Time

Foundation School. They were shown around by a “Brother” — a young Portuguese, darkly handsome and composed, dressed in a flapping black gown and dog collar.

It was a bleak place.

There were huts, like barracks, that had once been painted white, but the paint had faded to an indiscriminate pink. Otherwise there seemed to be no color at all, save the grayish red of the dust, here at the baked, eroded heart of Australia. The dust lay everywhere; as she walked she was trailed by a great cloud of it. Away from the reception area there seemed to be absolutely no vegetation, not a blade of grass. There was a hot, dry smell, of dust, dirty clothing, feces, and urine.

They weren’t allowed into the huts. She saw no children.

Here in Red Creek, three hundred children lived in administered squalor. Cornelius and the Brother remarked on none of this. The Brother talked instead of economies-of-scale joint administration of the School and the rest of the gin reservation.

Gin. This word referred to Aborigines. It seemed to be a word of casual abuse. Likewise the Brother referred to the children here, of course, as Blues. Even though, he said in what was apparently meant to be a joke, most of the children here were black.

Terra Nullius — the name of Australia’s governing party — meant “empty land.” It referred to the old fiction that Australia was unoccupied when Captain Cook planted the flag here, that the Aborigines had no rights to the lands they had inhabited for millennia. It was a good name for the policies the government followed ruthlessly.

The native Australians had suffered a couple of centuries of persistent discrimination, with the dispossession of land, the separation of children from parents for indenture as servants and laborers, and so on. There had been a brief summer of hope, hi the 1970s and after, when liberal, if flawed, protective legislation had been passed. It had all evaporated when the economy down- turned at the start of the new century and the soil erosion began to hit.

Today, black children made up 3 percent of the youth in Australia, but 60 percent of those in prison. International human rights groups and Aboriginal organizations talked of torture and beatings. And so on.

Modern Australia was a good place for a school like this. And the people who staffed it.

The Portuguese Brother belonged to a Christian group called the Order of Christ. This was part of the shadowy coalition that supported the Milton Foundation. The Order turned out to have roots going back to the fourteenth century. It was a religious-military society originally set up to attack Islam in its own territories. The Order had included Vasco da Gama, for example, one of whose specialities was hanging Muslims from his masts and using them for crossbow practice.

In the year 2011, here was the Order in the black heart of Australia, running a school. And it was partly funded by Bootstrap, with money that had passed through Emma’s control.

Appalled, ashamed, she drew Cornelius aside. “Dear God, Cornelius.”

He frowned. “You’re distressed.”

“Hell, yes. I never imagined—”

“There is no crime here,” Cornelius said smoothly. “The Brothers are actually here to protect the children. The Blues.”

“Does Malenfant know about this?”

Cornelius smiled. “What do you think?”

Emma took deep breaths. Compartmentalize, Emma. One issue at a time.

“Cornelius, how can a child, alone and uneducated, in this godforsaken School in the Australian outback, come up with a theory of everything?”

“I could point to Einstein. He was a patent clerk, remember.

His education was flawed. He didn’t even have access to experimental evidence. He just dreamed up relativity from first principles, by thinking hard. And—”

“What?”

“Well,, it’s possible Michael has had a little help.”

“What kind of help?”

He looked into the air, his pale blue eyes milky with light. “You have to think like a downstreamer. Anticipate them.”

“You really are insane, Cornelius.”

He smiled. He turned and walked away after the Portuguese Brother.

She had no choice but to follow him.

They returned to the reception area, and waited for the child, Michael, to be brought to them.

Michael:

In the rain house, the water stopped. He sat, shivering.

Then warm air gushed from the ceiling over him. The light grew strange, and he felt his skin tingle.

The door banged open, and the Sister returned.

He cowered, burying his hands between his thighs, but she hauled his hands out and dragged him to his feet.

She pulled him from the room into the open air. The sun felt harsh on his skin, which no longer had its warm screen of dirt. There were clothes here, but they weren’t his. She prodded him. Her meaning was clear.

Reluctantly he bent down and picked up the clothes, and pulled them on. They were crisp and white, a T-shirt and long trousers and even socks and a pair of shoes. But they scratched his denuded skin. Besides, they had no blue circle, and he was confused.

When he was dressed, the Sister grabbed his hand again and dragged him once more.

Now they walked the length of the School compound. The Sister took great long strides with a harsh, regular gait, and he had to half run to keep up. Once he almost fell. She screamed at him, evidently concerned he might have dirtied his new clothes.

They soon left behind the dormitory blocks, their paint peeling in the endless sunlight.

He started to feel frightened again. Although it was just a short walk from his own block, he didn’t recognize the buildings here. He must have been brought past them when he arrived here, but he didn’t remember, and he had never been so far since. Would he know his way back to his dormitory again? He tried to memorize the buildings he passed, but there was too much newness here.

He tried dragging his toe in the dirt, so as to leave a trail he might follow to get back. But when the Sister saw him she shouted at him because he had soiled his new white shoes, and she cuffed his head.

They were coming toward one of the buildings now. It had an open door, darkness inside. There was a fence beyond this building, and beyond that the desert stretched away, flat and empty.

The Brothers had told them all about the desert. It stretched away a long way from the School, so far you would soon collapse of thirst, and even if you did manage to cross it you would find people who would punish you and send you back. So even if you somehow got out of the School there was nowhere to go, nobody to help you.

The Sister dragged him toward the dark doorway. He couldn’t help but pull back. This was the end of the journey, and whatever awaited him, whatever he had been prepared for in the building with the rain and the light, was here, inside this building.

Sometimes children were taken away from the dormitory and never came back. Would he find their bleached bones piled up here?

The Sister dragged him inside, and he tried not to scream.

Cornelius Taine:

I can tell you now why I believe Michael is so important.

I have had long arguments with Malenfant over this: Malenfant, who feels it is callous to manipulate the lives of children so.

But Michael is not merely a child.

The Milton project was, of course, a cover. We have our own theory on the origin of the Blues, the bright children.

We believe the downstreamers must be trying to signal us. Because we would, if we knew what they know. But we’re not convinced that some technological gadget is the correct solution, even though we’ve got to try.

Perhaps instead the downstreamers are also targeting something else. Perhaps they are targeting the most widespread programmable information storage system on the planet.

I mean, of course, the human brain. Especially the brains of the young: empty, impressionable, easily shaped.

We don’t know how. We don’t know what it would feel like. We don’t seem to hear downstreamer voices in our heads.

Or perhaps we do — perhaps we always have — but we just don’t recognize them.

Quite a thought, isn’t it? Is it possible that Michael — born into ancient dust and squalor, unable to read or write, and yet dreaming of a four-dimensional universe — is more than some precocious genius, that he is actually being influenced, somehow, by time-traveler beams from the future?

It may sound fantastic, a dip into insanity.

But what if it’s true?

And… what if Michael and his generation aren’t the first? There have always been isolated geniuses, with insights and wisdom that seem to transcend the time and place they were born into.

Perhaps this has been going on a long time.

Michael is a treasure beyond price. Malenfant seems to understand this now.

None of us yet knows where this extraordinary multifaceted journey is taking us. But it is clear to me that the boy, Michael, and this man, Malenfant, together are the key element.

I feel I have been groping in the dark. And yet I feel proud to have reached so far, to have been the catalyst to this essential relationship.

The first time Malenfant met Michael he seemed electrified, as if by recognition.

The fate of the other Blue children, incidentally, is irrelevant.

Michael:

Inside the building it was cold. Air blew on his skin, chill and dry. There was a table and chairs and doors, but no people here, no children.

The Sister pushed him to a chair opposite the table. He sat down.

The Sister went to one of the doors. She opened it, and he glimpsed people beyond: adults talking and holding glasses, drinks. The door closed behind the Sister, and he was left alone.

He glanced around. There was nobody here. He could see no cameras or softscreens.

He slid off the chair and crossed to the table, feet padding on the hard floor. There was a paper plate on the table with something on it, curling and dry and brown. Perhaps it was the rind of some fruit. He crammed a piece of it into his mouth and pushed the rest inside his shirt. The rind was sharp on his tongue, tough and hard to chew.