And on a personal level, there were many people who seemed simply unable to cope with it all.
There were some estimates the downstream hysteria had claimed more than a thousand lives nationally already. People were killing themselves, and each other, because they believed the shadowy future visions weren’t real, that Carter must be right after all; others were killing themselves because they thought the Cruithne future was real.
A lot of the fear and violence seemed to have focused on the Blue children — and, just as distressing, those who were suspected of being Blue. Perhaps it was inevitable, she thought; after all, the children live among us, here and now. How convenient it is to have somebody to hate.
Meanwhile the FBI had reported on a new ritual-murder sect. The adherents believed they were “fast-forwarding” their victims to a point where they would be revived by the black hole miners or some other group of downstreamers and live in peace and harmony, forever in the future.
And so on. More and more she got the sense that she was stuck in the middle of an immature species’ crisis of adolescence.
Which shaped her view on the decision that faced her.
Personally Maura had severe doubts there would be anything to find on Cruithne, except for ancient dusty rock and Dan Ys-tebo’s peculiar squid. What was more important was the symbolism of the military action.
The government would act to show it was still in control of events: that it was not paralyzed by the Carter prediction, that even Reid Malenfant was not beyond its jurisdiction. It seemed to Maura that this was what Americans always strove to do: to take a lead, to take control, to do something.
And that was the subtext, the real purpose behind the military response. The think tank report argued that the resonance of action was essential now to restore the social cohesion of a wired-up planet.
And Maura, reluctantly, found she agreed.
Sorry, Malenfant, she thought.
She registered her recommendation, and turned, with relief, to other matters.
Reid Malenfant:
Removed from the swirling currents of humanity, the crew of the
Gerard K O ‘Neill sailed into darkness.
After just a couple of days, though Earth’s clouds and blue-green oceans were still visible, its disc had shrunk to the apparent size of the Moon from the ground. And the next day, it was smaller still. It would take ninety days of such phenomenal traveling to reach Cruithne, tracing out its own peculiar orbit all of forty million miles from home.
The celestial mechanics of the ship’s trajectory were complex.
Both Earth and Cruithne rounded the sun in about a year. Cruithne, tracing its ellipse, moved a tad faster. It meant that the O’Neill had to leap between two moving rocks, like a kid hopping from one roundabout to another. After the impulse given it by its booster throw, the ship was coasting through its own orbit independently of the Earth, a rounded ellipse that cut inside Earth’s path.
By the time they reached Cruithne the ship would be around twelve degrees in advance of Earth: twelve out of three-sixty, a thirtieth of the circumference of the planet’s orbit.
Malenfant liked to think he would be a couple of weeks ahead in time of the folks back home.
He treated the first bouts of motion sickness with Scop-Dex; he was glad when he could wean his crew off that because of the drowsiness it caused. They all suffered from low-G problems like the facial puffiness and nasal irritation caused by body-fluid redistribution. They were peeing too much as a result of their bodies’ confusion over this, and their hearts, with less work to do, were relaxing. And so on. Despite the artificial G and the exercise regime he imposed, their muscles were wasting, their hearts were shrinking, and their bones were leaching away.
It was all anticipated and well understood, of course. But that didn’t help make it easier to accept. Most of their decondi-tioning, in fact, had happened in the first nine hours in space, when they were still inside the orbit of the Moon. And after the nominal mission, after two hundred days in space, they would all be walking with a stick for months.
So it goes.
He kept Cornelius and Emma busy by cross-training them on the medical equipment. There was simple stuff like cardio-pulmonary resuscitation procedures, how to administer elec-troshock paddles, the use of chemicals like sodium bicarb. He gave them familiarization training on the drugs the ship carried, along with blood products. There were more grisly exercises, such as emergency tracheotomy and how to secure an intravenous catheter (the fat saphenous veins of the inner thigh were the best bet).
Of course he was no medic himself. He relied heavily on recordings and softscreen simulations to keep him on the right track.
But both Cornelius and Emma were intelligent; they both soon figured out the subtext of their training, which was that in the event of any real emergency there was little that could be done. A single serious injury would likely exhaust their medical supplies. And even if the patient, whichever unlucky sap it was, could be stabilized long enough to be kept alive and brought home, the others would have to nurse a nonfunctioning invalid all the way back to Earth.
Malenfant didn’t share with the others the training he’d gotten for himself on euthanasia, or on how to conduct a scientifically and legally valid autopsy.
During those first weeks they stayed healthy enough, luckily.
But once the adrenaline-rush excitement of the launch and the novelty of the mission wore off, all three of the adults — himself included — came crashing down into a feeling of intense isolation. He had expected this. He’d gotten some psychological training, based mainly on Russian experience, on long-duration spaceflight. Cornelius, for example, seemed locked in a bubble world of his own, his odd, smoothed-over personality cutting him off from the others like a second spacesuit. Malenfant left him alone as much as possible.
The general depression seemed to be hitting Emma hardest, however.
Oddly, when he looked into her eyes, it sometimes seemed as if she weren’t there at all, as if there were only a fragment of the Emma he knew, looking out at him, puzzled. How did I get here? It was understandable. He had, after all, shanghaied her, utterly without warning.
It would help if there were something to fill up her time, here on the O ‘Neill. But there was no real work for her to do beyond the chores and the training. He had softbooks, of course, but he’d only brought along technical manuals, a few books for the kid… Not a novel in the whole damn memory, and not even a yellowing hardcopy paperback. It would be easy enough to have stuff up-loaded from Earth, of course, but although the reports and telemetry he downloaded daily were surely being picked up by the NASA deep-space people, nobody down there seemed inclined to talk back to him.
He tried to handle his own deep sense of guilt.
He’d felt he needed to bring her along, on a whole series of levels. He still felt like that. But it would, after all, have been easy to push her away, there in the critical moments in the Mo-jave. To have kept from stealing her life from her.
If not for his Secret, maybe they’d be a little more open with each other. Of course, if not for the Secret, they wouldn’t be here at all.
But what was done was done.
Anyhow he’d refused to waste processor capacity on e-therapy programs, or any of that other modern crap that he regarded as mind-softening junk, despite recommendations from a slew of “experts” during the mission planning. The truth is, he knew, there were no experts, because nobody had gone out as far as this before. They would just have to cope, learn as they went along, support each other, as explorers always had.
He did worry about the kid, though. Even though Michael spooked him half to death. Wherever that came from, it surely wasn’t the kid’s fault…
Flight in deep space was, after all, utterly strange — even for Malenfant, who felt as if he’d spent his whole life preparing for this.
It was possible to forget, sometimes, that they were locked up here in this tiny met
al bubble, with nothing out there save for a few lumps of floating rock that came to seem less and less significant the farther they receded from Earth.
But most times, everything felt strange.
If he walked too rapidly across the meatware deck, he could feel the Coriolis cutting in, a ghostly sideways push that made him stagger. Even when he washed or took a drink, the water would move around the bowl in huge languid waves, pulsing like some sticky, viscous oil. If he immersed his hands it felt like water always had, but it clung to his flesh in great globules and ribbons, so that he had to scrape it off and chase it back into the bowl.
And so on. Everything was strange. Sometimes he felt he couldn’t cope with it, as if he couldn’t figure out the mechanics or logic of the environment. Perhaps, he thought, this is how Michael feels all the time, living in this incomprehensible, fragmented world.
It was a relief to retreat to his bunk, eyes closed, strapped in, shut out from all stimuli, trying to feel normal.
But even here, in deepest space, with no sensory input at all, he could still feel something: the evolution of his own thoughts, the sense of time passing as he forged downstream into the future, the deepest, most inner sense of all.
There was no science to describe this. The laws of physics were time-reversible: they ran as happily backward as forward. But he knew in his deepest soul that time was not reversible for him, that he was bound on a one-way journey to the future, to the deepest downstream.
How strange, how oddly comforting that was.
He drifted into sleep.
Milton Foundation e-spokesperson
It distresses all of us that the general psychological reaction to the news of the future has focused on the Blue children. You have to understand that Foundation Schools have always worked for the children’s protection as much as their development.
When the children’s nature was first publicized, the Schools first established, the effect was, at first, beneficial for everybody concerned. Families started to understand they weren’t alone, that their superintelligent children were part of a wider phenomenon. But after all, there is much about the children we do not understand. Their common obsession with blue-circle motifs, for instance.
There have been many theories to explain the children’s origin, their sudden emergence into the world. Perhaps this is all some dramatic example of morphic resonance. Perhaps they are aliens. Perhaps they represent an evolutionary leap — maybe we have Homo superior living among us, soldiers from the future who will enslave us. And so on.
Hysteria, perhaps. But people are afraid.
At first the general fear manifested itself in subtle ways: Surrounding communities generally shunned the Schools, starving them of resources and access to local infrastructure, blocking approvals for extensions, that sort of thing.
Lately, matters have taken a turn for the worse. Much worse.
Foundation Schools in cities and towns around the planet — buildings, their staff and students — have been attacked. Some children have been injured; one child is dead.
And even beyond the Schools, in the homes, we know that parents have turned on their own children.
We deeply regret several unfortunate incidents within Foundation Schools. We have tried to ensure that our supervision of the children has been of the highest quality. However I have to emphasize that the Milton Foundation has no direct control over the Schools. The Schools are independent establishments run under national and regional educational policies; we aren’t responsible for this. We have actually acted to mitigate the conditions many children are kept in.
We do not oppose the closure of our Schools, the taking of the children into federal custody. It’s easy to be judgmental. But what are we to do?
Besides, some of the worst Schools have been American.
Oh. You didn’t know that?
(Name and Address Withheld)
Sir,
There has been a great deal of speculation in these columns and elsewhere over the origin of the so-called “Blue child” phenomenon.
Perhaps this is just a statistical fluke — maybe these superkids have always been among us and we never even noticed. Some, of course, believe the Blue children may have some supernatural or even divine origin. It seems rather more likely to me they are
mutant products of the ecocollapse.
For example, many children have difficulty digesting proteins, such as casein and gluten, contained in cows’ milk and wheat. These proteins may be broken down, not into amino acids, but into peptides that can interfere with the hormones and neurotransmitters used by the developing brain. Perhaps some such physical cause is the solution. Certainly we seem to be suffering a parallel “plague” of developmental illnesses that includes attention deficit syndrome, hyperactivity, and dyslexia.
Whatever the truth I believe the focus of the debate must now shift: away from the origin of the children, to their destiny.
I believe the children represent a discontinuity in the history of our species. If they are truly superior to us, and if they breed true, they are the greatest threat to our continued survival since the Ice Age.
The resolution to this situation is clear.
First. The existing children must be sterilized to prevent their breeding and further propagation.
Second. Tests must be developed (perhaps they already exist) for assessing the developmental potential of a child while still in the womb. Such tests must be applied — nationally and internationally — to all new pregnancies.
Third. Fetuses that fail the tests, that is, which prove to have Blue attributes, must be terminated immediately.
This must be done without sentiment and with maximum efficiency, before the children accrue the power to stop us.
At present they are young: small and weak and unformed and vulnerable. They will not always be so.
It will be hard. If governments will not listen, it is up to us, the people, to take action. Any and all sanctions are morally defensible. This is a time of racial survival, a crux.
I would point out that we emerged from the Ice Age crisis transformed as a species, in strength and capability. So we must purge our souls again. These need not be dark days, but a time of glorious bright cleansing.
Turning to the comparable issue of the enhanced cephalopods…
Burt Lippard
We’ve all seen the future now. That Reid Malenfant stuff. Holy smoke. The one thing we know for sure is human beings, us, won’t be able to cope with that.
We shouldn’t fear the Blues. They’re smarter than us, is all. So what? Most people are smarter than me anyhow.
I say we should give up our power to them. Sooner one Blue child running the world than a thousand so-called democrats. I’ll work with them, when the day comes.
I say this. The Blues are the future. Anyone who lays a finger on them now will have me to answer to.
Maura Della:
Maura flew to Sioux Falls and spent the night.
The next morning was bright, clear, the sky huge. On a whim she gave her driver the day off. She set off, heading toward Minnesota. Past Worthington she turned into Iowa. The sun was high and bright in a blue cloudless sky. She drove past huge Day-Glo fields of rape and corn. This was a place of farms, and worked earth, and people living in the same nouses their great-grandparents did. Even the agri-chemical corporate logos, painted by gen-eng on the cornfields, seemed unobtrusive today.
In these days of gloom and ecodisaster, after too long buried in the orange smog of Washington, she’d forgotten that places like this still existed. And in her district, too.
Was all the Malenfant stuff — talk of the future, messages from time, the Carter catastrophe, the destiny of humankind — just an airy dream? If there was no way to connect the grandiose dreams of the future to this — the day-to-day reality, the small, noble aspirations of the people of Iowa — could they be said to have any meaning?
I should spend more time out here, she thought.
>
In fact, maybe it was time to retire — not in a couple of years — but now.
She was too old for children of her own, of course, but not for the whitewashed farmhouse, the couple of horses. Anyhow, she knew when she looked into her heart she’d never really wanted kids anyhow. She’d seen how kids dropped from the sky and exploded people’s lives like squalling neutron bombs. She was honest enough to admit she was too selfish for that; her life, her only life, was her own.
Of course that didn’t qualify her too well for the visit she must make today.
She had received a plea for help.
It had come into Maura’s office, remarkably, by snail-mail. She opened the envelope and found a picture of a wide-eyed five-year-old, a letter handwritten in a simple, childish hand, far beyond the reach of any spell-checker software and replete with grammatical and other errors.
Reading a letter was a charge of nostalgia for Maura, in these days of electronic democracy.
The letter was from a family in a town called Blue Lake, in northern Iowa, right at the heart of her district, the heart of the Midwest. It was a college town, she recalled, but she was ashamed to find she couldn’t remember the last time she’d been out there. The letter was from two parents baffled and dismayed because the government was demanding they give up their son. It was all part of the greater scandal that had broken out nationally — indeed, worldwide — about the treatment of Blue children.
The thing of it was, Maura couldn’t see a damn thing she could do about it.
She reached for her softscreen, preparing to post an e-reply. Somehow, though, as she sat here holding the simple scrap of paper, the old-fashioned still photo with its smiling kid, that didn’t seem enough.
She had glared out the window at the dull Washington sky, heard the wash of traffic noise. She needed a break from all this hothouse shit, the endless Malenfant blamestorming.
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