Authors: Paul Melko

Singularity's Ring (23 page)

BOOK: Singularity's Ring

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Isn’t it our duty to go back and report this?
Meda asked, looking at me for support.

I shrugged, unsure of what responsibility we had to anyone.

Meda frowned at me, then crossed her arms across her chest.

Then what? Stay out here until winter? I’d like a shower at some point.

In the silence following, Strom sent,
We’ve only just started looking for the bears.

The bears,
Meda replied,
are just someone’s science project.

So?
Strom replied.
They saved me. I owe them.

Then let them be.

Strom looked away, cowed by Meda’s anger. I knew I should step in and deflect this argument, but I was unsure which direction we should take. There was no safe course.

I turned to find Quant and Manuel looking at me.

Can it wait till morning?
I asked.

What will be different tomorrow, or the next, or the next?
Meda asked. She was pushing for consensus. Yet our bonds were still weak. Manuel had only just shaken the effects of the cluster buster drug. Meda’s own psyche was tender.

Do you forget why they want us destroyed?
I asked, harsher than I should have.

Quant shook her head.
This happened before Malcolm Leto,
she sent.
It’s not because of what he did to us. It’s something else.
I couldn’t understand what it could be, but I was certain now that we were too fragile to face what would come with our accusations.

This evidence has waited months,
I added.
It will wait more if necessary. The bears are important to Strom, but they are more important to pod science. If we can find them, we should.

Consensus shifted among us, until even Meda acknowledged it, though she wouldn’t meet my eyes.

The den was old: musty and scentless, but bits of fur clung to the walls and floor. Bears had wintered here, it was clear, but not this last winter.

We had been following the bear trails, from dead log to beehive to stream, for two weeks, searching for some sign of them, but all we had found were a few old footprints in some dried mud by a stream and this cave.

It smells like thought,
Strom sent. He breathed deeply, taking in the odors of the cave. He played his flashlight over the walls.

“Anything?” Meda yelled from the cave mouth.

“No,” I shouted back. It had been too small for all five of us to enter. So Meda, Quant, and Manuel had stayed at the cave mouth.

I sniffed too, but all I smelled was stale bear.

They’re long gone, Strom.

He shrugged and we climbed up the gentle-sloped,
rubbled mouth to the outside. We shared the images and sat down to eat lunch. Quant had found a blackberry patch with fruit the size of Strom’s knuckles. We’d been eating off the land as often as we could: wild strawberries, trout, blackberries, raspberries. Once we saw a herd of deer, but the idea of eating mammals disgusted us. If beavers and bears could be sentient pods, why not deer. Fish we were comfortable with eating. Even chicken, though we knew avian flocks could be cluster-modified. But not mammals. We had loyalty to our class if not our phylum.

We’ve trudged over these bear trails for days,
Manuel sent.
Perhaps they’ve moved on.

To where?
Strom asked.
They must have gone somewhere.

Whoever made them relocated them to somewhere where no one was looking for them.

Strom looked sadder than I had ever seen him. I sat down next to him and squeezed him. He was a large man, but I managed to get my arms around him.

Thanks, Moira,
he sent, squeezing back.

We’ll find them.

We camped there that night, not bothering to go any farther. Where would we have gone? These mountains were barren of large animals. Around the fire, we sang. We all knew the words, of course; they were part of our shared memories.

When the sun had set, and we had sung all our songs twice, all of us except for Strom filed into the tent.

“Coming?” I asked softly.

He shook his head. “I want to …” The image he painted was one of communion, one of meditation.

Are you ready to give up?
I asked.

He looked at me, startled.

Sooner or later, we need to face the rest of the world,
I added.

He nodded.
Not yet. I feel like I should know where they are.

I knew how he felt. It wasn’t uncommon for us to have intuitive knowledge or sudden thoughts just beyond our grasp. Our tandem brains seemed to dangle such things before us without making them understood by our singleton minds. Together, our mind could make great leaps, but sometimes it leaped beyond us.

I sat in front of him.

“I can stay with you,” I said. I leaned in close to him, my arms around his neck. This close, his thoughts were like thunderheads, anvils of swirling consciousness. I could barely think this close to him, he was so enveloping.

You’re growing a beard,
I sent.

The words “beard” and “bear” twisted in my mind, becoming superimposed.

You’re becoming a bear.

I giggled, and he laughed. My face brushed his, and I felt the roughness of it.

“Are you two coming inside?” Meda or Quant said, I couldn’t tell who, my mind and ears muffled.

“No,” Strom said, answering for both of us.

“Okay.”

I felt the boundary between us crumble. We were wires coiled around a magnet, so tightly bound that we might as well have been one to the electrons that coursed through us.

I sighed, glad to be so close, glad to lower all my barriers.

Within Strom’s mind I saw the bears’ map, the chemical topography that marked their territory. They had shared it with Strom, and he had it in his mind, just as they had passed it to him.

I found myself falling into it as if I were free-falling from an aircar. Memories of our own trekking through the mountains superimposed themselves upon what the bears
knew and understood. The significance of a termite-filled tree trunk flickered against the streams where we had filled our canteens. The cave, where the bears had lived for a winter, was beside us now.

Elevations and slopes, derivatives and topologies. To the bears, the mountains were not an area, but a linear composite: destinations strung together. Looking on high I saw the crisscross lines. Within the map, I saw the long itinerary of travels from start to finish, the finish being the camp where they had left Strom, where we had seen him.

But the start …

I felt myself peeling the map, following the threads back and forth, finding older and older lines, and points that had been faint memories to the bears: a salmon the length of one’s arm, as thick as a neck, a beehive where the youngest had learned a nasty lesson, a fire raging through a dried-out section of trees. Faint memories, but all leading back to a start, years ago, years ago.

Through a mountain pass, through a rock-strewn ravine, to the house. The master’s house.

I opened my eyes, staring straight into Strom’s, aware suddenly of the cold, the dampness in my clothes. The moon had moved across half the sky while we sat. My teeth began to chatter.

He lifted me up, not even an armful.

Thank you, Moira,
he sent.
I know where they went.

I knew that I was the group’s voice of reason, always controlled, always considering. But I was more than that. I could be a catalyst just like Quant. I could be a mother just like Meda. I was not just about right and wrong. It was good to be with Strom and not have to be on guard.

He carried me into the tent, and I slipped inside a sleeping bag, shivering. The warmth of the pod, the naked bodies were overwhelmingly sensual.

Coming?

No.

I dug in deeper, unzipping my pants and shedding my shirt.

You’re cold.
Sleepy half-thoughts, mixed with dreams.

I’m cold, warm me.

Where’s Strom?

On his spirit quest.

The smell of a joke appreciated.

Hold me.

The need for warmth turned to something else, and the heat of friction warmed me through and through.

In the dawn, Strom still sat before the burned-out fire, but now dew coated his shoulders and face. He was awake, staring into the fire ring. We filed out and stood around him.

He looked up at us, his dewed face seemingly too full with tears.

“I know where they are.”

Strom led us up over the lower foothills into the canyons and ridges of the higher mountains. Everywhere we turned, we were reminded of our painful stay on the mountain, and Strom’s trip down. Yet, he led us onward, through alpine slopes, still snow covered, through unravaged forests, older than pods, older than the Community.

In the mountains we only averaged eleven kilometers per day. In Quant’s head were tallies of every step of every day, every meter we traveled. She laid it all over the bears’ map I had discovered within Strom.

We passed the highest peaks just seven days after leaving the bears’ cave. Standing at the pass’s crest, we saw ranges of stone, ice, and forest stretching before us. It was cold in the pass, so we lingered only long enough to find our path down. By nightfall, we were back in more temperate weather. Winter to summer in a day.

I was the one who spotted it on the way down. At first my eyes passed right over it, but then I stopped walking and stared: a paw print. Not long before, a bear had crossed this path.

Strom knelt, touched the dirt around the print. It was damp, it having rained the day before. But the print had been shielded by a holly bush next to it. There were no other prints nearby.

A week old, two weeks?
Strom guessed.

All the other tracks had been obliterated. Yet it was clear what path the bear had been following: it led perpendicular to our direction, down to a placid lake, just a few hundred meters away.

It could be a loner,
Manuel sent, trying to cool Strom’s anxiousness.
It may not be our pod at all.

I know,
Strom sent.

We cut down the path toward the lake, slowed by the overgrown brush. Manuel pointed out a dob of fur stuck on a thorn. Meda found another soft print under a tree.

The path opened onto the lake edge; the water was rip-pleless. We saw no more tracks, no more indications of the bear at all. We realized then that we were stymied. The bear could have gone in any direction around the lake, and then taken off again at any point. We had not enough woodcraft to determine which direction it had gone.

Disappointment hung among us, and yet I was buoyed by what we had found. We touched palms, forming consensus.

We’re close. Very close,
I sent.

We’ll find them, I know we will.

We’re within a hundred kilometers of them for certain.

All rational thoughts, and yet there was a hint of despair among us as we pitched the tent and caught fresh fish for dinner. No one had thought it directly, but my own unshared questions hovered in my mind: how long could we
stay in the mountains by ourselves? When would we have to return to civilization and face the Overgovernment?

I didn’t want to dampen our hope, but these were questions we had to face sooner or later.

The next day, Strom was leading us along a forested ridge, an animal trail, when he yelped in discovery. As we ran forward, I saw the image he saw: a bear’s night den, a hollowed-out depression in the dirt a meter deep and three meters across. I stepped down into the hole, marveling at the creatures that had filled it. Strom’s memories of the beasts revealed their sizes, but they were in relation to Strom who is larger than the rest of us. In the den, my relative size to the beasts was apparent.

Smell that?
Strom asked.

We can’t share smells, oddly, but we shared his recognition of the distinct bear smell. It was not like any animal I knew.

We’re close,
Strom sent.

The ridge opened above a mountain lake, smoothly placid. No humans save us had seen this in decades. On the far shore, two moose pulled at grass.

Strom led us down to the shore.

BOOK: Singularity's Ring

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