of dirt and grass clustered to either side of the road and spread away to the flat distance.
Nervous – and embarrassed at herself for feeling so – Emma glanced back at the car. The driver had wound up and opaqued the windows. She could see him lying back, insulated from Africa in his air-conditioned bubble, his eyes closed, synth music playing.
As soon as she walked off the dusty hardtop road she was surrounded by kids, stick thin and bright as buttons. They were dressed in ancient Western clothes – T-shirts and shorts, mostly too big, indescribably worn and dirty, evidently handed down through grubby generations. The kids pushed at each other, tangles of flashing limbs, competing for her attention, miming cameras. ‘Snap me. Snap me alone.’ They thought she was a tourist.
The dominant colour, as she walked into the village, was a kind of golden brown. The village was constructed on the flat Kalahari sand that covered the area for a hundred miles around. But the sand here was marked only by human footprints, and pitted with debris, scraps of metal and wood.
The sky was a washed-out blue dome, huge and empty, and the sun was directly overhead, beating at her scalp. There were no shadows here, little contrast. She had a renewed sense of age, of everything worn flat by time.
There were pieces of car, scattered everywhere. She saw busted-off car doors used like garden gates, hub caps beaten crudely into bowls. Two of the kids were playing with a kind of skateboard, just a strip of wood towed along by a wire loop. The ‘wheels’ of the board were, she recognized with a shock, sawn-off lengths of car exhaust. Younger explained that a few years ago some wrecks had been abandoned a mile or so away. The villagers had towed them into town and scavenged them until there was nothing left.
‘… You’ll mostly see men here today, men and boys. It’s Sunday so some of the men will be drunk. The women and girls are off in the bush. They gather wild fruit, nuts, berries, that kind of stuff.’
There was no sanitation here, no sewage system. The people-women and girls – carried their water from a communal stand-pipe in yellowed plastic bowls and bottles. For their toilet they went into the bush. There was nothing made of metal, as far as she could see, save for the scavenged automobile parts and a few tools.
Not even any education, save for the underfunded efforts of gone-tomorrow volunteers like Younger.
Younger eyed her. ‘These people are basically hunter-gatherers. 150 years ago they were living Late Stone Age lives in the bush. Now, hunting is illegal. And so, this.’
‘Why don’t they return to the bush?’
‘Would you?’
They reached Younger’s hut. He grinned, self-deprecating. ‘Home sweet home.’
The hut was built to the same standard as the rest, but Emma could see within an inflatable mattress, what looked like a water-purifier, a softscreen with a modem and an inflatable satellite dish, a few toiletries. ‘I allow myself a few luxuries,’ Younger said. ‘It’s not indulgence. It’s a question of status.’
She frowned. ‘I’m not here to judge you.’
‘No. Fine.’ Younger’s mood seemed complex: part apologetic for the conditions here, part a certain pride, as if of ownership. Look at the good I’m doing here.
Depressed, Emma wondered whether, even if places of poverty and deprivation did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them, to give mixed-up people like Younger a purpose to their limited lives. Or maybe that was too cynical; he was, after all, here.
A girl came out of the hut’s shadows. She looked no more than ten, shoulder-high, thin as a rake in her grubby brown dress. She was carrying a bowl of dirty water. She seemed scared by Emma and she shrank back. Emma forced herself to smile.
Younger beckoned, and spoke to the girl softly. ‘This is Mindi,’ he told Emma. ‘My little helper. Thirteen years of age; older than she looks, as you can see. She keeps me from being a complete slob.’ He laid his soft hand on the girl’s thin shoulder; she didn’t react. When he let her go she hurried away, carrying the bowl on her head.
‘Come see the star of the show.’ Younger beckoned, and she followed him into the shadows of the little hut. Out of the glaring flat sunlight, it took a few seconds for her eyes to adjust to the dark.
She heard the boy before she saw him: soft breathing, slow, dusty movements, the rustle of cloth on skin.
He seemed to be lying on his belly on the floor. His face was illuminated by a dim yellow glow that came from a small flashlight, propped up in the dust. His eyes were huge; they seemed to drink in the flashlight light, unblinking.
Younger said, ‘He’s called Michael.’
‘How old is he?’
‘Eight, nine.’
Emma found herself whispering. ‘What’s he doing?’
Younger shrugged. ‘Trying to see photons.’
‘I noticed him when he was very young, five or six. He would stand in the dust and whirl around, watching his arms and clothes being pulled outwards. I’d seen kids with habits like that before. You see them focusing on the swish of a piece of cloth, or the flicker of light in the trees. Mildly autistic, probably: unable to make sense of the world, and so finding comfort in small, predictable details. Michael seemed a bit like that. But he said something strange. He said he liked to feel the stars pulling him around.’
She frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘I had to look it up. It’s called Mach’s principle. How does Michael know if he is spinning around, or if the universe is all spinning around him?’
She thought about it. ‘Because he can feel the centripetal forces?’
‘Ah. But you can prove that a rotating universe, a huge matter current flowing around him, would exert exactly the same force. It’s actually a deep result of general relativity.’
‘My God. And he was figuring this out when he was five?’
‘He couldn’t express it. But, yes, he was figuring it out. He seems to have in his head, as intuition, some of the great principles the physicists have battled to express for centuries …’
‘And now he’s trying to see a photon?’
Younger smiled. ‘He asked me what would happen if he shone his flashlight up in the air. Would the beam just keep on spreading, thinner and thinner, all the way to the Moon? But he already knew the answer, or rather, he somehow intuited it.’
‘The beam fragments into photons.’
‘Yes. He called them light bits, until I taught him the physics term. He seems to have a sense of the discreteness of things. If you could see photons one at a time you’d see a kind of irregular flickering, all the same brightness: photons, particles of light, arriving at your eye one after another. That’s what he hopes to see.’
‘And will he?’
‘Unlikely.’ Younger smiled. ‘He’d need to be a few thousand miles away. And he’d need a photomultiplier to pick up
