Hieroglyph (10 page)

GIRL IN WAVE : WAVE IN GIRL

Kathleen Ann Goonan

When humanity is primarily illiterate, it needs leaders to understand and get the information and deal with it. When we are at the point where the majority of humans them-selves are literate, able to get the information, we're in an entirely new relationship to Universe. We are at the point where the integrity of the individual counts and not what the political leadership or the religious leadership says to do.

—Buckminster Fuller,
Only Integrity Is Going to Count

© 2013, Haylee Bolinger / ASU

MY MANY-GREAT-GRANDMOTHER MELODY IS
beautiful. Her eyes are huge, dark, and laughing in her smooth, light brown face, and she is muscular, even a bit wiry, but most fivers (five quarters, 125 years old) are.

She sits cross-legged next to me on the Jump Rock, a coral arc rising like the back of a dolphin in Waimea Bay. Her wings, nearly invisible, overlap smoothly across her back.

Mammoth winter waves rise from the sea and break in perfect translucent curls. No one is jumping off Jump Rock today; those waves crash against and spray up the sides of the rock and swirl around the bottom. The tow skis are busy pulling surfers out to where the curl begins, and thirty or so surfers sit on their boards bobbing up and down. Acres of white foam, with an undertow deep and powerful enough to drag strong men to their death, suck at the beach.

“It was like that, Alia,” says Melody. “The change. Like a wave, and we are still on it. We—the entire human world—could have been smashed, like that foam, from a lot of convergent factors.”

“Yeah, that's what everybody says. The dark ages.” Melody mentions the change a lot, but not much about how it happened. Maybe getting her to talk about it will soften her up. This is one way to go about it, but maybe there is no good way. I've never been able to manipulate her. She has an unfair advantage, being older, smarter, and a Mentor. I'm just hoping she'll understand me, understand why I want to see her, and help me.

I want gills. They're not like fish gills, but that's what everyone calls them.

“You make it sound like a war.”

“It was a war. It was even called a war. Back then that kind of language seemed the only way to mobilize people. In the early twenty-first century, we were feeling like a pretty successful species, but we were sowing the seeds of our own destruction. Mass starvation, the breakdown of civilization, the loss of information was a hairsbreadth away, for those who spoke the language of chaos theory and statistics. The history of humanity was the history of war. Most people viewed the idea of world peace with tremendous suspicion. They believed it could only exist in a world where extreme submission was the byword, or if some essential bit of humanity was crushed to dust. Rarely was it seen to be a state of balance in which the highest capability of humans—to be freely creative—would be possible for a huge percentage of people, and if they saw it that way, they saw it as a danger. War defined humanity. We used wealth to amass munitions and armies. It seemed necessary, because nature really is, as Darwin said, ‘red in tooth and claw.' War was our peculiar sickness. It always seemed inevitable, something we had to return to despite our horror and reluctance.”

“It's hard to believe.”

“There's been a fundamental change in how we communicate, and how we see ourselves. Back then, everyone could easily relate to the idea of being at war. ‘The War on Poverty.' ‘The War on Cancer.' ‘The War on Illiteracy.' ”

“What's cancer?”

“Right. What's polio, what's tuberculosis, what's smallpox. If you want to be a physician—”

“I want to be a world-champion surfer.”

“You can be both. If you want to be a physician—that was one career you modeled, remember?—you need to study the history of disease, and in the early twenty-first century illiteracy was classified as a public health problem. That freed us to bring a lot of different resources to bear on solving the problem.”

Now, she'd roped me in and I had to go along. “What caused it?”

“Lots of things . . . but maybe we were just going through adolescence, as a species. Maybe our stubborn adherence to warehousing children in schools or, in poorer countries, sending them to work, or outright selling them, might not have crashed civilization, but willful ignorance about how humans learn, based on scientific evidence, wasted billions of lives and their potential. World economies were in a tailspin. People were mostly very rich or very poor; very healthy or slated to die young. It just wasn't working. There was an illusion, among the well-to-do, that it was working, but it wasn't.”

She caresses the gill pattern I have tattooed, like an ancient Polynesian hieroglyph, on my right cheek, a scream for independence, for control over my own body.

“Your mother says eighteen.”

“Why do I have to wait? You need to help me—Mom will listen to you. Look, out there—JJ has gills—see, she's the purple one—wow! Pounded!” I scan the vast undertow and see her pop up, so tiny in that big sea of white foam, about a hundred yards away. “See how much fun it is?”

“I see.”

“I'm fourteen, and she's only thirteen. I'm already way behind. Look, what happened to you—you were twelve, thirteen, right? When you got changed? It was radical, eh? Scary as gills. And look at you!”

“So you called me here to advocate for you.” Her smile is teasing, and I'm pretty sure that I have no hope. Still, I push.

“I know I could be a champion! I came in second in the Girls' Division, Natural, last year, but to go big you really need gills.”

“Gills won't protect you from getting smashed on the reef. Your mother feels they'll let you think you can take dangerous chances. And there's another one of your career models—physics! Tell me: What are you thinking right now, as you look out over the ocean?”

I realize: I'm hypnotized by the way the waves rise up, rush shoreward, curl, and break.

They are mathematically alluring. I study the sea, with its patches of azure, deep blue, shadowy reefs, and swirling foam, for at least five minutes. I always spend a lot of time up here, studying how the waves break in different situations. I can tell if tons of sand have shifted. I know the storm waves. I know when not to go out.

Now, as if the wind has changed, I'm seeing it through new eyes. “With gills, I could get inside the waves. Study them from the inside. Instead of only using the gills to give me an edge.”

Melody just smiles. The wind lifts her long white hair in fascinating tendrils, and I want to know, too, about the chaotic yet graceful mechanics of what is happening now, now, now. I want to be able to describe it in a way that is replicable, without words. I have given you a video of what is happening—you can see it in your head, no?—but I want to be able to replicate it in other mediums. I want to study it, and give voice to what I see. Maybe my voice will be a new voice, or maybe my discoveries will have been made before, but I want to be a part of that music.

I realize, suddenly, that I've just learned to think this way—just learned that it is
possible
to think this way—because of Melody's question. I see the potential of entering the phenomena I'm curious about in new ways, seeing them from different angles.

It is a form of love. I gaze at wingsurfers as they dip and fly, tumbling through the air, banzai-style, with this love, and frown.

She is trying to get me off course. She is going to try to make me think I don't need gills to do this. This won't work, of course. It seems obvious that immersion, tumbling in a suit designed to gather information about flow, force, turbulence, is the best way to study waves.

“You have wings. I thought you would understand.”

She laughs. “They're fun, but they're mainly dangerous toys. You put yourself at risk.” She smiles. “You want to be out there anyway, eh? Even without gills.” She pats my knee. “I know.”

“If I could stay inside the waves. I could know them. I could learn them. From the inside out.”

Even though she sits so solidly, and reaches out from time to time, to touch my knee, she is attending virtually to the twenty or so students, of all ages, whom she mentors around the world and even in space, via holographic avatars and many other not-so-elementary interfaces, depending on the learning style of the mentee. Some, she tells me, require more attention than others—a bit more intensive linking with resources, an encouraging nod, questions that will help them think in a more focused way about the intent of their research, or the process in which they are engaged.

“You
are
inside a wave,” she says gently. “In the curl, riding just ahead of the break, at enormous speed. Because you are on the inside, it's hard for you to see. The world has always been this way for you.”

“What way?”

“At peace. Most everyone able to be literate in many ways, reading . . .”

I snort. “There's no way
anyone
couldn't learn how to read. No matter how lazy they are. It's like breathing.”

“I couldn't read. I couldn't do math. And I was not lazy.”

“What?” I stare at her, astonished. “You helped develop
Zebra
!” That's the mudra-language everyone uses now.

She throws her head back and laughs until tears come to her eyes, then looks at me with a grin. “You know that I
changed,
but you have no idea how or why. It wasn't at all what you think. You need a history lesson a lot more than you need gills! Let me show you how different it was. Okay?”

I look with longing at the perfect shorebreak, just this side of deadly, glance at my short board, and feel tricked. But intrigued.

“So what happened? What was it like? Was it fun? As much fun as surfing?”

“Not at all,” she says soberly. “I guess it was just as thrilling, because it was scary. We—
I
—didn't know what would happen. But once the incalculable power of creativity was released, and evenly distributed, it was like an atomic reaction: we could not put the genie back into the bottle.”

She is silent for a moment, hands moving this way and that, choosing, plucking, and assembling from her Immanent Library the stories she wants for the lesson I know is coming.

I am actually excited. And honored, really. Melody's stories always change me, somehow—I feel stronger afterward. They are precious; I don't get them often. I can barely remember the last time she visited me in person.

“You always seem to know exactly what I need. Like medicine.”

She holds my gaze with hers. “I'm a Mentor. It's my job. I listen to my students, I see gaps, I figure out, from an array of possibilities, how best to show them information that might be useful in that particular time on their journey. Learning is all about timing, and understanding what media will most entice any particular person: which stories—and stories can be in words, numbers, Zebra, pictures, music—might draw them into the neuroplastic state of learning, of changing their brain in focused ways. You are right about medicine, in a way, but it seems more like food to me. This is your first grok, right?”

“A
grok
?” I've been biologically ready for a year, but a grok is a serious thing, and I hadn't been sure when I should try it. It's kind of like gauging whether to go over or under a wave, judging break.

I look at the waves and think,
Now
.

When I look back, I see that Melody has assembled spheres, which glow in the air like juggling balls, unaffected by the wind. She tosses me a golden sphere, a green sphere, and one that looks like Jupiter, pulsing with many dark swirling colors. I catch them—they feel like nothing but a slight tingle—and press them to my chest, where they melt into the interface on my skin. I smile and nestle into a smooth curve of volcanic rock as wind and sun wash my bare skin. I close my eyes and grok.

A VIOLENT WRENCH. IT
is dark. I seem to be looking at the pages of a book, but the letters dance and mock me, writhing like animated dream-creatures, and I feel bound up, like a prisoner.

When grokking, you can maintain awareness that you are separate from the grok. I know that I can end it whenever I choose, that I cannot be trapped in a bad nightmare. That is what I know, but I need to test it. I need to know I can get out.

I open my eyes and see luminous blue sky, a few white wisps of cumulus, the old clock tower across the bay, and a kind of sideways view of Melody, her eyelids at half-mast, gesturing in graceful Zebra to one of her students. She has implants that record and transmit that three-dimensional language, and, again, I feel a powerful urge to think of ways to describe it mathematically.

She stops gesturing and glances at me. “Pretty hard to believe, right?”