We don’t know how. We don’t know what it would feel like. We don’t seem to hear downstreamer voices in our heads.

Or perhaps we do — perhaps we always have — but we just don’t recognize them.

Quite a thought, isn’t it? Is it possible that Michael — born into ancient dust and squalor, unable to read or write, and yet dreaming of a four-dimensional universe — is more than some precocious genius, that he is actually being influenced, somehow, by time-traveler beams from the future?

It may sound fantastic, a dip into insanity.

But what if it’s true?

And… what if Michael and his generation aren’t the first? There have always been isolated geniuses, with insights and wisdom that seem to transcend the time and place they were born into.

Perhaps this has been going on a long time.

Michael is a treasure beyond price. Malenfant seems to understand this now.

None of us yet knows where this extraordinary multifaceted journey is taking us. But it is clear to me that the boy, Michael, and this man, Malenfant, together are the key element.

I feel I have been groping in the dark. And yet I feel proud to have reached so far, to have been the catalyst to this essential relationship.

The first time Malenfant met Michael he seemed electrified, as if by recognition.

The fate of the other Blue children, incidentally, is irrelevant.

Michael:

Inside the building it was cold. Air blew on his skin, chill and dry. There was a table and chairs and doors, but no people here, no children.

The Sister pushed him to a chair opposite the table. He sat down.

The Sister went to one of the doors. She opened it, and he glimpsed people beyond: adults talking and holding glasses, drinks. The door closed behind the Sister, and he was left alone.

He glanced around. There was nobody here. He could see no cameras or softscreens.

He slid off the chair and crossed to the table, feet padding on the hard floor. There was a paper plate on the table with something on it, curling and dry and brown. Perhaps it was the rind of some fruit. He crammed a piece of it into his mouth and pushed the rest inside his shirt. The rind was sharp on his tongue, tough and hard to chew.

The door opened abruptly. He turned. People came in: the Sister and another woman.

When the Sister saw him with the plate her face twisted. He saw her fist bunch, but something made her keep from hitting him. Instead she bent down and grabbed his face, pinching his cheeks until he had to spit out the rind onto the floor.

The other woman came forward. She looked familiar.

Memory floated into his head, unwelcome. She had come to the village, in the days before. Stoney. Stef had called her Stoney.

Suddenly he knew what they were going to do to him. After Stoney had come to the village, he had been taken to this School. Now here she was again, and he would be taken away again, somewhere worse than this, where he would have to learn the rules over again.

Stoney took a step toward him.

He fell to the ground, covering his belly and head, waiting for the blows.

But Stoney was reaching for him with open hands. She stroked his back. He looked up in surprise.

She was doing something he had never seen an adult do before. Something he’d thought only children did.

She was crying.

Emma Stoney:

A week after Emma got back from Australia, Cornelius called a meeting-at the Mount Palomar Observatory, from where he had been trying to observe Cruithne.

Emma — working furiously, unable to sleep, unable to put out of her mind what she’d seen in Australia — tried to veto this. But of course she was overruled.

And so, at the behest of Cornelius Taine and his bright insanities, she was dragged across the country once more.

To reach Mount Palomar, Emma had to fly into San Diego, and then she faced an hour’s drive east up into the San Jacinto Mountains. The highway was modern. Her driver — a chatty, overweight woman — told her the highway had been laid by prisoners from a local jail.

They reached the group of telescopes that made up the observatory. The site was dominated by the dome of the giant two-hundred-inch reflector: a national monument, its heart a mirror made of twenty tons of honeycombed glass. But tonight, even though the skies were clear — if stained a little by sodium-lit smog — the big dome was closed up.

Cornelius Taine met Emma at her car. She turned away from him, refusing to speak.

Apparently undisturbed, he led her to a small support building. Brightly lit, the hut was crammed with humming information technology, much of it looking a little antiquated. There were a few junior researchers working here, quietly bullshitting as they gave up another night of their lives to this slow, obsessive work, waiting for Earth to pass through the starlight shadow of some rock in space. The dedication, the ingenuity with which data was squeezed out of such invisibly small opportunities, was awesome.

They aren’t here, she thought, unlike Cornelius, because of the Carter catastrophe, whatever Cruithne means for him. They aren’t even paid well. They just do it because…

Actually, she didn’t really understand why they did it.

In this nervous, overcompensating crew, Cornelius in his black suit looked ice-cool and in control.

They reached a small, cluttered office. Emma had arrived late; the others, it seemed, had already started.

Malenfant was pacing the room, his movements large and aggressive and exaggerated. She hadn’t seen him since she got back from Australia. Dan Ystebo was sitting there, cradling a doughnut, looking obscurely pleased with himself.

And Emma was deeply disturbed to see that Michael was here: the boy from Africa whom she had retrieved from the nightmare camp in the Australian desert. He was wearing loose, clean clothes. He was sitting in a corner of the office with his back to a wall. He was playing with a prism, letting its scattered light wash over his eyes.

She hissed to Malenfant, “What is he doing here?”

“I don’t know yet, Emma,” Malenfant said. “I know it seems wrong. But I don’t think we have any choice.”

She frowned. He sounded frightened.

Cornelius stood by them. “Michael is safe and well, his situation legally controlled.” His eyes were very pale, like pieces of glass. “You know, Emma, if you were so concerned about this boy, you could have taken the initiative. You could have tried to find him a guardian of your choice, for instance. But you didn’t. You’re like all the bleeding hearts who have been shouting loud and long recently about the Schools and the treatment of the Blue children. As long as the kids were out of sight you didn’t care what happened to them.”

She found she couldn’t meet his eyes.

She noticed that even as Michael watched his prism, his eyes flickered, his gaze traveling over the adults. He doesn’t trust us, she thought. He’s expecting us to turn on him again, as we — the adult world — have done before.

She sat down, troubled. “Let’s get this over with.”

Tense, excited, Malenfant said, “You got something, haven’t you? Something on Cruithne.”

Cornelius nodded curtly. “To business. One thing at a time, yes? Thanks to our friend Dan here, the squidjiave survived on Cruithne.” He tapped at touchpads embedded in the table surface. “Unfortunately they aren’t talking to us. They are even turning away fireflies controlled by the squid faction who have remained in the primary Nautilus hab bubble — a faction who seem to be reasonably loyal. We’re trying to establish direct control of the fireflies ourselves, bypassing the cephalopods. In the meantime, ironically, we have had to rely on remote sensors, from Earth and Earth-orbital satellites, to figure out what is happening up there.”