by Paul Melko
“Ow!”
I jumped up, brushing at my face and neck.
They like baby pheromone, Moira sent.
Quant looked at the swarms. “I wonder what they don’t like.”
What do you mean?
She released a dozen pheromone signals, emotions, and nuances, aromatic babel, watching the insects swarm. One in particular drove the mosquitoes away.
They don’t like laughter, Quant sent. The chemical that had driven them away was the creche smell for a joke understood. We all released it then, and in a moment the sky was clear around us of bugs.
Now that’s funny, I sent.
I started spitting the fillets and handed one to each of us. Dinnertime.
A few moments later Gueran grunted and rolled over. “What you do with all the zanzara?” He looked up into the sky, grumbled again, then took a stick from me. “Ah, dinner. Then we go.”
I had expected the noise of the boat’s engine to be a beacon for the pursuing OG aircar, but the night sounds covered everything. The crickets alone would have covered the sound of the two-stroke engine. Gueran, sated from his six fillets, let forth a rumpling burp that resonated with the engine.
“Good fish,” he said.
I was sitting closest to the man, the rest of the pod spread out on the slates that marked the boat at one-meter intervals—seats and support structures both. I asked the question that was hovering among us before being whisked away by the wind.
“You’re older than the Ring, aren’t you?”
Gueran burped again, this one forced, too abrupt, and not as elegant as the previous.
“Yeah, so?”
“It’s just that you were around before, during, and after the Community. You saw a lot of change.”
“Huh.”
“What was it like to live through that?”
“Huh.”
I waited, then shrugged to the pod. He doesn’t want to talk about it.
We took turns sleeping in the damp bottom of the boat after that, while the rest watched the dark Amazon roll by.
We traveled by night and slept under canopied tributaries from dawn until dusk. Twice more we heard the shrill of aircars. I watched them zoom by from the cover of the jungle. Quant remembered the tail numbers for me later and told me that the prefix meant it was an OG car. There were at least three different aircars flying up and down the Amazon, looking for us.
Perhaps we should give up, I sent after walking back to the camp. I shaped the image of a warm shower, beds at the farm.
And be exiled from pod society? Meda replied.
We effectively are exiled, Moira sent.
Why would we be exiled?
But we’re free.
I was angry with myself for bringing it up, angry that we had to run from our own government, angry that we could do nothing about it but hide in the jungle and travel by night. I sat on a log next to Gueran, who was eating a mango fruit, rind and all.
“You don’t like the OG much, do you?” I asked.
Gueran looked at me with a red-rimmed eye.
“Nope. Don’t like the pods either.”
“Why not? You have a say in the OG. All the enclaves do.”
“Ha.”
“I mean it. It’s not an exclusive government.”
“You don’t know much for a fiver. You got maybe only four brains among you.” He finished the last of his fruit. “You one person, right? I’m one person, right? Your vote count for five, my vote for one.”
“We take up five times as many resources. Of course our vote should count more.”
“Yeah, you think that way. But you pods all vote the same way. We enclave humans, we all screwed up. Brown-nosers always vote pod. Ludds don’t vote at all. Christers vote for themselves. Adds up to mean our vote don’t mean shit. Your OG just like the Community.”
“We’re utterly different,” I said.
“You think so. I don’t. Just less of you. Community should have had one vote too. Had billions, all voted the same way. No justice there for me.” He rubbed at his tattooed arm. “Nobody back at the village care who running the world. They the same they always been. Maybe better now. No one coming down the elevator anymore, ’cept you.”
He looked around, perhaps in hopes of finding another mango. Then he said to me, “I been thinking about your question.”
“What it was like before the Community?”
“Yeah, that the one.” He poked the fire with a stick, and waves of sparks twirled into the sky to scare the bats. “My brother, he join the Community. He go take the test, and don’t come back for a long time. Where is he now? You see him up there?”
“No. There’s no one.”
“He come back once. Dressed him in nice Community clothes, all black, with boots that cost as much as a pig. His head shaved, but he still have tattoos we got together in Bacabal. He have the hole in his head like that one.” He pointed at Meda, who, listening, rubbed the back of her skull. I felt a trace of embarrassment, but nothing more. “He come back and say, Gueran, you must take the test. You must come live in the Community with me. I say no, thanks, and your wife, she miss you. He say, I have a billion wives now. I say, Okay, but the one down here, she miss you.”
Gueran leaned back and closed his eyes. “That what it like during the Community. People see how easy it is, look at how much work it is living here, and give up. Go get jacked. That what it like during the Community. Before and after? Don’t know that it so different.” He opened one of his eyes. “You so interested, tomorrow, I show what it’s like in a real enclave.”
Gueran crossed the river that night; up until then, we had been traveling the north side. The Amazon was so wide and turgid, it was as if we were on a lake. When dawn came, when we usually found an overgrown tributary to lie in till nightfall, Gueran kept going, pushing the boat through the foggy morning.
Every few kilometers, we passed fishing boats or houseboats. The owners always waved and Gueran waved back. Once he hailed a houseboat, anchored in the current, with a boy and a man fishing, and asked if they had gas. He traded two river turtles that he had caught with a bit of fish that night for five gallons of gas. The boy stared at me and the pod, as if he’d never seen a quintet before.
Around mid-morning, the river became busier: more fishing boats, more people. Gueran pulled five musty rain ponchos from under a seat and handed them to us.
“Cover your stink pads,” he said, touching his wrists and neck. I took the poncho and pulled it over my head, hiding my pheromone ducts from sight. No one would see us as an obvious pod now, but they would wonder instead why the five of us were wearing heavy cloaks in the heat.
“And stop touching hands,” Gueran added. “You look queer.”
We began to pass shantytowns on the riverbank, rows of corrugated metal shacks capping any high ground and even some low ground, though they would be covered by the river in the rainy season. We passed thousands of people, more people than we had ever seen in one place. I couldn’t help touching Strom’s hand.
These people are poor.
And numerous.
We consensed regardless of Gueran’s admonition, and I felt the claustrophobia of being among so many people, even though we were still away and in the river.
“Quit touching,” I said. “They’ll mark you for a pod for sure, and you don’t want that.”
My hand fell away, and I turned to watch the far side of the river.
Minutes later, Gueran ran the boat up to a dock. He passed a sullen boy a bit of OG scrip, and the boy took the lines and tied the boat down.
“Come on,” Gueran said. “I’d like some lunch other than fish and mango.”
From the docks, we climbed long steps into the city itself, which sat on a bluff overlooking the river. Above the rickety shanties were uniform modern buildings, hospitals and administration sites, and an aircar field. The town was quiet, empty. Shops were just opening and no one was up and about yet.
“Boliv
opolis,” Gueran muttered. “They just built it right out of the jungle. Relocated all the locals here. Wanted me to move here, but I say no way. This place have bad feng shui.”
Gueran led us through the streets as if he’d often been there before, until we came to a small restaurant. Unlike the shantytowns outside the city, the shops and restaurants inside it seemed overly planned and uniform. This one had been painted red, something boldly different than the grey of the enclave buildings. A patio littered with tables rose a meter above the street, granting a view in both directions.
“This the one.”
We took a table on the patio. Gueran ordered two beers right away, while we ordered juice. A young light-skinned woman singleton brought us our drinks.
“The special?” she asked.
“Yeah, six of them,” Gueran said.
“What’s the special?” I asked.
“The only thing they serve.”
The woman brought back a tray with six plates of red beans and rice and handed them out. When she gave me mine, she paused, her eyes on the pads on my wrist.
“You a cluster,” she said. “What you doing out here?”
Gueran jumped up.
“It’s nothing, honey.” He took her aside, handing her OG scrip. Her eyes fastened on mine, then looked away. She nodded at Gueran, then walked back into the kitchen.
“I tol’ you to keep the pads under wraps,” he said.
“It’s not that easy,” Meda said. “Maybe we should get out of here.”
Gueran shook his head.
“We go in a few minutes. We gotta see something first.”
He shoveled the beans and rice into his mouth and washed it down with the second beer.
Strom touched my hand under the table.
Pods coming.
I looked up the street, noticing consensus pheromones in the humid air. Pod smell.
Then I breathed in the smells of panic and veto, and a dozen minor yet common pod pheromones. It was chaos.
I half stood, but Gueran pushed me back in my seat.
“Hold on.”
A dozen people came down the street, all dressed in red jumpsuits. Around them, guarding them, were three men in white. They were singletons and carried long thin rods. I thought the red-clad ones were pods at first, but then I realized what they were. They were disassociated pods: singletons. Their guards were leading them down the street, herding them.
“Who are they?” Meda asked.
“Your kind,” Gueran growled. “There’s thousands of them in the hospitals.”
As they came closer, the smell of incoherent thoughts buffeted me. I hunched my shoulders, pulling the sleeves of the poncho over my wrists. They were uncontrolled, First State pod members who had never bonded. Or failed to bond. Their thoughts were madness.
I looked away. I clamped my hands around my thighs though I desperately wanted to grab my pod mates and come to a consensus about what we were seeing. But if I did, everyone in the restaurant and on the street would know we were a pod ourselves. And that didn’t seem like a good thing for others to know in this town.
Then even through the bunched-up poncho material I began to sense thoughts come from one of them, one of himself: one of the singletons looked up at us. That shouldn’t have been. I looked over, and Quant was shaking, her eyes clenched shut, her face red. Strom reached for her and I reached for Strom and it hit us like a brilliance of sunlight.
The broken pods on the street were nodes of intensity, thought, and emotion isolated and severed, but for that instant, I saw through Quant each one as a single point in a huge mesh, all linked through us.
Then I passed out, falling facefirst onto the table and into oblivion.
Manuel and Corrine came to Blue Haven Creche when they were four. Until then all they had known was each other and Gorton Creche, a crowded place with hundreds of children and stern matron pods. Always the matrons had been pushing him and Corrine to play with the other kids, to sleep in the bonding rooms with their friends. But they had not, or if they did, it had always been for short periods, and then they were back together in a corner by themselves or in the space under the stairs on the third floor.
“They’re going to be a duo,” Matron Reddinger had said once, when she thought that they were too busy playing to eavesdrop, as she folded and stacked white towels to the ceiling in the laundry room. But Manuel was always listening, and sharing it with Corrine.
“So, what’s wrong with duos now?” asked Matron Isitharp. “I myself am a duo, and so—one, two—are you.”
“But Dr. Yoder had high hopes for these two. High hopes.”
“You know most twins pair bond to duos. It’s just the way it is.”
“I know. But they’re special. Look at their feet. And always Dr. Yoder is here to look at them.”
Matron Reddinger caught Manuel’s look as she folded the laundry. “Look at you two. Why don’t you sleep with those three nice boys: Sensen, Joel, and Franklin. They’re nice boys, aren’t they? They could use a couple more in their room.”
Franklin stinks. Manuel heard the words in his mind, and laughed.
“Corrine says Franklin stinks,” Manuel echoed.
Matrons Reddinger and Isitharp glanced at one another.
“We’ll have to tell Dr. Yoder.”
Tell him what? Manuel wondered. That Franklin stunk? Everyone knew that.
Corrine giggled, looking at him, and he giggled back.
Not long after that, Dr. Yoder came and asked them a lot of questions. Usually he just came and checked their noses, necks, and wrists. Then he made sure they did their foot exercises, the ones where they stretched their toes and picked up balls and hung upside down for an hour. But this time he made them play weird games.
He had Manuel and Corrine hold hands through a curtain. Then he asked Manuel questions while he showed Corrine pictures. Then he showed Manuel the pictures. Usually they got his questions right.
“You two did very well,” he said. “I’m very, very proud of you.” He handed each of them a lollipop. “I just wish …”
“What, Dr. Yoder?” asked Manuel, hoping for another lollipop by asking smart questions.
“I just wish you two would spend more time with the other children.”
Corrine had frowned, and Manuel had too when he felt her sadness.
“We don’t like the kids here,” Corrine said. “They only play with each other.”
It was true. The kids all had their special groups of three, and four, and sometimes five. And none of them really wanted to play with Manuel and Corrine. Besides, they had fun by themselves.
“It’s very important for you two to find some friends, especially if it were a group of three.”
“Why?” Corrine asked.
Dr. Yoder had sat back, the one of him who always spoke to them, and touched hands with the rest of him.
“Do you know where the children go when they leave the First State?”
“Second State!” Manuel said, proud that he remembered what some of the older kids had been talking about.
“That’s right. Second State. And you can’t go to Second State until you have a group of friends to go with.”
“Can’t Corrine and I go together?”
“Of course you can! But it would be even better if you were part of a group of five.”
Corrine crossed her arms and shook her head.
Dr. Yoder sighed. “All right. All right.”
But later that week he came back again and told them they were going to stay at a new creche. They’d be leaving Gorton for Blue Haven that day.
Even though they hadn’t a lot of friends there, Gorton Creche was the only home they knew, and they cried and hugged Matron Reddinger and Matron Isitharp and even Matron Ulysses, all three of her, even the tall gangly one who never spoke and never looked at you. They even hugged the janitor robot, which all the children called Uncle Millions.
Blue Haven was so much bigger than Gorton, wi
th a huge fenced-in playground and a tall oak tree in the middle of it. There were just two groups of kids there, a group of four and a group of five.
Manuel and Corrine liked the four more than the five. The five kept to themselves and didn’t talk to anyone. They just held hands a lot and smirked.
“They’re going to Second State soon,” one of the four—Meda—said. “They think they’re better than the rest of us.”
Meda was one of the four and one of twins just like Manuel and Corrine were twins. But Meda and Moira were identical twins, while Manuel and Corrine didn’t look identical, just very similar.
They were sad to have left Gorton, but their new friends made Blue Haven so much nicer. And the Matron, Mother Redd, was very nice too.
On the first day, Manuel and Corrine showed the four how they could hang upside down by their feet. And then Strom showed them how strong he was. And Quant recited pi to one hundred digits. And Meda and Moira laughed at it all. That night they all slept in the same room—all six of them—and it felt right to be there. They hardly thought of Gorton at all after that.
Soon, the six of them became inseparable.
Once, when they were playing with the computer in the library, he heard Meda say, though she didn’t move her lips, Let’s work on a puzzle.
Moira had replied, speaking out loud, “Okay.”
After that, Manuel started to hear the others speak, just like he sometimes heard Corrine speak. Just like he had sometimes heard the kids at Gorton speak, but then it had been a horrible babble that he’d tried to shut out. But with these children, he was happy to hear them think.
They heard him too. Often when they slept together, they dreamed together.
Dr. Yoder was still their doctor, but now they had another doctor, Dr. Khalid. Dr. Khalid was a quartet, and he came every other day to see them and the other group of children. He was a silent doctor, who examined them three at a time.
He didn’t get along with Dr. Yoder, and the group heard them arguing one day in the courtyard. The children were in the back, playing, and what had started as an inaudible conversation slowly turned into a yelling match, with three of Yoder yelling and two of Khalid.
