by Paul Melko
We were in the biology section, so we sat through a dozen mice-in-maze and build-a-better-chlorophyll presentations until Candace’s turn finally came.
She climbed the steps to the speaker’s platform, looking pale and slouched.
She’s still sick, we thought, touching palms so we didn’t disturb anyone nearby.
She plugged in her cube and the screen behind her erupted with the title of her project.
She misspelled ruficollis!
“Shh!”
“Sorry.”
“I-I-I . . .” Candace started. “I’m, I’m Candace Thurgood.”
Then she changed interfaces in front of everyone and started again.
“I’m Candace Thurgood, and my presentation is . . .” She looked at the words on the screen behind her and paused.
She changed heads again, and this time I smelled the thoughts swirling around the auditorium.
“I’m Candace Thurgood and this is the title of my pr-pr-presentation.”
She was shaking. Her face shone with sweat. She tapped the cube and the page started showing video of her ducks. If she was supposed to be narrating what was happening, she wasn’t. She was just standing there.
Oh, no. She’s frozen up!
Sixty seconds passed, and, finally, Doctor Thomasin stood up.
Candace stared at him as he climbed the steps; I smelled his calming scent from where I was. But I smelled Candace’s fear too. She ran before her doctor reached her, dashing down the steps on the other side of the platform, heading for the door.
Let’s go! I sent. We need to help her.
“The next presenter is Apollo Papadopulos.”
Our presentation is next!
But, she needs . . .
We reached consensus and walked up to the platform.
*
It was just us and Mother Redd on the bus back to the farm that evening.
“I want to help look,” Meda had said as we climbed aboard.
“Doctor Thomasin is doing everything that needs to be done.”
“Okay.” I was sure she caught our sullenness, mine especially. It weighed heavy on me that we had not gone after Candace. For all her annoying habits, she was still a friend going through a crisis, and no blue ribbon was worth a friend’s pain.
She’s not our friend.
I turned on Manuel and let loose with my anger. He shirked back from me, but held his call for consensus.
Even if she isn’t our friend, she still needs our help! I sent.
I threw my ribbon at him. It missed and sailed to the front of the bus. Mother Redd glanced at it, then at us, but I didn’t care, even when Strom filled the air with embarrassment.
No one else stood up to help in that whole auditorium. No one. We should have.
More embarrassment from Manuel and the others.
She was scared. And she ran, because there was no one to help. And now she’s missing!
Finally they agreed. We sat in silence the rest of the way home.
At the house, there was a taxi bill in the house email account that we saw when we walked in the door.
“She’s here. She took a taxi,” Meda said.
We checked her room, and the rest of the house, but there was nothing. We checked the barn and the labs. Mother Redd called Doctor Thomasin, and we started to check the lake, but stopped when Strom’s duck quacked to be let out. Then the clutch rushed off toward the lake.
“Where are they going?”
“Apparently they aren’t imprinted on Strom anymore.”
Candace wasn’t at the lake either. We stood, looking in six directions for some sign of her, some clue to where she was hiding.
I hope she’s okay.
“Look!”
There coming out of the forest was a flock of ducks — our ducks; all our ducks.
“What are they doing?”
They waddled right up to us and began swarming around our legs.
“Oh, great. More imprinted ducks.”
They began to quack, not individual dissonant sounds, but in unison: Quack, pause, quack, pause, quack, with the tempo slowly increasing.
Then they rushed back toward the forest. We followed.
A flocking pod?
We followed the flock into the brush, struggling to keep up with their orderly and low-to-the-ground progression. They were waddling through the brush easier than we were walking.
Ahead, the woods broke into a clearing, and there was Candace, lying on the ground.
“Oh no!”
She was pale, every one of her, clammy to the touch. Her breathing was shallow.
Look how thin her face seems.
Her skin looks like paper. We could see the blue veins at her temples.
The ducks clustered around us as we checked her.
Let’s get her back to the house.
We found an easier way back, and carried her to the house, three at a time, leaving the male for last. We hated breaking her up like that, but she was unconscious, and we had to get her to the house.
“Goodness!” Mother Redd said when she saw us. She directed us to the lab. It jolted us to see her behaving as a medical doctor; we thought of the quartet she had been as a doctor. The trio she was was an ecologist. I guess she was still a doctor, even though she had lost a quarter of herself. I wondered how much medical training had been lost when her fourth had expired. “Lay her on the table. Get the rest of her.”
When we got back with the next three, Mother Redd had already begun running tests on her: hormone levels, blood tests, gene maps. When we got back with the last one, Mother Redd was on the vid to Doctor Thomasin.
“Her gene map has deviated from her norm. She appears to have applied transmogrifying sequences to herself, as recently as a week ago. The result is shock, renal failure, and seizures. Possibly shared memory degradation. I’ve called an ambulance.”
His face looked shocked. “Why would she do such a thing?”
He’s misleading us.
I don’t know why I thought it, but as soon as I did, the consensus formed behind it. None of us had had an inkling of his prevarication, but now it seemed obvious. We were built for intuitive leaps.
“I’ll be there in half an hour.
Meda said, “How would her own doctor not know she’s monkeying with her genome? She’s been sick all summer.” She said it softly, but loud enough for Mother Redd to hear.
One of her turned and looked directly at us. We met the gaze. She nodded slightly.
To Doctor Thomasin, she said, “The ambulance is already here. We’re going to the county hospital.”
“I’ll meet you there.” He signed off.
Mother Redd said, “Wait in the house, please.”
“But —”
“Wait in the house.”
We did, and, to pass the time, we ran searches on the legal and medical ramifications of postpartum genetic manipulation. Our children were built; it is a fact of our society. But the individual — the pod — is sacred, once it has pod-bonded. For his own reasons, Doctor Thomasin, who had built Candace, saw the need to change her still, to modify his creation.
It’s wrong.
There was no doubt in our mind.
When the ambulance arrived, Mother Redd directed it to the Institute hospital instead of the county hospital.
*
Mother Redd relented and allowed us to come with her as she followed the ambulance in the aircar. She wouldn’t let us drive, though we were checked out on the car, and had about ten times better reflexes than she did.
We sat in the waiting room while she consulted with the physicians at the Institute. We’d been in the Institute hospital only rarely; we’d had a single anatomy class the year before in one of the auxiliary buildings. Most of our classes were in engineering, science, and we were rarely sick enough that we couldn’t fix ourselves.
It was late, but we couldn’t sleep. We kept checking with the floor AI to see if Candace’s condition had chang
ed. It hadn’t.
Manuel gazed out the window at the dark buildings. The Institute looked desolate, and I doubted that anyone was on campus, certainly not students, and probably not teachers. Fall classes didn’t start for another three weeks.
A door banged. We looked up, and there was Doctor Thomasin, pushing out of the stairwell. He’d run up the six flights of stairs instead of waiting for the elevator.
Without thinking, we formed up behind Strom, our defensive position.
He did a double take.
“I thought you took her to the county hospital,” he said.
“We know what you did. Mother Redd knows,” Meda said.
“What are you talking about?” Now that we knew how he lied, his bluffs were transparent.
“You have been modifying her DNA all summer. You almost killed her.”
“It’s some problem with the DNA, sure. But I didn’t modify it. Where is she?”
He tried to step around us, but we repositioned ourselves in front of him.
“Get out of my way, student!”
“We’re not your student. We’re human beings with full rights just like Candace. But then you don’t care about that, do you?”
For a second, I thought that he was going to strike at us, and I felt Strom determine the best defense, the best offense. For a moment, we were a matrix of possibility, a phalanx of potential.
“Gorgi, you better go.”
It was Mother Redd, standing in the doorway of Candace’s room.
“I just need to see her.”
“No.”
“I was just trying to make her perfect, don’t you see?”
“I see.”
“I have a responsibility to the future,” he said. “We need to become a viable species. We’re on the cusp. We’re as near extinction as we’ve ever been, and I have got to save us!”
“Saving the human race through Candace is not your responsibility,” Mother Redd said.
“You were responsible for Candace,” we said. “But you failed.” We were suddenly aware of all our responsibilities, to our friends, to ourselves, to our ducks: duties and relationships interwoven.
Doctor Thomasin looked at me. “I wanted to build something as good as you,” he said.
“You did.”
He held our look and we smelled his thoughts. After a moment, he nodded, then turned away.
*
We saw Candace once after she left the hospital. She came to the farm, and we showed her the duck pod: one hundred and fifty-seven ducks forming a single entity. We told her that we were going to publish a paper, and we wanted her to be coauthor.
“No, thanks. I don’t have anything to contribute.”
We nodded, embarrassed. We’d forgotten that she’d lost a huge amount of pod memory with the last genetic modification.
“What are your plans then?”
“I’m thinking about medical school. I’ll have to start a lot of studies from scratch, but I think I’d like to do that.”
“That sounds good. You’ll do well.”
Her interface and Meda hugged, and then she finished packing her stuff. On the air pad, we said another awkward good-bye. We made sure she had our ID so she could write, but I had a feeling that she wasn’t going to. I doubted that she wanted to remember this summer at all.
We watched the aircar rise and depart.
Time to check the ducks.
It’s always time to check the ducks.
SINGLETONS IN LOVE
Moira was sick, in bed with a cough, so 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 quint or a quad or even a triple, 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.
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 backwards, 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 shoulder, breathed him a thought, and he offered the rose to Mother Redd. I saw immediately it wasn’t going to work.
“You five, go and play somewhere else today. Moira is sick, and it won’t do us any good for you to get sick too. 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 a hundred acres of soyfalfa that Mother Redd worked with three triples 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. 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 ’Drome. At school we learned to sleep in shifts, so four or five us were always awake to study. We’d spent summers at the Redds for sixteen years, since we were out of the creche.
Baker Road led west toward Worthington and the ’Drome or east toward more farms, the lake, and the woods. 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, and Bola last. Moira would have been after Quant. We felt a hole there, which Bola and Quant filled by touching hands too often.
Within a mile, we were relaxed, though not indifferent to Moira’s absence. Bola was tossing rocks onto the tops of old telephone poles. He didn’t miss once, but we didn’t feel any pride in it. It was just a one-force problem, and Bola lobbed the rocks for diversion, not practice.
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 the dishes 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.
Bola started tossing small twigs into the incoming microwave beam, small arcing meteoroids that burst into flame and then ash. He bent to pick up a small toad.
I felt the absence of Moira as I put my hand on his shoulder and sent, No living things.
I felt his momentary resentment, then he shrugged both physically and mentally. He smiled at my discomfort at having to play Moira while she was gone. Bola, in whom was hardwired all the Newtonian laws of force and reaction, had a devilishness in him. In us. Our rebel.
Once, the instructors had divided us up as two triples, male and female, 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 was different.<
br />
Strom, Bola, and Manuel found it first, by chance, and instead of taking it, they laid 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, Quant 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.
“Bola!”
“Forget it!” he yelled. “I win.” Then he threw the macguffin at us and Quant snatched it out of the air.
“Who’s ‘I’?” Moira yelled.
Bola stuck his head out. He looked at the five of us for a moment, then signed, Sorry. He 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 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 quads, 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.
