Terry Pratchett - The Long Mars

‘Concepts beyond the human, perhaps,’ Nelson said. ‘As unimaginable to us as the mystery of the Holy Trinity would be to a chimp. If these kids really have arrived in the world equipped with these super-powerful minds, they must come up against the limits of our mere human culture very quickly.’ He smiled. ‘How wonderful it must be, when they are free to talk together. How much they must be discovering, beyond the imagination of any human who ever lived.’

She was watching him. ‘You know, I think you’re going to make a fine chaplain. But let me tell you something even more remarkable. Even more different . We have a few infants here – and we’re monitoring even younger subjects, even babies, who are still with their families. Before the age of about two, the young ones will try to talk – well, as human infants do. They gabble out stuff that’s entirely incomprehensible to us, and mostly incomprehensible to the older ones – but not totally. Again the linguists have analysed this stuff; they tell me it’s like investigating the structure of dolphin song. These infant gabblings are languages, Nelson. Meaning they have actual linguistic content. We arrive in the world with the capacity for language, but we have to learn it from those around us. Next babies, trying to express themselves, invent their own language , independently of the culture, word by word, one grammatical rule after another. Only later do they start to pick up the language of the rest. And, still more remarkable, the others incorporate some of the infants’ inventions into their own shared post-English tongue. It’s like an entirely new language is emerging, mutating at a ferocious rate, right in front of our eyes.’

‘When you let it happen. When you let them speak to each other at all.’

She didn’t react to that. ‘It’s important you understand what we’re dealing with, Nelson. These children represent a different order, a step change. Something new.’

‘Umm. And yet they are children, in our care.’

‘So they are.’

‘I think I should get settled in. I imagine there are superior officers I need to be presented to.’

‘I’m afraid so. Also you need to get through your security processing.’

‘Then I’d like to talk to some of the inmates. One at a time, to begin with.’

‘Sure. Any preference who first?’

As if at random, Nelson pointed down at Paul Spencer Wagoner. ‘That one.’

Nelson was allowed, in fact encouraged, to speak to Paul in the nineteen-year-old’s own room.

Nelson could see that made the security set-up easier to manage, but he wasn’t sure about the psychology of it. When he was nineteen, twenty, he hadn’t had a room of his own, but he was pretty sure that if he had, he would have seen it as an imposition to have some stranger walk in and start talking about God. This was the condition of the meeting, though, and Nelson made the best of it.

Paul’s room was only sparsely customized, by the standards of others Nelson had seen – or rather, had looked into from above. Posters on the walls: a galaxy image, exotic Long Earth beasts, a singing star Nelson didn’t recognize. On the desk, a phone, tablet, TV, though Nelson had learned that the connections you could make on these devices were sparse and tightly controlled, here in this facility.

Paul himself, slim, dark, was dressed in a black coverall. All the inmates here had to wear coveralls, Nelson had learned, but at least you got a choice of colours, and only the most defiant chose Gitmo orange. Paul evidently wasn’t the most defiant. He just sat on the edge of the bed, arms wrapped around his torso, legs crossed, a blank expression on his face. A classic sulky-teenager pose.

Nelson sat opposite, on a chair. ‘I bet you didn’t choose any of this stuff,’ he said as an opener. ‘The posters and such. This is some elderly Navy officer’s idea of what people your age like, right?’

Paul returned his stare, but gave nothing back.

Nelson nodded. ‘Lieutenant Irwin, who showed me around earlier, said a lot of things about you and your colleagues in here.’

Paul snorted, and spoke for the first time. ‘“Colleagues”?’

‘But the most perceptive single word she used, in my view as far as I’ve formulated it, was this: institutionalized . And that’s what you’re falling back on now, right? The blank stare, the silence. The old tricks you learned to survive, in one institution or another. That’s OK. But you were lucky, you know. I can tell you there are worse institutions to fall into than the one that caught you, in the end. I mean the Home in Madison West 5.’

Paul shrugged. ‘All those nuns.’

‘Right. And Joshua Valienté. He’s a friend of mine. He sends his regards.’ Nelson stared at Paul, trying to send a subliminal signal. You aren’t alone. Joshua hasn’t forgotten you. That’s why I’m here, in fact . . .

Paul just smiled. ‘Good old Uncle Joshua. The magic stepper boy. Maybe he should be in some cage like this. What is he but the vanguard of a new human species?’

‘Well, in fact there are similarities. The whole Humanity First movement, that brought President Cowley to power, grew out of fear of steppers.’

‘I know. That bunch of nuts blew up Madison because of it. The nest of the stepping mutants.’ He mimed an explosion with his hands. ‘Ka-boom!’

‘Can you understand people feeling that way? About you, I mean?’

‘I understand it in the abstract. The way I understand much of how you dim-bulbs think. Just another aspect of the madness that grips most of you, for most of your waking lives. It goes back to witch hunts, and even deeper. If something goes wrong – it’s somebody’s fault! Find somebody different to blame! Burn the demon! Fire the ovens!

‘Oh, of course they’ve come for us. They were always going to. At least this prison they put us in is secure. I suppose we should be grateful for the organized madness of the US government, which is protecting us from the dis organized madness of the mob. But after all, we haven’t actually done anything to anybody, have we? We aren’t like steppers, who could in theory walk into your child’s locked bedroom and so forth. That’s something worth fearing. All we’ve actually done so far is make a little money. But that was enough to condemn the Jews under Hitler, wasn’t it?’

Nelson studied him. He was coming across now like a defiant youngster, a member of some punk-revival band, maybe, out to shock. Nelson realized he had no real idea what was going on in Paul’s head. ‘But you have the potential for much more than that in the future. Do you believe it’s rational that we should fear you?’

Paul studied him back, as if briefly interested in what he’d said. ‘Insofar as you’re capable of being rational at all – yes. Because we are a different species, you know.’

These words, delivered matter-of-factly, were chilling. ‘You mean, unlike the steppers—’

‘Who are genetically identical to the rest of you. Stepping is just a faculty, like a gift for languages, that people have more or less of. We are all potential steppers. You are not a potential Next. The bumbling dim-bulb scientists at this facility have confirmed what we have long known. We have an extra gene complex. This is expressed physically in new structures in the brain, specifically the cerebral cortex, the centre of higher processing. They’re studying that here too, though thankfully without cutting our heads open, at least not yet. My brain contains a hundred billion neurons, each with a thousand synapses, just as yours does. But the connectivity seems to have been radically upgraded. In your head, the cortex is like a single sheet of crinkled layers, folded up inside the skull – spread out it would be around a yard square – with about ten billion internal connections. The topology of the cortex in my head is much more complex, with many more interconnections . . . It cannot be modelled in less than four dimensions, actually.’