“You think like this for every sentence? Every single sentence?” Some of the associations were obvious: “breasts” linked to a nursing baby, for instance. But why was the baby linked to something called “Hubble’s constant,” and why was the Sistine chapel in that string? And a name I didn’t recognize: Chidiock Tichbourne?
“Yes,” Miri said. “But the best part—”
“You all think this way? All the Supers?”
“Yes,” she said quietly. “Although Terry and Jon and Ludie think mostly in mathematics. They’re younger than the rest of us, you know — they represent the next cycle of IQ reengineering.”
I looked at the complex pattern of Miri’s thoughts and reactions. “You have beautiful breasts.”
I would never know what my words actually meant to her, in all their layers. Not any of my words. Ever.
“Does this scare you, Drew?”
She looked levelly at me. I could feel her fear, and her resolution. The moment was important. It grew and grew in my mind, a looming white wall to which nothing could adhere, until I found the right answer.
“I think in shapes for every sentence.”
Her smile changed her whole face, opening and lighting it. I had said the right thing. I looked at the glowing green complexity of the holostage, a slowly turning three-dimensional globe jammed with tiny images and equations and, most of all, words. So many complicated words.
“We’re the same, then,” Miri said joyfully. And I didn’t correct her.
“The best part,” Miri had burbled on, completely at ease now, “is that after the extrapolated thought string forms and is adjusted as necessary, the master program translates it into everybody else’s thought patterns and it appears that way on their holostage. On all twenty-seven terminals simultaneously. So we can bypass words and get the full ideas we’re each thinking across to each other more efficiently. Well, not the full ideas. There’s always something lost in translation, especially to Terry and Jon and Ludie. But it’s so much better than just speech, Drew. The way your concerts are better than just unassisted daydreaming.”
Daydreaming. The only kind of dreaming SuperSleepless knew anything about. Until me.
When a Sleepless went into the lucid dreaming trance, the result was different from when a Liver did. Or even a donkey. Livers and donkeys can dream at night. They have that connection with their unconscious, and I direct and intensify it in ways that feel good to them: peaceful and stimulated both. While lucid dreaming, they feel — sometimes for the first time in their lives — whole. I take them farther along the road into their true selves, deeper behind the waking veil. And I direct the dreams to the sweetest of the many things waiting there.
But Sleepless don’t have night dreams. Their road to the unconscious has been genetically severed. When Sleepless go into a lucid dreaming trance, Miri told me, they see “insights” they wouldn’t have seen before. They climb around their endless jungle of words, and come out of the trance with intuitive solutions to intellectual problems. Geniuses have often done that during sleep, Miri said. She gave me examples of great scientists. I have forgotten the names.
Looking at the complex verbal design on her holostage, I could feel it in my mind. It made a shape like a featureless pale stone, cool with regret. Miri would never see this shape in my mind. Worse, she would never know she didn’t see it. She thought, because we both saw differently from donkeys, that we were alike.
I had wanted to be part of what was happening at Huevos Verdes. Already, even then, I could see that the project would change the world. Anyone not an actor in the project could only be acted on.
“Yes, Miri,” I said, smiling at her, “we’re the same.”
On a worktable in yet another lab, Miri spread out the performance stats from my concert tour. The hard copy was for me; Supers always analyzed directly from screens or holos. I wondered how much had been left out or simplified for my benefit. Terry Mwa-kambe, a small dark man with long wild hair, perched motionless on the open windowsill. Behind him the ocean sparkled deep blue in the waning light.
“See, here,” Miri said, “midway during your performance of ‘The Eagle.’ The attention-level measurements rose, and the at-titudinal changes right after the performance were pretty dramatic in the direction of risk taking. But then the follow-up stats show that by a week later, the subjects’ attitudinal changes had eroded more than they did for your other performance pieces. And by a month later, almost all risk-taking changes have disappeared.”
When I give a concert, they hook volunteer fans to machines that measure their brain wave changes, breathing, pupil variations — a lot of things. Before and after the concert the volunteers take virtual-reality tests to measure attitudes. The volunteers are paid. They don’t know what the tests are for, or who wants them. Neither do the people who administer the tests. It’s all done blind, through one of Kevin Baker’s many software subsidiaries, which form an impenetrable legal tangle. The results are transmitted to the master computer at Huevos Verdes. When the stats say so, I change what and how I perform.
I have stopped calling myself an artist.
“ ‘The Eagle’ just isn’t working,” Miri said. “Terry wants to know if you can compose a different piece that draws on subconscious risk-taking imagery. He wants it by your broadcast a week from Sunday.”
“Maybe Terry should just write it for me.”
“You know none of us can do that.” Then her eyes sharpened and her mouth softened. “You’re the Lucid Dreamer, Drew. None of us can do what you do. If we seem to be … directing you too much, it’s only because the project requires it. The whole thing would be impossible without you.”
I smiled at her. She looked so concerned, filled with so much passion for her work. So resolute. Implacable, Leisha had said of her father. Willing to bend anything that stood in his way.
She said, “You do believe that we know how important you are, Drew? Drew?”
I said, “I know, Miri.”
Her face broke into shards of light, like swords in my mind. “Then you’ll compose the new piece?”
“Risk taking,” I said. “Presented as desirable, attractive, urgent. Right. By a week from Sunday.”
“It’s really necessary, Drew. We’re still months away from a prototype in the lab, but the country…” She picked up another set of hard copy. “Look. Gravtrain breakdowns up eight percent over last month. Reports to the FCC of communications interruptions — up another three percent. Bankruptcies up five percent. Food movement — this is crucial — performing sixteen percent less efficiently. Industrial indicators falling at the same dismal rate. Voter confidence in the basement. And the duragem situation—”
For once her voice lost its quarter-beat-behind slowness. “Look at these graphs, Drew! We can’t even locate the origin of the duragem breakdowns — there’s no one epicenter. And when you run the data through the Lawson conversion formulas—”
“Yes,” I said, to escape the Lawson conversion formulas. “I believe you. It’s bad out there and getting worse.’
“Not just worse — apocalyptical.”
My mind fills with crimson fire and navy thunder, surrounding a crystal rose behind an impenetrable shield. Miri grew up on Sanctuary. Necessities and comforts were a given. All the time, for everybody, without question or thought. Unlike me, Miranda never saw a baby die of neglect, a wife beaten by a despairing and drunk husband, a family existing on unflavored soysynth, a toilet that didn’t work for days. She didn’t know these things were sur-vivable. How would she recognize an apocalypse?