"Subtwo?"
He spun at the voice. Jan Hikaru stood in the dimness of the next room, his hands in his pockets.
"What do you want? How did you get in here?"
"I thought you saw me—the door opened."
Subtwo glanced toward the intercom screen, expecting to see Subone's laughing face, but the communicator remained blank. He scowled; Subone was having a joke of his own. Subtwo decided then and there to sever the connections between the two suites. What had seemed a sensible safety precaution had proved a nuisance.
"What do you want?"
"To talk to you about Mischa."
Subtwo frowned. He had wondered if she might have trouble adjusting to a new situation, but he had expected her apparent determination to keep
her out of trouble longer than this. "What has happened?"
"Nothing bad," Jan Hikaru said quickly.
Subtwo assumed, then, that he was being given a simple progress report, and that annoyed him. He wanted to plan how quickly the ship could be made ready—he should have done that without even needing to think, certainly before sleeping, despite his weariness. "I'm very busy. As it isn't important, come back another time."
"It is important."
"I didn't ask for status checks. Follow your own judgment with her education."
"I'm trying to do that." The tone of Jan Hikaru's voice was moving into exasperation, which Subtwo noticed and found interesting in such an even-tempered young man. He could not remember ever having seen him angry or as much as annoyed.
"What is it?" More patiently.
"I'd like you to help her with her math."
"Help her—what? If you're not competent to teach simple arithmetic—"
Jan did not appear offended by the outburst. Subtwo cut himself off and waited.
"She already knew arithmetic," Jan said calmly. "She's working beyond what I know right now."
"Then you knew less than I thought."
"No, I knew more than you asked me about."
Subtwo realized that was quite possible; he had not, in fact, pressed Jan's knowledge, merely ascertained that he knew enough to work with. "You are saying?"
"With the right help, there's no telling how far she could go. She's a mathematical genius—she just never had any reason or chance to develop the ability."
"You tested her neural responses?"
"I don't need to test her neural responses," Jan said with irritation. "I've worked with her for weeks."
"Send her along, then, and I'll test her. We'll see." He was already considering ways one could feign genius: Mischa would have to be quite clever if this were a trick.
Jan Hikaru looked hardly satisfied with the response, but Subtwo had no patience to commend a discovery he had not certified himself; his enthusiasm focused in other directions. "Will that do?" he asked sardonically.
"All she needs is a chance," Jan said. "There's no way for her to get one in Center." He turned and left the suite.
Relieved to be alone again, Subtwo bent over his intercom. He started to call Madame, but he wanted to be certain he could offer her a concrete plan, not possibilities, after his first failure. He contacted the common room, and, after a few minutes' delay, Draco.
"What is the status of the ship?"
"It's coming along."
"How much work needs to be finished?"
"Couple weeks' worth."
"How quickly could it be completed in an emergency?"
"Something wrong? There's nothing that couldn't be jury-rigged in a day or so."
"Approximations are not required, but I would like to be able to leave should that seem advantageous."
Draco laughed, a quick short bark that annoyed Subtwo and amused Subone; Draco pretended anti-intellectualism and put on a face of contempt if anyone spoke to him multisyllabically.
"Okay," he said. "Five days, then?"
"Thank you." Subtwo tolerated being annoyed because of Draco's competence. He shut off the intercom and walked through his clean, pale, soothing rooms, anxious now to speak with his pseudosib and get that ordeal over with; Subone was fully as capable of taunting him as was Blaisse.
He opened the door as Mischa was about to knock. "Oh—you."
"Jan said you wanted to see me," she said.
"He does not delay, does he?"
She shrugged. "I'll come back some other time." She did not look like a genius of any sort, she looked like a maltreated stubborn child, wearing the same clothes she had arrived in, not exactly grubby, but far from spotless. Though self-assured, she was not arrogant, nor did her bright green eyes hold the superiority or surprise Subtwo might have expected in a newly confirmed genius.
"What did Jan Hikaru tell you when he sent you up here?"
"A minute ago he only said you wanted to see me. This morning he said
he wasn't very good in math and he thought he'd ask you to help."
"I see."
"I think he's good," she said defensively.
So he had not told her all that he believed, or had not let her know how much it might mean. Subtwo wondered why he had kept his silence, and admitted, though the fact was not flattering, that Jan might not have wanted to raise Mischa's expectations without knowing that Subtwo would be of assistance. He was honest enough with himself to acknowledge that he had been very close to sending Jan and his time-consuming ideas away.
"Come in," he said. "I want you to do something."
He called up the biomedical programs and uncoiled the electrode wires. "Sit there."
"What's that?"
"Electrodes—instruments to sense your brain waves."
"I know that—what for?" She looked very wary, almost afraid of the simple devices.
"Just to test the responses of your brain. It takes only a moment. It doesn't hurt."
"What's on the other end?"
"A sensor," he said, wondering why she was asking such questions. "A recording device, for the computer."
"No patterns?"
"Like a lock? No, of course not. That would be pointless. This does not compare, it only examines."
"Okay," she said, and after that seemed quite relaxed. He fixed the electrodes at her temples with adhesive, for he did not approve of the self-attaching kind. He dimmed the lights.
"Look at that screen."
She shook her hair back from her eyes and complied, gazing at the console. The design changed, and changed again. He turned it off and raised the light level. "Very good."
"Is that all?"
"Yes. You may take off the electrodes." Subtwo glanced down at the results, and froze.
"Wait."
And then he remembered what Jan Hikaru had said: "I don't need to test
her neural responses. I've worked with her for weeks."
He knew his instruments were not malfunctioning. They measured the time it took a mind to respond to the change in a pattern, an interval measured in milliseconds. It did not depend on learning, culture, motivation, any of the factors that could cause achievement above or below the average for ability. It measured only potential, and Mischa's potential was tremendous.
"Never mind," he said, half in a daze. "It's all right. Tell Jan Hikaru that he was correct to speak with me. Are you free tomorrow morning?"
"I can be, I guess."
"I will see you then."
"All right." She was looking at him curiously; he had the strange sensation that she had felt his astonishment, but she left without saying anything else, and Subtwo leaned over the console, staring at the amazing parameter, feeling a great, deep sorrow that Mischa had not been born somewhere else, anywhere else, where she would not have wasted all the best years for learning, her childhood.