Haldeman, Joe - None So Blind

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(This story, which won the Locus and Hugo Awards for "Best Short Story

of 1995,"

first appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine.)

Author, hiding behind his work

None So Blind

Joe Haldeman

It all started when Cletus Jefferson asked himself "Why aren't all

blind people

geniuses?" Cletus was only 13 at the time, but it was a good question,

and he

would work on it for 14 more years, and then change the world forever.

Young Jefferson was a polymath, an autodidact, a nerd literally without

peer. He

had a chemistry set, a microscope, a telescope, and several computers,

some of

them bought with paper route money. Most of his income was from

education,

though: teaching his classmates not to draw to inside straights.

Not even nerds, not even nerds who are poker players nonpareil, not

even nerdish

poker players who can do differential equations in their heads, are

immune to

Cupid's darts and the sudden storm of testosterone that will accompany

those

missiles at the age of 13. Cletus knew that he was ugly and his mother

dressed

him funny. He was also short and pudgy and could not throw a ball in

any

direction. None of this bothered him until his ductless glands started

cooking

up chemicals that weren't in his chemistry set.

So Cletus started combing his hair and wearing clothes that mismatched

according

to fashion, but he was still short and pudgy and irregular of feature.

He was

also the youngest person in his school, even though he was a senior--

and the

only black person there, which was a factor in Virginia in 1994.

Now if love were sensible, if the sexual impulse was ever tempered by

logic, you

would expect that Cletus, being Cletus, would assess his situation and

go off in

search of someone homely. But of course he didn't. He just jingled and

clanked

down through the Pachinko machine of adolescence, being rejected, at

first

glance, by every Mary and Judy and Jenny and Veronica in Known Space,

going from

the ravishing to the beautiful to the pretty to the cute to the plain

to the

"great personality," until the irresistable force of statistics brought

him

finally into contact with Amy Linderbaum, who could not reject him at

first

glance because she was blind.

The other kids thought it was more than amusing. Besides being blind,

Amy was

about twice as tall as Cletus and, to be kind, equally irregular of

feature. She

was accompanied by a guide dog who looked remarkably like Cletus, short

and

black and pudgy. Everybody was polite to her because she was blind and

rich, but

she was a new transfer student and didn't have any actual friends.

So along came Cletus, to whom Cupid had dealt only slings and arrows,

and what

might otherwise have been merely an opposites-attract sort of romance

became an

emotional and intellectual union that, in the next century, would power

a social

tsunami that would irreversibly transform the human condition. But

first there

was the violin.

Her classmates had sensed that Amy was some kind of nerd herself, as

classmates

will, but they hadn't figured out what kind yet. She was pretty fast

with a

computer, but you could chalk that up to being blind and actually

needing the

damned thing. She wasn't fanatical about it, nor about science or math

history or Star Trek or student government, so what the hell kind of

nerd was

she? It turns out that she was a music nerd, but at the time was too

painfully

shy to demonstrate it.

All Cletus cared about, initially, was that she lacked those pesky Y-

chromosomes

and didn't recoil from him: in the Venn diagram of the human race, she

was the

only member of that particular set. When he found out that she was

actually

smart as well, having read more books than most of her classmates put

together,

romance began to smolder in a deep and permanent place. That was even

before the

violin.

Amy liked it that Cletus didn't play with her dog and was

straightforward in his

curiosity about what it was like to be blind. She could assess people

pretty

well from their voices: after one sentence, she knew that he was young,

black,

shy, nerdly, and not from Virginia. She could tell from his inflection

that

either he was unattractive or he thought he was. She was six years

older than

him and white and twice his size, but otherwise they matched up pretty

well, and

they started keeping company in a big way.

Among the few things that Cletus did not know anything about was music.

That the

other kids wasted their time memorizing the words to inane top-40 songs

was

proof of intellectual dysfunction if not actual lunacy. Furthermore,

his parents

had always been fanatical devotees of opera. A universe bounded on one

end by

peurile mumblings about unrequited love and on the other end by

foreigners

screaming in agony was not a universe that Cletus desired to explore.

Until Amy

picked up her violin.

They talked constantly. They sat together at lunch and met between

classes. When

the weather was good, they sat outside before and after school and

talked. Amy

asked her chauffeur to please be ten or fifteen minutes late picking

her up.

So after about three weeks' worth of the fullness of time, Amy asked

Cletus to

come over to her house for dinner. He was a little hesitant, knowing

that her

parents were rich, but he was also curious about that life style and,

face it,

was smitten enough that he would have walked off a cliff if she asked

him

nicely. He even used some computer money to buy a nice suit, a symptom

that

caused his mother to grope for the Valium.

The dinner at first was awkward. Cletus was bewildered by the arsenal

silverware and all the different kinds of food that didn't look or

taste like

food. But he had known it was going to be a test, and he always did

well on

tests, even when he had to figure out the rules as he went along.

Amy had told him that her father was a self-made millionaire; his

fortune had

come from a set of patents in solid-state electronics. Cletus had

therefore

spent a Saturday at the University library, first searching patents and

then

reading selected texts, and he was ready at least for the father. It

worked very

well. Over soup, the four of them talked about computers. Over the

calimari

cocktail, Cletus and Mr. Linderbaum had it narrowed down to specific

operating

systems and partitioning schemata. With the Beef Wellington, Cletus and

"Call-me-Lindy" were talking quantum electrodynamics; with the salad

they were

on an electron cloud somewhere, and by the time the nuts were served,

the two

nuts at that end of the table were talking in Boolean algebra while Amy

and her

mother exchanged knowing sighs and hummed snatches of Gilbert and

Sullivan.

By the time they retired to the music room for coffee, Lindy liked

Cletus very

much, and the feeling was mutual, but Cletus didn't know how much he

liked Amy,

really liked her, until she picked up the violin.

It wasn't a Strad--she was promised one if and when she graduated from

Julliard--but it had cost more than the Lamborghini in the garage, and

she was

not only worth it, but equal to it. She picked it up and tuned it

quietly while

her mother sat down at an electronic keyboard next to the grand piano,

set it to

"harp," and began the simple arpeggio that a musically sophisticated

person

would recognize as the introduction to the violin showpiece Méditation

from

Massenet's Thaïs.

Cletus had turned a deaf ear to opera for all his short life, so he

didn't know

the back-story of transformation and transcending love behind this

intermezzo,

but he did know that his girlfriend had lost her sight at the age of

five, and

the next year--the year he was born!--was given her first violin. For

thirteen

years she had been using it to say what she would not say with her

voice,

perhaps to see what she could not see with her eyes, and on the

deceptively

simple romantic matrix that Massenet built to present the beautiful

courtesan

Thaïs gloriously reborn as the bride of Christ, Amy forgave her Godless

universe

for taking her sight, and praised it for what she was given in return,

and she

said this in a language that even Cletus could understand. He didn't

cry very

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

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(Thisstory,whichwontheLocusandHugoAwardsfor"BestShortStory\of1995,"firstappearedinAsimov'sScienceFic...

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