absorbed the simple math and physics I’ve been able to give him and taken them to places I never dreamed of. For instance he seems to have deduced special relativity too. From first principles.’
‘How?’
Younger shrugged. ‘If you have the physical insight, all you need is Pythagoras’s theorem. And Michael figured out his own proof of that two years ago.’
The boy played with his flashlight, obsessive, unspeaking, ignoring the adults.
She walked out into the sunshine, which was dazzling. Michael followed her out. In the bright light she noticed that Michael had a mark on his forehead. A perfect blue circle.
‘What’s that? A tribe mark?’
‘No.’ Younger shrugged. ‘It’s only chalk. He does it himself. He renews it every day.’
‘What does it mean?’
But Younger had no answer.
She told Younger she would return the following day with tests, and maybe she should meet Michael’s parents, discuss release forms and the compensation and conditions the Foundation offered.
But Younger said the boy’s parents were dead. ‘It ought to make the release easier,’ he said cheerfully.
She held up her hand to the boy, in farewell. His eyes widened as he stared at her hand. Then he started to babble excitedly to Younger, plucking his sleeve.
‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘It’s the gold. The gold ring on your hand. He’s never seen gold before. Heavy atoms, he says.’
She had an impulse to give the boy the ring – after all, it was only a token of her failed marriage to Malenfant, and meant little to her.
Younger noticed her dilemma. ‘Don’t offer them anything. Gifts, money. A lot of people come here and try to give the shirt off their backs.’
‘Guilt.’
‘I guess. But you give one money, they all want it. They have no ambition, these fellows. They sit around with their beer and their four wives. They’re happy, in their way.’
She remembered that Younger had talked about the baboon in the trash in exactly the same tone of voice.
Mindi, the slim girl-child, now returned, carrying a plastic bowl of fresh water. She looked anxiously to Younger, and would not meet Emma’s eyes.
If she was thirteen, Emma thought, the girl was of marriageable age here. Maybe Stef Younger was finding more compensation in his life here than mere altruism.
It was a relief to climb into the car, to sip cool water and brush ten-million-year-old Kalahari dust out of her hair.
That night, she had trouble sleeping. She couldn’t get the image of those bright-button village kids out of her head. Mute inglorious Miltons, indeed.
On the way here Emma had done some more digging into the Milton Foundation.
Milton turned out to be a shadowy coalition of commercial, philanthropic and religious groups, particularly Christian. The Foundation was international, and its Schools had been set up in many countries, including the US. The children were in general separated from their families and homes, and spirited away to a School perhaps half a world away. In fact – so some journalists alleged – children were being moved from School to School, even between countries, making monitoring even more difficult.
Not everybody welcomed the arrival of a School full of children labelled as geniuses. Nobody likes a smart ass. In some places the Schools and children had actually come under physical attack, and there were rumours of one murder; the Foundation, she had learned, spent a remarkable amount of its money on security, and almost as much on public relations.
And there were darker stories still of what went on inside the Schools.
Emma’s doubts about associating Bootstrap with the initiative continued to grow. But she knew that until she came up with a stronger case for pulling back she was going to be overruled by Malenfant himself.
She wished she understood Cornelius and his shadowy associates better. She didn’t yet grasp how this program fitted in with Eschatology’s wider agenda: the end of the world, messages from the future … She had the intuition that what they were seeking wasn’t just smart children, but something much more strange.
And she wondered if that was exactly what she had found here in Africa.
She stepped onto her balcony.
Looking up at the stars, Michael’s stars, she could tell she was far from home. She recognized Ursa Major. But the familiar childhood panhandle shape was upside down, and its pointer stars were pointing below the horizon. And when the Moon rose, it climbed straight up into the sky, heading for a point somewhere over her head. Not only that, it was ripped up sideways; the Man in the Moon’s forehead was pointing north.
But it wasn’t the Moon that was tipped; it was herself; for she had flown around the belly of the planet, which was thereby proven to be round. It was a startling thought.
I should travel more, she thought.
How was it possible for a kid on the fringe of the African bush to figure out so much fundamental physics?
If she and Malenfant had had kids, she supposed, she might have a better instinct on how to handle this situation. But she didn’t, and the whole world of children, damaged or super-intelligent or otherwise, was a mystery to her.
… On a whim, she unfolded her softscreen and looked up the properties of gold.
She learned that relativistic effects, the strange and subtle effects of very high speeds and energies, determined the colour of gold.
In light elements, electrons orbited the nuclei of atoms at a few hundred miles per second – fast, but only a few per cent of the speed of light. But in elements with massive nuclei – like uranium, lead or gold – the electrons were dragged around at a large fraction of the speed of light, and relativity effects became important.
Most metals had a silvery lustre. But not gold. And that was because of the strange high-speed phenomena Michael seemed intuitively to understand, relativity time dilation effects operating deep within the gold atoms themselves.
She took off her ring and put it on the balcony before her. The stars were reflected in its scuffed surface. She wondered what Michael had seen as he stared into her ring.
When she got back to the States she found Malenfant had found out about the accelerator project clearances, and had holed himself up at Fermilab … where Dan Ystebo claimed, almost immediately, to have results.
She flew straight on to Illinois.
New York Times:
From an unpromising grade school in a run-down neighbourhood at the heart of New York City has come what may prove to be the most striking example yet of the recent wave
