An immense light flooded her eyes.
She cried out.
Her mother enfolded her in her arms. “The Sun, Lieserl. The Sun…”
The first few days were the worst. Her parents — impossibly tall, looming figures — took her through brightly lit rooms, a garden always flooded with sunlight. She learned to sit up. The muscles in her back fanned out, pulsing as they grew. To distract her from the unending pain, clowns tumbled over the grass before her, chortling through their huge red lips, then popping out of existence in clouds of pixels.
She grew explosively, feeding all the time, a million impressions crowding into her soft sensorium.
There seemed to be no limit to the number of rooms in this place, this House. Slowly she began to understand that some of the rooms were Virtual chambers — blank screens against which any number of images could be projected. But even so, the House must comprise hundreds of rooms. And she — with her parents — wasn’t alone here, she slowly realized. There were other people, but at first they kept away, out of sight, apparent only by their actions: the meals they prepared, the toys they left her.
On the third day her parents took her on a trip by flitter. It was the first time she’d been away from the House, its grounds. She stared through the bulbous windows, pressing her nose to heated glass. The journey was an arc over a toy-like landscape; a breast of blue ocean curved away from the land, all around her. This was the island of Skiros, her mother told her, and the sea was called the Aegean. The House was the largest construct on the island; it was a jumble of white, cubeshaped buildings, linked by corridors and surrounded by garden — grass, trees. Further out there were bridges and roads looping through the air above the ground, houses like a child’s bricks sprinkled across glowing hillsides.
Everything was drenched in heavy, liquid sunlight.
The flitter snuggled at last against a grassy sward close to the shore of an ocean. Lieserl’s mother lifted her out and placed her — on her stretching, unsteady legs — on the rough, sandy grass.
Hand in hand, the little family walked down a short slope to the beach.
The Sun burned through thinned air from an unbearably blue sky. Her vision seemed telescopic. She looked at distant groups of children and adults playing — far away, halfway to the horizon — and it was as if she was among them herself. Her feet, still uncertain, pressed into gritty, moist sand. She could taste the brine salt on the air; it seemed to permeate her very skin.
She found mussels clinging to a ruined pier. She prised them away with a toy spade, and gazed, fascinated, at their slime-dripping feet.
She sat on the sand with her parents, feeling her light costume stretch over her still-growing limbs. They played a simple game, of counters moving over a floating Virtual board, pictures of ladders and hissing snakes. There was laughter, mock complaints by her father, elaborate pantomimes of cheating.
Her senses were electric. It was a wonderful day, full of light and joy, extraordinarily vivid sensations. Her parents loved her — she could see that in the way they moved with each other, came to her, played with her.
They must know she was different; but they didn’t seem to care.
She didn’t want to be different — to be wrong. She closed her mind against the thoughts, and concentrated on the snakes, the ladders, the sparkling counters.
Every morning she woke up in a bed that felt too small.
Lieserl liked the garden. She liked to watch the flowers straining their tiny, pretty faces towards the Sun, as the great light climbed patiently across the sky. The sunlight made the flowers grow, her father told her. Maybe she was like a flower, she thought, growing too quickly in all this sunlight.
On the fifth day she was taken to a wide, irregularly shaped, colorful classroom. This room was full of children — other children! — and toys, drawings, books. Sunlight flooded the room; perhaps there was some clear dome stretched over the open walls.
The children sat on the floor and played with paints and dolls, or talked earnestly to brilliantly-colored Virtual figures — smiling birds, tiny clowns. The children turned to watch as she came in with her mother, their faces round and bright, like dapples of sunlight through leaves. She’d never been so close to other children before. Were these children different, too?
One small girl scowled at her, and Lieserl quailed against her mother’s legs. But her mother’s familiar warm hands pressed into her back. “Go ahead. It’s all right.”
As she stared at the unknown girl’s scowling face, Lieserl’s questions, her too-adult, too-sophisticated doubts, seemed to evaporate. Suddenly, all that mattered to her — all that mattered in the world — was that she should be accepted by these children — that they wouldn’t know she was different.
An adult approached her: a man, young, thin, his features bland with youth. He wore a jumpsuit colored a ludicrous orange; in the sunlight, the glow of it shone up over his chin. He smiled at her. “Lieserl, isn’t it? My name’s Michael. We’re glad you’re here.” In a louder, exaggerated voice, he said, “Aren’t we, people?”
He was answered by a rehearsed, chorused “Yes.”
“Now come and we’ll find something for you to do,” Michael said. He led her across the child-littered floor to a space beside a small boy. The boy — red-haired, with startling blue eyes — was staring at a Virtual puppet which endlessly formed and reformed: the figure two, collapsing into two snowflakes, two swans, two dancing children; the figure three, followed by three bears, three fish swimming in the air, three cakes. The boy mouthed the numbers, following the tinny voice of the Virtual. “Two. One. Two and one is three.”
Michael introduced her to the boy — Tommy — and she sat down with him. Tommy, she was relieved to find, was so fascinated by his Virtual that he scarcely seemed aware that Lieserl was present — let alone different.
The number Virtual ran through its cycle and winked out of existence. “Bye-bye, Tommy! Goodbye, Lieserl!”
Tommy was resting on his stomach, his chin cupped in his palms. Lieserl, awkwardly, copied his posture. Now Tommy turned to her — without appraisal, merely looking at her, with unconscious acceptance.
Lieserl said, “Can we see it again?”
He yawned and poked a finger into one nostril. “No. Let’s see another. There’s a great one about the pre-Cambrian explosion—”
“The what?”
He waved a hand dismissively. “You know, the Burgess Shale and all that. Wait till you see Hallucigenia crawling over your neck…”
The children played, and learned, and napped. Later, the girl who’d scowled at Lieserl — Ginnie — started some trouble. She poked fun at the way Lieserl’s bony wrists stuck out of her sleeves (Lieserl’s growth rate was slowing, but she was still growing out of her clothes during a day). Then — unexpectedly, astonishingly — Ginnie started to bawl, claiming that Lieserl had walked through her Virtual. When Michael came over Lieserl started to explain, calmly and rationally, that Ginnie must be mistaken; but Michael told her not to cause such distress, and for punishment she was forced to sit away from the other children for ten minutes, without stimulation.
It was all desperately, savagely unfair. It was the longest ten minutes of Lieserl’s life. She glowered at Ginnie, filled with resentment.
The next day she found herself looking forward to going to the room with the children again. She set off with her mother through sunlit corridors. They reached the room Lieserl remembered — there was Michael, smiling a little wistfully to her, and Tommy, and the girl Ginnie — but Ginnie seemed different: childlike, unformed…