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The man she had come to meet was waiting at the checkpoint. He was the teacher who had reported the boy to the Milton Foundation. He came forward hesitantly, holding out his hand. ‘Ms Stoney. I’m Stef Younger …’ He was small, portly, dressed in a kind of loose safari style, baggy shirt and shorts fitted with deep, bulging pockets. He couldn’t have been older than thirty; he was prematurely balding, and his scalp, burned pink by the winter sun, was speckled with sweat.
He was obviously southern African, probably from Zimbabwe or South Africa itself. His elaborate accent, forever linked to a nightmare past, made her skin prickle. But there were blue chalk-dust stains on his shirt, she noticed, the badge of the teacher since time immemorial, and she warmed to him, just a little.
They got back in the car, and drove away from the Falls.
Africa was flat and still and dusty, eroded smooth by time, apparently untouched by the twenty-first century. The only verticals were the trees and the skinny people, moving slowly through the harsh light.
They reached the town of Livingstone. She could discern the remnants of Art Deco style in the closed-up banks and factories and even a cinema, now sun-bleached and washed out to a uniform sand colour, all of it marred by ubiquitous Shit Cola ads.
Younger gave her a little tourist grounding.
This remained a place of grinding poverty. Misguided aid efforts had flooded the area with cheap Western clothes, and local crooks had used them to undercut and wipe out the textile factories that had once kept everybody employed.
Now the unemployment here ran at 80% of adults. And there was no kind of welfare safety net. If you didn’t have a relative who worked somewhere, you found some other way to live …
Younger pointed. ‘Look at that.’
At the side of the road, there was a baboon squatting on the rim of a rusty trash can. He held himself there effortlessly with his back feet, while he dug with his forearms into the trash.
Emma was stunned. She’d never been so close to a non-human primate before, outside a zoo, anyhow. The baboon was the size of a ten-year-old boy, lean and grey and obviously ferociously strong, eyes sharp and intelligent. So much more human than she might have thought.
Younger grinned. ‘He’s looking for plastic bags. He knows that’s where he will find food. Tourists think he’s cute. But give him food and he’ll be back tomorrow. Smart, see. Smart as a human. But he doesn’t think.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘He doesn’t understand death. You see the females carrying round dead infants, sometimes for days, trying to feed them.’
‘Maybe they’re grieving.’
‘Nah.’ Younger wound down his window and raised his fist.
The baboon’s head snapped around, sizing up Younger with a sharp tense glance. Then he leapt off the trash can rim and loped away.
Away from the town the road stretched, black and unmarked, across a flat, dry landscape. The trees were sparse, and in many instances smashed over, as if by some great storm. There was little scrub growing between the trees. But everywhere the land was shaped by tracks, the footsteps of animals and birds overlaid in the white Kalahari sands. The tracks of elephants were great craters bigger than dinner plates, and where the ground was firm she could see the print left by the tough, cracked skin of an elephant’s sole, a spidery map as distinctive as a fingerprint.
Emma was a city girl, and she was struck by the self-evident organization of the landscape here, the way the various species – in some cases separated genetically by hundreds of millions of years – worked together to maintain a stable environment for them all. Control, stability, organization, all without an organizing human mind, without a proboscidean Reid Malenfant to plan the future for them.
But this, she thought, was the past, for better or worse. Now mind was here, and had taken control; it was mind which would shape this landscape in future, and the whole of the planet, not blind evolution.
Maybe there is a lesson here for us all, she thought. Damned if I know what it is.
At length, driving through the bush, she saw elephants.
They moved through the trees, liquid graceful and silent, like dark clouds gliding over the Earth, shapers of this landscape. With untrained eyes she saw only impressionistic flashes: a gleam of tusks, a curling trunk, an unmistakable morphology. The elephants were myths of childhood and picture books and zoo visits, miraculously preserved in a world growing over with concrete and plastic and waste.
They came, at last, to a village.
The car stopped, and they climbed out. Younger spread his hands. ‘Welcome to Nakatindi.’ Huts of dirt and grass clustered to either side of the road and spread away to the flat distance.
Nervous – and embarrassed at herself for feeling so – Emma glanced back at the car. The driver had wound up and opaqued the windows. She could see him lying back, insulated from Africa in his air-conditioned bubble, his eyes closed, synth music playing.
As soon as she walked off the dusty hardtop road she was surrounded by kids, stick thin and bright as buttons. They were dressed in ancient Western clothes – T-shirts and shorts, mostly too big, indescribably worn and dirty, evidently handed down through grubby generations. The kids pushed at each other, tangles of flashing limbs, competing for her attention, miming cameras. ‘Snap me. Snap me alone.’ They thought she was a tourist.
The dominant colour, as she walked into the village, was a kind of golden brown. The village was constructed on the flat Kalahari sand that covered the area for a hundred miles around. But the sand here was marked only by human footprints, and pitted with debris, scraps of metal and wood.
The sky was a washed-out blue dome, huge and empty, and the sun was directly overhead, beating at her scalp. There were no shadows here, little contrast. She had a renewed sense of age, of everything worn flat by time.
There were pieces of car, scattered everywhere. She saw busted-off car doors used like garden gates, hub caps beaten crudely into bowls. Two of the kids were playing with a kind of skateboard, just a strip of wood towed along by a wire loop. The ‘wheels’ of the board were, she recognized with a shock, sawn-off lengths of car exhaust. Younger explained that a few years ago some wrecks had been abandoned a mile or so away. The villagers had towed them into town and scavenged them until there was nothing left.
‘… You’ll mostly see men here today, men and boys. It’s Sunday so some of the men will be drunk. The women and girls are off in the bush. They gather wild fruit, nuts, berries, that kind of stuff.’
There was no sanitation here, no sewage system. The people-women and girls – carried their water from a communal stand-pipe in yellowed plastic bowls and bottles. For their toilet they went into the bush. There was nothing made of metal, as far as she could see, save for the scavenged automobile parts and a few tools.
Not even any education, save for the underfunded efforts of gone-tomorrow volunteers like Younger.
Younger eyed her. ‘These people are basically hunter-gatherers. 150 years ago they were living Late Stone Age lives in the bush. Now, hunting is illegal. And so, this.’
‘Why don’t they return to the bush?’
‘Would you?’
They reached Younger’s hut. He grinned, self-deprecating. ‘Home sweet home.’
The hut was built to the same standard as the rest, but Emma could see within an inflatable mattress, what looked like a water-purifier, a softscreen with a modem and an inflatable satellite dish, a few toiletries. ‘I allow myself a few luxuries,’ Younger said. ‘It’s not indulgence. It’s a question of status.’
She frowned. ‘I’m not here to judge you.’
‘No. Fine.’ Younger’s mood seemed complex: part apologetic for the conditions here, part a certain pride, as if of ownership. Look at the good I’m doing here.
Depressed, Emma wondered whether, even if places of poverty and deprivation did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them, to give mixed-up people like Younger a purpose to their limited lives. Or maybe that was too cynical; he was, after all, here.
A girl came out of the hut’s shadows. She looked no more than ten, shoulder-high, thin as a rake in her grubby brown dress. She was carrying a bowl of dirty water. She seemed scared by Emma and she shrank back. Emma forced herself to smile.
Younger beckoned, and spoke to the girl softly. ‘This is Mindi,’ he told Emma. ‘My little helper. Thirteen years of age; older than she looks, as you can see. She keeps me from being a complete slob.’ He laid his soft hand on the girl’s thin shoulder; she didn’t react. When he let her go she hurried away, carrying the bowl on her head.
‘Come see the star of the show.’ Younger beckoned, and she followed him into the shadows of the little hut. Out of the glaring flat sunlight, it took a few seconds for her eyes to adjust to the dark.
She heard the boy before she saw him: soft breathing, slow, dusty movements, the rustle of cloth on skin.
He seemed to be lying on his belly on the floor. His face was illuminated by a dim yellow glow that came from a small flashlight, propped up in the dust. His eyes were huge; they seemed to drink in the flashlight light, unblinking.
Younger said, ‘He’s called Michael.’
‘How old is he?’
‘Eight, nine.’
Emma found herself whispering. ‘What’s he doing?’
Younger shrugged. ‘Trying to see photons.’
‘I noticed him when he was very young, five or six. He would stand in the dust and whirl around, watching his arms and clothes being pulled outwards. I’d seen kids with habits like that before. You see them focusing on the swish of a piece of cloth, or the flicker of light in the trees. Mildly autistic, probably: unable to make sense of the world, and so finding comfort in small, predictable details. Michael seemed a bit like that. But he said something strange. He said he liked to feel the stars pulling him around.’
She frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘I had to look it up. It’s called Mach’s principle. How does Michael know if he is spinning around, or if the universe is all spinning around him?’
She thought about it. ‘Because he can feel the centripetal forces?’
‘Ah. But you can prove that a rotating universe, a huge matter current flowing around him, would exert exactly the same force. It’s actually a deep result of general relativity.’
‘My God. And he was figuring this out when he was five?’
‘He couldn’t express it. But, yes, he was figuring it out. He seems to have in his head, as intuition, some of the great principles the physicists have battled to express for centuries …’
‘And now he’s trying to see a photon?’
Younger smiled. ‘He asked me what would happen if he shone his flashlight up in the air. Would the beam just keep on spreading, thinner and thinner, all the way to the Moon? But he already knew the answer, or rather, he somehow intuited it.’
‘The beam fragments into photons.’
‘Yes. He called them light bits, until I taught him the physics term. He seems to have a sense of the discreteness of things. If you could see photons one at a time you’d see a kind of irregular flickering, all the same brightness: photons, particles of light, arriving at your eye one after another. That’s what he hopes to see.’
‘And will he?’
‘Unlikely.’ Younger smiled. ‘He’d need to be a few thousand miles away. And he’d need a photomultiplier to pick up those photons. At least, I think he would …’ He looked at her uneasily. ‘I have some trouble keeping up with him. He’s absorbed the simple math and physics I’ve been able to give him and taken them to places I never dreamed of. For instance he seems to have deduced special relativity too. From first principles.’
‘How?’
Younger shrugged. ‘If you have the physical insight, all you need is Pythagoras’s theorem. And Michael figured out his own proof of that two years ago.’
The boy played with his flashlight, obsessive, unspeaking, ignoring the adults.
She walked out into the sunshine, which was dazzling. Michael followed her out. In the bright light she noticed that Michael had a mark on his forehead. A perfect blue circle.
‘What’s that? A tribe mark?’
‘No.’ Younger shrugged. ‘It’s only chalk. He does it himself. He renews it every day.’
‘What does it mean?’
But Younger had no answer.
She told Younger she would return the following day with tests, and maybe she should meet Michael’s parents, discuss release forms and the compensation and conditions the Foundation offered.
But Younger said the boy’s parents were dead. ‘It ought to make the release easier,’ he said cheerfully.
She held up her hand to the boy, in farewell. His eyes widened as he stared at her hand. Then he started to babble excitedly to Younger, plucking his sleeve.
‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘It’s the gold. The gold ring on your hand. He’s never seen gold before. Heavy atoms, he says.’
She had an impulse to give the boy the ring – after all, it was only a token of her failed marriage to Malenfant, and meant little to her.
Younger noticed her dilemma. ‘Don’t offer them anything. Gifts, money. A lot of people come here and try to give the shirt off their backs.’
‘Guilt.’
‘I guess. But you give one money, they all want it. They have no ambition, these fellows. They sit around with their beer and their four wives. They’re happy, in their way.’
She remembered that Younger had talked about the baboon in the trash in exactly the same tone of voice.
Mindi, the slim girl-child, now returned, carrying a plastic bowl of fresh water. She looked anxiously to Younger, and would not meet Emma’s eyes.
If she was thirteen, Emma thought, the girl was of marriageable age here. Maybe Stef Younger was finding more compensation in his life here than mere altruism.
It was a relief to climb into the car, to sip cool water and brush ten-million-year-old Kalahari dust out of her hair.
That night, she had trouble sleeping. She couldn’t get the image of those bright-button village kids out of her head. Mute inglorious Miltons, indeed.
On the way here Emma had done some more digging into the Milton Foundation.
Milton turned out to be a shadowy coalition of commercial, philanthropic and religious groups, particularly Christian. The Foundation was international, and its Schools had been set up in many countries, including the US. The children were in general separated from their families and homes, and spirited away to a School perhaps half a world away. In fact – so some journalists alleged – children were being moved from School to School, even between countries, making monitoring even more difficult.
Not everybody welcomed the arrival of a School full of children labelled as geniuses. Nobody likes a smart ass. In some places the Schools and children had actually come under physical attack, and there were rumours of one murder; the Foundation, she had learned, spent a remarkable amount of its money on security, and almost as much on public relations.
And there were darker stories still of what went on inside the Schools.
Emma’s doubts about associating Bootstrap with the initiative continued to grow. But she knew that until she came up with a stronger case for pulling back she was going to be overruled by Malenfant himself.
She wished she understood Cornelius and his shadowy associates better. She didn’t yet grasp how this program fitted in with Eschatology’s wider agenda: the end of the world, messages from the future … She had the intuition that what they were seeking wasn’t just smart children, but something much more strange.
And she wondered if that was exactly what she had found here in Africa.
She stepped onto her balcony.
Looking up at the stars, Michael’s stars, she could tell she was far from home. She recognized Ursa Major. But the familiar childhood panhandle shape was upside down, and its pointer stars were pointing below the horizon. And when the Moon rose, it climbed straight up into the sky, heading for a point somewhere over her head. Not only that, it was ripped up sideways; the Man in the Moon’s forehead was pointing north.
But it wasn’t the Moon that was tipped; it was herself; for she had flown around the belly of the planet, which was thereby proven to be round. It was a startling thought.
I should travel more, she thought.
How was it possible for a kid on the fringe of the African bush to figure out so much fundamental physics?
If she and Malenfant had had kids, she supposed, she might have a better instinct on how to handle this situation. But she didn’t, and the whole world of children, damaged or super-intelligent or otherwise, was a mystery to her.
… On a whim, she unfolded her softscreen and looked up the properties of gold.
