Twelve Days

by Steven Barnes

  The pilot welcomed them aboard, and checked to be sure they were safe and comfortable as Maureen strapped herself into the third seat. The rotors began to turn. “Here we go!” she said, heavy jaw softened by a broad smile as the chopper lifted off the pad.

  “First time in a helicopter?” she asked.

  “Yes.” Olympia turned to her son. “Do you like this, hon?”

  “Up, up, and away!” Hani said.

  “How far is it?” she asked.

  “Twenty minutes,” Maureen said.

  “Twenty minutes to a new life,” she said, surprised that she would speak her thoughts aloud. “Just a helicopter ride. You’d think there would be more drama.”

  Maureen chuckled heartily, loud enough to be heard above the rotors. It occurred to Olympia that there seemed an element of theatricality about that guffaw. “Madame Gupta takes care of her people.”

  “Who owns the Salvation Sanctuary?” A perfect name, she thought. Sanctuary. Salvation. Yes.

  “We do,” Maureen said. “Two hundred and forty acres.”

  “Wow,” Olympia said, looking down over the patchwork of industrial parks beneath them, yielding to freeways and rolling green acreage. Her worries about what she had seen at work floated behind her.

  Instead, she took in the ivory-speckled foothills of the North Georgia mountains, and then the peaks themselves. Hani seemed at peace, perfectly happy just watching the patterns swirling past beneath them. Circles and squares and even spirals of green and brown. The patterns seemed comforting to him.

  Chaos swirled at the edges of logic. Reality was less solid than we like to think. What was it that Joyce Chow had said about money? She called it her favorite illusion. It was trust, belief, shared faith. And the instant the faith was gone … the entire pyramid of dreams would collapse.

  “The retreat was built atop an exhausted gold mine by a silent movie star in 1914, went into collections in ’48, and was purchased from the state in 1999. We’ve made extensive changes.”

  Now she reckoned they were approaching the Salvation Sanctuary itself. High walls topped with razor wire. The very center of the grounds was an elaborate circular hedge maze, looking like a page out of a Dell puzzle book. She could see what looked like a spa or pond at the center of it. Hani studied it carefully, his lips moving in silence.

  “Why so much security?” Olympia asked.

  “Not only do we need privacy, but our library has some of the rarest and most expensive books in the world, an estimated value of fifty million dollars.”

  “Wow!” Hannibal said.

  “That’s exactly what I said the first time.” Maureen laughed. “Wow.” She smiled that shovel-jawed smile again.

  Olympia blinked a bit, but managed to get her unease under control. Probably just the unaccustomed vehicle. Maybe it was just excitement. The sense of possibility.

  The helicopter descended.

  CHAPTER 21

  “Where exactly are we?” Olympia yelled against the helicopter rotor’s incessant whop-whop-whop.

  “North Georgia mountains,” Maureen said. She didn’t seem to be raising her voice, but somehow they could hear it anyway. “The Salvation Sanctuary is located in one of the most beautiful and peaceful spots in the Southeast. Blue Ridge Mountains, Cedar Mountain, in particular, to the west, and the Horseshoe Appalachians to the north. It’s great here year-round.”

  Olympia had grown up in a concrete village. Lived and worked all her life surrounded by stone and steel and glass. The endless expanse of natural green, dappled with white, was soothing even before she had placed a foot on the ground.

  “We have miles of nature trails, winding through old hardwoods and pines. Do you jog?”

  “Sometimes,” she said.

  “Good. Madame Gupta believes a healthy body is a doorway to a healthy mind and spirit. You can trot beside the streams, or sit at spring-fed reflection pools or quiet coves and never hear anything louder than a blackbird.” Maureen’s voice was oddly flat, as if she were quoting a tourist brochure.

  “Sounds lovely.”

  “Like barbecues?” she asked. “We have fire pits. Three outdoor hot tubs. A world-class library. We have it all.”

  * * *

  As the door opened, Maureen helped Olympia out into the mountain air, at least ten degrees cooler than it had been back in Smyrna. The sky above was too blue for snow, but a few drifting flakes would not have astounded her. A slender, pale young man in a gold robe greeted them. The joy radiating from his face both warmed and comforted her. “Welcome!” he said. “We’ve heard so much about you. Waited a long time for this.”

  The adulation was disorienting. “I’m supposed to be a writer, but I can’t think of words right now.”

  “No words are necessary,” he replied, and helped Hannibal down. She noticed that Maureen had seemed to melt away, leaving her to the newcomers.

  A guard in a very traditional security officer’s uniform waved them through a gated road, smiling broadly. Their guide led them in a clockwise fashion, pointing out buildings around the rim. “Administration,” he said. “And our dojo. And just a little farther on is the library.”

  At a slight distance, a group of people in civilian clothes headed toward the hedge maze. A woman in a gold robe led them, lecturing and gesturing languidly.

  “Who are they?”

  “Devotees from around the world,” he said. “We see hundreds a month. They come to study, hoping to glimpse Madame Gupta, or to gawk at the library.”

  “They research in your stacks?” she asked. He was leading her toward a brown two-story building with an adobe-tiled roof, about the size of a typical McDonald’s.

  “Oh no.” He laughed. “Outsiders never get to touch those.”

  The notion struck Olympia as profoundly sad; books so few could read or touch. “Oh!”

  They hurried on. The tour group, consisting of a dozen or so, passed murmuring like a flock of geese. For a moment she thought she recognized a woman in the group. Was that … Maria…?

  * * *

  Maria Cortez saw Olympia, but did not acknowledge her recent guest. She had recognized the possibility that they would encounter each other, but that couldn’t be helped. She had last been at the Salvation Sanctuary four months ago, and knew where she was going and what she needed to do.

  “And if you come right this way,” the tour guide chirped. “We’ll try not to get lost in the topiary maze.”

  They walked on. Maria continued to observe Olympia and her son, Hannibal, from the corner of her eye, but kept her head down and said nothing.

  * * *

  Olympia and Hannibal were led to the main library building, two stories tall with a tiled roof. The broad double doors opened into a reception area. Through walls of two-inch-thick glass they peered into an astonishing private book collection: two stories high, wide as a college auditorium, and crammed floor to ceiling with volumes, some protected behind Plexiglas panels.

  “Could we…?” she asked, expecting to be turned down.

  “Of course.” A woman’s voice, from behind them. Olympia turned as Madame Gupta glided toward them, smiling broadly. “Greetings,” she said. “Welcome to my humble home.”

  “Wow,” she said. “And the Taj Mahal is a Motel 6.”

  “Wow!” Hannibal finally said. Sang, actually, a musical quality entering the single syllable.

  Madame Gupta knelt down, her saffron robe barely touching the ground. “Hello, young man. I don’t expect you to answer me, but I think we’re going to become great friends. I certainly hope so.”

  Hannibal didn’t meet her eyes. He was counting books through the glass wall.

  “Would you like to go in?”

  “How many?” he said, staring straight ahead.

  “Thirty-two thousand, nine hundred, and forty-six,” Madame Gupta said. “We almost never let outsiders in. But you, young man, are no ordinary visitor.”

  She ruffled his hair, and stood. She took a deep b
reath of bracing winter air. “I never get completely used to it myself.” A twinkle lit her eye. “Would you like a personal tour?”

  “I’d love it,” Olympia said.

  “How about right after we go to the lab?”

  “That would be fine,” she said, but the bibliophile in her soul felt a keen stab of disappointment. Then she remembered why they were there, and what her son stood to gain. Gupta believed in Hannibal, and after all the bad news Olympia had gotten from his teachers, that was a very good thing to hear. Hannibal can’t sit still, can’t focus, can’t complete work on a schedule, she’d been told. Madame Gupta, at last, thought Hannibal could …

  Could what, exactly?

  “Was it difficult to get off from work?”

  Yes, Sloan had been irritated. But he had children of his own, and an office filled with panicky employees. In some ways, he had seemed relieved to have a problem small enough to solve. “No. I mean, yes, but nothing is more important than my boy. If you can really help him…”

  “We believe so, yes,” the smaller woman said.

  “That’s all that matters.”

  She led them through a panel in the glass wall, so cunningly concealed that Olympia hadn’t noticed the fault line. The door had to have been unlocked by some means she didn’t understand: a hidden camera or perhaps a magnetic passkey. They proceeded through a passage next to the library to a bank of elevators in a lobby formed of steel, glass, and dark, warm, earth-toned woods. A banner above them read: SANCTUARY.

  Yes. Sanctuary. She appreciated that. They had reached Sanctuary. A place of healing and safety.

  “… is also the meditation complex,” Madame Gupta said. Olympia realized her mind had wandered. She hoped she hadn’t missed anything important. “Here, we train, test, and prepare our followers for the rigors to come.”

  Olympia felt a bit of mental dazzle-fog slip away. “Rigors? Is there risk?”

  Madame Gupta placed a comforting hand on her arm. “Oh, no. Not in the training. Not for Hannibal, ever. Our missionaries sometimes encounter resistance.”

  They slid down a level, and Madame Gupta ushered them out. They passed through a hall lit by soft glowing tubes overhead, walking past a series of doors with broad, clear windows. Through them Olympia could see five young men and women wired to a series of machines with beeping displays, perhaps a variety of fancy brain-training machines.

  “What is all of this?”

  Madame Gupta took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. “You have heard people say we use only ten percent of our brains?”

  Olympia felt a bit of caution. Was this the opening for a Tony Robbins sales pitch? “Yes, I’ve heard that.”

  The little woman smiled. “Well, that’s not neurologically accurate. It’s a myth, really.”

  “Then why do people say it?”

  “Well, it’s probably a statement of our potential in terms of optimal organization. What we think we are capable of at higher levels of integration. But one thing that we can actually say with confidence is that we really have little idea of what human beings are capable of accomplishing. No one does.”

  “I can believe that,” Olympia said.

  “What do you think evolution is, my dear?”

  “Survival of the fittest?”

  “Well,” Madame Gupta said. “That is what people say. Not quite what Mr. Darwin had in mind, however, and Mr. Darwin had neither the first nor last word on the subject.”

  Olympia laughed. “All right. What is evolution?”

  “Darwinian evolution stems from the observation that there is great variety in life. And some of those variations ‘fit’ better with the world around them than previous incarnations of a particular species.” Odd. That almost sounded like she was quoting something, rather than accessing an integrated memory, a little like Maureen’s recitation of the Salvation Sanctuary’s attractions.

  “It isn’t just being bigger or stronger?”

  “Oh, no,” Gupta said. “Not at all.” Her tone of voice had changed. She was back to the warm maternal flow again. Olympia decided that she had been imagining things. “Now, the challenges faced by a child like Hannibal are clear. What is not so clear is that there may be equal and compensating advantages. Autism is often seen as a socialization issue. A difficulty in communicating with the external world. A lack of capacity to read body language or facial expressions or divine rules of behavior and interaction that seem automatic to the rest of us.”

  “Advantages?”

  “The world is changing, Olympia. All the time. And our children will face a very different landscape than what we ourselves traversed.” A changing world indeed, Olympia thought. But the horror of the mysterious killings felt far from her mind, merely gentle whispers drowned out by Madame Gupta’s voice.

  “It would stand to reason that some changes we consider problematic might actually be strengths. These strengths may only be revealed in a world we cannot currently imagine. A writer named Thom Hartmann thinks children designated with attention deficit disorder may simply be hunters in a world full of farmers. Those who prefer patterns to human interaction may simply have a male genius for organization.”

  “Isn’t that sexist?”

  Gupta laughed. “Oh … everyone believes there are differences between men and women. We just can’t agree on what they are, or what they mean. I would only consider it sexist to say those differences limit all behaviors for all people, or places one gender above the other. Labels offer little: we mustn’t mistake the label for the thing itself.”

  That was a little New Agey for her. “What kind of abilities?”

  Madame Gupta leaned forward and dropped her voice, her eyes twinkling. When she spoke, for the first time Olympia detected layers of accent below the American affectation. British. And … Indian? “That is what we brought you here to discover.”

  * * *

  The next elevator was concealed within an office, as if protected from casual eyes. Their descent lasted fifteen seconds, after which the elevator opened into a caged storage area. Beyond were raw rock walls and the impression that this level of the Sanctuary had been deliberately left a little rough, to preserve the old mine’s natural atmosphere. She could hear water trickling in the walls, trailed her hand across the uneven rock surface as if trying to read Braille. The rock floor beneath her had been smoothed by countless feet over a century of wear before the newcomers retrofitted man-made caverns with tile and incandescent lights.

  The basement lab was delightful to Hannibal—lab animals, lights, and fawning attendants. Toys! His grin was so wide she almost expected the top half of his head to fall off.

  “What is it you do here?”

  A round-faced technician whose name tag read ROY addressed her. “We have the facility available to measure mental and physical abilities on an extremely advanced level.”

  “Like at the center in Smyrna?” Her memory of the little laughing woman leaping and tumbling on the jigsaw mats returned in a flash. It was hard not to just swoon with awe and gratitude.

  Roy laughed. “Oh, no, far beyond that. We fund those centers all over the world. Over two hundred of them.”

  “Two … hundred? Why? How many are the size of the one in Smyrna?”

  “Few of them. The Smyrna facility is close to the Sanctuary. But why? We’re looking for very special people,” he said. “Like your little prince here.”

  Hannibal burbled with happiness at the attention. “I’m Hannibal!” he said.

  Olympia forgot to inhale, suddenly realizing she was holding her breath. “He said his name!” Had he ever done that? Spoken his name aloud? Surely, surely … but with tears flooding down her cheeks, she realized that she couldn’t remember when. And that might have been the most terrible thing of all. From the time her eleven-month-old son began to have difficulties meeting her eyes, the moment that his pediatrician had said the word “autistic” when he was twenty-five months old … from the time that Raoul had fled the boy wh
o might never catch a ball, might never ride a bicycle, let alone drive a car …

  This might have been the best moment in seven years of strangled hope.

  The technician was talking, and she’d not heard a word of it. “… that’s unusual, isn’t it? I’ve read the reports. Mrs. Dorsey—”

  “Please, call me Olympia.”

  “Olympia. We can’t promise anything. But I can tell you we’ve had excellent results, some of which we’ve yet to share with the outside world.” A glittering something surfaced in Gupta’s eyes, like a diamond in a pool of oil. Then it submerged again.

  “Why?”

  “We have … proprietary processes, based upon knowledge and models of the human body-mind connection not yet accepted by Western science.”

  Olympia’s head spun, then centered again. She had the odd sense that she was being buffeted by a storm, a cyclone, and that only by being in harmony with Gupta could she remain in the calm center. She so desperately longed to escape the travail that she longed to crawl into the little woman’s sheltering arms and sob with relief. “I don’t care about that. I care about my boy.”

  Gupta smiled warmly. “That was what I was hoping. Would you allow him to participate in an experiment?” The word “experiment” jarred, but Gupta’s face was open and inspiring of trust.

  “What sort of experiment?”

  * * *

  Even before they entered the next room, the muscular, dank zoo smell told her what she was about to encounter. The walls of the subbasement lab were lined with toys, reminiscent of developmental blocks and puzzles one might find at a preschool. What was the gamey aroma, then?

  “Hi!” a female tech said. She looked like Roy’s rounder, jollier sister. “Hannibal! We’ve been waiting for you!”

  “What is this place?” Olympia asked. The odd toys, the animal scents … her recent fabulous mood wavered.