by Lou Anders
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 the dishes 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.
Bola started tossing small twigs into the incoming microwave beam, small arcing meteoroids that burst into flame and then ash. He bent to pick up a small toad.
I felt the absence of Moira as I put my hand on his shoulder and sent, No living things.
I felt his momentary resentment; then he shrugged both physically and mentally. He smiled at my discomfort at having to play Moira while she was gone. Bola, in whom was hardwired all the Newtonian laws of force and reaction, had a devilishness in him. In us. Our rebel.
Once, the instructors had divided us up as two triples, male and female, 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 was different.
Strom, Bola, and Manuel 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, Quant, 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.
“Bola!”
“Forget it!” he yelled. “I win.” Then he threw the macguffin at us, and Quant snatched it out of the air.
“Who’s I?” Moira yelled.
Bola stuck his head out. He looked at the five of us for a moment, then signed, Sorry. He kicked over, and we shared everything that had happened.
The teachers didn’t split us up like 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 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 quads. Their thoughts slid across the pond surface in rainbows like gasoline that 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 Baskins.
We swam to shore and dried ourselves in the afternoon sun. 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 mile away? Manuel replied.
It could be a guest house, I sent.
Let’s go find out, Bola 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, Bola, 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.”
Bola 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 a
nger 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.
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.” We started training for the zero-gee classes that fall. Everybody said this was when the real culling began, when the teachers decided which pods were viable enough to crew our starships.
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 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 triple.
Mother Redd was in the greenhouse, watering, picking, and examining a hybrid cucumber.
“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 two thirds 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 Earthbound 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.”
“He’s the last member of the Community, then?”
“Practically.”
“Thanks.” I went to find the rest of my pod. They were in front of the computer, playing virtual chess with John Michelle Grady, one of our classmates. I remembered it was Thursday night, Quant’s hobby night. She liked strategic gaming.
I touched Strom’s hand and slipped into the mesh of our thoughts. We were losing, but then Grady was good and we had been down to four with me running off alone. Was that a trace of resentment from my fellows? I ignored it and dumped what I had learned from Mother Redd about the singleton.
The chess game vanished from our thoughts as the others focused on me.
He’s from the Community. He’s been in space.
Why is he here?
He missed the Exodus.
He’s handsome.
He’s been in space. Zero-gee. On the Ring.
We need to talk to him.
We stepped on his tomato plant.
We owe him another.
Yes.
Yes.
Strom said, “We have some plants in the greenhouse. I can transplant one into a pot. As a gift.” Strom’s hobby was gardening.
“Tomorrow?” I asked.
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 plan
t 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.”
