by Tom Caldwell
June, 2096
They toured a few planets, looking for a building site, but despite his protests, Ezra fell in love with Perdigon’s green highlands, several hours north of Bonaventure Crater. Having grown up in Indianapolis, he was a sucker for mountains. Here, the steep hills rose from the level plains of the marshes, ancient weather-beaten mountains dark with vegetation, streaked with snow. To the west, Perdigon’s permanent dawn-or-twilight cast the cliffs of Hellouin Mons in rose-gold light; to the east lay the pale foam of a vast, shallow sea. Far out toward the horizon, an iceberg drifted like a ghost ship.
Anton Mozersky cut the cheques, as promised, and so did Roshan. Natalie and Hannah sent a joint donation, earmarked for a girls’ dormitory. Ezra and Jacob found an architect who was patient with their exorbitant demands. More like a military fortress than a school, most of it underground, intended to withstand heavy impacts and to blend into the local terrain. Murdoch was intrigued by a new challenge and landed on Perdigon to oversee the creation of an unbeatable tech security system. Terraformers cut a space into the mountain, sheltered from the cold sea wind, and construction crews landed on the nearly-empty planet to build the school.
No one wanted to name it Taltos; Ezra was happy to leave the name behind. Besides, he didn’t want the place to be particularly easy to find—at some point in the future, certain corporations and governments were going to see this school as a threat. For now, the paperwork read Targeted Vocational Training Center (Hellouin II).
December, 2102
On the beach below Hellouin Mons, the space-field was windy, skimming powdery snow across the tarmac. Ezra was bundled up in a parka, with a spare CO2 scrubber tucked into his scarf; this part of the planet didn’t have swamp gases to contend with, but outdoors, the atmosphere could still leave you gasping when you walked a flight of stairs.
Jacob was more sensitive to it than Ezra was, and he had his mask up as they watched the ground crew bring the staircase up to the hatch of the Juno-class that had just landed.
Neither of them liked to watch big ship landings anymore. Ezra had his arm around Jacob, the nylon of their coats rustling together.
Jacob pulled the mask down again. “I’m smelling a lot of fumes, even through the filter, is that normal—”
“I know, I know. It’s okay,” Ezra told him. “Everything’s gonna be fine—shit, there they are…”
Anton Mozersky was climbing down the steps to the tarmac—a little greyer and more bloated, tanned from some recent vacation, wife and son in tow. The wife was young and blonde, of course, with sleepy lynx eyes that looked insolent, as if she knew she was expected to play dumb and didn’t plan to. She was pregnant, weighed down trying to manage a set of kids’ luggage along with her own—two carry-ons, a suitcase with a stubborn collapsible handle, a spare coat. Jacob hurried ahead to help her.
The boy was trailing behind, holding tight to the rail. Only about the age George had been, five or six. Dark hair ruffled by the high wind, big scared brown eyes. If Ezra had been expecting some trace of resemblance, there was none.
“Spasibo!” Mozersky said with a grin, and Ezra grimaced. “By which of course I mean privyet. Ezra, Jacob, you’re freezing to death out here, look at you. This is my lovely wife Irina, thank you for helping her with the bags—”
“Not at all,” said Jacob, loading everything onto an empty trolley. “Welcome to Perdigon, I’m sorry it’s so cold. And congratulations must be in order?”
“That’s a very risky thing to say to a lady,” Irina said comfortably, zipping her coat back up now that she was out of the warmth of the cabin. “This is the last one, I told him. We try once more to see if we can get a girl, and then that’s enough. So we chose a girl this time, but I said the lab should skip the Barany process on the embryo, because somebody’s going to have to be the practical one in the family. Anyhow, you already know who this must be—Lev, pay attention.”
Lev wasn’t holding onto his parents; he was standing a little apart from them, hands in his coat pockets, staring out at the sea. His head was tilted to the right and he was bouncing up on his toes and letting himself fall again, repeating the movement as if something about it left him unsatisfied.
“The grav’s lighter here than the standard for ships. Not much, it’s like a two percent difference,” Ezra said to Anton and Irina. “It always bugs me too, when we first land. Very…”
“Discombobulating,” Jacob supplied.
“Lev.” Irina finally tapped the boy on the shoulder, and he gave it up, turning back around. “Say hello. You’ve met Jacob and Ezra before, but you were too young to remember.”
Lev gravely reached up to shake hands with them, but said nothing.
“He does speak English,” said Irina, ruffling his hair. “He’s quiet, that’s all.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Jacob said, more to Lev than to Irina. “We’ll have a visit later, when you’re not shaken up from the flight. It doesn’t take too long to adjust.” To Ezra, he added, “You should save him from the small talk, I don’t think he likes it any better than you do.”
“He’s right, these guys are gonna be doing chit-chat for a million years,” Ezra told Lev. “Jacob’s got your bags, so let’s start heading inside, okay? Mom and Dad will bring up the rear when they’re ready. I don’t know about you, but I need to warm up.”
The complex had tunnels from the space-field up to the building on the mountain, in order to keep out of the wind, accessible by entrance points that looked like subway stations, long flights of concrete steps going underground. It was all dead silent now, apart from a few maintenance bots cruising around looking for meltwater to mop up.
“How far is it?” Lev asked from Ezra’s elbow. He did indeed speak impeccable English, with a weirdly specific middle-class British accent, probably copying a language tutor. Self-contained, a reserved little kid. Ezra had been nowhere near that calm, at his age. “Are we going all the way to the top?”
“Yeah, up the mountain to the main building. There’s an elevator, don’t worry,” said Ezra, who had to jump up and down in front of a motion sensor to make it unlock the next set of doors. “It’s like ten minutes,” he added, because the Bonaventure kids always used to grouse about anything over fifteen. “And then we can sit down—you hungry? Did they feed you?”
Lev nodded. “Lab beef on the flight. I didn’t want any.”
Ezra hated that shipboard stuff too, lifeless hamburger casserole with its edges frizzled by the microwave. “You don’t like the science meat, huh?”
“No.”
“Me neither. They used to eat frogs, down where Bonaventure used to be.”
“We saw the crater from orbit,” said Lev, and although he didn’t look up or say anything more, there was a subtle shift in the atmosphere.
Ezra felt it, but at first, he wasn’t sure what he was feeling. It was a feeling of being examined, but it was benign rather than threatening, like a doctor listening to his heart with a stethoscope. Curiously intimate. The half-formed echoes of his thoughts seemed loud, ringing on the concrete. It didn’t feel strange—the strange part was realising that nobody had ever been able to hear his thoughts before. All his life, every thought he’d ever had was locked up in such a small space as his own skull. He’d never felt another mind like his.
He also had no idea how to defend against it, and after a few minutes he realised that the kid had been rifling through his memories completely unchecked. Filmstrip flickers of the crater, the dead monks in the abbey huddled up against the altar, the frogs in the swamp hypnotised by the flashlight.
“So you’re not really quiet,” Ezra said when he gathered his wits back together. He’d been shambling along like a zombie, and had to backtrack to find the elevator. “It’s more that—it’s that nobody else ever wants to think with you, right? You hear them thinking but they never hear you. It’s like…it’s like they think things only count if you say them out loud.”
Lev pulled his at
tention back, relieving the pressure on Ezra’s mind. “Yeah. Your head feels weird.”
“I bet.”
“They said you were the same as me. But you’re not.” Lev didn’t sound disappointed; relieved, if anything.
“Um—well, we’re related, sort of, but we’re not the same. I can see things before they happen, but I can’t get into other people’s heads. What, were you worried about meeting someone else who could do what you can?” Ezra asked.
“A little.” A long pause, and then Lev elaborated. “I thought it must hurt, maybe. Because nobody likes it when I do it to them.”
“I won’t lie to you, it feels a little weird,” said Ezra. “And you need to learn how to ask first, okay? We’ll work on that. But it doesn’t hurt.” They reached the elevator and he hoisted Lev up high enough to reach the button. “Just once—there you go…”
They waited for the doors to open, while Lev traced lines and curves in the dirty meltwater from his boots on the floor. A bot hummed over and beeped a few times, piteously, before Ezra took the boy’s hand and drew him away from the mess on the floor. “C’mere, just let him clean it…”
“It never snows at home. I wish we could stay here for Christmas.”
“Nah, you’d be really bored,” said Ezra, leading him onto the elevator when the doors opened. “This is gonna be a quick visit and you’ll be back home for Christmas. Right in time for Santa,” he said before he remembered that Lev probably had an unusually sensitive bullshit detector. “If, um, if Santa’s what you’re into. Do you even have Santa in Russia?”
“Da, Ded Moroz,” Lev said in Russian, suppressing a smile. “But we know who Santa is.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty rich, huh? Americans acting like our ways are so mysterious. Anyway. I wanted to meet you and see how strong you are, but we won’t start studying together until you’re older.”
“Am I strong?”
Ezra didn’t know if you were supposed to lie to kids about this, so he told the truth. “I think you’ll be stronger than me, when you grow up,” he said. “But that’s a long time from now. And being strong—look, that stuff doesn’t matter as much as you might think. Sometimes you’ll probably find yourself wishing you were more like other people.”
Lev nodded. It had probably already occurred to him. Or maybe it hadn’t; for a kid that age, isolated by his money and his strangeness, his power might be the only mode of connection he had. “Do you wish you were normal?”
“Yeah. That’s the hard part,” said Ezra. “But there’s a lot of hard parts, I guess. Life is short and art is long—a doctor named Hippocrates said that, thousands of years ago. Hippocrates came from the island of Kos…”
The elevator doors opened, and they got off in the main hallway of the building on Mount Hellouin, empty and illuminated only by a few emergency lights at the intersections, and the display case next to the door. The Benedictines had sent their old ansible to Jacob and Ezra a few years ago, the famous Silvabela, and here it sat—still locked up in the Perspex box. They kept it turned on, with its screen glowing faintly in the half-darkness.
The first message it ever received still appeared on the display, with a pulsing cursor: the first words of the Rule of St. Benedict. “Hearken, O my son, to the precepts of the master...”
About the Author
Tom Caldwell was born in Ottawa, Canada, and studied Classics and philosophy at Queen’s University in Kingston. Because worldly success eluded him, he copy-edited articles for music magazines, celebrity gossip websites, a vanity project for a rapper, and two books on computer programming. He is also the author of Turing: an Anthology, a prose/poetry project about computer science pioneer Alan Turing. He lives in Eastern Ontario and is married to Clare Richardson, also a writer.
