The Speed of Dark: A Novel (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

by Elizabeth Moon

The normals.

A quick flick of a glance at my friends’ faces is all I need to know who is coming and who is not. We do not need to talk about it; we know one another.

Do they all have autism, or a disability?

normal

There is a technology being developed that wil remove autism for the individual.

“If you give a deaf child hearing, he is no longer one of the deaf,” I say. “If you do it early enough, he never was. It’s all pretending otherwise.”

Crenshaw snorted. “Autistics? Leaders? You must be kidding. They don’t have what it takes; they don’t understand the first thing about how society works.”

I am not trained to give assistance.

I wonder what it would be like to be normal. I made myself quit thinking about that when I left school. When it comes up, I push the thought away. But now . . . what would it be like to not be worried that people think I’m crazy when I stutter or when I can’t answer at all and have to write on my little pad? What would it be like to not carry that card in my pocket? To be able to see and hear everywhere? To know what people are thinking just by looking at their faces?

That even if you hadn’t done anything, having a big man waving a gun at you would scare anyone.

The police seemed tired and angry all the time, and the shows make it seem that this is all right. I am not supposed to act angry even when I am angry, but they can.

Everyone would order their food over the Internet, and it would be delivered to their doors.

Maybe if the things I was told about myself were not all correct, the things I was told about normal people were also not all correct.