The Best of Joe Haldeman

by Joe W. Haldeman

  Then about three in the morning, Snoopy came over. Snoopy was a big C-130 cargo plane that carried nothing but ammunition and gatling guns; they said it could fly over a football field and put a round into every square inch. Anyhow, it saturated the perimeter with fire and the enemy stopped shooting. Frenchy and I went to sleep.

  At first light we went out to help round up the KIAs. There were only four dead, counting the major, but the major was an astounding sight, at least in context.

  He looked sort of like a cadaver left over from a teaching autopsy. His shirt had been opened and his pants pulled down to his thighs, and the entire thoracic and abdominal cavities had been ripped open and emptied of everything soft, everything from esophagus to testicles, rib cage like blood-streaked fingers sticking rigid out of sagging skin, and there wasn’t a sign of the guts anywhere, just a lot of dried blood.

  Nobody had heard anything. There was a machine gun position not twenty yards away, and they’d been straining their ears all night. All they’d heard was flies.

  Maybe an animal feeding very quietly. The body hadn’t been opened with a scalpel or a knife; the skin had been torn by teeth or claws—but seemingly systematically, throat to balls.

  And the dry one was gone. Him with the pointed teeth.

  There is a rational explanation. Modern warfare is partly mind-fuck, and we aren’t the only ones who do it, dropping unlucky cards, invoking magic and superstition. The Vietnamese knew how squeamish Americans were, and would mutilate bodies in clever ways. They could also move very quietly. The dry one? They might have spirited him away just to fuck with us. Show what they could do under our noses.

  And as for the dry one’s odd mummified appearance, the mold, there might be an explanation. I found out that the Montagnards in that area don’t bury their dead; they put them in a coffin made from a hollowed-out log and leave them above ground. So maybe he was just the victim of a grave robber. I thought the nearest village was miles away, like twenty miles, but I could have been wrong. Or the body could have been carried that distance for some obscure purpose—maybe the VC set it out on the trail to make the Americans stop in a good place to be ambushed.

  That’s probably it. But for twenty years now, several nights a week, I wake up sweating with a terrible image in my mind. I’ve gone out with a flashlight and there it is, the dry one, scooping steaming entrails from the major’s body, tearing them with its sharp teeth, staring into my light with black empty sockets, unconcerned. I reach for my pistol, and it’s never there. The creature stands up, shiny with blood, and takes a step toward me—for a year or so that was it; I would wake up. Then it was two steps, and then three. After twenty years it has covered half the distance, and its dripping hands are rising from its sides.

  The doctor gives me tranquilizers. I don’t take them. They might help me stay asleep.

  ~ * ~

  INTRODUCTION TO “NONE SO BLIND”

  For several years I had a note pinned to my bulletin board at MIT, asking “Why aren’t all blind people geniuses?” The reasoning behind that question, and the story that follows, is that a large fraction of the brain is given over to the visual cortex. A blind person doesn’t use it, so why doesn’t the brain rewire those 300 million neurons for some other function, like enhancing intellect?

  If the brain won’t do it by itself, perhaps neurosurgery could help it along.

  I glanced at the note with that idea for some years, not sure whether I had a novel, a short story, or a poem. Ultimately what I did have was a contract for a book of short stories, so I did a little research and jumped into it.

  In the years between writing the note and writing the story, I’d learned a little bit about blind people. At the time, we lived in Daytona Beach, Florida, which had a regional center for the Library of Congress collection of “talking tapes” for the blind. They asked me to come down and record some of my books (the three or four that hadn’t already been recorded), which I was glad to do. My wife and I recorded other stuff there for years, until we moved away—she was valuable to them because she’s bilingual; I was useful not only for my own books, but because I could read texts in advanced science and mathematics. (Try to imagine a person without training trying to read a differential equation out loud!) I also did Greek tragedy and oddball stuff like knitting instructions, confession magazines, and a text on how to be a fire chief. All grist for the storyteller’s mill, of course.

  We got to know a few blind people there, but Amy here is modeled after a black teenager I met at a science fiction convention, born blind, who apparently knew more about science and literature than I did.

  NONE SO BLIND

  I

  t all started when Cletus Jefferson asked himself “Why aren’t all blind people geniuses?” Cletus was only thirteen at the time, but it was a good question, and he would work on it for fourteen more years, and then change the world forever.

  Young Jefferson was a polymath, an autodidact, a nerd literally without peer. He had a chemistry set, a microscope, a telescope, and several computers, some of them bought with paper route money. Most of his income was from education, though: teaching his classmates not to draw to inside straights.

  Not even nerds, not even nerds who are poker players nonpareil, not even nerdish poker players who can do differential equations in their heads, are immune to Cupid’s darts and the sudden storm of testosterone that will accompany those missiles at the age of thirteen. Cletus knew that he was ugly and his mother dressed him funny. He was also short and pudgy and could not throw a ball in any direction. None of this bothered him until his ductless glands started cooking up chemicals that weren’t in his chemistry set.

  So Cletus started combing his hair and wearing clothes that mismatched according to fashion, but he was still short and pudgy and irregular of feature. He was also the youngest person in his school, even though he was a senior—and the only black person there, which was a factor in Virginia in 1994.

  Now if love were sensible, if the sexual impulse was ever tempered by logic, you would expect that Cletus, being Cletus, would assess his situation and go off in search of someone homely. But of course he didn’t. He just jingled and clanked down through the Pachinko machine of adolescence, being rejected, at first glance, by every Mary and Judy and Jenny and Veronica in Known Space, going from the ravishing to the beautiful to the pretty to the cute to the plain to the “great personality,” until the irresistible force of statistics brought him finally into contact with Amy Linderbaum, who could not reject him at first glance because she was blind.

  The other kids thought it was more than amusing. Besides being blind, Amy was about twice as tall as Cletus and, to be kind, equally irregular of feature. She was accompanied by a guide dog who looked remarkably like Cletus, short and black and pudgy. Everybody was polite to her because she was blind and rich, but she was a new transfer student and didn’t have any actual friends.

  So along came Cletus, to whom Cupid had dealt only slings and arrows, and what might otherwise have been merely an opposites-attract sort of romance became an emotional and intellectual union that, in the next century, would power a social tsunami that would irreversibly transform the human condition. But first there was the violin.

  Her classmates had sensed that Amy was some kind of nerd herself, as classmates will, but they hadn’t figured out what kind yet. She was pretty fast with a computer, but you could chalk that up to being blind and actually needing the damned thing. She wasn’t fanatical about it, nor about science or math or history or Star Trek or student government, so what the hell kind of nerd was she? It turns out that she was a music nerd, but at the time was too painfully shy to demonstrate it.

  All Cletus cared about, initially, was that she lacked those pesky Y-chromosomes and didn’t recoil from him: in the Venn diagram of the human race, she was the only member of that particular set. When he found out that she was actually smart as well, having read more books than most of her
classmates put together, romance began to smolder in a deep and permanent place. That was even before the violin.

  Amy liked it that Cletus didn’t play with her dog and was straightforward in his curiosity about what it was like to be blind. She could assess people pretty well from their voices: after one sentence, she knew that he was young, black, shy, nerdly, and not from Virginia. She could tell from his inflection that either he was unattractive or he thought he was. She was six years older than him and white and twice his size, but otherwise they matched up pretty well, and they started keeping company in a big way.

  Among the few things that Cletus did not know anything about was music. That the other kids wasted their time memorizing the words to inane Top 40 songs was proof of intellectual dysfunction if not actual lunacy. Furthermore, his parents had always been fanatical devotees of opera. A universe bounded on one end by puerile mumblings about unrequited love and on the other end by foreigners screaming in agony was not a universe that Cletus desired to explore. Until Amy picked up her violin.

  They talked constantly. They sat together at lunch and met between classes. When the weather was good, they sat outside before and after school and talked. Amy asked her chauffeur to please be ten or fifteen minutes late picking her up.

  So after about three weeks’ worth of the fullness of time, Amy asked Cletus to come over to her house for dinner. He was a little hesitant, knowing that her parents were rich, but he was also curious about that lifestyle and, face it, was smitten enough that he would have walked off a cliff if she asked him nicely. He even used some computer money to buy a nice suit, a symptom that caused his mother to grope for the Valium.

  The dinner at first was awkward. Cletus was bewildered by the arsenal of silverware and all the different kinds of food that didn’t look or taste like food. But he had known it was going to be a test, and he always did well on tests, even when he had to figure out the rules as he went along.

  Amy had told him that her father was a self-made millionaire; his fortune had come from a set of patents in solid-state electronics. Cletus had therefore spent a Saturday at the university library, first searching patents, and then reading selected texts, and he was ready at least for the father. It worked very well. Over soup, the four of them talked about computers. Over the calimari cocktail, Cletus and Mr. Linderbaum had it narrowed down to specific operating systems and partitioning schemata. With the beef Wellington, Cletus and “Call-me-Lindy” were talking quantum electrodynamics; with the salad they were on an electron cloud somewhere, and by the time the nuts were served, the two nuts at that end of the table were talking in Boolean algebra while Amy and her mother exchanged knowing sighs and hummed snatches of Gilbert and Sullivan.

  By the time they retired to the music room for coffee, Lindy liked Cletus very much, and the feeling was mutual, but Cletus didn’t know how much he liked Amy, really liked her, until she picked up the violin.

  It wasn’t a Strad—she was promised one if and when she graduated from Julliard—but it had cost more than the Lamborghini in the garage, and she was not only worth it, but equal to it. She picked it up and tuned it quietly while her mother sat down at an electronic keyboard next to the grand piano, set it to “harp,” and began the simple arpeggio that a musically sophisticated person would recognize as the introduction to the violin showpiece “Meditation” from Massenet’s Thefis.

  Cletus had turned a deaf ear to opera for all his short life, so he didn’t know the back-story of transformation and transcending love behind this intermezzo, but he did know that his girlfriend had lost her sight at the age of five, and the next year—the year he was born!—was given her first violin. For thirteen years she had been using it to say what she would not say with her voice, perhaps to see what she could not see with her eyes, and on the deceptively simple romantic matrix that Massenet built to present the beautiful courtesan Thai’s gloriously reborn as the bride of Christ, Amy forgave her godless universe for taking her sight, and praised it for what she was given in return, and she said this in a language that even Cletus could understand. He didn’t cry very much, never had, but by the last high, wavering note he was weeping into his hands, and he knew that if she wanted him, she could have him forever, and oddly enough, considering his age and what eventually happened, he was right.

  He would learn to play the violin before he had his first doctorate, and during a lifetime of remarkable amity they would play together for ten thousand hours, but all of that would come after the big idea. The big idea—”Why aren’t all blind people geniuses?”—was planted that very night, but it didn’t start to sprout for another week.

  Like most thirteen-year-olds, Cletus was fascinated by the human body, his own and others, but his study was more systematic than others’ and, atypically, the organ that interested him most was the brain.

  The brain isn’t very much like a computer, although it doesn’t do a bad job, considering that it’s built by unskilled labor and programmed more by pure chance than anything else. One thing computers do a lot better than brains, though, is what Cletus and Lindy had been talking about over their little squids in tomato sauce: partitioning.

  Think of the computer as a big meadow of green pasture-land, instead of a little dark box full of number-clogged things that are expensive to replace, and that pastureland is presided over by a wise old magic shepherd who is not called a macroprogram. The shepherd stands on a hill and looks out over the pastureland, which is full of sheep and goats and cows. They aren’t all in one homogeneous mass, of course, since the cows would step on the lambs and kids and the goats would make everybody nervous, leaping and butting, so there are partitions of barbed wire that keep all the species separate and happy.

  This is a frenetic sort of meadow, though, with cows and goats and sheep coming in and going out all the time, moving at about 3 X 108 meters per second, and if the partitions were all of the same size, it would be a disaster, because sometimes there are no sheep at all, but lots of cows, who would be jammed in there hip to hip and miserable. But the shepherd, being wise, knows ahead of time how much space to allot to the various creatures and, being magic, can move barbed wire quickly without hurting himself or the animals. So each partition winds up marking a comfortable-sized space for each use. Your computer does that, too, but instead of barbed wire you see little rectangles or windows or file folders, depending on your computer’s religion.

  The brain has its own partitions, in a sense. Cletus knew that certain physical areas of the brain were associated with certain mental abilities, but it wasn’t a simple matter of “music appreciation goes over there; long division in that corner.” The brain is mushier than that. For instance, there are pretty well defined partitions associated with linguistic functions, areas named after French and German brain people. If one of those areas is destroyed, by stroke or bullet or flung frying pan, the stricken person may lose the ability—reading or speaking or writing coherently—associated with the lost area.

  That’s interesting, but what is more interesting is that the lost ability sometimes comes back over time. Okay, you say, so the brain grew back—but it doesn’t! You’re born with all the brain cells you’ll ever have. (Ask any child.) What evidently happens is that some other part of the brain has been sitting around as a kind of backup, and after a while the wiring gets rewired and hooked into that backup. The afflicted person can say his name, and then his wife’s name, and then “frying pan,” and before you know it he’s complaining about hospital food and calling a divorce lawyer.

  So on that evidence, it would appear that the brain has a shepherd like the computer-meadow has, moving partitions around, but alas, no. Most of the time when some part of the brain ceases to function, that’s the end of it. There may be acres and acres of fertile ground lying fallow right next door, but nobody in charge to make use of it—at least not consistently. The fact that it sometimes did work is what made Cletus ask “Why aren’t all blind people geniuses?”

/>   Of course there have always been great thinkers and writers and composers who were blind (and in the twentieth century, some painters to whom eyesight was irrelevant), and many of them, like Amy with her violin, felt that their talent was a compensating gift. Cletus wondered whether there might be a literal truth to that, in the microanatomy of the brain. It didn’t happen every time, or else all blind people would be geniuses. Perhaps it happened occasionally, through a mechanism like the one that helped people recover from strokes. Perhaps it could be made to happen.

  Cletus had been offered scholarships at both Harvard and MIT, but he opted for Columbia, in order to be near Amy while she was studying at Julliard. Columbia reluctantly allowed him a triple major in physiology, electrical engineering, and cognitive science, and he surprised everybody who knew him by doing only moderately well. The reason, it turned out, was that he was treating undergraduate work as a diversion at best; a necessary evil at worst. He was racing ahead of his studies in the areas that were important to him.

  If he had paid more attention in trivial classes like history, like philosophy, things might have turned out differently. If he had paid attention to literature, he might have read the story of Pandora.