Authors: Paul Melko

Singularity's Ring (34 page)

BOOK: Singularity's Ring

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The warehouse holds four arborobots, three of them still partially crated. More crates line the walls, gengineered tree seeds, nutrient-fixing bacteria, fertilizer.

“Get them working,” Muckle says, leaving us alone in the crowded warehouse.

Manuel climbs to the roof and sets up the sat phone. When he has signal with the geosync satellites, we get access to the pod networks and call Colonel Krypicz.

“Where are you? You never made contact with our agent,” he barks.

“We’re in Hinterland.”

“Hinterland? How did you get …” He shakes his head. “Has anyone ever overestimated you?”

Meda says nothing. If we had met everyone’s standards we would be on the
Consensus
right now.

Instead we’re in a desert.

“All right then,” the colonel says. “Good job, then. The question is where Leto is and we think it’s Hinterland or farther inland. At this point, you’re farther in than anyone we’ve ever had.”

He signs off and Quant starts searching for details on the arborobots, while the rest of us climb all over the one built machine.

They have the exhaust system backward,
Manuel sends. He and Strom reassemble the pipes coming off the hydrogen-burning system. The superheated water vapor leaving the catalyst is piped through the other systems for mechanical work.

For hours we absorb ourselves in checking and rebuilding the machine.

It is past dusk when Muckle returns. We have forgotten to eat lunch and are starving for food.

“Well? What have you got for me?”

Quant climbs into the cab and starts the engine. Electrolysis has split enough water vapor into hydrogen and oxygen to at least start the engine. The tractor will have to
sit in full sunlight for a couple days to fill the hydrogen tanks completely. Or we could find a microwave receiver.

“Holy crap!” cries Muckle. “You got it started! I guess you can stay.”

“We’ll need a microwave receiver to recharge the hydrogen tanks,” Meda says.

Muckle scratches his bald head. “Well, the receivers are closely monitored by the Power Guild.”

“Why? Anyone can put up a receiver in a few days.”

“Sure, okay, technically. But then you have to have the license fees and the guild inspection.”

Managed scarcity,
Quant sends.

“It’s better just to use the solar, if it’s got it.”

“Okay.”

“Are you ready to go? Are you ready to run this baby?”

“Not yet. We need to load it with material.”

“How many trees can this thing plant in a day?”

One thousand,
Manuel sends.

If the seeds are good. We don’t know that.

And the bacteria might be dead.

It may be a big hole digger.

“I don’t know. Maybe a few hundred.”

“A few hundred. Okay, okay. When can you try it out?”

“In a few days.”

“Not sooner?”

“Can you find us a microwave power receiver?”

Muckle rubs his scalp again. “Maybe. Maybe not. A few hundred a day, you say?”

“We don’t know, really.”

“But it could be a few hundred?”

“Maybe.”

“Can you unpack another one?” Muckle asks, looking at the other machines still boxed up.

“Only one of us is a trio,” Meda says. “We can only drive one.”

“What if you get a third guy?”

Meda shrugs. “It depends.”

“Okay, okay,” Muckle says. “Three days. Have it ready in three days.”

We send the boys out for dinner. They come back with skewers of grilled vegetables and chicken. We barely stop for the food. Our night is already planned out. It feels like we are back in school and working around the clock on shifts. We schedule ourselves so that at least three of us are up at any one time. One hour a day we are all awake and we use that time to consense and redirect our focus for the next twenty-four hours. For school tasks—memorizing and reading—or for things that don’t need all five of us at once to decide something, this schedule works best for us.

At dawn we move the first tractor into the alley out front, where it can sit in the sun and fill its hydrogen tank. We forget to lock the cabin, and Strom goes outside when we hear the engine turn over.

A gaggle of kids are crawling over the machine, trying to steal it. Strom climbs up the tractor wheel, a miniature thief under each arm. The rest scatter in all directions.

“Hey! Leave us alone,” the kid under the left pit yells. “I’ll tell my daddy. He’s a foreman.”

Before Strom can send the two street urchins flying, Moira is there.

Let’s hire them,
she sends.

These thieves?
Strom asks.

“We’ve got some work for you kids,” Meda says. “Who wants some breakfast?”

The kid under Strom’s left arm, the one whose father is a foreman, kicks free and says, “I’m Eliud. What’s for breakfast?”

For bagels and a few dollars in singleton scrip we suddenly have our own crew of tractor workers, Eliud its
makeshift foreman. We still lose seed and tools to theft, but we have the second and most of the third tractor built and ready by midnight. Most of the kids go home at dark, or wherever they stay each night. A couple of children stay. Eliud sleeps in our warehouse on a bag of apple-tree seed.

I thought his father was a foreman,
Quant sends.

That doesn’t mean he knows who his father is,
Manuel sends.

Fathers and mothers are abstract concepts to us. We have grown up with neither, just creche nurses and mentors.

The next day, we have twice as many kids show up for breakfast.

We have a guild,
Strom sends.

They’re like ducks,
Moira replies, pulling a wry grin from Strom.

Manuel takes a walk through the market, taking Eliud and another boy with him. The goal is a precision caliper, but he keeps his eyes open for any sign of Leto’s jacked associates. Even though it is the far end of the Congo, Hinterland is home to two hundred thousand humans. He finds nothing, not even a caliper, and he and Quant must work with what is available to tune the hydrogen-burning engines.

By noon, the third tractor is built, and the first two are loaded with seed, bacteria, fertilizer, and water. The weight threatens to warp the cobbled street and we set the props out on two-by-fours to distribute the force. The tractors have charged faster than we thought. The first will be ready tomorrow.

After lunch, we hear cursing from the street. Some of our kids are yelling. Meda is asleep, so Strom leads us out. Two men are climbing up the tractors.

“Can I help you?”

“Who the hell are you?”

“We’re Class B arborists and those are our machines.”

“Class B, huh?” The first man drops to the ground. He is dressed in clean coveralls. The name Ryan is stitched into the breast pocket. The lack of dirt proclaims this man as a foreman.

“Go wake Quant and Meda,” Manuel tells Eliud.

“You got a license for these tractors?” Ryan asks.

Bluff.

“Subforeman Muckle does.”

Ryan laughs, glancing up at his companion, still leaning against the cab.

“Muckle? So this is why he bought up the Jergens contract. This is his secret weapon.” Ryan’s laugh is not pleasant.

Strom shrugs. Meda would have said something appropriate, but for Strom a gesture is as good as a word.

“You should get these things out of the way,” Ryan says. “You’re blocking thoroughfare. You’re lucky we’re not the constable. He might confiscate the things.” He and his friend share another laugh.

“Why don’t you come on down before we call the constable,” Meda says. She and Quant have joined us from the cots in back. In seconds the entire history of this confrontation has been downloaded into her brain.

“Well, here’s a spicier one than this boyo,” Ryan says, but his friend climbs down, catching a hose and wire in hand as he does: malicious vandalism, though he would claim innocence. Manuel is there to repair the damage before the man reaches the cobbles. He glares at Manuel, but the damage is already fixed.

“Good day to you then, and we’ll see how this contraption works tomorrow.”

We watch Ryan and friend walk off down the alleyway, his angry laugh the last thing to disappear.

I guess there’ll be an audience for tomorrow.

“Eliud, can you fetch Subforeman Muckle?” Meda asks.

“Sure.”

Muckle curses for a few minutes when he hears that Ryan has been here.

“We should move the tractors,” Meda says.

“Sure, sure, that rat! I have another warehouse nearby.”

“It should be in the sun. We need to resupply the hydrogen.”

“Right, right. I don’t have any place with skylights.”

“A courtyard,” Meda suggests.

Or the field,
adds Quant.

“Or the field, the Jergens contract, wherever that is.”

Muckle gives Meda a look. “That Ryan! Sure, we can take them to the field. When?”

“Tonight.”

“Okay, okay.”

We siphon what hydrogen is already compressed and stored in the first tractor to balance out the other three. The children lug bags of seed all afternoon, dumping them into the bins. We handle the fertilizer and the bacteria. We’ve tested the stuff, and after three years in the warehouse, the bacteria is still active.

I hope the seeds are too,
Quant sends.

Manuel dumps a paper cup over on a table. The seed he placed in there on the first day in the warehouse has a whitish-green tail, the shoot coming off the seed.

Looks okay. I didn’t even add fertilizer or bacteria.

One is not a good sample set,
Quant replies.
That could be the only viable seed.

Not very likely,
Manuel sends.

The quick consensus is that we will have to rely on the seeds having remained well preserved in the dry warehouse.

The desert is the best place to keep things safe,
Strom sends.

We send the children back home before we leave, but Eliud is adamant in remaining.

“I want to drive,” he says.

“You’ll need six arms.”

“Not if I just want to drive,” he says. “I’d need six if I wanted to plant trees. Driving just needs two feet and two legs.”

He has a point,
Manuel sends.

“You still can’t come with us.”

“You need a gopher,” he replies.

“I’m not paying for street rats,” Muckle says. “I ain’t no junior arbor club.”

“I’m not asking for anything,” Eliud says sharply. He looks at Meda and adds, “There’s nowhere else for me to go that’d I’d rather be.”

Moira’s heart softens, and the rest of us shrug.

“All right,” Meda says.

Eliud smiles wider than his face. “I can drive?”

“No, you can come.”

The streets are empty as we drive the four machines toward the desert that night. We drive them two at a time, unable to split less than a duo for the task of maneuvering through the streets. Even so, we feel swathed and numb, until several minutes into the drive. We use sign language between the cabs to maintain distance and indicate direction. Eliud mimics our signs from his seat in the back of the first tractor’s cab. He peers over Quant’s shoulder to watch what she does to control the tractor.

The field Muckle has contracted is ten kilometers
downriver. It takes us two hours to find it, but when we do, we see a dozen arborists waiting by a fire. They cheer at the sight of the tractors, then detach a pair to guide us back to the warehouse on bicycles.

Strom flounders on the bicycle. Manuel sends him the memory of riding over and over again until he understands. At the warehouse, we latch the bicycles to the second pair of tractors and drive them to the site. Quant and Moira are tired—this is their sleep period—but we make the distance in a shorter time, and we all sleep by the fire in sleeping bags.

Eliud curls up against Meda, and as his arms reach around her neck, he touches her interface jack, and says, “My mom has one of those.”

He is asleep before we can respond. We let him slumber as we lie awake under the Ring. By chance, we have found what we are looking for.

BOOK: Singularity's Ring

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