‘It’s bad enough that you’re skipping years,’ Dr Darkkon added. ‘I’d be happier if you were following a more normal educational pattern. You’ve already been identified as highly gifted. Now you’ll be the subject of constant scrutiny.’
‘You have one advantage,’ Thaddeus went on, ‘and that’s your face. People with pretty faces aren’t expected to have brains.’
‘They stand out, though,’ Dr Darkkon said gloomily. ‘They’re noticed. They’re watched.’
‘Perhaps,’ Thaddeus conceded. ‘So Cadel will have to learn to fade into the background. It really isn’t hard. The right clothes, the right stance, the right attitude . . .’
‘Like not boasting to morons,’ Dr Darkkon interrupted.
‘Like that, yes. We admire you, Cadel. You don’t need the admiration of idiots like Jarrod.’
Cadel stared at his lap, legs swinging. Occasionally – very occasionally – he still felt like a freak. It happened sometimes when he made a remark and a teacher stared at him as if he’d just sprouted another arm. Or when the other kids started giggling behind his back because he’d been staring at a handball game for fifteen minutes, trying to calculate velocities and outcomes. Or when Mrs Piggott came home in a bad mood and blamed him for the fact that the thermostat in the hot water system wasn’t working. In these situations, Cadel always felt a powerful urge to tell everyone about his infamous traffic jam, or his brief penetration of the Pentagon security protocols.
Such a feeling, he knew, could be dangerous. He had to resist it with all his might.
‘Should I have known that Jarrod was going to make his own bomb?’ he asked, in a small voice. ‘Should I have expected that?’
Thaddeus blinked. Dr Darkkon said: ‘It was on the cards, Cadel.
‘There are certain personality types,’ Thaddeus remarked. ‘Self-destructive. Antisocial. I can tell you about them if you want. Though they can be useful, they’re not reliable tools.’
‘But should I have known what Jarrod was going to do?’ Cadel pressed. ‘Is there some way I could have known?’
After a long pause, Dr Darkkon grimaced, and Thaddeus studied Cadel carefully.
‘You had no idea?’ Thaddeus said at last. ‘It never crossed your mind that you might be planting a seed in Jarrod’s?’
Cadel shook his head. Thaddeus glanced at the transmitter screen, where Cadel’s father was echoing his son’s movement.
‘Well in that case, dear boy, you should focus your attention on human behaviour,’ Thaddeus advised. ‘You’ll never reach your true potential if you discount the importance of people, and the way they think.’
‘Except that they don’t think,’ Dr Darkkon growled. ‘Most of ’em don’t, anyway.’
‘Perhaps, but that doesn’t mean they don’t act.’ Thaddeus turned back to Cadel. ‘Being a bit of a behaviouralist myself, I know there’s a certain pattern to the chaos, if you look hard enough,’ he said. ‘So far, though, I haven’t seen a one hundred per cent success rate when it comes to predicting people’s actions.’
‘There isn’t a formula? Or a program?’ Cadel wanted to know.
‘Not that I’m aware of,’ Thaddeus replied. ‘Nothing generic.’
‘There are programs that plot population expansion,’ Dr Darkkon interjected. ‘Certain predictive formulas associated with actuarial work, and so forth. Sociological measurements.’
‘People are people,’ Thaddeus finished. ‘They tend to have fairly fixed personality patterns and routines – and there are usually danger signals that you can spot if someone’s been traumatised, say – but on the whole, Cadel, even I can’t forecast individual behaviour. Not in a way that’s scientifically admissible. I’m relying on instinct as much as anything else. Instinct and a very thorough knowledge of the person involved.’
Cadel nodded, thinking hard. It occurred to him, suddenly, that there could be no system more complex than the system of human interaction. All the petty disagreements, the sudden friendships, the jealousies, the emotional outbursts that swirled around him at school – could they all somehow be codified? Could he find the key to the network of hopes, loyalties and basic needs that underpinned every community in the world?
He believed that he probably could, but not without a lot of work.
SIX
Cadel was ten years old when he was sent to high school.
The Jamboree teaching staff had had enough. They felt that Cadel was now beyond them: he was clearly bored with everything they threw at him. They decided that his interest in applied chemistry, his repeated attempts to sneak onto the school computers, even his slightly patronising manner, would best be handled in a secondary-school environment.
So Stuart and Lanna were left with the problem of where to send him. Stuart, who believed that Cadel needed more discipline, favoured a private boys college with its own cadet training. Lanna preferred a coeducational school. She was convinced that all-male environments were brutish and cruel, and that Cadel, with his girlish face and short stature, would be tormented in such a place.
Finally they compromised by enrolling Cadel in a nearby private school called Crampton College.
Cadel had to pass an entrance exam before he was accepted into year seven. He had to wear a straw hat whenever he donned his school uniform. During his first day at Crampton, he was assigned a counsellor, who spent two hours with Cadel and the Piggotts filling in forms that covered Cadel’s goals, strengths and faults, as well as his state of health and family history. Together, they also worked out his course program and timetable of lessons.
‘We have some other escalated learning students,’ the counselor informed Cadel. ‘They’re not much older than you, and they’re in year eight, now. I’m sure you’ll have a lot in common.’
Cadel smiled and nodded. He had decided that, if he was going to understand the way social systems worked, he would have to do more than study sociological and anthropological texts. He would have to make friends, and listen, and watch, and feign interest in the boring obsessions of normal teenagers. By doing so, he would also improve his chances of ‘fading into the background’. A boy fascinated by DSL access multiplexers was bound to stand out. A boy who collected sports cards wouldn’t.
So Cadel began to smile a lot. He studied the slang of his classmates, and copied it. He laughed at their jokes and admired their possessions. Mostly, however, he listened. He listened to complaints, gossip and detailed descriptions of everything from holiday trips to new bikes. He listened to girls as well as boys. His placid smile and unlimited access to sweets meant that he was tolerated, if not hugely popular; some of the boys still thought him a little weird – especially the more sensitive, intelligent boys. They didn’t like the way he would sit in corners, his blank, blue gaze fixed on particular people for minutes at a time. Some of the girls thought he was cute, but kept this belief to themselves. Being at least two years younger than most of the kids in his year, Cadel was widely regarded as a baby. To have openly admired his long, dark eyelashes, or his dewy complexion, would have invited general scorn.
Cadel was treated like a baby by the teaching staff as well. He was still carefully watched whenever he went anywhere near a computer, with the result that he didn’t often sit down in front of a computer screen. Instead, he concentrated on social networks. He noted down arrivals and departures. He observed the procedures for fire drills, canteen deliveries and bus lines. Most importantly, he paid very close attention to his classmates. He learned that Paul hated Isaiah, that Chloe loved Brandon, that Sarah was jealous of Odette, that Jocelyn and Fabbio were inseparable. He watched – almost wistfully – as Erin and Rachael shared a chocolate biscuit, or as Jason kindly showed Fergal how to bowl a cricket ball properly. No one ever shared chocolate biscuits with Cadel. He was an outsider in year seven, mostly because of his age. And few of the kids had parents as rich as Cadel’s, so they expected him to be a source of chocolate biscuits.
There was one crew of rough boys who
didn’t like Cadel at all. They would jostle him in corridors and knock his peanut-butter sandwiches out of his hand. Cadel studied them with particular intensity. He picked out the lead bully, the jokesmith, the thinker and the offsider.
One of these boys was soon expelled; rumour had it that he’d been caught smoking marijuana. Another was laid up for two months with a broken leg, which had befallen him in the boys toilets – no one quite knew how. The third was made to repeat year seven, and the fourth became a laughing-stock for appearing at a cricket match in a t-shirt with the words ‘Girl Power’ emblazoned on it. By the time he realised that he wasn’t wearing his usual t-shirt, which was identical in size and colour, the damage had been done.
Cadel watched this boy scurry back to the change room, while all around him people fell about laughing. It was a gratifying moment that filled Cadel with a dizzy sense of achievement, and it soon led to more ambitious attempts.
Three months before Cadel’s eleventh birthday, his French teacher left the classroom, briefly, to answer an urgent phone call. When she returned, she found the entire class in an uproar, with everyone fighting and shouting – except Cadel.
He sat in the midst of this chaos, quietly finishing the exercise she had set for all of them.
‘It was weird,’ she said later, in the staffroom. ‘It was just . . . I mean, I’ve never seen anything like it. They were all red in the face. Even Talitha Edwards was fighting. And Cadel was just sitting there, like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.’
‘Cadel’s always on the sidelines,’ a colleague pointed out.
‘Yes, but he looked so smug.’
‘He always does.’
‘Yes, but . . .’ The French teacher sighed, suddenly. ‘Oh well, you’re probably right. It was strange, though. It was . . .’ She searched for the word. ‘It was spooky,’ she concluded.
It was also Cadel’s first conscious attempt to manipulate a whole social system. His next effort was more complicated. It involved his encyclopedic knowledge of class timetables and cleaning schedules, his familiarity with every portion of the school fire drill, his awareness that a particular girl had to go to the toilet at a particular time every day, and his close monitoring of one teacher, who always felt compelled to move his car whenever a more convenient parking spot became available behind the canteen. By using these pieces of information, and tampering with a deadlock, he engineered the disappearance of a year eight boy. Then, when the alarm was finally raised, he mentioned having seen a strange man in the playground that morning.
It was only after the police had been alerted that the missing boy was found, locked in the ‘art cottage’ toilet. No one thought to blame Cadel for this incident. No one knew of his part in it except Thaddeus and Dr Darkkon, who applauded his ingenuity.
‘A harmless piece of mischief,’ said Thaddeus, ‘but very well executed. You’ve begun to grasp some psychological truths, Cadel. Well done. I’m impressed.’
‘So am I,’ Dr Darkkon added, beaming. His teeth, magnified by the transmitter, looked like the rotting stumps of an old wharf; they were ragged and brownish, full of hairline cracks and black pits, and studded with greenish fragments that vaguely resembled lichen.
Cadel glanced from his father to Thaddeus, and back again.
‘Do I get a reward?’ he asked.
Thaddeus removed his glasses and polished them carefully. From the screen on Thaddeus’s desk, Dr Darkkon growled: ‘A reward?’
‘It’s my birthday soon,’ Cadel pointed out. ‘My eleventh birthday.’
The two men waited. To his surprise, Cadel found it hard to go on. But he did.
‘The Piggotts are buying me a mobile phone for my birthday,’ he explained. ‘One with a photo function. I was thinking that, with DNA wiring, you could probably turn it into a computer.’
There was a pause. With a little smile, Thaddeus put his glasses back on. Dr Darkkon screwed up his rubbery face.
‘Who could?’ he said.
Cadel swallowed.
‘Well – you could,’ he murmured. ‘We could switch phones. I could tell you what kind it is, and you could get another one and turn it into a computer for me. With a mobile capacity, of course,’ he added.
‘Could I indeed?’ Dr Darkkon drawled. ‘And why should I do that?’
‘Because I need one,’ Cadel said. He squeezed his hands into fists, and sat on them. ‘I’ve got an idea,’ he continued. ‘An idea for making some money. But I need a computer. One of my own.’
‘Go on,’ said Dr Darkkon. He was clearly waiting to be convinced.
‘I could be a child model, you know,’ Cadel announced, deciding to unveil his secret weapon. When he saw his father frown, he knew that his aim had been true. ‘I was at the shops on Saturday and a man came up,’ he said. ‘A photographer. He said he could get me work. He gave his card to Filomena.’ Filomena was Cadel’s latest nanny. Cadel didn’t add that the photographer had been surprised to learn Cadel’s true age. (‘I thought you must be eight or nine,’ he had said.) That part of the conversation had been a bit humiliating. In fact the whole conversation had been a bit humiliating because Cadel didn’t much like his own looks. Given the choice, he would have preferred a few more muscles and a square jaw. There could be no doubt, however, that the meeting in the mall had provided him with some great ammunition. ‘Lanna likes the idea, but Stuart doesn’t. They’ve been arguing about it.’ Out of the corner of his eye, Cadel saw Dr Roth’s smile widen. ‘I could make lots of money,’ Cadel finished. ‘Lots and lots. Enough to buy my own computer.’
‘Which the Piggotts would confiscate,’ Dr Darkkon snapped.
‘Not if I paid Filomena to say that it was her computer. I’d have enough money for that, too.’
‘Cadel, you’re not going to be a child model,’ Dr Darkkon declared. ‘You know what I’ve said about keeping a low profile. How can you keep a low profile if your face is plastered all over television ads for fruit chews?’
‘But –’
‘I’ll make you a computer phone,’ Dr Darkkon said abruptly. ‘I’ll do it if you tell me how.’
Cadel’s bubbling excitement suddenly went off the boil.
‘Pardon?’ he bleated.
‘Tell me how, and I’ll do it.’ Dr Darkkon squinted into the transmitter. ‘You’re the one who made the suggestion. You’ll have a screen the size of a postage stamp, and precious few keys – it’ll be a third generation, I suppose?’
‘Probably.’
‘Even so, there’ll be a bloody great DSP cluttering up its innards, DNA wiring or no DNA wiring. You’ll have your work cut out. We all will. Not that it can’t be done. We’re heading that way as it is, what with texting and calendar functions and multi-player gaming and video-conferencing – in fact I seem to recall reading somewhere –’
‘I know,’ Cadel interrupted. He was feeling very low, because he had just realised how long it would take him to design such a piece of technology – if he could do it at all. ‘Will you . . . will you help me?’ he stammered. ‘If I need to ask questions?’
Dr Darkkon smiled. (It wasn’t a pretty sight.)
‘Of course I will,’ he said. ‘You can have all the help you need.’
‘Thanks.’
‘And when we put this thing together, you can have the patent on anything new you come up with. That means you’ll get most of the money when we launch it onto the market – though we won’t attach your name to your Swiss bank account, of course.’
‘Oh, but –’
‘Relax, son. We won’t go public unless someone else is catching up fast.’ Another ferocious grin. ‘It’ll be like this transmitter, won’t it? Our little secret. For the time being.’
‘Okay.’
‘Now it’s down to you,’ Dr Darkkon finished, settling back, so that his image careered wildly around the screen. ‘We’ll have to see how long it takes you to come up with something workable.’
In the end, it took just over eight months. By
then, Cadel had been promoted to year nine, and had begun to worry a few of the more intelligent teachers on the staff of Crampton College. The trouble was, they couldn’t quite work out exactly why he worried them. Perhaps it was his obvious isolation. Perhaps it was his placid blue gaze. Or perhaps it was his tendency to be hanging around on the sidelines during those peculiar events that seemed to overtake the school more and more often, as Cadel moved quickly up the educational ladder.
First there was the brawl that occurred among a softball team waiting to bat. (Cadel was on that team, hovering at the edge of the fight.) Then there was the teacher who slapped another teacher in full view of several students – including Cadel. Then there was the sprinkler system in one of the science labs that suddenly turned itself on and doused the whole lab with a strange, red, strong-smelling, jam-like substance. (Cadel wasn’t anywhere in the vicinity, but he had used the classroom.) There was the teacher who was found passed out in the school vegetable garden, drunk, wearing only his jockey shorts. (He couldn’t remember what had happened.) There was the case of the disappearing gym mats, the mysterious sighting of a ‘green pig’ in the canteen, and stories of a haunted art cupboard. Finally, there was the incident of the teacherless morning.
This occurred after Cadel had been promoted to year ten. One Monday morning, the students of Crampton turned up at school to discover that none of their teachers was present. So the kids milled around for a while; some went home, some stayed. At last the vice-principal appeared, at about half past ten, and from then on the staff trickled in until three-quarters of them were at their posts. The rest telephoned with various excuses, mostly to do with being ill, though one had to wait for a plumber to mend a burst pipe and one didn’t telephone at all until the next day: he had been lost on a weekend bushwalk.
The teachers who did make it had all been held up by a peculiar combination of traffic problems, rail delays, stopped watches and the wide-ranging failure of telephone company wake-up calls. They were completely flummoxed.