“You think Decter’s daughter is spying on what they’re doing in case it has military applications?”
“It’s possible,” Shel drawled. “Until her family moved to Canada, she’d been in the same school her whole life—a school for the blind in Texas.”
“Uprooted,” said Tony, nodding. “Isolated from her friends.”
“And a bit of an outcast to begin with,” added Shel. “A math geek herself, apparently; didn’t really fit in.”
“Kind of person that’s easily compromised.”
“My thought exactly,” said Shel.
“All right,” Tony replied. “Let’s get that visual data decoded; see what the kid is sharing with whoever the hell it is. I’ll put Donnelly himself on it.”
two
The world I’d been shown was vast, complex—and utterly alien.
It was a universe of dimensions, of extent, of space. But what was this concept known as up to me? What meant this forward? What sense was I to make of left?
More: it was a reality ruled by the invisible force of gravity.
More still: it was a realm of light and shadow, concepts that had no analogs in my own existence; my sensorium was as devoid of them as Caitlin’s had been.
And it was a domain of air—but how was I to understand a substance that even humans could not see or taste or smell?
Most of all, it was a realm of material objects with heft and texture and color, of items that moved or could be moved.
I could assign arbitrary values to dimensional coordinates; I knew the formula for acceleration due to gravity; I was aware of the chemical constituents of air; I had read descriptions both technical and poetic of things. But they were all abstractions to me.