Meanwhile — like a hobby for her spare time — she was, somewhat more reluctantly, pursuing Malenfant’s other current obsession. Find me an accelerator… With glass in hand she tapped at her softscreen, searching for updates from her assistants and data miners.
A candidate particle physics laboratory had quickly emerged: Fermilab, outside Chicago, where Malenfant had a drinking-buddy relationship with the director. So Emma started to assemble applications for experiment time.
Immediately she had found herself coming up against powerful resistance from the researchers already working at Fermilab, who saw the wellspring of their careers being diverted by outsiders. She tried to make progress through the Universities Research Association, a consortium of universities in the United States and overseas. But she met more obstruction and resistance. She had to fly to Washington to testify before a subpanel of something called the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel of the Department of Energy, which had links into the president’s science adviser.
The problem was that the facilities and experiments required giant sums of money. The physicists were still smarting from the cancellation by Congress in the 1990s of the Superconducting Supercollider, a fifty-three mile tunnel of magnets and particle beams that would have been built under a cotton field in Ellis County, Texas, and would have cost as much as a small space station. And in spite of all the megabucks spent, there didn’t seem to have been a fundamental breakthrough in the field for some decades.
Well, the news today, she learned now, was that the approval for the Fermilab runs had come through.
It wasn’t a surprise. She had found the physicists intelligent, prone to outrage — but also politically naive and easily outma-neuvered.
She sat back, thinking. The question was, what should she do with this news?
She decided to sit on it for now, trying to squeeze a little more productivity out of Malenfant. Because when she told Malenfant they’d won, he would take the first plane to Chicago. And she had a lot of issues to discuss with him.
Such as the pressure Cornelius was applying for Bootstrap to get involved with another of Eschatology’s pet projects: the Milton Foundation.
The Foundation was a reaction to the supersmart children who seemed to be sprouting like weeds across the planet. The Foundation was proposing to contact these kids to make sure their special needs were met and to try to ensure they got the opportunities they needed to exercise their abilities. No potential Einsteins doomed to waste their brief lives toiling in fields, no putative Picassos blown apart in mindless wars — no more “mute inglorious Miltons.” Everyone would benefit: the kids themselves, their families, and the human race as a whole, with this bright new intellectual resource to call on.
That was the prospectus, and it had sold easily to Malenfant; it fit in with his view that the future needed to be managed, ideally by Reid Malenfant.
But it was worrying for Emma, on a number of levels. Here was a report, for example, on some kid who’d turned up in Zambia, southern Africa. He seemed the brightest of all, according to some globally applied assessment rating. But did that make it right to take him out and dump him in some school, maybe on another continent? What could a kid like that, or even his parents, possibly know about getting involved with a powerful, amorphous western entity like Eschatology?
And besides, what really lay behind this strange phenomenon of supersmart children? Could it really be some kind of unusually benign environmental-change effect, as the experts seemed to be saying?
Her instinct, if she felt she wasn’t in control of some aspect of the business, was always to go see for herself. She had to get out there and see for herself how all this worked, just once. This Zambia case, the first in Africa, might be just the excuse.
Of course it could be the tequila doing her thinking for her.
Africa. Jesus.
She poured another shot.
The journey was grueling, a hop over the Atlantic to England and then an interminable overnighter south across Europe, the Mediterranean, and the dense heart of Africa.
She flew into Harare, Zimbabwe. Then she had to take a short internal flight to Victoria Falls, the small tourist-choked town on the Zimbabwe side of the Falls themselves.
At her hotel, she slept for twelve hours.
The next morning a Bootstrap driver took her across the Falls, through a comic-opera immigration checkpoint, and into Zambia.
The man she had come to meet was waiting at the checkpoint. He was the teacher who had reported the boy to the Milton Foundation. He came forward hesitantly, holding out his hand. “Ms. Stoney, I’m Stef Younger.” He was small, portly, dressed in a kind of loose safari style: baggy shirt and shorts fitted with deep, bulging pockets. He couldn’t have been older than thirty; he was prematurely balding, and his scalp, burned pink by the winter sun, was speckled with sweat.
He was obviously southern African, probably from Zimbabwe or South Africa itself. His elaborate accent, forever linked to a nightmare past, made her skin prickle. But there were blue chalk-dust stains on his shirt, she noticed, the badge of the teacher since time immemorial, and she warmed to him, just a little.
They got back in the car and drove away from the Falls.
Africa was flat and still and dusty, eroded smooth by time, apparently untouched by the twenty-first century. The only verticals were the trees and the skinny people, moving slowly through the
harsh light.
They reached the town of Livingstone. She could discern the remnants of Art Deco style in the closed-up banks and factories and even a cinema, now sun-bleached and washed out to a uniform sand color, all of it marred by ubiquitous Shit Cola ads.
Younger gave her a little tourist grounding.
This remained a place of grinding poverty. Misguided aid efforts had flooded the area with cheap Western clothes, and local crooks had used them to undercut and wipe out the textile factories that had once kept everyone employed.
Now the unemployment here ran at 80 percent of adults. And there was no kind of welfare safety net. If you didn’t have a relative who worked somewhere, you found some other way to live.
Younger pointed. “Look at that.”
At the side of the road, there was a baboon squatting on the rim of a rusty trash can. He held himself there effortlessly with his back feet while he dug with his forearms into the trash.
Emma was stunned. She’d never been so close to a nonhuman primate before — not outside a zoo, anyhow. The baboon was the size of a ten-year-old boy, lean and gray and obviously ferociously strong, eyes sharp and intelligent. So much more human than she might have thought.
Younger grinned. “He’s looking for plastic bags. He knows that’s where he will find food. Tourists think he’s cute. But give him food and he’ll be back tomorrow. Smart, see. Smart as a human. But he doesn’t think.”
“What does that mean?”
“He doesn’t understand death. You see the females carrying around dead infants, sometimes for days, trying to feed them.”
“Maybe they’re grieving.”
“Nah.” Younger wound down his window and raised his fist.
The baboon’s head snapped around, sizing up Younger with a sharp, tense glance. Then he leapt off the trash can rim and loped away.
Away from the town the road stretched, black and unmarked, across a flat, dry landscape. The trees were sparse, and in many instances smashed over, as if by some great storm. There was little scrub growing between the trees. But everywhere the land was shaped by tracks, the footsteps of animals and birds overlaid in the white Kalahari sands. The tracks of elephants were great craters bigger than dinner plates, and where the ground was firm she could see the print left by the tough, cracked skin of an elephant’s sole, a spidery map as distinctive as a fingerprint.