Time

Anyhow he’d refused to waste processor capacity on e-therapy programs, or any of that other modern crap that he regarded as mind-softening junk, despite recommendations from a slew of “experts” during the mission planning. The truth is, he knew, there were no experts, because nobody had gone out as far as this before. They would just have to cope, learn as they went along, support each other, as explorers always had.

He did worry about the kid, though. Even though Michael spooked him half to death. Wherever that came from, it surely wasn’t the kid’s fault…

Flight in deep space was, after all, utterly strange — even for Malenfant, who felt as if he’d spent his whole life preparing for this.

It was possible to forget, sometimes, that they were locked up here in this tiny metal bubble, with nothing out there save for a few lumps of floating rock that came to seem less and less significant the farther they receded from Earth.

But most times, everything felt strange.

If he walked too rapidly across the meatware deck, he could feel the Coriolis cutting in, a ghostly sideways push that made him stagger. Even when he washed or took a drink, the water would move around the bowl in huge languid waves, pulsing like some sticky, viscous oil. If he immersed his hands it felt like water always had, but it clung to his flesh in great globules and ribbons, so that he had to scrape it off and chase it back into the bowl.

And so on. Everything was strange. Sometimes he felt he couldn’t cope with it, as if he couldn’t figure out the mechanics or logic of the environment. Perhaps, he thought, this is how Michael feels all the time, living in this incomprehensible, fragmented world.

It was a relief to retreat to his bunk, eyes closed, strapped in, shut out from all stimuli, trying to feel normal.

But even here, in deepest space, with no sensory input at all, he could still feel something: the evolution of his own thoughts, the sense of time passing as he forged downstream into the future, the deepest, most inner sense of all.

There was no science to describe this. The laws of physics were time-reversible: they ran as happily backward as forward. But he knew in his deepest soul that time was not reversible for him, that he was bound on a one-way journey to the future, to the deepest downstream.

How strange, how oddly comforting that was.

He drifted into sleep.

Milton Foundation e-spokesperson

It distresses all of us that the general psychological reaction to the news of the future has focused on the Blue children. You have to understand that Foundation Schools have always worked for the children’s protection as much as their development.

When the children’s nature was first publicized, the Schools first established, the effect was, at first, beneficial for everybody concerned. Families started to understand they weren’t alone, that their superintelligent children were part of a wider phenomenon. But after all, there is much about the children we do not understand. Their common obsession with blue-circle motifs, for instance.

There have been many theories to explain the children’s origin, their sudden emergence into the world. Perhaps this is all some dramatic example of morphic resonance. Perhaps they are aliens. Perhaps they represent an evolutionary leap — maybe we have Homo superior living among us, soldiers from the future who will enslave us. And so on.

Hysteria, perhaps. But people are afraid.

At first the general fear manifested itself in subtle ways: Surrounding communities generally shunned the Schools, starving them of resources and access to local infrastructure, blocking approvals for extensions, that sort of thing.

Lately, matters have taken a turn for the worse. Much worse.

Foundation Schools in cities and towns around the planet — buildings, their staff and students — have been attacked. Some children have been injured; one child is dead.

And even beyond the Schools, in the homes, we know that parents have turned on their own children.

We deeply regret several unfortunate incidents within Foundation Schools. We have tried to ensure that our supervision of the children has been of the highest quality. However I have to emphasize that the Milton Foundation has no direct control over the Schools. The Schools are independent establishments run under national and regional educational policies; we aren’t responsible for this. We have actually acted to mitigate the conditions many children are kept in.

We do not oppose the closure of our Schools, the taking of the children into federal custody. It’s easy to be judgmental. But what are we to do?

Besides, some of the worst Schools have been American.

Oh. You didn’t know that?

(Name and Address Withheld)

Sir,

There has been a great deal of speculation in these columns and elsewhere over the origin of the so-called “Blue child” phenomenon.

Perhaps this is just a statistical fluke — maybe these superkids have always been among us and we never even noticed. Some, of course, believe the Blue children may have some supernatural or even divine origin. It seems rather more likely to me they are

mutant products of the ecocollapse.

For example, many children have difficulty digesting proteins, such as casein and gluten, contained in cows’ milk and wheat. These proteins may be broken down, not into amino acids, but into peptides that can interfere with the hormones and neurotransmitters used by the developing brain. Perhaps some such physical cause is the solution. Certainly we seem to be suffering a parallel “plague” of developmental illnesses that includes attention deficit syndrome, hyperactivity, and dyslexia.

Whatever the truth I believe the focus of the debate must now shift: away from the origin of the children, to their destiny.

I believe the children represent a discontinuity in the history of our species. If they are truly superior to us, and if they breed true, they are the greatest threat to our continued survival since the Ice Age.

The resolution to this situation is clear.

First. The existing children must be sterilized to prevent their breeding and further propagation.

Second. Tests must be developed (perhaps they already exist) for assessing the developmental potential of a child while still in the womb. Such tests must be applied — nationally and internationally — to all new pregnancies.

Third. Fetuses that fail the tests, that is, which prove to have Blue attributes, must be terminated immediately.

This must be done without sentiment and with maximum efficiency, before the children accrue the power to stop us.

At present they are young: small and weak and unformed and vulnerable. They will not always be so.

It will be hard. If governments will not listen, it is up to us, the people, to take action. Any and all sanctions are morally defensible. This is a time of racial survival, a crux.

I would point out that we emerged from the Ice Age crisis transformed as a species, in strength and capability. So we must purge our souls again. These need not be dark days, but a time of glorious bright cleansing.

Turning to the comparable issue of the enhanced cephalopods…

Burt Lippard

We’ve all seen the future now. That Reid Malenfant stuff. Holy smoke. The one thing we know for sure is human beings, us, won’t be able to cope with that.

We shouldn’t fear the Blues. They’re smarter than us, is all. So what? Most people are smarter than me anyhow.

I say we should give up our power to them. Sooner one Blue child running the world than a thousand so-called democrats. I’ll work with them, when the day comes.

I say this. The Blues are the future. Anyone who lays a finger on them now will have me to answer to.

Maura Della:

Maura flew to Sioux Falls and spent the night.

The next morning was bright, clear, the sky huge. On a whim she gave her driver the day off. She set off, heading toward Minnesota. Past Worthington she turned into Iowa. The sun was high and bright in a blue cloudless sky. She drove past huge Day-Glo fields of rape and corn. This was a place of farms, and worked earth, and people living in the same nouses their great-grandparents did. Even the agri-chemical corporate logos, painted by gen-eng on the cornfields, seemed unobtrusive today.

In these days of gloom and ecodisaster, after too long buried in the orange smog of Washington, she’d forgotten that places like this still existed. And in her district, too.

Was all the Malenfant stuff — talk of the future, messages from time, the Carter catastrophe, the destiny of humankind — just an airy dream? If there was no way to connect the grandiose dreams of the future to this — the day-to-day reality, the small, noble aspirations of the people of Iowa — could they be said to have any meaning?

I should spend more time out here, she thought.

In fact, maybe it was time to retire — not in a couple of years — but now.

She was too old for children of her own, of course, but not for the whitewashed farmhouse, the couple of horses. Anyhow, she knew when she looked into her heart she’d never really wanted kids anyhow. She’d seen how kids dropped from the sky and exploded people’s lives like squalling neutron bombs. She was honest enough to admit she was too selfish for that; her life, her only life, was her own.

Of course that didn’t qualify her too well for the visit she must make today.

She had received a plea for help.

It had come into Maura’s office, remarkably, by snail-mail. She opened the envelope and found a picture of a wide-eyed five-year-old, a letter handwritten in a simple, childish hand, far beyond the reach of any spell-checker software and replete with grammatical and other errors.

Reading a letter was a charge of nostalgia for Maura, in these days of electronic democracy.

The letter was from a family in a town called Blue Lake, in northern Iowa, right at the heart of her district, the heart of the Midwest. It was a college town, she recalled, but she was ashamed to find she couldn’t remember the last time she’d been out there. The letter was from two parents baffled and dismayed because the government was demanding they give up their son. It was all part of the greater scandal that had broken out nationally — indeed, worldwide — about the treatment of Blue children.

The thing of it was, Maura couldn’t see a damn thing she could do about it.

She reached for her softscreen, preparing to post an e-reply. Somehow, though, as she sat here holding the simple scrap of paper, the old-fashioned still photo with its smiling kid, that didn’t seem enough.

She had glared out the window at the dull Washington sky, heard the wash of traffic noise. She needed a break from all this hothouse shit, the endless Malenfant blamestorming.

She started going through her diary.

Blue Lake — pop. 9000 — seemed to be a classic small town, built around the wide, glimmering lake that had given it its name. The downtown — brick buildings and