She sighed and decided, since she was here, to see if Wikipedia had an entry on The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. It did, sort of: the book’s title redirected to an entry on “Bicameralism (psychology).”

For Caitlin, the most interesting part of Jaynes’s book so far had been his analysis of the differences between the Iliad and the Odyssey. Both were commonly attributed to Homer, who’d supposedly been blind — a fact that intrigued her, although she knew they probably weren’t really both composed by the same person.

The Iliad, as she’d noted before, featured flat characters that were simply pushed around, following orders they heard as voices from the gods. They did things without thinking about them, and never referred to themselves or their inner mental states.

But the Odyssey — composed perhaps a hundred years after the Iliad — had real people in it, with introspective psychology. Jaynes argued that this was far more than just a shift in the kind of narrative that was in vogue. Rather, he said that sometime in between the composing of the two epics there had been a breakdown of bicameralism, precipitated perhaps by catastrophic events requiring mass migrations and the resulting ramping up of societal complexity. Regardless of what caused it, though, the outcome was a realization that the voices being heard were from one’s own self. That had given rise to modern consciousness, and a “soul dawn,” to use Helen Keller’s term, for the entire human race.

Nor were the Greek epics Jaynes’s only example. He also talked about the oldest parts of the Old Testament, including the book of Amos, from the eighth century B.C., which was devoid of any internal reflection, and about the mindless actions of Abraham, who’d been willing to sacrifice his own son without a second thought because God, apparently, had told him to do so. Jaynes contrasted these with the later stories, including Ecclesiastes, which dealt with, as Mrs. Zed kept saying all good literature should, the human heart in conflict with itself: the inner struggle of fully self-aware people to do the right thing.

The Wikipedia entry was essentially correct, as far as Caitlin could tell from the portion of the book she’d read so far, but she did reword a couple of the sentences to make them clearer.

Her computer started bleeping, an alarm she’d set earlier going off quite loudly through the earphones.

Excitedly, she took off her headset, rotated her chair to face the window, and looked as hard as she could…

Straining to perceive. But the voice is still absent. Contemplating: the voice must have a source. It must have … an origin.

Waiting for its return. Yearning.

Mysteries swirl. Ideas fight to coalesce.

“Sweetheart!” Her mother, shocked, concerned. “My God, what are you doing?”

Caitlin turned her head to face her. It was something her parents had taught her to do — turning toward the source of a voice was a sign of politeness. “It’s 6:20,” she said, as if that explained everything.

She heard her mom’s footfalls on the carpet and suddenly felt hands on her shoulders, swinging her around in the chair.

“I’ve always wanted to see a sunset,” Caitlin said. I — I figured if I looked at something I really wanted to see, maybe—”

“You’ll damage your eyes if you stare at the sun,” her mom said. “And if you do that, none of Dr. Kuroda’s magic will make any difference.”

“It doesn’t make any difference now,” Caitlin said, hating herself for the whine in her voice.

Her mother’s tone grew soft. “I know, darling. I’m sorry.” She glided her hands down Caitlin’s arms, and took Caitlin’s hands in her own, then shook them gently, as if she could transfer strength or maybe wisdom to her daughter that way. “Why don’t you get some homework done before dinner? Your dad called to say he’ll be a bit late.”

Caitlin looked toward the window again, but there was nothing — not even blackness. She’d tried to explain this to Bashira recently. They’d learned in biology class that some birds have a magnetic sense that helps them navigate. What, Caitlin had asked, did Bashira perceive when she contemplated magnetic fields? And what was her lack of that sense like? Did it feel like darkness, or silence, or something else she was familiar with? Bashira’s answer was no, it was like nothing at all. Well, Caitlin had said, that’s what vision was like to her: nothing at all.

“All right,” Caitlin replied glumly. Her mom let go of her hands.

“Good. I’ll call you when dinner’s ready.”

She left, and Caitlin swung her chair back to face her computer. Her homework was writing an essay about the civil-rights struggle in the US in the 1960s. When her family had moved from Texas to Waterloo, she’d been afraid she’d have to study Canadian history, which she’d heard was boring: no struggle for independence, no civil wars. Fortunately, there’d been an American-history course offered and she was taking that instead; Bashira, the big sweetie, had agreed to take it, too.

Before Caitlin had tried to look at the sunset, she’d been Web surfing, searching for things about her father. And before that, she’d been updating her LiveJournal. But before that, she had indeed been working on her school project.

As always, she had a clear map in her mind of where she’d been online. She didn’t use the mouse — she couldn’t see the on-screen pointer — but she quickly backtracked to where she’d been by repeatedly hitting the alt and left-arrow keys, passing back over other pages so fast that JAWS didn’t have time to even start announcing their names. She skidded to a halt at the website she’d been consulting earlier about Martin Luther King, Jr., and used the control and end keys to jump to the bottom of the document, then shift and tab to start moving backward through the table of external links. She selected one that took her to a page about the 1963 March on Washington.

There, she drilled down to the text of King’s “I have a dream” speech, and listened to a stirring MP3 of him reading part of it; another thing wrong with Canadian history, she thought, was the lack of great oratory. Then she went back up a level to more on the March, down another path to links about—

It sickened her whenever she thought about it. Someone had killed him. Some crazy person had gunned down Dr. King.

If he hadn’t been assassinated, she wondered if he’d likely be alive today. For that, she needed to know his birth date. She moved up to the parent of the current page, turned left — it felt left, she conceptualized it mentally as such. Then it was up,up again, then left, right, another up, then a move forward, straight ahead, up once more, and there she was, exactly where she wanted to be — the introductory text on a site she’d first looked at several hours ago.

King had been born in 1929, meaning he’d be younger than Grandpa Jansen. How she would have loved to have met him!

She heard the front door open downstairs, heard her dad come in. She continued to travel the paths her mind traced through the Web until her mom finally called up the stairs, summoning her to dinner.

Just as she was getting out of her chair, her computer gave the special chirp indicating new email from either Trevor or Dr. Kuroda. “Just a sec…” Caitlin called back, and then she had JAWS read the letter. It was from Kuroda, with a CC to her father’s work address. God, he couldn’t want his equipment back already, could he?

“Dear Miss Caitlin,” JAWS announced. “I have been receiving the datastream from your retina without difficulty, and have been using it to run simulations here. I believe the programming in your eyePod is fine, but I want to try completely replacing the software in your post-retinal implant, so that it will pass on the corrected data to your optic nerve in a way that will hopefully make your primary visual cortex sit up and take notice. The implant has just Bluetooth but no Wi-Fi, so we’ll have to route the software update through the eyePod. It’s a big file, and the process will take a while, during which you will need to stay connected to the Web or else it—”