Singularity's Ring

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Authors: Paul Melko

BOOK: Singularity's Ring
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For Stacey, of course
This book would have been impossible without the help of many, many people. Thanks go first to Lou Anders, whose anthology evoked the universe. Also thanks to Gardner Dozois and Sheila Williams for giving Strom’s story a home. The Blue Heaven writers group helped me perfect the thing. My agent, Caitlin Blasdell, provided crucial advice and guidance. David Hartwell and Denis Wong at Tor turned some scraps of paper into a book. There are others, I know, who helped too. Thank you. Lastly, extra special thanks to my wife, Stacey, who puts up with my daydreaming and distraction. (See? I wasn’t ignoring you; I was working.)
Strom
I am strength.
I am not smart, that is Moira. I cannot articulate, like Meda. I do not understand the math that Quant does, and I cannot move my hands like Manuel.
If to anyone, you would think I am closest to Manuel; his abilities are in his hands, in his dexterity. But his mind is jagged sharp; he remembers things and knows them for us. Trivial information that he spins into memory.
No, I am closest to Moira. Perhaps because she is everything I am not. She is as beautiful as Meda, I think. If she were a singleton, she would still be special. If the pod were without me, I think, they would be no worse off. If I were removed, the pod would still be Apollo Papadopulos, and still be destined to become the starship captain we were built to be. We are all humans individually, and I think my own thoughts, but together we are something different, something better, though my contribution is nothing like the others’.
When I think this, I wall it off. Quant looks at me; can she smell my despair? I smile, hoping she cannot see past my fortifications. I touch her hand, our pads sliding together, mixing thoughts, and send her a chemical memory of Moira and Meda laughing as children, holding hands. They are three or four years old in the memory, so it is after we have pod-bonded, prior to Third State, but still in the creche. Their hair is auburn, and it hangs from their heads in baloney curls. Moira has a skinned knee and she isn’t smiling as largely as Meda. In the memory, from the distant past, Meda reaches for Quant, who reaches for Manuel, who touches my hand, and we all feel Meda’s joy at seeing the squirrel in the meadow, and Moira’s anger at falling down and scaring it off. Here on the mountain, there is a pause in our consensus, as everyone catches the memory.
Moira smiles, but Meda says, “We have work to do, Strom.”
We do, I know we do. I feel my face redden. I feel my embarrassment spread in the air, even through our parkas. No one needs to touch the pads on my wrist to share it.
Sorry.
My hands form the word, as the thought passes among us.
We are somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. Our teachers have dropped us by aircar, here near the treeline, and told us to survive for five days. They have told us nothing else. Our supplies are those we could gather in the half hour they gave us.
For seven weeks we and our classmates have trained in survival methods: desert, forest, jungle. Not that we will see any of these terrains in space. Not that we will find climates of any kind whatsoever except for deadly vacuum, and that we know how to survive. But these are the hurdles that have been placed before us. The prize is the captaincy of the starship
Consensus;
it is what we have been built to do, as have our classmates.
On the first day of survival training, our teacher Theseus had stood before us and screamed in volleying bursts. He was a duo, the most basic form of pod, just two individual humans.
“You are being taught to think!” yelled Theseus on the left.
“You are being taught to respond to unknown environments, under unknown and strenuous conditions!” continued Theseus on the right.
“You do not know what you will face!”
“You do not know what will allow you to survive and what will kill you!”
Two weeks of class instruction followed, and then week after week we had been transported to a different terrain, a different locale, and shown what to do to survive. But always with Theseus nearby. Now, in our final week, we are alone, just the students on this mountain.
“Apollo Papadopulos! Cold-weather survival! Twenty kilos per pod member! Go!” one of Theseus yelled at us from our dorm-room doorway.
Luckily the parkas were in the closet. Luckily we had a polymer tent. Hagar Julian has only canvas coats with no insulation, we know. They will have a harder time of it.
Twenty kilograms is not a lot. I carry sixty kilos of it myself and distribute the rest to my podmates. In the aircar, we note that Hagar Julian and Elliott O’Toole have split the load evenly among themselves; they are not playing to their strengths.
Strom!
Once again Meda chastises me, and I jerk my hands away from Manuel’s and Quant’s, but they can still smell the embarrassment pheromones. I cannot stop the chemical proof of my chagrin from drifting in the frigid air. I reach again for my place in the consensus, striving to be an integral part of the pod, trying to concentrate. Together we can do anything.
Chemical thoughts pass from hand to hand in our circle, clockwise and counterclockwise, suggestions, lists, afterthoughts. I stand between Moira and Quant, adding what I can. This is our most comfortable thinking position. If we rearrange ourselves, me holding Manuel’s hand perhaps, or Moira and Meda together, the thoughts are different. Sometimes this is useful.
Ideas whir past me and I feel I am only a conduit. Some thoughts are marked by their thinker, so that I know it is Quant who has noted the drop in temperature and the increased wind speed, which causes us to raise the priority of shelter and fire. Consensus forms.
We have to rig our shelter before dark. We have to start a fire before dark. We have to eat dinner. We have to dig a latrine.
The list passes among us. We reach consensus on decision after decision, faster than I can reason through some of the issues: I add what I can. But I trust the pod. The pod is me.
Our hands are cold; we have removed our gloves to think. In the cold of the Rockies our emotions—the pheromones that augment our chemical thoughts—are like lightning, though sometimes the wind will whisk the feeling away before we can catch it. With gloves on our touch pads and parkas over our noses and neck glands, it is hard to think. It is almost like working alone, until we finish some subtask and join for a quick consensus, shedding gloves.
“Strom, gather wood for the fire,” Moira reminds me.
The tasks that require broad shoulders fall to me. I step away from the others, and I am suddenly cut off from them: no touch, no smell. We practice this, being alone. We were born alone, yet we have spent our youth from First State to Fourth State striving to be a single entity. And now we practice being alone again. It is a skill. I look back at the other four. Quant touches Moira’s hand, passing a
thought, some shared confidence. The spike of jealousy must be the face of my fear. If they have thought something important, I will know it later when we rejoin. For now, I must act alone.
We have chosen an almost flat tract of land in a meager grove of wind-stunted pines. The rock slopes gently away into a V-shape, a catch for wind and snow. The shallow ravine drops sharply into a ledge of rock, the side of a long valley of snowdrifts and trees that the aircar passed over as we arrived. Above us is a sheer wall, topped with a mass of snow and ice. I cannot see the peak from here; we are many hundreds of meters below it. Stretching in either direction are lines of jagged mountaintops, their white faces reflecting the afternoon sun. Clouds seem to bump against their western sides.
The snow is thin enough on the ground here that we can reach the rocky earth beneath it. The trees will shelter us from the wind and provide support for the tent lines, we hope. I walk down the gentle slope, along the line of pines.
We have no axe, so I must gather fallen logs and branches. This will be a problem. We cannot have a good fire with half-decayed logs. I file the thought away for later consensus.
I find a sundered pine branch, thick as my forearm, sticky with sap. I wonder if it will burn as I drag it back up to the camp. I should have climbed up to find wood, I realize, so that I could drag it down to the camp. It is obvious now and would have been obvious before if I had asked for consensus.
I drop my wood in the clearing the others have made and start to arrange it into a fireplace. I draw stones into a U-shape, the open end facing the wind coming down the mountain for a draft. The stones at the sides can be used for cooking.
Strom, that is where the tent will go!
I jump back, and I realize that I had been working without consensus, making decisions on my own.
Sorry.
Confused and embarrassed, I drag the stones and wood away from the tent clearing. I think that I am not well, but I suppress that as I sweep snow away and place the stones again.
We decide to gauge our classmates’ progress, so I climb the trail above the treeline to see how the rest of our class is doing. There are five of us on survival training, all of us classmates, all of us familiar with each other and in competition. It is how it has always been among us. How the rest are doing is important.
I climb above the treeline, and to the west half a kilometer away, I see our classmate Elliott O’Toole’s tent already up, with the pod inside it. To the east, a few hundred meters away, I see another student—Hagar Julian—working in the snow, instead of on an area of rocky slope. They are digging into a drift, perhaps to form a snow cave. They will have a long time to dig, I think. Hollowing out a space for five will expend much energy. They can’t have a fire.
The other two pods—Megan Kreighton and Willow Murphy—are hidden in the trees beyond Hagar Julian. I cannot determine their progress, but I know from experience that our greatest competition will be from Julian and O’Toole. Only one of us will pilot the
Consensus
through the Rift.
I return and pass the others memories of what I have seen.
We have begun pitching the tent, using the nearby pine trees to support it. We have no ground spikes, removed from the packs to reach the twenty-kilogram-per-person limit. There are many things we have removed to make our weight limit, but not matches. I kneel to start the fire.
Strom!
The scent call is sharp on the crisp wind. The pod is waiting for me to help pull and tie the tent support lines; they have consensed without me. Sometimes they do that. When it is expedient. I understand; they can reach a valid consensus without me easily enough.
We pull the spider-silk lines taut, and the tent stretches into place, white on white, polymer on snow, a bubble of sanctuary, and suddenly our shelter is ready. The thrill of success fills the air, and Quant enters and comes out again, smiling.
“We have shelter!”
Now dinner,
Manuel sends.
Dinner is small bags of cold, chewy fish. Once we have the fire going, we can cook our food. For now, it’s cold from the bag.
If we were really on our own in the mountains, we would hunt for our food,
I send. The image of me carrying the carcass of an elk over my shoulders makes Moira laugh. I mean it as a joke, but then I count the bags of jerky and dried fruit. We will be hungry by the end of the test. It is my job to see to the safety of the pod, and I feel bad that we did not pack more food.
“Another test,” Quant says. “Another way to see if we’re good enough. As if this mountain is anything like another world. As if this will tell them anything about us.”
I know what Quant means. Sometimes we feel manipulated. Everything we face is another test to pass. There is no failure, just success, repeated, until it means nothing. When we fail, it will be catastrophic.
The thought is unleashed before I can stop it.
“We will not fail,” Meda says, and I am embarrassed again.
Quant shakes her head, then is suddenly absorbed with the flicker of light on the tent wall.
“We can watch the sunset,” I say.
We have loosened hoods and gloves in the tent, though
it is still just above freezing inside. But the difference between inside and out is even more severe as the sun now hides behind the western peaks. The sunset is colorless, the sunlight crisp and white. It reflects off the bottom of the Ring, making the slim orbital torus brighter than it is at noon. Wispy clouds slide across the sky, fast, and I note to the others a possibility of snow. Before our five days on the mountain are over, we will see more snow, that is certain. Perhaps tonight.
Elliott O’Toole has managed to light a fire and we smell the burning wood. He probably hasn’t finished his tent, but he has a fire. The smell of roasted meat drifts on the wind.
“Bastard!” Quant said. “He has steak!”
We don’t need it.
I want it!
I say, “This is only about surviving, not luxury.”
Quant glares at me, and I sense her anger. She is not alone. I cave before this partial consensus and apologize, though I don’t know why I do. Meda has told me that I hate strife. I assume everyone does. We are five and I am one. I bow to the group consensus, as we all do. It is how we reach the best decision.
With dinner finished and night upon us, we complete what chores we can outside: a fire, if we can start it, and a latrine. Manuel and I work on the fire pit, moving stones, breaking tinder, building up a steeple of wood. The wind is too strong, I realize, for a fire tonight. The flatness of the plateau made it a good place for a tent, but the wind whips down the ravine. The tent ropes sing.
We smell fear on the wind, child pheromones, and I think one of us is in danger, but then we smell it as a foreign fear: one of our classmates is in danger. Then, as the wind dies for a moment, we hear the heavy breathing of someone running through the snowdrifts. The pod condenses around me,
as it does in times of crisis. We touch, assess, but we have only the smell and the sound to base consensus on.

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