None So Blind by Joe Haldeman

much, never had, but by the last high wavering note he was weeping into his

hands, and he knew that if she wanted him, she could have him forever, and oddly

enough, considering his age and what eventually happened, he was right.

He would learn to play the violin before he had his first doctorate, and during

a lifetime of remarkable amity they would play together for ten thousand hours,

but all of that would come after the big idea. The big idea–“Why aren’t all

blind people geniuses?”–was planted that very night, but it didn’t start to

sprout for another week.

Like most 13-year-olds, Cletus was fascinated by the human body, his own and

others, but his study was more systematic than others’ and, atypically, the

organ that interested him most was the brain.

The brain isn’t very much like a computer, although it doesn’t do a bad job,

considering that it’s built by unskilled labor and programmed more by pure

chance than anything else. One thing computers do a lot better than brains,

though, is what Cletus and Lindy had been talking about over their little squids

in tomato sauce: partitioning.

Think of the computer as a big meadow of green pastureland, instead of a little

dark box full of number-clogged things that are expensive to replace, and that

pastureland is presided over by a wise old magic shepherd who is not called a

macroprogram. The shepherd stands on a hill and looks out over the pastureland,

which is full of sheep and goats and cows. They aren’t all in one homogeneous

mass, of course, since the cows would step on the lambs and kids and the goats

would make everybody nervous, leaping and butting, so there are partitions of

barbed wire that keep all the species separate and happy.

This is a frenetic sort of meadow, though, with cows and goats and sheep coming

in and going out all the time, moving at about 3 x 108 meters per second, and if

the partitions were all of the same size it would be a disaster, because

sometimes there are no sheep at all, but lots of cows, who would be jammed in

there hip to hip and miserable. But the shepherd, being wise, knows ahead of

time how much space to allot to the various creatures and, being magic, can move

barbed wire quickly without hurting himself or the animals. So each partition

winds up marking a comfortable-sized space for each use. Your computer does

that, too, but instead of barbed wire you see little rectangles or windows or

file folders, depending on your computer’s religion.

The brain has its own partitions, in a sense. Cletus knew that certain physical

areas of the brain were associated with certain mental abilities, but it wasn’t

a simple matter of “music appreciation goes over there; long division in that

corner.” The brain is mushier than that. For instance, there are pretty

well-defined partitions associated with linguistic functions, areas named after

French and German brain people. If one of those areas is destroyed, by stroke or

bullet or flung frying pan, the stricken person may lose the ability–reading or

speaking or writing coherently–associated with the lost area.

That’s interesting, but what is more interesting is that the lost ability

sometimes comes back over time. Okay, you say, so the brain grew back–but it

doesn’t! You’re born with all the brain cells you’ll ever have. (Ask any child.)

What evidently happens is that some other part of the brain has been sitting

around as a kind of back-up, and after a while the wiring gets rewired and

hooked into that back-up. The afflicted person can say his name, and then his

wife’s name, and then “frying pan,” and before you know it he’s complaining

about hospital food and calling a divorce lawyer.

So on that evidence, it would appear that the brain has a shepherd like the

computer-meadow has, moving partitions around, but alas, no. Most of the time

when some part of the brain ceases to function, that’s the end of it. There may

be acres and acres of fertile ground lying fallow right next door, but nobody in

charge to make use of it–at least not consistently. The fact that it sometimes

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