Josh followed Dawn’s lead, loaded a huge oval plate, and ate and ate. As he did so he wondered how he was going to earn his keep. He couldn’t expect his uncle and aunt to go on feeding him for nothing. Even if that was what his mother had had in mind when she sent him out here, Aunt Stacy would never stand for it. And although he had been to Burnt Willow Farm before, he really knew nothing about farming. What was he going to do? Would he be able to stay? If not, where would he go?
Aunt Stacy came in while they were still eating. Josh could have asked her his questions, but the previous evening had given him the funny feeling that he did not quite trust her. It was a relief when she said, almost before the “Good morning” was out of her mouth, “Joshua, I have a job for you. Your uncle and I are going to be busy with a visitor, and I don’t know how long it will take. I forgot, but Dawn has a doctor’s appointment this morning. She can’t go alone, of course. I’d like you to take her. Will you do that?”
“Sure.” It was a relief to feel useful.
“Then eat up. The doctor’s office is in Payette. It’s easy to find, once you’re in the town.” Aunt Stacy glanced at the clock over the stove. “You’ll have to hurry, though. I’ve called for the bus to stop for you, same place as you got off yesterday, in twenty minutes.”
He was already stuffed. Just the same, it was a scramble to get washed and changed and ready in ten minutes. And it was a surprise to find Dawn, in a new dress, patiently waiting for him at the door when he thundered back down the old wooden staircase.
She didn’t speak, but maybe she understood a lot more than Aunt Stacy gave her credit for. She at once took his hand and began to run them uphill. There was no time today for looking at failing crops, or wandering along the ridge when they got there. Josh had one moment to glance north, at another hazy sky free of rain clouds, and then the PV was in sight. It cruised toward them, slowing as its memory told its sensors that it was expecting new passengers.
Dawn grinned happily at Josh as they boarded and settled into their seats. He wondered again, how much did she follow of what was happening? She had the uncanny knack of parroting back exactly what she heard, without adding to it; but the words she quoted always seemed relevant to the question or the situation. That meant she must understand. She merely chose a strange way of answering.
Josh made a decision: if he was allowed to stay at Burnt Willow Farm, he had to be very careful what he said in Dawn’s presence. She might be badly retarded, as Aunt Stacy insisted, but her memory and the odd way that her mind worked also made her likely to say things he might not want to hear repeated.
Josh had seen his own role as a kind of chaperon, guarding Dawn to the doctor’s office and making sure that she got safely back.
While he waited for Dawn’s examination to be completed, he finally had a chance to read the rest of the file that he had printed.
Autistic people sometimes have strange and singular talents, emerging at an early age and developing with amazing speed. These talents can include an intuitive understanding of complex machinery, or great athletic skills. Musical, mathematical, and artistic ability are not uncommon, together with feats of memory that stagger the imagination.
At the same time, the autistic patient appears to lack normal reasoning power. They remember works word for word, but often do not understand them. They recall events but don’t interpret them. They may have prodigious powers of computation but no concept of mathematical proof.
Although autistic persons are often retarded in many areas, and cannot function unassisted in the everyday world, “autistic” and “retarded” are not the same and should not be thought of as such. For some autistic people, the words “genius” and “idiot” can be employed with equal logic; hence the term “idiot savant,” coined by an early worker in this field, Dr. J. Langdon Downe. It was one of his patients, who, on a single reading, committed to memory Edward Gibbon’s multivolume masterwork The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and was ever thereafter able to repeat any part of it. Similar feats have been noted again and again—
“All right.” It was Dr. Ergan, standing at the door. “I’m done with Dawn. Your turn.”
“Turn for what?”
“Your examination.”
“I’m just here with Dawn. I’m not here for an examination.”
“You are, you know. You were scheduled for a complete physical.”
“Me? Are you sure?”
“Quite sure. I spoke to Stacy Kelsh less than two hours ago.” The doctor was maybe sixty-five years old, but still straight and vigorous, and her bright gray eyes seemed to see right inside Joshua. “She’s your aunt, isn’t she?”
“Yes.” Josh didn’t want to get into the fact that she wasn’t his real aunt. “But I don’t need an examination.”
“How long since you had one?”
“A physical? I don’t remember. Four or five years.” Things like physical examinations were low on his mother’s scale of priorities.
“Then you ought to have one anyway, whether you think you need one or not.” Dr. Ergan smiled at him. “Don’t worry, it won’t hurt a bit.”
Hurt, no. Embarrass, yes.
Josh didn’t like the idea of taking his clothes off in front of strangers. He liked even less being poked and prodded and sniffed at, even if the poking and prodding and sniffing was done by spidery little machines, while Dr. Ergan sat behind a bank of monitors and seemed to take no notice of him at all.
After twenty minutes of that she stood up—still without looking at him—and said, “All right. That does it. Clothes on, and come outside.”
Dawn was waiting in the office, staring at the same page of the same picture book as when Joshua had left. Dr. Ergan motioned Josh to a chair next to his cousin and sat herself down opposite. For a few seconds she studied both of them in silence.
“Well,” she said at last, “I’ll be sending the full report to your aunt, of course, but I thought you might like the quick summary. You, Joshua, are in fine physical condition. So is Dawn. I just wish that most of the people I see were in half as good shape. Of course, there are a couple of things. Joshua, how long since you visited a dentist?”
“I don’t know.”
“I can make a guess. Certainly not since your second permanent molars came in, and probably not for a long time before that. I bet it’s five years and more. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. You have half a dozen cavities. Do your teeth ache?”
“No.”
“You’re lucky. They will, unless you have some work done on them in the near future. But don’t worry. Three or four short sessions, and you’ll be fine. You can relax about everything else. I don’t see anything that would stop you from going—today, if you had to.”
Josh wondered what he had missed. “Going where?”
“Uh-oh.” Dr. Ergan bit her lower lip, and glanced from Joshua to Dawn and back. “I hope I haven’t spoiled a surprise. But your aunt didn’t say to keep anything a secret. Look.” She turned around to her desk, picked up a message sheet, and read from it. “Examine as soon as possible, to make sure that they are medically fit to travel off-Earth, and could stand to make transitions through the node network.”
“That’s what it says.” She laid the sheet back on her desk. “I’m going to reply to her that you are both medically fit enough, even without the dental work. I see no reason either or both of you shouldn’t go up into orbit. Or, if you feel like it, through a node to the Kuiper Belt. Or anywhere else that your uncle and aunt see fit to take you.”