“How old would the child be who does this work?”
“It depends. They would of course have to know how to count, how to read numbers, what the numbers meant—84 is eight tens and four units—and so on. They might be anywhere from, oh, three years and a few months to five years old.”
“So by the age of five, they understand multiplication.”
“Four would be normal. There are many other pieces of equipment they can use to understand the process. The entire point is that they have to handle, touch, explore the quantities. Before we can extrapolate an abstract concept, humans must have a concrete grounding. Their hands have to touch and move real objects in order to create neural pathways. That’s what’s missing in a mathematical approach in which a teacher just puts equations on a blackboard, or the child reads them in a book.”
“And writing?”
“They write before they read. Generally, they are able to write words—sequence the sounds—but are unable to read back what they have written. That’s a later developmental task. In order to separate the task of composing words from the laborious task of controlling a pencil, which can be frustrating at their age, they simply pick the letters from something that resembles a large typesetter’s box.”
“And they actually choose their own tasks?”
“For the most part. That’s where the directress comes in. It is her job—so far, I haven’t seen many male preschool teachers— to notice when a child is ready for the next stage of whatever they are doing, and introduce that work—to improvise, even, to help them understand some step that they might not be able to get right away. The teacher is trained to be a very careful observer. Quite often the children learn from watching older children, or actually are taught by them.”
“So the children are basically running wild?”
“No, because they always choose to challenge themselves. If they don’t have any choice in what they do, though, they never know that joy, and never learn how to consider choices, possibilities. Instead, they learn it is best to wait, mouths open, for the teacher to stuff down the next task, which was often determined by some government agency, and which is almost always incorrectly synced with their innate learning progression. So somewhere along the way, that desire to learn, and that early autodidactic confidence, is snuffed out. For me, it was never lost, nor, probably, for you. But most children reach only a small fraction of their human potential.”
“That’s why love of learning often vanishes?”
“I’m convinced of it. We need to provide children and young adults with an optimal learning environment. We need to make education science-based. We’re talking about optimal conditions. Good nutrition; shelter, an ordered society. Freedom from fear. Freedom to improvise. Big change, for most of the world.”
Hadntz sighed. “From Communism to Fascism, utopian plans are the same. First, we have to have a cataclysmic upheaval, burn everything to the ground and kill everyone who disagrees and then—viola! Everything takes care of itself. There is never any middle ground, any plan, any gradual procession. Who am I to think that. . .well. . .“ She stared into some distance for a moment, then looked back at Bette. “Perhaps, as basic needs are met, the great mass of humanity can finally discover even more sensitive periods as they age, learn more about one another, learn more how to prevent war, and thus envision new goals with their new minds.” She looked uncharacteristically downcast.
“Why does this have to be such a big secret?” asked Bette. “If more people were involved—thinktanks—”
“That is what I once hoped for, but Q is too malleable at this point to withstand attacks. It is, however, working on its own protective models. The main thing Q requires is universal participation. It must spread. The criminally inclined are the smallest percentage of humanity, but they are the most powerful simply because they lack empathy, lack a conscience. So that is another ambition of mine—finding out how to inflict sociopaths of varying degrees with a conscience, with extreme empathy, so that they know how it feels to be hurt by people like them.” She frowned. “I suppose I want to push them into a deep depression, self-examination, reparation, to commit their lives to an expanding community of people who unselfishly help, and learn the necessary skills to do so. And then, the powerless of the world—generally, women—must also be empowered, through literacy, supported and protected by law, given choices and the power to enforce their choices. By distributing the Spacies, you have taken the first step in worldwide distribution. Now, perhaps, you might think about ways to get it into the hands of other children throughout the world, as well as adults. Are you finished? Yes? Let’s walk.”
They emerged into a drizzly Washington day and walked randomly.
Hadntz said, “You now have a very difficult problem. You and I, and to a lesser extent, your husband, are targets, here, of ongoing investigation. Investigation is perhaps not a strong enough word. Pursuit? A race for information. We are not so far removed from the timestream you just left.”
“Why did you have to get my daughter Jill involved?” asked Bette with vehemence.
“You did that, Bette.” Hadntz spoke gently, but that did not remove the sting of truth. “She had access to the Device in your house. But it might not be good for you to think this. I accept full blame.”
“What is she doing now?” asked Bette, her voice choked. “Now!” She said the word as if she wanted to grind it into little pieces. “The word barely has any meaning to me any longer. Let’s see. ‘After’ I have done this. The place in their timestream when Jill returns to her old life in 1970 but it isn’t her old life, because that’s all been wiped out. What is she doing in the timestream where I never came home, but, instead, stayed here, or went. . .elsewhen? You know. You were there.”
“All I know is that they miss you desperately.”
Bette dropped into a park bench, hugged her knees, and sobbed. Hadntz sat next to her, pulled her close. When Bette was finished, she sat up, found a hankie in her purse, and blew her nose. “So it’s best, for them, if I remain lost? Right here, in their 1964, right from the very beginning of the change?”
“That is up to you to decide. Maybe it would be better for all of you if you went back, revealed everything to them.”
“But you just said—”
“Everything is fluid.”
“In the other timestream, things didn’t get better just because more and more people were able to make atomic weapons,” said Bette. “I’m not sure that things will get better here just because of the Device.”
“This timestream has a different past than the one in which we were before,” replied Hadntz. “A better one, it seems. It’s true that we are counting on the inferred goodness of humanity to rise to the forefront. We’re counting on certain brain changes, much like the changes that have taken place over millennia to create homo erectus.” She smiled, but only briefly. “Homo conscious? Bette, I think that we will, eventually, be able to reunite all of these segments of time. It’s not possible for us to understand how that would seem to the person experiencing the simultaneity. I think it would be an entirely new human brain development—like the way humans use memory, now. It seems effortless to us, because it happened gradually, and everyone takes for granted that our stories have a past and that they constantly shift and are reworked. We are children in that regard, which is one reason I am so deeply interested in how children learn. We need a new, universal model of education to fit us, from the beginning, as children, for the huge, fast conversion humans have experienced from being farmers to being technologists. We now have the tools to mindfully plan our own evolution, to decide what is really best for us, and to manage our environment wisely. But our brains haven’t changed, and we’re stuck in the habits and conflicts of the past. Time itself is more like a rhizome now, something organic that is related to the original, yet takes root and grows in new territories. It is a network, an increasingly human construction. Therefore, humanity must grow in order to be ready, t
o be worthy, to be responsible, in whatever milieu is developing. We must become prepared. One can’t learn to read in a day. Perhaps we cannot absorb the rudiments of true self-governance for decades. I simply, deeply hope that people become more aware of the astonishing fact that they are alive at all, and treat themselves and others accordingly, with respect. ”
Bette retied her scarf; it was growing cold as evening fell. “You’re talking to a trained spy. What if I say that you want to remove that which defends us against others: fear, preparedness, willingness to fight and to die. Those who plot and plan and amass wealth or weapons and move on to more and more harmful means to do so would have a huge advantage over those who are trusting and altruistic.”
Hadntz shook her head. “I only would like people to be able to defend themselves with more wisdom; I do not want humanity to become more childish. Here, already, we have Q. Facilitated communication. Limited and exclusive, now, but it will expand, and you can help with this. You could distribute Q throughout countries and continents—even timestreams. I see education as the vital center of any change that might take place. Montessori is a good starting point, but when we are able to actually see and know what is happening in the brain, on a neuronal and synaptic level, and associate those changes with specific physical activities or surroundings, we will be able to move forward at an accelerated rate.”
Hadntz continued, in a voice tinged with sadness. “Oddly enough, there are many people in this world who would be completely against this idea—a lot of them educators, who are heavily invested in our present way of doing things. But many of them are also politicians, military experts, and your own intelligence organizations.”
She turned to face Bette, and looked into her eyes. “But back to your terrible decision—which I, too, have gone through. I am, simply, very much afraid that if you return to your family now, it will put them in extreme danger.”
Bette bowed her head. Her voice was a hoarse whisper. “I’m afraid you’re right. I have to let Sam know.”
Hadntz nodded. “You must do whatever you think is best. You always have. So far, that has worked.”
She walked off into the fog, down an avenue lined with leafless trees, and then was gone.
For a week that seemed like a decade, Bette weighed her options. The recent shock of finding herself in a timestream in which her family did not exist—her phone call to Washington had been followed by much more extensive research—was the dark, irrational shadow with which she struggled. Yes, they didn’t have her here, but Jill, Brian, and Megan were together, at least. They were not pursued by assassins or kidnappers, as they might well be if she went home and said Hi, kids, I’m back from—wherever!
She wept, she watched them, and then, one day, she realized that she was being watched and noticed herself. By one person, or by many? By her old colleagues at the CIA, or new, Q-seeking enemies now much more aware of Q’s power? She now knew what it could do. And so did they.
One day in March, after her hundredth meeting with Sam, during which they argued, wept, and agonized, they decided.
She got in her plane and buried herself in Asia, then in Africa, and then in time, making sure to leave clues to lead her enemies from this present, where her precious family lived, so that they would follow her, and leave Jill, Brian, and Megan to grow.
Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? , by Kathleen Ann Goonan
Leilani Kalani
I hear her on the radio, while I’m in the bathroom drying my hair.
It’s about seven in the morning, and the forecast promises another dim, drizzly winter day. I’m an animal rights lawyer in Washington. I hate my job, I love my job, you get the picture. I’m happily married to Dan, a government employee, and we have a three-year-old daughter, Kara. He’s just left to drop her off at school.
The roar of hot air obscures every other radio word. When my mother speaks—“We demand legal recognition for all living creatures”—I drop my hair dryer. It clatters on the tile floor. I turn up the radio and listen, stunned.
My mother died twenty-five years ago.
Yet I hear my mother’s beloved voice: “. . . and humans practice deliberate cross-speciation, mingling plant and animal DNA for commercial gain. We therefore demand the right to accept or reject technological changes to our fundamental being.”
First come swift, crazy suppositions: she’s not really dead; this is a recording. Then it hits me, quite literally, in a flash, like slap upside the head. It’s Meitner, and she is an African Grey Parrot.
“From space, I see the Earth below me. I see the broad outlines of rain forests, where my kin flock; oceans where others of us school, and plains where herds run headlong . . .”
But it is like hearing the dead speak, and I am correspondingly chilled. When Mom died, Meitner vanished into the cloudy reaches of Kauai’s rain forest mountains, blended with her flock. I was just a little girl, as lonely as Meitner must have been, even though my father was close at hand. He was suffering too—withdrawn, grumpy. Unavailable, as they say.
Meitner could have consoled me. She did not.
The anger I’d had as a child resurfaces. I visualize smashing the mirror with the hair dryer, for an instant. The intensity of the impulse surprises me.
I feel betrayed. It had been easier to think that Meitner had died, though that too was as painful as any animal’s loss, the mystery of a vanishing. Funny to expect so much of a parrot, but Meitner is more than a parrot, and less than a parrot.
I sink to the cold tile floor, cross my legs, bow my head, and drink in my mother’s rich, low voice for a few more seconds before a male announcer interrupts the flowing words.
“Meitner, the African Grey Parrot you have just heard speaking, was a celebrity at one time. She disappeared after the death of her trainer, Dr. Jean Woodward, twenty-five years ago. As we piece together her story, we find that it is long and complicated. Presently, she is part of an experiment.
“Meitner is in a specially modified space suit, on a scientific mission in what has been dubbed the Stinger Ship. It looks like a massive jellyfish, complete with tentacles. But instead of stinging, these are life-support tentacles that allow people, and now, apparently, parrots, to float free in space. For those of you who have not been keeping up, this ship, which has been decades in the building, is scheduled to leave Earth’s orbit soon.
“We have gotten word that an entire flock of parrots will be dropped from the ship in specially made suits that allow parrots to operate jet packs, radios, and computers. All the parrots are enhanced in various ways, and their brain activities are being measured in real time. In fact, according to their spokesperson, the data being gathered is related to the mathematical abilities from which flocking behavior emerges. This information may lead to many breakthroughs, including—and it does sound far-fetched—space-time travel.”
Meitner’s words recede, and I recall my mother’s real voice telling bedtime stories, all of them merged in my memory into a single narrative of cloudy jungle, infused with the thrill of finding her African Grey Parrot and of the knowledge she hoped her studies might lead to. When I was a little girl, I imagined I had been with her on that trip. Like Meitner, I became part of her, so much so that her story is like a well-worn stone with strata exposed by the rush, the power, of time.
Mom was a postdoc when she tracked down Meitner.
She knew that animal activists had liberated Meitner and other animals from a Cairo lab, run by someone known internationally as Dr. Moreau. WikiLeaks had published some of Moreau’s research, in which it seemed clear that chimps, Grey Parrots, and porpoises injected with experimental neuroplasticity drugs were in captivity.
It was also clear that human DNA was part of their makeup.
The activists ran their standard operation, which, as usual, was in the news after the fact. They turned off the electricity, posted fake surveillance videos showing everything as normal, herded all the humans into a bus, evacuated
every animal to an appropriate environment, and incinerated all records. A few bits left behind on the Internet are all anyone ever knew about the experiments. It was discovered that the lab had been established by a wealthy man, who died five years before the dramatic rescue. The original project was framed as an exploration of the possibilities and limits of rapid transpeciism with an eye to expanding human capabilities and lifespan. After the founder died, the project segued into a drug-development mill. Elephant poachers, charged with procuring a calf, tipped off authorities anonymously when they felt underpaid. No one knew what had happened to the animals, but once my mother heard about the parrot, she began sleuthing, getting closer to the secret heart of the activist organization, until she made the connection that changed our lives.
“After a year of feints and parries,” my mother would begin, at that magical hour on our Kauai ridgetop when I was tucked into bed and the smell of wild ginger filled the room, “I was in a small plane that landed with a big bounce on a short runway that looked like a river from the air because of the rain. When I climbed down from the plane, the wind whipped up my poncho and I was soaked in the first minute.”
Meitner was always in the bedroom, perched behind my mother on the old rocking chair from the Big Island that Tutu, my grandmother, gave us, eyes closed, listening and waiting, soothed as if on a bough moved by wind.
Mom’s calm, measured words and soothing voice were always tinged with humor, as if she might laugh at any moment at her younger self, so intrepid and, perhaps, lacking good judgment. “I could hardly see because of the rain, but a short, dark woman yelled ‘Bienvenu!’ out the window of a beat-up Land Rover almost hidden by the brush, under a huge baobab tree. When I got to the car, she flung open the passenger door and said, ‘Hurry inside, hurry inside!’ She had a round face and a big smile. She said, ‘Call me Belinda.’ It wasn’t her real name; that was part of the plan. I thrust my pack inside and slid into the seat. She shifted into first gear and rocketed down a mud-dirt road. I had no idea how she could see. The wipers didn’t work at all. I held onto the sissy bar for dear life.”
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two Page 189