“Do you know what it is, Tom? The Milky Way, I mean, the Galaxy.”

“It’s stars. And it’s a big whirly.”

“A spiral?”

“Yeah. Look, you can see. There’s the middle of the Galaxy, in Sagittarius, where it gets fat and bulgy. And all the arms wrap around that.

“We’re inside an arm. You can see one of the other arms between us and the center there, going through Centaurus and the Southern Cross and Carina. And there—” He pointed to the bright cloud in Carina. “ — that’s where it turns away from us, and you see it end-on, and that’s why it looks so bright, like a road full of cars coming at you. And then there’s a lane of dust and stuff that looks dark, the stuff between the arms, and that’s the black stripe down the middle. And then on the other side of Carina you can see the arm that wraps around the outside of the sun, and it goes—” He turned around and pointed to his northern sky.” — there, all the way across.”

Bill shrugged. “He figured all this out for himself.”

“He figured out he’s in the middle of a spiral Galaxy?”

“All by himself. Yes.”

The kid, Tom, talked on. He might have been any five-year-old — cute, friendly enough, a little subdued — except for his subject. Most kids his age, the kids in the neighborhood here, were surely barely aware they were in Iowa. Little Tom was already a galactic traveler.

She felt a brush of fear.

It was, she thought, this mix of the mundane with the strange — the childish toys and mess with the visions of galactic geography — that was so unsettling about these Blue children. A kid wasn’t supposed to be like this.

And she noticed, now, that every one of Tom’s toys — the cars and boats and figures he had put in a protective ring around himself — was blue.

Maura accepted some coffee, tried to put Bill at his ease.

Bill Tybee was a stay-at-home parent, the homemaker. He showed her, shyly, an animated postcard of his wife, June. It had been taken on an air base somewhere. She was a short, slightly dumpy blond, a wide Iowa smile, dressed in a crisp USASF uniform; when Bill lifted it into the sunlight the postcard cycled ten seconds of her saluting and grinning, over and over. She was enlisted, a technical specialist in a special forces unit.

After a few minutes, Bill started to open up about his fears for the boy. “I know he’s Blue. The school assessment proved it—”

“Then you should be proud. You know that means he’s exceptional.”

“I don’t want him to be exceptional. Not if it means he has to go away.”

“Well, that’s the law, Bill. I know how you feel. I know you’re concerned for his safety, and you’ve every right to be after what happened to him before.”

“They failed to protect him, and they expelled him, Ms. Della. I wasn’t going to give him back just because they said they changed their minds.”

“But you can’t keep him at home. The new centers aren’t run by some private organization like the Miltons, but by the federal government. There’s nothing to fear. It’s the best for him.”

“With respect, Ms. Della, I don’t think you know what’s best for my kid.”

“No,” she said. “No, I probably don’t. That’s why I’m here.”

“So he’s smart. But he still needs to grow, to have a life, to play with other kids. Is he going to get all of that at one of these fancy centers?”

“Well, that’s why the centers were set up, Bill.”

“I know the theory,” Bill said. “But that’s not how it is. That’s not what it’s like to live with this thing.” Bill talked on about the effect of TV and the Nets: the talk shows featuring kids with giant plastic dome heads, the TV evangelists who claimed that the kids were a gift from Jesus or a curse from Satan, and so on. “It’s a drip, drip, drip. There’s a whole host of ‘experts’ telling the world it’s okay to pick on my kid, because he’s different. And I’ve seen the reports of those places overseas, in Australia and places, where they beat up the kids and starve them and—”

“That’s not happening here, Bill.” She leaned forward, projecting a practiced authority. “And besides, I’ll ensure Tom is protected.”

Or at least, she thought, I will strive to minimize the harm that is done to him. Maybe that is my true vocation.

Bill Tybee burst out, “Why us, Ms. Della? Why our kid?”

To that, of course, she had no answer.

Emma Stoney:

Emma tried to care for Michael. Or at least to maintain some

kind of human contact with him.

But the boy would barely stir from his sleeping compartment down on the meatware deck. He seemed to spend the whole time sitting on his bunk bed over some softscreen program or another.

When they did force Michael out of his bunk, for food and exercise and hygiene breaks, the kid seemed to veer between catatonia and a complete freak-out, an utter inability to deal with the world. He would rock back and forth, crooning, making strange flapping motions with his hands. Or he would find some control panel light, flickering on and off, and stare at it for hours.

Meanwhile, no amount of encouragement or attention seemed able to root out Michael’s fundamental suspicion of them.

It disturbed Emma. She knew that when Michael looked at her, he just saw another adult in the long line who had mistreated him, subjected him to arbitrary rales, punished him endlessly. From Michael’s point of view, this new environment was just another setup, the kind hands and smiling voices just part of a new set of rales he had to learn.

Eventually, the punishment would return.

Once she tried to push him, with the help of a softscreen translator. “Michael. What are you thinking about?”

I am nothing.

“Tell me what that means.”

It means I am not special. I am nowhere special. I am in no special time. I would not know if the whole world were suddenly made one day older, or one day younger. I would not know if the whole world were moved to the left, this much. He hopped sideways, like a frog; briefly he grinned as a child. It means that the world was born, and will die, just as I will. He said this calmly, as if it were as obvious as the weather.

Cornelius stirred. “This is new. It sounds like the Copernican principle. No privileged observers. Every day he surprises me.”

Emma felt baffled, distracted by Michael’s software voice, which sounded like a middle-aged American woman, perhaps from Seattle. “Tell me how you know that, Michael.”

Because the sky is dark at night.

It took her some minutes of cross-examination, and cross-reference with sources she accessed through her softscreen, to figure out his meaning.

It was, she realized slowly, a version of Gibers’ paradox, an old cosmological riddle. Why should the sky be dark at night? If the universe was infinite, and static, and lasted forever, then Earth would be surrounded by an array of stars going off to infinity. And every direction Michael looked, his eye would receive a ray of light from the surface of a star. The whole sky ought to glow as bright as the surface of the sun.

Therefore, since the sky was dark — and since Michael had figured out that he wasn’t in a special place in the universe, and so there were no special places — the universe couldn’t be eternal and infinite and static; at least one of those assumptions must be wrong.

So the stars must have been born, as I was born, Michael said. Otherwise their light would fill up the sky. People are born; people fade; people die. I was born; I fade; I die. So the stars were born; the stars will fade; the stars will die. It is okay.

Big Bang to Heat Death, just from looking at the stars.

Cornelius said, “Maybe it comes from his belief system. His people had Christianity imposed on them, but the Lozi have kept many of their old beliefs. They believe in an afterlife, but it isn’t a place of punishment or reward. This world, of illness and crop failure and famine and short, brutal lives, is where you suffer. In the next life you are happy. They wear tribal markings so that when they die they are placed with their relatives.”