This happened twelve years ago.
They called us madmen, suicides, condemned men. To be honest, that’s how it was in the beginning. The point is that they couldn’t use experimental dogs or monkeys: only creatures with intelligence, consciousness and free will can be “read.” You must not only not fear the transition into radio-wave form, you must want it, must long for it, must invest the whole of your soul – with no exaggeration – into the process. You must also take a risk. The crystalloids gave us the idea, the information-transfer method, and the confidence that such a thing was possible. For the rest we had to pay: there were sacrifices in our search for a reading mode, there were sacrifices in finding the optimal methodology for storing half-alive bodies, and in returning into these bodies, in retransmission, in dissipation there were sacrifices, sacrifices, sacrifices…
Then again, aviation, back in its day, began no better than this.
So, four months ago I launched from the Institute’s vortical antenna towards the median, a line that traces the shortest possible route from Earth to the chain of retransmitters linking Barnard’s Star and the Alpha Centauri trinary star system. It was from this very route that the crystalloids’ radio-packets “turned off” to get to us. Now the route, made with us in mind, jackknifes at an angle towards the Sun, and soon it will be just a stone’s throw of one and a half light years from Earth to the intersection leading to two other worlds.
Four retransmitters with twinned vortical antennae are already on their way to this intersection, moving along the median from Earth. One looks back, to the Sun, the other forward. The interval between them is a month’s flight at light speed.
My task was to reach the first retransmitter, get replenished and gather my strength, and radiate myself forward to the second. Then, after getting replenished the same way there, I would manually switch over to the opposite transmission and radiate myself back towards the Sun. If I had not been successful in this, the third retransmitter would have done it automatically, and then I would have spent half a year in space.
Before me Boris Geraklovich had done the same trick with the closest retransmitter.
This was my sixth working radio flight, and in all the preceding ones everything had been normal. My body, in a state of minimal metabolic function, of lethargic depression (just sort of being an idiot, as Boryunia says) was located on the platform in the chamber, slowly breathing and drooling into the opening below the face; instruments controlled, and, if necessary, stimulated my heart, kidney, and lung activity, along with the blood flow to all my tissues. Everything was like usual. So what happened?
Wait, maybe some transitional process was delayed, and everything is done now? Can I come back from the zero-point of “quiet and dark?” Well, let’s give it a try.
I extend my left hand to the desk lamp (it stands where it always stood), I fumble for the button. I press it, and then jump from the sharp bang just beside me. There’s no light. Did the lamp break?
But what are these sounds that have sprung up: dim ones, hissing, with sudden clicks? Did someone come in here?
“Who’s there?! I asked you not to…”
Flashes of rosy light, alternating in time with the words. And the voice is the same, like from a barrel, deep-chested. And no answer. What the hell! I get up, find the light switch on the wall, and turn on the overhead light.
Boom! It’s like a cannon went off overhead. And still there is no light. This is getting to be monotonous. The clicks, the noises, the murmurs all around are stronger, more distinct. Interesting. I close my eyes, the sounds die away. I open them – with bangs, as if someone uncorked two bottles of champagne right under my nose – the sounds are stronger. And no light.
Once I guess the truth, my skin goes cold. I clap my hands firmly: once, twice, a third time. Now I perceive bursts of yellowish-green light: flash, flash, flash. My hands go limp, my legs go weak.
I turn off the overhead light: let’s have some quiet. I find the armchair. I sit down. So that’s how it is. Well isn’t this great. A fine way to fly home. I’m back.
“… he touched my eyes, and noise and ringing filled them.” It’s not the way Pushkin wrote it.
During entry into my body, the paths of the optic nerve (from the eyes to the analytical region of the brain) and the cochlear nerve (from the ears to the temporal lobes) got mixed up, but why, how?! And now I see sound and hear light.
3
Identical bluish flashes in front of me and to the right, lasting a half-second each, with pauses of the same length. Aha, it’s the telephone. Someone couldn’t take it any longer. I fumble for the handset on the table and raise it to my ear. Now some uneven shimmering flashes have started up: just try and figure out whose voice it is and who’s talking! Oh, well: let them listen to me.
“Hello, if this is not Patrick Yanovich, give him the phone.” (Rapid flashes of elevated brightness. It’s probably him on the phone? Well, let’s assume so.) “Don’t say anything, I won’t understand anyway. Just listen…”
I inform them of what has happened to me. And that in all other respects I am all right, and require no assistance. I don’t understand how it all happened. I ask them to stop by in the morning with everything they can find on learning to read Braille. Reading with your fingers. And let them assign someone (the word in my mind is “caregiver”) who will communicate with me via Braille and will help me make contact with the world. And now I intend to rest. That’s all! I hang up the phone. There are no more flashes: they understood.
It’s a cheerful little life that lies ahead for me. I see, I hear, but I am more blind than a person who has no eyes and I am more deaf than a person who has lost his hearing. I need to make a pile of everything that I know (no more than anyone else, unfortunately) and all that might come in handy in decoding what I will “hear” now with my eyes and “see” with my ears. That I lived to see the day! My realization of the sheer mockery of this situation so burns me that I sit and curse for a full minute, cursing the way my ancestors – workers and peasants – cursed in high latitudes and in bad weather. In the room there is a crimson flickering, as if it’s lit by a bonfire.
OK. My eyes perceive signals as before – in the range of electromagnetic oscillations between 0.76 and 0.4 microns – as do my ears (air vibrations from approximately 30,000 to 20,000 hertz). I will see lower-pitched sounds in the red part of the spectrum, higher-pitched sounds in the blue part. Loud sounds, of course, will be bright, quiet sounds dim… Bats catch midges on the wing with the help of ultrasound target location. This will not work for me, as the shortest sound waves that I can sense are about a centimeter in length: I would not even be able to make out something as small as a fly. (Just the same I should acquire some sort of device that buzzes or squeaks, a “flashlight.” Although… would I be able to “illuminate” things with it? Ears don’t provide images. Maybe I would at least not bump into posts?)
What was once light is now electromagnetic oscillations. Bright light will sound loud, dim light, accordingly, will rustle quietly. Red light will give a low tone, violet will be the highest… Wait, not all of this is so simple; in the eye we have the phenomenon of adaption. It follows that brightness will be loud at first, and then will get increasingly quiet. But what are these clicks I hear while “looking at” the stationary objects in the room that are illuminated by still light? This is from another capability of the eyes: the pupils, while viewing, move not smoothly, but in hops. They pause on contrasts, on distinctive places, and then skip to something new. That’s your click. (I stage an experiment: I concentrate a stationary gaze… at nothing. The sounds die down to a whisper. I move my eyes around freely: right away there is a click. So that’s all correct.)
But what good does all this physics do me? I’ll be analyzing my perceptions: aha, the red light means a low-pitched sound. The light is getting brighter: the source of the sound is getting closer… And only once I end up under the wheels will I understand that it was an automobile.
The fact of the matter is that the normal ability to distinguish objects has a billion-year service record of instinctual reactions to all stimuli, of unconditioned reflexes, fixed and unequivocal. The world is really not “optical” and “aural,” it is integrated. But certain reactions of a certain frequency and force (and from them reflexes, and then organs) developed in protein-based flesh in response to its manifestations. For other manifestations, again depending on frequency and force, there is a different specificity of reactions and abilities to distinguish. This specificity is in us; it is something like our agreement to regard the world just as we do.
But now a certain person has appeared with his own special point of… view? hearing? of the world: me. And now what?
The feeling of deprivation, of existential defeat, is gradually abating. It’s being crowded out by a sharp sensation of the novelty of the situation. It is interesting, after all: for thirty-two years I saw the world like everyone else, and now I will perceive it in a new way. Maybe I will be able to observe something that I did not notice before, that was not noticed by other normal people. Your view of the world is not in your eyes, but in what lies behind them: in the analytical regions of the brain. And, to take it even further: in deep reasoning, in understanding the essence of a thing. In ancient Indian philosophy, in the Upanishads, there is a thesis: “You cannot see your seeing from within; you cannot hear your hearing from within.”
But now I must find a way to do this.
Some new murmurs and noises are getting louder to the left, coming from the window. Daybreak? I extinguish the lamp, I open the window wide (not without difficulty), and I breathe in the cold, harsh air. Now it is September, the time of golden fall, of the farewell feast of nature’s colors. What will it sound like to me? Over there is a faraway, low-pitched sound, building up like music; in conjunction with the movement of my eyes emerges something like the plucking of the strings of a double-bass: the crimson dawn? Or are there light, white clouds today? And that drawn-out rustling sound if I direct my eyes to the right: is that not the right bank of the Volga – all covered with dark fir trees with red trunks, with yellow birches and aspens – the side lit first by the rising sun? And this deafening triumphant roar that overwhelms all other sounds, is it the bright morning sun itself? Is this all that I have left? My God!
I feel my face quivering.
4
“Now D.”
Three pins touch the index finger of my right hand: two above, one below and to the right.
“Press the button several times, let them vibrate. Now E?”
Two pins along a diagonal.
“F?”
Two pins above, one below and to the left.
I am assimilating the alphabet of the blind, the system of Louis Braille, a boy who went blind at the age of three, and later became a musician and teacher. My hand rests in a cradle, my fingers in hollows; from below, electromagnets hit the pads of my fingers with pins in various combinations, from one to six: they go completely through the letters, numbers, punctuation marks, even mathematical symbols and musical notation. And they are more simple than the usual tracings, by the way. I would have died never knowing about this. Thanks, Monsieur Braille, my dear colleague!
“Now dial in some simple little phrase… like, say: “Sally sells sea shells by the sea shore.” Don’t go too fast.”
“One more time! Again… Say that phrase.” (Wavering greyish-green flashes with intervals of darkness.) “Don’t overarticulate, say it normally. Just one more time… Did you know that your voice has a green color? Now type out that phrase. Give me the piece of paper. Thank you!”
I feel the piece of paper in my left hand. I hold it at a normal distance in front of my unseeing eyes and move them back and forth. Aha, there it is, the typed phrase: the even high-pitched hiss becomes irregular, tripping. So this, it seems, is “Sally sells sea shells by the sea shore?” Well screw you, Lord-God-and-differential-calculus, dammit! Be calm, Bob – or what’s your name? Max? Easy does it, we’ll get it. The main thing is to make it so that a one-to-one correspondence develops, new reflex arcs. For this to take place, I have to perceive visual and aural “images” along with what I touch.
“Now dial in your name, pronounce it, and type it out.”
From the other side of the wall… no, more like from the other side of the mine collapse through which a thin little ray of information has begun to bore in my direction: at the teletype is Yulia, Yulia Vasilyevna, the boss’s lab assistant and head deputy. What is she like? To be honest, I can’t bring up an image of her, or I don’t remember her well. And it’s not because we never saw one another, since we did so fairly often. I simply didn’t pay much attention to her: she was always in someone else’s shadow, close at hand, diligent, and nothing about her appearance jumped out at you. I think that she has blondish (or brownish?) hair, with short bangs above a steep little forehead, a thin face, a sharp chin, and early wrinkles that she feels no need to conceal; I think that she is not even thirty yet. Yes, she also has nice, derisive lips: she often twists them to the right or to the left in a sort of self-directed incredulous smile, a sneer at herself. She has a thin, upturned nose, her eyes are… grey? No, I don’t remember. Her voice, as far as I remember, is quiet and pure, but without those overtones that so penetrate a man’s soul, overtones of femininity. She is very petite, and put together more or less normally.
Now it seems very important to me to recall, to at least see in my mind, what she is like. Because Yulia Vasilyevna is present in my room as these liquid, inexplicably soft sounds (this when I move my eyes from left to right or down to up and back again), and as a green-colored voice… and also as a barely perceptible smell of some sort of cosmetic product, either perfume or lipstick. In fact, when I felt her name under my fingers, I was not certain that it was definitely her; I only knew that it was not Patrick and not Geraklych.
“You know what, Yulia, you really need to fall in love with me right away. Then I will hear the sparkle of your eyes and the flushing of your cheeks… as some sort of rippling sound? Or a purring sound? I will see the intimate visual modulations of your voice, the sunflecks of your laughter… What do you say?”
No answer on the teletype. Just a sort of hissing from her side, with a touch of buzzing. What is that? Maybe I made her blush; she’s an old maid, after all. I can feel the tension.
“Fine, let’s do the next phrase. Maybe, ‘Anna und Marta baden’ in Cyrillic…”
5
We’ve consulted with many biologists and neurophysiologists. It’s a unique case, no one will venture to explain exactly what has happened to you…
We’ll find out during the autopsy, huh!
Stop it, Boris, you should be ashamed of yourself!
“It’s fine, Patrick Yanovich, he can joke, let him.”
Lip movements convey sounds. Those of the person on the left are more distinct; those of the one on the right are smeared. Their voices form visual sunflecks: greenish-yellow to the left (Patrick’s little tenor), reddish-orange to the right. But this is all seasoning, the accompaniment to the talking, not the thing itself. The talking I receive with my fingers. Mind you, I can already use two blind-reading devices fluently, with both hands at once. But from the other side, from their side, the talking flows freely: they’ve replaced the teletype with an adapter that transforms words into discrete signals, into impulses for the electromagnetic pins. They have it good!
I am receiving Patrick Yanovich with my right hand; with the left – closer to my heart – I receive Boryunia, who just now put in his two cents about my autopsy, and I guess that this isn’t all he wants to say. I understand him. He is flatly disinclined to regard me as unfortunate, as crippled, to pity me and imagine things from my perspective. I returned alive, and in this I am more than lucky. He and I are the last of our psychonaut team, and we know how much this really means.
I personally find Wu Chun’s hypothesis the most convincing, Patrick s
emaphores in yellow and green flashes. The pins tap into my fingers. You should remember him, he taught you all acupuncture. (Of course I remember him, but I didn’t think that that dried up little old man was still alive.) He thinks that the problem is the length of your radioflight. The body cannot remain that long without its psyche, without that excess of life that shapes our complexity and our rational behavior. To put a finer point on it, the body can do fine without the psyche, but the brain cannot: it begins to manifest a simplification of structures… a smoothing, a diffusion, a dedifferentiation, as Chun says. In you… more specifically, in your body, towards the end of the storage period the connections of your eyes with your visual analyzers and your ears with the auditory areas of the cortex in the temporal lobes of your brain probably broke off…
It’s simple liquefaction of the brain, issues Boris into my left fingers, after which I recognize, without the pins, his “Ha-ha-ha” in explosive scarlet flashes.
And when you returned and entered your body, the pressure of your psy-potential caused the connections in your brain to come out all wrong, Patrick concludes. It’s most likely that your visual channels took the shortest routes to the nearest analyzers, and they outflanked your aural channels, which took form in the occipital region, and connected up with the thalami optici. We played the situation out on a perceptron model of the brain: this kind of reorganization of structures is possible in the process of switching fields.
So that’s it. That, it seems, is how it happened. And I can even guess why: because of my impatience, because of the pressure of my desire to see my native world as soon as possible. And then I further reinforced this reorganization with my see! hear! Yep.
Red Star Tales Page 37