Free Beggars and Choosers by Nancy Kress Page A

part,” Miri had burbled on, completely at ease now, “is
that after the extrapolated thought string forms and is adjusted as
necessary, the master program translates it into everybody else’s
thought patterns and it appears that way on their holostage. On all
twenty-seven terminals simultaneously. So we can bypass words and get
the full ideas we’re each thinking across to each other more
efficiently. Well, not the full ideas. There’s always something lost in
translation, especially to Terry and Jon and Ludie. But it’s so much
better than just speech, Drew. The way your concerts are better than
just unassisted daydreaming.”
    Daydreaming. The only kind of dreaming SuperSleepless knew anything
about. Until me.
    When a Sleepless went into the lucid dreaming trance, the result was
different from when a Liver did. Or even a donkey. Livers and donkeys
can dream at night. They have that connection with their unconscious,
and I direct and intensify it in ways that feel good to them: peaceful
and stimulated both. While lucid dreaming, they feel—sometimes for the
first time in their lives— whole. I take them farther along the road
into their true selves, deeper behind the waking veil. And I direct the
dreams to the sweetest of the many things waiting there.
    But Sleepless don’t have night dreams. Their road to the unconscious
has been genetically severed. When Sleepless go into a lucid dreaming
trance, Miri told me, they see “insights” they wouldn’t have seen
before. They climb around their endless jungle of words, and come out
of the trance with intuitive solutions to intellectual problems.
Geniuses have often done that during sleep, Miri said. She gave me
examples of great scientists. I have forgotten the names.
    Looking at the complex verbal design on her holostage, I could feel
it in my mind. It made a shape like a featureless pale stone, cool with
regret. Miri would never see this shape in my mind. Worse, she would
never know she didn’t see it. She thought, because we both saw
differently from donkeys, that we were alike.
    I had wanted to be part of what was happening at Huevos Verdes.
Already, even then, I could see that the project would change the
world. Anyone not an actor in the project could only be acted on.
    “Yes, Miri,” I said, smiling at her, “we’re the same.”
    ==========
    On a worktable in yet another lab, Miri spread out the performance
stats from my concert tour. The hard copy was for me; Supers always
analysed directly from screens or holos. I wondered how much had been
left out or simplified for my benefit. Terry Mwakambe, a small dark man
with long wild hair, perched motionless on the open windowsill. Behind
him the ocean sparkled deep blue in the waning light.
    “See, here,” Miri said, “midway during your performance of ‘The
Eagle.” The attention-level measurements rose, and the attitudinal
changes right after the performance were pretty dramatic in the
direction of risk taking. But then the follow-up stats show that by a
week later, the subjects’ attitudinal changes had eroded more than they
did for your other performance pieces. And by a month later, almost all
risk-taking changes have disappeared.“
    When I give a concert, they hook volunteer fans to machines that
measure their brain wave changes, breathing, pupil variations—a lot of
things. Before and after the concert the volunteers take
virtual-reality tests to measure attitudes. The volunteers are paid.
They don’t know what the tests are for, or who wants them. Neither do
the people who administer the tests. It’s all done blind, through one
of Kevin Baker’s many software subsidiaries, which form an impenetrable
legal tangle. The results are transmitted to the master computer at
Huevos Verdes. When the stats say so, I change what and how I perform.
    I have stopped calling myself an artist.
    “ ‘The Eagle’ just isn’t working,” Miri said. “Terry wants to know
if you can compose a different piece