He had made his fortune in the Americas, where he'd mined slums and orphanages for bright, determined children whose feckless or dying parents could provide neither an environment nor an education adequate to develop their offsprings' potential. 'Brazil, of course, was the first to privatize their orphanages,' he told her. Burdened by hundreds of thousands of children, abandoned or orphaned by HIV and TB and cholera or just running wild, the government had finally given up pretending that it could do anything with these kids. Jaubert's backers had another way.
'Everyone wins,' Jean-Claude Jaubert explained. 'The taxpayers' burden is reduced, the children raised in a proper manner, fed and educated. In return, the investors receive a percentage of the children's earnings for life.'
A lively secondary market had developed, a bourse where one could invest in an eight-year-old who'd tested extraordinarily high in mathematical ability, where one could trade rights to the earnings of a medical student for those of a talented young bioengineer. Liberals were horrified, but men like Jaubert knew that the practice gave children a monetary value, which made them less likely to be shot during street-cleaning sweeps through the slums.
'And yet,' Jaubert told her, 'I think that the most promising and spirited young people are depressed by the lifelong contracts they are held to. They burn out, refuse to work. You can see perhaps what a waste this is.' Jaubert proposed that a more equitable contract be drawn, lasting perhaps twenty years, which would include the years of training provided by the investors. 'Brokers, such as I, will find work for the talent, who will receive a decent living wage. When released from the contract, mademoiselle, you would have a reputation, experience and contacts—a firm foundation upon which to build.' It was necessary that Sofia be tested for various diseases and disabilities that might affect her work, of course. 'Should anything untoward be detected,' Jaubert told her, 'you would be treated if possible and with your consent, naturally,
It was Sofia herself who negotiated the clause allowing her to buy Jaubert out if she were able to earn his backers' investment, plus four percent over projected inflation, compounded annually over the contract life, in less than twenty years. Jaubert was delighted. 'Mademoiselle, I applaud your business sense. It is a pleasure to work with someone as practical as she is beautiful!' The clause provided her with a motive to earn the highest fees as quickly as possible, a benefit to them both.
Their relationship from that time on was cordial. After the handshake that sealed their agreement, he never touched her again: Jaubert had his own code of ethics. Her tutors and trainers found her a machine for learning. Polyglot from childhood, she spoke Ladino, classical Hebrew, literary French, commercial English, as well as the Turkish of her neighbors and schoolmates. To these, the investors determined, she should add Japanese and Polish, to widen her sphere of usefulness. She had a natural bent toward AI analysis, which the investors lost no time in developing. In the great Sephardic tradition, her programs were distinguished by their strict logical clarity, the transitions from one subject to the next graceful and simple.
Jaubert was congratulated, and prospered along with his backers. He himself felt he had rescued something very fine when he found Sofia Mendes. Jaubert had seen self-possession and intelligence under the dirt and hunger, and his perception paid off handsomely.
What Sofia Mendes saw now, with vision unclouded by emotion, was an end to a time of bondage. All she had to do was learn an astronomer's job and then do it faster, cheaper and more accurately than he could do it himself. She resisted both hope and fear. Either could weaken you.
Dr. Yanoguchi introduced her to George Edwards on her first day at the dish. 'Mr. Edwards is our most knowledgeable volunteer,' Yanoguchi told her, as she shook the hand of a lean, silver-haired man the age her father would have been, had he lived. 'We get quite a few tourists and school groups. He'll give you the standard tour, but don't hesitate to ask questions. George knows everything! And when you're finished, you can get started with Jimmy Quinn.'
She was startled by the size of the Arecibo dish—three hundred meters in diameter, a vast aluminum bowl set into a natural depression in the mountains. Above the bowl, hundreds of tons of steerable antennae hung from cables connected to support towers anchored in the surrounding hills.
'It works just like an old-fashioned TV satellite dish,' George said, wondering for a moment if she was too young to remember TV. It was hard to tell; the girl might have been twenty-four or thirty-four. 'A radio telescope focuses every radio wave that hits it down toward a central collection point. The signals bounce off the dish to a system of amplifiers and frequency converters suspended above the bowl.' He pointed things out as they walked along the edge of the dish. 'From there, the signals travel down to the building that houses the processing equipment.' The wind made it hard to hear, and George had to shout. 'The astronomers use what's essentially a very fancy spectrometer to analyze the polarization, intensity and duration of the radio waves. Jimmy Quinn can explain how all that works, or you can ask me if you like.'
George turned to her before they went inside. 'Have you ever done anything like this system before?'
'No,' she admitted, shivering. She should have realized it would be chilly in the highlands. And one had a sense of being overwhelmed at the beginning of a project. She was always starting from scratch and there was always the chance that, this time, she wouldn't be able to understand, that something would simply be beyond her. Sofia straightened her back. I am Mendes, she thought. Nothing is beyond me. 'I'll manage,' she said aloud.
George looked at her sideways for a moment and then reached past her to open the door to the main building. 'I'm sure you will. Listen, if you don't have any plans next weekend, why not come down to San Juan for dinner…' And they went indoors.
Upon meeting Mr. Quinn for the first time, Sofia Mendes noted privately that it was evidently her day for being startled by the size of things. She was accustomed to being the smallest adult in nearly any gathering but she had never stood next to anyone as tall as Jimmy Quinn before. She had to reach up to shake his hand and momentarily felt herself to be ten years old, meeting a friend of her father's.
She followed him to his work space, Quinn ducking under doorways and pipes as they passed through aisles flanked by cubicles constructed from old-fashioned movable panels. As they walked, he pointed out the locations of the coffee machine and the WC, not seeming to notice that she could not see over the half-walls that rose only chest-high for him. When they arrived at his cubicle, Sofia noticed that he'd removed the middle drawer of his desk, probably to keep his knees from being bruised, she decided.
For his part, Jimmy was half in love with Sofia Mendes before they sat down. For one thing, she was the most beautiful girl he'd ever seen, in real life. And she'd made the first cut in his mind already by not saying anything about his height. If she managed to go one more minute without asking any stupid basketball questions or the odious 'How's the weather up there?' he swore he'd marry her, but before he could propose, Sofia opened her notebook and asked him for an overview of his job.
Emilio had warned him that she was not much for small talk, so Jimmy began by walking her through the process of collecting data from a bright region called 12–75. 'There's a stable configuration near the central engine of the system, with two very powerful jets at right angles to it, throwing off material at half the speed of light.' He sketched on the screen as he spoke, using an open display so she could take notes while he talked. 'Elizabeth Kingery is a light astronomer who thinks she's got a new way of finding out if there are two galaxies surrounding two black holes locked in orbit around each other, like this, see? And she wants to compare the data to quasars, which people think used to be twinned galaxies like 12–75. Are you following this?'
Mendes looked up from her notes and impaled him with a stare. Very bright, Emilio had told him. Don't underestimate her. Jimmy cleared his throat. 'So, the idea is to map this region of the sky using both radio and light astronomy in synchronized observations. The astronomer who originates the request gives the observatories at least two or three times when we can do the work. We have to work around the celestial conditions and the weather on Earth.'
'Why not use orbiting observatories?'
'Liz doesn't have enough funding or clout for access. But you can do a lot with land-based data. So. Anyway, you get a consensus on the schedule and then you hope it doesn't rain or something, because that messes things up. Sometimes if there's a narrow window, we gut it out and do the work even if conditions are bad. Do you want to know about that now?'
'Later, please. Just an overview for now.'
