“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. 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 anything 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 follow?”
“No,” Juanito said. “How can you possibly make sense out of anything? What you see doesn’t have anything 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 and 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 anything 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. And the world I move through looks completely different from the world that normal people see. 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? Do you follow?”
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, very 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 this stuff?”
“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 new countries formed out of the Soviet Union, which you’ve also probably never heard of, after the Breakup. My father was Hungarian consul at Tashkent. He was killed in the Breakup 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 new republic. I was one of the experiments in extending the human perceptual range. I was supposed to have normal sight plus blindsight, but I 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.”
“So did the surgeon who did my prenatal splice,” Farkas said. “Fifteen years ago. He’s still living here.”
“Of course,” Juanito said, as everything fell into place.
“The man’s name is Wu Fang-shui,” Juanito said. “He’d be about 75 years old, Chinese, and that’s all I know, except there’ll be a lot of money in finding him. There can’t be that many Chinese on Valparaiso, right?”
“He won’t still be Chinese,” Kluge said.
Delilah said, “He might not even still be a he.”
“I’ve thought of that,” said Juanito. “All the same, it ought to be possible to trace him.”
“Who you going to use for the trace?” Kluge asked.
Juanito gave him a steady stare. “Going to do it myself.”
“You?”
“Me, myself. Why the hell not?”
“You never did a trace, did you?”
“There’s always a first,” Juanito said, still staring.
He thought he knew why Kluge was poking at him. A certain quantity of the business done on Valparaiso involved finding people who had hidden themselves here and selling them to their pursuers, but up till now Juanito had stayed away from that side of the profession. He earned his money by helping dinkos go underground on Valparaiso, not by selling people out. One reason for that was that nobody yet had happened to offer him a really profitable trace deal; but another was that he was the son of a former fugitive himself. Someone had been hired to do a trace on his own father seven years back, which was how his father had come to be assassinated. Juanito preferred to work the sanctuary side of things.
He was also a professional, though. He was in the business of providing service, period. If he didn’t find the runaway gene surgeon for Farkas, somebody else would. And Farkas was his client. Juanito felt it was important to do things in a professional way.
“If I run into problems,” he said, “I might subcontract. In the meanwhile I just thought I’d let you know, in case you happened to stumble on a lead. I’ll pay finders’ fees. And you know it’ll be good money.”
“Wu Fang-shui,” Kluge said. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Me too,” said Delilah.
“Hell,” Juanito said. “How many people are there on Valparaiso all together? Maybe nine hundred thousand? I can think of fifty right away who can’t possibly be the guy I’m looking for. That narrows the odds some. What I have to do is just go on narrowing, right? Right?”