was the first thing to cause confusion. Moth insisted that the blue cup was a different color when viewed from the chair than it was from the door. Sara told her, “No, it’s the same color, it’s just the lighting that’s different.”
“So I must memorize many colors thou dost call blue?” Moth said in frustration.
Sara remembered her own frustration with Hua Ming’s arbitrary botanical categories. Yet she had accepted the category of “blue” not as if it were imposed by humans, but as natural, self-evident.
Moth also had trouble telling which boundaries were the significant ones that defined the edges of objects. A simple chest of drawers had several dozen interior boundaries that, depending on the lighting, could look more significant than the ones at its edges. On the second day of lessons, Sara and Moth got into an argument about why the legs of a table, which were separated from the top by a very distinct boundary, ought to be classified as part of the table, instead of something different.
“Because they’re attached!” Sara said in frustration.
“I cannot tell that,” Moth said.
“Not from where you’re standing. But if I move the table, the legs will come along. You know that.”
She looked thoughtful. “So the table-symbol in the eyes is supposed to represent things about the real table?”
“No, the table in the eyes is the real table.”
“How can that be? Doth the table send out thoughts about its nature that the eyes receive?”
That question led to a long explanation of electromagnetic radiation. At the end, Moth said, “So what the eyes see is the radiation bouncing off the furniture?”
“That’s right.”
“Not the furniture itself. So how can thou be sure the radiation is truthful?”
“Experience, Moth. Just trust me on this one, okay?”
But when Sara reported this conversation to David, he said, “You know, she has a point. Sight is a secondhand sort of sense. We can’t be sure something isn’t lost in translation.”
Sara groaned. “Don’t you get all epistemological on me, David!”
The next principle Sara had to teach was occlusion. It took several frustrating days before she realized that Moth did not understand that a close thing could hide objects that were farther away. Moth had already begun to figure it out before Sara realized the problem, but her interpretation was creative. As they stood looking into Sara’s office one morning, she said, “Thy desk is very loud.”
Since the desk was being no noisier than usual, Sara asked what she meant. “It doth drown out the chair and the cabinet,” she said.
“No, it hides the chair and cabinet, because they are behind it.” Moth looked quite puzzled, so Sara asked, “You only see part of the chair now, right?”
“Right.”
“What would you do if you wanted to see more of it?”
Hesitantly, she said, “Wait for the desk to be quieter?”
“No, this is as quiet as it gets. Just walk forward.”
This defied Moth’s common sense. “How can my moving affect the desk?”
“When you change positions, it will no longer be in front of the chair. Try it.”
She did, and was intrigued at the result. Sara said, “The scene is in layers, Moth. The desk is covering the chair and cabinet.”
“Oh, I hear thee now,” she said, then frowned. “But I did not move the desk.”
“No, moving yourself accomplished the same thing, because you changed the angle at which you viewed the scene.” But she knew as the words came out that Moth would have no intuitive grasp of angles, and it would be yet another thing to teach her.
This led to the next principle of seeing: parallax. Sara knew how the angle of separation between her two eyes allowed her brain to construct a three-dimensional picture, even though she was seldom conscious of it; but she had never thought about how much she learned from the parallax created when she herself moved. She had to teach Moth that when she moved, the objects in the foreground shifted position more radically than objects in the background. She could use this information, along with occlusion, to determine what was close and what was far off. But although the theory was easy for Moth to memorize, using it was far more difficult. Sara watched her practice, pacing across the room again and again, her face a study in intense concentration. The analysis of visual clues that sighted people did so automatically, she had to do with arduous, deliberate thought.
The topic of depth naturally led to another principle: perspective, or compression with distance. Moth noticed it herself, and complained that objects were never the same size twice. When Sara told her the key—that they were smaller when farther away and larger when close—she said, “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why doth the chair shrink when I am not close?”
“It doesn’t really shrink. It’s an illusion.”
Frowning, Moth said, “Thou knowest that, and yet believe thy eyes?”
“It’s a useful illusion, not a deceptive one. We can tell whether we’re likely to bump into things or not.”
“So if a thing be small, I shall not bump into it?”
“Not necessarily. Things all have intrinsic sizes and apparent sizes, and the difference between the two reveals how far away they are.”
“Why dost thou make things so hard?” she said in frustration.
“I’m sorry, Moth. I didn’t invent the rules.”
“Well,” she said, resigned, “perhaps thou ought to show me everything’s intrinsic size.”
Sara hesitated. “That would be hard. With eyes, all you get is apparent sizes. You have to figure out intrinsic sizes by other means, like touch.”
“What good is this seeing?” Moth exclaimed angrily. “All it gives thee is deception.”
She had a stormy side to her personality, and a low tolerance for failure. Sara was also finding that she herself had less patience than she needed.
At last Sara devised a system of judging intrinsic size by viewing things at a standardized distance, the length of an outstretched arm. Even then Moth was skeptical, and Sara slowly realized it was because she did not have the kind of body image sighted people did. At an instinctive level she was unconvinced that her arm was always the same length.
“I think she would have found it easier to believe the chair really does shrink,” Sara said to David. “She simply doesn’t have the same concept of space we do. To us, space and everything in it is invariable. To her, it’s as if things assume shape and size the moment she touches them; if she’s
not touching them they might as well not exist. No wonder she’s having trouble.”
It took only a week for Mr. Gibb to get discouraged at the slow pace of Moth’s lessons. When he realized it was going to take a long time to get to the part where she tearfully thanked Epco for giving her sight, he told them to call if anything interesting happened, and decamped. Thereafter, Sara wore a headnet to record their sessions for the rest of the scientists.
Moth stuck with it doggedly even after her initial enthusiasm faded. They had been able to give her some novel sensations of color and movement. But her attempts to get beyond mere entertainment—to use sight as a tool—moved more slowly the further she got.
One day Sara got clearance from the Director to take Moth to the refectory, and insisted that she walk with her eyes open, focusing on the visual evidence. The girl moved with agonizing slowness, arms outstretched to fend off the looming shapes of posters, light fixtures, and carpeting. She flinched at stepping into a crevasse of shadow or barking her shin on a beam of light. After each step she had to pause to reassimilate the changed scene. They had barely gotten past the security station when she stopped, her eyes shut tight. “Nay, I cannot go on,” she said. Her voice was not angry, but panicky. Her face was flushed and covered with sweat. “My head is like to explode.”
Concerned, Sara put an arm around her shoulder, and could feel her trembling. She had pushed too far. Accepting defeat, Sara led her back to the Embassy, and left her to rest in a darkened room.
“A panic attack,” David said. “It was sensory overload; her brain couldn’t take it.”
Sara felt terribly discouraged. “This isn’t going to work, is it, David?”
He looked as if he wished disappointment were something he could medicate. “I told you it wouldn’t work. You’ve got to be more detached, Callicot.”
Sara didn’t want to be detached. “Why should her brain be any less able to take it than ours?” she asked. “She’s smart, and it wasn’t a difficult or stimulating task.”
David looked thoughtful. “Our brains have learned to extract pattern from a relentless, chaotic bombardment of stimuli. The main work in creating any pattern from noise is exclusion of irrelevant detail. So when you think about it, the brain’s main function is elimination of stimuli: sorting the information from the noise. We do it so automatically that we’re only aware of the data that form useful patterns, not the sea of irrelevant data around them. We couldn’t make sense of the world if input wasn’t radically simplified.”
“So do you think Moth hasn’t learned to sort out the irrelevant visual impulses?”
“That’s almost certainly true. Walking down the hall doesn’t overtax your brain because you see very little of what the eyes record, and notice even less. Think of it like a radio. All around you is a sea of radio signals you can’t sense. Imagine I installed a receiver in your brain, but you couldn’t tune it. It would pick up all frequencies at once, and you’d think radio was a completely useless invention. The only really useful receiver is the one that can exclude all but one channel at a time.”
“But—” Sara stopped.
“Yes?”
“That implies there could be other frequencies—other messages—we’re not receiving.”
“Well, sure,” David said.
“There could be whole categories of information—aspects of reality—that our brains are hiding from us, because knowing about them has no evolutionary advantage.”
“Like invisible parts of the EM spectrum? Our cameras and instruments tell us about those.”
Sara was pursuing a thought by now. “But cameras and instruments are just extensions of our senses, and designed to work like them. We can only design cameras to photograph things whose existence we can deduce. What about things our brains aren’t wired to see?”
“Hold it right there, Callicot,” he said, laughing. “It’s too early in the day for a paradigm shift.”
* * *
Moth’s repeated failures eventually put her in a black mood. The drills and practices lost their novelty, and Sara could tell that she was on the verge of giving up.
“I can never remember all of this,” Moth said. “It takes so much thinking. How do you have room in your minds for aught else?”
Sara wanted to find something to encourage her again, to convince her it was all worthwhile. So one day she said, “I have something to show you, Moth. Come along.”
“Thou will not make me walk with mine eyes?” she said.
“No, I’ll lead you.”
At the security station they acquired an escort who followed them through the twisting, canted hallways to the forward end of the questship. Sara ignored him. When they came to the stairway up to the observation bubble, she told Moth, “You’re going to feel yourself getting lighter. Hang on to my hand.”
When Moth’s feet started lifting off from the steps, she looked alarmed. “Don’t worry,” Sara said.
“Is it not a riffle?” Moth asked nervously.
“It’s just the way our ship is made. In this part you’re weightless.”
When they passed into the bubble, Sara positioned Moth where she could hang on to the door handle, then said, “Open your eyes.”
It was nearly noon on the planet below. Moth was silent as Sara studied her face. She did not seem alarmed or acrophobic, so Sara turned to look at Iris, letting her eyes lose themselves in the dazzle.
“What is it?” Moth finally said.
“That is your planet,” Sara said. “Your home.”
“That is Torobe?”
“No, Torobe is below us, but it is so tiny you cannot see it. It is very, very far away.”
Moth held out her arm, as if to verify Sara’s claim of its distance. “Let go of the handle,” Sara said, and guided her forward till she touched the windowpane. Moth felt its flat surface and said, “’Tis a wall.”
“No, it’s a window—something you can see through but not pass through.”
From the expression on Moth’s face, Sara could tell that this latest illusion was too much to bear. She looked like a person trapped in a nightmarish hall of mirrors, never able to believe anything she saw, never sure of what was real. Sara watched particles of light play across her face. Then her breath began to come in spurts, and Sara realized she was crying, tearlessly.
“I want to go home,” she said.
Suddenly sorry for all she had done, Sara hugged Moth tight, stroking her quivering back. “Forgive me, Moth,” she said. They had taxed her beyond endurance with deceptions. “We’ll take you home, I promise.”
They clung to each other, bathed in shifting Irislight.
The next day, Moth was gone.
* * *
When Sara first woke up to an empty suite, she assumed Moth was with David, so she used the time alone to catch up on her notes. But when she finally made it to the clinic, she found that neither David nor Bakai had seen Moth all morning. After a thorough search, Sara strolled down to the security station and asked if Moth had passed them. Sal, the guard on duty, shook her head, scowling. “No, why?”
“We seem to have misplaced her,” Sara said lightly. “She’s probably playing a joke on us.”
As Sara was returning to the Embassy, she heard Sal reporting the news on her radio. Minutes later, Atlabatlow arrived with a team, radios crackling with reports.
The guards searched the Embassy while the colonel interrogated Sara with a demeanor a few degrees above absolute zero. When had she last seen Moth? Why hadn’t she reported the absence right away? What had the girl said?
“She was frustrated yesterday, and a little homesick,” Sara answered to the last question. “My guess is that she’s hiding somewhere to get away from us. Teenage girls sometimes need to be alone.”
Atlabatlow ordered her to stay where she was, then left to coordinate the search. Before long, the announcement system in the hallway gave off an alarm tone, and a man’s voice boomed out, “Attention. This is a shipwide s
ecurity alert. All personnel are ordered to stay in place until further notice. Anyone found outside assigned areas is subject to detention. This is an emergency.”
Sara groaned. She could only imagine the panic and confusion spreading through the questship. People would be speculating on what had happened, whether their lives were in danger, whether someone else had died. There would be people caught in bathrooms and storage closets, afraid to come out. The halls would be patrolled by grim-faced security guards. And all because a blind girl had wandered off.
“This is ridiculous,” she muttered to herself. Then, in case the guards had left a bug behind in the Embassy, she said loudly, “Did you hear that, Colonel? You’re overreacting.”
There was no response. She sat down to do paperwork, but it was hard to concentrate. Minutes passed, then hours. Weary with following instructions, Sara peered out the Embassy door into the hallway. The black-clad guard posted there turned swiftly; Sara thought she saw a weapon on his belt. “Return to your station,” he ordered.
It was evening before the emergency order was lifted and people were allowed to use the hallways again. Sara was heading for the refectory when she was intercepted by a message on her pager, informing her that there was an emergency meeting in the Director’s office. When she arrived, the department heads were all waiting in the antechamber. They pounced on Sara.
“This is the second person you’ve lost,” Magister Sarcodan said.
“What was I supposed to do, put a leash on her? She’s a guest, not a prisoner. You ought to ask our crack security team how she managed to walk right past them, since that’s what she must have done.”
As if on cue, the door into the Director’s office opened. Just inside it stood Colonel Atlabatlow, stiff as a man of metal. Behind him, Director Gavere looked nervously off balance; a sprig of his hair was not properly shellacked down.
When they were all seated except for Atlabatlow, the Director cleared his throat and said, “I have called you all here to let you know of a change in the organizational structure of the expedition. In view of all the unexpected incidents, I have decided to put Colonel Atlabatlow in charge of all operations that are not strictly scientific. The first thing he will be in charge of is a complete shipwide search. You’re going to have to warn your people that nothing is off-limits. We’ll be searching cabins, offices, everything.”
Dark Orbit Page 17
