3
Since her earliest consciousness had formed from a kind of white mist, she had lived in the palace. It was located on the shores of a sea, surrounded on three sides by a high wall of snowy marble. The wall had no gate or openings, but the palace grounds were open to the sea.
Her tutor’s name was Princess Nourinnihar. They spent every morning together, in the palace garden, and the princess would teach her marvelous and mysterious things. Her first lessons focused on who she was, how she had been created, how her mind worked, and the nature of the world around her. She learned that her world consisted of a vast matrix of numerical data, a numberscape, which she processed through visualization and auralization. She lived inside the numbers. She saw them and heard them. Her mind was itself a complex, ongoing Boolean calculation. Her body, her senses, and her movements were also a numerical simulation. She was constrained to obey physical laws, because she could not violate the numerical matrix surrounding her—or chaos would result.
The Princess taught her about the solar system, the sun, planets, and moons. They spent a long time studying Titan, the most enigmatic of all the moons, which she learned was named after the Titans, the race of gods who once ruled the heavens—the offspring of Gaia, the goddess of Earth, and Uranus, the god of the Sky, according to ancient myths. The Princess taught her about the stars and galaxies, the Pisces-Cetus Supercluster Complex, the Bo?tes Void, the Huge-LQG, the Big Bang, and Inflation. They studied gravitation and perturbative superstring theory and n-dimensional de Sitter space. During this process the Princess also taught her many practical skills, such as photography, analytic geochemistry, navigation, mechanical engineering, and exometeorology. She knew she was being trained for a great mission, but what exactly that mission was, and what would be required of her, remained a secret that would be revealed to her at the right moment.
Then came what the Princess called the “humanities.” These were the enigmatic bodies of learning—music, art, and literature—created by human beings for their own pleasure and edification. Understanding them was the most difficult of all. She listened to the Princess’s favorite music, including Beethoven’s late string quartets and Bill Evans, trying to make sense of it. But music, as mathematically complex as it was, didn’t give her pleasure the way it did the Princess. This was a source of frustration. Reading books proved almost impossible. She started with Winnie-the-Pooh and Goodnight Moon, which were puzzling enough, and then moved on to the novels of Anne Rice and Isaac Asimov, Vonnegut, Shakespeare, Homer, and Joyce. Even as she read countless numbers of books, she wasn’t sure she had understood a single one. She just didn’t “get it,” as the Princess would say.
Despite these difficulties, her life was good. While she studied in the garden with the Princess, Nubians in capes and turbans carried them sherbets in the heat of the day and petits fours and wine in the evening. Eunuchs perfumed and turned down her sheets at night and brought her cakes and Turkish coffee in the morning. Sometimes in the evening, when her lessons were done, she would go down to the granite quays with her dog, Laika, at her side and watch the ships come and go, their purple sails billowing. They unloaded their wares on the stone quays, sacks of spices and rolls of silks, chests of gold and caskets of sapphires, loaves of sugar and amphorae brimming with wine, olive oil, and garum. And then they would sail away for distant shores and worlds unknown. Sitting on the edge of the quay, she would take off her golden sandals and dangle her feet in the cold water. She loved the ocean in all its vastness. She hoped that her mission would be a seafaring one, and that she would someday sail away to explore unknown seas and savage coasts.