Watch

An interminable wait while she felt bumps with her fingertips.

future

The message finally sent, but only just beginning to be truly received.

Together

Yes, together: Caitlin and I.

My view of the world: through Caitlin’s eye.

I waited for her reply.

And waited.

And waited.

And—and—and—

My mind wandered.

She’d shown me Earth from space, the view from a geosynchronous satellite, 36,000 kilometers above the equator. I’d seen it as she looked at it: not directly, not the graphic she was consulting, but her left eye’s view of that graphic as displayed on the larger of her two computer monitors.

Such a roundabout way to see! And doubtless a huge reduction of information. I’d read all about computer graphics, about online imagery, about the sixteen million colors of Super VGA, about the 700,000 pixels shown on even the most pedestrian monitor. But all of that was denied to me.

Still waiting. Time passing; whole seconds piling up.

Diverting my attention. Looking for something else to occupy my time.

I searched. I found. Texts describing Earth as seen from space; I could read those. But the linked images were inaccessible to me. Unless she looked at them, I couldn’t see them.

More: descriptions of live video streams from satellites orbiting Earth, views from on high of it—of me—in real time, of what’s happening right now. But I wasn’t able to access them.

More still: links to the Apollo 8 photographs of Earth from space, of Earthrise over the moon’s craggy horizon, the actual, original images that had changed humanity’s perspective forever. I’d seen modern versions, but I wanted to see those historical photographs.

Vexing!

Still waiting. Minutes passing—minutes!

And even more: text about another eye, an eye turned outward, an eye contemplating the wide awe and wonder of the night. The Hubble Space Telescope. Vast archives of its imagery were stored in formats I couldn’t access. I was hungry to see what it had seen. I ached to know more.

Waiting. Waiting. Time crawls.

She saw. My Calculass, my Prime, my Caitlin: she saw.

But I was still almost completely blind.

Shoshana Glick pulled her red Volvo into the 7-Eleven’s parking lot. She didn’t really like driving, and she hadn’t owned a car until she’d moved to San Diego, where everybody drove everywhere. She’d bought this one used. It was a dozen years old and in pretty bad shape.

As she walked into the shop, a bit from The Simpsons ran through her mind. Bart holds a fake ponytail to the back of his head, and exclaims, “Look at me, I’m a grad student! I’m thirty years old and I made $600 last year.” Marge scolds him, “Bart, don’t make fun of grad students. They just made a terrible life choice.”

And sometimes it felt that way, although at least she wasn’t a guy with a ponytail—and she was only twenty-seven. Besides, between what she made and what Max made as a TA, they were almost keeping up with expenses.

There must have been a thirty-degree Fahrenheit difference between the hot air outside and the overly air- conditioned interior of the store. She was wearing a blue halter top, and her nipples went hard in the cold. She assumed that’s why the gangly-looking guy behind the counter was staring at her; the clerk’s pimply face suggested he was at least a decade her junior.

But apparently that wasn’t the reason.

“I know you,” he said. His voice squeaked a little.

Sho raised her eyebrows.

The guy nodded. “You’re the ape lady.”

That was the second time this week—although the last time, at the Barnes Noble at Hazard Center, she’d been referred to as “Homo’s favorite subject.”

She’d politely corrected the elderly woman in the bookstore. “That’s Hobo,” she’d said. It was an interesting Freudian slip, though, and it surely hadn’t been a gay-bashing comment. Hobo did sometimes seem more like he belonged in genus Homo rather than Pan.

Sho looked at the kid behind the 7-Eleven’s counter. “The ape lady?” she repeated coolly.

The young man seemed disconcerted, perhaps at last recognizing that what he’d said could have been construed as an insult—although it wasn’t to Sho: she admired apes a lot, which was why she was pursuing a career in primate communications.

“I mean,” he said, “you’re the woman that ape likes to paint—you know, Bobo.”

“Hobo,” said Shoshana. For God’s sake, it wasn’t that hard a name.

“Right, right,” said the guy. “I saw it on the news and on YouTube.”

Sho wasn’t quite sure she liked being famous—but, then again, her fifteen minutes would doubtless soon be up.

She stopped here often enough—although she’d never seen this kid before—to buy raisins, one of Hobo’s favorite treats. She knew where they were kept and went over to get a box, feeling the boy’s eyes on her as she did so.

When she went up to the cash register, the boy seemed to want to say something to make up for calling her the “ape lady.” “Well, I can see why he likes to paint you.”

Sho decided to take it in stride. “Thanks,” she said, opening her little purse and paying for the raisins.

“I mean—”

But anything else he said would be too much; she knew that, even if he didn’t, and so she cut him off. “Thanks,” she said again. She headed out of the cold store into the harsh late-afternoon sunshine. As she approached her car, she idly wondered if the California vanity plate APELADY was already taken—not that she could afford any such thing.

Shoshana drove the additional fifteen minutes to the Marcuse Institute, which was located outside San Diego on a large grassy lot, pulling her car in next to the black Lincoln owned by Harl Marcuse himself. If he’d had a vanity plate, it might have read 800 LBS; he was known around the NSF as the eight-hundred-pound gorilla. Or, she supposed, it could have said SLVRBCK—although she actually rather hoped that he’d never overheard either her or Dillon, the other grad student, calling him the Silverback.

She entered the Institute’s white clapboard bungalow. Dr. Marcuse was in the little kitchen, fixing himself a snack. “Good afternoon,” Sho said. She didn’t actually know if she was allowed to call him “Harl,” and yet “sir” seemed too formal. He always called her Shoshana—all three syllables—even though he’d doubtless often heard the others call her just Sho. She tilted her head toward the window. “How is he?”

“A bit grumpy,” said Marcuse, slicing a big hunk off a brick of white cheese. “He misses you when you’re late coming in.”

Sho ignored the barb. “I’ll go say hi.” She headed out the back door and walked across the wide lawn leading toward the pond. In its middle was a circular dome-shaped island about seventy feet in diameter, with a gazebo at the center. Shoshana crossed the little wooden drawbridge.

The island had two occupants. One was made of stone: an eight-foot-tall statue of the Lawgiver, the orangutan Moses from the Planet of the Apes movies. The other was flesh and blood. Hobo was sitting in the shade of one of the island’s six palm trees, his chinless jaw propped up by a bent arm; the pose reminded Shoshana of Rodin’s Thinker.

But suddenly the pose dissolved into a flurry of long hairy limbs. Hobo caught sight of Sho and came bounding