Time m-1

by Stephen Baxter

  As if he were meant to be here.

  Malenfant unzipped the airlock’s fabric door, rolled it down, and stepped forward.

  Emma glimpsed frozen air sailing away into the vacuum, frozen particles of it glinting in the sunlight, as if this handful of molecules were trying to expand to fill all of infinite space. The last noises disappeared, save for her own breathing, loud in her bubble helmet, and the sounds that carried through her suit: the rustle of fabric, the slither of the skinsuit against her flesh when she moved.

  Still gripping Michael’s hand, Emma pushed her head out of the hatch. The sun’s light flooded over her, astoundingly bright after months in the dingy interior of the O ‘Neill. She took a step out of the airlock, and, gentle as a snowflake, settled to the dirt of Cruithne.

  Where her blue-booted feet hit the regolith, with dreamy slowness, she kicked up a little coal-black asteroid dirt. It sailed into the air — no, just upward — for a few feet, before settling back, following perfect parabolas.

  The four of them, huddled together in their glowing white suits, were the brightest objects in the landscape, like snowmen on a pile of coal. But already the clinging black dust of the asteroid had coated their lower legs and thighs.

  The ground was coal black, layered with dust, and very uneven, extensively folded. She could see maybe a hundred yards in any direction before the ground fell away, but the horizon was close and crumpled, as if she were standing on a hilltop. The hab dome was a drab mound of regolith over orange fabric, and it was surrounded by ground that was scarred by firefly tracks. Beyond it she could see a cluster of equipment: the bulky form of the tethered O ‘Neill, and the coiling lines leading to Malenfant’s illegal nuclear power plant, now installed somewhere over the horizon of Cruithne.

  And the shadows were already shifting under her feet, lengthening as she watched.

  When she raised her head and looked into the sky, the sun was almost over her head, its glare steady and fierce, so that she cast only a short shadow. Off to her left she saw a point of light: blue, bright. It was Earth. But the Moon was invisible, as were the stars, washed out of her vision by the intense brightness of the sun.

  Beyond sun and Earth there was nothing: above, behind, beyond her, like the depths of the deepest, darkest ocean, but spreading around her in all three dimensions. The sense of scale, of openness, after the enclosure of the ship and the hab dome, was stunning. Watching the sliding shadows, she understood on some gut level that she was indeed clinging to the outside of a rock that was tumbling in space. She swallowed hard; she absolutely did not want to throw up in a spacesuit.

  A firefly robot came tumbling past, ignoring them, on some errand of its own. It was a hatbox covered with gleaming solar panels, and with miniature manipulator arms extending before it. It worked its way over the surface with a series of tethers that it fired out before itself, then winched in after it, never less loosely anchored than by two tethers at a time, and little puffs of exhaust vapour escaped from tiny kid’s-toy rocket nozzles at the rear. The firefly’s case was heavily stained with regolith; there were cute little wiper blades on each of the solar cell panels. The robot moved jerkily, knocked and dragged this way and that by its tethers and tiny rockets, but in the silence and harsh sunlight it was oddly graceful, its purposefulness undeniable.

  The firefly disappeared over the close horizon. Emma wondered if it was from the O ‘Neill or the Nautilus. Ours or theirs.

  She knew, in fact, that the way the firefly had gone was where the blue artifact stood in its excavated pit. A door to the future, a quarter-mile away.

  The thought meant nothing. She was immersed, already, in too much strangeness.

  And today, there was work to do. She turned back to the others.

  e-CNN:

  To recap, you are seeing pictures received live from Cruithne, broadcast from the asteroid just minutes ago. As you can see the image is a little nondescript right now, but our experts are telling us that we are seeing a stretch of Cruithne surface known as “regolith,” with the black starry sky in the background — or rather there would be stars but for overloading by the sunlight.

  The slave firefly robot seems to be panning right now, under your command, and we’re trying to make out what we’re seeing. It is a little like looking for a black cat in a mine shaft, hah hah.

  Just to remind you that you can take part in the live online exploration of Cruithne with the Bootstrap bandit astronauts. Just select your preference from the menu at the bottom of the picture and your vote will be polled, with all the others, once a second, and the recommendation passed straight to our camera firefly on Cruithne via our e-controller. You control the picture; you are on Cruithne right along with the astronauts; you can be a Bootstrap bandit, alongside the infamous Reid Malenfant.

  Right now the image seems a little static; perhaps you folks are arguing amongst yourselves, hah hah.

  There! Did you see that? Bob, can we rerun that? We can’t. Well, it looked to me like an astronaut, and it looked to me like he, or she, was waving at us. Maybe it was Reid Malenfant himself. If you folks out there want to start voting to pan back maybe we can get a good look…

  Maura Della:

  This was the Great Basin of Nevada.

  Stretches of empty highway roller-coasted over mountain ranges and down into salt flats. The human hold on this land seemed tenuous: she drove past ghost towns, federal prisons, brothels surrounded by barbed wire. The corroded mountainsides were dominated by abandoned gold mines, and the land in between was sagebrush open range. Dust devils danced across the flats, eerie.

  Eerie, yes. And, she thought, a kind of sinkhole for American national craziness too. To the south was the infamous Area 51, still a center of mystery and speculation. To the northwest, in the Black Rock desert, hippies and aging punks and other fringe meatware had gathered for decades for their Burning Man Festival, an annual orgy of gunplay, punk rock, and off-road driving.

  Somehow it seemed an entirely appropriate place to site America’s largest education and protection center for the Blues — the strange, smart, alien children who had sprouted in the midst of humanity.

  And Maura Della was on her way to visit little Tom Tybee there.

  She stopped for gas in a place called Heston. The guy who came out to serve her was about sixty; he had a beard like Santa Claus, and a red baseball cap with the logo of a helicopter firm. The big plate glass of the gas station window was shattered; there were brutal-looking shards scattered over the forecourt.

  Santa Claus saw her looking at the glass. She didn’t want to ask him how it got there, but he told her anyhow. “Sonic boom,” he said.

  The thing of it was, the conspiracy theorists here had a point. If there was anywhere in the U.S. that was manipulated by remote and mysterious agencies it was Nevada, where 90 percent of the land was managed by the federal government, a remote and imperial power to the ranchers and miners who lived here. Nevada was America’s wasteland, the dumping ground for the rest of the country.

  She paid, and got out of there.

  At the center she was met by the principal, Andrea Reeve.

  Reeve walked her around the center. It looked like… well, a grade school: flat-roofed buildings with big bright windows, a yard with climbing frames and play areas and big plastic outdoor toys, a shiny yellow fireman robot patrolling the outer walls. But most schools weren’t surrounded by an electrified fence.

  Inside, the center was bright, modern, airy. The rooms weren’t set out like the formal classrooms Maura remembered, with rows of desks in the center and a teacher and a blackboard at the front. The furniture was mixed and informal, much of it soft. The walls were covered by e-paintings that cycled every couple of minutes, and other aids like number tables and giant animated alphabet letters, as well as drawings and other pieces of work by the children.

  Everything was low, Maura noticed. Here was a coatrack no more than four feet from the ground, a canteen where the tables and chair
s looked like they were made for dolls. The walls were mostly bare beyond the height a small child could reach.

  Reeve saw her looking. “Most of our children are young,” she said. “Very few are over nine. It’s only a few years ago that the Blue phenomenon became apparent, less time since the systematic searches for the children began. We’ve brought them here from all over the continental U.S., and some from overseas. Generally rescue cases, in fact.”

  Reeve looked like schoolteachers always had, Maura thought: comfortably round, a little dowdy, hair streaked with gray. Maura found herself responding instinctively, trusting the woman. But, confusingly, this motherly woman was actually about two decades younger than Maura herself. Maybe parents feel like this all the time, she thought.

  But Reeve looked overtired, a little baffled, evidently disturbed by Maura’s presence here.

  They both knew Maura had no formal influence here. The truth was she wasn’t even sure where she stood, now, on the issue of the children. On the one hand she clung to her promise to oversee Tom Tybee; on the other she was a member of a government responsible for protecting the wider public from danger. Was it possible those two motivations conflicted?

  She only knew one way to figure it out, and that was to come see for herself.

  And now here were the children themselves. They were scattered through the rooms, working individually or in little groups. The children stood, sat, or lay on the floor without self-consciousness. Many of the children wore cordless earpieces and worked at bright plastic softscreens. There were teachers, but mostly the children seemed to be working with teaching robots: cute, unthreatening little gadgets covered in orange fur or shiny velvet.

  “We refer to these rooms as laboratories,” Reeve said. “The children have differing individual needs, levels of achievement, and learning paces. So we use the robots, individually programmed and heuristically adaptable.

  “A lot of the work we do is remedial, you might be surprised to know. Some of the children don’t even have much speech, and even from here in the U.S. they are often subliterate. They have tended to be taken out of school, or thrown out, as soon as their special abilities are recognized.” She eyed Maura. “You do need to understand the difficulties we face. Many of these children display some of the symptoms associated with autism. There is a mild form known as Asperger’s Syndrome, or mad scientist syndrome. Such a child may be highly intelligent, and driven by an obsession that pushes her to extraordinary achievements. But at the same time she may be extremely clumsy and uncoordinated. Also socially clumsy. You see, we have to protect them from themselves.” She sighed. “In some cases the disorder may be more severe. Some of the children seem to have only a peripheral response to pleasure and pain. That makes it difficult to control them.”

  “Because they don’t respond to punishment?”

  “Or to hugs,” Reeve said severely. “We aren’t monsters, Representative.”

  “I don’t see how you can dissociate evidence of a disorder like that from, umm, the bruises left by the handling some of these kids have received.”

  “No. And we don’t try. You must believe, Ms. Della, that we do our best for the children here, as intellectuals, and as children.”

  “And once they are past the remedial stage—”

  “Once past that, they are very soon beyond us” Reeve sighed. “All we can do is monitor them, try to ensure their physical needs are met, and give them some elements of a rounded education. And we try to develop social skills.” Reeve eyed Maura. “Often we have to all but drag them to the games, to the yard, and teach them how to play. A child is a child, no matter how gifted.”

  “I’m sure you’re right.”

  “But it isn’t made easier by the experts who come here,” Reeve said severely. “Of course we understand, it’s part of our charter that the more advanced children are essentially performing original research, with results that might benefit the broader academic community. And we have to make their results accessible. But to have teams of academics trampling through here, quizzing the children and disrupting their general education, all for the sake of seeking out some new nugget of knowledge that can be written up and published under their names—”

  Maura half tuned her out. This was obviously Reeve’s particular grievance, her hobbyhorse. What was Reeve really concerned about? The fate of the children here, in this rather sinister place, or the fact that the jackdaw academics clearly didn’t credit her in their papers and theses?

  Each child wore a pale gold coverall, zipped up the front, with a blue circle stitched to the breast.

  “Why the uniforms?”

  “Everyone asks that. We call them play suits. We had to come up with something when the blue-circle identifiers became federal law. They’re actually very practical. They are made of smart fabric that can keep warm in winter, cool in summer… Actually the children seem to find the blue-circle logo comforting. We don’t know why. Besides, it does help us identify the children if any of them escape.”

  Nevada. Barbed wire. Uniforms. Escape. This was a school, perhaps, but with a powerful subtext of a cage.

  Reeve led her into another laboratory. There was equipment of some kind scattered around the room on lab benches. Some of it was white-box instrumentation, anonymous science-lab stuff, unidentifiable to Maura. But there were also some pieces of apparatus more familiar from her own school days: Bunsen burners and big chunky electromagnets and what looked like a Van de Graaff generator.

  There were five children here, gathered in a circle, sitting cross-legged on the ground. One of them was Tom Tybee. The children didn’t have any tools with them, no softscreens or writing paper. They were simply talking, but so fast Maura could barely make out a word. One of the children was a girl, taller than the rest, her blond hair plaited neatly on her head. But it wasn’t clear that she was in any way leading the discussion.

  “We call this our physics lab,” Reeve said softly. “But much of what the children seem to be exploring is multidisciplinary, in our terms. And if you can’t follow what they’re saying, don’t worry. If they don’t know a word, they will often make up their own. Sometimes we can translate back to English. Sometimes we find there is no English word for the referent.”

  “Clever kids.”

  “Little smart-asses,” Reeve said with a vehemence that startled Maura. “Of course most of what they do is theoretical. We can’t give them very advanced equipment here.”

  “If it’s a question of budget—”

  “Representative Della, they are still children. And you can’t put a child, however smart, in charge of a particle accelerator.”

  “I suppose not.”

  Watching the children talking and working, quietly, purposefully, Maura felt a frisson of fear: the superstitious, destructive awe she so reviled in others.

  The question was, what were they working toward? What was their goal, why were they here, how did they know what to do? The questions were unanswerable, deeply disturbing — and that was without being a parent, without having to ask herself the most profound questions of all: Why my child? Why has she been taken away?

  Perhaps, she thought uneasily, they would all soon find out. And then what?

  “Hello, Ms. Della.”

  Maura looked down. It was Tom Tybee. He was standing before her, straight and solemn in his golden suit. He was clutching an orange football shape.

  Maura forced a smile and bent down to Tom’s level. “Hello, Tom.”

  The taller blond girl had come to stand beside him. She was holding Tom’s hand and was watching Maura with suspicious eyes.

  “Look.” Tom held out his toy to her. It was his Heart: an emotion container, a sound-vision recording device that enabled the user to record his favorite experiences. Maura wondered what he found to record here.

  “My mom gave it to me.”

  “Well, I think it’s terrific.”

  Reeve said, “Representative Della, meet Anna. Our oldest student.
”

  The girl stared at Maura — not hostile, just reserved, wary.

  “Can I go?” Tom asked.

  Maura felt unaccountably baffled, excluded. “Yes, Tom. It was nice to see you.”

  Tom, his hand still in Anna’s, returned to the group and sat down, and the rich flow of their conversation resumed. Anna joined in, but Maura noticed that she kept her gray eyes on her and Reeve.

  “You see?” Reeve said tiredly.

  “See what?”

  “How they make you feel!’1 Reeve smiled and pushed gray hair out of her eyes. “Hello, good-bye. I know they can’t help it. But they simply aren’t interested in us. It’s impossible to feel warmth for them. People, the staff, tend not to stay long.”

  “How do you vet your staff?”

  “We use parents and relatives where we can. Tom Tybee’s father has done some work here, for instance… I’ll take you through the recruitment procedures.”

  “Where is Anna from?”

  “The North Territory School.”

  “Australia.” The worst in the world, a virtual concentration camp. No wonder she is so wary, Maura thought.

  Well, this wasn’t a summer camp either, she reminded herself. It was a prison.

  But the real bars around these children were intangible, formed by the fear and ignorance and superstition of the society that had given them birth. Until that got better, until some kind of public education worked its way into the mass consciousness to displace the hysterical fear and hostility that surrounded these children, maybe this fortress was the best anybody could do. But she promised herself that she would watch this place, and the others around the country, and ensure that here at least things did not get worse for Tom Tybee, and Anna, and the other children here, the Blues.

  Some childhood, she thought.

  She let Reeve take her to her office, and they began to go through staff profiles.