The Long Mars

The elevator slid to a halt. The doors opened smoothly to reveal a metal-grille walkway, suspended over a kind of compartmented pit.

Irwin led him along this pathway, and Nelson found himself looking down into a series of rooms: into, for these rooms all had transparent ceilings, even the bathrooms, though Nelson imagined that some visual trickery ensured the ceilings looked opaque from underneath. The rooms individually didn’t seem all that impressive, or unusual. They were like small hotel suites, each a bedroom-cum-study equipped with TV and computer terminal and other gear, a small bathroom. The rooms had been personalized, with posters and souvenirs, clothing in the cupboards (all of which lacked doors) or heaped on the floor. Nelson felt as if he was looking down into something like an upmarket campus dorm. But heavily armed and body-armoured marines patrolled this high walkway, pointing their weapons down into the rooms below.

In most of the rooms there was a single person, alone – all young, aged maybe five years old to early twenties, both sexes, varying ethnicity – some fat, some thin, some tall, some short. Ordinary-looking, at first glance. Some had company, an adult or two, generally talking quietly. There was a lounge where a few of these inmates gathered, and a small crèche where infants played amid a litter of toys. Both crèche and lounge were supervised by adults, men and women in civilian clothes. One room was more like a small clinic, where a girl was having samples taken, blood, a cheek swab for DNA.

And Nelson soon spotted Paul Spencer Wagoner, the friend of Joshua Valienté, alone in a room, reading on a tablet.

Through Lobsang and Sister Agnes, Nelson had at last got to meet Valienté properly, and to know him. Joshua was a man whose Long Earth exploits Nelson had studied for many years – and, Nelson suspected, another ally of Lobsang’s in whatever long-term game that mysterious entity was playing. Joshua had asked Nelson to look out especially for this Wagoner kid, who had wound up in the same kids’ home, Sister Agnes’s Home, as Joshua himself a few decades earlier . . . And now here was Wagoner in this military cage.

Lieutenant Irwin was saying, ‘A few hundred of these individuals are known in the American Aegis, though the sweeps continue. This is the largest single group we’re holding. Of course there must be others of foreign nationalities. So. What’s your first impression?’

‘It’s a prison. An impressive facility. But it is a prison.’ She nodded. ‘We’re wary of them. We don’t know what they’re capable of—’

‘They’re in glass boxes, like lab rats. With armed guards twenty-four seven. You have young teenagers in there. Can you really give them no privacy?’

‘These were the security protocols mandated. We try to normalize their environment as much as possible. You may baulk at this confinement, Nelson. They look like ordinary kids, don’t they? Ordinary young Americans. But they’re not. Any contact with them and you’ll find that out for yourself. In fact they distinguish themselves from us, you know. They do call themselves the Next. Of course they’re only youngsters. But they have quite a lot of money behind them, actually, or some do. Also some of their parents have the resources to fight this. The Navy is having to dig deep fending off petitions from some fancy lawyers.’

‘Hmm. Fancy lawyers who are arguing about such irrelevancies as these kids’ constitutional rights, I imagine. US citizens swept up and imprisoned without any semblance of due process. A few foreign nationals too?’

She raised an eyebrow. ‘I’m going to enjoy debating such issues with you, Nelson. But I suspect you are rushing to judgement. We had to do something. And remember, I am a naval officer. The purpose of this place is to maintain national security.’

‘They don’t seem such a terrible threat to national security to me.’

She nodded. ‘Well, that’s one of the things we are here to ascertain. Generally they are no trouble, from a disciplinary and control point of view. Most of them quickly adapted to confinement, actually, which is because so many of them have been through processes of care, fostering, even prison at the juvenile or adult levels. They are institutionalized, used to confinement. Says something about how well our society has been able to handle these individuals, right? And if they do play up they are removed from this part of the facility.’

‘To where? A punishment block?’

‘A special therapy facility.’ She studied him. ‘You do use judgemental language. You need to keep an open mind, Nelson. Until you get to know them. They are extraordinarily acute – perceptive, controlling, manipulative. In person they can be very difficult to deal with, one to one. But it’s when they get together that – well, they take off. Their talk is incredible, rooted in English but superfast and dense. We have linguists analysing their talk, as best they can. Whatever they are discussing, we can at least measure the sheer complexity of the talk. And that itself is far beyond the norm. I was shown a transcript, of a kind of argument being developed by a girl called Indra; there was a single sentence that went on for four pages. That is one of the simpler examples. Often we don’t even know what they are talking about—’

‘Concepts beyond the human, perhaps,’ Nelson said. ‘As unimaginable to us as the mystery of the Holy Trinity would be to a chimp. If these kids really have arrived in the world equipped with these super-powerful minds, they must come up against the limits of our mere human culture very quickly.’ He smiled. ‘How wonderful it must be, when they are free to talk together. How much they must be discovering, beyond the imagination of any human who ever lived.’

She was watching him. ‘You know, I think you’re going to make a fine chaplain. But let me tell you something even more remarkable. Even more different. We have a few infants here – and we’re monitoring even younger subjects, even babies, who are still with their families. Before the age of about two, the young ones will try to talk – well, as human infants do. They gabble out stuff that’s entirely incomprehensible to us, and mostly incomprehensible to the older ones – but not totally. Again the linguists have analysed this stuff; they tell me it’s like investigating the structure of dolphin song. These infant gabblings are languages, Nelson. Meaning they have actual linguistic content. We arrive in the world with the capacity for language, but we have to learn it from those around us. Next babies, trying to express themselves, invent their own language, independently of the culture, word by word, one grammatical rule after another. Only later do they start to pick up the language of the rest. And, still more remarkable, the others incorporate some of the infants’ inventions into their own shared post-English tongue. It’s like an entirely new language is emerging, mutating at a ferocious rate, right in front of our eyes.’

‘When you let it happen. When you let them speak to each other at all.’

She didn’t react to that. ‘It’s important you understand what we’re dealing with, Nelson. These children represent a different order, a step change. Something new.’

‘Umm. And yet they are children, in our care.’

‘So they are.’

‘I think I should get settled in. I imagine there are superior officers I need to be presented to.’

‘I’m afraid so. Also you need to get through your security processing.’

‘Then I’d like to talk to some of the inmates. One at a time, to begin with.’

‘Sure. Any preference who first?’

As if at random, Nelson pointed down at Paul Spencer Wagoner. ‘That one.’

Nelson was allowed, in fact encouraged, to speak to Paul in the nineteen-year-old’s own room.

Nelson could see that made the security set-up easier to manage, but he wasn’t sure about the psychology of it. When he was nineteen, twenty, he hadn’t had a room of his own, but he was pretty sure that if he had, he would have seen it as an imposition to have some stranger walk in and start talking about God. This was the condition of the meeting, though, and Nelson made the best of it.