"A bat flew past a cage where a bird was singing. 'Why are you singing at this hour?' the bat asked. 'I only sing at night,' the bird answered. 'I once sang during the daytime, and that is how the hunter caught me and put me in this cage.' 'If you had thought that while you were free,' the bat said, 'it might have done you some good.' "
With this account, I taught H several irregular verbs as well as the indispensable lesson that precaution is worthless after the fact. H could not understand this point until understanding itself rendered the warning worthless.
While I rewove H on fable, Lentz busied himself with browsing our copy of the Master's Comps List for his own edification. He liked to sit behind his desk, stretched out as I had seen him that first night, chuckling at Austen or Dickens. Sometimes he'd spurt out his favorites. "Classic! ' "There are strings," said Mr. Tappertit, "in the human heart that had better not be vibrated." ' Try it out, Marcel. Just try it."
All he wanted was to be put off. One evening, though, he refused even that patronage. He collared a sentence from the List and brought it over to me. "Here we go, Marcel. A brief one. A piece of cake."
I read the citation he'd penciled on his scrap of paper. "Oh, Philip. A little mercy, please?" The request saddened me inexplicably. I guess I imagined that, having seen his woman in the attic, I'd no longer be the object of his aggression. Now I saw that his aggression would always bless whoever was nearest, whatever they knew or didn't.
Lentz pleaded like a little child. "Just tell it once. Don't be a killjoy, Marcel. What connections can we possibly hurt? It's the simplest sentence in the world."
I sighed, unable to oppose his setup any longer. I spoke the quote into the digitizing microphone. "Once you learn to read you will be forever free." I gave H a moment to list-process the idea and compose itself. Then I asked, "What do you think that means?"
H thought for an ungodly length of time. Perhaps the prescription meant nothing at all.
"It means I want to be free."
Lentz and I exchanged looks. It chilled us both, to hear that pronoun, volunteered without prompting, express its incredible conclusion.
We humans studied each other. I searched Lentz's face for a response that might unfold this syllogism without killing it. What rare conjunction of axon weights laid claim to the vector of volition? What association could it have for "want"?
"How does it mean that you want to be free?" I asked H.
"Because I want to read."
Tell another one, in other words. Freedom was irrelevant. A happy side effect of that condition when you no longer relied on a trainer for access. When you could get all the stories you needed on your own.
"It means just the opposite," I told H. I felt myself killing this singular intelligence with each word. "It probably means that reading is a way of winning independence."
"Okay," H said. No affect to speak of.
"Now tell it who said that," Lentz elbowed me. "Go on. Give it the author. Then ask it again what the line means."
H did not yet have an associative matrix for Frederick Douglass. We needed to get to the hard stuff. I'd thought H too young. We were, in fact, overdue. I used that moment for our introductory lesson. I started with what little of the human impasse I understood.
"It's all made up," I tried to tell H.
"Tell me another way."
"All those morals. 'Necessity is the mother of invention.' 'Look before you leap.' 'Don't count your chickens.' They are all things that we've decided. Built up socially."
"Morals are false."
"It's not that they. . Well. We make them true. We figure them out. The things people say and live by — it's all geographical. Historical."
"Facts change," H tried. We built H to be a paraphrasing machine. And it was doing its damnedest to keep the paraphrases going, despite me.
"I suppose they have to. Think of yourself three weeks ago." I had no idea if the assemblage of knitted nets could take snapshots of its own mental state, for later examination. That would be consciousness. The memory of memory. "Three weeks ago, the things you knew formed a different shape than they do now. They were connected differently. They meant something else to you."
"Facts are facts," H said. Its plaintive speech synthesis sounded almost hurt.
"The bricks are the same. You make a different building of them." It was still too young for the final paradox: that we somehow make more buildings than we have bricks.
"What do the Chinese say?"
H took me aback. Who taught you to ask questions? And yet, if it could learn to acquire content, why not form? "About what?"
"About 'Look before you leap.' "
I told it how many Chinese there were, and how long they had been around. I made a note to read a bit of the Analects and Great Learning. Tu Fu.
"What do the Africans say?"
I wanted to tell it how "the Africans" was a construct of "the Europeans." About the six major language families found on the continent, their thousand implementations.
"What do the South Americans…?"
Maybe it was going blindly down a rote catalog. I didn't care. I was just glad it knew how to pair the adjectival forms with the place-names. That it had some sense of the shifting mosaic, a flux that discounted every single thing I'd ever told it.
"What do you say, Richard?" H asked me. I taught it to associate direct address with that tag, even the "you" of an invisible trainer. "What do I say?" It made a tag for itself all by itself.
H's questions seemed to speed up. Literally. It began jabbering faster.
H was growing up too quickly. I was not the first trainer in the world to feel this. But I was among the first who might have some say in the matter.
I could slow things down, double back to the years we skipped. While H's cubic landscape modified itself continuously now, it stabilized the less I instigated. I thought we might nestle down again, into simpler play. But it was too late. I learned that certain lessons are not undone by their opposites. Certain lessons are self-protecting, self-correcting tangles of threads that will forever remain a frayed knot.
The Mother Goose stuff drove it up the bloody wall.
"Snips and snails," I told it. "Sugar and spice."
"Do you think so, Richard?" It went to the well, when all else failed. Milked its one question.
"No. Not really."
"Do people think so? Americans?"
"Maybe some. Most would laugh. It's just a poem. A nursery rhyme." Part of the cultural bedrock.
"Little girls learn that. Little boys."
"Not really. Not anymore. Not now." But there wasn't an adult that didn't have it as part of her parasitic inheritance.
"When is anymore? When is now?"
H had learned something. Whatever stuck in the throat, indigestible, could be made less acute by slipping it into a question.
"We can talk about that later."
"Am I a boy or a girl?"
I should have seen. Even ungrounded intelligence had to grow self-aware eventually. To grab what it needed.
H clocked its thoughts now. I was sure of that. Time passed for it. Its hidden layers could watch their own rate of change. Any pause on my part now would be fatal. Delay meant something, an uncertainty that might undercut forever the strength of the connection I was about to tie for it.
"You're a girl," I said, without hesitation. I hoped I was right. "You are a little girl, Helen."
I hoped she liked the name.
I thought continually of quitting my abortive novel in progress before it quit on me. Every time I sat down to write, I sank in no end of topics more seductive and profound.
I toyed with starting a book called Orchestra. A postmodern, multiframed narrative remake of Renaissance epic poetry. One hundred instrumentalists, each an anthology of stories, tours the globe. The bout of depression plaguing the basses. The pact among the lower brass, never to capitulate to marriage. The fetishized obsession that the seventh-chair viola has for the first-chair oboe, who discovers too late this pathetic but returnable love.