Sometimes Meitner sidled back and forth on the top of the chair, head bobbing, barely able to contain her excitement at this, her own story. Sometimes she just listened, as if contemplating.
“Belinda said, ‘How was your trip?’ She looked at me for a long time, a huge grin lighting her face. I wanted to scream, ‘Keep your eyes on the road!’ but I didn’t want to distract her. I settled for ‘Interesting.’
“It was a horrible, rough, eight-hour-long ride. I started out feeling like an intrepid explorer, but pretty soon I realized that I was pretty low on the Martha Gellhorn scale—she’s a writer, honey. We drove over huge cloudy mountains. Like here. We got stuck behind big trucks and Belinda would get out and yell at them. We finally got to a place way back of nowhere, a house with a stone floor and big heavy beams, mostly open. Belinda took me to a tiny bedroom with high, open louvered windows and a bed covered with mosquito netting. The room was full of a beautiful smell that I wanted to inhale forever. I asked Belinda, ‘What’s that smell?’”
At that point I’d always say, “Wild ginger! Just like here.”
“Right,” Mom would say. “I fell onto that lovely bed, just for a minute, and didn’t wake until the next morning. The howler monkeys screamed all night, though.”
“Just like here,” Meitner and I would say, then laugh.
My mother said that she chatted with Belinda for two days, but she knew that Belinda was really giving her the final test. Mom’s background, her experience, her plans, were just what the activists wanted. She was perfect.
Finally, she met Meitner. This was the place in the story where Meitner always got excited. She’d flutter from the chair to the bed and back again, muttering in low, rapid French.
“Belinda said that I might want to take a walk down to the river. The man who brought Meitner was tall and thin. He had blue-ebony skin. He was nervous and left quickly.
“I picked up the big plastic parrot carrier that he left on the bank under the banana trees. What did you say, Meitner?”
Meitner raised her head, whistled, and imitated the sound of a car engine and some phone tones. Then she said, in a really cranky man’s voice, “Où allons nous?”
My cue to translate: “Where are we going?”
My mother responded, “Right! And what did I say?”
Meitner would say, “‘Maison.’ Home.”
And home—my future home—was where she would soon meet John Kalani, my father.
John Kalani
I am on a Kauai ridgetop, monitoring the feed from the Stinger ship, when I hear Jean’s voice, but after an instant’s shock, I realize that it is Meitner. Our former family member, up on that ship, with some kind of plan.
Awe, puzzlement, delight, dark loss, and emotions beyond the reach of the most nuanced languages stop my mind. A blast of cool wind brings a spatter of rain and then, for an instant, parts the clouds so that I see the steep range of cliffs, one behind the other, vanishing from deep green to blue, lavender, gray. Jean’s voice. A brilliant parrot. A murder. All long ago, and yet as close, in my mind, as yesterday.
The day I met Dr. Jean Woodward, she stepped from a rented Jeep into my backyard as I watched from my lanai. Her red hair glinted in the sun as she retrieved a cage containing her African Grey Parrot, Meitner, from the back of the Jeep.
I’m a Hilo boy who went to Silicon Valley by way of Cal Tech and got big, as they say. I made a lot of money on software and bought a chunk of rain forest on the island of Kauai.
An acquaintance from Cal Tech sent me Dr. Woodward’s proposal. She was searching for a habitat for an extraordinary parrot she had acquired. As it happened, there was a flock of African Greys in my backyard—a range of the steepest, rainiest mountains on the earth. Years ago, someone brought a flock of Greys to Kauai, illegally, as is the case with most of the fauna and flora in the Hawaiian Islands. So we have quite a population of non-indigenous creatures here—monkeys, aforesaid African Grey Parrots, other kinds of parrots, macaws—you name it, someone smuggled one in and let it go.
I’d read about the liberation of the lab animals a while back. All of the animals had vanished, but Dr. Woodward tracked down the parrot.
“Since all records were destroyed, I’m not sure how old she was when I got her,” Jean had told me over the phone a week earlier. “Or, when she got me.” That was the first time I heard Jean’s low, burbling chuckle. “I could almost hear her thinking how lucky she was to get such a pliable custodian. I know that she was at least three, because that’s when the iris turns from pale gray to yellow. Her language skills are amazing for a gray parrot of any age.” Her voice became fervent. “I want to help her discover who—or what—she is. I want all of her abilities to—unfold, just as they do in any living creature. I think she might be a bridge between us and other animals—or, at least, between us and parrots. Parrots and humans share speech-related genes and genetically expressed neural pathways. She needs a strong human presence in order to manifest her humanity. But she also needs the environment of a parrot in the wild. No one knows what might happen in Meitner’s instance. I want to be there when she needs human interaction and let her have distance when she needs to be a bird. Her wings have always been clipped, but I think that the development of innate parrot-intelligences are just as linked to the use of wings as the development of human intelligence is linked to use of the hands. It seems plausible that learning flocking behavior in flight is analogous to humans learning to navigate and explore their world, I . . .”
But she had me the second she said “flocking behavior.” That’s what I do—work on mathematical models of flocking behavior, synchronous movement that displays rules of spacing, momentum, direction, and individual choice that we observe in the movement of groups of birds, fish, insects, herds, and even, some claim, humans in social environments, both physical and in thought and opinion. That’s how I made my fortune. So, when I look back, it all seems inevitable.
Now I know that Jean dreamed of illuminating the nature of consciousness through a series of carefully articulated projects that she was busily mapping out when she acquired Meitner.
That first morning, I waved, shouted “Aloha!” and hurried through my wild yard to shake Jean’s hand. When I picked up the bird carrier I was startled to hear a man’s voice, cursing in French. I set the cage on the lanai; it was too unwieldy to carry on the hike to see Meitner’s possible new digs. As Jean and I passed through my orchid-laced yard and reached the trailhead, the curses blessedly receded.
Jean wanted to build a communication bridge between humans and other species. This intrigued me. I worked on making computers seem like humans, so that they might, perhaps, be a home for human minds at some point. She wanted to go in the opposite direction. She had a vision of all living creatures being increasingly connected through biology. She wanted all creatures to be able to selectively incorporate the biological richnesses of other species.
The many vectors and implications of flocking behavior were our Venn diagram overlap.
Her thesis was that birds, who navigate rapidly in three dimensions, have mathematical abilities that exceed those of humans. Flocking—or schooling, or swarming—adds another layer of complexity. Therefore, to develop optimally, Meitner needed to learn to flock.
The social aspects of flocking seem as important as the spatial aspects. Parrots and other social animals converse with intent. As the feral Wild Boy of Aveyron revealed so long ago, in a situation it would be unethical to repeat, sociality delayed is sociality denied. Jean’s desperation about time-related developmental doors closing came through in the proposal.
As far as I could tell, the woman lived on a shoestring—hand to mouth, grant to grant. But she seemed happy, despite her unemphasized but obvious lack of funds. I had money coming out of my ears. The idea of helping her out in this good cause gave me kind of a do-gooder feeling. I often thought I should do something good. Maybe, I thought, this is it.
The minute she stepped ont
o the narrow trail, where lush tropical forest pressed in on both sides and gusts of wind brought spatters of rain that soaked us, she began to talk. “We live parallel lives with animals. We co-evolved, and yet we’re so insular. We’re impacting their habitats, killing them, and we have so much to learn from them. If people only understood what it means—”
“What what means?”
And so it began, with her following closely behind and me hanging on her every word, tossing back interruptions like small stones—or bread crumbs. I found that instead of rising to the bait when I needled her every three minutes—a bad habit that upset most people—she always responded with patience. I liked that. Soon I realized that for her these were opportunities; teachable moments. I’m smart, sure, but socially and emotionally I’m in the stone age. Knowing that never changed my behavior, and it may be the reason I spend most of my time with computers. Or maybe it’s the other way around.
Jean said, “Every species has niche-evolved skills, ways of interpreting the environment. Our senses and our skills evolved for survival. The species that have survived are descended from the wariest, so we don’t intermingle. We can’t. We might kill or be killed. But we’re just learning what human consciousness is, and that it isn’t the only form of consciousness. We have so much to learn from each other! For instance, I think that mathematics could be enriched by a native model of flocking behavior.”
“We actually do flock,” I offered. “We flock with our minds. In opinions, ideas, art, science. We test, we keep our distance, we draw together, we change our theories en masse, engage in political movements, have revolutions.”
“Hmmm,” she allowed. “Yeah. Language is like that—emergent. Emergence is cooperation of things of unlike kinds. Lewes said that in 1870s. I think.”
If there’s anything I know a lot about, it’s emergence. G. H. Lewes, a philosopher, had coined the term and defined it, as this increasingly remarkable woman had just pointed out. Emergence is self-organized and unpredictable. It tickles and delights the human mind (while it may dismay politicians or those who make financial predictions) because of its propensity to spring from events, properties, social currents, whatever, that would seem unconnected, almost as if their sheer unlikeness has drawn them together and created new energy.
“A lot of things were shakin’ back in the nineteenth century, that’s for sure, I said.” I’d heard the term “emergent” applied to language, and perhaps her surprising perspicacity jolted this sardonic, dismissive response out of me—suddenly, she was on my turf.
“Well, blow it off if you want.” Her voice was low, strong, and sure, and in it I heard a shrug.
“I’m trying to have a conversation. With you it’s—well, having a conversation with you seems to be an exercise in emergence. According to your definition—‘things of unlike kinds.’ Or Lewes’ definition.”
She laughed, then the sound of her footsteps paused for a second. “Oh! What’s that smell?”
“Awapuhi kuahiwi. Ginger. So . . . what do you think you’ll learn? You’ve said that you think Meitner is unique.”
“I think every brain is unique, but mostly in small ways. She may be unique in large ways. And I don’t know what I’ll learn. That’s the point. I guess I’m just curious.”
Entranced would have been a better word. As was I—not with Meitner, but with Jean.
And that name! Lise Meitner was the physicist who confirmed that nuclear fission was possible. In the late forties, she was called “The Mother of the Atomic Bomb,” a title she hated. Deeply pacifist, she had turned down an invitation to work on the Manhattan project, and had earlier risked her career during World War I when she turned down the opportunity to work with her mentor, Otto Hahn, on developing ever more potent poison gas. Instead, to fill out her mandatory war-effort dance card, she went to the German front and used the new technology of X-rays to diagnose the shattered bones of German troops.
When I joked about laying such a heavy mantle on a mere bird, as we huffed up the steep, slippery ridge and rain forest gave way to views of the canyon and the blue Pacific, Jean bridled. I’d say that’s when I first began to fall in love with her, but that’s not true—that began to happen when I read her visionary proposal, though I didn’t realize it. I could tell, then, that she played a long game. Her vision of the possible shone like an isolated, sharp, brilliant ellipse of sun far out on an otherwise stormy sea, and I admired that. I prefer the long game as well. What I’m doing might not ever bear fruit, but it’s a worthy and fascinating goal. Or obsession.
The trail to the hale—the semi-traditional Hawaiian house I’d offered for her use for her study—steepened on the knife-edge of a ridge. Wild goat country. I yelled over my shoulder, “Her name—like Einstein, the parrot? The parrot is funny—why not, um, Lucille Ball? Or Julie Andrews. The parrot can sing, right?”
I heard Jean’s slogging footsteps stop, and I turned to look down at her. Her face red (she was slightly overweight, sunburnt, and not in very good shape), she was sitting on a rock, apparently unfazed by the sheer drop behind her. She unhooked her water bottle from her belt and took a long gulp. Her chin-length red hair stuck to her cheeks.
I got the feeling she’d heard that jibe before, and thought, I’m in for it now. It was a careless remark. I’d taken Dr. Woodward seriously enough to offer her some support for her endeavor, so I’m sure the tone was unexpected.
She stared out a tiny triangular patch of Pacific Ocean, far below at the end of a widening valley. Finally she said, “Lise Meitner’s extraordinary gifts were invisible to the society she lived in—Vienna in 1900. It was illegal—illegal!—for girls to attend school after eighth grade.” Despite a gust of cool wind, her face flushed deep pink. “She had to get a tutor—”
“I know,” I told her, a bit nettled. I’d just read Meitner’s most recent biography. “She got her doctorate in physics, went to Berlin, pretty quickly became part of the in-crowd in theoretical physics. Bohr, Einstein, all those guys.”
“Right. All those guys.” But she smiled. “Anyway, sure, I guess it’s pretentious, but it fits. We have no idea what she’s capable of. We have no idea what any animal really thinks, or any other human, for that matter. Parrot Meitner has had some kind of—well, let’s be positive, and call it enhancement, although it might just be damage. I don’t know if you read the whole proposal and background.”
I had. “I know that these parrots can talk, but do they really understand what they’re saying?”
She stood. “How much farther?” She passed me and pushed on in silence for a few minutes, then yelled over her shoulder, “They can spell phonetically. They can formulate situation-appropriate questions. They can add and subtract.” She turned and faced me. “Think of how you might meet an alien, and although your minds and worlds might be very different, you might strive to establish a bridge of mutually understood testable hypotheses about what you are each thinking. Language is a model, and it is also a reduction, a focal point.”
“But their brains are so tiny—”
She pivoted, put on a surprising burst of speed, and disappeared around a switchback. When I caught up, she was sitting on the platform of the haleswinging her legs over an abyss, with the sunlit, verdant valley a mile below. Rain swept across the tightly woven roof, yielding rainbows all around us.
The heiau was here when I bought the property. It’s about thirty feet long and fifteen feet wide. Heavy posts rise from the platform. Above the worn, old, koa plank floor there is a gap of about ten feet before the steep peaked roof rises toward its apex. Bamboo mats, rolled up on the sides, can be dropped down for walls. A few damp futons still complete the ambiance.
Her hair, drying in the wind, flared out around her head. She looked like a different person; a goddess, almost. The flock of Greys rose from a nearby banyan tree.
She grinned. “I’ll take it.”
Jean’s life work began. Meitner’s first words in English were “I hate you,” followe
d quickly by “I love you.” Like any child, she meant both.
Twelve years passed. We were having our annual Mele Kalikimaka party. Big doin’s. A ten-minute shower threaded cliffs with silver waterfalls that wavered with every gust of wind. The sun was low in the sky and would soon dive straight into the sea, bringing swift equatorial night. Good smells came from the kitchen.
My friends and neighbors from near and far had come to celebrate Christmas. My ohana—mother, grandmother, brothers and sister, nieces and nephews, transported from the Big Island by helicopter and running mad riot—spilled through the house and onto the broad veranda with its long, lava-rock wall where Jean and I displayed our art and artifacts. A few old friends from Cal Tech were in attendance
As was Meitner.
Elegantly dressed, as usual, in gray feathers and red tail, and celebrity, she held forth as if she were human and not a Grey Parrot.
She had not been surprised when she first saw herself in the mirror, as Alex, the most famous Grey Parrot had been. Her need to socialize with other parrots—so she would not see herself as wholly human—was why she had ended up here, why I fell in love with Jean, and why we had Leilani, now ten and hobnobbing with the guests as easily as Meitner.
Methodically teaching Meitner human speech via a program developed by experts in education and neurology (human and avian) was not an end in itself. It was only a way to help Jean communicate with Meitner. Once that happened, once Meitner was truly accomplished in English and brought out her French curses only when she was extremely irritated, which was about once every hour, the real work began. When it became clear that the parrot understood and could use metaphor and complex linguistic constructions, the world was at Jean’s feet. Jean’s, and Meitner’s.
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two Page 190
