“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 hale swinging 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,” followed 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.
I sidled up to one of my friends, an astronomer from the Big Island, as he chatted with the parrot, whose fluid, lovely voice mirrored Jean’s. Exactly. Jean’s accent, inflections, even that lovely low chuckle.
They were talking about dynamic topology—flocking—an emergent behavior around which I developed related software used by many governments.
Leilani, a thin, brown, sparkling girl with long black hair, was showing her cousins her favorite painting, a copy of Gauguin’s “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” The metaphysical painting of 1897 shows lightly clothed Tahitians in various life stages.
“Look,” Leilani said to her cousin, Jake, as she pointed to an old woman crouched in the corner of the painting. “There’s Tutu.”
“Ugh!” Jake, eleven, recoiled. Tutu is prettier than that!” He turned his stare to the bare breasts of a young woman.
In the painting, a fanciful, fictional Polynesian idol overlooks the people in the foreground. I imagined that Leilani liked the painting because she was always asking about the life of her ancestors in the old days. Perhaps she believed it might have been like the scene depicted in the painting, though we had etchings and photographs that showed the real thing.
Meitner was on Leilani’s leather shoulder perch, as usual, and attended to the painting quite closely. She often studied it, and I wondered if her mind encompassed the wider implications of the questions that make up the title—particularly since, being a hybrid of human and parrot, she was the living embodiment of where we might all be going.
But maybe she just liked looking at the tropical foliage in the painting.
Leilani and Meitner were classmates. In fact, they spent all their time together—sisters, of a sort—and they sometimes squabbled, as sisters do. The true dimensions of their relationship were unknown to me; I only witnessed dynamics, behaviors that looked like love, anger, apologies, wild play, and quiet, shared concentration. Jean brought in tremendously gifted educators on a regular basis. They waited in line to work with Meitner, to carry out their research. As a result, Leilani zipped through subjects that most high schoolers might have a hard time mastering. Like Meitner, she was good at calculus and trigonometry. She loved biology. She was on a soccer team, a debate team, and played a mean ukulele. We dropped her off at her cousins’ houses regularly, and they visited us here. We read, sang, watched movies, and played a lot of card games. Poker, for instance. Leilani and Meitner could take the house anywhere.
I grabbed my astronomer friend by the elbow. “Hugh, take a look at my new painting. Just hung it today.” I herded several people toward “The Stinger Ship.” Leilani leaped and danced ahead of us, Meitner fluttering to cling to her perch, and stopped in front of the painting, a proud smile on her face.
“You’ve heard about the latest private space venture?”
“Yes! Great concept.” Hugh’s broad face crinkled in an enthusiastic smile.
“Jean and I bought stock.”
He laughed. “Bound to pay off when your grandchildren are old.”
“Oh, some of the early spinoffs are already paying dividends. The brightest and the best are working on it. Anyway, this artist painted a picture based on it.”
Holding drinks, we examined it. A gigantic dome of a space ship with a cylinder hanging from its underside revealed a slice of the planet behind it. The domed shape and the tentacles that tethered human figures to the ship gave the ship its nickname.
Two figures were foregrounded. One was a space suit attached to the enormous ship with a tether. Another figure hung in space beneath the floating suit.
Hugh squinted at the second figure. “Ah. This man is naked. See the detail?” He leaned closer, gestured with his drink.
I clearly saw a human calf. A foot.