Time. Stephen Baxter
them until there was nothing left.
‘… You’ll mostly see men here today, men and boys. It’s Sunday so some of the men will be drunk. The women and girls are off in the bush. They gather wild fruit, nuts, berries, that kind of stuff.’
There was no sanitation here, no sewage system. The people-women and girls – carried their water from a communal stand-pipe in yellowed plastic bowls and bottles. For their toilet they went into the bush. There was nothing made of metal, as far as she could see, save for the scavenged automobile parts and a few tools.
Not even any education, save for the underfunded efforts of gone-tomorrow volunteers like Younger.
Younger eyed her. ‘These people are basically hunter-gatherers. 150 years ago they were living Late Stone Age lives in the bush. Now, hunting is illegal. And so, this.’
‘Why don’t they return to the bush?’
‘Would you?’
They reached Younger’s hut. He grinned, self-deprecating. ‘Home sweet home.’
The hut was built to the same standard as the rest, but Emma could see within an inflatable mattress, what looked like a water-purifier, a softscreen with a modem and an inflatable satellite dish, a few toiletries. ‘I allow myself a few luxuries,’ Younger said. ‘It’s not indulgence. It’s a question of status.’
She frowned. ‘I’m not here to judge you.’
‘No. Fine.’ Younger’s mood seemed complex: part apologetic for the conditions here, part a certain pride, as if of ownership. Look at the good I’m doing here.
Depressed, Emma wondered whether, even if places of poverty and deprivation did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them, to give mixed-up people like Younger a purpose to their limited lives. Or maybe that was too cynical; he was, after all, here.
A girl came out of the hut’s shadows. She looked no more than ten, shoulder-high, thin as a rake in her grubby brown dress. She was carrying a bowl of dirty water. She seemed scared by Emma and she shrank back. Emma forced herself to smile.
Younger beckoned, and spoke to the girl softly. ‘This is Mindi,’ he told Emma. ‘My little helper. Thirteen years of age; older than she looks, as you can see. She keeps me from being a complete slob.’ He laid his soft hand on the girl’s thin shoulder; she didn’t react. When he let her go she hurried away, carrying the bowl on her head.
‘Come see the star of the show.’ Younger beckoned, and she followed him into the shadows of the little hut. Out of the glaring flat sunlight, it took a few seconds for her eyes to adjust to the dark.
She heard the boy before she saw him: soft breathing, slow, dusty movements, the rustle of cloth on skin.
He seemed to be lying on his belly on the floor. His face was illuminated by a dim yellow glow that came from a small flashlight, propped up in the dust. His eyes were huge; they seemed to drink in the flashlight light, unblinking.
Younger said, ‘He’s called Michael.’
‘How old is he?’
‘Eight, nine.’
Emma found herself whispering. ‘What’s he doing?’
Younger shrugged. ‘Trying to see photons.’
‘I noticed him when he was very young, five or six. He would stand in the dust and whirl around, watching his arms and clothes being pulled outwards. I’d seen kids with habits like that before. You see them focusing on the swish of a piece of cloth, or the flicker of light in the trees. Mildly autistic, probably: unable to make sense of the world, and so finding comfort in small, predictable details. Michael seemed a bit like that. But he said something strange. He said he liked to feel the stars pulling him around.’
She frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘I had to look it up. It’s called Mach’s principle. How does Michael know if he is spinning around, or if the universe is all spinning around him?’
She thought about it. ‘Because he can feel the centripetal forces?’
‘Ah. But you can prove that a rotating universe, a huge matter current flowing around him, would exert exactly the same force. It’s actually a deep result of general relativity.’
‘My God. And he was figuring this out when he was five?’
‘He couldn’t express it. But, yes, he was figuring it out. He seems to have in his head, as intuition, some of the great principles the physicists have battled to express for centuries …’
‘And now he’s trying to see a photon?’
Younger smiled. ‘He asked me what would happen if he shone his flashlight up in the air. Would the beam just keep on spreading, thinner and thinner, all the way to the Moon? But he already knew the answer, or rather, he somehow intuited it.’
‘The beam fragments into photons.’
‘Yes. He called them light bits, until I taught him the physics term. He seems to have a sense of the discreteness of things. If you could see photons one at a time you’d see a kind of irregular flickering, all the same brightness: photons, particles of light, arriving at your eye one after another. That’s what he hopes to see.’
‘And will he?’
‘Unlikely.’ Younger smiled. ‘He’d need to be a few thousand miles away. And he’d need a photomultiplier to pick up those photons. At least, I think he would …’ He looked at her uneasily. ‘I have some trouble keeping up with him. He’s absorbed the simple math and physics I’ve been able to give him and taken them to places I never dreamed of. For instance he seems to have deduced special relativity too. From first principles.’
‘How?’
Younger shrugged. ‘If you have the physical insight, all you need is Pythagoras’s theorem. And Michael figured out his own proof of that two years ago.’
The boy played with his flashlight, obsessive, unspeaking, ignoring the adults.
She walked out into the sunshine, which was dazzling. Michael followed her out. In the bright light she noticed that Michael had a mark on his forehead. A perfect blue circle.
‘What’s that? A tribe mark?’
‘No.’ Younger shrugged. ‘It’s only chalk. He does it himself. He renews it every day.’
‘What does it mean?’
But Younger had no answer.
She told Younger she would return the following day with tests, and maybe she should meet Michael’s parents, discuss release forms and the compensation and conditions the Foundation offered.
But Younger said the boy’s parents were dead. ‘It ought to make the release easier,’ he said cheerfully.
She held up her hand to the boy, in farewell. His eyes widened as he stared at her hand. Then he started to babble excitedly to Younger, plucking his sleeve.
‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘It’s the gold. The gold ring on your hand. He’s never seen gold before. Heavy atoms, he says.’
She had an impulse to give the boy the ring – after all, it was only a token of her failed marriage to Malenfant, and meant little to her.
Younger noticed her dilemma. ‘Don’t offer them anything. Gifts, money. A lot of people come here and try to give the shirt off their backs.’
‘Guilt.’
‘I guess. But you give one money, they all want it. They have no ambition, these fellows. They sit around with their beer and their four wives. They’re happy, in their way.’
She