Time

It disturbed Emma. She knew that when Michael looked at her, he just saw another adult in the long line who had mistreated him, subjected him to arbitrary rales, punished him endlessly. From Michael’s point of view, this new environment was just another setup, the kind hands and smiling voices just part of a new set of rales he had to learn.

Eventually, the punishment would return.

Once she tried to push him, with the help of a softscreen translator. “Michael. What are you thinking about?”

I am nothing.

“Tell me what that means.”

It means I am not special. I am nowhere special. I am in no special time. I would not know if the whole world were suddenly made one day older, or one day younger. I would not know if the whole world were moved to the left, this much. He hopped sideways, like a frog; briefly he grinned as a child. It means that the world was born, and will die, just as I will. He said this calmly, as if it were as obvious as the weather.

Cornelius stirred. “This is new. It sounds like the Copernican principle. No privileged observers. Every day he surprises me.”

Emma felt baffled, distracted by Michael’s software voice, which sounded like a middle-aged American woman, perhaps from Seattle. “Tell me how you know that, Michael.”

Because the sky is dark at night.

It took her some minutes of cross-examination, and cross-reference with sources she accessed through her softscreen, to figure out his meaning.

It was, she realized slowly, a version of Gibers’ paradox, an old cosmological riddle. Why should the sky be dark at night? If the universe was infinite, and static, and lasted forever, then Earth would be surrounded by an array of stars going off to infinity. And every direction Michael looked, his eye would receive a ray of light from the surface of a star. The whole sky ought to glow as bright as the surface of the sun.

Therefore, since the sky was dark — and since Michael had figured out that he wasn’t in a special place in the universe, and so there were no special places — the universe couldn’t be eternal and infinite and static; at least one of those assumptions must be wrong.

So the stars must have been born, as I was born, Michael said. Otherwise their light would fill up the sky. People are born; people fade; people die. I was born; I fade; I die. So the stars were born; the stars will fade; the stars will die. It is okay.

Big Bang to Heat Death, just from looking at the stars.

Cornelius said, “Maybe it comes from his belief system. His people had Christianity imposed on them, but the Lozi have kept many of their old beliefs. They believe in an afterlife, but it isn’t a place of punishment or reward. This world, of illness and crop failure and famine and short, brutal lives, is where you suffer. In the next life you are happy. They wear tribal markings so that when they die they are placed with their relatives.”

She asked Michael if he believed there would be a happy life for the world and the stars, after they died.

Oh yes, the translating machine said. Oh yes. But not for people. We have to make it right for others. Do you see?

“Moses,” Malenfant growled. “Moses and the Promised Land. Are bumans like Moses, Michael?”

Yes, oh yes.

But she was not sure if they had understood each other.

One day, cleaning up, Emma found, behind a ventilation grill, a cache of food — just scraps, crumbs in cleaned-out bags, fragments of fruit bars, a few dehydrated packets that had been chewed on, dry, as if by a rat. She left it all exactly as she had found it.

Cornelius Ta/ne

In a way Michael’s soul is the essence of the mathematician’s.

I know what he is feeling. I remember how strange it was when I realized that if I became a mathematician I could spend my life in pursuit of a kind of mystical experience few of my fellow humans could ever share.

Mystical? Certainly. Data can serve only as a guide in the deepest intellectual endeavors. We are led more by a sense of aesthetics, as we manufacture our beautiful mathematical structures. We believe that the most elegant and simple structures are probably the ones that hold the greatest truth. That is why we seek unified theories — ideas that underpin and unite other notions — in mathematics as well as physics.

We’re artists, we mathematicians, we physicists.

But more than that. There is always the hope that a mathematical construction, a product of the human imagination, nevertheless corresponds to some truth in the external world.

Perhaps you can understand this. When you learned Pythagoras’ theorem, you learned something about every right-angled triangle in the world, for all time. If you understood Newton’s laws, you grasped something about every particle that has ever existed. It is a sense of reach, of joy — of power.

For most of us such transcendent moments are rare. But not for Michael. The whole universe is the laboratory for his thought experiments. And given the most basic of tools to work with — even scratchings in the dirt — he attains that state of grace easily. He is in a kind of…

Ecstasy? Well, perhaps.

Of course it may be that his genius is associated with a deeper disorder.

There is a mild form of autism called Asperger’s Syndrome. This is characterized by introversion and a lack of emotion; it results in difficulty in communicating, a lack of awareness of and sympathy for the emotions of others. But it is also associated with a narrow focus, adherence to an obsession that takes precedence over mere social satisfaction.

Surely such a nature is essential for any intellectual success.

Emma Stoney claims that Michael’s withdrawn and suspicious nature has nothing to do with any autism, but is a direct result of how he has been handled by us, the adult world. Well, perhaps.

There are six classic symptoms of Asperger’s. I would claim Michael exhibits five of these.

I should know. I recognize four in myself.

June Tybee

For June Tybee, the pace of the training was ferocious. As a tech specialist who seemed likely to go into battle, her own workload was mostly physical stuff and combat.

She was put through parachute drops. She endured the rigors of” a centrifuge in a big navy lab in Pennsylvania. She floated for hours underwater in weighted-down pressure suits fighting mock battles against experienced NASA astronauts who would come swarming at her from any which way (think three-D! think three-D!). The training was clearly intended to desensitize her against the experiences of the upcoming spaceflight. There would be time enough during the mission, the long flight to Cruithne, to brief them all on operations at the asteroid itself.

And, suddenly, it was shipping-over time.

In the week before she was to be flown to California, she paid a last visit to Tom’s center in Nevada. Bill was here to meet her, of course. He’d been working as an unpaid assistant at the center since Tom had been brought here, leaving Billie with Bill’s sister back home.

They spent an unhappy, sleepless night in a motel, and then Bill drove her in to the center.

The security operation was ferocious. But it was obviously necessary. Bill pointed out a place where the desert sand was blackened and scarred, the wire fencing obviously repaired.

June, crisp in her Air Space Force uniform, wished she were wearing a weapon.

“I hate to think of you and Tommy in here, with this shit going on.”

Bill said tiredly, “Junie, don’t you follow the news? The whole damn world is going crazy. In here is about the safest place in the country we could be right now.”

Maybe so, June thought, as she returned the glare of the scowling grunt on the gate. As long as those goons don’t turn around and start firing inward.

They found Tom in a lab room filled with science equipment. Bill said the children worked on physics here.

“Physics? How can Tom be working on physics? He’s five years old.”

“June, things here are… different. Until you work with them, you wouldn’t believe it.”

And now here came little Tom himself, straight and serious in his gold uniform with that ugly blue band on his breast. He was still carrying the electronic Heart she had given him. At first he walked solemnly, almost cautiously, holding on to the hand of a girl, an older kid, tall and blond and staring.

But then Tom broke away and ran to his mother, and he was just Tommy, for a few moments more. She knelt down and grabbed his squirming warm body and buried her face in his hair, determined not to show him any tears.

She played with him for a while, and he showed her his work. Some of it was frankly beyond her, strings of symbols crossing bright plastic softscreens. But some of it was just kids’ stuff, paintings of stick people and fluffy yellow clouds, clumsy models of rockets and animals made of paper and clay.

The mix of the weird wonder-kid stuff and normal, everyday childishness was unnerving. She stole glances at Bill, and saw that he understood how she was feeling.

And the whole time the older girl, Anna, stayed near Tom, always watching, always silent.

When her time was up, June knelt down again and faced her son. “Tommy, you know I have to go away.”

“Into space. Dad told me.”

“I don’t know how long I’ll be gone.”

“Will you come back?”

A quick answer came to her lips, a mother’s white lie, but she bit back on it. She glanced up into Bill’s weary bafflement — into the gray, clear eyes of the girl, Anna — into the deep, unfathomable eyes of her own son.

“I don’t know,” she told him. It was the truth, of course.

He nodded gravely.

When she let him go, he went to Anna, who took him by the hand and led him to a group of the others, and soon he was immersed in physics, or quantum mechanics, or whatever the hell they were doing over there. And he was animated, engaged.

More than with her, his mother.

Bill wiped tears from her cheek. “Some space ranger you’re going to make.”

“We’re losing him,” she said. “That isn’t Tom any more.”

“It is Tom. It’s just that he’s found something more… interesting than anything we can offer him.”

“I’m going to be away for months,” she said.

“I’ll be here when you come back,” Bill said. “We’ll have each other. Even if that’s all.”

And he held her a long time.