None So Blind
Page 2
The end result was not grisly at all. Amy finally agreed to go to Geneva, and Cletus and his surgical team (all as skilled as they were unethical) put her through three 20-hour days of painstaking but painless microsurgery, and when they took the bandages off and adjusted a thousand-dollar wig (for they’d had to go in behind as well as through the eyesockets), she actually looked more attractive than when they had started. That was partly because her actual hair had always been a disaster. And now she had glass baby-blues instead of the rather scary opalescence of her natural eyes. No Buck Rogers TV cameras peering out at the world.
He told her father that that part of the experiment hadn’t worked, and the six Swiss scientists who had been hired for the purpose agreed.
“They’re lying,” Amy said. “They never intended to restore my sight. The sole intent of the operations was to subvert the normal functions of the visual cortex in such a way as to give me access to the unused parts of my brain.” She faced the sound of her husband’s breathing, her blue eyes looking beyond him. “You have succeeded beyond your expectations.”
Amy had known this as soon as the fog of drugs from the last operation had lifted. Her mind started making connections, and those connections made connections, and so on at a geometrical rate of growth. By the time they had finished putting her wig on, she had reconstructed the entire microsurgical procedure from her limited readings and conversations with Cletus. She had suggestions as to improving it, and was eager to go under and submit herself to further refinement.
As to her feelings about Cletus, in less time than it takes to read about it, she had gone from horror to hate to understanding to renewed love, and finally to an emotional condition beyond the ability of any merely natural language to express. Fortunately, the lovers did have Boolean algebra and propositional calculus at their disposal.
Cletus was one of the few people in the world she could love, or even talk to one-on-one, without condescending. His IQ was so high that its number would be meaningless. Compared to her, though, he was slow, and barely literate. It was not a situation he would tolerate for long.
The rest is history, as they say, and anthropology, as those of us left who read with our eyes must recognize every minute of every day. Cletus was the second person to have the operation done, and he had to accomplish it while on the run from medical ethics people and their policemen. There were four the next year, though, and twenty the year after that, and then 2000 and 20,000. Within a decade, people with purely intellectual occupations had no choice, or one choice: lose your eyes or lose your job. By then the “secondsight” operation was totally automated, totally safe.
It’s still illegal in most countries, including the United States, but who is kidding whom? If your department chairman is secondsighted and you are not, do you think you’ll get tenure? You can’t even hold a conversation with a creature whose synapses fire six times as fast as yours, with whole encyclopedias of information instantly available. You are, like me, an intellectual throwback.
You may have a good reason for it, being a painter, an architect, a naturalist, or a trainer of guide dogs. Maybe you can’t come up with the money for the operation, but that’s a weak excuse, since it’s trivially easy to get a loan against future earnings. Maybe there’s a good physical reason for you not to lie down on that table and open your eyes for the last time.
I know Cletus and Amy through music. I was her keyboard professor once, at Julliard, though now of course I’m not smart enough to teach her anything. They come to hear me play sometimes, in this rundown bar with its band of ageing firstsight musicians. Our music must seem boring, obvious, but they do us the favor of not joining in.
Amy was an innocent bystander in this sudden evolutionary explosion. And Cletus was, arguably, blinded by love.
The rest of us have to choose which kind of blindness to endure.
FB2 document info
Document ID: 5b005f57-f574-4dab-90c9-e900fe423edd
Document version: 1
Document creation date: 2006-04-03
Created using: MS Word, FB Tools software
Document authors :
Jolly Roger Skull
Document history:
v 1.0. The text is read through. All found misprints are corrected. All qoutes (single and double) and apostrophes are changed to side oriented ones. All dashes are corrected. Some minor corrections.
by Jolly Roger Skull, 2006.04.03
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