Free A Cage of Butterflies by Brian Caswell Page A

made such demands.
    So, how did they end up at the farm? How did Larsen get hold of them?
    I asked Susan and her answer was to let me read her brother’s research. Basically, it was a coincidence, a series of accidents. Under other circumstances, the Babies might have lived their whole lives virtually unnoticed, trapped in their own separate little worlds. Richard Grace didn’t go looking for them in particular. He was working for Larsen, searching hospital records, talking to paediatricians, looking for signs of kids with unusual intelligence. Larsen was in the process of setting up the Institute to study advanced learning techniques. He’d already lined up the kids in the think-tank. I guess we were easy to find; a few letters to regional counsellors in the Education Department would have given him our names, and probably a number of others. Richard Grace had the harder job. He was after something different. Abilities that were more … bizarre.
    And he certainly found them.
    First, it was Myriam. He came across a reference to her in the literature from one of the big teaching hospitals. A five-year-old autistic kid who could write down the entire score for a complex piece of piano music – say a Chopin “Etude” – after hearing it played just once. She had apparently just picked it up by watching her mother play. The little girl couldn’t play a note, had never tried, but apparently she had the ability to connect the notes on the paper with the sounds she heard, even the sharps and flats and time signatures. Her father had found her one day scribbling down the notes to a new piece her mother had just finished playing. And this from a kid who had not said a word to anyone since the age of three.
    They’d tested her at the hospital, but she wouldn’t perform the trick on demand, only if and when the mood moved her. But she could do it. It was just the sort of “off the wall” talent Larsen had sent him out looking for.
    Richard had talked to the doctors, but they couldn’t explain it. Myriam’s case was a puzzle. The mysterious fever and its aftermath, the total withdrawal, the bit with the music and the other signs of obvious intelligence. She was a case for the “too hard” basket, and she fascinated Richard, who, like his sister, could never let a problem lie.
    Then he discovered Pep. Her real name was Phetmany, (pronounced ‘Petmany’), but to her brothers and sisters – six of them – she’d always been “Pep”, and the name had stuck.
    Her case came to light quite by accident. According to Richard’s journal, he was at a party – one of his old professors was retiring or something – and he mentioned his interest in Myriam’s unusual abilities. He was talking with a young paediatrician who’d just set up practice in the south-west.
    One of the guy’s first cases was a little Asian kid who’d been diagnosed by the local GP as autistic. As the doctor outlined the facts of the case, the similarities to Myriam’s situation were overwhelming: the fever, the withdrawal and some striking flashes of intelligence …
    Richard left the party early.
    And the search for the Babies was on.
    By isolating all the similarities in the two cases, especially their place of birth, and following them up, he soon had a list of five or six others – including a set of twins. A pattern was emerging.
    All the time, he dutifully forwarded the information to Larsen, who by now had the Institute up and running, with four or five of the think-tank – including me – already in residence. But something about Larsen’s approach or attitude began to worry Richard. You could pick it from the journal entries, and by the fact that he stopped informing Larsen when he discovered new names – some of the names on the second sheet in the red folder that Susan let us see.
    Shortly before Richard died, he’d