I decided he must be sticking up for me. "Thank you, Ram."
"No, my friend. I am the one who should be thanking you. You fiction writers are the only creatures among us arrogant enough to be the conscience of the race, as you might say. God forbid anyone should let the critic decide which of you shall live and which die. My mother wrote over one hundred of what you call fictions. She stopped reading reviews after the first several dozen of her books."
"Did you — several dozen?"
"Especially after she won India's Pulitzer Prize."
"India's Pulitzer?"
Ram laughed, high-pitched, singsong. Nothing was cultural. Nothing essential, anyway. "You know what I mean."
We fed her an eidetic image of the Bible. The complete Shakespeare. We gave her a small library on CD-ROM, six hundred scanned volumes she might curl up with. This constituted a form of cheating, I suppose. An open-book exam, where the human, in contrast, had to rely on memory alone. And yet we meant to test just this: whether silicon was such stuff as dreams might be made on.
Besides: Helen didn't know these texts. She just had a linear, digital array where she might go look them up. A kid with her own computer. A front-end index hasher helped her locate what she looked for. She could then place the complete text on her own input layers for mulling over.
This way she could read at night, while no one was around. And she didn't even need a flashlight. The one thing missing from her education was a sense of danger. The forbidden. The risk factor. Someone to come tell her to knock it off and get to bed.
In a wonderful twist, Helen acquired Chen and Keluga's physical-symbol rule base twice. At the low-level, we deep-wired many of the relationships into actual data structures. These we affixed at junctures in the net of nets, where they in effect applied semantic filters to her thought. But Helen also learned our colleagues' work by appending their culled knowledges herself, inefficiently, to her own weighted and qualified, high-level Platonic reflection.
Worldliness was massive, and deeper than any sea-dingle. It came, in the end, only in the form of a catalog.
We told her about parking tickets and two-for-one sales. About tuning forks and pitchforks and forked tongues and the road not taken. We told her about resistors and capacitors, baiters-and-switchers, alternating current, alternate lifestyles, very-large-scale integration and the failure of education to save society from itself.
We told her about wool and linen and damask. We told her about finches and feeders, bats and banyans, sonar and semaphores and trail markers made of anything the living body might shed. About mites and motes, insect galls and insecticides, about mating for life or for a fraction of a minute.
We taught her about the Securities and Exchange Commission. We told her about collectors who specialize in Depression-era glass. About the triple jump and the two-man luge. About how people used to teach their children about the big hand and the little hand. About defecation and respiration and circulation. About Post-it notes. Registered trademarks and draft resistance. The Oscar and Grammy and Emmy. Dying of heart disease. Divining with a fresh-cut alder rod.
We told her how the keys on a piano were laid out. About letterhead. Debutantes' balls. Talk radio and docudrama television. Colds and flus, and a brief five-century tour of their treatments. The Great Wall and the Burma Road and the Iron Curtain and the Light at the End of the Tunnel. About how the earth looked from space. About a fire that has raged underground beneath a Pennsylvania town for the last thirty years.
We showed her the difference between triforium and clerestory. We traced the famous pilgrims' routes through time and space. We told her about spoilage and refrigeration. How salt was once worth its weight in gold. How spice fueled the whole tragic engine of human expansion. How plastic wrap solved one of civilization's nightmares and started another.
We showed her Detroit, savaged by short-term economics. We showed her Sarajevo in 1911. Dresden and London in 1937. Atlanta in 1860. Baghdad. Tokyo, Cairo, Johannesburg, Calcutta, Los Angeles. Just before, and just after.
We told her East African in-law jokes. Java highland jokes about stupid Sumatrans. Aussie put-downs of Pommy bastards. Catskills jokes about unlicensed operation of knishes. City folk and country folk. Pat and Mike. Elephant riddles. Inuit jokes where fish and bears scoff at the mere idea of human existence.
We told her about revenge and forgiveness and contrition. We told her about retail outlets and sales tax, about ennui, about a world where you hear about everything yet where nothing happens to you. We told her how history always took place elsewhere.
We taught her never to draw to an inside straight and never to send a boy to do a man's job. We laid out the Queen's Necklace affair and the Cuban trade embargo. The rape of continent-sized forests and the South Sea bubble of cold fusion. Bar codes and baldness. Lint, lintels, lentils, Lent. The hope, blame, perversion, and crippled persistence of liberal humanism. Grace and disgrace and second chances. Suicide. Euthanasia. First love. Love at first sight.
Helen had to use language to create concepts. Words came first: the main barrier to her education. The brain did things the other way around. The brain juggled thought's lexicons through multiple subsystems, and the latecomers, the most dispensable lobes, were the ones where names per se hung out.
In evolution's beginning was not the word but the place we learned to pin the word to. Little babies registered and informed long before they invented more mama by calling her such. Aphasies, even deaf-mute sign aphasies, wove rich conceptual tapestries through their bodies' many axes in the absence of a single verb.
Chen and Keluga's dream seemed more hopeless to me all the time. The lexical rules of speech were not enumerable. Not even recursively so. So much less so, the lexical rules of felt existence. I spoke to Helen sentences that had half a dozen valid parsings or that resisted parsing altogether. I pitied her as I reeled off the exceptions to a Chen-Keluga semantic categorization of "tree." All trees have green leaves at some time during the year unless the tree is a red maple or a saguaro or diseased or dormant or petrified or a seedling or recently visited by locusts or fire or malicious children or unless it is a family tree or a shoe tree or… An exhaustive dictionary for the term would take every tree that ever lived just to make the pages.
Not to mention trees in politics, religion, commerce, or philosophy. I could read Helen the poem that insisted no poem in creation stood comparison to one. But I could not lay out the difference between popular and academic, between hearth and hermeneutic, poetry and verse, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Then then and Then now, between evocative simile and mind-fogging confusion, prewar sentimentality and the deforested poem-landscape just before that poet's death in the French trenches. Words alone would not explain to Helen the difference between "poem" and "tree." She could diagram, but she could not climb.
I taught her the parts of the internal combustion engine and how to make change. I told her how my brother liked to go into the "Everything's a Dollar" store and ask how much things were. I told her Taylor's favorite joke about the priest, the scientist, and the literary critic each receiving the death sentence. I told her about the WPA and the interstate system. She asked why there were interstates in Hawaii. I couldn't say.
I told her how, as a boy, I often played at saving my plastic farm animals from a worldwide flood. Only when I managed to corral them all into a small cardboard box were they saved. Then I would look for a smaller cardboard ark and start the whole desperate rescue over again.