Stephen Baxter - Time

Of course he was no medic himself. He relied heavily on recordings and softscreen simulations to keep him on the right track.

But both Cornelius and Emma were intelligent; they both soon figured out the subtext of their training, which was that in the event of any real emergency there was little that could be done. A single serious injury would likely exhaust their medical supplies. And even if the patient, whichever unlucky sap it was, could be stabilized long enough to be kept alive and brought home, the others would have to nurse a nonfunctioning invalid all the way back to Earth.

Malenfant didn’t share with the others the training he’d gotten for himself on euthanasia, or on how to conduct a scientifically and legally valid autopsy.

During those first weeks they stayed healthy enough, luckily.

But once the adrenaline-rush excitement of the launch and the novelty of the mission wore off, all three of the adults — himself included — came crashing down into a feeling of intense isolation. He had expected this. He’d gotten some psychological training, based mainly on Russian experience, on long-duration spaceflight. Cornelius, for example, seemed locked in a bubble world of his own, his odd, smoothed-over personality cutting him off from the others like a second spacesuit. Malenfant left him alone as much as possible.

The general depression seemed to be hitting Emma hardest, however.

Oddly, when he looked into her eyes, it sometimes seemed as if she weren’t there at all, as if there were only a fragment of the Emma he knew, looking out at him, puzzled. How did I get here? It was understandable. He had, after all, shanghaied her, utterly without warning.

It would help if there were something to fill up her time, here on the O ‘Neill. But there was no real work for her to do beyond the chores and the training. He had softbooks, of course, but he’d only brought along technical manuals, a few books for the kid… Not a novel in the whole damn memory, and not even a yellowing hardcopy paperback. It would be easy enough to have stuff up-loaded from Earth, of course, but although the reports and telemetry he downloaded daily were surely being picked up by the NASA deep-space people, nobody down there seemed inclined to talk back to him.

He tried to handle his own deep sense of guilt.

He’d felt he needed to bring her along, on a whole series of levels. He still felt like that. But it would, after all, have been easy to push her away, there in the critical moments in the Mo-jave. To have kept from stealing her life from her.

If not for his Secret, maybe they’d be a little more open with each other. Of course, if not for the Secret, they wouldn’t be here at all.

But what was done was done.

Anyhow he’d refused to waste processor capacity on e-therapy programs, or any of that other modern crap that he regarded as mind-softening junk, despite recommendations from a slew of “experts” during the mission planning. The truth is, he knew, there were no experts, because nobody had gone out as far as this before. They would just have to cope, learn as they went along, support each other, as explorers always had.

He did worry about the kid, though. Even though Michael spooked him half to death. Wherever that came from, it surely wasn’t the kid’s fault…

Flight in deep space was, after all, utterly strange — even for Malenfant, who felt as if he’d spent his whole life preparing for this.

It was possible to forget, sometimes, that they were locked up here in this tiny metal bubble, with nothing out there save for a few lumps of floating rock that came to seem less and less significant the farther they receded from Earth.

But most times, everything felt strange.

If he walked too rapidly across the meatware deck, he could feel the Coriolis cutting in, a ghostly sideways push that made him stagger. Even when he washed or took a drink, the water would move around the bowl in huge languid waves, pulsing like some sticky, viscous oil. If he immersed his hands it felt like water always had, but it clung to his flesh in great globules and ribbons, so that he had to scrape it off and chase it back into the bowl.

And so on. Everything was strange. Sometimes he felt he couldn’t cope with it, as if he couldn’t figure out the mechanics or logic of the environment. Perhaps, he thought, this is how Michael feels all the time, living in this incomprehensible, fragmented world.

It was a relief to retreat to his bunk, eyes closed, strapped in, shut out from all stimuli, trying to feel normal.

But even here, in deepest space, with no sensory input at all, he could still feel something: the evolution of his own thoughts, the sense of time passing as he forged downstream into the future, the deepest, most inner sense of all.

There was no science to describe this. The laws of physics were time-reversible: they ran as happily backward as forward. But he knew in his deepest soul that time was not reversible for him, that he was bound on a one-way journey to the future, to the deepest downstream.

How strange, how oddly comforting that was.

He drifted into sleep.

Milton Foundation e-spokesperson

It distresses all of us that the general psychological reaction to the news of the future has focused on the Blue children. You have to understand that Foundation Schools have always worked for the children’s protection as much as their development.

When the children’s nature was first publicized, the Schools first established, the effect was, at first, beneficial for everybody concerned. Families started to understand they weren’t alone, that their superintelligent children were part of a wider phenomenon. But after all, there is much about the children we do not understand. Their common obsession with blue-circle motifs, for instance.

There have been many theories to explain the children’s origin, their sudden emergence into the world. Perhaps this is all some dramatic example of morphic resonance. Perhaps they are aliens. Perhaps they represent an evolutionary leap — maybe we have Homo superior living among us, soldiers from the future who will enslave us. And so on.

Hysteria, perhaps. But people are afraid.

At first the general fear manifested itself in subtle ways: Surrounding communities generally shunned the Schools, starving them of resources and access to local infrastructure, blocking approvals for extensions, that sort of thing.

Lately, matters have taken a turn for the worse. Much worse.

Foundation Schools in cities and towns around the planet — buildings, their staff and students — have been attacked. Some children have been injured; one child is dead.

And even beyond the Schools, in the homes, we know that parents have turned on their own children.

We deeply regret several unfortunate incidents within Foundation Schools. We have tried to ensure that our supervision of the children has been of the highest quality. However I have to emphasize that the Milton Foundation has no direct control over the Schools. The Schools are independent establishments run under national and regional educational policies; we aren’t responsible for this. We have actually acted to mitigate the conditions many children are kept in.

We do not oppose the closure of our Schools, the taking of the children into federal custody. It’s easy to be judgmental. But what are we to do?

Besides, some of the worst Schools have been American.

Oh. You didn’t know that?

(Name and Address Withheld)

Sir,

There has been a great deal of speculation in these columns and elsewhere over the origin of the so-called “Blue child” phenomenon.