What was that?
A bright flash — brighter than anything I’d ever encountered.
And then darkness again.
And then another flash! Incredible!
Another flash — and then more thunder. Finally, though, it seemed the electrical part of the storm had stopped, and Caitlin began walking home again, and—
Shit!
She stumbled off the curb; she must have turned around at some point, and—
The honk of a horn, the sound of tires swerving on wet pavement. She jumped backward, up onto the sidewalk. Her heart was pounding. She wasn’t sure which way she was facing, and—
No, no. The curb had been on her right, and it was on her right now, so she must be facing west again. Still, it was terrifying, and she just stood still for a time, regaining composure, and rebuilding her mental map of where she was.
The raindrops grew smaller, less heavy. She was sad the lightning had ended, and, as she began again to walk toward her house, she wondered if everyone else was now seeing a rainbow — but no, no, Sunshine had said it was dark out. Ah, well, flashes of light were wondrous enough!
Caitlin arrived at the corner lot and walked up the driveway, which was made of zigzag-shaped interlocking stone tiles; she could feel them beneath her feet. She dug out her key (she carried it in the pocket with her wallet, not the one with the eyePod), opened the front door, and—
“Caitlin!”
“Hi, Mom.”
“Look at you! You’re soaked to the skin!” Caitlin imagined her peering over her shoulder. “Where’s Trevor?”
“He’s — a jerk,” Caitlin said, catching herself before she said “an asshole.”
“Oh, sweetheart,” she said sympathetically. But then her voice grew angry.
“You walked by yourself? Even if this is a safe neighborhood, you shouldn’t be out alone after dark.”
Caitlin decided to elide over the last few hundred yards. “No, Sunshine — a girl I know — she walked me back.”
“You should have called. I’d have come to get you.”
Caitlin struggled to pull the sodden sweatshirt over her head. “Mom,” she said once it was off. “I saw the lightning.”
“Oh, my God! Really?”
“Yes. Jagged lines, over and over again.”
She was gathered into a hug. “Oh, Caitlin, oh, darling, that’s wonderful!” A pause. “Can you see anything now?”
“No.”
“Still…”
Caitlin smiled. “Yes,” she said, bouncing up and down a bit on her toes.
“Still. Where’s Dr. Kuroda?”
“He’s gone to bed; he was exhausted — he’s totally jet-lagged.”
She thought about suggesting they wake him, but there was nothing happening now, and the data her eyePod produced during the thunderstorm would be safely stored on his servers in Tokyo; he could examine it after a good night’s sleep. Besides, she was exhausted herself. “And Dad?”
“Still at the Institute — the public lecture, remember?”
“Oh. Well, I’m going to go change.”
She headed up to her room, got out of her soaked clothes, put on her pajamas, and lay down on the bed, hands intertwined behind her head. She wanted to relax and she was hungry for more vision, so she touched the button on her eyePod.
Webspace faded into existence: lines, points, colors, but—
Was it her imagination? Was it just that the lightning had been so bright that the colors in webspace now seemed … yes, she could draw the parallel, see how the word she knew from sound could apply to vision: the colors did seem muted now, dulled, less vibrant, and—
No, no, it wasn’t that! They weren’t muted. Rather, they were less sharp because…
Because now, behind everything, there was …
How to describe it? She sifted through words she knew related to visual phenomena. Something … shimmering, that was it. There was a background visible now, shining with a subdued flickering light.
Had something happened to the structure of webspace? That seemed unlikely. No, surely it was her way of visualizing it that had changed — presumably because of the real vision she’d just experienced. The background of webspace no longer appeared as a void but rather was twinkling, and rapidly, too. And at the very limits of … of resolution, there was a … a structure to it.
She got off the bed, went to her desk chair, and had JAWS recite email headers while she continued to look at webspace. Twenty-three messages had come in, and there’d doubtless be lots of new things written on her Facebook wall and new comments to her LJ postings. She switched back to simplex mode, clearing her vision so she could concentrate. She was about to type a response to an email when suddenly, shockingly, her entire field of vision flooded with intense whiteness. What the hell?
But then the crack of thunder came, shaking her bedroom’s window, and she realized that it was more lightning.
Another flash!
One steamboat, two steam—
The storm was only three-tenths of a mile away.
She had missed hearing her mother come up the stairs — what with thunder shaking the whole house — and was startled when she heard her saying, “Well? Can you see this lightning, too?”
Caitlin moved toward the voice, letting her mother’s arms wrap around her.
Yet more lightning, and—
Her mother letting her go, maneuvering so she was standing beside her, instead of holding her. Caitlin took her hand, and—
Another flash.
“You can!” said her mom. “You close your eyes when there’s lightning.”
“I do?” said Caitlin.
“Yes!”
“But I can still see it.”
“Well, sure. Eyelids aren’t completely opaque.”
Caitlin was stunned. Why hadn’t she known that? How much else was there to know about the world?
“Thanks, Mom,” she said.
“For what?”
The storm was moving off; the thunder was taking longer to arrive each time.
She lifted her shoulders a bit. How do you thank someone who has given you so much, and given up so much for you? She turned to face her, hoping against hope that this was the real beginning — that she would soon at last see her heart-shaped face. “For everything,” she said, hugging her tightly.
Chapter 25
It was now almost 9:00 P.M. in California. The Silverback was resting his bulk in the one overstuffed easy chair in the bungalow’s main room. Shoshana Glick had propped her rump against the edge of the desk that held the big computer monitor. Dillon Fontana, clad all in black, was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, leaning against the jamb. Werner and Maria had gone home for the weekend.
“What’s noteworthy,” Dillon said, “is that Hobo began doing representational art after he started communicating with Virgil.”
Shoshana nodded. “I’d noticed that, too. But Virgil doesn’t paint — I asked Juan in Miami. He doesn’t do any sort of art. So it’s not like the orangutan gave Hobo a tip or encouragement.”
Marcuse was drinking Coke from a two-liter bottle that looked small in his hands. He took a swig, wiped his face, and said, “It’s the flat screen.”
Shoshana turned to look at him.
“Don’t you see?” Marcuse said. “Until we linked the two apes in a videoconference, all the ASL signs Hobo had ever seen were three dimensional — done by actual human beings in close physical proximity to him. But now he’s seeing someone sign on a flat two-dimensional screen, on a computer monitor.” He gestured at the Apple display behind Shoshana.