A Cage of Butterflies by Brian Caswell Read Free Book Online Page B

had some way of knowing what we were really like? I remembered Katie, mumbling away in her sleep. They must have known what she was thinking – so why not the rest of us? I spoke my thoughts aloud.
    â€œWell, suddenly it makes sense why Larsen would be so interested in them. Why he would keep them locked away in the complex. If he can be the first to bring proof of telepathy to —”
    â€œOh, Larsen doesn’t know about the mind-speech. But he is getting close. That’s part of the problem.” Katie spoke with an authority I hadn’t heard from her before, and I got the strange feeling that it wasn’t really her speaking to us.
    Greg had been very quiet. Now he interrupted. “If he doesn’t know, then what is he interested in? He’s gone to a lot of trouble and expense setting up that complex. He must have had some good reason. I mean, he’s a jerk, but he’s not stupid.”
    For a moment, Katie didn’t reply. You could almost sense her attention turning inwards.
    Then she walked across to the desk and started writing on a sheet of paper. I felt the familiar scrabbling at the back of my mind.
    â€œIt’s because of this,” she said, and handed the page to him. He studied, frowned, then passed it across to me.
    Scrawled across the paper were lines of meaningless algebraic symbols.
    I had to ask: “What is it?”
    â€œIt looks like some kind of mathematical proof. Maybe it’ll mean something to Gretel.”
    â€œBut what does it mean?” I was talking to Katie, but Greg answered.
    â€œI think I know,” he said. Then he stopped.
    â€œWell?” I prompted him impatiently.
    â€œIt means that they’re here for the same reason we are.”
    And that was all he said. I do love him, but he can be damned infuriating at times.
    Did you ever see Rainman? Gretel watched the video eight times; but that was only to gape at Tom Cruise. Dustin Hoffman was the key to the whole film. Or rather his character was: Raymond.
    An “autistic savant”, they called him – Greg says that in the old days the term was “idiot savant”: an individual who cannot function at all in society, unable, apparently, even to think, yet is able to perform almost magical feats of counting and arithmetic, much faster than any calculator, without really understanding what he’s doing.
    No one knows what causes it. The autism or the fantastic ability. And some people believe that if we ever learn, we’ll know a whole lot more about how our brain works than we do now.
    Did you know we only use about ten per cent of our brain’s capacity? No, that’s not strictly true. They just haven’t worked out yet what the other ninety per cent is used for. It’s all theory and guesswork. No one really knows.
    So, I guess it made perfect sense for Larsen to be interested in the Babies. If you want to find what makes the “normal” normal, study the abnormal, and find what makes them different. He was trying to solve the problem by working backwards. And it wasn’t just the Babies – what about the seven of us?
    The tank. Chris, the electronics whiz and science nut, contriver of amazing theories – some of which actually worked; Gretel, with her maths, a fourteen-year-old with a uni professor’s grasp of abstract/symbolic logic; Katie, who at ten spoke twelve languages and could break the most complex of codes before breakfast; Lesley and Gordon, whose just-about-perfect memories annoyed Greg so much … mainly because they loved to catch him out and correct him, especially when he contradicted himself, which he’s been known to do in order to win an argument.
    All quite specialised, all performing Larsen’s “party tricks”. How much did he learn from them?
    Of course, Greg and I weren’t quite so specialised. In fact, our talent lay in not being limited. In knowing a little bit, or more than a