For the most part she no longer tasted what she did not want to taste, heard what she did not want to hear, saw what she did not want to see—at least while she was conscious—but now and then strange sensations overcame her, and she felt urgencies she could not fully bring to awareness.
Meanwhile, life and work went on; a year passed, then two. On a hot and humid August morning Sparta bent close over the papers on her desk, hardcopies of documents and articles she had pored over many times before, none of them secret, all easily available to the public, doc- umenting the innocent beginnings of the SPARTA project.
One of them began: A PROPOSAL submitted to the United States Of- fice of Education for a demonstration project in the development of multiple intelligences.
Introduction It has frequently been suggested that the brain of the average human being has unrealized potential for growth and learning—potential which is unrealized, that is, in all but a tiny, haphazard minority of individuals we recognize as “geniuses.”
From time to time educational programs have been suggested which would have as their goal the maximization of this unused intellectual capacity in the developing child. At no time before the present, however, have actual methods of stimulating intellectual growth been precisely identifiable, much less subject to conscious control and application. Claims to the contrary have proven at worst false, at best difficult to verify.
Moreover, the mistaken view persists that intelligence is a single, quantifiable trait, a heritable or even a genetic trait—a view perpetuated by the continued widespread use of long-discredited Intelligence Quotient (IQ) tests by schools and other institutions. This continued use can only be understood as an attempt by administrators to find a convenient (and most probably a self-fulfilling) predictor upon which to base the allocation of resources perceived as scarce. The continued use of the IQ has had a chilling effect on the testing of alternate theories.
The authors of this proposal intend to demonstrate that there are no unidimensional geniuses, that each individual human being possesses many intelligences, and that several, perhaps all, of these intelligences may be nurtured and encouraged to grow by simple, mindful intervention on the part of appropriately trained teachers and educational technicians. . . .
Shaved of its academic fuzz, this document—a draft, rejected by the government to which it had been submitted, and dating from some years before Sparta herself had been born—was a fair statement of what Sparta’s parents had set out to do.
They were cognitive scientists, Hungarian immigrants with a special interest in human development. In their view an IQ number, lacking inherent meaning, was a label that blessed some, damned many, and gave easy comfort to racists. Most pernicious was the peculiar notion that some mysterious something, reified as IQ, was not only heritable but fixed, that not even the most beneficial intervention in the growth of the child could increase the quantity of this magical mental substance, at least not more than a few insignificant percentage points.
Sparta’s parents intended to prove the opposite. But despite their revolutionary rhetoric, the public and the granting agencies perceived something old-fashioned about their up-by-your-bootstraps ideas, and it was several years before support materialized, in the form of a modest grant from an anonymous donor. Their first subject, as their convictions demanded, was their own young daughter. Her name was still Linda, then.
Not long after, New York State and then the Ford Foundation chipped in grants of their own. The SPARTA project got its acronymous name, plus a small staff and several new students. After it had been officially underway for two years, the Science section of the New York Times carried a notice: Bullish on Fox, Bearish on Hedgehog Psychologists at the New School for Social Research hope to resolve an argument that goes back at least as far as the 8th century B.C., when the Greek poet Archilochus made the enigmatic statement, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” In recent times the poet’s remark has symbolized the debate between those who think intelligences are many— linguistic, bodily, mathematical, social, and so forth—and those who believe intelligence comes as a lump sum, symbolized by an IQ score, which is resistant to change and can probably be blamed on one’s genes.
Now comes new evidence from the New School, favoring the fox. . . .
Other articles and stories, in a widening circle of media, glamorized the SPARTA project. The little girl who was its first and for a while its only subject became a star—a mysterious star, whose parents insisted she be kept out of public view; there were no pictures of herself among the chips and clippings on Ellen Troy’s desk. Then at last the U.S.
territorial government showed interest in the project. . . .
“Ellen, you’re hiding something.”
Sparta looked up at the broad brown face in front of her. The big woman wasn’t smiling, exactly, but her ac- cusatory expression hid mischief. “What are you talking about, boss?” Sparta asked.
The woman settled her considerable weight into the chair facing Sparta’s desk, Ellen Troy’s desk. “Taking first things first, honey, you applied to get out from under my thumb, again. You think Sister Arlene doesn’t know what goes on in her own department?”
Sparta shook her head once, sharply. “I’m not hiding anything. I’ve been trying to get out from behind this desk for the past two years. As often as the regs let me apply.”
The desk in question was one of fifty just like it in the information-processing department of the Board of Space Control’s Investigatory Services Division, housed in a pink brick and blue glass building overlooking Manhattan’s Union Square.
The boss, Arlene Diaz, was the IP department manager.
“You and me both know, anybody’s had the surgery you’ve had doesn’t stand a prayer of getting out of the office and onto the beat. So how come you keep doin’ it, Ellen? Tryin’ to get out there?”
“Because I keep hoping somebody upstairs has some common sense, that’s why. I want to be judged by what I can do, Arlene. Not by what’s on my scans.”
Arlene sighed heavily. “Truth is, field supervisors are mighty partial to perfect physical specimens.”
“There’s nothing wrong with me, Arlene.” She let the color come into her cheeks. “When I was sixteen some drunk squashed me and my scooter against a light pole.
Okay, the scooter was a total loss. But me they patched up—it’s all on file for anybody who wants to look.”
“You got to admit it was a pretty weird fix, honey. All those lumps and wires and hollow places . . .” Arlene paused. “I’m sorry. You wouldn’t know it, but it’s policy that when a person wants to transfer, their supervisor sits on the review panel. I’ve pondered your scans, dear. More than a couple of times.”
“The docs who patched me up did the best they could.”
Sparta seemed embarrassed, as if she were apologizing for them. “They were local talent.”
“They did fine,” Arlene said. “Mayo Clinic it wasn’t, but what they did works.”
“You think so”—Sparta studied her boss from under arched brows, and became suspicious—”what do the others on the panel think?”
When Arlene didn’t say anything, Sparta smiled.
“Faker,” she said. “You’re the one who’s hiding something.”
Arlene grinned back at her. “Congratulations, honey.
We’re gonna miss you around here.”
It wasn’t quite that easy.
There were the physicals to do all over again, the lies to rehearse and keep straight, the phony electronic documents to plant instantly, backing up the new stories.
And then the work. The six-month basic training for a Space Board Investigator was as rigorous as any astronaut’s.
Sparta was smart, quick, coordinated, and she could store far more knowledge than the academy’s instructors had to give (a capacity she did not reveal), but she was not physically strong, and some of the things that had been done to her for reasons she was still trying to understand had left her highly sensitive to pain and vulnerable to fatigue. It was clear from day one that Sparta was in danger of washing out.
The investigator-trainees did not live in barracks; the Space Board regarded them as adults who would show up for classes if they wanted to and meanwhile keep their noses out of trouble, being responsible for themselves.
Sparta reported daily to the training division’s facilities in the New Jersey marshes and each night boarded the magneplane back to Manhattan, wondering if she would have the courage to return the next morning. It was a long ride, not long in minutes so much as in the repeated lesson of what sort of world she lived in. Sweet Manhattan was a jewel nestled in a swamp, cinched in by seaweed and algae farms that filled the once flowing rivers that made it an island, ringed by hideous shacks and crumbled slums beyond the river shores, wholly walled about by smoking refineries that transformed human waste and garbage into hydrocarbons and salvageable metals.