Stephen Baxter - Time

“With respect, Ms. Della, I don’t think you know what’s best for my kid.”

“No,” she said. “No, I probably don’t. That’s why I’m here.”

“So he’s smart. But he still needs to grow, to have a life, to play with other kids. Is he going to get all of that at one of these fancy centers?”

“Well, that’s why the centers were set up, Bill.”

“I know the theory,” Bill said. “But that’s not how it is. That’s not what it’s like to live with this thing.” Bill talked on about the effect of TV and the Nets: the talk shows featuring kids with giant plastic dome heads, the TV evangelists who claimed that the kids were a gift from Jesus or a curse from Satan, and so on. “It’s a drip, drip, drip. There’s a whole host of ‘experts’ telling the world it’s okay to pick on my kid, because he’s different. And I’ve seen the reports of those places overseas, in Australia and places, where they beat up the kids and starve them and—”

“That’s not happening here, Bill.” She leaned forward, projecting a practiced authority. “And besides, I’ll ensure Tom is protected.”

Or at least, she thought, I will strive to minimize the harm that is done to him. Maybe that is my true vocation.

Bill Tybee burst out, “Why us, Ms. Della? Why our kid?”

To that, of course, she had no answer.

Emma Stoney:

Emma tried to care for Michael. Or at least to maintain some

kind of human contact with him.

But the boy would barely stir from his sleeping compartment down on the meatware deck. He seemed to spend the whole time sitting on his bunk bed over some softscreen program or another.

When they did force Michael out of his bunk, for food and exercise and hygiene breaks, the kid seemed to veer between catatonia and a complete freak-out, an utter inability to deal with the world. He would rock back and forth, crooning, making strange flapping motions with his hands. Or he would find some control panel light, flickering on and off, and stare at it for hours.

Meanwhile, no amount of encouragement or attention seemed able to root out Michael’s fundamental suspicion of them.

It disturbed Emma. She knew that when Michael looked at her, he just saw another adult in the long line who had mistreated him, subjected him to arbitrary rales, punished him endlessly. From Michael’s point of view, this new environment was just another setup, the kind hands and smiling voices just part of a new set of rales he had to learn.

Eventually, the punishment would return.

Once she tried to push him, with the help of a softscreen translator. “Michael. What are you thinking about?”

I am nothing.

“Tell me what that means.”

It means I am not special. I am nowhere special. I am in no special time. I would not know if the whole world were suddenly made one day older, or one day younger. I would not know if the whole world were moved to the left, this much. He hopped sideways, like a frog; briefly he grinned as a child. It means that the world was born, and will die, just as I will. He said this calmly, as if it were as obvious as the weather.

Cornelius stirred. “This is new. It sounds like the Copernican principle. No privileged observers. Every day he surprises me.”

Emma felt baffled, distracted by Michael’s software voice, which sounded like a middle-aged American woman, perhaps from Seattle. “Tell me how you know that, Michael.”

Because the sky is dark at night.

It took her some minutes of cross-examination, and cross-reference with sources she accessed through her softscreen, to figure out his meaning.

It was, she realized slowly, a version of Gibers’ paradox, an old cosmological riddle. Why should the sky be dark at night? If the universe was infinite, and static, and lasted forever, then Earth would be surrounded by an array of stars going off to infinity. And every direction Michael looked, his eye would receive a ray of light from the surface of a star. The whole sky ought to glow as bright as the surface of the sun.

Therefore, since the sky was dark — and since Michael had figured out that he wasn’t in a special place in the universe, and so there were no special places — the universe couldn’t be eternal and infinite and static; at least one of those assumptions must be wrong.

So the stars must have been born, as I was born, Michael said. Otherwise their light would fill up the sky. People are born; people fade; people die. I was born; I fade; I die. So the stars were born; the stars will fade; the stars will die. It is okay.

Big Bang to Heat Death, just from looking at the stars.

Cornelius said, “Maybe it comes from his belief system. His people had Christianity imposed on them, but the Lozi have kept many of their old beliefs. They believe in an afterlife, but it isn’t a place of punishment or reward. This world, of illness and crop failure and famine and short, brutal lives, is where you suffer. In the next life you are happy. They wear tribal markings so that when they die they are placed with their relatives.”

She asked Michael if he believed there would be a happy life for the world and the stars, after they died.

Oh yes, the translating machine said. Oh yes. But not for people. We have to make it right for others. Do you see?

“Moses,” Malenfant growled. “Moses and the Promised Land. Are bumans like Moses, Michael?”

Yes, oh yes.

But she was not sure if they had understood each other.

One day, cleaning up, Emma found, behind a ventilation grill, a cache of food — just scraps, crumbs in cleaned-out bags, fragments of fruit bars, a few dehydrated packets that had been chewed on, dry, as if by a rat. She left it all exactly as she had found it.

Cornelius Ta/ne

In a way Michael’s soul is the essence of the mathematician’s.

I know what he is feeling. I remember how strange it was when I realized that if I became a mathematician I could spend my life in pursuit of a kind of mystical experience few of my fellow humans could ever share.

Mystical? Certainly. Data can serve only as a guide in the deepest intellectual endeavors. We are led more by a sense of aesthetics, as we manufacture our beautiful mathematical structures. We believe that the most elegant and simple structures are probably the ones that hold the greatest truth. That is why we seek unified theories — ideas that underpin and unite other notions — in mathematics as well as physics.

We’re artists, we mathematicians, we physicists.

But more than that. There is always the hope that a mathematical construction, a product of the human imagination, nevertheless corresponds to some truth in the external world.

Perhaps you can understand this. When you learned Pythagoras’ theorem, you learned something about every right-angled triangle in the world, for all time. If you understood Newton’s laws, you grasped something about every particle that has ever existed. It is a sense of reach, of joy — of power.

For most of us such transcendent moments are rare. But not for Michael. The whole universe is the laboratory for his thought experiments. And given the most basic of tools to work with — even scratchings in the dirt — he attains that state of grace easily. He is in a kind of…

Ecstasy? Well, perhaps.

Of course it may be that his genius is associated with a deeper disorder.

There is a mild form of autism called Asperger’s Syndrome. This is characterized by introversion and a lack of emotion; it results in difficulty in communicating, a lack of awareness of and sympathy for the emotions of others. But it is also associated with a narrow focus, adherence to an obsession that takes precedence over mere social satisfaction.