The Speed of Dark Read online

  But tonight it’s Hi-I’m-Sylvia and Tyree, who is picking up the plates and dirty knives and forks as if it didn’t bother him. Tyree doesn’t wear a name tag; he just cleans tables. We know he’s Tyree because we heard the others call him that. The first time I used his name to him, he looked startled and a little scared, but now he knows us, though he doesn’t use our names.

  “Be done in a minute here,” Tyree says, and gives us a sidelong look. “You doin’ okay?”

  “Fine,” Cameron says. He’s bouncing a little from heel to toe. He always does that a little, but I can tell he’s bouncing a bit faster than usual.

  I am watching the beer sign blinking in the window. It comes on in three segments, red, green, then blue in the middle, and then goes off all at once. Blink, red. Blink, green, blink blue, then blink red/green/blue, all off, all on, all off, and start over. A very simple pattern, and the colors aren’t that pretty (the red is too orange for my taste and so is the green, but the blue is a lovely blue), but still it’s a pattern to watch.

  “Your table’s ready,” Hi-I’m-Sylvia says, and I try not to twitch as I shift my attention from the beer sign to her.

  We arrange ourselves around the table in the usual way and sit down. We are having the same thing we have every time we come here, so it doesn’t take long to order. We wait for the food to come, not talking because we are each, in our own way, settling into this situation. Because of the visit to Dr. Fornum, I’m more aware than usual of the details of this process: that Linda is bouncing her fingers on the bowl of her spoon in a complex pattern that would delight a mathematician as much as it does her. I’m watching the beer sign out of the corner of my eye, as is Dale. Cameron is bouncing the tiny plastic dice he keeps in his pocket, discreetly enough that people who don’t know him wouldn’t notice, but I can see the rhythmic flutter of his sleeve. Bailey also watches the beer sign. Eric has taken out his multicolor pen and is drawing tiny geometric patterns on the paper place mat. First red, then purple, then blue, then green, then yellow, then orange, then red again. He likes it when the food arrives just when he finishes a color sequence.

  This time the drinks come while he’s at yellow; the food comes on the next orange. His face relaxes.

  We are not supposed to talk about the project off-campus. But Cameron is still bouncing in his seat, full of his need to tell us about a problem he solved, when we’ve almost finished eating. I glance around. No one is at a table near us. “Ezzer,” I say. Ezzer means “go ahead” in our private language. We aren’t supposed to have a private language and nobody thinks we can do something like that, but we can. Many people have a private language without even knowing it. They may call it jargon or slang, but it’s really a private language, a way of telling who is in the group and who is not.

  Cameron pulls a paper out of his pocket and spreads it out. We aren’t supposed to take papers out of the office, in case someone else gets hold of them, but we all do it. It’s hard to talk, sometimes, and much easier to write things down or draw them.

  I recognize the curly guardians Cameron always puts in the corner of his drawings. He likes anime. I recognize as well the patterns he has linked through a partial recursion that has the lean elegance of most of his solutions. We all look at it and nod. “Pretty,” Linda says. Her hands jerk sideways a little; she would be flapping wildly if we were back at the campus, but here she tries not to do it.

  “Yes,” Cameron says, and folds the paper back up.

  I know that this exchange would not satisfy Dr. Fornum. She would want Cameron to explain the drawing, even though it is clear to all of us. She would want us to ask questions, make comments, talk about it. There is nothing to talk about: it is clear to all of us what the problem was and that Cameron’s solution is good in all senses. Anything else is just busy talk. Among ourselves we don’t have to do that.

  “I was wondering about the speed of dark,” I say, looking down. They will look at me, if only briefly, when I speak, and I don’t want to feel all those gazes.

  “It doesn’t have a speed,” Eric says. “It’s just the space where light isn’t.”

  “What would it feel like if someone ate pizza on a world with more than one gravity?” Linda asks.

  “I don’t know,” Dale says, sounding worried.

  “The speed of not knowing,” Linda says.

  I puzzle at that a moment and figure it out. “Not knowing expands faster than knowing,” I say. Linda grins and ducks her head. “So the speed of dark could be greater than the speed of light. If there always has to be dark around the light, then it has to go out ahead of it.”

  “I want to go home now,” Eric says. Dr. Fornum would want me to ask if he is upset. I know he is not upset; if he goes home now he will see his favorite TV program. We say good-bye because we are in public and we all know you are supposed to say good-bye in public. I go back to the campus. I want to watch my whirligigs and spin spirals for a while before going home to bed.

  CAMERON AND I ARE IN THE GYM, TALKING IN BURSTS AS WE bounce on the trampolines. We have both done a lot of good work in the last few days, and we are relaxing.

  Joe Lee comes in and I look at Cameron. Joe Lee is only twenty-four. He would be one of us if he hadn’t had the treatments that were developed too late for us. He thinks he’s one of us because he knows he would have been and he has some of our characteristics. He is very good at abstractions and recursions, for instance. He likes some of the same games; he likes our gym. But he is much better—he is normal, in fact— in his ability to read minds and expressions. Normal minds and expressions. He misses with us, who are his closest relatives in that way.

  “Hi, Lou,” he says to me. “Hi, Cam.” I see Cameron stiffen. He doesn’t like to have his name shortened. He has told me it feels like having his legs cut off. He has told Joe Lee, too, but Joe Lee forgets because he spends so much of his time with the normals. “Howzitgoin?” he asks, slurring the words and forgetting to face us so we can see his lips. I catch it, because my auditory processing is better than Cameron’s and I know that Joe Lee often slurs his words.

  “How is it going?” I say clearly, for Cameron’s benefit. “Fine, Joe Lee.” Cameron breathes out.

  “Didja hear?” Joe Lee asks, and without waiting for an answer he rushes on. “Somebody’s working on a reversal procedure for autism. It worked on some rats or something, so they’re trying it on primates. I’ll bet it won’t be long before you guys can be normal like me.”

  Joe Lee has always said he’s one of us, but this makes it clear that he has never really believed it. We are “you guys” and normal is “like me.” I wonder if he said he was one of us but luckier to make us feel better or to please someone else.

  Cameron glares; I can almost feel the tangle of words filling his throat, making it impossible for him to speak. I know better than to speak for him. I speak only for myself, which is how everyone should speak.

  “So you admit you are not one of us,” I say, and Joe Lee stiffens, his face assuming an expression I’ve been taught is “hurt feelings.”

  “How can you say that, Lou? You know it’s just the treatment—”

  “If you give a deaf child hearing, he is no longer one of the deaf,” I say. “If you do it early enough, he never was. It’s all pretending otherwise.”

  “What’s all pretending otherwise? Otherwise what?” Joe Lee looks confused as well as hurt, and I realize that I left out one of the little pauses where a comma would be if you wrote what I said. But his confusion alarms me—being not understood alarms me; it lasted so long when I was a child. I feel the words tangling in my head, in my throat, and struggle to get them out in the right order, with the right expression. Why can’t people just say what they mean, the words alone? Why do I have to fight with tone and rate and pitch and variation?

  I can feel and hear my voice going tight and mechanical. I sound angry to myself, but what I feel is scared. “They fixed you before you were born, Joe Lee,” I say. “You
never lived days—one day—like us.”

  “You’re wrong,” he says quickly, interrupting. “I’m just like you inside, except—”

  “Except what makes you different from others, what you call normal,” I say, interrupting in turn. It hurts to interrupt. Miss Finley, one of my therapists, used to tap my hand if I interrupted. But I could not stand to hear him going on saying things that were not true. “You could hear and process language sounds—you learned to talk normally. You didn’t have dazzle eyes.”

  “Yeah, but my brain works the same way.”

  I shake my head. Joe Lee should know better; we’ve told him again and again. The problems we have with hearing and vision and other senses aren’t in the sensory organs but in the brain. So the brain does not work the same if someone doesn’t have those problems. If we were computers, Joe Lee would have a different main processor chip, with a different instruction set. Even if two computers with different chips do use the same software, it will not run the same.

  “But I do the same work—”

  But he doesn’t. He thinks he does. Sometimes I wonder if the company we work for thinks he does, because they have hired other Joe Lees and no more of us, even though I know there are unemployed people like us. Joe Lee’s solutions are linear. Sometimes that’s very effective, but sometimes… I want to say that, but I can’t, because he looks so angry and upset.

  “C’mon,” he says. “Have supper with me, you and Cam. My treat.”

  I feel cold in the middle. I do not want to have supper with Joe Lee.

  “Can’t,” Cameron says. “Got a date.” He has a date with his chess partner in Japan, I suspect. Joe Lee turns to look at me.

  “Sorry,” I remember to say. “I have a meeting.” Sweat trickles down my back; I hope Joe Lee doesn’t ask what meeting. It’s bad enough that I know there is time for supper with Joe Lee between now and the meeting, but if I have to lie about the meeting I will be miserable for days.

  GENE CRENSHAW SAT IN A BIG CHAIR AT ONE END OF THE TABLE; Pete Aldrin, like the others, sat in an ordinary chair along one side. Typical, Aldrin thought. He calls meetings because he can be visibly important in the big chair. It was the third meeting in four days, and Aldrin had stacks of work on his desk that wasn’t getting done because of these meetings. So did the others.

  Today the topic was the negative spirit in the workplace, which seemed to mean anyone who questioned Crenshaw in any way. Instead, they were supposed to “catch the vision”—Crenshaw’s vision—and concentrate on that to the exclusion of everything else. Anything that didn’t fit the vision was… suspect if not bad. Democracy wasn’t in it: this was a business, not a party. Crenshaw said that several times. Then he pointed to Aldrin’s unit, Section A as it was known in-house, as an example of what was wrong.

  Aldrin’s stomach burned; a sour taste came into his mouth. Section A had remarkable productivity; he had a string of commendations in his record because of it. How could Crenshaw possibly think there was anything wrong with it?

  Before he could jump in, Madge Demont spoke up. “You know, Gene, we’ve always worked as a team in this department. Now you come in here and pay no attention to our established, and successful, ways of working together—”

  “I’m a natural leader,” Crenshaw said. “My personality profile shows that I’m cut out to be a captain, not crew.”

  “Teamwork is important for anyone,” Aldrin said. “Leaders have to learn how to work with others—”

  “That’s not my gift,” Crenshaw said. “My gift is inspiring others and giving a strong lead.”

  His gift, Aldrin thought, was being bossy without having earned the right, but Crenshaw came highly recommended by higher management. They would all be fired before he was.

  “These people,” Crenshaw went on, “have to realize that they are not the be-all and end-all of this company. They have to fit in; it’s their responsibility to do the job they were hired to do—”

  “And if some of them are also natural leaders?” Aldrin asked.

  Crenshaw snorted. “Autistics? Leaders? You must be kidding. They don’t have what it takes; they don’t understand the first thing about how society works.”

  “We have a contractual obligation…” Aldrin said, shifting ground before he got too angry to be coherent. “Under the terms of the contract, we must provide them with working conditions suitable to them.”

  “Well, we certainly do that, don’t we?” Crenshaw almost quivered with indignation, “At enormous expense, too. Their own private gym, sound system, parking lot, all kinds of toys.”

  Upper management also had a private gym, sound system, parking lot, and such useful toys as stock options. Saying so wouldn’t help.

  Crenshaw went on. “I’m sure our other hardworking employees would like the chance to play in that sandbox—but they do their jobs.”

  “So does Section A,” Aldrin said. “Their productivity figures—”

  “Are adequate, I agree. But if they spent the time working that they waste on playtime, it would be a lot better.”

  Aldrin felt his neck getting hot. “Their productivity is not just adequate, Gene. It’s outstanding. Section A is, person for person, more productive than any other department. Maybe what we should do is let other people have the same kinds of supportive resources that we give Section A—”

  “And drop the profit margin to zero? Our stockholders would love that. Pete, I admire you for sticking up for your people, but that’s exactly why you didn’t make VP and why you won’t rise any higher until you learn to see the big picture, get the vision. This company is going places, and it needs a workforce of unimpaired, productive workers—people who don’t need all these little extras. We’re cutting the fat, getting back to the lean, tough, productive machine…”

  Buzzwords, Aldrin thought. The same buzzwords he had fought in the first place, to get Section A those very perks that made them so productive. When the profitability of Section A proved him right, senior management had given in gracefully—he thought. But now they’d put Crenshaw in. Did they know? Could they not know?

  “I know you have an older brother with autism,” Crenshaw said, his voice unctuous. “I feel your pain, but you have to realize that this is the real world, not nursery school. Your family problems can’t be allowed to make policy.”

  Aldrin wanted to pick up the water pitcher and smash it—water and ice cubes and all—onto Crenshaw’s head. He knew better. Nothing would convince Crenshaw that his reasons for championing Section A were far more complex than having an autistic brother. He had almost refused to work there because of Jeremy, because of a childhood spent in the shadow of Jeremy’s incoherent rages, the ridicule he’d had from other kids about his “crazy retard” brother. He’d had more than enough of Jeremy; he’d sworn, when he left home, that he would avoid any reminders, that he would live among safe, sane, normal people for the rest of his life.

  Now, though, it was the difference between Jeremy (still living in a group home, spending his days at an adult day-care center, unable to do more than simple self-care tasks) and the men and women of Section A that made Aldrin defend them. It was still hard, sometimes, to see what they had in common with Jeremy and not flinch away. Yet working with them, he felt a little less guilty about not visiting his parents and Jeremy more than once a year.

  “You’re wrong,” he said to Crenshaw. “If you try to dismantle Section A’s support apparatus, you will cost this company more in productivity than you’ll gain. We depend on their unique abilities; the search algorithms and pattern analysis they’ve developed have cut the time from raw data to production—that’s our edge over the competition—”

  “I don’t think so. It’s your job to keep them productive, Aldrin. Let’s see if you’re up to it.”

  Aldrin choked down his anger. Crenshaw had the self-satisfied smirk of a man who knew he was in power and enjoyed watching his subordinates cringe. Aldrin glanced sideways; the others were studiously no
t looking at him, hoping that the trouble landing on him would not spread to them.

  “Besides,” Crenshaw went on. “There’s a new study coming out, from a lab in Europe. It’s supposed to be on-line in a day or so. Experimental as yet, but I understand very promising. Maybe we should suggest that they get on the protocol for it.”

  “New treatment?”

  “Yeah. I don’t know much about it, but I know someone who does and he knew I was taking over a bunch of autistics. Told me to keep an eye out for when it went to human trials. It’s supposed to fix the fundamental deficit, make them normal. If they were normal, they wouldn’t have an excuse for those luxuries.”

  “If they were normal,” Aldrin said, “they couldn’t do the work.”

  “In either case, we’d be clear of having to provide this stuff—” Cren-shaw’s expansive wave included everything from the gym to individual cubbies with doors. “Either they could do the work at less cost to us or, if they couldn’t do the work, they wouldn’t be our employees anymore.”

  “What is the treatment?” Aldrin asked.

  “Oh, some combination of neuro-enhancers and nanotech. It makes the right parts of the brain grow, supposedly.” Crenshaw grinned, an unfriendly grin. “Why don’t you find out all about it, Pete, and send me a report? If it works we might even go after the North American license.”

  Aldrin wanted to glare, but he knew glaring wouldn’t help. He had walked into Crenshaw’s trap; he would be the one Section A blamed, if this turned out bad for them. “You know you can’t force treatment on anyone,” he said, as sweat crawled down his ribs, tickling. “They have civil rights.”

  “I can’t imagine anyone wanting to be like that,” Crenshaw said. “And if they do, that’s a matter for a psych evaluation, I would think. Preferring to be sick—”

  “They aren’t sick,” Aldrin said.