The first time I realised that I was more intelligent than my father was when I looked into his eyes.
This did not happen during his lifetime, of course. I was only two years old when my father took his own life, fearful to an equal degree of both the disease he believed he had contracted from his mentor, Mr Cohn - who would himself pass some weeks later - and the damage he believed the revelation of that disease would do to his reputation. If I looked into my father's eyes during one of those brief occasions when I saw him in those younger days, I have no memory of it - and at any rate, if I had been cognizant of any intellectual gap between us it would have been very much in the other direction.
No, the moment when I looked into my father's eyes and realised, with certainty, that he was not my intellectual equal occurred only a few months ago. Two years ago, having broken ground on the TideFate California facility (following our proof-of-concept work at the Kirkoswald complex), knowing that the project on which I have laboured for so long was now nearing completion, and feeling that I could at last devote some of my time and talents to some less intensive project, I took up painting. My initial works in that field, completed as they were during a period when my mind had been preoccupied with some extremely complex concepts, were decidedly abstract, but once the initial fever had passed I began to explore the possibilities of figuration - and to work on improving my drawing from life, the better to do so.
Even then, although I sketched many of my friends and acquaintances - my wife, my brother, my colleague E.M. - it was only three months or so ago that I set myself the task of creating a portrait of the man whose memory has guided every one of my life's actions - my late father.
And so I busied myself scanning back through the library of footage of my father that I have acquired, trying to find a freeze-frame which truly captured his essence, his animating principle - his soul, if you want to use a mystical term. And it was in doing so that I realised that, whatever else I might discern behind his eyes - amusement, lust, a certain social cunning - the thing that stood out most was a sort of confused incomprehension. Again and again, when I paused the footage, I saw the eyes of a man trying, often in vain, to work out what was going on around him. A man whose mind, except on a few topics, most of them base - was mercilessly dull.
I found it hard to capture it, this emptiness in that man's eyes. That vacancy. I have tried hard, over the years, to look for the intelligence in others. It has been necessary to do so. If I allow myself to become prey to my ego, I may start making mistakes, and, given my research, who knows what horrors might come from complacency? And it has been of practical use too. It allowed me to realise how E.M., once properly broken, might be put to practical use. Among many other things. And it allowed me to give TideFate a convincing cover. And so, when I draw people, I try to do so from a position of respect. And when I see the emptiness inside those eyes, my pencil tends to euphemise, to make the pupil just a little sharper, to tighten the slack in the jaw. But for all my generosity as an artist, I cannot deny it.
If I did not know this man to be my father, I would think him an idiot.
This troubles me. It has always been one of my guiding assumptions, from the moment I began to plot the ways in which our world has diverged from those in which my father lived, that had he done so most of the work I have had to do would already have been accomplished. In that world, I have long felt certain, I would have been able to live the carefree life which my brother has allowed himself, instead of playing catch-up with the world I could have known. But what if I have been wrong? What if my father, in that other world, has truly been my brother's namesake, and squandered every opportunity afforded him? Will I cross realities, only to lock eyes with an uncomprehending oaf, a senile fool who nods emptily when I explain what my branch of our great family has achieved?
I tell myself it does not matter. The California facility will be online in mere weeks. The stars move still, time runs, the hour must come and, one way or another, I will make that journey no other man has ever made before. I will look my long-dead father in his living eyes and bid him look upon my works. And together - in both our names, even if he is capable of little more than looking on and drooling - we will put right the wrongs of our two worlds. Alea iacta est.
I am coming, father. You will see me soon.