Caitlin couldn’t stop looking at her father, thinking that it might prompt him to look back at her. But he never did. He just looked away, or, as he was doing now, he stared out the living-room window at the gray sky and the trees, which were now losing their leaves.
She had hoped that when she finally saw him, his face would be … animated, that was the word; that he would smile frequently, that his eyebrows would move up and down as he spoke, that she might even see that he was affectionate toward her mother, touching her forearm at odd moments, maybe, or even stroking her hair.
“Caitlin.” Her mom’s voice, very soft. She turned. Her mother was doing something with her head, and…
Oh! She was gesturing with it, just as her dad had earlier to Kuroda: she was indicating Caitlin should come with her. Caitlin got up and followed her to the kitchen, on the far side of the intervening dining room, leaving her dad sitting in his favorite chair in the living room.
“Sit down, sweetheart.”
Caitlin did so. She was still just beginning to learn to interpret expressions, but her mother’s seemed … agitated, perhaps. “Have I done something wrong?”
“You can’t stare at your father like that.”
“Was I? Sorry. I know it’s not polite — I’ve read that.”
“No, no. It’s not that. It’s — well, you know how he is.”
“How?”
“He doesn’t like to be looked at.”
“Why not?”
“You know. I told you.”
“Told me what?”
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” her mom said. “And maybe it’s even why he’s so good at math and things like that.”
Caitlin shook her head a bit. “Yes?”
“You know,” her mom said again. “You know about your father’s…” She lowered her voice, and turned her head, perhaps, Caitlin thought, to glance through the door. “…condition.”
Caitlin felt her eyes going wide — but, as she’d already discovered, that didn’t really expand her field of view. “Condition?”
“I told you years ago. Back in Austin.”
Caitlin racked her brain, trying to recall any such conversation, but—
Oh. “I asked you why Dad didn’t talk much, and you said — at least I thought you said … oh, cripes.”
“What?”
“I thought you said he was artistic. I hadn’t known that word then.” She swallowed and found herself looking through the kitchen doorway, too, making sure they were alone.
“Well, he is artistic. He thinks in pictures, not words.”
Caitlin felt herself go limp in the chair. It made sense, she realized, her heart pounding; it made perfect sense. Her father — the renowned physicist Malcolm Decter, B.Sc., M.Sc., Ph.D. — was autistic.
Shoshana had heated up a couple of sacks of Orville Redenbacher’s in the microwave, and she, the Silverback, Dillon, Maria, and Werner were now seated in the main room of the bungalow, facing the large Apple computer monitor, munching away.
“Okay,” said Shoshana, touching a button on the remote, “here we go.”
She had footage of Dr. Marcuse from earlier projects, including one bit in which he’d done an amazingly protracted yawn. She’d thought about putting that in a circle, with the letters M-G-M above, and the caption “Marcuse Glick Movies” below, but she’d decided not to risk it. Instead, the little video began with white letters over a plain black screen that said, “Ape Makes Representational Art,” followed by the URL of the Marcuse Institute.
Next there was footage of the blank canvas, and then a reverse angle to show Hobo. “This is Hobo,” said Marcuse’s voice over top of the pictures, “a male…” There was just the slightest hesitation, Shoshana noticed. She hadn’t been aware of it when they’d recorded the audio; she’d take it out in the final edit. “…chimpanzee,” continued Marcuse. “Hobo was born at Georgia State Zoological Park, but was raised in San Diego, California, under the care of primatologist Harl P. Marcuse, who…”
The narration continued, and Hobo’s second painting of Shoshana took shape on the canvas. She ate some popcorn and watched the faces of the little audience as much as she watched her video, gauging their reaction. And then came her own big moment: the image divided into a split-screen, with the colored canvas on the left and new footage Dillon had shot on the right: a long pan around her head, and then holding on her in profile, the portrait Hobo had made side-by-side with the genuine article.
“The money shot!” said Dillon. Shoshana threw a little popcorn at him, which he batted out of the air with his hands.
When the video was over, Dillon and Maria clapped politely, and Werner nodded his head in satisfaction. But it didn’t matter what they thought, Shoshana knew. Only the Silverback’s opinion counted. “Dr. Marcuse?” she said, a bit timidly.
He shifted in his chair. “Good work,” he said. “Let’s get it online — and then see what the response is from the Georgia Zoo.”
Chapter 36
And here was the biggest leap of all so far, here was the discovery, the realization, the breakthrough, that was the hardest to make but also, I suspected, the most important.
The other entity looked at many, many things, and I had gathered that they were mostly near to it, but there was this rectangle, this frame, this window that it often looked at that was—
Oh, such a leap! Such a strange concept!
It was a display of some sort, a way of representing things that weren’t actually there. And I could see what was on the display, but only when the entity looked at it.
And, just now, the display was showing something … strange. It took me time to work out the recursiveness of it alclass="underline" the entity was looking at the display, and the display was showing moving images of a being unlike any I’d yet seen, with longer upper projections and shorter lower ones and a lump that was differently shaped. And this abnormal being was making…
Yes, yes, yes! The abnormal being was making marks on yet another flat surface: shapes, splashes of color. I watched, baffled, perplexed, and—
And suddenly the display was divided into two parts. On one side, I saw the colored shapes that the strange entity had made, and on the other there was an entity of the type I was more used to seeing. That entity was rotating, and — and — and—
And then it stopped rotating, holding its position, and—
The shapes on one side, the entity on the other: there was a … a correspondence between them. The shapes were a — yes, yes! They were a simplified version of the entity on the right. It was a stunning revelation: this was a representation of that!
The simplified representation was two-dimensional, similar to the way I was used to conceptualizing my own reality. I watched, and concentrated, and—
Suddenly it all made sense!
The lump at the top of each entity did have structure, did have components. As I saw them rendered in basic form, I could now discern the parts on the actual entity that had been rendered. The strange being that had made this rendering had exaggerated certain details so that I now saw not only their significance but realized what things differed from lump to lump: the color of the … eye, I’d call it. The color of the hair. The color of the rest of the lump. The shape of the nose. The shape of the mouth. The relative size of the ear.
The individual that had been rendered had an odd projection off the back of its lump, possibly part of its hair; as I recalled other lumps I’d seen, I realized that such projections were rare but not unheard of.
It was wonderful! I was clearly discerning the parts of the … no, not lump; a lump was a generic mass, and this was a specific, very special form, so it deserved its own coinage: head.
I was still far from fully understanding these creatures, but I was at last making progress!