Authors: Paul Melko

Singularity's Ring (5 page)

BOOK: Singularity's Ring

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I see everything that has happened, and they see everything that I have done, and in one moment it is I who surfed the avalanche, dangling on the line Strom tied to a tree trunk, and it is we who walked down the mountain and communed with bears.

You saved us, Strom,
Moira sends. Quant shows me how the tent, dangling on my line of spider-silk, rides the top of the cascade of snow instead of plunging down the mountain. I hug Meda and Manuel to my chest, squeezing. It hurts my ribs, but I do not let go.

“Careful!” Meda says, but she buries her face in my chest.

I am strength again, I think, as my pod helps me to the infirmary, not because they are weak, but because we are all strong.

TWO

Meda

We spent a week in the Rockies searching for the bears in all the wrong places. Of course we couldn’t tell the military duo that flew in to head the search that we knew their territory because Strom had shared memories with the bear pod. The duo didn’t even believe the bears had been a pod, mostly likely “an escaped, partially domesticated grizzly.”

We helped search anyway and tried mining the databases for bear pod information in the evenings. There was nothing.

How could someone hide a whole line of research regarding carnivore pods?
I asked.

My pod had no answer either, so we took a suborbital car back to the farm to await our practicum assignments and help Mother Redd with the summer’s chores. The first morning back, Moira awoke with a stuffed nose and circles under her eyes, and we all awoke with memories of a clogged throat and a sinus headache.

Mother Redd shooed us out of the house. At first we
just hung around the front yard, feeling weird. We’d been separated before, of course; it was part of our training. In space, we’d have to act as a quartet or a trio or even a duo, so we practiced all our tasks and chores in various combinations. That had always been practice, and we’d all been in sight. But Moira was
separated
now, and we did not like it. It reminded us of Strom on the mountain. He had been apart for too long.

Manuel climbed the trellis on the front of the house, skirting the thorns of the roses that grew among the slats. As his hands caught the sill and pulled his head just over the edge, his hind legs caught a rose and bent it back and forth to break it off.

I see Moira,
he signed.

“Does she see you?” I asked, aloud since he couldn’t see me, and the wind took the pheromones away leaving half-formed thoughts.

If Manuel could see Moira and she could see him, then it would be enough for all of us. We’d be linked.

Just then the window flew open, and one of Mother Redd was there. Manuel fell backward, but he righted himself and landed on the grass, rolling, sprawling until he was among the rest of us, the red rose still clutched in his toes.

I touched his wrist, breathed him a thought, and he offered the rose to Mother Redd. I saw immediately it wasn’t going to work.

“You
four,
go and play somewhere else today. Moira is sick, and it won’t do us any good for you to get sick too. Your assignments will be here in a month. So vamoose!” She slammed the window shut.

We thought it over for a few seconds, then tucked the rose in my shirt pocket, and started down the front path.

We didn’t have Moira, but we did have license to vamoose, and that meant the forest, the lake, and the caves
if we were brave enough. Moira would have advised caution. But we didn’t have Moira.

The farm was part ecopreserve and part commercial venture, the latter a hundred acres of soyfalfa that Mother Redd worked with three trios of oxalope. The ox were dumb as rocks by themselves, but when you teamed them up, they could plow and seed and harvest pretty much by themselves. They were the biggest animals that we had ever seen pod-bonded, until Strom had found the bears. No one built carnivore or omnivore pods; it just wasn’t done.

Our search for them after the incident on the mountain—hampered by Strom’s cracked ribs—had turned up no ursine pods, and the military teams sent to search for them came to disbelieve the bears had helped save Strom and the remainder of Hagar Julian’s pod. We could tell they didn’t believe they were pods, probably just partially tame normal bears. They had questioned Strom on those points extensively.

“Could the scent glands have been the silver mane of the male?” one army duo had asked.

We were certain of what had happened, certain that the bear had been a pod, and certain that Strom had spoken to them via chemical memory, but the more they hounded us on the details of the bears, the more we shrugged our shoulders and said, “Maybe you’re right.” We were glad to fly back to Mother Redd’s farm to wait for our assignments.

The practicum semester included not just a dozen classes on astrophysics and space science, but also an extraterrestrial work program. This was supposed to be the semester when they chose who would command the
Consensus
.

The farm was a good place to spend the summer. Lessons took up our mornings, but they weren’t as rigorous as during the school year when we studied all day and most of the night at the Institute. At school we learned to sleep in shifts, so three or four of us were always awake
to study. We’d spent summers with Mother Redd for sixteen years, since we had left Mingo Creche.

Baker Road led west toward Worthington and the Institute or east toward more farms, the lake, the woods, and beyond that ruins and desolation. We chose east, Strom first like always when we were in the open with Manuel as a scurrying point, never too far away. I followed Strom, then Quant last. Moira would have been after Quant. We felt a hole there, which Quant and I filled by touching hands too often.

Within a mile, we were relaxed, though not indifferent to Moira’s absence. Quant was tossing rocks onto the tops of old telephone poles, grabbing chunks of asphalt and stones from the broken edge of the road, flinging them into the sky with a flash of her blond hair, an Olympic shotputter in a ponytail. She didn’t miss once, but we didn’t feel any pride in it. It was just a one-force problem, and Quant lobbed the rocks for diversion, not practice. There weren’t enough quintets in the world to relegate such a class in the Olympics; quartets had only been allowed the year before. Not that we wanted to be in the Olympics. We had no desire to hang around Earth at all.

We passed a microwave receiving station, hidden in a grove of pine trees, just off from the road. Its paraboloid shape reflected the sun as it caught the beamed microwaves from the Ring. The Earth was dotted with such dishes, each providing a few megawatts to the Earth-side enclaves, more than we could use, now that the Community had left. But they had built the Ring and the solar arrays and the dishes as well. Decades later and they still worked.

I could see the Ring clearly, even in the brightness of the morning, a pale arch from horizon to horizon. At night, it was brighter, its legacy more burdensome to those of us left behind. On the mountain, it had been clearer still, as if we could reach out, grasp it, and pull ourselves
astride it. A silly thought: no pod had ever set foot on the Ring or any of its base stations. The doors would only open to members of the Community.

Quant started tossing small twigs into the incoming microwave beam, small arcing meteoroids that burst into flame and then ash. She bent to pick up a small toad.

I felt the absence of Moira as I put my hand on her shoulder and sent,
No living things
.

I felt her momentary resentment, then she shrugged both physically and mentally. She smiled at my discomfort at having to play Moira while she was gone. Quant, in whom was hardwired all the Newtonian laws of force and reaction, had a devilishness in her. In us. Our rebel. You would not know it to look at her, nor would you have guessed if you had met her alone.

Once, on Sabah Station, the instructors had divided us up as a duo and a trio, and broken up our classmates as well along the same lines. The objective was an obstacle course, no gravity, two miles of wire, rope, and simulated wreckage, find the MacGuffin first. All other teams were enemy, no rules.

They hadn’t given us no-rules games too often; we were young then, twelve. Mostly they gave us a lot of rules. That time had been different.

Strom, Manuel, and Quant found it first, by chance, and instead of taking it, they lay in wait, set traps and zero-gee deadfalls. They managed to capture or incapacitate the other four teams. They broke three arms and a leg. They caused two concussions, seventeen bruises, and three lacerations, as they trussed up the other teams and stowed them in the broken hut where the MacGuffin sat.

Finally we came along, and the fiberglass mast zinged past, barely missing us.

As Moira and I swam behind cover, we heard them laughing. We knew it was them and not some other team.
We were too far for pheromones, but we could still smell the edges of their thoughts: proud and defiant.

Moira yelled, “You get your asses out here right now!”

Strom popped out right away. He listened to Moira first no matter who else was there. Then Manuel left the hut.

“Quant!”

“Forget it!” she yelled. “I win.” Then she threw the MacGuffin at us, and Moira snatched it out of the air.

“Who’s ‘I’?” Moira yelled.

Quant stuck her head out. She looked at the four of us for a moment, then signed,
Sorry
. She kicked over and we shared everything that had happened.

The teachers didn’t split us up like that again.

Baker Road swerved around Lake Cabbage like a giant letter
C.
It was a managed ecomite, a small ecosystem with gengineered inhabitants. The Baskins, two first-generation duos, ran it for the Overdepartment of Ecology, trying to build a viable lake ecosystem with a biomass of twenty-five Brigs. It had everything from beavers to snails to mosquitoes. Lots of mosquitoes.

The adult beavers turned a blind eye to our frolicking in the lake, but the babies found us irresistible. They had been bioed to birth in quartets, their thoughts sliding across the pond surface in rainbows like gasoline. We could almost understand, but not quite. In the water our own pheromones were useless, and even our touch pads were hard to understand. If we closed our eyes and sank deep enough, it was like we weren’t a part of anything, just empty, thoughtless protoplasm.

Strom didn’t like to swim, but if we were all in the water, he’d be too, just to be near. I knew why he was uncertain of the water, I knew his anxiety as my own, but I couldn’t help deriding us for having such a fear.

We took turns with the beavers pulling rotten logs into
the water and trying to sink them in the mud, until the adult beavers started chiding us with rudimentary hand signs,
No stop work. Messing home. Tell Mother Redd.

We had taken for granted all our lives that beavers could use sign language, that ducks within a flock were more intelligent than without, and that plow beasts did their work on their own. But what Mother Redd created was not common, though one day it would be. The goal for her and her colleagues like Colonel Krypicz was an Earth of interwoven fauna, in concert with all its species. Though we had grown up on the farm, at least spent our summers there, this was not our dream at all. We wanted to explore the Universe beyond the Rift.

We swam to shore and dried ourselves in the afternoon sun, naked. Manuel climbed an apple tree and gathered enough ripe fruit for all of us. We rested, knowing that we’d have to head back to the farm soon. Strom balled up some memories.

For Moira,
he sent.

Quant came alert and we all felt it.

A house,
she sent.
That wasn’t there before.

She was up the bank, so I waited for the thoughts to reach me through the polleny humid air. It was a cottage, opposite the lake from the beavers’ dam, half hidden among the cottonwoods which shed like snowfall during the summer.

I searched our memory of the last time we’d been at the lake, but none of us had looked over that way, so it may have been there since last year.

The Baskins put in a summer house,
Strom sent.

Why, when their normal house is just a kilometer away?
Manuel replied.

It could be a guesthouse,
I sent.

Let’s go find out,
Quant sent.

There was no dissent, and in the shared eagerness I wondered what Moira would have said about our trespassing.

She’s not here.

We leaped between flat stones, crossing the small stream that fed the lake.

Beneath the cottonwoods, the ground was a carpet of threadbare white. The air was cold through our damp clothes. We stepped across and around the poison oak with its quintuple leaves and ivy its triplet.

An aircar stood outside the cottage, parked in a patch of prairie, shaded by the trees.

Conojet 34J,
Manuel sent.
We can fly it.
We had started small-craft piloting the year before.

The brush had been cleared from the cottage to make room for long flower gardens along each wall. Farther from the house, in the full sun, was a rectangle of vegetables: I saw tomatoes, pumpkins, squash, and string beans.

“It’s not a summer house,” I said, because Quant was out of sight. “Someone’s living here.”

Manuel skirted the vegetable garden to get a good look at the aircar. I felt his appreciation of it, no concrete thought, just a nod toward its sleekness and power.

“What do you kids think you’re doing in my garden?”

The door of the cottage flew open with a bang, and we jumped, as a man strode toward us.

BOOK: Singularity's Ring

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