Teranesia by Greg Egan

intellectual”.’
    He read, ‘ “The transputer will only be the first stage in arevolution that will transform the entire gendered megatext of technology and science. The next hegemony to fall, long overdue
     for its own hyperqueer inversion, will be mathematics itself. Once again we will need to rebuild the discipline from the ground
     up, rejecting the flawed and biased axioms of the old, male dispensers of truth, transforming their rigid, hierarchical approach
     into one that is organic, nurturing, and playful. Proof is dead. Logic is obsolete. The next generation must be taught from
     childhood to ridicule Russell’s
Principia
, to tweak the beard of Carl Friedrich Gauss – to
pull down
Pythagoras’s trousers!” ’
    Prabir stretched his hand out and took the book. The passage was exactly as Keith had read it. And Amita’s name was at the
     top of the article.
    He sat down, light-headed, still disbelieving. In the camp, when he’d recalled the things his father had said about Amita,
     he’d feared that she might be religious, but it was even worse than that. She was opposed to everything his parents had stood
     for: the equality of men and women, the separation of scholarship from self-interest, the very idea of an honest search for
     truth.
    And he’d delivered Madhusree into her hands.
    Prabir had been dreading the start of school, but by the end of the first week all his worst fears had proved groundless.
     The teachers spoke like sane human beings; there was no Keith-and-Amita babble in sixth grade. And he’d been allowed to sit
     in on Madhusree’s first morning in childcare, which seemed equally harmless. Madhusree had played with other children in the
     camp, so it had come as no great shock to her to meet the same kind of strange beings again, and though she’d cried when Prabir
     left her on the second day, when he came home she’d been full of enthusiastic reports of her activities.
    Prabir had expected to be beaten up at school, but the other students kept their distance. One boy had started taunting himabout his face, but then another boy had whispered something to the first that had made him fall silent. Prabir fervently
     hoped that they only imagined they knew the story behind the scars; he’d rather have been laughed at than have these strangers
     discussing anything that had happened on the island.
    There were three other students in his class who looked like they might have had Indian parents, but they all spoke with Canadian
     accents, and when Prabir was around them he thought he sensed an even greater unease than he produced in everyone else. Amita
     had come to Canada when she was three, and her parents had stopped speaking Bengali immediately; she remembered almost nothing
     of the language. He was determined to keep Madhusree bilingual, but in her presence he sometimes found himself halting in
     the middle of sentences, suddenly doubting that he was speaking correctly. He could have tried to contact some of his old
     classmates from the Calcutta IRA’s net school, but he couldn’t face the prospect of explaining the reasons for his changed
     circumstances.
    In the months that followed, he grew used to the routine: waking at seven, washing and dressing, catching the bus, sitting
     through lessons. It was like sleep-walking on a treadmill.
    On the weekends, there were outings. Keith took him to a festival screening of a film called
The Four Hundred Blows
. Prabir went along for the novelty of finally experiencing celluloid technology, with its giant image and communal audience.
     Though he remembered Calcutta being full of movie houses, he’d never been inside one; his parents had preferred to rent a
     disk, and he’d been far too young to go on his own.
    ‘So what did you think?’ Keith asked as they crossed the foyer on their way out. He’d been talking about the event for weeks
     beforehand; apparently this was his all-time favourite film.
    Prabir said, ‘I think the