None of the bus’ passengers — not even Bill Tybee — got past that first checkpoint. None save Maura.
The walkway was translucent, a tunnel between black sky and glowing ground. Craning her neck, Maura peered through the fabric walls and glimpsed Never-Never Land itself. It was a dome, shaded silver-gray. Hints of green inside. Something moving, like a swaying tree trunk. Good God, it was a neck.
Just before the entry to the complex, the aide paused and pointed. “The dome itself is polarized. It turns opaque and transparent by turns to simulate an Earthlike day-night cycle. And during the long night there are lights to achieve the same effect. See? There are banks of electric floods on gantries, like a sports stadium.” The aide’s hair was blond, eyes blue, classic Nordic type. Minnesota? But her accent was neutral.
Maura said, “Did I see a giraffe in there?”
The girl laughed. “Maybe. That’s what we think it is.”
“Don’t you know?”
“I only have clearance to violet level.”
“How long have you been up here?”
“Two years, with breaks.”
“Aren’t you curious?”
“We’re not paid to be curious, ma’am.” Then the professional mask slipped a little. “Actually, no. Never-Never is just a tent full of those little Blue-ass monsters. What is there to be curious about? Anyhow you have blue clearance, right?”
“Yes.”
“I guess you’ll see for yourself, whatever you want.”
At the other end of the walkway was another airlock, another security check, where Maura said good-bye to the aide, whose sole purpose seemed to have been to escort Maura all of twenty yards of this quarter-million-mile journey.
The processing here took another hour. Her pass and other credentials were checked several times over; she was body-searched twice, and passed through an X-ray machine and metal detector and other scanners she didn’t recognize. Finally she was asked to strip, and she stood alone under a shower that turned hot and cold and stank of some antiseptic agent. She was distantly pleased that she didn’t sag quite as much as at home. Then there was a pulse of light, a sharp pain. She was left with a fine ash on her exposed skin.
After that she was given a fresh set of clothes: underwear and a coverall. The coverall had no pockets, just a transparent pouch on the outside where she was allowed to carry her blue pass and passport, handkerchief, and other small items.
She was led along one last translucent corridor — one last glimpse of the Moon — and then, escorted by two more soldiers — there must be dozens here, she thought, racking up one hell of an expense — she passed through the curving wall of Never-Never Land itself.
And then there was grass under the soft slippers on her feet, a dome that glowed blue-black over her head, scored by a great diffuse shadow, a shadow cast by Tycho’s rim mountains.
There were a few stands of bushes and a single giant tree, low and squat. The air was cool, crisp, fresh, and it smelled of green growing things, of cut summer lawns. Green grass, growing on the Moon. Who’d have thought she’d live to see this?
A girl was standing before her: aged maybe sixteen, slender, willowy, barefoot, dressed in a smock of simple orange fabric, a bright blue circle stitched to the breast. Her face wasn’t pretty, Maura thought, but it was calm, composed, self-possessed. Centered. She was missing a tooth in her lower jaw.
It was Anna. And she had wings.
“It’s nice to see you again, Ms. Della,” Anna said gravely.
“Call me Maura. You remember me, then.”
“You were always a friend to us.”
Maura sighed. “Child, I tried to have you killed.”
“You did your duty. There are many worse people in the world than you, Maura Della. Why don’t you take your shoes off?”
Maura smiled. “Why don’t I?” She kicked off the slippers and walked forward on the grass. It was cool and moist under her feet. The blades felt oddly stiff, but she knew that was an artifact of the low gravity.
Anna folded her wings and jumped into the air: just bent her legs and leaped up through ten feet or more. She seemed to hover for a long heartbeat. Then she flapped the wings — Maura felt a great downrush of the cool, low-pressure, crystal-sharp air — and Anna shot into the domed sky.
Maura glanced at the two soldiers behind her. One of them, a bull-powerful blond man, was watching the girl’s body with narrow, hard eyes.
Anna swept in for a neat landing, slowing with a couple of running steps, thin legs flashing.
Maura applauded slowly. “I’d like to try that.”
Anna held the wings out. “It’s not as easy as it looks. You have to flap hard enough to support one-sixth of your Earth weight.” She eyed Maura. “Imagine a nine-pound dumbbell in each hand, holding them out from your body… Maybe you should take an air car for today. It’s kind of easier.”
Maura turned to her escort questioningly.
The blond soldier spoke. “We can’t go any farther into the interior, ma’am. But you’re authorized. At your own risk.” He sounded as if he was middle European, German maybe. He pointed upward. Maura saw a football-sized surveillance robot, small and complex and glittering with lenses, gliding noiselessly through the air. “Just shout and we’ll get you out.”
“Thank you.”
Maura let the girl lead her to a small fenced-off area where three cars sat, parked roughly on the grass. Maura picked one and, with the simulacrum of youthful exhilaration granted her by lunar G, she vaulted neatly over the door into the driver’s seat.
The car was just a white box of metal and ceramic, open, with a joystick and a small control panel. It had Boeing markings, and simple instructions marked in big block capitals. The car wasn’t wheeled; instead there was a turbofan in a pod at each corner. Maura quickly learned how to use the joystick to make the pods swivel this way and that.
And when she fired up the engine — noiseless, powered by clean-burning hydrogen — the car shot straight up into the air. At a touch of the joystick, it tipped and squirted back and forth, like
something out of The Jetsons.
Anna jumped into the air and circled higher. When she passed out of Tycho’s shadow into sunlight, her wings seemed to burst into flame. Then she turned and streaked toward the heart of the dome.
Maura followed more cautiously, skimming a few feet above the grass.
Never-Never Land was maybe the size of a football field. It seemed to be mostly grassed over, but here and there ponds glinted, blue as swimming pools. She could see small robot gardeners trundling cautiously over the grass, clipping and digging.
Low mounds protruded from the grass. One of them had an open door, bright artificial light streaming out. Maybe the children slept in there, to keep down their hours of exposure to the Moon’s high radiation levels.
At the very center of the dome was an area fenced-off by a tall glass wall. Maura knew that not even her blue pass would get her through that perimeter; for within was the artifact — transport, bubble, whatever — that the children had constructed in Nevada to protect them from the nuke and carry them here.
Even now, no adult had the faintest idea how it worked.
Anna flew toward the dome’s single giant tree.
It looked like an oak to Maura, but its trunk had to be twenty feet across, and each of its branches, broad and sturdy, was no less than three or four feet thick. But the tree looked somehow stunted, constrained to grow broad and flat rather than tall; if it had remained in proportion it might, she supposed, have reached five or six hundred feet, busting out of this stadium-sized dome.
Anna glided to a branch and settled there gracefully, folding her wings behind her. Maura killed her engine and, with a soft creak, the air car settled into place in a crook of the branch.
Maura saw some of the other children, seemingly far below. There were two groups, each of four or five kids; the oldest of them looked around ten. After five years on the Moon, th
ey looked skinny, graceful. One group was playing what looked like a tag game, chasing with great loping strides and somersaults and spectacular lunar leaps. Maura could hear them laughing, the sound drifting up to her like the ripple of water.
The other group seemed more solemn. They were moving around each other, but in a series of patterns, each of which they would hold for a fraction of a second of stillness, and then move on to the next. They seemed to be talking, or maybe singing, but Maura couldn’t make out any words.
“Anna, where are the Tybee children? Tom and Billie—”
Anna pointed.
The Tybees were part of the solemn party below. Maura recognized Tom, ten years old now, his face round and set and serious. At his waist he had his electronic Heart — battered, dirty, probably nonfunctioning, a gift from his long-lost mother. She wondered which one of the younger kids was Billie.
Once she had promised his father that she would protect Tom. It was a promise that had brought her all this way. And yet, what protection could she offer him? What could she ever have given him?
“Can you tell me what they are doing down there?”
“They’re working. It’s what your people call—”
“Multiplexing. Yes, I know. What are they talking about?”
Anna’s face worked. “They are considering constraints on the ultimate manifold.”
Maura suspected that she was going to struggle with the rest of this conversation. “The manifold of what?”
“Universes. It is of course a truism that all logically possible universes must exist. The universe, this universe, is described — umm, that’s the wrong word — by a formal system. Mathematics. A system of mathematics.”
Maura frowned. “You mean a Theory of Everything?”
Anna waved a hand, as if that were utterly trivial, and her beautiful wings rustled. “But there are many formal systems. Some of them are less rich, some more. But each formal system, logically consistent internally, describes a possible universe, which therefore exists.”
Maura tried to follow that. “Give me an example of a formal system.”
“The rules of geometry. I mean, Euclid’s geometry.”
“High school stuff.”
Anna looked at her with reproof. “I never went to high school, Maura.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Some of these universes, as described by the formal systems, are rich enough to support self-aware substructures. Life. Intelligence. And some of the universes aren ‘t rich enough. A universe described by Euclidean geometry probably isn’t, for example. Therefore it can’t be observed. What the group down there is trying to establish is whether a universe that cannot be observed, though it exists, may be said to have a different category of existence.” Anna glanced at Maura. “Do you understand?”
“Not a damn word.”
Anna smiled.
Maura could see firefly robots hovering over the heads of the children, peering down, recording everything they did and said. There might be a rich treasure of knowledge and wisdom being conjured up in the dance of those slim forms, but the world’s massed experts couldn’t begin to decode it. IBM had quoted development times in decades just to construct a translation software suite.
The children had, it seemed, evolved their own language from elements of their native spoken languages, mixed with gestures, dance, and music. It was a complex, multilevel communication channel, with many streams of information multiplexed together. Linguists believed it was a true language, with a unifying grammar. But it transcended human languages in the richness of its structure, the speed and compression of its data transmission, the fact that it was analog — the angle of an arm or head held just so seemed to make an immense difference to meaning — and its rate of evolution, sometimes changing daily.
And besides, there seemed to be some features that could not be translated into English, even in principle. Such as new tenses. There was one based on palindromic constructions, symmetric in time, that seemed to be designed to describe situations with looping causality, or even causality violation.
Grammar for a time traveler.
Some theorists were saying that the orderly linear perception of time, of neat cause and effect, enjoyed by humans was an artifact of a limited consciousness: like the way the brain could “construct” an image of a face from a few lines on a page. Perhaps the children could experience time on a deeper level: non-linearly, even acausally.
And the farthest-out theorists wondered if their minds were somehow linked, permanently, by the neutrino ocean that filled the universe. As if Feynman radio technology was allowing some higher strata of consciousness and self-awareness to operate here.
The various strategies that had been tried to keep a handle on the children had yet to pay off. The Trojan Horse kids — like little Billie Tybee, below — seemed to have melted into the strange community here without a backward glance. The Trojan Horses had been heavily indoctrinated with a basic common grammar and quantification rules in the hope that they would at least continue to talk comprehensibly to the outside world. But even that had failed. They just didn’t have the patience or inclination to translate their thoughts into baby talk for their parents.
The only Blue who would regularly talk to those outside was Anna, five or six years older than any of the rest. And the specialist observers believed that — though Anna was the de facto leader of the children here — she was too old, her grammatical sense frozen too early, to have become fully immersed in the complex interchanges that dominated the lives of the rest of the children.
And besides, Anna was hardly a useful ambassador. Adults had damaged her too much.
A section of oak tree trunk seemed to split away, bending stiffly, and a thin, distorted face turned and peered up at Maura.
Maura nearly jumped out of her seat. “Oh, my good gosh.”
Anna laughed.
The giraffe stepped out of the shade of the tree. The yellow-and-black mottled markings on its body had made it almost invisible to Maura, startling for such a huge animal. The giraffe loped easily forward, fine-chiseled head dipping gently, the lunar gravity making no apparent difference to its stately progress. Now two more animals followed the first, another adult and a baby, its neck stubby by comparison.
Anna said, “There are little NASA robot dung beetles that come out at night and roll away their droppings. They’re really funny.”
“Why are they here?”
Anna shrugged. “We asked for them. Somebody saw one in a picture book once.”
Maura watched the giraffes recede, loping easily in the wash of sunlight and crater-wall shadow, their bodies and motion utterly strange, unlike the body plans of any creature she had seen. A real extreme of evolution, she thought.
Just like these damn kids.
Anna’s eyes, gray as moondust, were grave, serious. “Maura, why are you here?”
“You deserve the truth,” Maura said.
“Yes, we do.” Anna looked up at Earth, fat and full, its round-ness slightly distorted by the fabric of the dome. “We see the lights sometimes, on the night side.”
“What do you think they are?”
Anna shrugged. “Cities burning.”
Maura sighed. “Have you studied history, Anna?”
“Yes. The information is limited, the interpretations partial. But it is interesting.”
“Then you’ll know there have been times like this before. The religious wars during the Reformation, for instance. Protestants against Catholics. The Catholics believed that only their priests controlled access to the afterlife. So anybody who tried to deny their powers threatened not just life, but even the afterlife. And the Protestants believed the Catholic priests were false, and would therefore deny their followers access to the afterlife. If you look at it from the protagonists’ point of view, they were reasonable wars to fight, because they were over the afterlife itself.”
“Are the wars now religious?”
“In
a sense. But they are about the future. There are different groups who believe they have the right to control the future of humankind — which, for the first time in our history, has come into our thinking as a tangible thing, an asset, something to be fought over. And that’s what they are fighting for.”
“What you mean is they are fighting over the children. Blue children, like me, and what they think we can offer.”
“Yes,” said Maura.
“They are wrong,” Anna said carefully. “All of them.”
“Here’s the bottom line,” Maura said. “I’m not sure how much longer, umm, wise heads are going to prevail. Even in the U.S.”
Anna listened, her eyes soft. “How long?”
“I don’t know,” Maura said honestly. “Months at the most, I would think. Then they will come for you.”
Anna said, “It will be enough.”
“For what? “
Anna wouldn’t reply.
Frustrated, Maura snapped, “You frighten people, Anna. Christ, you frighten me. Sitting here on the Moon with your plans and your incomprehensible science. We detected the artifact in the lunar mantle…”
It had been picked up by seismometry. A lump of highly compressed matter — possibly quark matter — the size of a mountain. It was right under this dome. Nobody had any idea how it got there, or what it was for.
Maura glared at Anna. “Are we right to be frightened?”
“Yes,” Anna said gently, and Maura was chilled.
“Why won’t you tell us what you’re doing?”
“We are trying. We are telling you what you can understand.”
“Are we going to be able to stop you?”
Anna reached out and grabbed Maura’s hand, squeezed it. The girl’s skin was soft, warm. “I’m sorry.”
Then, without warning, Anna tipped forward, falling out of the tree, and spread her wings. She soared away, sailing across the distorted face of Earth, and out of Maura’s view.
When Maura got back to the tractor, Bill was waiting for her. He affected a lack of interest. But as the bus crawled its painful way back to the NASA base, he hung on every word she had to tell him about conditions inside the dome, and about the children, and what she had glimpsed of Tom and little Billie.
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