by Paul Melko
Anyway, Henry spent a week in wedge 214 with another group of researchers, and while he was gone, Gillian and I, sorta communed on our own. I’d known Gillian almost as long as I’d known Henry. We were first wave emigrants to the Ring and had been friends back in Ann Arbor when we were in school. We’d met Gillian and her friend Robin in the cafeteria. He liked them tall, so he took Gillian. Robin and my relationship lasted long enough for her to brush her teeth the next morning. Gillian and Henry were married.
She was a beautiful woman. Auburn hair like yours. Nice figure. Knew how to tell a joke. Knew how to . . . Well, we won’t go there.
I know, best man screwing the bride. You’ve heard that pitiful tale before. Well, maybe you clusters haven’t. Trust me. It’s pitiful.
I’m sure it didn’t take Henry long to find out. The Community sees all.
But he took a long time plotting his revenge. And when he did — bam! — that was the end for me.
We were working on some new interfaces for the occipital lobe, to enhance visualization during communing, some really amazing things. Henry ran the tests and found out our stuff was safe, so I elected to test it.
It’s funny. I remember volunteering to try it out. But I don’t remember what Henry said before that, how he manipulated me into trying it. Because that’s what he did all right.
The enhancements were not compatible with my interface. When I inserted them, the neural pathways in the cerebral cortex fused. The interface flash froze. I was a vegetable.
The Community placed my body into suspended animation while it rebuilt my brain. All things were possible for the Community. Only some things take a while, like rebuilding a brain. Six months later, the Exodus occurred, and still the machinery of the Ring worked on my brain. For twenty-six years, slowly with no human guidance, it worked on my brain, until three months ago. It revived me, the one human left over from the Exodus.
Sometimes I still dream that I’m a part of it. That the Community is still there for me to touch. At first those were nightmares, but now they’re just dreams. The quantum computers are still up there, empty, waiting. Maybe they’re dreaming of the Community as well.
It’ll be easier this time. The technology is so much farther along than it was before. The second Exodus is just a few months away. I just need a billion people to fuel it.
*
On my hobby night, instead of painting, we spent the evening on the Net.
Malcolm Leto had come down the Macapa space elevator two months before, much to the surprise of the Overgovernment body in Brazil. The Ring continued to beam microwave power to all the receivers, but no one resided on the Ring or used the space elevators that lined the equator. No one could, not without an interface.
The news of Leto’s arrival had not made it to North America, but the archives had interviews with the man that echoed his sentiment regarding the Community and his missing out on the Exodus. There wasn’t much about him for a couple weeks until he filed suit with the Brazilian court for ownership of the Ring, on the basis of his being the last member of the Community.
The Overgovernment had never tried to populate the Ring. There was no need to try to overcome the interface access at the elevators. The population of the Earth was just under half a billion. The Gene Wars killed most of the people that hadn’t left with the Exodus. It’d taken the Overgovernment almost three decades to build the starships, to string its own nanowire-guided elevators to low earth orbit, to build the fleet of tugs that plied between LEO and the Lagrange points.
No one used the quantum computers anymore. No one had an interface or could even build one. The human race was no longer interested in that direction. We were focused on the stars and on ourselves. All of us, that is, except for those in the enclaves that existed outside of, yet beneath, the Overgovernment.
The resolution to Leto’s case was not published. It had been on the South American court docket a week ago, and then been bumped up to the Overgovernment Court.
He’s trying to build another Community.
He’s trying to steal the Ring.
Is it even ours?
He’s lonely.
We need Moira.
He wants us to help him. That’s why he told us the story.
He didn’t tell us. He told Meda.
He likes Meda.
“Stop it!” I made fists so that I couldn’t receive any more of their thoughts. They looked at me, perplexed, wondering why I was fighting consensus.
Suddenly, I wasn’t looking at me. I was looking at them. It was like a knife between us. I ran upstairs.
“Meda! What’s wrong?”
I threw myself onto the floor of Moira’s room.
“Why are they so jealous?”
“Who, Meda? Who?”
“Them! The rest of us.”
“Oh. The singleton.”
I looked at her, hoping she understood. But how could she without sharing my thoughts?
“I’ve been reading your research. Meda, he’s a potential psychotic. He’s suffered a great loss and awoke in a world nothing like he remembers.”
“He wants to rebuild it.”
“That’s part of his psychosis.”
“The Community accomplished things. It made advancements that we don’t understand even decades later. How can that be wrong?”
“The common view is that the Exodus was a natural evolution of humankind. What if it wasn’t natural? What if the Exodus was death? We didn’t miss the Exodus, we escaped it. We survived the Community just like Leto did. Do we want to suffer the same fate?”
“Now who’s talking psychosis?”
“The Overgovernment will never allow him back on the Ring.”
“He’s alone forever then,” I said.
“He can go to one of the singleton enclaves. All of the people there live alone.”
“He woke up one morning and his self was gone.”
“Meda!” Moira sat up in bed, her face gray. “Hold my hand!” As she held out her hand, I could smell the pheromones of her thoughts whispering toward me.
Instead of melding with her, I left the room, left the house, out the door into the wet night.
*
A light was on in the cottage. I stood for a long time, wondering what I was doing. We spend time alone, but never in situations like this. Never outside, where we can’t reach each other in an instant. I was miles away from the rest of me. Yet Malcolm Leto was farther than that.
It felt like half the things I knew were on the tip of my tongue. It felt like all my thoughts were garbled. But everything I felt and thought was my own. There was no consensus.
Just like Malcolm had no consensus. For singletons, all decisions were unanimous.
It was with that thought that I knocked on the door.
He stood in the doorway, wearing just short pants. I felt a thrill course through me, one that I would have hidden from my pod if they were near.
“Where’s the rest of your cluster?”
“At home.”
“Best place for ’em.” He turned, leaving the door wide open. “Come on in.”
There was small metal box on his table. He sat down in front of it. I noticed for the first time the small, silver-edged circle at the base of his skull, just below his hairline. He slipped a wire from the box into the circle.
“That’s an interface box. They’re illegal.” When the Exodus occurred, much of the interface technology that was the media for the Communion was banned.
“Yeah. But not illegal anymore. The OG repealed those laws a decade ago, but no one noticed. My lawyer pried it loose from them and sent it up.” He pulled the wire from his head and tossed it across the box. “Useless now.”
“Can’t you access the Ring?”
“Yes, but it’s like swimming in the ocean alone.” He looked at me sidelong. “I can give you one, you know. I can build you an interface.”
I recoiled. “No!” I said quickly. “I . . .”
H
e smiled, perhaps the first time I’d seen him do it. It changed his face. “I understand. Would you like something to drink? I’ve got a few fix’ns. Sit anyway.”
“No,” I said. “I’m just . . .” I realized that for a pod’s voice, I wasn’t articulating my thoughts very well. I looked him in the eye. “I came to talk with you, alone.”
“I appreciate the gesture. I know being alone is uncomfortable for you.”
“I didn’t realize you knew so much about us.”
“Multiples were being designed when I was around. I kept up on the subject,” he said. “It wasn’t very successful. I remember articles on failures that were mentally deficient or unbalanced.”
“That was a long time ago! Mother Redd was from that time and she’s a great doctor. And I’m fine —”
He held up a hand. “Hold on! There were lotsa incidents with interface technology before . . . well, I wouldn’t be here if it was totally safe.”
His loneliness was a sheer cliff of rock. “Why are you here, instead of at one of the singleton enclaves?”
He shrugged. “There or in the middle of nowhere, it would be the same.” He half-smiled. “Last of a vanished breed, I am. So you’re gonna be a starship captain, you and your mingle-minded friends.”
“I am . . . We are,” I replied.
“Good luck, then. Maybe you’ll find the Community,” he said. He looked tired.
“Is that what happened? They left for outer space?”
He looked puzzled. “No, maybe. I can almost . . . remember.” He smiled. “It’s like being drunk and knowing you should be sober and not being able to do anything about it.”
“I understand,” I said. I took his hand. It was dry and smooth.
He squeezed once and then stood up, leaving me confused. I was sluggish on the inside, but at the same time hyperaware of him. We knew what sex was. We’d studied it, of course. But we had no experience. I had no idea what Malcolm was thinking. If he was a multiple, part of a pod, I would.
“I should go,” I said, standing.
I was hoping he’d say something by the time I got to the door, but he didn’t. I felt my cheeks burn. I was a silly little girl. By myself I’d done nothing but embarrass my pod, myself.
I pulled the door shut and ran into the woods.
“Meda!”
He stood black in yellow light at the cottage door.
“I’m sorry for being so caught up in my own troubles. I’ve been a bad host. Why don’t you —” I reached him in three steps and kissed him on the mouth. Just barely I tasted his thoughts, his arousal.
“Why don’t I what?” I said after a moment.
“Come back inside.”
*
I — they — were there to meet me the next morning as I walked back to the farm. I knew they would be. A part of me wanted to spend the rest of the day with my new lover, but another wanted nothing more than to confront myself, rub my nose in the scent that clung to me, and show me . . . I didn’t know what I wanted to prove. Perhaps that I didn’t need to be a composite to be happy. I didn’t need them, us, to be a whole person.
“You remember Veronica Proust,” Moira said, standing in the doorway of the kitchen, the rest of us behind her. Of course she would take the point when I was gone. Of course she would quote precedent.
“I remember,” I said, staying outside, beyond the pull of the pheromones. I could smell the anger, the fear. I had scared myself. Good, I thought.
“She was going to be a starship captain,” Moira said. We remembered Proust; she’d been two years ahead of us. Usually pods sundered in the Creche, with time to reform, but Veronica had broken into a pair and a quad. The pair had bonded and the quad had transferred to engineering school, then dropped out.
“Not any more,” I said. I pushed past them into the kitchen, and as I did so, I balled up the memory of fucking Malcolm and threw it at them like a rock.
They recoiled. I walked upstairs to our room and began packing my things. They didn’t bother coming upstairs and that made me angrier. I threw my clothes into a bag, swept the bric-a-brac on the dresser aside. Something glinted in the pile, a geode that Strom had found one summer when we flew to the desert. He’d cut it in half and polished it by hand.
I picked it up, felt its smooth surface, bordering the jagged crystals of the center. Instead of packing it, I put it back on the dresser and zipped up my bag.
“Heading out?”
Mother Redd stood at the door, her face neutral.
“Did you call Dr. Khalid?” He was our physician, our psychologist, perhaps our father.
She shrugged. “And tell him what? You can’t force a pod to stay together.”
“I’m not breaking us up!” I said. Didn’t she understand? I was a person, by myself. I didn’t need to be part of a thing.
“You’re just going to go somewhere else by yourself. Yes, I understand.” Her sarcasm cut me, but she was gone before I could reply.
I rushed downstairs and out the front door so that I wouldn’t have to face the rest of me. I didn’t want them to taste my guilt. I ran the distance to Malcolm’s cottage. He was working in his garden and took me in his arms.
“Meda, Meda. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I whispered.
“Why did you go back there? We could have sent for your things.”
I said, “I want an interface.”
*
It was a simple procedure. He had the nanodermic, and placed it on the back of my neck. My neck felt cold there, and the coldness spread to the base of my skull and down my spine. There was a prick, and felt my skin begin to crawl.
“I’m going to put you under for an hour,” Malcolm said. “It’s best.”
“Okay,” I said, already half asleep.
I dreamed that spiders were crawling down my optic nerve into my brain, that earwigs were sniffing around my lobes, that leeches were attached to all my fingers. But as they passed up my arms, into my brain, a door opened like the sun dawning, and I was somewhere else, somewhen else, and it all made sense with dream-like logic. I understood why I was there, where the Community was, why they had left.
“Hello, Meda,” Malcolm said.
“I’m dreaming.”
“Not anymore,” his voice said. It seemed to be coming from a bright point in front of me. “I’ve hooked you up to the interface box. Everything went fine.”
My voice answered without my willing it to. “I was worried that my genetic mods would cause a problem.” I felt I was still in my dream. I didn’t want to say those things. “I didn’t mean to say that. I think I’m still dreaming.” I tried to stop speaking. “I can’t stop speaking.”
I felt Malcolm’s smile. “You’re not speaking. Let me show you what’s possible within the Community.”
He spent hours teaching me to manipulate the reality of the interface box, to reach out and grasp it like my hand was a shovel, a hammer, sandpaper, a cloth.
“You do this well,” he said, a brightness in the gray-green garden we had built in an ancient empty city. Ivy hung from the walls, and within the ivy sleek animals scurried. The dirt exuded its musty smell, mingling with the dogwoods that bounded the edge of the garden.
I smiled, knowing he could see my emotion. He could see all of me, as if he was a member of my pod. I was disclosed, though he remained aloof.
“Soon,” he said, when I pried at his light, and then he took hold of me and we made love again in the garden, the grass tickling my back like a thousand tongues.
*
In the golden aftermath, Malcolm’s face emerged from within the ball of light, his eyes closed. As I examined his face, it expanded before me, I fell into his left nostril, into his skull, and all of him was laid open to me.
In the garden, next to the ivy-covered stone walls, I began to retch. Even within the virtual reality of the interface box, I tasted my bile. He’d lied to me.
*
I had no control of my body. The inter
face box sat on the couch beside me as it had when we’d started, but pseudo reality was gone. Malcolm was behind me — I could hear him packing a bag — but I couldn’t will my head to turn.
“We’ll head for the Belem elevator. Once we’re on the Ring, we’re safe. They can’t get to us. Then they’ll have to deal with me.”
There was a water stain on the wall, a blemish that I could not tear my eyes away from.
“We’ll recruit people from singleton enclaves. They may not recognize my claim, but they will recognize my power.”
My eyes began to tear, not from the strain. He’d used me, and I, silly girl, had fallen for him. He had seduced me, taken me as a pawn, as a valuable to bargain with.
“It may take a generation. I’d hoped it wouldn’t. There are cloning vats on the Ring. You have excellent stock, and if raised from birth, you will be much more malleable.”
If he had me, part of one of the starpods, he thought he’d be safe from the Overgovernment. But he didn’t know that our pod was sundered. He didn’t realize how useless this all was.
“All right, Meda. Time to go.”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw him insert the connection into his interface, and my legs lifted me up off the couch. My rage surged through me, and my neck erupted in pheromones.
“Jesus, what’s that smell?”
Pheromones! His interface controlled my body, my throat, my tongue, my cunt, but not my mods. He’d never thought of it. I screamed with all my might, scent exploding from my glands. Anger, fear, revulsion.
Malcolm opened the door, fanned it. His gun bulged at his waist. “We’ll pick up some perfume for you on the way.” He disappeared out the door with two bags, one mine, while I stood with the interface box in my outstretched arms.
Still I screamed, saturating the air with my words, until my glands were empty, spent, and my autonomous nervous system silenced me. I strained to hear something from outside. There was nothing.
Malcolm reappeared. “Let’s go.” My legs goose-stepped me from the cottage.
I tasted our thoughts as I passed the threshold. My pod was out there, too far for me to understand, but close.
With the last of my pheromones, I signaled, Help.
“Into the aircar,” Leto said.
