by Paul Melko
Meda groaned. My sister is always so expressive; there’s never any doubt what she’s — or we’re — feeling. That’s why she was our interface.
“We have to show our work on the tests! We can’t just write down the answer.”
Quant shrugged.
Sometimes Quant won’t be with us, I sent.
Moira!
I felt Quant’s surprise and a moment’s fear; we’d been together for almost fourteen years. Being cut off from the rest of us was what we most often had nightmares about. And if one of us had a nightmare, we all had it.
“Okay.” I sent a smile and reassurance to Quant, and she relaxed and returned focus to the problem set. We worked through the rest of them on paper, Quant guiding us through the equations to the answer she already knew.
After lunch, we trudged up to the back bedroom and started moving boxes. We couldn’t just throw the junk out the window and then haul it to the trash heap; Manuel had found a pipette set, and there were frames and pictures in some of the boxes. We had to be careful.
“What’s this?” Meda asked, holding up a photo in an old plastic frame.
We saw the image through her eyes, well enough for me to recognize Mother Redd, a younger woman than she was now, and a quartet. Her hair was brown and bobbed, not long as she wore it now. And she was slender in the picture, not anything like the plump, huggable women we knew.
“That was before —” Meda said.
Yes.
Mother Redd was a trio now, but once, a long time ago, she had been a quartet. She had been a medical doctor, a famous one; we’d read a few of her papers and barely understood them, even though we were the highest order — a sextet — and specialized in math and science. Then one of her had died, leaving her three-quarters of what she had been.
Again, the fear of separation rippled through us, emotions that we would have to learn to check. Strom shivered, and I touched his hand. To lose one of ourselves, to become a quintet . . .
Meda looked closely at the picture. I knew what she was wondering, though I could only taste the curiosity. Which one of Mother Redd had died? I didn’t think we could tell; she had been identical quadruplets. Meda put the picture away.
“Look at this,” Quant said. She held up a tattered and old biology book. The date inside was 2020.
“That is so old!” Meda said. “Older than pods. What could that have that’s any use?”
Quant thumbed through the pages and it fell open at a colored plate, a bisection of the female body.
“Now that’s sexy,” Manuel said. Arousal mingled with embarrassment. The stupidest things triggered desire in our male components. I sometimes wished that we were an all-female pod like Mother Redd, instead of an equally mixed sextet.
He turned the page, and there was a dissected frog, with overlays, so that you could flip from the skin, into the musculature, and then the internal organs.
“The spleen’s in the wrong place,” Bola said.
We had built frogs in biology class last year. Ours had been the best jumper.
As we were stowing the last of the boxes in the barn loft, we heard the whine of a jet car.
“Folsom 5X,” Bola said. “Six-prop hydrogen burner.”
It was actually a Folsom 3M, a converted older skybus, but we didn’t have time to razz him for his mistake. The skybus landed on the airpad behind the farm house, and we ran to meet it.
Mother Redd waved us back, and we saw why. The bus had already discharged its passenger and was whining back into the sky. Another pod stood there next to Mother Redd, its interface shaking hands.
“Hi, I’m Apollo Papadopulos,” Meda said. “Welcome to–”
The newcomer turned to us, and we counted: a seven-person pod, a septet. Our greeting hung in Meda’s mouth. We gaped in wonder, stunned by the sight. We were a sextet; our order was only six.
*
“Everyone knows that the higher the order, the stronger the pod,” Quant said.
“That’s not true,” Meda said.
We’d gotten over our voicelessness and had managed a polite greeting to Candace Thurgood. Meda had shaken hands with the leader of the septet, one of six identical females, skinny, blonde-haired, green-eyed girls. The seventh member was a male, taller, just as skinny and pale in skin and hair. We’re three females and three males; Meda and I were identical female twins, while our other pod mates were of different genetic stock.
Then Strom came up with the idea that we still had chores in the barn, and we made a quick exit, watching as the seven of Candace and the three of Mother Redd walked to the house.
Yes, it is!
No, it isn’t!
I shushed them with a whiff of baby pheromone, a poke at their childish behavior.
We all knew the history. The first pods had been duos, created almost fifty years ago, the first to use the chemical memory and pheromones to share feelings between two separate humans. Since then, the order of the pods and complexity of the chemical signaling had grown. We were a sextet, the largest order we’d ever seen. All our classmates were sextets. Everyone in the space program was a sextet.
“Because sextets are the largest order. They’re the best,” Strom said.
Not anymore! Candace is a seven, a septet!
It made sense. Genetic engineers were always trying to add to the power of an individual. Why wouldn’t they try to build a seven? Or an eight?
“They succeeded in building one, finally.”
“How old is she?”
“Younger than us. Maybe twelve.”
I hope she’s not staying all summer.
But we knew she was. We wouldn’t have turned out the guest room if she wasn’t.
Maybe we can make her leave.
I said, “We have to be nice. We have to be friends.”
We have to be nice, but we don’t have to be friends.
Why be nice?
I looked at Meda, and she said, “Oh, all right. Let’s go be nice. At least there isn’t eight of her.”
Though how far away would that be?
*
We tried to be nice.
I was the one who’d advised it, and even I chafed at the manners of that arrogant septet.
“Fifteen point seven five three,” Candace said, while we were still scribbling the problem. One of her was looking over Quant’s shoulder as we sat at the great room table.
I knew that, Quant sent.
Still Meda wrote the problem down and we worked through to the answer, while Candace tapped seven of her feet.
“Fifteen point seven five three three,” Meda said.
“I rounded down,” she said. “One of us —” She nodded at the identical girl to her left — “is specialized in mathematics. When you have seven, you know, you can do that. Specialize.”
We were specialized too, we wanted to say, but I sent, Humble.
She’s specialized at being a git.
“You’re very smart,” Meda said diplomatically. I hadn’t even had to remind her.
“Yes, I am.” She was standing so close that the pungent smell of her chemical thoughts tickled our noses and distracted us. It was almost rude to stand so close that our memories mingled. We couldn’t understand her thoughts, of course, just a bit of self-satisfaction from the pheromones. The chemical memories that we passed from hand to hand, and to some extent by air, were pod-specific, most easily passed by physical touch at the wrists where our pads were. Pheromones were more general and indicated nuance and emotion. These were often common across all pods, especially those from the same creche. So even though our thoughts didn’t mix together, it felt weird for her to be so close.
She doesn’t know any better, I sent, touching the pad on Manuel’s left wrist. She’s young.
We knew better at that age.
We should try to be friendly, I sent.
“Do you want to go swimming this afternoon?” Meda asked.
Candace shook her head quickly, then she paused for a
consensus. We smelled the chemical thoughts, pungent and slick in the air, and wondered why she had to consense on going swimming.
“We don’t swim,” she said finally.
“None of you?”
Another pause. They touched hands, tap, tap, tap, pads sliding together. “None of us.”
“Okay. Well, we’re going swimming in the pond.”
The smell was stronger. The heads turned inward, and they held palms together for ten seconds. What was so complicated about going swimming?
Finally, she said, “We’ll come and watch, but we won’t swim in dirty water.”
Meda said, “Okay,” and we shrugged.
After physics, we studied biology, and, in that, Mother Redd instructed us closely. The farmhouse was not just a farmhouse; attached were a greenhouse and a laboratory with gene-parsers and splicers. The hundred hectares of woods, ponds, and fields were all Mother Redd’s experiment, and part of it she let us work on. We were rebuilding the local habitat, reintroducing flora and fauna in a close facsimile to what had been there before the Exodus and the Gene Wars. Mother Redd was building beaver pods. She was letting us build pods of ducks.
Candace followed us to observe our latest version of duck: a clutch of ducklings that had been gengineered to share chemical duck memories, supposedly. There’d been success in modifying some mammals for chemical memories, but none for other classes of Chordata. We were trying to build a duck pod for the Science Fair at the end of the summer.
We’d released our ducklings — two different modified clutches — by a pond on the farm, and every morning we went and watched how they worked together.
Bola slid between the reeds while the rest of us hunched down and listened to his thoughts on the wind. The chemical memories were fragile and diffused over distance, but still we could understand what he was seeing and thinking if we concentrated.
“Where are the ducks?” Candace asked.
“Shh!”
“I don’t see them.”
“You’re going to scare them!”
“Fine.” The seven of her folded her arms across her chests.
An image flitted across from Bola of the ducklings poking at the edge of the pond with their bills. They were still covered in yellow fluff that wasn’t quite feathers yet.
“See? One of them saw that patch of moss and the others came over right away!”
Maybe she signaled with sound.
Maybe it was random.
We’d mounted pheromone detectors around the pond to pick up any intrapod memory-sharing among the ducks. So far we’d measured nothing, so we were using observation to try to prove that the ducks were thinking as one.
“Here, ducky, ducky!”
“Candace!” Meda yelled.
The duck, about to climb into her hand, scattered with its siblings.
“What?”
“Will you leave our experiment alone?”
“I was just going to hold it.”
“We want them to be wild, not bonded to a human.”
“Fine.” She turned and left, and, in disbelief, we watched her go. This was supposed to be where we spent our summers. This was our farm.
It’s going to be a long summer, Strom sent.
*
We went swimming by ourselves that day, and, when we got back, we found Candace in the lab building her own duck.
Great.
“Look!” she cried. “I’m building a duck too!”
We didn’t want to look, but I suggested we at least feign interest.
She showed us the gene sequence she was using, a modified string used with the beavers.
“We’ve tried that already,” Meda said.
“Yeah, I know. I looked at your notes. But I’m adding a different olfactory sequence.”
She looked at our notes! Our notes were on our locked desktop.
I advised calm, but Meda’s face twitched with rage.
“Good luck,” she grated, and we left.
In the barn, Meda railed, too angry for chemical thoughts. Her emotions filled the loft and caused the pigs Mother Redd was building to oink and stamp at us. “She’s stealing our project, and she’s stealing our notes! She has got to go!”
“She just wants to fit in,” I said.
No one else was buying that.
“We should give her the benefit of the doubt,” I said.
Manuel growled, and snaked his fury through the air.
“Anyone can enter the gengineering competition at the Fair,” I said.
We need to do something.
What?
No one was looking at me.
We need more ducks.
How many more?
A lot.
They all turned to me, and I smelled the consensus like fresh bread. I could have held out, but I didn’t. I wanted to win the competition too.
“Fine.”
*
We snuck all the incubators we could find from the lab into the barn. Candace had already tagged a couple for herself. Then we built a dozen more from spare parts.
For the genes, we begged cutting-edge sequences from Professor Ellis at the Institute — mammalian, reptilian, avian — anything that we could jam into the anatine DNA. We cooked eggs instead of doing our chores. We even cooked while we studied. By the time we were done cooking, we had over a gross of duck eggs incubating.
We figured that at least some of them would show something interesting that we could report at the Fair. Candace couldn’t keep up with our volume of output either. We had her licked, no problem.
*
“Which egg has which genes?”
“Um,” Meda said. Mother Redd was surveying the rows of duck eggs. We’d hidden the incubators in the empty stalls, but you couldn’t miss the electric wires we’d strung across the rafters.
One of her eyed the code violations and tsked.
“None of these are marked,” she said.
“Um,” Meda said.
“Where’s your control variable? Where’s your lab books?”
We didn’t bother to “um.” Embarrassment coursed among us. I expected a well-deserved lecture, but instead, Mother Redd, said, “Come on. There’s someone in the house I want you to meet.”
We climbed down from the loft and followed Mother Redd across the yard to the house. I tried to force down the I-told-you-so deep inside.
Strom and Bola both threw me guilty looks.
Some scientist we were.
Candace and another pod were in the great room. The other pod was a quintet, in his thirties. One of him was examining one of Candace with a stethoscope; another tapped another of her on the chest.
“Doctor Thomasin. This is Apollo.”
Four pods in the great room, large though it was, made the place pretty crowded, especially when one of us was a seven. We hung against the wall and let Meda shake hands with Doctor Thomasin’s interface.
“Ah, Apollo Papadopulos! A pleasure to meet someone with your strong lineage.”
“Um, thanks, I guess.”
Who cares what our lineage is? We had been designed and built, then raised in Mingo Creche. As far as we knew, our lineage was just the result of some scientists somewhere mixing eggs and sperm together.
“I’m Candace’s doctor. I built her,” he said.
Several of Candace blushed.
He was young to be a human gengineer. But he must have been good to have succeeded at a septet.
Compare his and Candace’s face, Bola sent.
I saw it the way Bola saw it: Thomasin was a genetic donor for Candace. He could have been her biological father if she’d been born that way.
Weird. We had no father or mother, though we understood the concept. Mother Redd took the title, but she was more a mentor than an actual mother to us.
“Congratulations,” Meda said, though it seemed odd even as she said it.
“Thank you.”
He turned and started discussing something regarding nanospl
icing with Mother Redd, so we snuck out with Candace on our heels.
“Isn’t he great?” she said.
“You have a nice father,” Meda said, before I could cut her off.
“He’s not my dad! He’s my doctor.”
“You look —”
Meda!
“How’re your ducks doing?” she asked.
“I think they’re gonna hatch soon!” she said. Bola pointed out that it was a different one talking than before; she’d changed faces when we changed topics. Meda was always our face; she did all our interfacing with other pods. “I’ve been varying the heating and light to simulate a real mother sitting on the eggs.”
“Great,” Meda said.
Another of Candace spoke up. How many faces did she use? “Did you know we had our first period? That’s why Doctor Thomasin was here.”
“Um.” It was our turn to flush. I felt Strom’s shock. He turned away from Candace and looked across the yard at the barn. Meda, Quant, and I had all had our first menses. We’d all had to deal with it, as well as wet dreams and all the other drawbacks of male and female puberty. But some things were best left within the pod.
“You know what that means, don’t you?”
“Yeah, I think so,” said Meda. “We’re half female, you know.”
“No. That isn’t what I mean. Doctor Thomasin made me so I can breed true.”
“What?”
“You know why all pods are gengineered.”
“Yes!”
“If I breed with another of my type of pod, I can birth six members of a septet.”
“If you breed with a six male, one female septet?”
“Yes!”
“Why do you need a septet? You just need one male to inseminate all of you and one more female to carry the seventh.”
They have a male, Manuel sent.
That is so gross.
“Biological diversity, of course!”
We all felt foggy, the smell of confusion circling among us.
“But —”
“If you breed,” she went on, “you’ll just have normal human singletons who will still have to be coalesced into a pod. It won’t happen naturally. With me, my children will be born as a pod!”
“But —”
“It’s so much more stable biologically, don’t you see?”
“But —”
“Until pods can reproduce more pods, we’re just a genetic dead-end. This is all part of Doctor Thomasin’s work.”
