She knows exactly who has bought his complacency. It is easy for her to make her face unreadable, but perhaps her doing so right now is the tell he’s been looking for. Even now, after a lifetime of effort to gain fluency in the language of emotion-filled faces, she has not completely mastered the human tap-dance of mask and reveal that normal children easily absorb, despite her neuroplasticity infusions and cognitive therapies.
She does not wish to be normal. But aspects of normality would often be helpful.
Zi leans forward, sets both hands on the table, and links his fingers. His big smile makes jolly-looking crinkle lines at the corners of his eyes. She is sure he knows just how jolly they are. His voice warm and hearty, he says, “Hey, isn’t children’s literature one of your areas of expertise?”
This is a new tack. “Seventy years ago, it was. I’m not at all up-to-date, and wasn’t then. Just books, written before 1965. But yes, it was a passion.” Indeed, one of her rickety bridges to life. “And?”
“I recall a video of you speaking at an international conference after you received your first doctorate. You were a very passionate and effective communicator about how the brains of children on the autistic spectrum can be physically changed through engagement with literature. All the more impressive because—”
She smiles; nods. “I’m Asperger’s. As are most of our visiting children. Part of my international cachet, I might add.” Two can play at his game.
“Um, yes. Of course. We’re all open books here, no pun intended. I’m just thinking you might help organize our vast children’s library. It’s a terrible jumble—all those files shot up here willy-nilly from all over the world. You can link these kids to it—”
Pele leans forward, laces together her own fingers, lights up her own wide,
brown face with a warm, face-crinkling smile. “Great idea. That task might serve to distract me from effectively executing my responsibilities. Or maybe I should write another paper that bridges two fields of physics, and create a new field. The first was a hit. I won a small prize.”
She does not usually talk this way. She was brought up to be modest, but he has vastly overplayed his hand. Her small stature, her long, shimmering white hair, and even, still, the fact that she is a woman, have often caused others to underestimate her. She was here long before him, and will be here long after he is gone. But she still can’t tell whether he understands that he has picked the wrong foe.
He straightens his back. “You can’t fight money, even if you do have Nobel authority. Moku runs on the entertainment and tourist industries.”
“I agree. And technological, scientific, and academic research is the dog. Setting a timetable for actual travel to an exoplanet seems to be our least concern. In the two years since you arrived, you or your proxies have generated many irrelevant but effective roadblocks and dismantled several long-running initiatives. Not many people have examined your record thus far, but a close scrutiny reveals a definite pattern.”
He juts his head forward and stares at her with open hostility. “You’re out of your—do you really?—” He raises both hands in a questioning attitude, drops them to his side, and laughs. “Wow. It doesn’t matter, then, that there is no place to go?”
“There are many places we could go. Potentially, an infinite number of habitable planets. We’re finding a new one, literally, every day.”
“Yes, but we cannot get there.”
Pele decides to take advantage of this teachable moment. Perhaps she can awaken him to Mokus true wonder. “We are approaching an age in which we might be able to mesh our growing understanding of quantum processes with new technologies, a time in which the specific needs of a particular possibility might generate a new paradigm regarding our ability to move through space and time. In that reality, it could seem only instants until all habitable planets are populated.”
He nods. “You are talking, of course, about your particular pet, the theoretical Alcubierre drive. Powered by the equally theoretical Casimir vacuum.” His eyes gleam with true humor, for a moment. “Wouldn’t that be something! But just a pipe dream.”
She says, “We’ve made a lot of advances since you took your one required theoretical physics course thirty years ago. I’d love to set aside time to talk to you about how much we’ve learned since then. You are right about one thing—Moku has been vital to forwarding our ability to learn more about so many subjects. It is a scientific wonderland. And, in fact, I will hand off this job next month and return to my own research. Sometimes it’s useful to give that part of my brain time to process information on its own. That’s how it works for me. Call this just another stint in the patent office.” She grins at him with fierce, friendly energy; she knows her eyes are twinkling. “I think that we’re on the verge of some very, very big changes. Things that will truly change humanity.”
He shakes his head. “There’s no appetite for that.”
“Of course not. We have a fabulous playground here. It’s like when Walt Disney died and his Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow morphed from a serious attempt at living the dream of the future to one of the most successful amusement parks of all time.”
He stares blankly. He has no idea what she’s talking about.
No surprise. She says, “Not everyone shares your view.”
She refers to her fellow research scientists and astronauts, to their wild romance with space, to how hard they work, on the other side of this Mobius strip, in the humming hive of Moku, and its environments of rain forest, high sierra, deep sea, and other ecosystems vital to life to realize these dreams.
It is her dream, too.
That is
