The consensus was immediate. Yes.
This time we knocked instead of skulked. The tomato plant we had squashed had been staked, giving it back its lost structure. There was no answer at the door.
“Aircar’s still here.”
The cottage was not so small that he couldn’t have heard us.
“Maybe he’s taking a walk,” I said. Again we were out without Moira. She was better, but still sick.
“Here, I think.” Strom indicated a spot at the end of the line of tomato plants. He had brought a small spade and began to dig a hole.
I took out paper from my backpack and began to compose a note for Malcolm Leto’s door. I started five times, wadding up each after a few lines and stuffing the garbage back in my bag. Finally I settled on “Sorry for stepping on the tomato plant. We brought a new one to replace it.”
There was a blast, and I turned in a crouch, dropping the note and pen. Fight-or-flight pheromones filled the air.
Gunshot.
There. The singleton. He’s armed.
Posturing fire.
I see him.
Disarm.
This last was Strom, who always took control of situations like this. He tossed the small shovel to Bola on his right. Bola threw the instrument with ease.
Malcolm Leto stood under the cottonwoods, the pistol pointed in the air. He had come out of the woods and fired the shot. The shovel slammed into his fingers, and the pistol fell.
“Son of a bitch!” he yelled, hopping and holding his fingers. “Goddamn cluster!”
We approached. Strom faded into the background again, and I took the lead.
Leto watched us, looked once at the pistol but didn’t move to grab it.
“Come back to wreck more of my tomato plants, did you?”
I smiled. “No, Mr. Leto. We came to apologize, like good neighbors. Not to be shot at.”
“How was I to know you weren’t thieves?” he said.
“There are no thieves here. Not until you get to the Christian Enclave.”
He rubbed his fingers, then smirked. “Yeah. I guess so. You bunch are dangerous.”
Strom nudged me mentally, and I said, “We brought you a tomato plant to make amends for the one we squashed.”
“You did? Well, now I’m sorry I startled you.” He looked from the cottage to me. “You mind if I pick up my gun? You’re not going to toss another shovel at me, are you?”
“You’re not going to fire another shot, are you?” The words were more flip than was necessary for the last member of the Community, but he didn’t seem to mind.
“Fair’s fair.” He picked up his pistol and walked through us toward the cottage.
When he saw the last tomato plant in the line, with the fresh dirt around it, he said, “Should have put it on the other end.”
I felt exasperation course through us. There was no pleasing this man.
“You know my name. So you know my story?” he asked.
“No. We just know you’re from the Ring.”
“Hmmm.” He looked at me. “I suppose the neighborly thing to do is to invite you in. Come on.”
The cottage was a single room, with an adjoining bathroom and kitchenette. The lone couch served as Leto’s bed. A pillow and blanket were piled at one end.
“Suddenly crowded in here,” Leto said. He put the pistol on the table and sat on one of the two kitchen chairs. “There’s not enough room for all of you, but then there’s only one of you anyway, isn’t there.” He looked at me when he said it.
“We’re all individuals,” I said quickly. “We also function as a composite.”
“Yeah, I know. A cluster.”
Ask him about the Ring. Ask him about being in space.
“Sit,” he said to me. “You’re the ringleader, aren’t you.”
“I’m the interface,” I said. I held out my hand. “We’re Apollo Papadopulos.”
He took my hand after a moment. “Who are you in particular?”
He held my hand and seemed to have no intention of releasing it until I answered the question. “I’m Meda. This is Bola, Quant, Strom, and Manuel.”
“Pleased to meet you, Meda,” he said. I felt the intensity of his gaze again and forced my physical response down. “And the rest of you.”
“You’re from the Ring,” I said. “You were part of the Community.”
He sighed. “Yes, I was.”
“What was it like? What’s space like? We’re going to be a starship pilot.”
Leto looked at me with one eyebrow raised. “You want to know the story.”
“Yes.”
“All right. I haven’t told anybody the whole story.” He paused. “Do you think it’s just a bit too convenient that they put me out here in the middle of nowhere, and yet nearby is one of their starship pilot clusters?”
“I assume you’re a test for us.” We had come to assume everything was a test.
“Precocious of you. Okay, here’s my story: Malcolm Leto, the last, or first, of his kind.”
You can’t imagine what the Community was like. You can’t even comprehend the numbers involved. Six billion people in communion. Six billion people as one.
It was the greatest synthesis humankind has ever created: a syner-gistic human-machine intelligence. I was a part of it, for a while, and then it was gone, and I’m still here. The Community removed itself from this reality, disappeared, and left me behind.
I was a biochip designer. I grew the molecular processors that we used to link with the Community. Like this one. It’s grafted onto the base of your skull, connects to your four lobes and cerebellum.
We were working on greater throughput. The basics were already well established; we – that is myself, Gillian, and Henry – were trying to devise a better transport layer between the electrochemical pulses of the brain and the chips. That was the real bottleneck: the brain’s hardware is slow.
We were assigned lines of investigation, but so were a hundred thousand other scientists. I’d go to sleep, and during the night, someone would close out a whole area of research. The Community was the ultimate scientific compilation of information. Sometimes we made the cutting-edge discovery, the one that changed the direction for a thousand people. Usually we just plodded along, uploaded our results, and waited for a new direction.
The research advanced at a pace we as individuals could barely fathom, until we submerged ourselves in the Community. Then, the whole plan was obvious. I can’t quite grasp it now, but it’s there in my mind like a diamond of thought.
It wasn’t just in my area of technology, but everywhere. It took the human race a century to go from horses to space elevators. It took us six months to go from uncertainty cubes to Heisenberg AND gates, and from there twenty days to quantum processors and Nth-order qubits.
You’re right. It does seem like a car out of control, barrelling down a hill. But really, it was the orderly advancement of science and technology, all controlled, all directed by the Community.
We spent as much time as we could in the Community, when we worked, played, and even slept. Some people even made love while connected. The ultimate exhibitionism. You couldn’t spend all your time connected, of course. Everyone needed downtime. But being away from the Community was like being half yourself.
That’s what it was like.
Together, in the Mesh, we could see the vision, we could see the goal, all the humans of Earth united in mind, pushing, pushing, pushing to the ultimate goal: Exodus.
At least I think that was the goal. It’s hard to remember. But they’re all gone now, right? I’m all that’s left. So they must have done it.
Only I wasn’t with them when it happened.
I don’t blame Henry. I would have done the same thing if my best friend were screwing my wife.
Gillian, on the other hand.
She said she and I were soul mates, and yet when I came out of the freezer twenty-six years later, she was as gone as the rest of them.
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’s 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 Macapá 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 of 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 who 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 Overgovernmemt 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 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 looke
d at me sidelong. “I can give you one, you know. I can build you an interface.”
I recoiled. “No!” I said quickly. “I . . .”
He 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 were 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 were 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.
The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 17 Page 57
