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.
“He’s called Michael,” Younger said.
“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 taken 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’ 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 remembered that Younger had talked about the baboon in the trash in exactly the same tone of voice.
Mindi, the slim girl-child, now returned, carrying a plastic bowl of fresh water. She looked anxiously to Younger, and would not meet Emma’s eyes.
If she was thirteen, Emma thought, the girl was of marriageable age here. Maybe Stef Younger was finding more compensation in his life here than mere altruism.
It was a relief to climb into the car, to sip cool water and brush ten-million-year-old Kalahari dust out of her hair.
That night, she had trouble sleeping. She couldn’t get the image of those bright-button village kids out of her head. Mute inglorious Miltons, indeed.
On the way here Emma had done some more digging into the Milton Foundation.
Milton turned out to be a shadowy coalition of commercial, philanthropic, and religious groups, particularly Christian. The Foundation was international, and its Schools had been set up in many countries, including the United States. The children were in general separated from their families and homes and spirited away to a School perhaps half a world away. In fact — so some journalists alleged — children were being moved from School to School, even between countries, making monitoring even more difficult.
Not everybody welcomed the arrival of a School full of children labeled as geniuses. Nobody likes a smart-ass. In some places the Schools and children had actually come under physical attack, and there were rumors of one murder; the Foundation, she had learned, spent a remarkable amount of its money on security, and almost as much on public relations.
And there were darker stories still of what went on inside the Schools.
Emma’s doubts about associating Bootstrap with the initiative continued to grow. But she knew that until she came up with a stronger case for pulling back she was going to be overruled by Malenfant himself.