Aphantasia

[WP] As it turns out, aliens all have aphantasia. This makes Humans the only species capable of imagining images in their heads. This greatly confuses alien telepaths, who report seeing “constantly shifting landscapes of alternate realities” when peering into human minds

*****

On Valennen, where the Dauri live, they think that humans are dangerously mad. This was my doing as much as it was Avi’s, a consequence of my dreams racing ahead. I’ve always been a dreamy girl. Sometimes I’m scared that it’s a failing.

Other times I remember a book I once read, the very first line: “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality,” and think to myself that there’s no other way for me to be. That what I did was Human, and no crime. Not really. And I hope, perhaps, that I've grown.

But I am still what I am. And he is what he is. Though it might be the worst breakup anyone has ever had.

***

Born towards the end of the last Fire Time on his alien and rugged world, Avi was a creature of exquisite practicality. He could assess a problem instantly from a half dozen directions, slim, quick fingers trailing across its surface, exploring and understanding the state of things, even as the state of his body changed; chameleon skin adapting itself to the varying fall of sunlight from Vallennen’s three suns, or shifting colors to match the rustling lia grass all around us. A Dauri, and an exquisite example at that, Avi stood just taller than my (modest) height. He looked like a human stretched out and then dipped into the paint of the world. I loved him best at night, when he would roll over on the blanket and look down at me, his beautiful body painted in swathes of inky blue and black shot through with grains of stardust from the sky above, perhaps a bit of moonlight. He would look at me in those moments and whisper, “How?” which looking back summed up so many of our conversations.

I was none of the things he was. Not beautiful and not adaptable, and if I was practical it was only grudgingly and reserved for extremes. I’d joined the Peace Corp after all, and in those days, before what happened, they still let dreamers in. They thought, naively, that people like me could smooth over alien fears.

What happened?

The night was it should have been, not a cloud in the sky. The stars were racing past overhead, the kind of night where every moment had that extra bit of weight, and where you were afraid to blink and miss it. Our breath was quick and shallow, in time to one another. We lay on our backs, minds spinning with the heavens as we stared up at the progress of moons and stars. He was holding my hand, or I was holding his.

We’d known each other for a month, and I was in love.

That I’d spent the past week agonizing about that fact should come as no surprise to anyone who remembers twenty. It’s a year where such things matter. Where, after a month of knowing someone, after two months of knowing their entire species, you can look at them and see something new weaving itself into your life. The future is a land of dreams, and there you are trying to shape them. Splicing pictures into other pictures, putting where they might belong because you want them to—more than anything. And if they blend a little then so what?

“Are all Earth women like you?” Avi said. His voice was soft and silken.

“What, are you getting tired of me already?” I said.

He laughed. The stars ran faster. “Never. I’m only trying to make sense of it. You’re…different than I’m used to.”

“Used to?” I said.

Shifting in the night. I heard him roll, move above me. Avi was a wrinkle in the sky. I found the outline of his lips, felt his hair tickling my skin.

“You know what I meant,” he said.

Wide-eyed, I nodded.

The sky moved closer. “There’s something that my people do when we…” He took a sharp breath. “I want to try something. The Sharing.”

And then it was my turn to breathe. To get lost in the night and in his chameleon eyes: like someone had carved facets into stars.

All of us Peace Corps volunteers knew what The Sharing was. I’d seen it my very first day on Valennen, a pair of Dauri clasped so tightly together that they looked to be woven from the same silk, their eyes open but sightless, mouths moving with no sound coming out. The Sharing was the ceremony that stitched Dauri society together, allowing them to peer into each other and learn in a way that no pair of human friends or lovers ever could.

I was not the only girl in the Corps who’d seen a Dauri pass and wonder, perhaps a little desperately, what that kind of knowing would be like. I remain the only Human to ever try.

“Are you sure?” I said. “What about your elders, or—”

“It’s not forbidden, necessarily,” Avi said. “They told us to be careful. I have been. It’s been the best month of my life.”

I bit my lip. He was there right above me but somehow I’d lost sight of him. Dauri camouflage was too perfect. Avi was hot breath and a low voice. My imagination could run away with that, and did.

“What do you want to know?” I said.

“It doesn’t work like that,” he said.

“Are you sure?”

A little girl’s question. Not a Peace Corp volunteer’s, all those light-years from home.

“Okay,” I said.

Okay.

I found him again, then. Avi’s skin rippled with something, call it excitement. For the space of a breath he was sketched out against the night with all the brilliant force of his world’s three suns, so blinding I had to look away. His hand had caught my chin, brought me back gently. He was the night once more, and he was the man I’d spent the best month of my life with, and I was only twenty. You can understand that, and forgive.

Avi’s cheek against my cheek. Our arms around each other. A sense of pulling away, like glue against bare skin.

And then the night cracked open.

A truth: Humans are not telepathic.

A reality: I was exquisitely self-aware.

A moment frozen in time: Avi, slipping down through the layers of perception and nervous reaction, in the place where my thoughts lived. Where they revolved around him. Avi, a spectral being flitting my consciousness. Avi, the construct I’d made of him in my mind. A composite of a chameleon-man conforming himself to a young Human girl’s hopes and fears and dreams until he was nothing like the man was, the Dauri he was, but a human man exotified, an identity stripped away. I swear to God I meant well.

When they sent the Peace Corps to Valennen it was with the hope that naive young dreamers could win hearts and minds in a way that an army or a diplomatic corp never could. We didn’t know some things then. We didn’t know that the Dauri imagination didn’t work like ours. That it was founded on a principle of absolute reality, and that, when changes must occur, they were not conceptualized in the same way. A Dauri could at a tree and take it through all the useful permutations of its being: chair, table, spear, fire, fishing pole, but he didn’t see it happen as we did.

Avi saw it. Saw himself twisting and becoming something else. His body running like liquid in my mind until he was unrecognizable; the man I loved, but not the man that he did. A change on such a level that he could never comprehend, and might never want to. After all, Avi was young too. Looking back, I think he was as frightened as I was by the way that we both felt.

And he did feel it. I didn’t need to be a telepath to know that. It radiated off him, filled up my soul as it had filled my days. It was still there when he pulled away, stood above me, colors shifting with the night as he said “What would you make of us?”

The old fears that they’d sent children like me to assuage.

He was gone before I could even respond. The night was quiet. The stars moved too fast. Reality crashed in around me, left me gasping.

I lay among the rustling lia grasses as night turned into day. Towards dawn, the Peace Corp found me. By then, Avi was already home.