Of course that didn’t qualify her too well for the visit she must make today.

She had received a plea for help.

It had come into Maura’s office, remarkably, by snail-mail. She opened the envelope and found a picture of a wide-eyed five-year-old, a letter handwritten in a simple, childish hand, far beyond the reach of any spell-checker software and replete with grammatical and other errors.

Reading a letter was a charge of nostalgia for Maura, in these days of electronic democracy.

The letter was from a family in a town called Blue Lake, in northern Iowa, right at the heart of her district, the heart of the Midwest. It was a college town, she recalled, but she was ashamed to find she couldn’t remember the last time she’d been out there. The letter was from two parents baffled and dismayed because the government was demanding they give up their son. It was all part of the greater scandal that had broken out nationally — indeed, worldwide — about the treatment of Blue children.

The thing of it was, Maura couldn’t see a damn thing she could do about it.

She reached for her softscreen, preparing to post an e-reply. Somehow, though, as she sat here holding the simple scrap of paper, the old-fashioned still photo with its smiling kid, that didn’t seem enough.

She had glared out the window at the dull Washington sky, heard the wash of traffic noise. She needed a break from all this hothouse shit, the endless Malenfant blamestorming.

She started going through her diary.

Blue Lake — pop. 9000 — seemed to be a classic small town, built around the wide, glimmering lake that had given it its name. The downtown — brick buildings and family-owned stores — was solid and immortal looking. There was a park at the edge of the lake, and from it ran a whole series of broad, leafy streets lined with big nineteenth-century homes. One of these turned out to be the street she was looking for.

She stopped the car and got out.

The air was fresh, silent save for a distant growl of traffic, a rustle of leaves over her head. The sidewalk felt oddly soft under her feet. It was smart concrete, of course: self-repairing, unobtrusive. She walked up a path past a glowing green lawn. There was a bicycle, child-sized, bright red, dumped on the grass. The house itself might still be in the middle of the nineteenth century, save for the solar collection blanket draped over the roof, the button-sized security camera fixed to the door, the intelligent garbage can half hidden by foliage. Thus technology could be used to improve the world: not to change it, or spin it out of touch with humanity. Sometimes we get it right, she thought; the future doesn’t have to destroy us.

This is a good place, she thought, a human place. And the federal government — no, Maura, admit your responsibility, / — I want to take away a child, spirit him off from this beautiful place to some godforsaken center in Idaho or Nevada or maybe even overseas.

She rang the doorbell.

Bill Tybee turned out to be thirtyish, slim, a little overawed by this congresswoman who had parachuted into his life. He welcomed her in, talking too fast. “My wife’s away on military assignment. She was thrilled you were coming out to see us. Tommy’s our older child. We have a little girl, Billie, not yet two; she is at a creche today…”

She put together a picture of the Tybees’ life from the little clues around the house: the empty box of fatbuster pills; the big softscreen TV plastered over one wall; the ticking grandfather clock, obviously ancient; a run-down cleaner microbot the size of a mouse that she nearly stepped on in the middle of the living room carpet. Bill kicked it out of the way, embarrassed.

Bill wore a silver lapel ribbon, the med-alert that marked him out as a cancer victim. Every time she looked, Maura counted more cancer victims among her electors than seemed reasonable. No doubt something to do with the breakdown of the environment.

Bill led her upstairs to a bedroom door. There was a sign, cycling around like a Times Square billboard: TOM TYBEE’S ROOM! DO NOT ENTER! SANTA CLAUS ONLY!

Bill knocked. “Tom? There’s a lady to see you. Can we

come in?”

Uh-huh.

Bill pushed open the door — there was some kind of junk behind it, and he had a little trouble — and he led Maura into the room.

It was painted bright yellow, with a window that overlooked the garden. Along one wall there was a wardrobe and a bunk bed with a giant storage locker underneath, against the other wall a big chest of drawers. The wardrobe and chest were both open, and clothes and other stuff just spilled out, all over the floor and the bed, to such an extent it was hard to believe it was possible, even in principle, to stow it all away. The spare acreage of walls was covered with posters: a map of the world, sports pennants, some aggressive-looking superhero glaring out of a mask.

It was a typical five-year-old boy’s room, Maura thought to herself. Not that she was an expert on such matters.

The most striking thing about the room was a series of photographs and posters, some of them blown up, that had been stuck to the walls at about waist height — no, she thought, at little-boy eye level — some of them even lapping over the precious sports pennants. They were pictures of star fields. Maura was no astronomer but she recognized one or two constellations — Scorpio, Cygnus maybe. A river of light ran through the images, a river of stars. The photographs made up, she realized, in a kind of patchwork way, a complete three-hundred-and-sixty-degree map of the Milky Way as it wrapped around the sky.

Tom himself — the kid, the Blue — was a very ordinary five-year-old; small, thin, dark, big eyed. He was sitting in the middle of the kipple-covered floor. He was playing some kind of game, Maura realized; he had toys — cars, planes, little figures — set out in a ring around him. He had a Heart, one of those electronic recording gadgets, sitting on the floor beside him.

“Hello,” the boy said.

“Hello, Tom.”

Bill kneeled down, with a parent’s accustomed grace. “Tom, this lady is from Congress.”

“From Washington?”

Maura said, “That’s right.” She picked up one of his toys, some kind of armed lizard in a blue cape. “What are you making? A fort?”

“No,” Tom said seriously. He took back the lizard and put it back in its place in the circle. He didn’t expand, and Maura felt very dumb.

She stood up and pointed at the Milky Way photos. “Did you find all these yourself?”

“I started with that one.” He pointed. It was Cygnus, an elegant swan shape, bright Vega nestling alongside. “I found it in my dad’s book.”

“An old astronomy encyclopedia,” Bill said. “Fixed-image. I had it when / was a kid. He found the other pictures himself. From books, the Net. I helped him process them and get them to the same scale, match them. But he knew what he was looking for. That’s when we first suspected he might be—”

Solitary. Brilliant. Obsessive. Uncommunicative. Pursuing projects beyond his years. Blue.

Tom said, “I have a telescope.”

“You do? That’s great.”

“Yeah. You can see it’s made up of stars.”

“The Milky Way?”

“The Galaxy. And it goes beyond Cygnus.” He pointed at his walls. “It starts in Sagittarius, over there. Then it goes through Aquila and Cygnus, and it brushes Cassiopeia, and past Perseus and Orion and Puppis, and then you can’t see it any more. I wanted to see it from the other side.”

Bill said, “He means the southern hemisphere. His mother brought him home a couple of images from postings in the Pacific.”

Tom pointed to his photos. “It goes to Carina, and you can see a lot more of it. And it goes to the Southern Cross and Centaurus and the tail of Scorpio, and it gets brighter, and then it goes to Sagittarius where it’s really wide and has a dark line in the middle. And then it goes on to Aquila and to Cygnus…”