Stephen Baxter - Time

The Sister started pulling at his clothes, lifting or ripping them off him. He endured this passively. He would get them back later.

He reached out and touched the smooth wall. The grime on his palm left a mark. He snatched back his hand and looked at the Sister, wondering if she would punish him for that, but she didn’t seem to have noticed.

When she had removed all his clothes she pushed him into the middle of the room, away from the walls. Then she walked out of the door and pulled it closed behind her.

He just stood there in the middle of the room, because nobody had told him to do anything else.

And then water began to gush from the ceiling, hard needle jets of it. It hissed against the walls, and battered at his flesh. At first he thought it might be rain. There used to be rain at home, in the summer. But there was never rain here.

The roof rain grew harder, so hard it stung. There was an odd smell in it, like the smell of the liquid the Sisters sometimes used to hose out the dormitory. And it was getting hotter. He stumbled back, fetching up against the hard, slippery wall, but the rain seemed to follow him and there was nowhere to run, not even other children to hide behind.

Perhaps this was his punishment, then. Perhaps it was because of the flashlight.

He huddled down in the corner, wedged into the angle of the walls. He could see water trickling off his body into a hole in the middle of the floor. The water was stained brown and black, but after a time it began to run clear.

Emma Stoney:

Emma had become increasingly dismayed by the bad news that surrounded the Blue-children Schools. Nothing, however, could have prepared her for the reality of Red Creek.

Red Creek turned out to be an Aboriginal reserve in Australia’s Northern Territory, reinstated by the Terra Nullius national government. A section of it had been hastily cordoned off to site this Foundation School. They were shown around by a “Brother” — a young Portuguese, darkly handsome and composed, dressed in a flapping black gown and dog collar.

It was a bleak place.

There were huts, like barracks, that had once been painted white, but the paint had faded to an indiscriminate pink. Otherwise there seemed to be no color at all, save the grayish red of the dust, here at the baked, eroded heart of Australia. The dust lay everywhere; as she walked she was trailed by a great cloud of it. Away from the reception area there seemed to be absolutely no vegetation, not a blade of grass. There was a hot, dry smell, of dust, dirty clothing, feces, and urine.

They weren’t allowed into the huts. She saw no children.

Here in Red Creek, three hundred children lived in administered squalor. Cornelius and the Brother remarked on none of this. The Brother talked instead of economies-of-scale joint administration of the School and the rest of the gin reservation.

Gin. This word referred to Aborigines. It seemed to be a word of casual abuse. Likewise the Brother referred to the children here, of course, as Blues. Even though, he said in what was apparently meant to be a joke, most of the children here were black.

Terra Nullius — the name of Australia’s governing party — meant “empty land.” It referred to the old fiction that Australia was unoccupied when Captain Cook planted the flag here, that the Aborigines had no rights to the lands they had inhabited for millennia. It was a good name for the policies the government followed ruthlessly.

The native Australians had suffered a couple of centuries of persistent discrimination, with the dispossession of land, the separation of children from parents for indenture as servants and laborers, and so on. There had been a brief summer of hope, hi the 1970s and after, when liberal, if flawed, protective legislation had been passed. It had all evaporated when the economy down-turned at the start of the new century and the soil erosion began to hit.

Today, black children made up 3 percent of the youth in Australia, but 60 percent of those in prison. International human rights groups and Aboriginal organizations talked of torture and beatings. And so on.

Modern Australia was a good place for a school like this. And the people who staffed it.

The Portuguese Brother belonged to a Christian group called the Order of Christ. This was part of the shadowy coalition that supported the Milton Foundation. The Order turned out to have roots going back to the fourteenth century. It was a religious-military society originally set up to attack Islam in its own territories. The Order had included Vasco da Gama, for example, one of whose specialities was hanging Muslims from his masts and using them for crossbow practice.

In the year 2011, here was the Order in the black heart of Australia, running a school. And it was partly funded by Bootstrap, with money that had passed through Emma’s control.

Appalled, ashamed, she drew Cornelius aside. “Dear God, Cornelius.”

He frowned. “You’re distressed.”

“Hell, yes. I never imagined—”

“There is no crime here,” Cornelius said smoothly. “The Brothers are actually here to protect the children. The Blues.”

“Does Malenfant know about this?”

Cornelius smiled. “What do you think?”

Emma took deep breaths. Compartmentalize, Emma. One issue at a time.

“Cornelius, how can a child, alone and uneducated, in this godforsaken School in the Australian outback, come up with a theory of everything?”

“I could point to Einstein. He was a patent clerk, remember.

His education was flawed. He didn’t even have access to experimental evidence. He just dreamed up relativity from first principles, by thinking hard. And—”

“What?”

“Well,, it’s possible Michael has had a little help.”

“What kind of help?”

He looked into the air, his pale blue eyes milky with light. “You have to think like a downstreamer. Anticipate them.”

“You really are insane, Cornelius.”

He smiled. He turned and walked away after the Portuguese Brother.

She had no choice but to follow him.

They returned to the reception area, and waited for the child, Michael, to be brought to them.

Michael:

In the rain house, the water stopped. He sat, shivering.

Then warm air gushed from the ceiling over him. The light grew strange, and he felt his skin tingle.

The door banged open, and the Sister returned.

He cowered, burying his hands between his thighs, but she hauled his hands out and dragged him to his feet.

She pulled him from the room into the open air. The sun felt harsh on his skin, which no longer had its warm screen of dirt. There were clothes here, but they weren’t his. She prodded him. Her meaning was clear.

Reluctantly he bent down and picked up the clothes, and pulled them on. They were crisp and white, a T-shirt and long trousers and even socks and a pair of shoes. But they scratched his denuded skin. Besides, they had no blue circle, and he was confused.

When he was dressed, the Sister grabbed his hand again and dragged him once more.

Now they walked the length of the School compound. The Sister took great long strides with a harsh, regular gait, and he had to half run to keep up. Once he almost fell. She screamed at him, evidently concerned he might have dirtied his new clothes.

They soon left behind the dormitory blocks, their paint peeling in the endless sunlight.

He started to feel frightened again. Although it was just a short walk from his own block, he didn’t recognize the buildings here. He must have been brought past them when he arrived here, but he didn’t remember, and he had never been so far since. Would he know his way back to his dormitory again? He tried to memorize the buildings he passed, but there was too much newness here.