From each of four chambers on the outside of the bubble, five mice were released. The mice squeezed through the tunnels, whose low height prevented free fall, squeaking hysterically. On the hologrid model twenty black dots traced their path. A screen on another wall displayed twenty sets of readings from the biometers implanted in each mouse.
The mice ran free for ten minutes. Then from a single source inside the bubble was released the genemod organism, distantly related to a virus, that Toliveri and Blure had spent seven years creating.
One by one, the biometer readings faltered and the squeaking, amplified on audio, disappeared. The first three ceased transmitting within three minutes; the next six a few minutes later; five more within ten minutes. The last six transmitted for nearly thirty-one minutes.
Dr. Blure fed the data into an extrapolation program. He frowned. He was very young, no more than twenty-five, and since he was very blond the beard he seemed trying hard to grow was a soft stubble, like down. “No good. At that rate, the configurations of the smallest orbital project at over an hour. And of a beggar city, on a still day, over five hours for saturation.”
“Too slow,” Will Sandaleros said. “It won’t convince.”
“No,” Blure said. “But we’re closer.” He glanced again at the flat bioreadings. “Imagine people who would actually use such a thing.”
“The beggars would,” Jennifer Sharifi said.
No one contradicted her.
Miri and Tony sat in their shared lab in Science Dome Four. Ordinarily children used school laboratories, not professional ones, for their learning projects; space on an orbital was too precious to dole out indiscriminately. But Miri and Tony Sharifi were not ordinary children and their projects were not just learning experiences. The Sanctuary Council, Sharifi Labs, and the Board of Education had held a meeting to explore the issues: Should Miri’s neurological experiments and Tony’s datasystems improvements be considered class projects, patentable private enterprises, or work for hire for Sanctuary Corporation? Should any potential profits belong to the family business, to the corporation, or to a trust fund arranged for Miri and Tony until they were no longer minors under New York State law? Everyone at the meeting had smiled, and the discussion had been happy; they were all too proud of the Supers to fight over them. The decision had been that their work belonged to Sanctuary with a 60 percent royalty share to the children themselves of any commercial applications, plus college credit. Miri was twelve, Tony eleven.
“L-l-look at th-this,” Tony said. Miri didn’t answer for forty-five seconds, which meant she was at a crucial point in thought-string construction and the string Tony’s words had started was knotted in only at the periphery. Tony waited cheerfully. He was usually cheerful, and Miri could seldom detect any black strings among the thought edifices he mapped for her on his hologrid. That was his current project: mapping how the Supers thought. He had started with one sentence: “No adult has an automatic claim on the production of another; weakness does not constitute a moral claim on strength.” Tony had spent weeks eliciting from twelve Supers every string and cross-string this sentence evoked, entering each into a program he had written himself.
It had been slow work. Jonathan Markowitz and Ludie Calvin, the youngest Supers in the experiment, had lost patience with the opaque, stammering slowness of spoken words and had twice flounced out of Tony’s dogged sessions. Mark Meyer’s strings had been so bizarre that the program refused to recognize them as valid until Tony rewrote sections of the code. Nikos Demetrios had clear strings and cooperated eagerly, but in the middle of his interrogation he caught cold, was quarantined for three days, and came back with such different strings for the same phrases that Tony threw out all his data for contamination by artistic rearrangement.
But he had persisted, sitting at the holoterminal across from Miri’s even longer hours than she did, twitching and muttering. Now he smiled at her. “C-c-come s-s-see!”
Miri walked around their double desk to Tony’s side. The holoterminal’s three-dimensional display had been opaqued on the side facing her. When she finally got to see his preliminary results, Miri gasped in delight.
It was a model of her strings for Tony’s research sentence, each concept represented by a small graphic for concretes, by words for abstracts. Glowing lines in various colors mapped first-, second-, and third-level cross-references. She had never seen such a complete representation of what went on in her mind. “It’s b-b-beautiful!”
“Y-y-yours are,” Tony said. “C-c-c-compact. El-elegant.”
“I kn-know that sh-shape!” Miri turned to the library screen. “T-T-Terminal on. Open L-Library. Earth b-b-bank. Ch-Chartres C-C-C-Cathedral, F-F-France, R-R-R-Rose W-W-Window. G-GG-Graphic d-d-d-display.”
The screen glowed with the intricate stained-glass design from the thirteenth century. Tony studied it with the critical eye of a mathematician. “N-n-noo…n-not r-really the s-s-s-s-same.”
“In f-f-feel it is,” Miri said, and the old frustration teased her, making limp spiraling strings in her mind: There was some essential connection between the Rose Window and Tony’s computer model that wasn’t obvious but was there, somehow, and of tremendous unseen importance. But her thinking couldn’t express it. Something was missing in her thought strings, had always been missing.
Tony said, “L-l-look at J-J-Jonathan.” Miri’s thought model vanished and Jonathan’s appeared. Miri gasped again. “H-h-how c-can he think l-like th-that!”
Unlike Miri’s, Jonathan’s model wasn’t a symmetrical shape but an untidy amoeba, with strings shooting off in all directions, petering out, suddenly shooting back for weird connections Miri didn’t immediately understand. How did the Battle of Gettysburg connect to the Hubble constant? Presumably Jonathan knew.
Tony said, “Th-those are the only t-t-two I’ve d-d-done s-s-so far. M-m-mine is n-next. Then the p-program will s-s-superimpose them and l-look for c-c-communication p-principles. S-s-someday, M-M-Miri, b-b-besides f-furthering c-c-communications science, we c-c-could use t-terminals to t-t-talk to each other w-without this f-f-f-fucking one-d-d-dimensional sp-sp-speech!”
Miri looked at him with love. His was work with a genuine contribution to the community. Well, maybe some day hers would be, too. She was working on synthetic neurotransmitters for the speech centers of the brain. Someday she hoped to create one that, unlike any the scientists had tried so far, would produce no side effects while it inhibited stuttering. She reached out and caressed the side of Tony’s big head, lolling and jerking on his thick neck.
Joan Lucas burst into their lab without knocking. “Miri! Tony! The playground’s open!”
Instantly Miri dismissed neurotransmitters and communications science. The playground was open! All the children, Norms and Supers alike, had waited for this for weeks. She grabbed Tony’s hand and scampered after Joan. Outside, Joan, long-legged and fleet, easily outdistanced her, but no child in Sanctuary needed directions to the new playground. They just looked up.
In the core of the cylindrical world, anchored by tough thin cables, the inflated plastic bubble floated at the orbital’s axis. Gravity here was so thin it approximated free fall, at least enough for the children. Miri and Tony crowded into the elevator that took them up, slipped on velcro mittens and slippers, and screamed in delight as they were dumped inside the huge bubble. The inside was crossed by translucent pink plastic struts, all with elastic give, with opaque boxes for hiding in, with pockets and tunnels that ended in midair. Everything was dotted with soft inflated hand-holds and velcro strips. Miri launched herself headlong into the air, flew across a plastic room, and launched herself back, crashing into Joan. Both girls giggled, and drifted slowly downward, clutching at each other and squealing when Tony and a boy they didn’t know tore by overhead.