by Paul Melko
Something yanked at my neck and my body spasmed as I collapsed. I caught sight of Manuel on the cottage roof, holding the interface box.
Leto pulled his gun and spun.
Something flew by me, and Leto cried out, dropping the pistol. I stood, wobbly, and ran into the woods, until someone caught me, and suddenly I was in our mesh.
As my face was buried in Strom’s chest and my palms squeezed against his, I watched with other eyes — Moira’s eyes! — as Leto scrambled into the aircar and started the turbines.
He’s not going far.
We played with his hydrogen regulator.
Also turned his beacon back on.
Thanks for coming. Sorry.
I felt dirty, empty. My words barely formed. I released all that had happened, all that I had done, all my foolish thoughts into them. I expected their anger, their rejection. I expected them to leave me there by the cottage.
Still a fool, Moira chided. Strom touched the tender interface jack on my neck.
All’s forgiven, Meda. The consensus was the juice of a ripe fruit, the light of distant stars.
All’s forgiven.
Hand in hand in hand, we returned to the farm, sharing all that had happened that day.
STRENGTH ALONE
I am strength.
I am not smart, that is Moira. I can not articulate, like Meda. I do not understand the math that Quant does, and I cannot move my hands like Manuel. My world is not the fields of force that Bola sees. If to anyone, you would think I am closest to Manuel; his abilities are in his hands, in his dexterity. But his mind is jagged sharp; he remembers things and knows them for us. Trivial information that he spins into memory.
No, I am closest to Moira. Perhaps because she is everything I am not. She is as beautiful as Meda, I think. If she were a singleton, she would still be special. If the pod were without me, I think, they would be no worse off. If I were removed, the pod would still be Apollo Papadopulos, and still be destined to become the starship captain we were built to be. We are all humans individually, and I think my own thoughts, but together, we are something different, something better, though my contribution is nothing like the others’.
When I think this, I wall it off. Bola looks at me; can he smell my despair? I smile, hoping he cannot see past my fortifications. I touch his hand, our pads sliding together, mixing thoughts, and send him a chemical memory of Moira and Meda laughing as children, holding hands. They are three- or four-years-old in the memory, so it is after we have pod-bonded, prior to Third State, but still in the creche. Their hair is auburn, and it hangs from their heads in baloney curls. Moira has a skinned knee, and she isn’t smiling as largely as Meda. In the memory, in the distant past, Meda reaches for Bola, who reaches for Manuel, who reaches for Quant, who touches my hand, and we all feel Meda’s joy at seeing the squirrel in the meadow, and Moira’s anger at falling down and scaring it off. Here on the mountain, there is a pause in our consensus, as everyone catches the memory.
Moira smiles, but Meda says, “We have work to do, Strom.”
We do, I know we do. I feel my face redden. I feel my embarrassment spread in the air, even through our parkas.
Sorry. My hands form the word, as the thought passes among us.
We are somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. Our teachers have dropped us by aircar, here near the tree line, and told us to survive for five days. They have told us nothing else. Our supplies are those we could gather in the half-hour they gave us.
For seven weeks, we and our classmates have trained in survival methods: desert, forest, jungle. Not that we will see any of these terrains in space. Not that we will find climates of any kind whatsoever, except for deadly vacuum, and that we know how to survive.
On the first day of survival training, our teacher, Theseus, had stood before us and screamed in volleying bursts. He was a duo, the most basic form of pod, just two individual humans bound together.
“You are being taught to think!” yelled Theseus on the left.
“You are being taught to respond to unknown environments, under unknown and strenuous conditions!” continued Theseus on the right.
“You do not know what you will face!”
“You do not know what will allow you to survive and what will kill you!”
Two weeks of class instruction followed, and then, week after week, we had been transported to a different terrain, a different locale, and shown what to do to survive. But always with Theseus nearby. Now, in our final week, we are alone, just the students on this mountain.
“Apollo Papadopulos! Cold-weather survival! Twenty kilos per pod member! Go!” one of Theseus had yelled at us from our dorm-room doorway.
Luckily, the parkas were in the closet of our dorm room. Luckily, we had a polymer tent. Hagar Julian has only canvas coats with no insulation, we know. They will have a harder time of it.
Twenty kilograms is not a lot. I carry sixty kilos of it myself, and distribute the rest to my podmates. In the aircar, we note that Hagar Julian and Elliott O’Toole have split the load evenly among themselves; they are not playing to their strengths.
Strom! Once again, Meda chastises me, and I jerk my hands away from Manuel’s and Quant’s, but they can still smell the embarrassment pheromones. I can not stop the chemical proof of my chagrin from drifting in the frigid air. I reach again for my place in the consensus, striving to be an integral part of the pod, trying to concentrate. Together, we can do anything.
Chemical thoughts pass from hand to hand in our circle, clockwise and counterclockwise, suggestions, lists, afterthoughts. Some thoughts are marked by their thinker, so that I know that it is Bola who has noted the drop in temperature and the increased wind-speed, which causes us to raise the priority of shelter and fire. Consensus forms.
We have to rig our shelter before dark. We have to start a fire before dark. We have to eat dinner before dark. We have to dig a latrine.
The list passes among us. We reach consensus on decision after decision, faster than I can reason through some of the issues: I add what I can. But I trust the pod. The pod is me.
Our hands are cold; we have removed our gloves to think. In the cold of the Rockies our emotions — the pheromones that augment our chemical thoughts — are like lightning, though sometimes the wind will whisk the feeling away before we can catch it. With gloves on our touch pads and parkas over our noses and neck glands, it is hard to think. Almost, it is like working alone, until we finish some sub-task and join for a quick consensus, shedding gloves.
“Strom, gather wood for the fire,” Moira reminds me.
I am strength, so the tasks that require broad shoulders fall to me. I step away from the others, and I am suddenly cut off from them: no touch, no smell. We practice this, being alone. We were born alone, yet we have spent our youth, from first state to fourth state, striving to be a single entity. And now we practice being alone again. It is a skill. I look back at the other five. Quant touches Moira’s hand, passing a thought, some shared confidence. The spike of jealousy must be the face of my fear. If they have thought something important, I will know it later, when we rejoin. For now, I must act alone.
We have chosen an almost-flat tract of land in a meager grove of wind-stunted pines. The rock slopes gently away into a V shape, a catch for wind and snow. The shallow ravine drops sharply into a ledge of rock, the side of a long valley of snow drifts and rock that the aircar passed over as we arrived. Above us is a sheer wall, topped with a mass of snow and ice. I can not see the peak from here; we are many hundreds of meters below it. Stretching in either direction are lines of jagged mountain tops, their white faces reflecting the afternoon sun. Clouds seem to bump against their western sides.
The snow is thin enough on the ground here that we can reach the rocky ground beneath it. The trees will shelter us from the wind and provide support for the tent lines, we hope. I walk down the gentle slope, along the line of pines.
We have no axe, so I must gather fallen logs and
branches. This will be a problem. We cannot have a good fire with half-decayed logs. I file the thought away for later consensus.
I find a sundered pine branch, thick as my forearm, sticky with sap. I wonder if it will burn, as I drag it back up to the camp. I should have climbed up to find wood, I realize, so that I could drag it down to the camp. It is obvious now and would have been obvious before if I had asked for consensus.
I drop my wood in the clearing the others have made and start to arrange it into a fireplace. I draw stones into a U shape, the open end facing the wind down the mountain for a draft. The stones at the sides can be used for cooking.
Strom, that is where the tent will go!
I jump back, and I realize that I had been working without consensus, making decisions on my own.
Sorry.
Confused and embarrassed, I drag the stones and wood away from the tent clearing. I think that I am not well, but I suppress that as I sweep snow away and place the stones again.
We decide to gauge our classmates’ progress, so I climb the trail above the tree line to see how the rest of our class is doing. There are five of us on survival training, all of us classmates, all of us familiar with each other and in competition. It is how it has always been among us.
Each is destined to be a starship pilot. Or so we think. How many master pilots can the Consensus have? Not more than one. Will there be other ships for the rest of us to pilot? None are being built. Will the rest of us be allowed a lesser rank or position in the ship? Would we want it? These are questions we have asked ourself often.
How the rest are doing is important.
Above the tree line and to the west half a kilometer away, I see our classmate Elliott O’Toole’s tent already up, with the pod inside it. To the east, a few hundred meters away, I see another student — Hagar Julian — working in the snow, instead of on an area of rocky slope. They are digging into a drift, perhaps to form a snow cave. They will have a long time to dig, I think. Hollowing out a space for six will expend much energy. They can’t have a fire.
The other two pods are hidden in the trees beyond Hagar Julian. I cannot determine their progress, but I know from experience that our greatest competition will be from Julian and O’Toole.
I return and pass the others memories of what I have seen.
We have begun pitching the tent, using the nearby pine trees to support it. We have no ground spikes, removed from the packs to reach the twenty-kilogram-per-person limit. There are many things we have removed to make our weight limit, but not matches. I kneel to start the fire.
Strom!
The scent call is sharp on the crisp wind. The pod is waiting for me to help pull and tie the tent support lines; they have consensed without me. Sometimes they do that. When it is expedient. I understand; they can reach a valid consensus without me easily enough.
We pull the spider-silk lines taut, and the tent stretches into place, white on white, polymer on snow, a bubble of sanctuary, and, suddenly, our shelter is ready. The thrill of success fills the air, and Bola enters and comes out again, smiling.
“We have shelter!”
Now dinner, Manuel sends.
Dinner is small bags of cold, chewy beef. Once we have the fire going, we can cook our food. For now, it’s cold from the bag. If we were really on our own in the mountains, we would hunt for our food, I send. The image of me carrying the carcass of an elk over my shoulders makes Moira laugh. I mean it as a joke, but then I count the bags of jerky and dried fruit. We will be hungry by the end of the test. It is my job to see to the safety of the pod, and I feel bad that we did not pack more food.
“Another test,” Bola says. “Another way to see if we’re good enough. As if this mountain is anything like another world! As if this will tell them anything about us!”
Sometimes we feel manipulated. I know what Bola means. Everything we face is another test to pass. There is no failure, just success, repeated, until it means nothing. When we fail, it will be catastrophic.
“We can watch the sunset,” I say.
We have loosened hoods and gloves in the tent, though it is still just above freezing inside. But the difference between inside and out becomes even more severe as the sun now hides behind the western peaks. The sunset is colorless, the sunlight crisp and white. It reflects off the bottom of the Ring, making the slim orbital torus brighter than it is at noon. Wispy clouds slide across the sky, moving fast, and I note to the others the possibility of snow. Before our five days on the mountain are over, we will see more snow, that is certain. Perhaps tonight.
Elliott O’Toole has managed to light a fire, and we smell the burning wood. He probably hasn’t finished his tent, but he has a fire. The smell of roasted meat drifts on the wind.
“Bastard!” Quant says. “He has steak!”
We don’t need it.
I want it!
I say, “This is only about surviving, not luxury.”
Bola glares at me, and I sense his anger. He is not alone. I cave before this partial consensus and apologize, though I don’t know why I do. Meda has told me that I hate strife. I assume that everyone does. We are six and I am one. I bow to the group consensus, as we all do. It is how we reach the best decision.
With dinner finished and night upon us, we finish what chores we can outside: a fire, if we can start it, and a latrine. Manuel and I work on the fire pit, moving stones, breaking tender, building up a steeple of wood. The wind is too strong, I realize, for a fire tonight. The flatness of the plateau made it a good place for a tent, but the wind whips down the ravine. The tent ropes sing.
We smell fear on the wind, child pheromones, and I think one of us is in danger, but then we smell it as a foreign fear: one of our classmates is in danger. Then, as the wind dies for a moment, we hear the heavy breathing of someone running through the snow drifts. The pod condenses around me, as it does in times of crisis. We touch, assess, but we have only the smell and the sound to base consensus on.
I move forward to help whoever it is. I smell the caution in the air, but ignore it. Now is the time to help. Sometimes we spend too much time being cautious, consensing on things. I would never share such thoughts.
It is one of Hagar Julian, just one. I don’t know her name, but she is running in the cold, her hood down, her head exposed. She doesn’t see me, but I catch her in my arms and stop her. In her terror, she would have run past us into the dark night, perhaps over the cliff.
The smell of her is alien. I force the hood over her head. The head is a heat sink; you must always keep it covered in the cold. That and the hands. Perhaps this is why the instructors have chosen the mountains for our final test; the organs that make us a pod are nearly useless in the cold.
“What is it? What’s happened?” I ask.
She is heaving, releasing fear and nothing else. I don’t know how much of her fear is from being separated from her self or from something else that has happened. I know that Julian is a close-knit pod. They seldom separate.
The night is black. I can’t see O’Toole’s fire, nor Julian’s ice cave anymore. It is a miracle that she reached us.
I pick her up over my shoulder and carry her slowly through the snow drifts to the open area around our tent. She is shivering. I push through the questions of my pod. Now is not the time for questions. Quant pulls open the tent for me.
Snow falls out of the woman’s gloves. I take them off her hands, which are blue, and exchange them for my own. I check her boots and coat for more snow, and brush it out. By then, the rest of my pod has joined me, and I use them to access our survival instruction.
Hypothermia.
The shivering, the disorientation, and the lack of response are all signs of body-temperature loss. Maybe some of the disorientation is from being separated from her pod.
Hospitalize.
One of us glances at the transceiver in the corner of the tent. It is defeat to use it.
“Where’s the rest of you?” I ask.
She doesn’t even look at me.
I take a coil of spider-silk rope and begin cinching it to my coat.
No.
“Someone has to see what happened to the rest of her,” I say.
We can’t separate now.
I feel the pull to stay and consense. To wait for rescue.
“Keep her warm. Huddle close to her. Don’t warm her quickly.”
I pull the tent door open and close it, but not before Quant follows me out.
“Be careful. It’s beginning to snow,” she says. She takes the rope end from me and ties it to one of the D-rings on our tent. The end wraps around itself and knits itself together.
“I will.”
The wind whips the snow into my face, needles of cold. I hunch over and try to make out Julian’s tracks from her camp to ours. Snow has already started to fill in the prints. The moon glooms through scudding gray clouds, making the mountainside gray on gray. I continue, making this task my focus, so that I do not remember that I have left my pod behind. Even so, I count the steps I take, marking the distance of our separation.
I have to keep my face up to follow the tracks, and when I do, the wind freezes my nasal passages. The cold is like a headache. There is no smell on the wind, no trace of Hagar Julian.
The woman has walked across a slide of broken slate. Her footprints end on the jagged mounds of rock. I pause, knowing I am close to their campsite; they had been no farther than three hundred meters when I’d spied them.
I turn my back to the wind and tuck my head a moment. Still the snow finds a way into my eyes. The weather is worsening. I take a moment to memorize the feeling, the sting, the sound for later.
I trudge on across the slate, slipping once and falling to one knee. The slate ends in a river of gray snow. I don’t remember seeing this before. Then I realize that it’s new. The snow bank above has collapsed, burying Hagar Julian’s campsite in an avalanche.
I stand there, ignoring the cold.
I take one step onto the snow and it crunches under my boots. An hour ago, this area was clear, and now it is under a flood of rocks and snow. I look up at the mountain, wondering if more will follow, but swirling snow obscures it.
