I manage to suppress my thoughts during English class. Chloe spends much of the time reading and writing. I regret that I didn’t study the symbols for language. If I had, I’d be able to understand what our eyes are seeing and our hands are noting. It would be enlightening to share in this physical method of thought exchange. But since I can’t, I find myself bored into doze mode.
Art is entirely different. The room we enter for this class is a disordered explosion of materials and colors. Some of the juvenile humans sit at tables, working on paper. Others perch on stools, spinning clumps of mud. They immerse their hands in the mud and cause it to change shape.
I would like to feel that mud, but Chloe has a different plan. She places a plain white rectangle on a stand alongside a tray. The tray is dotted with blobs of color, and she uses a thin metal tool to mix colors together. This is interesting. The blue and red merge to become purple, while the yellow and red become orange.
Once Chloe has several new shades, she picks up a brush. She dips the brush into a vibrant orange and strokes the paint onto the white rectangle. A long wavy line of orange appears. She dips the brush again, picking up a yellow, and swiftly adds this to the orange. The colors merge together, and where they meet, a third color appears.
Again and again, Chloe applies color to the rectangle. Sometimes she uses a fatter brush and swirls it through the colors. They blend into ever more shades, some light and some dark. The white disappears swiftly, and then I realize something astonishing.
Chloe is creating! She is making something altogether unique! She pauses and lays down the brush. We move into a tiny room lined with shelves.
“It’s the supply closet, Welks,” she whispers.
“Why are we here?” I ask. “I want to watch the creation.”
“You know…” Her voice trails away, and she’s quiet for a moment. Then she sighs and says, “I never thought of it quite like that. I just thought I was painting a memory of a sunrise I once saw.”
“Painting a memory?” This is a stunning concept. “You’re attempting to make thought physical?”
“I guess.”
“Incredible,” I say. I have a strange urge to shake our head, but rule one says I can’t operate our body.
Chloe laughs softly and shakes our head for us. “Do you still think we’re primitives?”
“Uh. Hmm. Maybe not so much. Universals can only share memory through thought transfer.” I wonder if I’ll be able to transfer my memory of Chloe. “Is this painting exactly like your memory?”
“Not exactly, no,” she replies. “It’s an abstract. More like the feeling of my memory.”
“I understand,” I say.
“Don’t lie, Welkin. But tell me this. Do you still think art serves no purpose?”
I ponder that, but before I can answer, a human appears at the closet door. “Hey, Chloe,” it says.
“Hey,” Chloe responds. She removes a tube of paint from a shelf. “There it is. I need some cyan.”
It turns out that cyan is a shade of blue. When Chloe feathers this color into the edges of her creation, even I can see why she needed it. I think she too is surprised by the change it makes. The yellows and oranges are suddenly glowing. Our eyes widen.
“Wow,” she murmurs. “It was just an impulse.”
She didn’t plan for this effect? How did it happen, then?
The loud ringing that has sounded throughout the day occurs once more. A hubbub of sound arises in the room as the humans chatter and rush to put materials away. Chloe begins cleaning her brushes. Under cover of the noise, she whispers, “Some accidents are good.”
My impulse is to deny that. Accidents are not good. They are like variables in experiments. Unpredictable. But then, choosing Chloe as my host was a type of accident. I think perhaps she’s right. Some accidents are good.