Greaves sees nothing remarkable in this split-level reasoning. He is not really thinking simultaneously on all three levels; he is simply swapping between them and letting each one claim his attention when he reaches an impasse on one of the others. While his conscious mind is focused on level one, say, his unconscious hovers over levels two and three—so usually, the next time one of those levels comes to the top of the stack he will have had some new insight.
Actually there is a fourth level, but he has ceased to annotate it. What has happened to Beacon, to stop them from talking to us? is an urgent question with very wide-ranging implications but it can’t be addressed until he has some data, and currently he has none at all.
All three active levels are represented in the notes he writes in the diary, in a code of his own making that reduces words and phrases to single strokes of the pencil. He uses superscript and subscript to carry the chatter alongside the capitalised font that represents the main topic. He is aware that other people don’t do this; that when they take notes they try to filter out the things they think of as extraneous to the subject. Greaves finds that digressions and distractions are usually there for a reason, and can yield unexpected insights. So he writes down everything that crosses his mind, as it comes. To save time, he is cavalier with punctuation and sometimes with syntax.
Top level:
Hungries’ heliotropism appears side effect of heat-seeking behaviour used for hunting at night. Could be hijacked? Used against them? But how determine level of radiant heat that will activate tropic behaviour? Contrast with background ambient temperature probably crucial. Hence no heat-seeking by day. Higher overall temperatures degrade contrast.
Middle level:
Fact: she cannot be human.
Fact: she cannot be hungry.
Define anomalies. Strength and speed clearly outside human range, but within observed parameters for hungries. Also, hungries did not respond to her. Did not identify her as prey.
But she showed volition. Reacted to non-food stimulus. Made conscious, creative use of environment (me).
Is she new?
Determine ontological status. Priority: urgent.
Lowest level:
Dr. Khan Dr. Khan Dr. Khan Dr. Khan Dr. Khan Dr. Khan
Rina Rina Rina Rina Rina Rina Rina Rina Rina Rina Rina
Dr. Khan Dr. Khan Dr. Khan Dr. Khan Dr. Khan Dr. Khan
This is shorthand for a great many things: thoughts he does not wish at the moment to examine too closely. It hurts him to make Rina unhappy. She is important, in a way that other people are not important. She is an exception to every rule. She can look at him, and even touch him. He is able to listen to her voice without counting the syllables of her words or breaking them down by grammatical and instrumental function.
He supposes he loves her. Love is a word that people use about other people all the time, and Greaves has assembled a reason-ably clear idea of its many contradictory referents. For more than half of these referents, he can place a positive mark against Dr. Khan’s name in a polydimensional matrix that he has imagined.
He knows, though, that the matrix does not accurately model what he feels for her. It only defines a logical space that she partially inhabits.
After he came to Beacon, after he went to dormitory twelve, Rina came and found him. “We refugees have got to stick together,” she said. And she held something out for him to take. Two somethings.
Captain Power. And Captain Power’s voice box.
The captain had fallen from Greaves’ hand when he was carried from the transport into the orphanage. Greaves had heard the crack when he hit the concrete. Dr. Khan must have found the toy, broken, and she evidently remembered how determinedly Greaves had held on to it as they marched out of London. Remembering, she took the trouble to come and bring the two pieces to him when she found them.
And as he took the captain back, with an interior lurch of relief and wonder, she sang to him. In a soft murmur that none of the other children or adults in the crowded room could hear. “He’s the hero of the spaceways, the galactic engineer …” She stopped at that. Most likely she didn’t remember the rest of the words, about the Terran Code and the Planetary League and how the captain fights for truth.
Greaves thinks of that day as the start of their relationship. On the journey from London he had been aware of her, but only in the same way that he was aware of all the other people in the refugee column.
At that moment, she became Dr. Khan—and later still, Rina. Like the girl at the water-testing plant, she sits in a category of one. An anomaly.
For Greaves, growing up in Beacon was like a years-long walk across a minefield, very lonely and very arduous. Except that the errors were marked not by explosions but by humiliations, so there wasn’t even the hope that a final, fatal misstep would make it all go away. The teachers at the school and the wardens at the orphanage tried to protect him when they noticed him at all, but Beacon was a refugee camp with a million people trying to find a place to stand, in a space too small for half that number. People fought to the death in the streets for frost-gnawed carrots and wire-trapped rats. The laws were just the same brawl being fought in a wider theatre.
And Greaves found that every act of kindness brought, reliably, its own reprisal. If a teacher gave him a book to read, an older child would take it from him—to trade it away for food, or just to enjoy the experience of power—and beat him for the sin of having it in the first place. The key to survival was not being noticed at all.
Until suddenly the key was Rina. She took him out of school for weeks at a time to teach him herself, in her canvas-walled lab—to teach him science mostly, but other things, too. She reasoned that if he loved the captain, he would have a taste for science fiction and fantasy in general, so she introduced him to Asimov and Clarke, then Miéville and Gaiman and Le Guin. He had already learned to read, but now he learned the pleasure of stories which is like no other pleasure—the experience of slipping sideways into another world and living there for as long as you want to.
In the streets, now, he walked with slightly more assurance. Beacon was growing older along with him. Curfews had been introduced, and a hard-labour farm for people guilty of breaches of public order. Greaves carried Alice and Ged and Coraline and Grimnebulin in his head, along with the captain, and talked with them when the external world became problematic. But that happened less and less. He had found out what happiness was, and therefore was able to realise that he hadn’t been happy up to now.