Ten Sigmas & Other Unlikelihoods

by Paul Melko

  Edeo watched the door swing shut. “Huh,” he said.

  “You know what you got there?” Gremon was hanging over the top bunkbed, his head dark against the gray ceiling.

  “No.”

  “Hell! It’s a snail, Edeo. A snail! You know what that means?”

  “No. What?”

  “Snails grow gems on their backs if you feed it the right crap. You hear me? Gems.”

  “I know.”

  “You feed it iron, it grows emerald. You feed it copper, it grows diamonds. You feed it–”

  “They’re not really diamonds and emeralds,” he replied. What the snails grew weren’t found naturally.

  “We could be rich.”

  “We?”

  “Yeah, we, little boy.”

  Edeo stared up at his brother. “You breathe a word, little boy,” he said softly, “and Nelli Ione learns you pissed your pants.”

  Gremon was silent. This was all Edeo had over him. He hoped it would work.

  A dark shape dropped from the top bunk. Pain shot up Edeo’s arm, and he stifled a gasp.

  “This isn’t yours to keep, stupid. It’s to use.”

  Then Gremon climbed back up into his bunk.

  *

  The next day, the snail thrashed around in its cave when they came to see it.

  “Is it sick?” Haron asked.

  “I dunno,” Edeo said. He was still concerned about what Gremon would do. Perhaps he’d try to take the snail for himself.

  The snail slammed its carapace against the stone walls of the alcove, again and again.

  “What’s wrong with it?” They dared not go near the thing. It weighed twice as much as they did together, and its shell was hard. They’d be smashed.

  Finally it stopped and something tinkled inside its grotto.

  “What was that?” Edeo asked.

  The snail slid forward and Edeo leaned into the darkness. Something sparkled on the floor. He reached for it, but jerked his hand back.

  He stuck his bleeding finger in his mouth.

  Haron shined the flashlight. “It’s a gem.”

  This was the first gem they’d seen the snail grow since they’d started feeding it a week earlier.

  “It’s sharp.”

  Edeo reached for it again, carefully. It was metallic, not a gem stone at all. It was heavy, like lead. One edge was rounded and had indentations in it. The other edge was sharp. It looked like a clamming knife the divers at the ocean used to open crustaceans.

  The snail shook itself and its chain jingled.

  Edeo and Haron shared a look. Edeo then bent down and started sawing at the chain with the stone. In the light of Haron’s flashlight, they saw the stone had chipped the metal. The stone was cutting the chain.

  “It grew a saw!” Haron said.

  Edeo worked until his arm was too sore to continue, then Haron took a turn. By noon they were halfway through the link, and so engrossed in the process they failed to hear Fruge’s arrival until he flung open the door.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  Edeo and Haron backed away from the snail. Haron eyed the rope, then the gun in Fruge’s hand. No way he’d make it.

  Fruge took the steps, his eyes riveted on the two kids.

  “This explains what happened to my supply of gems. You two have been feeding my snail the wrong stuff.” He kicked at the pile of curdleberry leaves. “Do you know what you’ve cost me?”

  “You can’t do this to a snail,” Edeo said, his voice cracking halfway through.

  “Just shut up,” Fruge said. “I can do whatever I want with my snail. And that includes feeding you to it.”

  The snail charged at Fruge, coming up just short on the end of the chain.

  “Look what you did!” Fruge yelled. “You made it crazy!”

  The snail lurched again, pulling the chain tight.

  “If I have to get a new snail because of you,” Fruge said, “I’m going to chain you both to the wall and feed you iron scrap.”

  The snail backed up into its cave.

  “That’s right. Back in your cave.”

  But the snail wasn’t submitting, it was getting some distance.

  It charged.

  For a moment, Edeo was certain the chain would hold, but the weakened link gave way with a snap and the snail was on top of Fruge.

  “He’s going to eat him,” Haron said, with some amount of relish.

  Fruge screamed and the gun flew from his hand as he tried to fight off the snail. The snail rolled right over him, covering his head, then backed up so it could roll over him again with its giant foot.

  “He’s not going to eat him,” Edeo said. “That’s not his mouth down there; it’s his foot.”

  “He’s sliming him,” Haron said, which was better.

  The snail rolled off Fruge, found his gun and stowed it in his gullet with a slurp.

  Fruge stood, his body dripping snail slime in huge dollops. He coughed.

  “I’m going to kill you with my bare hands.”

  The snail lunged at him then, and Fruge backed up. Fruge tried to move around him, but the snail was far faster than he. Fruge backed into the cave.

  Edeo slammed the door shut and Haron threw the bolt.

  “That’ll never hold him.”

  But the snail had apparently realized that and was pushing barrels in front of it, as well as crates and other bits of junk that lined the walls of the basement.

  Surveying Fruge’s cage, Edeo said, “Let’s get out of here.”

  Haron looked at the snail. “What about him?”

  Edeo looked up at the rope, wondering if they could haul the snail out, but he need not have worried. The snail slithered up the steps, its flexible foot molding itself to the stairs. It was up to the landing in seconds, pushing open the door.

  It hesitated there, its antennae waving around.

  “It’s probably never been outside,” Haron said.

  “It’s scared.”

  Edeo and Haron walked around it and stood out in the middle of the street, waving it on.

  Finally the snail scooted out of the building and into the open.

  Edeo grinned. “We’ll take it to my house. It can live in my room. Then Gremon can’t bully me anymore. It can make me gems whenever I want. We’ll be rich . . . .”

  Haron looked at Edeo, his eyebrows raised.

  Edeo caught his friend’s look.

  “I mean —”

  “We’d be no better than that wagger,” Haron said with a nod toward the building. Edeo paused, sipping at his dream one last time.

  “No,” Edeo said. “I guess not. Then where?”

  “He likes curdleberries.” He pointed to the spaceport, where the tarmacs were surrounded with native flora. “Of course, we could take the long way.”

  By the time they reached their street, they had quite a parade: dozens of children, the mailman, shop clerks, a team of street cleaners, even Gremon followed.

  The snail slid happily along, unperturbed by it all, as if it was expecting a parade.

  A magistrate caught up to them on Jury Street.

  “What is this? Where did this snail come from?”

  Edeo was brave enough to answer.

  “Fruge had him chained in a vacant building by the spaceport.” He showed the magistrate the soldered end of the chain. “We’re taking him to the spaceport so he can eat.”

  “Fruge,” the magistrate said with undisguised venom. He sent a muni to the vacant building, then accompanied the parade to the spaceport where he had one of the bumbling maintenance men open the gate so that the snail could crawl into the fields of lillweed and curdleberry bushes. In the distance, on the far side of the spaceport, a rocket roared into the sky. The snail cocked one antenna at it as it munched contentedly on a tuff of vegetation.

  It chuffed once at Edeo and Haron, then ambled off into the prairie.

  STORY NOTES

  “Ten Sigmas” is one of three parallel u
niverse stories in this collection — yes, I’m a bit infatuated with the idea — but this one is the one with the most interesting core idea. It first appeared in Talebones and later was published in Dozois’ Year’s Best Science Fiction, the first story from Talebones to make it into that long-running series. My pride in this story is enough that I chose it for this collection’s title.

  I can not recommend Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies enough. It speculates on why societies rise and fall and boils it down to the practical aspect of domesticable plants and animals. His ideas led me to wonder how scientists could actually test them. It’s easy now to see how mankind developed in the Crescent Valley, but what if we could test those theories with real universes? “The Teosinte War” tries to answer that “what-if.”

  It’s not easy being a normal person, with family and work commitments. Having a superhero’s job only makes it tougher. “Doctor Mighty and the Case of Ennui” is my take on superheros — and supervillains — who just aren’t in the right line of work. I put as many superhero jokes and puns in as I could and threw half of them out.

  Stories I write end up being set in the cities I live in at the time. When I wrote “Alien Fantasies” I lived in Pittsburgh. I was also watching a lot of Late Night. I actually did write the entire top-ten list.

  It’s not easy being a teen, and if there’s seven of you, you end up with seven times the pimples. “Summer of the Seven” is about growing up, jealousy, friendship, responsibility, all those things a teenager needs to learn, but also with a theme of scientific responsibility. “Summer of the Seven” is set in the same universe as my first novel Singularity’s Ring. (Tor Books, February 2008.) In the editing process, I realized the chapter didn’t add to the over plot arc, and so here it sits, cut from the final novel.

  The novel begins with the novelette “Strength Alone” instead. This story made the preliminary Nebula ballot, but not the final one. Strom’s story still is moving when I read it.

  “Singletons in Love” is the first story in the Ring universe that I wrote. It was a stand-alone novelette for Lou Anders’ Live Without a Net anthology. His theme for the anthology was one where the Internet was not the central technological gadget it seems to be for our world today. I posited a universe in which humans used biological means to create high-density human computers called pods. This story was reprinted in Gardner Dozois’ The Year’s Best Science Fiction, a first for me.

  “Dysfunctional Family Cat” is my wife Stacey’s fault. She’s allergic to cats. That, combined with the fact that many seem to hold felines sacred, caused me to make cats the clueless villains of this piece. The earlobe-based drug dispenser is still one of my favorite bits of technological extrapolation.

  I grew up in a trailer park very similar to the one in “Fallow Earth.” We never did come across an alien as shown here, though the people aren’t too far from the truth.

  You seldom understand what a bastion university life is until you leave it. “Death of the Egg King” draws on my emotional state during my time in graduate school at the University of Michigan.

  “Walls of the Universe” takes the nurture versus nature argument and uses parallel selves to see what happens when the selves are stressed to the limit. The people you end up hurting the most are those closest to yourself, and, of course, yourself. “Walls of the Universe” made the short lists for the Nebulas, Sturgeon, and Hugo Awards in 2007. It won the Asimov’s Readers Award for Best Novella.

  In writing “Snail Stones” I borrowed a bit of Haldeman’s All My Sins Remembered and Tiptree’s Brightness Falls From the Air, but with none of their drama. My protagonists are kids who find something wrong and do what they can to fix it. These are my favorite types of characters; these are my favorite types of drama.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  There are just too many people who are a part of these stories. Where do I start? First I note my debt to my writers workshops: Mary Soon Lee’s Pittsburgh Worldwrights where I learned to put nouns and verbs together in an interesting way, the Semi-Omniscents who saw most of these stories first, Writeshop where I started thinking about craft, the Million Monkeys who polished all the rough edges, and Blue Heaven where I came to trust my instincts. Every one of those groups seemed to happen at the right time for me, and every one of them is filled with fine writers with whom I have been lucky to work.

  Many thanks to Patrick, not just for making this collection happen, but for giving me a chance when I was starting out. And thanks to the other editors who published my work: Jed Hartman (and the rest of the Strange Horizon crew), Gardner Dozois, Sheila Williams, Lou Anders, Richard Blair, and Jan Berrien Berends.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Paul’s fiction has appeared in various magazines and anthologies. Singularity’s Ring, his first novel, was released from Tor in February 2008 and a science fiction collection, Ten Sigmas and Other Unlikelihoods was released from Fairwood Press in March 2008. His novella “The Walls of the Universe” was nominated for the Sturgeon, Nebula, and Hugo Awards in 2007.

  His second novel, The Walls of the Universe, appeared in February 2009. It was optioned by Aron Warner of Strange Weather. The sequel, The Broken Universe, was released in June of 2012.