The military transport plane had begun its final approach. Nelson focused on the issues of the present.
Once off the plane, Nelson was led through a short blast of open-air heat that made him feel all of his fifty-three years, and into a surface building. He found himself in an anteroom with air conditioning, potted plants and a receptionist behind a desk: a room full of Pacific light. Save for the insignia of various command units on the wall, it was like the waiting room for an upmarket dentist.
An officer came out to meet him, a woman, forty-ish, in a crisp Navy uniform. ‘Reverend Azikiwe?’
‘Call me Nelson. I’m freelance these days.’
She smiled, pushed back a lock of greying blonde hair, and shook his hand. ‘I’m Louise Irwin. Lieutenant. I’m in operational control of the treatment of the patients here. We’ve corresponded, of course, but it’s good to meet you in person.’ She led him out of the room, nodding to the receptionist, and used a swipe card to guide him through a doorway. They walked down a narrow corridor with low polystyrene ceiling tiles, very mid-twentieth century. ‘How was your flight? Those military transports can be a little rough. The room we’ve assigned you is in a neighbouring block. If you need some time to freshen up—’
‘I’m fine.’
‘You’d rather go straight to see our charges, wouldn’t you? It’s a very understandable reaction. There really isn’t any substitute for encountering them in person. That’s true of most psychiatric patients, of course. You’re going to need full security clearance but I can swipe you through for now.’
They came to an elevator that opened for Irwin’s card. It descended smoothly, if slowly.
Nelson asked, ‘Is that how you think of them? As patients? Not as prisoners?’
‘Well, that is my background. I trained as a psychiatrist, and found I needed a little more excitement in my life, and I joined the Navy. Now I’m a psychiatrist who travels.’ She smiled again.
‘I guess we’re all chameleons. We chop and change during our lives.’
‘As you have,’ she said, studying him with an evident insight that felt faintly disturbing to Nelson. ‘I read your file, of course. Anybody allowed in a facility like this has to have a biography as long as my arm – and you came with top personal recommendations, to serve as our inmates’ personal chaplain. A kid from the South African townships who got his chance through a Black Corporation scholarship; a respected archaeologist; a Church of England vicar . . . You’ve adopted many roles.’
Nelson knew all about the ‘personal recommendations’. His credentials for being allowed in had essentially been engineered by the Quizmasters, along with Lobsang, through a web of behind-the-scenes contacts – including a little help from Roberta Golding, he’d been surprised to discover, the rather glamorous, in-the-news White House staffer who’d taken some kind of personal interest in the inmates of this place since they’d been brought here, though for now Nelson had no idea what her connection was to all this. On the other hand the substance of his record as seen by the US Navy had mostly been genuine. When lying, it was always best to tell as much truth as possible. And he really did intend to serve as a chaplain for these imprisoned children, to the best of his ability, until the time came for his deeper purpose to be revealed.
The elevator slid to a halt. The doors opened smoothly to reveal a metal-grille walkway, suspended over a kind of compartmented pit.
Irwin led him along this pathway, and Nelson found himself looking down into a series of rooms: into, for these rooms all had transparent ceilings, even the bathrooms, though Nelson imagined that some visual trickery ensured the ceilings looked opaque from underneath. The rooms individually didn’t seem all that impressive, or unusual. They were like small hotel suites, each a bedroom-cum-study equipped with TV and computer terminal and other gear, a small bathroom. The rooms had been personalized, with posters and souvenirs, clothing in the cupboards (all of which lacked doors) or heaped on the floor. Nelson felt as if he was looking down into something like an upmarket campus dorm. But heavily armed and body-armoured marines patrolled this high walkway, pointing their weapons down into the rooms below.
In most of the rooms there was a single person, alone – all young, aged maybe five years old to early twenties, both sexes, varying ethnicity – some fat, some thin, some tall, some short. Ordinary-looking, at first glance. Some had company, an adult or two, generally talking quietly. There was a lounge where a few of these inmates gathered, and a small crèche where infants played amid a litter of toys. Both crèche and lounge were supervised by adults, men and women in civilian clothes. One room was more like a small clinic, where a girl was having samples taken, blood, a cheek swab for DNA.
And Nelson soon spotted Paul Spencer Wagoner, the friend of Joshua Valienté, alone in a room, reading on a tablet.
Through Lobsang and Sister Agnes, Nelson had at last got to meet Valienté properly, and to know him. Joshua was a man whose Long Earth exploits Nelson had studied for many years – and, Nelson suspected, another ally of Lobsang’s in whatever long-term game that mysterious entity was playing. Joshua had asked Nelson to look out especially for this Wagoner kid, who had wound up in the same kids’ home, Sister Agnes’s Home, as Joshua himself a few decades earlier . . . And now here was Wagoner in this military cage.
Lieutenant Irwin was saying, ‘A few hundred of these individuals are known in the American Aegis, though the sweeps continue. This is the largest single group we’re holding. Of course there must be others of foreign nationalities. So. What’s your first impression?’
‘It’s a prison. An impressive facility. But it is a prison.’ She nodded. ‘We’re wary of them. We don’t know what they’re capable of—’
‘They’re in glass boxes, like lab rats. With armed guards twenty-four seven. You have young teenagers in there. Can you really give them no privacy?’
‘These were the security protocols mandated. We try to normalize their environment as much as possible. You may baulk at this confinement, Nelson. They look like ordinary kids, don’t they? Ordinary young Americans. But they’re not. Any contact with them and you’ll find that out for yourself. In fact they distinguish themselves from us, you know. They do call themselves the Next. Of course they’re only youngsters. But they have quite a lot of money behind them, actually, or some do. Also some of their parents have the resources to fight this. The Navy is having to dig deep fending off petitions from some fancy lawyers.’
‘Hmm. Fancy lawyers who are arguing about such irrelevancies as these kids’ constitutional rights, I imagine. US citizens swept up and imprisoned without any semblance of due process. A few foreign nationals too?’
She raised an eyebrow. ‘I’m going to enjoy debating such issues with you, Nelson. But I suspect you are rushing to judgement. We had to do something. And remember, I am a naval officer. The purpose of this place is to maintain national security.’
‘They don’t seem such a terrible threat to national security to me.’
She nodded. ‘Well, that’s one of the things we are here to ascertain. Generally they are no trouble, from a disciplinary and control point of view. Most of them quickly adapted to confinement, actually, which is because so many of them have been through processes of care, fostering, even prison at the juvenile or adult levels. They are institutionalized, used to confinement. Says something about how well our society has been able to handle these individuals, right? And if they do play up they are removed from this part of the facility.’
‘To where? A punishment block?’
‘A special therapy facility.’ She studied him. ‘You do use judgemental language. You need to keep an open mind, Nelson. Until you get to know them. They are extraordinarily acute – perceptive, controlling, manipulative. In person they can be very difficult to deal with, one to one. But it’s when they get together that – well, they take off. Their talk is incredible, rooted in English but superfast and dense. We have linguists analysing their talk, as best they can.
Whatever they are discussing, we can at least measure the sheer complexity of the talk. And that itself is far beyond the norm. I was shown a transcript, of a kind of argument being developed by a girl called Indra; there was a single sentence that went on for four pages. That is one of the simpler examples. Often we don’t even know what they are talking about—’
‘Concepts beyond the human, perhaps,’ Nelson said. ‘As unimaginable to us as the mystery of the Holy Trinity would be to a chimp. If these kids really have arrived in the world equipped with these super-powerful minds, they must come up against the limits of our mere human culture very quickly.’ He smiled. ‘How wonderful it must be, when they are free to talk together. How much they must be discovering, beyond the imagination of any human who ever lived.’
She was watching him. ‘You know, I think you’re going to make a fine chaplain. But let me tell you something even more remarkable. Even more different. We have a few infants here – and we’re monitoring even younger subjects, even babies, who are still with their families. Before the age of about two, the young ones will try to talk – well, as human infants do. They gabble out stuff that’s entirely incomprehensible to us, and mostly incomprehensible to the older ones – but not totally. Again the linguists have analysed this stuff; they tell me it’s like investigating the structure of dolphin song. These infant gabblings are languages, Nelson. Meaning they have actual linguistic content. We arrive in the world with the capacity for language, but we have to learn it from those around us. Next babies, trying to express themselves, invent their own language, independently of the culture, word by word, one grammatical rule after another. Only later do they start to pick up the language of the rest. And, still more remarkable, the others incorporate some of the infants’ inventions into their own shared post-English tongue. It’s like an entirely new language is emerging, mutating at a ferocious rate, right in front of our eyes.’
‘When you let it happen. When you let them speak to each other at all.’
She didn’t react to that. ‘It’s important you understand what we’re dealing with, Nelson. These children represent a different order, a step change. Something new.’
‘Umm. And yet they are children, in our care.’
‘So they are.’
‘I think I should get settled in. I imagine there are superior officers I need to be presented to.’
‘I’m afraid so. Also you need to get through your security processing.’
‘Then I’d like to talk to some of the inmates. One at a time, to begin with.’
‘Sure. Any preference who first?’
As if at random, Nelson pointed down at Paul Spencer Wagoner. ‘That one.’
Nelson was allowed, in fact encouraged, to speak to Paul in the nineteen-year-old’s own room.
Nelson could see that made the security set-up easier to manage, but he wasn’t sure about the psychology of it. When he was nineteen, twenty, he hadn’t had a room of his own, but he was pretty sure that if he had, he would have seen it as an imposition to have some stranger walk in and start talking about God. This was the condition of the meeting, though, and Nelson made the best of it.
Paul’s room was only sparsely customized, by the standards of others Nelson had seen – or rather, had looked into from above. Posters on the walls: a galaxy image, exotic Long Earth beasts, a singing star Nelson didn’t recognize. On the desk, a phone, tablet, TV, though Nelson had learned that the connections you could make on these devices were sparse and tightly controlled, here in this facility.
Paul himself, slim, dark, was dressed in a black coverall. All the inmates here had to wear coveralls, Nelson had learned, but at least you got a choice of colours, and only the most defiant chose Gitmo orange. Paul evidently wasn’t the most defiant. He just sat on the edge of the bed, arms wrapped around his torso, legs crossed, a blank expression on his face. A classic sulky-teenager pose.
Nelson sat opposite, on a chair. ‘I bet you didn’t choose any of this stuff,’ he said as an opener. ‘The posters and such. This is some elderly Navy officer’s idea of what people your age like, right?’
Paul returned his stare, but gave nothing back.
Nelson nodded. ‘Lieutenant Irwin, who showed me around earlier, said a lot of things about you and your colleagues in here.’
Paul snorted, and spoke for the first time. ‘“Colleagues”?’
‘But the most perceptive single word she used, in my view as far as I’ve formulated it, was this: institutionalized. And that’s what you’re falling back on now, right? The blank stare, the silence. The old tricks you learned to survive, in one institution or another. That’s OK. But you were lucky, you know. I can tell you there are worse institutions to fall into than the one that caught you, in the end. I mean the Home in Madison West 5.’
Paul shrugged. ‘All those nuns.’
‘Right. And Joshua Valienté. He’s a friend of mine. He sends his regards.’ Nelson stared at Paul, trying to send a subliminal signal. You aren’t alone. Joshua hasn’t forgotten you. That’s why I’m here, in fact . . .
Paul just smiled. ‘Good old Uncle Joshua. The magic stepper boy. Maybe he should be in some cage like this. What is he but the vanguard of a new human species?’
‘Well, in fact there are similarities. The whole Humanity First movement, that brought President Cowley to power, grew out of fear of steppers.’
‘I know. That bunch of nuts blew up Madison because of it. The nest of the stepping mutants.’ He mimed an explosion with his hands. ‘Ka-boom!’
‘Can you understand people feeling that way? About you, I mean?’
‘I understand it in the abstract. The way I understand much of how you dim-bulbs think. Just another aspect of the madness that grips most of you, for most of your waking lives. It goes back to witch hunts, and even deeper. If something goes wrong – it’s somebody’s fault! Find somebody different to blame! Burn the demon! Fire the ovens!
‘Oh, of course they’ve come for us. They were always going to. At least this prison they put us in is secure. I suppose we should be grateful for the organized madness of the US government, which is protecting us from the disorganized madness of the mob. But after all, we haven’t actually done anything to anybody, have we? We aren’t like steppers, who could in theory walk into your child’s locked bedroom and so forth. That’s something worth fearing. All we’ve actually done so far is make a little money. But that was enough to condemn the Jews under Hitler, wasn’t it?’
Nelson studied him. He was coming across now like a defiant youngster, a member of some punk-revival band, maybe, out to shock. Nelson realized he had no real idea what was going on in Paul’s head. ‘But you have the potential for much more than that in the future. Do you believe it’s rational that we should fear you?’
Paul studied him back, as if briefly interested in what he’d said. ‘Insofar as you’re capable of being rational at all – yes. Because we are a different species, you know.’
These words, delivered matter-of-factly, were chilling. ‘You mean, unlike the steppers—’
‘Who are genetically identical to the rest of you. Stepping is just a faculty, like a gift for languages, that people have more or less of. We are all potential steppers. You are not a potential Next. The bumbling dim-bulb scientists at this facility have confirmed what we have long known. We have an extra gene complex. This is expressed physically in new structures in the brain, specifically the cerebral cortex, the centre of higher processing. They’re studying that here too, though thankfully without cutting our heads open, at least not yet. My brain contains a hundred billion neurons, each with a thousand synapses, just as yours does. But the connectivity seems to have been radically upgraded. In your head, the cortex is like a single sheet of crinkled layers, folded up inside the skull – spread out it would be around a yard square – with about ten billion internal connections. The topology of the cortex in my head is much more complex, with many more interconnections . . . It cannot be modelled i
n less than four dimensions, actually.’
‘Hence you’re a brighter bulb.’
Paul shrugged. ‘The biological definition of a species is the ability to interbreed. Our claim of species differentiation is blurred, but it is real enough.’ He smiled. ‘Do you have a daughter, Nelson?’
The question took Nelson by surprise. He remembered that living island, a woman with a red flower in her hair . . . ‘Probably not.’
Paul raised his eyebrows. ‘Odd answer. Well, if you did, she could serve as an incubator for my child. Who would be one of us, not one of you. Does that offend you? Does that frighten you? Does it make you want to kill me? Perhaps it should.’
‘Tell me how this has happened. If you understand it yourself.’
Paul laughed in his face. ‘Oh, you seek to manipulate me through challenging me. I will tell you only what the dim-bulbs in this place must already have figured out. It’s not hard, after all. I was born in Happy Landings, as you probably know. And I am a Spencer, on my mother’s side. You’ve heard of the place.’
It had loomed large in the talk of Lobsang and Joshua.
‘If you know about Happy Landings, you know about the trolls. Nelson, the secret is the trolls. Happy Landings is infested by them, and their presence has shaped that particular society. Not every human being gets along with the trolls, and vice versa. With time, there has been a selection pressure. Only a certain kind of human is welcomed to Happy Landings. Even some of those who are born there know, somehow, it is not for them. There is nothing mysterious about it, nothing psychic, merely a question of complex group dynamics spanning two humanoid species, humans and trolls, working over centuries – many generations, long before Step Day, as the place was accidentally populated by natural steppers. But the outcome, unplanned, unintended, is that there has been a selection for a greater human intelligence. Of course there must have been some competitive advantage. Maybe only smarter humans can accept the blessing of the company of trolls . . .’
The Long Mars Page 25