"We don't swim,” she said finally.
"None of you?"
Another pause. They touched hands, tap, tap, tap, pads sliding together. “None of us."
"Okay. Well, we're going swimming in the pond."
The smell was stronger. The heads turned inward, and they held palms together for ten seconds. What was so complicated about going swimming?
Finally, she said, “We'll come and watch, but we won't swim in dirty water."
Meda said, “Okay,” and we shrugged.
After physics, we studied biology, and, in that, Mother Redd instructed us closely. The farmhouse was not just a farmhouse; attached were a greenhouse and a laboratory with gene-parsers and splicers. The hundred hectares of woods, ponds, and fields were all Mother Redd's experiment, and part of it she let us work on. We were rebuilding the local habitat, reintroducing flora and fauna in a close facsimile to what had been there before the Exodus and the Gene Wars. Mother Redd was building beaver pods. She was letting us build pods of ducks.
Candace followed us to observe our latest version of duck: a clutch of ducklings that had been gengineered to share chemical duck memories, supposedly. There'd been success in modifying some mammals for chemical memories, but none for other classes of Chordata. We were trying to build a duck pod for the Science Fair at the end of the summer.
We'd released our ducklings—two different modified clutches—by a pond on the farm, and every morning, we went and watched how they worked together.
Bola slid between the reeds while the rest of us hunched down and listened to his thoughts on the wind. The chemical memories were fragile and diffused over distance, but still we could understand what he was seeing and thinking if we concentrated.
"Where are the ducks?” Candace asked.
"Shh!"
"I don't see them."
"You're going to scare them!"
"Fine.” The seven of her folded her arms across her chests.
An image flitted across from Bola of the ducklings poking at the edge of the pond with their bills. They were still covered in yellow fluff that wasn't quite feathers yet.
"See? One of them saw that patch of moss and the others came over right away!"
Maybe she signaled with sound.
Maybe it was random.
We'd mounted pheromone detectors around the pond to pick up any intrapod memory-sharing among the ducks. So far, we'd measured nothing, so we were using observation to try to prove that the ducks were thinking as one.
"Here, ducky, ducky!"
"Candace!” Meda yelled.
The duck, about to climb into her hand, scattered with its siblings.
"What?"
"Will you leave our experiment alone?"
"I was just going to hold it."
"We want them to be wild, not bonded to a human."
"Fine.” She turned and left, and, in disbelief, we watched her go. This was supposed to be where we spent our summers. This was our farm.
It's going to be a long summer, Strom sent.
* * * *
We went swimming by ourselves that day, and, when we got back, we found Candace in the lab building her own duck.
Great.
"Look!” she cried. “I'm building a duck too!"
We didn't want to look, but I suggested we at least feign interest.
She showed us the gene sequence she was using, a modified string used with the beavers.
"We've tried that already,” Meda said.
"Yeah, I know. I looked at your notes. But I'm adding a different olfactory sequence."
She looked at our notes! Our notes were on our locked desktop.
I advised calm, but Meda's face twitched with rage.
"Good luck,” she grated, and we left.
In the barn, Meda railed, too angry for chemical thoughts. Her emotions filled the loft and caused the pigs Mother Redd was building to oink and stamp at us. “She's stealing our project, and she's stealing our notes. She has got to go!"
"She just wants to fit in,” I said.
No one else was buying that.
"We should give her the benefit of the doubt,” I said.
Manuel growled, and snaked his fury through the air.
"Anyone can enter the gengineering competition at the Fair,” I said.
We need to do something.
What?
No one was looking at me.
We need more ducks.
How many more?
A lot.
They all turned to me, and I smelled the consensus like fresh bread. I could have held out, but I didn't. I wanted to win the competition too.
"Fine."
* * * *
We snuck all the incubators we could find from the lab into the barn. Candace had already tagged a couple for herself. Then we built a dozen more from spare parts.
For the genes, we begged cutting-edge sequences from Professor Ellis at the Institute—mammalian, reptilian, avian—anything that we could jam into the anatine DNA. We cooked eggs instead of doing our chores. We even cooked while we studied. By the time we were done cooking, we had over a gross of duck eggs incubating.
We figured that at least some of them would show something interesting that we could report at the Fair. Candace couldn't keep up with our volume of output either. We had her licked, no problem.
* * * *
"Which egg has which genes?"
"Um,” Meda said. Mother Redd was surveying the rows of duck eggs. We'd hidden the incubators in the empty stalls, but you couldn't miss the electric wires we'd strung across the rafters.
One of her eyed the code violations and tsked.
"None of these are marked,” she said.
"Um,” Meda said.
"Where's your control variable? Where's your lab books?"
We didn't bother to “um.” Embarrassment coursed among us. I expected a well-deserved lecture, but instead Mother Redd said, “Come on. There's someone in the house I want you to meet."
We climbed down from the loft and followed Mother Redd across the yard to the house. I tried to force down the I-told-you-so deep inside.
Strom and Bola both threw me guilty looks.
Some scientist we were.
Candace and another pod were in the great room. The other pod was a quintet, in his thirties. One of him was examining one of Candace with a stethoscope; another tapped another of her on the chest.
"Doctor Thomasin. This is Apollo."
Four pods in the great room, large though it was, made the place pretty crowded, especially when one of us was a seven. We hung against the wall, and let Meda shake hands with Doctor Thomasin's interface.
"Ah, Apollo Papadopulos! A pleasure to meet someone with your strong lineage."
"Um, thanks, I guess."
Who cares what our lineage is? We had been designed and built, then raised in Mingo Creche. As far as we knew, our lineage was just the result of some scientists somewhere mixing eggs and sperm together.
"I'm Candace's doctor. I built her,” he said.
Several of Candace blushed.
He was young to be a human gengineer. But he must have been good to have succeeded at a septet.
Compare his and Candace's face, Bola sent.
I saw it the way Bola saw it: Thomasin was a genetic donor for Candace. He could have been her biological father if she'd been born that way.
Weird. We had no father or mother, though we understood the concept. Mother Redd took the title, but she was more a mentor than an actual mother to us.
"Congratulations,” Meda said, though it seemed odd even as she said it.
"Thank you."
He turned and started discussing something regarding nanosplicing with Mother Redd, so we snuck out with Candace on our heels.
"Isn't he great?” she said.
"You have a nice father,” Meda said, before I could cut her off.
"He's not my dad! He's my doctor."
"You look—"
; Meda!
"How're your ducks doing?” she asked.
"I think they're gonna hatch soon!” she said. Bola pointed out that it was a different one talking than before; she'd changed faces when we changed topics. Meda was always our face; she did all our interfacing with other pods. “I've been varying the heating and light to simulate a real mother sitting on the eggs."
"Great,” Meda said.
Another of Candace spoke up. How many faces did she use? “Did you know we had our first period? That's why Doctor Thomasin was here."
"Um.” It was our turn to flush. I felt Strom's shock. He turned away from Candace and looked across the yard at the barn. Meda, Quant, and I had all had our first menses. We'd all had to deal with it, as well as wet dreams and all the other drawbacks of male and female puberty. But some things were best left within the pod.
"You know what that means, don't you?"
"Yeah, I think so,” said Meda. “We're half female, you know."
"No. That isn't what I mean. Doctor Thomasin made me so I can breed true."
"What?"
"You know why all pods are gengineered."
"Yes!"
"If I breed with another of my type of pod, I can birth six members of a septet."
"If you breed with a six male, one female septet?"
"Yes!"
"Why do you need a septet? You just need one male to inseminate all of you and one more female to carry the seventh."
They have a male, Manuel sent.
That is so gross.
"Biological diversity, of course!"
We all felt foggy, the smell of confusion circling among us.
"But—"
"If you breed,” she went on, “you'll just have normal human singletons who will still have to be coalesced into a pod. It won't happen naturally. With me, my children will be born as a pod!"
"But—"
"It's so much more stable biologically, don't you see?"
"But—"
"Until pods can reproduce more pods, we're just a genetic dead-end. This is all part of Doctor Thomasin's work."
"But—"
"But what?"
"You're just a new breed. You're still human."
She stared at us with her fourteen green eyes. “I'm more than human, Apollo."
"So you can only have babies with a pod just like you, another of Dr. Thomasin's septets. You can't have babies with just anyone."
"Oh, I see what you're getting at. Don't be silly! Procreation doesn't have to follow love. I'll have children for the sake of the species regardless of who I bond with,” Candace said.
"Did Doctor Thomasin pick your mate yet?"
"No. I guess not. Maybe."
She paused to think. This time we saw the interface cycle into the pack and another of the identical females take her place.
Why is she doing that? Manuel asked.
Identity crisis, Bola replied.
"Even if he has,” the new face said, “that's fine. Besides, any mate will have to be one that he made. No one else has succeeded in building a septet."
"So you don't know other septets?” we asked.
"No. Not really. But there are others like me, I guess. And I'd mate with whomever was necessary, to propagate the species."
"Pods aren't a separate species. We're all human beings,” we said.
"Of course we're a separate species!” she replied. “Pods are much better than singletons. It's obvious. And I'm much better than a sextet or a quintet or a quartet."
"We're all human,” we said again.
"Well, you may be human, but I'm another species,” she said, walking off.
I'll say.
* * * *
We rotated the eggs every day. We measured the humidity with a wet bulb. We determined temperature with sensors that logged to our desktop. The damn alarms kept failing and waking us in the middle of the night. We couldn't just roll over and go back to sleep, since the ducklings might really be freezing to death. After fifteen days of incubation, we opened the vents on the incubators and lowered the temperature a half a degree.
Mother Redd's words had stung us, and we started keeping better records. We marked the eggs with their genome tag, at least the ones we could remember. We tracked temperature and humidity hourly and graphed the data.
We watched the brood by the lake meticulously, though the pheromone sensors never picked up a whiff of chemical thought and our lab books were line after line of “No sign of consensus."
We avoided Candace when we could, which was tougher than it would seem on a farm of over a hundred hectares. Mother Redd had given her chores that seemed to overlap ours.
Candace's arguments, however, were something we couldn't avoid. I found myself researching her ideas. She was wrong about a lot of things and right about a lot of things too.
The classical definition of “species” still stated that pods were human. If Meda, Quant, or I had a child with an unmodified human, the child would be human. We weren't a new species. However, we weren't entirely standard human either. We had been modified by our predecessors to have pads on our palms that could transfer chemical memories among our podmates. We had glands at our necks to send pheromonal emotions and crude thoughts. We had enhanced olfactory capability to decode the scents. Unless closely inspected, we would not look any different than a human from a century ago.
But the fact that we were a pod, that we functioned as a single being in the fabric of our society, indicated that we were a radically different type of social organization, created by our biological technology and artificially sustained. If there were no creche-system and no genetic modification of embryos to add pod traits, pod society would disappear in a few generations, replaced by normal humans. Candace was right; if the Overgovernment fell and society crumbled, then pods would fall apart. There would be no pods without constant social manipulation. We were the most advanced animal on the planet, but behind that façade was a framework of scaffolding and wires.
There were three million pods in the world, which amounted to just over ten million people. Three decades ago, there had been over ten billion humans on the planet. The cataclysm was far from over. We pods had inherited the Earth, not because we were superior, but because we had failed to leave or die or advance with the rest of the Community. It was a fragile ecosystem we had inherited. Our own biology was fragile, and perhaps more desperate than we knew.
We spoke to Mother Redd.
"How stable is our society?” Meda asked one evening as we cleaned up after dinner. Candace was out turning her duck eggs.
"We have a representative democracy implemented by consensus-formed legislation. It is more stable than most,” she said.
"No. I mean biologically and societally. If we lost our scientific knowledge, what would happen?"
One of Mother Redd stopped her drying to look at us, while the other two continued with the pots.
"A sage question. I don't know, but I expect that the next generation of humans would be normal. Perhaps we could form pods; perhaps the genetic changes we have implemented would breed true."
"Do we know if they will?"
She smiled. “Perhaps you should do a literature search."
"I did! I couldn't understand the results.” Biology wasn't our strongest subject. Physics and math suited us.
"Technology gives us our individuality. That is the problem. And, given that, we will not willingly give up our individuality, we can't see the path back,” Mother Redd said. “We have passed our own singularity, just as the Community did. And you have hit upon the greatest problem of our world. How do we propagate?"
There were some who said the Exodus—the near instantaneous vanishing of all the billions of Community members—was a technological singularity, the transmogrification of normal humans to post-humans. Mother Redd was saying that the pod society had created its own parallel singularity, one we could not reverse without losing our identity.
"Candace is the future, i
sn't she?"
"Maybe. Doctor Thomasin's ideas are radical. Perhaps reproducing septets are the answer. There are others researching it, including ethicists."
"Why?"
"If our society and our biology are unsound, we cannot allow them to advance."
"But—"
Candace bounded in then, shouting, “One of my ducklings is hatching!"
We all went out to watch the wet and lizard-like bird peck its way through the shell. Our mind was on Mother Redd's words, and we kept touching hands, swapping thoughts, as we considered them. I realized then, as we watched the ducklings hatch, that there were those who were considering the elimination of pod society and biology as a desirable path into the future.
* * * *
Doctor Thomasin visited again the next day. He was visiting every week now, examining Candace for hours. That evening, after he left, Candace hadn't shown for dinner, so Mother Redd sent us up to fetch her.
"Candace?” Meda called, as she knocked on the door.
"She needs to check the temperature on the ducklings, too,” said Bola. We pretended we didn't care about Candace's project, but clearly we did.
We just don't want the ducklings to die!
"Yes?” Her voice was soft, and male. When had her male component done anything but stay in the background?
Meda pushed open the door.
Candace was sprawled on the beds, her faces flushed, her shirts wet at the pits. The room reeked of heavy thinking.
"Are you okay?"
The male was the only one sitting. “We'll be okay."
"It's dinner time."
"We're not feeling too well. I think we'll pass."
One of the females opened her eyes.
Didn't she have green eyes before?
Yes.
"Do you want us to check on your ducklings?"
"What ducklings?” she asked.
"Your Science Fair project!"
She grasped wrists, consensing.
"Oh, right. Thanks."
"Are you all right?"
"I'm fine. Really."
Maybe Doctor Thomasin gave her a vaccination.
She's old enough to make her own vaccinations.
We ate quickly, then went out to the lab to feed and check Candace's ducks. Ours were still a few days from hatching.
Asimov's SF, August 2005 Page 8