Singularity's Ring

by Paul Melko

  “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? Through the Rift?”

  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, even practiced—but 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. Usually pods sundered in the creche, with time to re-form, but Veronica had broken into a duo and a trio. The pair had bonded and the trio had transferred to engineering school, then dropped out.

  “Not anymore,” 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. “I used to be a four.” She was gone before I could reply.

  A four? Of course we knew that. One of Mother Redd had died … Was she saying that the fourth had left the composite voluntarily? My decision was nothing like that.

  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 I 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 dreamlike 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. The interface box was no simple machine; it was a quantum computer, more powerful than any organic or silicon computers we could build.

  “You do this well,” he said, a brightness in the grey-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 were 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 interface 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. The
n 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 are 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 the air. 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.

  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. Manuel threw the interface box at him.

  Something else 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.

  THREE

  Quant

  When we returned to the farmhouse, Dr. Khalid was there. One of him stepped into our space and lifted Meda’s hair from her nape. The skin there was raw, the outer jacket of the interface silver in a patch of red.

  “What has been done to you, child?” Khalid whispered.

  Meda flushed, and I felt her embarrassment as my own. He was our doctor, and yet we did not want to talk about what Malcolm Leto had done to us.

  “It was Leto,” Mother Redd said. She stood aside; she often examined us as well, but when Dr. Khalid was present, she deferred to him.

  One of Khalid whirled on her, and a sharp expression crossed his face. “You knew the danger!”

  One of Mother Redd took a step back, and then her interface shook her head.

  “Do not lecture me on risk, Doctor,” she said.

  We had not seen this clash between them before, and we did not know what to make of it. Dr. Khalid made no reply, but turned back to Meda and scanned the base of her skull with his portable MRI.

  “It’s embedded in her cerebellum,” he murmured. “This is not good.”

  “Will it come out?” Meda asked.

  All four of Khalid pursed his lips before answering, and we knew that it would not.

  What about our practicum? I sent. The culmination of our years of training was the ten-week space-tour. Would this delay it?

  Strom touched my shoulder, and he passed a thought between us. This is about Meda.

  I flinched. He was right, and I felt guilty for thinking of what I wanted above Meda’s trauma.

  But Meda glanced at me, and then said to Dr. Khalid, “I don’t want this to affect the practicum.”

  “I don’t think—” Dr. Khalid began.

  “That’s nothing to worry about now,” Mother Redd interrupted and again a dark look passed between one or two of each of them.

  Worry, however we did, especially when the full MRI at the Institute confirmed that the nanofilaments of the interface were far into Meda’s brain and impossible to remove. Furthermore, we saw via e-mail that other of our classmates were getting their assignments.

  Where’s ours? I sent, as we read the smarmy letter from Elliott O’Toole regarding his lunar posting.

  Willow had a peach of an assignment at the Rift Observatory, where several telescopes were pointed through the hole in space in hopes of mapping as much of the remote location as possible. They had already found a G4 star less than half a light-year away.

  How’d Elliott get the moon? Manuel asked.

  It’s not the Consensus, Moira replied. He didn’t get assigned to L4.

  That would have been the worst, a fait accompli for him.

  We fretted the rest of the day, but finally the message came. Meda read it as I hid my face, but I felt the elation and I knew.

  GEO! Meda sent. We’re going to Columbus Station!

  “Let’s go! We have cargo to unload, and we have to turn this barge around in sixty minutes!”

  The words were just sounds, but the pod moved, and I followed, mesmerized. Not by the shouts, but by the subtlety of motion I could achieve with the slightest force or pressure. As I glided into the wall, I stopped myself with a touch of my finger. I had been experimenting during the shuttle ride over, and I knew that I could use a palm to rotate my body. A solid grip on a bar gave me pitch and yaw control over my torso.

  It was wonderful.

  “Quant!” Manuel whispered at me. He was the last of us, except me, to exit the barge, and I realized that I was alone, save a muttering duo scrubbing vomit from an air vent’s debris trap. It wasn’t ours; we’d been in zero-gee before. It was poor Anderson McCorkle’s, a fresh space dog duo who’d had a bad time of it. He’d managed to introduce himself to us before turning green in the gills, retching, and spending the last three hours of the push in the toilet.

  “You’re a quint,” he said. “You guys are rare. Never seen one.”

  “Yeah, we were designed to fly the Consensus,” Meda said, replying for all of us.

  “Oh, yeah.” One of him held his hand to his throat, forcing down a heave as the barge twisted. “Excuse me …”

  “You picked an odd career if you get space sick,” Meda said.

  Anderson McCorkle seemed to get his stomach under control. He swallowed. I was only idly listening, waiting for the pilot to say we could get up from our seats. The barge was too fat to be under thrust the whole way to Columbus Station. We’d have at least two hours of free fall.

  “Apollo? I recognize that name. Didn’t you have—?”

  And then one of him spewed into the air. His globules of floating vomitus had formed galaxies of regurgitated toast and coffee, their orbit defined by mome
ntum, Coriolis, and surface tension. I calculated their positions over and over again.

  “Quant!”

  Manuel, grabbing the rails near the dilated door with his feet, pulled me through into Columbus Station.

  Don’t zone out on us.

  Sorry, mesmerized.

  He smiled. He knew it happened, and here in zero-gee it happened a lot. This wasn’t our first time in space, but the first time we’d spent more than a couple of days. We’d traveled directly from Mother Redd’s farm to Indonesia when our practicum on Columbus Station came through. Three days of basic orientation had preluded the six-hour barge ride over. I was only just beginning to understand what motion was, after almost two decades of prison on earth.

  I know, Manuel sent.

  He was hanging by his prehensile feet, oriented orthogonally to me. I grinned. Of course Manuel understood. A bit of our mindspace seeped together in shared thoughts and memories. He experienced the spectacle of perturbations I saw; I understood his sense of balance and control over his parasensual organs. Though five, we were one.

  The sound of retching hit me the same time as the smell.

  Hope that wasn’t Strom, I sent.

  No, Strom replied before I saw him. He had a notoriously strong stomach, and my jest brought a quick smile from the pod, shared on grasped palms.

  “What kind of space dog are you?” someone was asking.

  The bay was cramped for four pods: us, the newbie space hand McCorkle, and two trios—one all male, one all female—wedged to the wall at the far door of the bay. Through meter-square windows, I saw crews unloading the barge. It was easier to eject the cargo all at once instead of moving it into the bay box by box. The crews strapped the boxes to the station with self-knitting lines. I watched their dance, and hardly noticed as the new guy—both of him now—erupted again into a wall-mounted solid waste suck.

  “Inner—” one started.

  “—ear—” the other continued in stereo with the thump of bile into the duct.

  “—infection.”

  “Sure.” The male trio shook his head. “A quint and a space-sick duo. I don’t have time for this; we have real work to get done. What am I supposed to do with you?”