Her ducks had a fine layer of down and weren't too noisy nor too active, so the temperature was probably okay. We dipped bits of bread in water and dropped the food in the hutches.
Don't let them imprint on us.
Why not? That would be funny.
Because they wouldn't survive in the wild if they did. They need to imprint on each other.
Like we are.
We shared a glance. We were indeed imprinted on each other.
* * * *
Two days later, our own eggs began to hatch. Twelve hatched that day, which wasn't so bad. Twenty-five hatched the day after. Then fifty-some the day after that. We were too frazzled to notice when the last fifty hatched.
The barn suddenly became a duck maternity ward, with assembly lines for soaked corn meal, temperature and humidity checks, and bedding manufacture.
We quickly found that the chicken brooders we'd planned to use for the ducks were too small, and had to build half a dozen more out of plywood and chicken wire. We kept one as a spare so that we could move a clutch at a time to clean the brooders.
"We should have kept better track of the gene sequences that we used,” Strom said. He was scooping duckling after duckling from one brooder to another. He held up one that had a lizard's tail attached to its fluffy bottom.
Bola looked into the emptied brooder and held his nose. We all felt his revulsion though we couldn't actually smell what he smelled.
"How long until they can forage on their own?"
Six weeks.
Not soon enough.
* * * *
We had so many ducklings to take care of that we couldn't spend a moment watching for pod-like behaviors. Candace, however, loved to stop by the barn and provide details of her latest experiment and success.
"I separate one duckling,” she explained to us, “and feed it a bit of food. The other ducklings start quacking within seconds."
"They smell the food,” we said.
"Maybe. But it also works for pain stimuli."
"Pain stimuli?"
"Sure. When I pinch one of the ducklings, the others start making noise."
"You're pinching your ducks?"
"Just a gentle pinch. Besides, it's for science!"
"Right."
"I've got video of the process. It's very compelling,” she said.
"You'll have a good presentation at the Science Fair then,” we said.
"You have an awful lot of ducks."
We turned and stared at her, all six of us.
"We know."
"This one has Dalmatian spots."
"We know!"
Her eyes are green again.
She looks pale.
"Are you still sick?"
She swapped faces, something she did all the time now. “A little still. Allergies, maybe."
"What are allergies?"
"Reactions to air-borne particles and pollen. It used to be very common. Doctor Thomasin thinks I have it, and it just manifested when I came to the farm."
"Hopefully he'll fix that in the next batch of septets he cooks up,” Meda said.
"Yeah, I guess."
As she walked away, Quant showed us memories of her when she first arrived. She's grown fifteen centimeters in a month.
Growth spurt.
Bigger boobs. This was followed by a pheromone leer from Manuel.
"Stop it."
There's something wrong with her. Changing interfaces, allergies, forgetting things.
The rest of my pod shrugged at me.
What can we do?
Talk to Mother Redd.
We didn't have time to ponder Candace's allergies and growth chart, and we never talked with Mother Redd. The ducklings needed their food.
* * * *
Two weeks later, we started letting the ducklings roam the farmyard for food.
Look! They re-form into the same subgroups if we separate them!
I didn't understand until Bola shared his memory of what he saw. Bola's specialty was spatial, and, in an instant, I saw how the nearly identical ducklings coalesced into groups when we removed them from the brooder.
It could be the group they imprinted to.
Perhaps imprinting is a crude form of pod-building.
Strom scattered the ducklings and we watched them re-form into their subgroups. We marked a few of them with paint on their backs and did it again and again, showing how a single group of six re-formed every time.
It seemed that we were on to something.
Unfortunately, so were the six ducklings with the paint on their backs. They followed Strom wherever he went. When he broke them apart, they re-formed and headed straight back to his ankles.
They've imprinted on you.
"Didn't they imprint on themselves already?” Strom asked as the ducklings clustered on his feet.
Apparently not. Dad.
Strom answered that with a sardonic smile.
* * * *
Once we moved the ducklings to the lake, we actually had time to do our chores and study. One hundred and fifty ducks, less the six that would not leave Strom's feet, made for a crowded, messy lake, and we still had to drag out bags of bread so the birds wouldn't starve.
Candace continued to have luck with her clutch of ducks, while we showed mannerisms that could easily be attributed to other ducklike behavior patterns.
"This fair project is gonna suck,” Quant said. “We've got nothing."
Negative results are still results.
"Negative results don't get the blue ribbon."
Before we knew it, the Science Fair arrived and we drove over to the county fairgrounds with Mother Redd and Candace in the farm bus. We left the ducks, though Strom's six quacked pitifully.
"Can't we take the aircar?” Meda asked. “And can't we drive?"
"No."
The county seat was a good 100 kilometers away, a mere hop in an aircar, but two hours in the old bus. It was a tight fit with three of us in it. We opened the windows, and that helped.
In the three decades since the Exodus, there'd been little need for the roadway infrastructure. With the smaller global population, farms that had been critical to feed the masses had gone fallow. We passed orchards where the clear lines of trees were now the start of a chaotic forest, carefully tended hybrids gone wild. It was a bumpy ride, over a decaying road.
"It's hard to imagine what was here twenty years ago,” we said to Candace.
She looked at us blank-eyed. “Yeah,” she said, though we didn't think she knew what we'd said.
"Are you nervous?"
She shrugged.
"Do you want to borrow a brush?” we asked. Her hair was straggly.
"I'm okay!” she shrilled. “Leave me alone."
Just nervous. We had butterflies too.
"Sorry."
One of Mother Redd was driving, and the other two glanced at us. Manuel shrugged to show our confusion at Candace's overreaction, and Mother Redd turned back to the road.
Bola read the schedule for the Fair, while we watched the countryside.
One hundred junior presentations.
That was a lot. That was one for every student pod in the county. He read off some of the presentation titles.
"Hyper-efficient Hydrogen Engines with Platinum Catalyst."
We did that in Third Class.
"Vaccination Study for Rhinovirus AS234."
The cure for the uncommon cold, Strom sent.
"Cold Fusion Yields in Superconducting Amalgams."
That'll never work.
Nothing with avian genetics except for us and Candace.
"Harumph."
On our side of the bus, we passed a large tract of overgrown houses, small three-story homes, with just a few meters between them.
"Look at those. So many people in such a small space."
Mother Redd said, “Each of those housed a family, just four or five people.” She must have smelled our puzzlement. “It's hard to believe th
at the population of the Earth dropped by three orders of magnitude in the course of just a couple of years. You two were born just after the most cataclysmic events in human history. Before the Exodus, pods and multi-humans comprised less than a tenth of a percent of humanity. Now we are the stewards of the entire world. It is a grave responsibility."
Quant slid across the aisle to catch a glimpse of the Ring. Candace flinched as Quant neared her, and glared at us. The sky was pale blue and cloudless, and there, arcing across its dome, was the Ring, the symbol of the Community and now a lifeless reminder of their former glory.
"They failed,” said Candace, not her face, but the male. “They're a dead-end."
"So are we,” Meda said. “According to your theories. We can't breed true."
Don't bait her, I sent. She's not feeling well.
Meda glared at me. “Sorry, Candace,” she said. “Do you want to talk ... or something?"
She didn't turn; her eyes remained on the Ring.
It isn't worth trying, Manuel sent bitterly.
I couldn't really argue with him, and we turned away to watch the desolate countryside slip by.
The Science Fair was held in a huge building that dated to the previous century. It was crowded, almost like school, pods shoulder to shoulder with other pods; it was nearly impossible to think with all the interference in the air. We felt so crowded after the summer on the farm with just Candace and Mother Redd. It would be good to get back to school in a few weeks.
We found the junior pavilion, registered, and then wandered the Fair. Our presentation wasn't until the afternoon, and Candace's was right before ours.
Stealing our thunder again.
* * * *
The junior pavilion was packed at three o'clock that afternoon, and not just with us student pods. Mother Redd was there and so was Doctor Thomasin. We recognized several professors from the Institute, including Doctors Thackery and Charona.
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 more easily 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 b
uilt 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 changed. 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.
Asimov's SF, August 2005 Page 9
