The Speed of Dark

by Elizabeth Moon

  “Explain the money,” I say to Aldrin.

  “Explain… what?”

  “The money. How does the company make money to pay us?”

  “It’s… very complicated, Lou. I don’t think you could understand.”

  “Please try. Mr. Crenshaw claims we cost too much, that the profits suffer. Where do the profits really come from?”

  Chapter Ten

  MR. ALDRIN JUST STARES AT ME. FINALLY HE SAYS, “I don’t know how to say it, Lou, because I don’t know what the process is, exactly, or what it could do if applied to someone who isn’t autistic.”

  “Can’t you even—”

  “And… and I don’t think I should be talking about this. Helping you is one thing…” He has not helped us yet. Lying to us is not helping us. “But speculating about something that doesn’t exist, speculating that the company is contemplating some broader action that may be… that could be construed as…” He stops and shakes his head without finishing the sentence. We are all looking at him. His eyes are very shiny, as if he were about to cry.

  “I shouldn’t have come,” he says after a moment. “This was a big mistake. I’ll pay for the meal, but I have to go now.”

  He pushes back his chair and gets up; I see him at the cash register with his back to us. None of us says anything until he has gone out the front door.

  “He’s crazy,” Chuy says.

  “He’s scared,” Bailey says.

  “He hasn’t helped us, not really,” Linda says. “I don’t know why he bothered—”

  “His brother,” Cameron says.

  “Something we said bothered him even more than Mr. Crenshaw or his brother,” I say.

  “He knows something he doesn’t want us to know.” Linda brushes the hair off her forehead with an abrupt gesture.

  “He doesn’t want to know it himself,” I say. I am not sure why I think that, but I do. It is something we said. I need to know what it was.

  “There was something, back around the turn of the century,” Bailey says. “In one of the science journals, something about making people sort of autistic so they would work harder.”

  “Science journal or science fiction?” I ask.

  “It was—wait; I’ll look it up. I know somebody who will know.” Bailey makes a note on his handcomp.

  “Don’t send it from the office,” Chuy says.

  “Why—? Oh. Yes.” Bailey nods.

  “Pizza tomorrow,” Linda says. “Coming here is normal.”

  I open my mouth to say that Tuesday is my day to shop for groceries and shut it again. This is more important. I can go a week without groceries, or I can shop a little later.

  “Everybody look up what you can find,” Cameron says.

  At home, I log on and e-mail Lars. It is very late where he is, but he is awake. I find out that the original research was done in Denmark, but the entire lab, equipment and all, was bought up and the research base shifted to Cambridge. The paper I first heard about weeks ago was based on research done more than a year ago. Mr. Aldrin was right about that. Lars thinks much of the work to make the treatments human-compatible has been done; he speculates on secret military experiments. I do not believe this; Lars thinks everything is a secret military experiment. He is a very good game player, but I do not believe everything he says.

  Wind rattles my windows. I get up and lay a hand on the glass. Much colder. A spatter of rain and then I hear thunder. It is late anyway; I shut down my system and go to bed.

  Tuesday we do not speak to one another at work, other than “good morning” and “good afternoon.” I spend fifteen minutes in the gym when I finish another section of my project, but then I go back to work. Mr. Aldrin and Mr. Crenshaw both come by, not quite arm in arm, but as if they were friendly. They do not stay long, and they do not talk to me.

  After work, we go back to the pizza place. “Two nights in a row!” says Hi-I’m-Sylvia. I cannot tell if she is happy or unhappy about that. We take our usual table but pull over another one so there is room for everybody.

  “So?” Cameron says, after we’ve ordered. “What have we found out?”

  I tell the group what Lars said. Bailey has found the text of the old article, which is clearly fiction and not nonfiction. I did not know that science journals ever published science fiction on purpose, and apparently it only happened for one year.

  “It was supposed to make people really concentrate on an assigned project and not waste time on other things,” Bailey said.

  “Like Mr. Crenshaw thinks we waste time?” I say.

  Bailey nods.

  “We don’t waste as much time as he wastes walking around looking angry,” Chuy says.

  We all laugh, but quietly. Eric is drawing curlicues with his colored pens; they look like laughing sounds.

  “Does it say how it was going to work?” Linda asks.

  “Sort of,” Bailey says. “But I’m not sure the science is good. And that was decades ago. What they thought would work might not be what really works.”

  “They don’t want autistic people like us,” Eric says. “They wanted—or the story said they wanted—savant talents and concentration without the other side effects. Compared to a savant we waste a lot of time, though not as much as Mr. Crenshaw thinks.”

  “Normal people waste a lot of time on nonproductive things,” Cameron says. “At least as much as we do, maybe more.”

  “It would take what to turn a normal person into a savant without the other problems?” Linda asks.

  “I don’t know,” Cameron says. “They would have to be smart to start with. Good at something. Then they would have to want to do that instead of anything else.”

  “It wouldn’t do any good if they wanted to do something they were bad at,” Chuy says. I imagine a person determined to be a musician who has no rhythm and no pitch sense; it is ridiculous. We all see the funny side of this and laugh.

  “Do people ever want to do what they aren’t good at?” Linda asks. “Normal people, that is?” For once she does not make the word normal sound like a bad word.

  We sit and think a moment; then Chuy says, “I had an uncle who wanted to be a writer. My sister—she reads a lot—she said he was really bad. Really, really bad. He was good at doing things with his hands, but he wanted to write.”

  “Here y’are, then,” Hi-I’m-Sylvia says, putting down the pizzas. I look at her. She is smiling, but she looks tired and it is not even seven yet.

  “Thank you,” I say. She waves a hand and hurries away.

  “Something to keep people from paying attention to distraction,” Bailey says. “Something to make them like the right things.”

  “ ‘Distractibility is determined by the sensory sensitivity at every level of processing and by the strength of sensory integration,’” Eric recites. “I read that. Part of it’s inborn. That’s been known for forty or fifty years; late in the twentieth century that knowledge had worked its way down to the popular level, in books on parenting. Attention control circuitry is developed early in fetal life; it can be compromised by later injury…”

  I feel almost sick for a moment, as if something were attacking my brain right now, but push that feeling aside. Whatever caused my autism is in the past, where I cannot undo it. Now it is important not to think about me but about the problem.

  All my life I’ve been told how lucky I was to be born when I was— lucky to benefit from the improvements in early intervention, lucky to be born in the right country, with parents who had the education and resources to be sure I got that good early intervention. Even lucky to be born too soon for definitive treatment, because—my parents said—having to struggle gave me the chance to demonstrate strength of character.

  What would they have said if this treatment had been available for me when I was a child? Would they have wanted me to be stronger or be normal? Would accepting treatment mean I had no strength of character? Or would I find other struggles?

  I AM STILL THINKING ABOUT
THIS THE NEXT EVENING AS I change clothes and drive to Tom and Lucia’s for fencing. What behaviors do we have that someone could profit from, other than the occasional savant talents? Most of the autistic behaviors have been presented to us as deficits, not strengths. Unsocial, lacking social skills, problems with attention control… I keep coming back to that. It is hard to think from their perspective, but I have the feeling that this attention control issue is at the middle of the pattern, like a black hole at the center of a space-time whirlpool. That is something else we are supposed to be deficient in, the famous Theory of Mind.

  I am a little early. No one else is parked outside yet. I pull up carefully so that there is the most room possible behind me. Sometimes the others are not so careful, and then fewer people can park without inconveniencing others. I could be early every week, but that would not be fair to others.

  Inside, Tom and Lucia are laughing about something. When I go in, they grin at me, very relaxed. I wonder what it would be like to have someone in the house all the time, someone to laugh with. They do not always laugh, but they seem happy more often than not.

  “How are you, Lou?” Tom asks. He always asks that. It is one of the things normal people do, even if they know that you are all right.

  “Fine,” I say. I want to ask Lucia about medical things, but I do not know how to start or if it is polite. I start with something else. “The tires on my car were slashed last week.”

  “Oh, no!” Lucia says. “How awful!” Her face changes shape; I think she means to express sympathy.

  “It was in the parking lot at the apartment,” I say. “In the same place as usual. All four tires.”

  Tom whistles. “That’s expensive,” he says. “Has there been a lot of vandalism in the area? Did you report it to the police?”

  I cannot answer one of those questions at all. “I did report it,” I say. “There is a policeman who lives in our apartment building. He told me how to report it.”

  “That’s good,” Tom says. I am not sure if he means it is good that a policeman lives in our building or that I reported it, but I do not think it is important to know which.

  “Mr. Crenshaw was angry that I was late to work,” I say.

  “Didn’t you tell me he’s new?” Tom asks.

  “Yes. He does not like our section. He does not like autistic people.”

  “Oh, he’s probably…” Lucia begins, but Tom looks at her and she stops.

  “I don’t know why you think he doesn’t like autistic people,” Tom says.

  I relax. It is so much easier to talk to Tom when he says things this way. The question is less threatening. I wish I knew why.

  “He says we should not need the supportive environment,” I say. “He says it is too expensive and we should not have the gym and… and the other things.” I have never actually talked about the special things that make our workplace so much better. Maybe Tom and Lucia will think the same way as Mr. Crenshaw when they find out about them.

  “That’s…” Lucia pauses, looks at Tom, and then goes on. “That’s ridiculous. It doesn’t matter what he thinks; the law says they have to provide a supportive work environment.”

  “As long as we’re as productive as other employees,” I say. It is hard to talk about this; it is too scary. I can feel my throat tightening and hear my own voice sounding strained and mechanical. “As long as we fit the diagnostic categories under the law…”

  “Which autism clearly does,” Lucia says. “And I’m sure you’re productive, or they wouldn’t have kept you this long.”

  “Lou, is Mr. Crenshaw threatening to fire you?” Tom asks.

  “No… not exactly. I told you about that experimental treatment. They didn’t say anything more about it for a while, but now they—Mr. Crenshaw, the company—they want us to take that experimental treatment. They sent a letter. It said people who were part of a research protocol were protected from cutbacks. Mr. Aldrin talked to our group; we are having a special meeting on Saturday. I thought they could not make us take it, but Mr. Aldrin says that Mr. Crenshaw says they can shut down our section and refuse to rehire us for something else because we are not trained in something else. He says if we do not take the treatment they will do this and it is not firing because companies can change with the times.”

  Tom and Lucia both look angry, their faces knotted with tight muscle and the shiny look coming out on their skin. I should not have said this now; this was the wrong time, if anything was the right time.

  “Those bastards,” Lucia says. She looks at me and her face changes from the tight knots of anger, smoothing out around the eyes. “Lou— Lou, listen: I am not angry with you. I am angry with people who hurt you or do not treat you well… not with you.”

  “I should not have said this to you,” I say, still uncertain.

  “Yes, you should,” Lucia says. “We are your friends; we should know if something goes wrong in your life, so that we can help.”

  “Lucia’s right,” Tom says. “Friends help friends—just as you’ve helped us, like when you built the mask rack.”

  “That is something we both use,” I say. “My work is just about me.”

  “Yes and no,” Tom says. “Yes in that we are not working with you and cannot help you directly. But no when it is a big problem that has general application, like this one. This isn’t just about you. It could affect every disabled person who’s employed anywhere. What if they decided that a person in a wheelchair didn’t need ramps? You definitely need a lawyer, all of you. Didn’t you say that the Center could find one for you?”

  “Before the others get here, Lou,” Lucia says, “why don’t you tell us more about this Mr. Crenshaw and his plans?”

  I sit down on the sofa, but even though they have said they want to listen it is hard to talk. I look at the rug on their floor, with its wide border of blue-and-cream geometric patterns—there are four patterns within a frame of plain blue stripes—and try to make the story clear.

  “There is a treatment they—someone—used on adult apes,” I say. “I did not know apes could be autistic, but what they said was that autistic apes became more normal when they had this treatment. Now Mr. Crenshaw wants us to have it.”

  “And you don’t want it?” Tom asks.

  “I do not understand how it works or how it will make things better,” I say.

  “Very sensible,” Lucia says. “Do you know who did the research, Lou?”

  “I do not remember the name,” I say. “Lars—he’s a member of an international group of autistic adults—e-mailed me about it several weeks ago. He sent me the journal Web site and I went there, but I did not understand much of it. I did not study neuroscience.”

  “Do you still have that citation?” Lucia asks. “I can look it up, see what I can find out.”

  “You could?”

  “Sure. And I can ask around in the department, find out if the researchers are considered any good or not.”

  “We had an idea,” I say.

  “We who?” Tom asks.

  “We… the people I work with,” I say.

  “The other autistic people?” Tom asks.

  “Yes.” I close my eyes briefly to calm down. “Mr. Aldrin bought us pizza. He drank beer. He said that he did not think there was enough profit in treating adult autistic persons—because they now treat pre-borns and infants and we are the last cohort who will be like us. At least in this country. So we wondered why they wanted to develop this treatment and what else it could do. It is like some pattern analysis I have done. There is one pattern, but it is not the only pattern. Someone can think they are generating one pattern and actually generate several more, and one of those may be useful or not useful, depending on what the problem is.” I look up at Tom and he is looking at me with a strange expression. His mouth is a little open.

  He shakes his head, a quick jerk. “So—you are thinking maybe they have something else in mind, something that you people are just part of?”

 
“It might be,” I say cautiously.

  He looks at Lucia, and she nods. “It certainly could be,” he says. “Trying whatever it is on you would give them additional data, and then… Let me think…”

  “I think it is something to do with attention control,” I say. “We all have a different way of perceiving sensory input and… and setting attention priorities.” I am not sure I have the words right, but Lucia nods vigorously.

  “Attention control—of course. If they could control that in the architecture, not chemically, it’d be a lot easier to develop a dedicated workforce.”

  “Space,” Tom says.

  I am confused, but Lucia only blinks and then nods.

  “Yes. The big limitation in space-based employment is getting people to concentrate, not be distracted. The sensory inputs up there are not what we’re used to, what worked in natural selection.” I do not know how she knows what he is thinking. I would like to be able to read minds like that. She grins at me. “Lou, I think you’re onto something big, here. Get me that citation, and I’ll run with it.”

  I feel uneasy. “I am not supposed to talk about work outside the campus,” I say.

  “You’re not talking about work,” she says. “You’re talking about your work environment. That’s different.”

  I wonder if Mr. Aldrin would see it that way.

  Someone knocks on the door, and we quit talking. I am sweaty even though I have not been fencing. The first to arrive are Dave and Susan. We go through the house, collect our gear, and start stretching in the backyard.

  Marjory is next to arrive, and she grins at me. I feel lighter than air again. I remember what Emmy said, but I cannot believe it when I see Marjory. Maybe tonight I will ask her to go to dinner with me. Don has not come. I suppose he is still angry with Tom and Lucia for not acting like friends. It makes me sad that they are not all still friends; I hope they do not get angry with me and quit being friends with me.

  I am fencing with Dave when I hear a noise from the street and then a squeal of tires moving fast. I ignore it and do not change my attack, but Dave stops and I hit him too hard in the chest.