A Cage of Butterflies (7 page)

A Kind of Freedom

“It may be accounted a kind of Freedom for a man to choose the nature of his own prison – or the style of his own execution …”

Anonymous

“The mind is free, what' er afflict the man.”

Michael Drayton, “The Baron's War”

XV

MIKKI'S STORY

It's hard to remember exactly when the plan came into being, or whose idea it was originally. For a long time, it was more like one of those old-style kids' adventure stories. You know; the “Famous Five” huddle in a corner and someone whispers a plan to defeat the bad guys in the final chapter …

Except that we weren't the “Famous Five”, and the situation was far more complicated than any kids' adventure novel.

Larsen was getting close. From what the Babies could tell us, and from the information Susan and Erik had managed to extract from his secret files (using his own password), it was clear that things were beginning to add up in his mind. And it was even clearer that the way they were adding up didn't look too good for Myriam and the others.

Susan had postponed her search for “the cause” in favour of studying the result. Of course, she had one huge advantage over Larsen. She could ask questions – and get answers. While he was poking around in the dark, assembling little bits of data, spying with his hi-tech equipment, planning experiments, Susan had managed to build up a pretty extensive profile.

And if what we knew before was amazing, some of the things she came up with were … almost frightening.

IQ tests don't mean a thing. We've been told that for years. Every one of us in the tank had been tested well above 150 – genius level – and we all found some things easier to do; but it didn't help us fit in. IQ is just a measure of your potential, not a guarantee that you will achieve it. Social skills, artistic ability, morality; those things are much harder to measure – or develop.

I know. I'm coming on like a lecturer. Greg accuses me of that all the time. But it's essential to understand the importance of Susan's discoveries if you want to come to terms with what happened to the Babies.

Like I said, we were all 150 plus. Not bad when you consider that the average is around 100 to 120. But when Susan started testing the Babies, they went right off the scale. I think she gave up at around 450, when the twins began analysing the procedures and suggesting new tests of their own. The whole thing was even more amazing when you consider that all the tests were administered “long-distance”, with each of them looking at the questions through Erik's eyes and using his hands to answer for them.

But IQ was only a part of it. Apart from the mind-speech, they also had memories that made even Gordon and Lesley look like absent-minded professors. Sights, sounds, scents – they remembered
everything.

I made the mistake (only once!) of asking Susan why.

“How the hell do
I
know?” She'd had a hard day. I should have known better – especially as Erik was away for the week. “My speciality's psychology, not brain physiology.”

She'd spent hours poring over copies of Larsen's notes and the meticulous sketches he'd constructed from the Babies' CAT scans.

Between them, Suse and Erik had become expert burglars. As well as raiding Larsen's secret computer files, they'd made a duplicate of his filing-cabinet key, and they regularly copied the contents of his brief-case. They were a great team; especially with the assistance of Pep or Ricardo, who always kept mental watch to make sure the coast was clear.

Anyway, Susan picked up one of the sketches and held it out to me. It was a frontal view – and it looked nothing like any view of the brain that I'd ever seen.

“Read Larsen's notes, and tell me what
you
think.” It sounded almost like a challenge. I read:

The irregularity appears to be an outgrowth of the thalamus, extending along the interhemispheric and longitudinal fissures, bonding, simultaneously, to both cerebral hemispheres and, in its posterior aspect, to the medulla oblongata.

If the normal sensory processing functions of the thalamus are reproduced along the entire length of the outgrowth, then a vast increase in the efficiency of sensory input processing, abstract cognitive reasoning and even left-brain/right-brain interaction might be hypothesised …

And on it went. Reading around the jargon and translating it into English, Larsen's theory sounded remarkably like a prediction of what we knew to be the case – minus any mention of telepathic ability. Reluctantly, I had to admire his insight. Working in the dark, he had at least found the light-switch.

Now we had to find a way to stop him turning it on.

“Well?” Susan held my gaze as I dropped the notes onto the desk.

“What's the thalamus?” I had a pretty fair idea, but I wanted confirmation before I launched into the theory that was beginning to suggest itself.

I watched her collect her thoughts.

“From what I've read …” she paused carefully, then went on. “It's the part of the brain which collects the information from all the different senses and channels it into the relevant areas of the brain; some into the conscious brain – the rest, the less necessary stuff, into the subconscious memory or into scrap if it's really useless.”

“I thought so.” Susan just smiled. I continued, “The thalamus is like a micro-processor. It decides what goes to screen and what gets saved in memory.”

“If you think of the brain as a computer, I suppose —” She began, but I cut in. I was on a roll.

“So, whatever happened to the Babies –
which
whatever we still don't have a clue about – somehow caused a change in the thalamus, making it much more efficient, as well as a hell of a lot bigger.”

“And …?” I had her hooked, now.

“And … it turned their normal everyday PC into a supercomputer.” I paused. She waited. I carried on, pointing to the sketch which Larsen had unwittingly supplied to us. “If Larsen's theory is true – and what we know suggests it is – the Babies' brains process information more efficiently and recall it far more easily.”

“That explains the intelligence,” Susan cut in. I wasn't telling her anything she hadn't already considered. “But what about the mind-speech? Telepathy isn't a function of intelligence.”

“How do we know? It has to be related to the Babies' ‘irregularity', as Larsen calls it. So, the intelligence and the telepathy must have a common cause.” I walked over to the settee and slumped into it.

Susan moved towards the kitchenette. “You want a Coke?” She drank more Coke – and more tea and coffee – than anyone I'd ever met. A regular caffeine addict. It was no wonder she could never sleep.

I declined with a shake of my head and returned to what I was saying. “Maybe telepathy needs a super-computer rather than a PC.”

“How do you mean?” She returned, cans in hand, and tossed one to me anyway. Addicts!

“Well, we've heard of so-called telepathics – mind-readers – but if you take away the showmen and the frauds, what you have are a few individuals with faint glimmerings of insight, a slight increase in the ability to name which unseen card was turned over; catching the odd word or feeling – not a hell of a lot more. Not much more than what you might call a sixth sense.” I was really motoring now. Susan sat down beside me. “But if it is a ‘sixth sense', if we all have the beginnings of it, so faint it's hardly noticeable, how do we receive? We have no obvious organ for it, like a nose or an ear, so it has to be some part of the brain – and why not the thalamus? After all, it is a pretty sophisticated piece of machinery.”

“You mean we
all
have the ability?” She was beginning to follow my line of reasoning.

“We must.” Here was the crunch. “Otherwise, the Babies could never communicate with us. It's like a radio. It doesn't matter how strong the signal is, you can't hear the music without a receiver. Maybe our poor little PCs are just not powerful enough to pick up anything more than a faint echo of the signal. The Babies just have the hardware to amplify it – for themselves and for us.”

Susan nodded, half-convinced. I went on: “Look, we've been learning for weeks. We can pick up just about anything they throw at us – tastes, sounds, feelings – anything, as long as they slow it down. And they've taught us to focus, so that it's easier for them to pick up what we're projecting. We know we can receive and transmit –
but only if they're involved.”
I opened the can and took a mouthful. “What am I thinking now?”

Susan shrugged. “I don't —”

“Exactly. You don't
know.
All our training hasn't made it any easier to mind-speak with each other – we don't have the equipment. It all fits.”

“I guess it does.” She smiled and took the sketch from me, staring at it for a moment before she rose and returned it to the desk. “By the way, what
were
you thinking?”

I took another mouthful and raised the can before answering. “I was thinking I'm glad you got me one after all.” And I grinned: one addict to another.

XVI

The Key to the Inside

September 8, 1990

Larsen stared at the three sheets of paper on the desk. Intelligence was one thing, but this …

During the past year, he had watched the video dozens of times – so had MacIntyre – and there was no rational explanation. At no point while they were drawing had any of the Babies looked up; not even to check what the others were doing. And yet they had produced …

“An ortho – what?”

He smiled as he recalled MacIntyre's initial reaction. So efficient in his own areas of expertise, poor Mac was terminally channelled. He had gaping holes in his general knowledge, and it was fun to bait him.

“Orthographic projection. Pictures of the same object, viewed from the front, top and the side. They're roughly drawn, but you can see. This is the side view of a chair, this one is how it would look from the front and this is the view from above. And they're perfectly in proportion. How the hell could they do it?”

Almost a year ago. And an explanation was still as far away as ever. Where does a seven-year-old learn orthographic projection? How do three seven-year-olds, working independently, come up with three different but compatible projections of the same object?

None of the tapes showed anything resembling communication. The Babies remained as isolated, as “autistic” as ever, and yet …

He reached out and touched one of the sheets, but his thoughts had moved beyond them.

Friends
the girl Phetmany had said. One word in six and a half months. Why
friends?
Why not “table” or “door” or … “pumpkin”? It would be easy to read too much into a single word, but under the circumstances, it was such an important word.

And the tear. That single tear. The Babies rarely smiled; never cried. Removed from the world, they showed no emotions. But the girl had cried. And said “friends”.

The thought welled up, as it had done more and more often recently. The explanation that he had rejected when it had first suggested itself a year earlier.

Telepathy. Parapsychology.

Crap!

He was a scientist, and none of the so-called evidence held water. It belonged to
Ripley's Believe It or Not,
not in scientific journals. There had to be another explanation.

The tapes showed nothing resembling communication, but the drawings showed that some communication had taken place. It must have.

In the end, it had been easier to concentrate on the concrete, to search for what made the Babies different, to analyse the phenomenal intelligence which showed itself at times. And to work out ways in which it might be directed, controlled. Used.

To ignore the unexplainable.

But then the girl had cried; one tear – and one word. And by some chemistry he knew. Playing the incident over and over, it grew clear. The look of intense concentration, then the almost-smile as she relaxed. And the emotion betrayed by that single tear …

September 20, 1990

“He must know. There's no other explanation.” Erik pushed his thick curls back from his face. “What's he doing to them in there?”

“How the hell do
I
know?” Susan bit down on her reaction. It had come out much more harshly than she intended, a measure of her concern. She reached across and touched his hand. “I'm sorry. It's just … I'm scared for them.”

“I know. I feel …” He touched her cheek gently. “I know.”

The sky was cloudless, but in the middle of the lawn the breeze was quite strong; a cool spring wind, sweeping up from the south, carrying with it a memory of winter. Susan shivered inside her thin jacket; looking at her, Erik was unsure whether it was the cold or her concern for the Babies that made her tremble. She leaned against him and he put a comforting arm around her shoulders.

For two days the tension had been building; two days – since the formless wave of fear had jolted them all from their sleep, leaving them wide-awake and shaking. Every member of the tank had felt it. Katie had woken up screaming. Then … nothing.

After the weeks of learning, of eagerly devouring the new communication, the mind-silence was a terrifying emptiness. Not just for the feeling of withdrawal which it produced in all of them, but for fear of what it meant.

Susan stood and walked towards the old eucalypt which stood in the centre of the lawn. The ground was bare beneath its spreading branches, where it had starved the grass of sunlight and drained the goodness from the soil. She picked absent-mindedly at a piece of bark as she spoke.

“If I could just persuade him to let me inside.”

“Forget it.” Erik walked up behind her and placed a hand softly on her shoulder. “No one goes in except the terrible twosome. How are the other researchers taking it?”

“That lot? Larsen has them just where he wants them. He says ‘Jump', and they say ‘How high?' Besides, he's organised it pretty carefully. Those he couldn't send on wild-goose-chase assignments have been given a week's paid leave. They must've thought it was Christmas.”

“What did he tell them?”

Susan picked a dry leaf from one of the lower branches, and crushed it between her fingers, letting the pieces drop. “Just that they were reorganising and didn't need anyone around.”

“Except you?”

“Except me. I guess they think they might need me later on … in case something goes wrong.” He could taste the fear in her voice.

“Come on. Let's get back. Maybe the kids can think of something …”

“Why don't you use your card to get inside? I bet we could keep them occupied for the best part of an hour, if we put our minds to it.” Greg sat on the rocker in Mikki's room. The others sprawled around the room, on the beds or on the floor. Susan stood with Erik beside the door.

“He's changed the access code,” she replied. “Without it, the card's useless.”

Chris untangled his legs, stood up and left the room without a word.

Lesley, standing beside the window, gave voice to everyone's unspoken thought. “What could that jerk be doing to them? It's been two days already … and nothing.”

Gordon placed a soothing hand on her shoulder. Gretel shifted uncomfortably on Katie's bed, dislodging one of the pillows, which slid in slow motion to the ground.

“Look.” Greg's voice was even. He held Lesley's gaze before continuing. “He's not going to harm them. Not yet. Not if he even suspects their potential. My guess is that he does suspect something and that he has them sedated. He's probably working out ways to test his theories. But it worries me that the bastard had to send everyone away.”

“Why?” Sometimes, it was easy to forget that Katie was only ten years old; still the baby of the group.

Susan almost smiled at the naivety of her question. Instead, she crouched down beside the girl and spoke quietly. “Because, Katie, it means that he probably intends doing things that he wants no one else to know about.”

A long silence settled on the room.

Then the door opened and Chris returned. On his open palm, he held a thin black disc – about the size of a ten-cent piece.

“Here it is.”

“Here
what
is?” Erik leaned forward, looking over Chris's shoulder.

“Your key to the inside.” He had everyone's attention, and allowed himself a small smile of satisfaction. “I kept a few of these – for old times' sake. This is the best model.”

“A bug?” Greg spoke up from the depths of the rocker. “What use is that? We don't want to listen to them, we want to get inside.”

“Exactly.” Chris's smile expanded to a grin. “The access code is computer-controlled – it's just like a bank PIN number. And the key-pad you punch the numbers on works on electronic tones, the same as a push-button phone. All we need to do is stick this little baby onto the underside of the key-pad, then record the tones when Larsen lets himself in, and bingo – we know the code.”

Susan smiled. “Remind me not to use the autobank when you're around. Did you ever consider a career in white-collar crime?”

“I did.” Chris beamed. “But there's no challenge in it. I'd much rather play point-guard for the Chicago Bulls.”

“So when do we begin?” Greg struggled to his feet, easing his weight onto his crutches.

“How about right now? It only takes five seconds to attach it.”

“Well, what are we waiting for, Christmas?”

And the crisis-meeting broke up.