Robert Siverberg: Hot Sky at Midnight

Farkas didn’t say a word about jellyfish. But in some fashion or other he did indeed seem to be taking in the view. He stood close to the elevator’s glass wall in deep concentration, gripping the rail, not saying a thing. Now and then he made a little hissing sound as something particularly awesome went by outside. Juanito studied him with sidelong glances. What could he possibly see? Nothing seemed to be moving beneath those shadowy places where his eyes should have been. Yet somehow he was seeing out of that broad blank stretch of gleaming skin above his nose.

It was damned disconcerting. It was downright weird.

The San Bernardito gave Farkas a rim-side room, facing the stars. Juanito paid the hotel clerks to treat his clients right. That was something his father had taught him when he was just a kid who wasn’t old enough to know a Schwarzchild singularity from an ace in the hole. “Pay for what you’re going to need,” his father kept saying. “Buy it and at least there’s a chance it’ll be there when you have to have it.” His father had been a revolutionary in Central America during the time of the Empire. He would have been prime minister if the revolution had come out the right way. But it hadn’t.

“You want me to help you unpack?” Juanito said.

“I can manage.”

“Sure,” Juanito said.

He stood by the window, looking at the sky. Like all the other satellite worlds, Valparaiso Nuevo was shielded from cosmic-ray damage and stray meteoroids by a double shell filled with a three-meter-thick layer of lunar slag. Rows of V-shaped apertures ran down the outer skin of the shield, mirror-faced to admit sunlight but not hard radiation; and the hotel had lined its rooms up so each one on this side had a view of space through the Vs. The whole town of Cajamarca was facing darkwise now, and the stars were glittering fiercely.

When Juanito turned from the window he saw that Farkas had hung his clothes neatly in the closet and was shaving—methodically, precisely—with a little hand-held laser.

“Can I ask you something personal?” Juanito said.

“You want to know how I see.”

“It’s pretty amazing, I have to say.”

“I don’t see. Not really. I’m just as blind as you think I am.”

“Then how—”

“It’s called Blindsight,” Farkas said. “Proprioceptive vision.”

“What?”

Farkas chuckled. “There’s all sorts of data bouncing around that doesn’t have the form of reflected light, which is what your eyes see. A million vibrations besides those that happen to be in the visual part of the electromagnetic spectrum are shimmering in this room. Air currents pass around things and are deformed by what they encounter. And it isn’t only the air currents. Objects have mass, they have heat, they have—the term won’t make any sense to you— shapeweight. A quality having to do with the interaction of mass and form. Does that mean anything to you? No, I guess not. But it does to me. And for two-dimensional images: I have a different technique for detecting those. Look, there’s a lot of information available beyond what you can see with eyes, if you want it. I want it.”

“You use some kind of machine to pick it up?” Juanito asked.

Farkas tapped his forehead. “It’s in here. I was born with it.”

“Some kind of sensing organ instead of eyes?”

“That’s pretty close.”

“What do you see, then? What do things look like to you?”

“What do they look like to you?” Farkas said. “What does a chair look like to you?”

“Well, it’s got four legs, and a back—”

“What does a leg look like?”

“It’s longer than it is wide.”

“Right.” Farkas knelt and ran his hands along the black tubular legs of the ugly little chair beside the bed. “I touch the chair, I feel the shape of the legs. But I don’t see leg-shaped shapes.”

“What then?”

“Silver globes that roll away into fat curves. The back part of the chair bends double and folds into itself. The bed’s a bright pool of mercury with long green spikes coming up. You’re six blue spheres stacked one on top of another, with a thick orange cable running through them. And so on.”

“Blue?” Juanito said. “Orange? How do you know anything about colors?”

“The same way you do. I call one color blue, another one orange. I don’t know if they’re remotely like your blue or orange, but so what? My blue is always blue for me. It’s different from the color I see as red and the one I see as green. Orange is always orange. It’s a matter of relationships. You Mow?”

“No,” Juanito said, “How can you possibly make sense out of anything? What you see doesn’t have a thing to do with the real color or shape or position of anything.”

Farkas shook his head. “Wrong, Juanito. For me, what I see is the real shape and color position. It’s all I’ve ever known. If they were able to retrofit me with normal eyes now, which I’m told would be less than fifty-fifty likely to succeed and tremendously risky besides, I’d be lost trying to find my way around in your world. It would take me years to learn how. Or maybe forever. But I do all right, in mine. I understand, by touching things, that what I see by blindsight isn’t the ‘actual’ shape. But I see in consistent equivalents. Do you follow? A chair always looks like what I think of as a chair, even though I know that chairs aren’t really shaped at all like that. If you could see things the way I do it would all look like something out of another dimension. It is something out of another dimension, really. The information I operate by is different from what you use, that’s all. But I do see, in my own way. I perceive objects and establish relationships between them, I make spatial perceptions, just as you do. Do you follow, Juanito?”

Juanito considered that. How very weird it sounded. To see the world in funhouse distortions, blobs and spheres and orange cables and glimmering pools of mercury. Weird, yes, extremely weird. After a moment he said, “And you were born like this?”

“That’s right.”

“Some kind of genetic accident?”

“Not an accident,” Farkas said quietly. “I was an experiment. A master gene-splicer worked me over in my mother’s womb.”

“Right,” Juanito said. “You know, that’s actually the first thing I guessed when I saw you come off the shuttle. This has to be some kind of splice effect, I said. But why—why—” He faltered. “Does it bother you to talk about these things?”

“Not really.”

“Why would your parents have allowed—”

“They didn’t have any choice, Juanito.”

“Isn’t that illegal? Involuntary splicing?”

“Of course,” Farkas said. “So what?”

“But who would do that to—”

“This was in the Free State of Kazakhstan, which you’ve never heard of. It was one of the countries formed out of the Soviet Union, which you’ve also probably never heard of, after the First Breakup, a hundred, hundred fifty years ago. My father was Hungarian consul at Tashkent. He was killed in the Second Breakup, what they called the War of Restoration, and my mother, who was pregnant, was volunteered for the experiments in prenatal genetic surgery then being carried out in that city under Chinese auspices. A lot of remarkable work was done there in those years. They were trying to breed new and useful kinds of human beings to serve the republic. I was one of the experiments in extending the human perceptual range. I was supposed to have normal sight plus blindsight, but it didn’t quite work out that way.”

“You sound very calm about it,” Juanito said.

“What good is getting angry?”

“My father used to say that too,” Juanito said. “Don’t get angry, get even. He was in politics, the Central American Empire. When the revolution failed he took sanctuary here.”