While they were stopped, some faint, tiny smudges in the sky caught Caitlin’s eye — an expression she finally understood! “What’s that?”
“Geese,” her mom said. “Flying south for the winter.”
Caitlin was amazed. If they’d been honking, she’d have known they were there even when she was blind, but they were absolutely silent, moving in a … a…
She balled her fist in frustration. The shape they made, the formation they were flying in: she knew she should be able to name it, but…
“Okay,” said her mom, “and green means go!”
Caitlin had gotten used to the clearly defined points and sharp lines she’d seen in webspace, but the real world was soft, diffuse. She figured maybe that the eyePod, after it processed the garbled output from her retina, was sending back only a low-resolution data-stream to her implant; she’d have to ask Dr. Kuroda if he could increase the bandwidth.
Still, even blurred, she was amazed to see her house from the outside. She’d had a doll house as a little girl, and had assumed that all houses had the sort of simple symmetry that her toy one had had, but this house was a complex shape, with a variety of angles and elevations, and it was made out of brown brick — she’d thought all bricks were red.
When they went inside, Schrodinger came down the stairs to greet them. Caitlin was stunned: she knew every inch of that cat’s fur, but had never even imagined that it was three different colors! She scooped him up and he looked into her face. His eyes were amazing.
“I guess we should call Dad,” Caitlin said.
“I already did — as soon as you called. But I couldn’t get through to him. And, anyway, Masayuki borrowed his car. I took your father to the Institute this morning; I should go pick him up.”
Caitlin did want to see her father, but the ride here had been overwhelming and almost incomprehensible, and the sun had been so bright! She wanted to look at things she’d touched before so she could get her bearings, and she didn’t want to be left alone. “No, let’s wait,” she said. She looked around the living room while stroking Schrodinger. “That window’s not too bright…”
Her mother’s tone was gentle. “That’s a painting, dear.”
“Oh.” There was so much to learn.
“So what do you want to see?”
“Everything!”
“Well, shall we start up in your room?”
“Sounds like a plan,” Caitlin said, and she followed her mother to the staircase. Even though she’d gone up it hundreds of times now, she found herself counting the steps as if it were a new staircase to her.
“Wow,” Caitlin said. It was astonishing, perceiving a room she thought she knew in a whole new way. “Tell me what the colors are.”
“Well the walls are blue — they call that shade cornflower blue.” Her mom sounded a tad embarrassed. “The previous owners, they had a boy living in this room, and we figured…”
Caitlin smiled. “It’s okay. I bet I’m going to hate pink, anyway. What does it look like?”
She saw her mother’s head turning left and right as she looked for a sample, then she got an object off a … a shelf, it must be, and brought it back. Caitlin looked at it but had no idea at all what it was, and her face must have conveyed that because her mother said, “Here, let me give you a hint.”
She did something to the object and—
“Math is hard!”
Caitlin laughed out loud. “Barbie!”
“She’s wearing a pink top.”
“Tell me some more colors.”
“Your blue jeans are, well, blue. And your T-shirt is yellow — and a bit low-cut, young lady.”
They walked around the room, and Caitlin picked up object after object — a plush zebra that hurt her eyes a bit to look at, the jar full of coins, the little trophy she’d won in an essay-writing contest back in Texas.
And as she heard the names of colors, she finally had to ask. “So the sheets on my bed are white, right?”
“Yes,” said her mom.
“And the faceplate on the light switch — that’s white, too, right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And the venetian blinds, they’re white.”
“Yes.”
“But…” she held up her hands and turned them back to front. “That’s not the color I am.”
Her mother laughed. “Well, no! I mean, we call it white, but it’s, um, I guess it’s more of a light pink with a little yellow, isn’t it?”
Caitlin looked at her hands again. The idea of mixing colors to get a different shade was still novel to her, but, yes, what her mother had said seemed more or less right: a light pink with a little yellow. “What about black people? I didn’t see any at school, and…”
“Well, they’re not really black, either,” her mother said. “They’re brown.”
“Oh, well, there are lots of brown people at school — like Bashira.”
“Well, yes, her skin is dark, but we wouldn’t actually say she’s black. At least in the States, we’d only use that term for people whose recent ancestors came from Africa or the Caribbean; Bashira was born in Pakistan, wasn’t she?”
“Lahore, yes,” said Caitlin. “I don’t suppose I should even ask if there’s really such a thing as a red Indian?”
Her mother laughed again. “No, you shouldn’t. And the term is ‘First Nations’ here in Canada.”
“Um, shouldn’t that be ‘First National’?”
“No, that’s a bank. They also call them ‘aboriginals’ here, I think.” Her mother moved along. “And this, of course, is your computer.”
Caitlin looked at it in wonder: that must be the monitor on the left, and the keyboard, and her Braille display, and on the floor next to the desk the CPU, and — and suddenly it hit her: yes, she had seen the Web, but now she wanted to see the Web!
“Show me,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“Show me what the World Wide Web looks like.”
Her mother shook her head slightly. “That’s my Caitlin.” She reached her hand out and turned on the monitor.
“Okay,” her mom said. “That’s your Web browser, and that’s Google.”
Caitlin sat in the chair and loomed close to the screen, trying to make out the details. “Where?” she said.
Her mother leaned in and pointed. “That’s the Google logo, there.”
“Oh! Such nice colors!”
“And that’s where you type in what you’re searching for. Let’s put in — well, where your dad works.” Caitlin leaned to one side and her mother worked the keyboard, presumably typing “Perimeter Institute.”
A screen that was mostly white with blue and black text came up, and — ah, her mother was using the mouse. The screen changed. “Okay,” her mom said. “That’s the PI home page.”
Caitlin peered at it. “What does it say?”
Her mother sounded concerned. “Is it that blurry?”
Caitlin turned to face her. “Mom, I’ve never seen letters before — even if they weren’t blurry, I still couldn’t read them.”
“Oh, right! Oh, God! You’re such a bookworm, I forgot. Um, well, at the top it says, ‘Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics’ and there are a bunch of links, see? That one says ‘Scientific,’ and that one’s ‘Outreach,’ and ‘What’s New,’ and ‘About.’”
Caitlin was astonished. “So that’s what a Web page looks like. Um, so show me how the browser works.”
Her mother sounded perplexed — Caitlin guessed she’d never seen herself in the tech-support role. “Well, um, that’s the address bar. And the forward and back buttons…”
She demonstrated the bookmark list, and how to open tabs, and the refresh button, and the home button — which looked to Caitlin like what a house was supposed to look like. And then they started visiting different Web pages.