Singularity's Ring

by Paul Melko

My pod had no answer either, so we took a suborbital car back to the farm to await our practicum assignments and help Mother Redd with the summer’s chores. The first morning back, Moira awoke with a stuffed nose and circles under her eyes, and we all awoke with memories of a clogged throat and a sinus headache.

  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 quartet or a trio or even a duo, 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. It reminded us of Strom on the mountain. He had been apart for too long.

  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 backward, 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 wrist, breathed him a thought, and he offered the rose to Mother Redd. I saw immediately it wasn’t going to work.

  “You four, go and play somewhere else today. Moira is sick, and it won’t do us any good for you to get sick too. Your assignments will be here in a month. 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 part ecopreserve and part commercial venture, the latter a hundred acres of soyfalfa that Mother Redd worked with three trios 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. They were the biggest animals that we had ever seen pod-bonded, until Strom had found the bears. No one built carnivore or omnivore pods; it just wasn’t done.

  Our search for them after the incident on the mountain—hampered by Strom’s cracked ribs—had turned up no ursine pods, and the military teams sent to search for them came to disbelieve the bears had helped save Strom and the remainder of Hagar Julian’s pod. We could tell they didn’t believe they were pods, probably just partially tame normal bears. They had questioned Strom on those points extensively.

  “Could the scent glands have been the silver mane of the male?” one army duo had asked.

  We were certain of what had happened, certain that the bear had been a pod, and certain that Strom had spoken to them via chemical memory, but the more they hounded us on the details of the bears, the more we shrugged our shoulders and said, “Maybe you’re right.” We were glad to fly back to Mother Redd’s farm to wait for our assignments.

  The practicum semester included not just a dozen classes on astrophysics and space science, but also an extraterrestrial work program. This was supposed to be the semester when they chose who would command the Consensus.

  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 Institute. At school we learned to sleep in shifts, so three or four of us were always awake to study. We’d spent summers with Mother Redd for sixteen years, since we had left Mingo Creche.

  Baker Road led west toward Worthington and the Institute or east toward more farms, the lake, the woods, and beyond that ruins and desolation. 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 last. Moira would have been after Quant. We felt a hole there, which Quant and I filled by touching hands too often.

  Within a mile, we were relaxed, though not indifferent to Moira’s absence. Quant was tossing rocks onto the tops of old telephone poles, grabbing chunks of asphalt and stones from the broken edge of the road, flinging them into the sky with a flash of her blond hair, an Olympic shotputter in a ponytail. She didn’t miss once, but we didn’t feel any pride in it. It was just a one-force problem, and Quant lobbed the rocks for diversion, not practice. There weren’t enough quintets in the world to relegate such a class in the Olympics; quartets had only been allowed the year before. Not that we wanted to be in the Olympics. We had no desire to hang around Earth at all.

  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 they 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. On the mountain, it had been clearer still, as if we could reach out, grasp it, and pull ourselves astride it. A silly thought: no pod had ever set foot on the Ring or any of its base stations. The doors would only open to members of the Community.

  Quant started tossing small twigs into the incoming microwave beam, small arcing meteoroids that burst into flame and then ash. She bent to pick up a small toad.

  I felt the absence of Moira as I put my hand on her shoulder and sent, No living things.

  I felt her momentary resentment, then she shrugged both physically and mentally. She smiled at my discomfort at having to play Moira while she was gone. Quant, in whom was hardwired all the Newtonian laws of force and reaction, had a devilishness in her. In us. Our rebel. You would not know it to look at her, nor would you have guessed if you had met her alone.

  Once, on Sabah Station, the instructors had divided us up as a duo and a trio, 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 had been different.

  Strom, Manuel, and Quant found it first, by chance, and instead of taking it, they lay 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 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.

  “Quant!”

  “Forget it!” she yelled. “I win.” Then she threw the MacGuffin at us, and Moira snatched it out of the air.

  “Who’s ‘I’?” Moira yelled.

  Quant stuck her head out. She looked at the four of us for a moment, then signed, Sorry. She kicked over and we shared everything that had happened.

  The teachers didn’t split us up li
ke 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, two first-generation duos, 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 quartets, 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.

  We took turns with the beavers pulling rotten logs into the water and trying to sink them in the mud, until the adult beavers started chiding us with rudimentary hand signs, No stop work. Messing home. Tell Mother Redd.

  We had taken for granted all our lives that beavers could use sign language, that ducks within a flock were more intelligent than without, and that plow beasts did their work on their own. But what Mother Redd created was not common, though one day it would be. The goal for her and her colleagues like Colonel Krypicz was an Earth of interwoven fauna, in concert with all its species. Though we had grown up on the farm, at least spent our summers there, this was not our dream at all. We wanted to explore the Universe beyond the Rift.

  We swam to shore and dried ourselves in the afternoon sun, naked. Manuel climbed an apple tree and gathered enough ripe fruit for all of us. We rested, knowing that we’d have to head back to the farm soon. Strom balled up some memories.

  For Moira, he sent.

  Quant came alert and we all felt it.

  A house, she sent. That wasn’t there before.

  She was up the bank, so I waited for the thoughts to reach me through the polleny humid air. It was a cottage, opposite the lake from the beavers’ dam, half hidden among the cottonwoods which shed like snowfall during the summer.

  I searched our memory of the last time we’d been at the lake, but none of us had looked over that way, so it may have been there since last year.

  The Baskins put in a summer house, Strom sent.

  Why, when their normal house is just a kilometer away? Manuel replied.

  It could be a guesthouse, I sent.

  Let’s go find out, Quant sent.

  There was no dissent, and in the shared eagerness I wondered what Moira would have said about our trespassing.

  She’s not here.

  We leaped between flat stones, crossing the small stream that fed the lake.

  Beneath the cottonwoods, the ground was a carpet of threadbare white. The air was cold through our damp clothes. We stepped across and around the poison oak with its quintuple leaves and ivy its triplet.

  An aircar stood outside the cottage, parked in a patch of prairie, shaded by the trees.

  Conojet 34J, Manuel sent. We can fly it. We had started small-craft piloting the year before.

  The brush had been cleared from the cottage to make room for long flower gardens along each wall. Farther from the house, in the full sun, was a rectangle of vegetables: I saw tomatoes, pumpkins, squash, and string beans.

  “It’s not a summer house,” I said, because Quant was out of sight. “Someone’s living here.”

  Manuel skirted the vegetable garden to get a good look at the aircar. I felt his appreciation of it, no concrete thought, just a nod toward its sleekness and power.

  “What do you kids think you’re doing in my garden?”

  The door of the cottage flew open with a bang, and we jumped, as a man strode toward us.

  Strom took a defensive posture by reflex, his foot mashing a tomato plant. I noted it, and he corrected his stance, but the man had seen it too, and he frowned. “What the hell!”

  We lined up before the man, me at the head of our phalanx, Strom to my left and slightly behind, then Quant and Manuel behind him. Moira’s spot to my right was empty.

  “Stepping on my plants. Who do you think you are?”

  He was young, dressed in a brown shirt and tan pants. His hair was black and he was thin-boned, almost delicate. I assumed he was the interface for his pod, but then we saw the lack of sensory pads on his palms, the lack of pheromone ducts on his neck, the lack of any consensus gathering on his part. He had said three things before we could say a single word.

  “We’re sorry for stepping on your plant,” I said. I stifled our urge to waft conciliatory scent into the air. He wouldn’t have understood. He was a singleton.

  He looked from the plant to me and to the plant again.

  “You’re a fucking cluster,” he said. “Weren’t you programmed with common courtesy? Get the hell off my property.”

  Quant wanted to argue with the man. This was Baskin land. But I nodded, smiling. “Again, we’re sorry, and we’ll leave now.”

  We backed away, and his eyes were on us. No, not us, on me. He was watching me, and I felt his dark eyes looking past my face, seeing things that I didn’t want him to see. A flush spread across my cheeks, hot suddenly in the shade. The look was sexual, and my response …

  I buried it inside me, but not before my pod caught the scent of it. I clamped down, but Manuel’s then Quant’s admonition seeped through me.

  I dashed into the woods, and my fellows had no choice but to follow.

  The undertones of their anger mingled with my guilt. I wanted to rail, to yell, to attack. We were all sexual beings, as a whole and as individuals, but instead, I sat apart, and if Mother Redd noticed, none of her said a word.

  Finally, I climbed the stairs and went to see Moira.

  “Stay over there,” she wheezed.

  I sat in one of the chairs by the door. The room smelled like chicken broth and sweat. We had gengineered antibodies for cholera and hepatitis, but no one had found a better solution for rhinovirus except rest and tissues.

  Moira and I are identical twins, the only ones in our pod. We didn’t look that much alike anymore, though. Her hair was close-cropped; mine was shoulder-length auburn. She was twenty pounds heavier, her face rounder where mine was sharp. We looked more like cousins than identical sisters.

  She leaned on her elbows, looked at me closely, and then flopped down onto the pillow. “You don’t look happy.”

  I could have given her the whole story by touching her palm, but she wouldn’t let me near her. I could have sketched it all with pheromones, but I didn’t know if I wanted her to know the whole story.

  “We met a singleton today.”

  “Oh, my.” The words were so vague. Without the chemical sharing of memories and thoughts, I had no idea what her real emotions were, cynical or sincere, interested or bored.

  “Over by the Baskins’ lake. There was a cottage there …” I built the sensory description, then let it seep away. “This is so hard. Can’t I just touch you?”

  “That’s all we need. Me, then you, then everybody else, and by the time school starts in two weeks, we’re all sick. We can’t be sick.” Moira nodded. “A singleton. Luddite? Christian?”

  “None of those. He had an aircar. He was angry at us for stepping on his tomato plants. And he … looked at me.”

  “He’s supposed to look at you. You’re our interface.”

  “No, he looked at me. Like a woman.”

  Moira was silent for a moment. “Oh. And you felt …”

  The heat crept up my cheeks again. “Flushed.”

  “Oh.” Moira contemplated the ceiling. She said, “You understand that we are individually sexual beings and as a whole—”

  “Don’t lecture me!” Moira could
be such a pedant, one who never threw a stone.

  She sighed. “Sorry.”

  “’Sokay.”

  She grinned. “Was he cute?”

  “Stop that!” After a pause, I added, “He was handsome. I’m sorry we stepped on his tomato plant.”

  “So take him another.”

  “You think?”

  “And find out who he is. Mother Redd has got to know. And call the Baskins.”

  I wanted to hug her, but settled for a wave.

  Mother Redd was in the greenhouse, watering, picking, and examining a hybrid cucumber. She had been a doctor, and then one of herself had died, and she’d chosen another field instead of being only part of the physician she had been. She—there had been four cloned females, so she was a she any which way you looked at it—took over the farm, and in the summer boarded us university kids. She was a kind woman, smart and wise, but I couldn’t look at her and not think how much smarter she would have been if she were four instead of just a trio.

  “What is it, sweetie? Why are you alone?” asked the one looking at the cucumber under the light microscope.

  I shrugged. I didn’t want to tell her why I was avoiding my pod, so I asked, “We saw a singleton over by the Baskins’ lake today. Who is he?”

  I could smell the pungent odor of Mother Redd’s thoughts. Though it was the same cryptic, symbolic chaos that she always used, I realized she was thinking more than a simple answer would warrant. Finally, she said, “Malcolm Leto. He’s one of the Community.”

  “The Community! But they all … left.” I used the wrong word for it; Quant would have known the technical term for what had become of nine tenths of humanity. They had built the Ring, built the huge cybernetic organism that was the Community. They had advanced human knowledge of physics, medicine, and engineering exponentially until finally they had, as a whole, disappeared, leaving the Ring and the Earth empty, except for the fraction of humans who either had not joined the Community or had not died in the chaos of the Gene Wars.

  “This one was not on hand for the Exodus,” Mother Redd said. That was the word that Quant would have known. “There was an accident. His body was placed into suspended animation until it could be regenerated.”