Time m-1

by Stephen Baxter

  She started going through her diary.

  Blue Lake — pop. 9000 — seemed to be a classic small town, built around the wide, glimmering lake that had given it its name. The downtown — brick buildings and family-owned stores — was solid and immortal looking. There was a park at the edge of the lake, and from it ran a whole series of broad, leafy streets lined with big nineteenth-century homes. One of these turned out to be the street she was looking for.

  She stopped the car and got out.

  The air was fresh, silent save for a distant growl of traffic, a rustle of leaves over her head. The sidewalk felt oddly soft under her feet. It was smart concrete, of course: self-repairing, unobtrusive. She walked up a path past a glowing green lawn. There was a bicycle, child-sized, bright red, dumped on the grass. The house itself might still be in the middle of the nineteenth century, save for the solar collection blanket draped over the roof, the button-sized security camera fixed to the door, the intelligent garbage can half hidden by foliage. Thus technology could be used to improve the world: not to change it, or spin it out of touch with humanity. Sometimes we get it right, she thought; the future doesn’t have to destroy us.

  This is a good place, she thought, a human place. And the federal government — no, Maura, admit your responsibility, / — I want to take away a child, spirit him off from this beautiful place to some godforsaken center in Idaho or Nevada or maybe even overseas.

  She rang the doorbell.

  Bill Tybee turned out to be thirtyish, slim, a little overawed by this congresswoman who had parachuted into his life. He welcomed her in, talking too fast. “My wife’s away on military assignment. She was thrilled you were coming out to see us. Tommy’s our older child. We have a little girl, Billie, not yet two; she is at a creche today…”

  She put together a picture of the Tybees’ life from the little clues around the house: the empty box of fatbuster pills; the big softscreen TV plastered over one wall; the ticking grandfather clock, obviously ancient; a run-down cleaner microbot the size of a mouse that she nearly stepped on in the middle of the living room carpet. Bill kicked it out of the way, embarrassed.

  Bill wore a silver lapel ribbon, the med-alert that marked him out as a cancer victim. Every time she looked, Maura counted more cancer victims among her electors than seemed reasonable. No doubt something to do with the breakdown of the environment.

  Bill led her upstairs to a bedroom door. There was a sign, cycling around like a Times Square billboard: TOM TYBEE’S ROOM! DO NOT ENTER! SANTA CLAUS ONLY!

  Bill knocked. “Tom? There’s a lady to see you. Can we

  come in?”

  Uh-huh.

  Bill pushed open the door — there was some kind of junk behind it, and he had a little trouble — and he led Maura into the room.

  It was painted bright yellow, with a window that overlooked the garden. Along one wall there was a wardrobe and a bunk bed with a giant storage locker underneath, against the other wall a big chest of drawers. The wardrobe and chest were both open, and clothes and other stuff just spilled out, all over the floor and the bed, to such an extent it was hard to believe it was possible, even in principle, to stow it all away. The spare acreage of walls was covered with posters: a map of the world, sports pennants, some aggressive-looking superhero glaring out of a mask.

  It was a typical five-year-old boy’s room, Maura thought to herself. Not that she was an expert on such matters.

  The most striking thing about the room was a series of photographs and posters, some of them blown up, that had been stuck to the walls at about waist height — no, she thought, at little-boy eye level — some of them even lapping over the precious sports pennants. They were pictures of star fields. Maura was no astronomer but she recognized one or two constellations — Scorpio, Cygnus maybe. A river of light ran through the images, a river of stars. The photographs made up, she realized, in a kind of patchwork way, a complete three-hundred-and-sixty-degree map of the Milky Way as it wrapped around the sky.

  Tom himself — the kid, the Blue — was a very ordinary five-year-old; small, thin, dark, big eyed. He was sitting in the middle of the kipple-covered floor. He was playing some kind of game, Maura realized; he had toys — cars, planes, little figures — set out in a ring around him. He had a Heart, one of those electronic recording gadgets, sitting on the floor beside him.

  “Hello,” the boy said.

  “Hello, Tom.”

  Bill kneeled down, with a parent’s accustomed grace. “Tom, this lady is from Congress.”

  “From Washington?”

  Maura said, “That’s right.” She picked up one of his toys, some kind of armed lizard in a blue cape. “What are you making? A fort?”

  “No,” Tom said seriously. He took back the lizard and put it back in its place in the circle. He didn’t expand, and Maura felt very dumb.

  She stood up and pointed at the Milky Way photos. “Did you find all these yourself?”

  “I started with that one.” He pointed. It was Cygnus, an elegant swan shape, bright Vega nestling alongside. “I found it in my dad’s book.”

  “An old astronomy encyclopedia,” Bill said. “Fixed-image. I had it when / was a kid. He found the other pictures himself. From books, the Net. I helped him process them and get them to the same scale, match them. But he knew what he was looking for. That’s when we first suspected he might be—”

  Solitary. Brilliant. Obsessive. Uncommunicative. Pursuing projects beyond his years. Blue.

  Tom said, “I have a telescope.”

  “You do? That’s great.”

  “Yeah. You can see it’s made up of stars.”

  “The Milky Way?”

  “The Galaxy. And it goes beyond Cygnus.” He pointed at his walls. “It starts in Sagittarius, over there. Then it goes through Aquila and Cygnus, and it brushes Cassiopeia, and past Perseus and Orion and Puppis, and then you can’t see it any more. I wanted to see it from the other side.”

  Bill said, “He means the southern hemisphere. His mother brought him home a couple of images from postings in the Pacific.”

  Tom pointed to his photos. “It goes to Carina, and you can see a lot more of it. And it goes to the Southern Cross and Centaurus and the tail of Scorpio, and it gets brighter, and then it goes to Sagittarius where it’s really wide and has a dark line in the middle. And then it goes on to Aquila and to Cygnus…”

  “Do you know what it is, Tom? The Milky Way, I mean, the Galaxy.”

  “It’s stars. And it’s a big whirly.”

  “A spiral?”

  “Yeah. Look, you can see. There’s the middle of the Galaxy, in Sagittarius, where it gets fat and bulgy. And all the arms wrap around that.

  “We’re inside an arm. You can see one of the other arms between us and the center there, going through Centaurus and the Southern Cross and Carina. And there—” He pointed to the bright cloud in Carina. “ — that’s where it turns away from us, and you see it end-on, and that’s why it looks so bright, like a road full of cars coming at you. And then there’s a lane of dust and stuff that looks dark, the stuff between the arms, and that’s the black stripe down the middle. And then on the other side of Carina you can see the arm that wraps around the outside of the sun, and it goes—” He turned around and pointed to his northern sky.” — there, all the way across.”

  Bill shrugged. “He figured all this out for himself.”

  “He figured out he’s in the middle of a spiral Galaxy?”

  “All by himself. Yes.”

  The kid, Tom, talked on. He might have been any five-year-old — cute, friendly enough, a little subdued — except for his subject. Most kids his age, the kids in the neighborhood here, were surely barely aware they were in Iowa. Little Tom was already a galactic traveler.

  She felt a brush of fear.

  It was, she thought, this mix of the mundane with the strange — the childish toys and mess with the visions of galactic geography — that was so unsettling about these Blu
e children. A kid wasn’t supposed to be like this.

  And she noticed, now, that every one of Tom’s toys — the cars and boats and figures he had put in a protective ring around himself — was blue.

  Maura accepted some coffee, tried to put Bill at his ease.

  Bill Tybee was a stay-at-home parent, the homemaker. He showed her, shyly, an animated postcard of his wife, June. It had been taken on an air base somewhere. She was a short, slightly dumpy blond, a wide Iowa smile, dressed in a crisp USASF uniform; when Bill lifted it into the sunlight the postcard cycled ten seconds of her saluting and grinning, over and over. She was enlisted, a technical specialist in a special forces unit.

  After a few minutes, Bill started to open up about his fears for the boy. “I know he’s Blue. The school assessment proved it—”

  “Then you should be proud. You know that means he’s exceptional.”

  “I don’t want him to be exceptional. Not if it means he has to go away.”

  “Well, that’s the law, Bill. I know how you feel. I know you’re concerned for his safety, and you’ve every right to be after what happened to him before.”

  “They failed to protect him, and they expelled him, Ms. Della. I wasn’t going to give him back just because they said they changed their minds.”

  “But you can’t keep him at home. The new centers aren’t run by some private organization like the Miltons, but by the federal government. There’s nothing to fear. It’s the best for him.”

  “With respect, Ms. Della, I don’t think you know what’s best for my kid.”

  “No,” she said. “No, I probably don’t. That’s why I’m here.”

  “So he’s smart. But he still needs to grow, to have a life, to play with other kids. Is he going to get all of that at one of these fancy centers?”

  “Well, that’s why the centers were set up, Bill.”

  “I know the theory,” Bill said. “But that’s not how it is. That’s not what it’s like to live with this thing.” Bill talked on about the effect of TV and the Nets: the talk shows featuring kids with giant plastic dome heads, the TV evangelists who claimed that the kids were a gift from Jesus or a curse from Satan, and so on. “It’s a drip, drip, drip. There’s a whole host of ‘experts’ telling the world it’s okay to pick on my kid, because he’s different. And I’ve seen the reports of those places overseas, in Australia and places, where they beat up the kids and starve them and—”

  “That’s not happening here, Bill.” She leaned forward, projecting a practiced authority. “And besides, I’ll ensure Tom is protected.”

  Or at least, she thought, I will strive to minimize the harm that is done to him. Maybe that is my true vocation.

  Bill Tybee burst out, “Why us, Ms. Della? Why our kid?”

  To that, of course, she had no answer.

  Emma Stoney:

  Emma tried to care for Michael. Or at least to maintain some

  kind of human contact with him.

  But the boy would barely stir from his sleeping compartment down on the meatware deck. He seemed to spend the whole time sitting on his bunk bed over some softscreen program or another.

  When they did force Michael out of his bunk, for food and exercise and hygiene breaks, the kid seemed to veer between catatonia and a complete freak-out, an utter inability to deal with the world. He would rock back and forth, crooning, making strange flapping motions with his hands. Or he would find some control panel light, flickering on and off, and stare at it for hours.

  Meanwhile, no amount of encouragement or attention seemed able to root out Michael’s fundamental suspicion of them.

  It disturbed Emma. She knew that when Michael looked at her, he just saw another adult in the long line who had mistreated him, subjected him to arbitrary rales, punished him endlessly. From Michael’s point of view, this new environment was just another setup, the kind hands and smiling voices just part of a new set of rales he had to learn.

  Eventually, the punishment would return.

  Once she tried to push him, with the help of a softscreen translator. “Michael. What are you thinking about?”

  I am nothing.

  “Tell me what that means.”

  It means I am not special. I am nowhere special. I am in no special time. I would not know if the whole world were suddenly made one day older, or one day younger. I would not know if the whole world were moved to the left, this much. He hopped sideways, like a frog; briefly he grinned as a child. It means that the world was born, and will die, just as I will. He said this calmly, as if it were as obvious as the weather.

  Cornelius stirred. “This is new. It sounds like the Copernican principle. No privileged observers. Every day he surprises me.”

  Emma felt baffled, distracted by Michael’s software voice, which sounded like a middle-aged American woman, perhaps from Seattle. “Tell me how you know that, Michael.”

  Because the sky is dark at night.

  It took her some minutes of cross-examination, and cross-reference with sources she accessed through her softscreen, to figure out his meaning.

  It was, she realized slowly, a version of Gibers’ paradox, an old cosmological riddle. Why should the sky be dark at night? If the universe was infinite, and static, and lasted forever, then Earth would be surrounded by an array of stars going off to infinity. And every direction Michael looked, his eye would receive a ray of light from the surface of a star. The whole sky ought to glow as bright as the surface of the sun.

  Therefore, since the sky was dark — and since Michael had figured out that he wasn’t in a special place in the universe, and so there were no special places — the universe couldn’t be eternal and infinite and static; at least one of those assumptions must be wrong.

  So the stars must have been born, as I was born, Michael said. Otherwise their light would fill up the sky. People are born; people fade; people die. I was born; I fade; I die. So the stars were born; the stars will fade; the stars will die. It is okay.

  Big Bang to Heat Death, just from looking at the stars.

  Cornelius said, “Maybe it comes from his belief system. His people had Christianity imposed on them, but the Lozi have kept many of their old beliefs. They believe in an afterlife, but it isn’t a place of punishment or reward. This world, of illness and crop failure and famine and short, brutal lives, is where you suffer. In the next life you are happy. They wear tribal markings so that when they die they are placed with their relatives.”

  She asked Michael if he believed there would be a happy life for the world and the stars, after they died.

  Oh yes, the translating machine said. Oh yes. But not for people. We have to make it right for others. Do you see?

  “Moses,” Malenfant growled. “Moses and the Promised Land. Are bumans like Moses, Michael?”

  Yes, oh yes.

  But she was not sure if they had understood each other.

  One day, cleaning up, Emma found, behind a ventilation grill, a cache of food — just scraps, crumbs in cleaned-out bags, fragments of fruit bars, a few dehydrated packets that had been chewed on, dry, as if by a rat. She left it all exactly as she had found it.

  Cornelius Ta/ne

  In a way Michael’s soul is the essence of the mathematician’s.

  I know what he is feeling. I remember how strange it was when I realized that if I became a mathematician I could spend my life in pursuit of a kind of mystical experience few of my fellow humans could ever share.

  Mystical? Certainly. Data can serve only as a guide in the deepest intellectual endeavors. We are led more by a sense of aesthetics, as we manufacture our beautiful mathematical structures. We believe that the most elegant and simple structures are probably the ones that hold the greatest truth. That is why we seek unified theories — ideas that underpin and unite other notions — in mathematics as well as physics.

  We’re artists, we mathematicians, we physicists.

  But more than that. There is always the hope that a mathematical
construction, a product of the human imagination, nevertheless corresponds to some truth in the external world.

  Perhaps you can understand this. When you learned Pythagoras’ theorem, you learned something about every right-angled triangle in the world, for all time. If you understood Newton’s laws, you grasped something about every particle that has ever existed. It is a sense of reach, of joy — of power.

  For most of us such transcendent moments are rare. But not for Michael. The whole universe is the laboratory for his thought experiments. And given the most basic of tools to work with — even scratchings in the dirt — he attains that state of grace easily. He is in a kind of…

  Ecstasy? Well, perhaps.

  Of course it may be that his genius is associated with a deeper disorder.

  There is a mild form of autism called Asperger’s Syndrome. This is characterized by introversion and a lack of emotion; it results in difficulty in communicating, a lack of awareness of and sympathy for the emotions of others. But it is also associated with a narrow focus, adherence to an obsession that takes precedence over mere social satisfaction.

  Surely such a nature is essential for any intellectual success.

  Emma Stoney claims that Michael’s withdrawn and suspicious nature has nothing to do with any autism, but is a direct result of how he has been handled by us, the adult world. Well, perhaps.

  There are six classic symptoms of Asperger’s. I would claim Michael exhibits five of these.

  I should know. I recognize four in myself.

  June Tybee

  For June Tybee, the pace of the training was ferocious. As a tech specialist who seemed likely to go into battle, her own workload was mostly physical stuff and combat.

  She was put through parachute drops. She endured the rigors of” a centrifuge in a big navy lab in Pennsylvania. She floated for hours underwater in weighted-down pressure suits fighting mock battles against experienced NASA astronauts who would come swarming at her from any which way (think three-D! think three-D!). The training was clearly intended to desensitize her against the experiences of the upcoming spaceflight. There would be time enough during the mission, the long flight to Cruithne, to brief them all on operations at the asteroid itself.