Stephen Baxter - Time

She put together a picture of the Tybees’ life from the little clues around the house: the empty box of fatbuster pills; the big softscreen TV plastered over one wall; the ticking grandfather clock, obviously ancient; a run-down cleaner microbot the size of a mouse that she nearly stepped on in the middle of the living room carpet. Bill kicked it out of the way, embarrassed.

Bill wore a silver lapel ribbon, the med-alert that marked him out as a cancer victim. Every time she looked, Maura counted more cancer victims among her electors than seemed reasonable. No doubt something to do with the breakdown of the environment.

Bill led her upstairs to a bedroom door. There was a sign, cycling around like a Times Square billboard: TOM TYBEE’S ROOM! DO NOT ENTER! SANTA CLAUS ONLY!

Bill knocked. “Tom? There’s a lady to see you. Can we

come in?”

Uh-huh.

Bill pushed open the door — there was some kind of junk behind it, and he had a little trouble — and he led Maura into the room.

It was painted bright yellow, with a window that overlooked the garden. Along one wall there was a wardrobe and a bunk bed with a giant storage locker underneath, against the other wall a big chest of drawers. The wardrobe and chest were both open, and clothes and other stuff just spilled out, all over the floor and the bed, to such an extent it was hard to believe it was possible, even in principle, to stow it all away. The spare acreage of walls was covered with posters: a map of the world, sports pennants, some aggressive-looking superhero glaring out of a mask.

It was a typical five-year-old boy’s room, Maura thought to herself. Not that she was an expert on such matters.

The most striking thing about the room was a series of photographs and posters, some of them blown up, that had been stuck to the walls at about waist height — no, she thought, at little-boy eye level — some of them even lapping over the precious sports pennants. They were pictures of star fields. Maura was no astronomer but she recognized one or two constellations — Scorpio, Cygnus maybe. A river of light ran through the images, a river of stars. The photographs made up, she realized, in a kind of patchwork way, a complete three-hundred-and-sixty-degree map of the Milky Way as it wrapped around the sky.

Tom himself — the kid, the Blue — was a very ordinary five-year-old; small, thin, dark, big eyed. He was sitting in the middle of the kipple-covered floor. He was playing some kind of game, Maura realized; he had toys — cars, planes, little figures — set out in a ring around him. He had a Heart, one of those electronic recording gadgets, sitting on the floor beside him.

“Hello,” the boy said.

“Hello, Tom.”

Bill kneeled down, with a parent’s accustomed grace. “Tom, this lady is from Congress.”

“From Washington?”

Maura said, “That’s right.” She picked up one of his toys, some kind of armed lizard in a blue cape. “What are you making? A fort?”

“No,” Tom said seriously. He took back the lizard and put it back in its place in the circle. He didn’t expand, and Maura felt very dumb.

She stood up and pointed at the Milky Way photos. “Did you find all these yourself?”

“I started with that one.” He pointed. It was Cygnus, an elegant swan shape, bright Vega nestling alongside. “I found it in my dad’s book.”

“An old astronomy encyclopedia,” Bill said. “Fixed-image. I had it when / was a kid. He found the other pictures himself. From books, the Net. I helped him process them and get them to the same scale, match them. But he knew what he was looking for. That’s when we first suspected he might be—”

Solitary. Brilliant. Obsessive. Uncommunicative. Pursuing projects beyond his years. Blue.

Tom said, “I have a telescope.”

“You do? That’s great.”

“Yeah. You can see it’s made up of stars.”

“The Milky Way?”

“The Galaxy. And it goes beyond Cygnus.” He pointed at his walls. “It starts in Sagittarius, over there. Then it goes through Aquila and Cygnus, and it brushes Cassiopeia, and past Perseus and Orion and Puppis, and then you can’t see it any more. I wanted to see it from the other side.”

Bill said, “He means the southern hemisphere. His mother brought him home a couple of images from postings in the Pacific.”

Tom pointed to his photos. “It goes to Carina, and you can see a lot more of it. And it goes to the Southern Cross and Centaurus and the tail of Scorpio, and it gets brighter, and then it goes to Sagittarius where it’s really wide and has a dark line in the middle. And then it goes on to Aquila and to Cygnus…”

“Do you know what it is, Tom? The Milky Way, I mean, the Galaxy.”

“It’s stars. And it’s a big whirly.”

“A spiral?”

“Yeah. Look, you can see. There’s the middle of the Galaxy, in Sagittarius, where it gets fat and bulgy. And all the arms wrap around that.

“We’re inside an arm. You can see one of the other arms between us and the center there, going through Centaurus and the Southern Cross and Carina. And there—” He pointed to the bright cloud in Carina. “ — that’s where it turns away from us, and you see it end-on, and that’s why it looks so bright, like a road full of cars coming at you. And then there’s a lane of dust and stuff that looks dark, the stuff between the arms, and that’s the black stripe down the middle. And then on the other side of Carina you can see the arm that wraps around the outside of the sun, and it goes—” He turned around and pointed to his northern sky.” — there, all the way across.”

Bill shrugged. “He figured all this out for himself.”

“He figured out he’s in the middle of a spiral Galaxy?”

“All by himself. Yes.”

The kid, Tom, talked on. He might have been any five-year-old — cute, friendly enough, a little subdued — except for his subject. Most kids his age, the kids in the neighborhood here, were surely barely aware they were in Iowa. Little Tom was already a galactic traveler.

She felt a brush of fear.

It was, she thought, this mix of the mundane with the strange — the childish toys and mess with the visions of galactic geography — that was so unsettling about these Blue children. A kid wasn’t supposed to be like this.

And she noticed, now, that every one of Tom’s toys — the cars and boats and figures he had put in a protective ring around himself — was blue.

Maura accepted some coffee, tried to put Bill at his ease.

Bill Tybee was a stay-at-home parent, the homemaker. He showed her, shyly, an animated postcard of his wife, June. It had been taken on an air base somewhere. She was a short, slightly dumpy blond, a wide Iowa smile, dressed in a crisp USASF uniform; when Bill lifted it into the sunlight the postcard cycled ten seconds of her saluting and grinning, over and over. She was enlisted, a technical specialist in a special forces unit.

After a few minutes, Bill started to open up about his fears for the boy. “I know he’s Blue. The school assessment proved it—”

“Then you should be proud. You know that means he’s exceptional.”

“I don’t want him to be exceptional. Not if it means he has to go away.”

“Well, that’s the law, Bill. I know how you feel. I know you’re concerned for his safety, and you’ve every right to be after what happened to him before.”

“They failed to protect him, and they expelled him, Ms. Della. I wasn’t going to give him back just because they said they changed their minds.”

“But you can’t keep him at home. The new centers aren’t run by some private organization like the Miltons, but by the federal government. There’s nothing to fear. It’s the best for him.”