Stephen Baxter - Time

When he had been taken out of the village he had understood almost none of what happened to him, and his memories had become jumbled, like the snapshots.

But there was still a sky above him, with stars and a Moon, even though they were in different places from when he was in the village.

And -when he closed his eyes — on his pallet at night, in the stillness of his blanket, with no sound or sensation — he could feel deep inside himself that time wore on, passing inexorably, measured invisibly by the evolution of his own thoughts. It didn’t matter that his memories didn’t make sense, that what had happened to him had no logic or explanation. It was enough that he knew, deep inside, that the universe still worked.

The rules, here in the School, became simple.

Food was everything.

You could not be sure when another meal might come, so you had to eat or hoard every scrap of food you could find.

In fact it was better to hoard as much as possible, to hide it in your clothes or in a cache, like Michael’s store in the wall of the dormitory hut, to make it last longer.

If you had food you had power. If another had food, they had power over you.

There were other rules.

For example: at night the children were not allowed to go outside their dormitory room to relieve themselves. There was always a Sister or a Brother in the dormitory to ensure this was so. There was a single slop bucket at night, set in the middle of the floor. It was not big enough and soon filled up. If it spilled on the floor, you would be punished. If you made a mess, if you wet your bed or relieved yourself where you shouldn’t, you would be punished. Many of the younger children were quite clumsy, and so would often knock over the bucket or otherwise mess the place up. They were punished often.

At night Michael would hear children crying in pain as they tried to resist the temptation to use the bucket. And he would hear Anna’s quiet, grave voice, helping them stay quiet, overcome the discomfort.

New children, arriving here in their shirts marked with crude blue circles, would often cry and complain, and suffer when they broke the rules. They soon learned, however.

Michael had one possession he cared about. It was the flashlight Stef had given him. Michael used the flashlight sparingly, and the new batteries had hardly dimmed.

At night, he would crawl under his bed, in utter silence. He had some pieces of scrap metal into which he had knocked small holes with a headless nail.

He shone the flashlight on one metal scrap and looked at the spot of yellow light he cast on the wall. He saw a bright central spot surrounded by a band of half shadow, and darkness beyond. Then he put another scrap in that spot, punctured by a second hole, so that the light he cast was stretched thinner.

The spot of light cast by the second hole was different. He saw the central spot and the outer darkness, but between them there were intricate patterns of light and dark, concentric rings. There was color here, blue and orange and red rings overlapping. The rings, in the silent dark, were quite beautiful. He was seeing waves, like ripples on a pond, places where the bits of light — photons — were washing against each other, falling together in the bright places or nudging each other out of the way in the dark.

He found a scrap of cellophane, bright blue, and put that over one of the holes. Now he saw a simpler system of concentric rings, painted in blue only. He found the blue circles comforting. He imagined they were doors painted on the wall, and that he might pass through them, to go home to the village, or somewhere even better.

He kept pulling his apparatus apart. Perhaps he could stretch it so much that only one light bit at a time, one photon, would pass through the holes. He never managed that, but it didn’t matter; he could see in his mind what the result would be.

He would see a stream of photons speckling against the wall, nudging and jostling, working together to make the glowing bands.

But one photon, alone, separate from the others, was like a thrown stone. What was affecting itl How could it know which parts of the wall to land on, and which not?

The answer was obvious. The photon was being nudged and jostled into the right place, just as it had been when part of a flood. So there must be things coming from the holes to jostle the photon, even when only one photon at a time passed through the holes. Those things behaved exactly like photons, except he could not see them.

They were ghost photons, he thought. Partners of the “real” one, the one he could see. The real photon reached forward in time, inquiring. And a flood of ghosts from the future came crowding back in time, along every possible path it could take. And yet they were real, for they jostled the genuine photon just as if it were part of a dense, bright beam.

For every photon, there was an uncounted flood of ghosts, of possible futures, just as real as the photon he saw.

And so, surrounding every person, there must be a flood of future ghosts, representing all the unrealized possibilities, all equally real.

Michael, with his flashlight and metal scraps, surrounded by ghosts, smiled in the dark. Perhaps the future Michaels were happy.

One day a Brother found his food cache, and the flashlight, and the scraps of metal, all buried in the wall.

The children in the dormitory were made to stand in a line, before their beds, while the Brother barked at them. Michael did not understand the words, but he knew what would happen. The Brother wanted the owner of the cache to step forward. If nobody volunteered as responsible, all the children would be beaten. And then, when the Brothers were gone, the other children would beat Michael.

Still, he waited. Sometimes a child, one who was not responsible, would step forward and take the punishment for another. Anna often did this, but today she was not here. Michael had done it once, to spare a sickly boy.

Today, nobody came forward.

Michael took a step.

His punishment was severe.

And later the Brother stamped on the flashlight, smashing it. Michael was made to sweep up the pieces, the bits of broken glass, with his bare hands. The fragments of glass that stuck in his fingers made them bleed for days.

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