The Crystal Child Read Online Free PDF Page B

best sign is he’s getting bored with the junior level of the game.”
    “Why is that good?”
    “Boredom is a sure sign of either ignorance or intelligence.  In his case, it isn’t ignorance.”
    But there was one game, that never bored Aaron. It was called Kong , among the most basic of the games Alex had given her.  Though it struck Julia as particularly banal, Aaron often played it over and again almost obsessively for hours at a time.  Kong was a gorilla, the pixelated replica of King Kong.  He was supposed to leap from building to building across an ever-shifting city skyline.  The object of the game was to calculate the speed he needed in order to take a flying leap off one building and reach the next.  Solving the math could be tricky, especially if the player set himself a short deadline for making the calculations.  If Kong ran too slowly, he would fall short and wind up splattered on the streets below.  If he ran too fast, he would overleap the next tower and suffer the same fate.  Julia watched as Aaron struggled to read the numbers on the screen —  distance, weight, wind resistance —  and worked clumsily with the on-screen calculator.  After several weeks, she noticed that he was doing much of the math in his head, not troubling to bring up the calculator.  Each time he managed to guess the right speed, he was absolutely gleeful.  “Look, look! He made it,” he would cry, and then run the game again. It was the same excitement he displayed when he managed to get one of his checkers across the board.
    “Why do you like this one so much?” Julia asked.
    “I don’t know.  I want to see him make it across. I like the way that feels.”
     
    ***
     
    “What’s that?” Aaron asked one night as Beth Soames was arranging his covers for the night.  He was pointing to a pendant she wore.  She wore it all the time, tucked into her blouse.  Sometimes it slipped out of her collar, but Aaron, with his dim eyesight, could never bring it into focus.
    “It’s a snowflake,” Beth said, holding it closer for him to see.  “Well, not a real snowflake.  It’s a pattern taken from a snowflake.”  She let the light fall across it.  The delicate silver tracery sparkled, casting a darting reflection on the wall beside Aaron’s bed.
    “Is it diamonds?” he asked.
    “Oh, hardly,” Beth said.  “It’s not worth much, actually.  My mother gave it to me.”
    “She’s dead?”
    “Well, what would you think?  Here I am ninety years old.  But she did pretty well, Mama did. She made it to 105.”
    Aaron was fingering the bright little object.  It was eight sided with a delicate webbing between the prongs.  “Where did your mother get it?” he asked.
    “Well, believe it or not, she got it from her mother.  But that’s as far back as it goes.”  After he had inspected it for a while, Beth said, “Mama used to say that every soul starts out as a snowflake.  We fall to Earth out of the sky and become whatever we become.  No two snowflakes are the same, you know.  There must be jillions and zillions of snowflakes, but each one is unique.  Mama would say, ‘and everyone of us ought to be unique.’ I don’t know where she got that from, but it always sounded good to me.  Ever since then, when I think of the soul, I see it as a snowflake right here, next to the heart.”
    Aaron pondered the idea.  “But snowflakes melt.  They don’t last.  They don’t turn into people.”
    Beth laughed.  “You’re being much too literal, my boy.  It’s just a story is all.  But I like thinking of myself as a snowflake.  And, you know, Aaron, in time, we all do melt.  In a sense.”
    Before she left his side, he asked, “What’s ‘literal’ ?  What’s being ‘too literal’ mean?”
    She came back to stroke her hand across his brow.  “Ah, well, let’s see.  It means when you try to make words mean just one thing so you can’t, well, bend them and play with them a little