The Speed of Dark

by Elizabeth Moon

  “That is why you need us, or people like us. It is not a good idea to do both. In science, you change one variable at a time.”

  Mr. Arakeen looks relieved; Dale says nothing, but his eyelids droop. I do not know what he is thinking. I know how I feel, shaky inside.

  “I want to live longer,” Linda says. Her hand flings out as if it had a life of its own. “I want to live longer and not change.”

  “I do not know if I want to live longer or not,” I say. The words come slowly but even Dr. Hendricks does not interrupt. “What if I become someone I don’t like and am stuck living longer like that? First I want to know who I would be, before I can decide about living longer.”

  Dale nods slowly.

  “I think we should decide on the basis of this treatment alone. They are not trying to force us. We can think about it.”

  “But—but—” Mr. Arakeen seems caught on the word, jerking it out, then makes a twisting movement with his head and goes on. “You’re saying you will think… How long will that take?”

  “As long as they want,” Ms. Beasley says. “You’ve already got one subject undergoing treatment; it would be prudent to space them out anyway, see how it goes.”

  “I don’t say I’ll do it,” Chuy says. “But I would think about it more… more in favor… if LifeTime is part of it. Maybe not at the same time, but later.”

  “I will think about it,” Linda says. She is pale and her eyes are moving around the way they do before she shuts down, but she says it. “I will think about it, and living longer would make it better, but I do not really want it.”

  “Me, either,” Eric says. “I do not want someone changing my brain. Criminals have their brains changed and I am not a criminal. Autistic is different, not bad. It is not wrong to be different. Sometimes it is hard, but it is not wrong.”

  I do not say anything. I am not sure what I want to say. It is too fast. How can I decide? How can I choose to be someone else I do not know and cannot predict. Change comes anyway, but it is not my fault if I did not choose it.

  “I want it,” Bailey says. He squeezes his eyes shut and speaks that way, with his eyes shut and his voice very tense. “It is this to exchange for that—for Mr. Crenshaw threatening us and the risk it has of not working and making things worse. It is this I need to make a balance.”

  I look at Dr. Hendricks and Dr. Ransome; they are whispering to each other, moving their hands. I think they are already thinking how the two treatments might interact.

  “It is too dangerous,” Dr. Ransome says, looking up. “We can’t possibly do them at the same time.” He glances at me. “Lou was right. Even if you get a life extension treatment later, it can’t be done at the same time.”

  Linda shrugs and looks down. Her shoulders are tense; her hands are fisted in her lap. I think she will not take the treatment without the promise of longer life. If I do it and she does not, we may not see each other again. I feel strange about that; she was in this unit before I was. I have seen her every working day for years.

  “I will talk to the board about this,” Mr. Arakeen says, more calmly. “We’ll have to get more legal and medical advice. But if I understand you, some of you are demanding life extension treatment as part of the package, at some time in the future, as a condition of participation, is that right?”

  “Yes,” Bailey says. Linda nods.

  Mr. Arakeen stands there, his body swaying a little as he shifts from foot to foot. The light catches on his name tag, moving with his motion. One button on his coat disappears and reappears behind the podium as he rocks back and forth. Finally he stops and gives a sharp nod.

  “All right. I will ask the board. I think they will say no, but I will ask them.”

  “Keep in mind,” Ms. Beasley says, “that these employees have not agreed to the procedure, only to think about it.”

  “All right.” Mr. Arakeen nods and then twists his neck again. “But I expect you all to keep your word. Really think about it.”

  “I do not lie,” Dale says. “Do not lie to me.” He gets up, unfolding a bit stiffly as he does. “Come on,” he says to the rest of us. “Work to do.”

  None of them say anything, not the lawyers nor the doctors, nor Mr. Aldrin. Slowly, we get up; I feel uncertain, almost shaky. Is it all right to just walk away? But when I am moving, walking, I start to feel better. Stronger. I am scared, but I am also happy. I feel lighter, as if gravity were less.

  Out in the corridor, we turn left to go to the elevators. When we get to the place where the hall widens out for the elevators, Mr. Crenshaw is standing there, holding a cardboard box in both hands. It is full of things, but I can’t see all of them. Balanced on top is a pair of running shoes, an expensive brand I remember seeing in the sporting goods catalog. I wonder how fast Mr. Crenshaw runs. Two men in the light-blue shirts of company security stand beside him, one on each side. His eyes widen when he sees us.

  “What are you doing here?” he says to Dale, who is slightly ahead of the rest of us. He turns toward him, taking a step, and the two men in uniform put their hands on his arms. He stops. “You’re supposed to be in G-Twenty-eight until four P.M.; this isn’t even the right building.”

  Dale does not slow down; he walks on by without saying a word.

  Mr. Crenshaw’s head turns like a robot’s and then swings back. He glares at me. “Lou! What is going on here?”

  I want to know what he is doing with a box in his hands, with a security guard escort, but I am not rude enough to ask. Mr. Aldrin said we did not have to worry about Mr. Crenshaw anymore, so I do not have to answer him when he is rude to me. “I have a lot of work to do, Mr. Crenshaw,” I say. His hands jerk, as if he wants to drop the box and reach out to me, but he does not, and I am past him, following Dale.

  When we are back in our own building, Dale speaks. “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes,” he says. And louder, “YES, YES, YES!”

  “I am not bad,” Linda says. “I am not bad person.”

  “You are not a bad person,” I agree.

  Her eyes fill with tears. “It is bad to be autistic person. It is bad to be angry to be autistic person. It is bad to want not be—not want be— autistic person. All bad ways. No right way.”

  “It is stupid,” Chuy says. “Tell us to want to be normal, and then tell us to love ourselves as we are. If people want to change it means they do not like something about how they are now. That other— impossible.”

  Dale is smiling, a wide, tight smile I have not seen him use before. “When someone says something impossible, someone is wrong.”

  “Yes,” I say. “It is a mistake.”

  “Mistake,” Dale says. “And mistake to believe impossible wrong.”

  “Yes,” I say. I can feel myself tensing up, afraid Dale will start talking about religion.

  “So if normal people tell us to do something impossible, then we do not have to think everything normal people say is true.”

  “Not all lies,” Linda says.

  “Not all lies does not mean all true,” Dale says.

  That is obvious, but I had not thought before that it was really impossible for people to want to change and at the same time be happy with who they were before the change. I do not think any of us thought that way until Chuy and Dale said it.

  “I started thinking at your place,” Dale said. “I could not say it all then. But that helped.”

  “If it goes wrong,” Eric said, “it will be even more expensive for them to take care of… what happens. If it lasts longer.”

  “I do not know how Cameron is doing,” Linda says.

  “He wanted to be first,” Chuy says.

  “It would be better if we could go one at a time and see what happens to the others,” Eric says.

  “The speed of dark would be slower,” I say. They look at me. I remember that I have not told them about the speed of dark and the speed of light. “The speed of light in a vacuum is one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second,” I say.
>
  “I know that,” Dale says.

  “What I wonder,” Linda says, “is, since things fall faster as they get nearer the ground and that is gravity, does light go faster near a lot of gravity, like a black hole?”

  I never knew Linda was interested in the speed of light at all. “I do not know,” I say. “But the books do not say anything about the speed of dark. Some people told me it does not have a speed, that it is just not light, where light is not, but I think it had to get there.”

  They are all silent a moment. Dale says, “If LifeTime can make time longer for us, maybe something can make light faster.”

  Chuy says, “Cameron wanted to be first. Cameron will be normal first. That is faster than us.”

  Eric says, “I am going to the gym.” He turns away.

  Lindas face has tightened, a ridged furrow on her forehead. “Light has a speed. Dark should have a speed. Opposites share everything but direction.”

  I do not understand that. I wait.

  “Positive and negative numbers are alike except for direction,” Linda goes on, slowly. “Large and small are both size, but in different directions. To and from mean the same path, but in different directions. So light and dark are opposite, but alike just in the same direction.” She throws her arms out suddenly. “What I like about astronomy,” she says. “So much out there, so many stars, so many distances. Everything from nothing to everything, altogether.”

  I did not know Linda liked astronomy. She has always seemed the most remote of us, the most autistic. I know what she means, though. I also like the series from small to large, from near to far, from the photon of light that enters my eye, closer than close, to where it came from, light-years away across the universe.

  “I like stars,” she says. “I want—I wanted—to work with stars. They said no. They said, ‘Your mind does not work the right way. Only a few people can do that.’ I knew it was math. I knew I was good in math, but I had to take adaptive math even though I always made hundreds, and when I finally got into the good classes they said it was too late. At college they said take applied math and study computers. There are jobs in computers. They said astronomy was not practical. If I live longer, it will not be too late anymore.”

  This is the most I have ever heard Linda talk. Her face is pinker on the cheeks now; her eyes wander less.

  “I did not know you liked stars,” I say.

  “Stars are far apart from each other,” she says. “They do not have to touch to know each other. They shine at each other from far away.”

  I start to say that stars do not know each other, that stars are not alive, but something stops me. I read that in a book, that stars are incandescent gas, and in another book that gas is inanimate matter. Maybe the book was wrong. Maybe they are incandescent gas and alive.

  Linda looks at me, actually makes eye contact. “Lou — do you like stars?

  “Yes,” I say. “And gravity and light and space and — ”

  “Betelgeuse,” she says. She grins, and it is suddenly lighter in the hall. I did not know it was dark before. The dark was there first, but the light caught up. “Rigel. Antares. Light and all colors. Wavelengths…” Her hands ripple in the air, and I know she means the pattern that wavelength and frequency make.

  “Binaries,” I say. “Brown dwarfs.”

  Her face twists and relaxes. “Oh, that’s old,” she says. “Chu and Sanderly have reclassified a lot of those — ” She stops. “Lou — I thought you spent all your time with normals. Playing normal.”

  “I go to church,” I say. “I go to fencing club.”

  “Fencing?”

  “Swords,” I say. Her worried look does not change. “It’s… a kind of game,” I say. “We try to poke each other.”

  “Why?” She still looks puzzled. “If you like stars — ”

  “I like fencing, too,” I say.

  “With normal people,” she says.

  “Yes, I like them.”

  “It’s hard…” she says. “I go to the planetarium. I try to talk to the scientists who come, but… the words tangle. I can tell they do not want to talk to me. They act like I am stupid or crazy.”

  “The people I know, they are not too bad,” I say. I feel guilty as I say it, because Marjory is more than “not too bad.” Tom and Lucia are better than “not too bad.” “Except for the one who tried to kill me.”

  “Tried to kill you?” Linda says. I am surprised that she did not know but remember that I never told her. Maybe she does not watch the news.

  “He was angry with me,” I say.

  “Because you are autistic?”

  “Not exactly… well… yes.” What was the core of Don’s anger, after all, but the fact that I, a mere incomplete, a false-person, was succeeding in his world?

  “That is sick,” Linda says, with emphasis. She gives a great shrug and turns away. “Stars,” she says.

  I go into my office, thinking of light and dark and stars and the space between them that is full of light they pour out. How can there be any dark in space with all the stars in it? If we can see the stars, that means there is light. And our instruments that see other than visible light, they detect it in a great blur—it is everywhere.

  I do not understand why people speak of space as cold and dark, unwelcoming. It is as if they never went out in the night and looked up. Wherever real dark is, it is beyond the range of our instruments, far on the edge of the universe, where dark came first. But the light catches up.

  Before I was born, people thought even more wrong things about autistic children. I have read about it. Darker than dark.

  I did not know Linda liked stars. I did not know she wanted to work in astronomy. Maybe she even wanted to go into space, the way I did. Do. Do still. If the treatment works, maybe I can—the very thought holds me motionless, frozen in delight, and then I have to move. I stand up and stretch, but it is not enough.

  Eric is just getting off the trampoline as I come into the gym. He has been bouncing to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, but it is too strong for what I want to think about. Eric nods at me, and I change the music, scrolling through the possibilities until something feels right. Carmen. The orchestral suite. Yes.

  I need that excitement. I need that explosive quality. I bounce higher and higher, feeling the wonderful openness of free fall before I feel the equally wonderful compression, joints squeezing, muscles working to push me to a higher bounce. Opposites are the same thing in different directions. Action and reaction. Gravity—I do not know an opposite for gravity, but the elasticity of the trampoline creates one. Numbers and patterns race through my mind, forming, breaking up, re-forming.

  I remember being afraid of water, the unstable, unpredictable shifts and wobbles in it as it touched me. I remember the explosive joy of finally swimming, the realization that even though it was unstable, even though I could not predict the changing pressure in the pool, I could still stay afloat and move in the direction I chose to go. I remember being afraid of the bicycle, of its wobbly unpredictability, and the same joy when I figured out how to ride out that unpredictability, how to use my will to overcome its innate chaos. Again I am afraid, more afraid because I understand more—I could lose all the adaptations I have made and have nothing—but if I can ride this wave, this biological bicycle, then I will have incomparably more.

  As my legs tire, I bounce lower, lower, lower, and finally stop.

  They do not want us stupid and helpless. They do not want to destroy our minds; they want to use them.

  I do not want to be used. I want to use my own mind, myself, for what I want to do.

  I think I may want to try this treatment. I do not have to. I do not need to: I am all right as I am. But I think I am beginning to want to because maybe, if I change, and if it is my idea and not theirs, then maybe I can learn what I want to learn and do what I want to do. It is not any one thing; it is all the things at once, all the possibilities. “I will not be the same,” I say, letting go of th
e comfortable gravity, flying up out of that certainly into the uncertainty of free fall.

  When I walk out, I feel light in both ways, still in less than normal gravity and still full of more light than darkness. But gravity returns when I think of telling my friends what I am doing. I think they will not like it any better than the Center’s lawyer.

  Chapter Twenty

  MR. ALDRIN COMES BY TO TELL US THAT THE COMPANY will not agree to provide LifeTime treatments at this time, though they may—he emphasizes that it is only a possibility—assist those of us who want to have LifeTime treatments after the other treatment, if it is successful. “It is too dangerous to do them together,” he says. “It increases the risk, and then if something does go wrong it would last longer.”

  I think he should say it plainly: if the treatment causes more damage, we would be worse off and the company would have to support us for longer. But I know that normal people do not say things plainly.

  We do not talk among ourselves after he leaves. The others all look at me, but they do not say anything. I hope Linda takes the treatment anyway. I want to talk to her more about stars and gravity and the speed of light and dark.

  In my own office, I call Ms. Beasley at Legal Aid and tell her that I have decided to agree to the treatment. She asks me if I am sure. I am not sure, but I am sure enough. Then I call Mr. Aldrin and tell him. He also asks if I am sure. “Yes,” I say, and then I ask, “Is your brother going to do it?” I have been wondering about his brother.

  “Jeremy?” He sounds surprised that I asked. I think it is a reasonable question. “I don’t know, Lou. It depends on the size of the group. If they open it up to outsiders, I’ll consider asking him. If he could live on his own, if he could be happier…”

  “He is not happy?” I ask.

  Mr. Aldrin sighs. “I… don’t talk about him much,” he says. I wait. Not talking about something much does not mean someone doesn’t want to talk about it. Mr. Aldrin clears his throat and then goes on. “No, Lou, he’s not happy. He’s… very impaired. The doctors then… my parents… he’s on a lot of medication, and he never learned to talk very well.” I think I understand what he is not saying. His brother was born too early, before the treatments that helped me and the others. Maybe he didn’t get the best treatment, even of those available at the time. I think of the descriptions in the books; I imagine Jeremy being stuck where I was as a young child.