Singularity's Ring

by Paul Melko

  I take the woman over my shoulder, and say, “Hold on.” I slide down the hill, one arm to balance me, one arm to hold her, and my legs folded beneath me, lowering myself down the slope.

  No hidden tree branches, I hope. There are none, and sooner than I think, we are at the bottom of the ravine.

  The two others are there, sprawled at the edge of a small, unfrozen stream. Sometime in the past, water has carved a cavelike trough into the ravine wall. The woman on my shoulder has passed out, her face grey, her breathing shallow. How bad is her fracture? I wonder. How much worse have I made it? Manuel would have known an elegant way to get her down.

  The air is warm here, in this grotto that is nearly below the ground. It is like a cave; the ground is a constant temperature a few meters below the surface, regardless of the blazing heat or the blowing snow. I squat. It may be five degrees.

  “We can rest here.” We can even sleep, I think. No chance of frostbite. We can’t get wet; the stream is too shallow.

  A few meters down the streambed, I find an indentation. It is dry rock with roots overhanging. I carry the woman there and lead the others to the cave.

  “Sleep,” I tell them.

  My body is exhausted, and I watch the three fall asleep at once. I cannot. The female is in shock. I have made her arm worse by slinging her over my shoulder. She is probably bleeding internally.

  I look at her grey face, and console myself that she would be dead if we were still a thousand meters up the mountain.

  Unless they had sent another aircar.

  I sit there, my heart cold, not sleeping.

  I have always been strong, even when we were children, before we first consensed. I was always taller, stronger, heavier. And that has always been my weapon. It is obvious. I am not about deception. I am not about memory, or insight, or agility. I am quick when threats are near, yes, but never agile.

  I never thought I would outlive my pod. I never thought I’d be the one left.

  I don’t want to think these things, so I stand up, and use my utility knife to cut two saplings that are trying to grow in the gully. Using the rope, I fashion a travois. It will be easier on the female.

  “You should have left us on the mountain.” It is the one who I had first found in the snow. “You’re wasting too much energy on a broken pod.”

  I say nothing, though I could acknowledge the truth of it.

  “But then you wouldn’t know that. All your thinking parts are missing.”

  He’s angry, and he is striking out at me because of it. I nod.

  “You probably don’t even understand what I’m saying.”

  “Yes, I am strength and nothing more.”

  Maybe he wants to fight, I think, so I add, “I saved your life today.”

  “So? Should I thank you?”

  “No. But you owe me your life. So we will walk down this mountain in the morning, and then we are even. You can die then, and I won’t care.”

  “Pigheaded.”

  “Yes.” I can’t argue with that either.

  He is asleep in moments, and I am too.

  I am stiff and cold in the morning, but we are all alive. I squat on the stones and listen for a few moments. The trickle of the water muffles all sound. I can’t hear the whine of a rescue aircar. I can’t hear the shouts of searchers. We have traveled so far that they will not look for us in the right spot. We have no choice but to continue on.

  A wave of doubt catches me unaware. The tenet of pod sentience is that a consensus of one is always false. My choice has doomed us. But more than likely staying on the mountain would have done the same, only sooner. These three want that, I know. Perhaps I should too.

  I touch my pockets one by one. I am hungry, but I already know there is no food. I was just stepping out of the tent for a moment. I had not prepared myself for a long journey in the cold. I check the pockets of the injured one, but she too is without food.

  “Do you have food?” I ask the male, the one who argued with me. “What’s your name anyway?”

  “Hagar Jul—” he starts to say, then stops. He glares at me. “No food.”

  I squat next to him. “Perhaps I can lead you back up the mountain, and then you’ll forgive me for saving you.”

  “‘Saving’ is a debatable term.”

  I nod. “What’s your name?”

  We have been classmates for ten years, and yet I do not know his individual name. We have always interfaced as pods, never as individuals.

  He doesn’t say anything for a long moment, then says, “David.”

  “And them?”

  “Susan is the one with the broken arm. Ahmed is the third.” These two are still asleep on the ground.

  “The others may still be alive,” I say, and as I say it, I know it is what I wish for myself. But I saw the river of snow that carried them away.

  “We didn’t find Alia and Wren,” he says, and then he coughs. It is to hide the sob.

  I turn away, not wanting to embarrass him, and I say, “One of them found our tent. She may still live.”

  “That was Wren. Alia was near me.”

  “A rescue party—”

  “Did you see a rescue party?”

  “No.”

  “A body will survive for an hour in the snow if there’s air. If there’s no air, then it is ten minutes.” His voice is savage. The other two stir.

  “It was like swimming in oil. Like swimming in a dream while smothering,” David says.

  “David.”

  It is Ahmed. He pulls him close, and I smell the tang of consensus. They gather near Susan and sit for minutes, thinking. I am glad for them, but I walk down the stream several meters, not wanting to be reminded. I am a singleton now.

  The creek twists and turns. I pull myself across a rotten pine tree blocking the way, banging loose a rain of brown needles. My breath hangs in the moist air. It is not cold anymore, and I feel like a thaw has passed through me.

  The stream widens and opens up over a rocky basin where it spills in white spray. I see the valley before me, shrouded in mist. A kilometer below, the stream merges with a river. The ground to the river is rough and rocky, but not as snowy as we have traveled until now. Nor is it as steep.

  We’d left for the survival trip from a base camp near a river. I can only suppose that this is the same river. Following it would lead us to the camp.

  I hurry back to the three.

  They stand apart, their consensus concluded. David hoists Susan’s travois.

  “Are you ready?” I ask.

  They look at me, their faces relaxed. This is the first time these three have consensed since their pod was sundered. It is a good sign that they can do it with just three.

  “We’re going back to find Alia and Wren,” David says.

  I stand for a moment, voiceless. They have reached a false consensus. It is something that we are trained to detect and discard. But the trauma and loss they have suffered has broken their thought processes.

  David takes my silence for agreement, and he pulls Susan up the streambed.

  I stand, unable to resist a valid consensus, unable to stop them from climbing back up the mountain. I take one step toward them, perhaps to fall in line with them, but I stop.

  “No!” I say. “You’ll never make it.”

  The three of them look at me as if I am a rock. It’s not false consensus; it’s pod instability. Insanity.

  “We need to re-form the whole,” David says.

  “Wait! You’ve reached false consensus!”

  “How could you know? You can’t consense at all.” The biting words jolt me.

  They start walking. I run to intercept, placing a hand on David’s chest.

  “You will die if you go back up the mountain. You can’t make it.”

  Ahmed pushes my arm away.

  “We have to get back to Alia and Wren.”

  “Who was your ethicist?” I say. “Was it Wren? Is that why you’re making faulty consensus? Think
! You will die, just like Wren and Alia are dead.”

  “We had no ethical specialist,” Ahmed says.

  “I saw the river from the end of this gully. We’re almost to the camp! If we turn around, we will never find our way. We will be on the mountain at night. We have no food. We have no shelter. We will die.”

  No response but a step forward.

  I push David hard, and he stumbles. Susan screams as the travois slams onto the rocks.

  “You have reached a faulty consensus,” I say again.

  Pheromones flood the air, and I realize much of it is mine: veto, a simple pheromone signal we all know but rarely use. David swings at me, but I stop his fist. He is not strength.

  “We go down,” I say.

  David’s face is taut. He spins and the three fall into consensus.

  I push David away from his podmates, breaking their contact. I push Ahmed onto his back.

  “No consensus! We go now!”

  I pick up Susan’s travois and drag her down the streambed. Fast. I look back once and the two are standing there, watching. Then they come.

  Maybe I am reaching false consensus too. Maybe I will kill us all. But it is all I can do.

  The trek down the gorge is not easy on Susan, as the snow has disappeared in spots and the travois rides roughly across the ground. I find myself issuing soothing thoughts, though I know she cannot understand them. Only crude emotions can pass between pods, and sometimes not even that if they aren’t from the same creche. I change the thoughts to feelings of well-being. Perhaps she can understand the simple pheromones.

  Each time I glance behind, I see the others trailing. I have broken their re-formed pod again with trauma, and I hope that I have done no irreparable damage to them. The doctors of the Institute will be the judge of that. Perhaps they can save them. I am a useless case and will probably have to emigrate to one of the singleton enclaves in South America or Australia.

  A line of boulders faces me, surrounded by smaller stones and rocks, too large for the travois to travel freely across.

  “Take one end each,” I say to Ahmed and David. The travois becomes a stretcher. If I walk slowly, we make awkward progress.

  The forest has changed. The pines are gone, and we are surrounded by maples. I keep checking the horizon for any sign of search parties. Why aren’t they frantically trying to find us? Had we passed too far beyond the search pattern? Do they already know where we are? Perhaps they found us in the night, noted that we were broken pods and left us to fend for ourselves.

  The paranoia drowns me, and I stumble on a loose rock. Even they would not be so callous. Everything is a test, Moira says. Is this just another? Would they kill a pod to test the rest of us?

  That I cannot believe.

  At the edge of a four-meter drop, our stream falls into the river, adding its small momentum to the charging rapids. I see no easy way down; we are forced to unlash Susan and help her down the jagged slope.

  The rocks are wet and slimy. I slip, and we are flying to the ground, falling less than a meter, but the wind is knocked from me. Susan lands atop me, and she screams in pain.

  I roll over and try to breathe. Then Ahmed and David are there, helping us up. I don’t want to stand up. I just want to lie there.

  “Up,” David says. “More to go.”

  Everything is hazy in my vision, and I feel dizzy. The pain in my chest is not going away. I have a sharp sting in my ribs, and I prod myself. I have broken ribs. I almost collapse, but Ahmed pulls me up.

  Susan manages to stand too now, and we limp along the flat stones of the shrunken riverbed. In a few months it will fill the entire wash.

  We are an ad hoc pod, all of us clinging together as we walk, step after step downriver. I am no longer strength. I am weakness and pain.

  We pass a boulder and the smell hits me as we see it.

  A bear, almost as big as the boulder. No, three bears pawing through the slow water for fish. We are not five meters from the biggest and closest.

  Fear sweeps through the air; my fight response kicks in and the pain washes out of me like cold rain.

  We have surprised the bears.

  The closest rears up on its hind legs. On all fours it was to my chest. Standing, it is a meter above me. Its claws are six centimeters long.

  We back away. I know we cannot outrun a bear in this open terrain. Our only hope is to flee alone.

  Separate, I send, then remember that the three are not of my pod. “We need to separate and run,” I say.

  The bear stops coming toward us. I think for a moment that it is reacting to my voice, but then I remember the smell I had caught as I passed the boulder. Pheromones.

  The bears aren’t a natural species.

  Hello, I send, in the simplest of glyph thoughts.

  The bear’s jaws snap shut and it lands on its four legs again.

  Not food, it sends.

  The thought is more than simple. I can taste it like my own podmates’.

  Not food. Friend.

  The bear considers us with liquid brown eyes, then seems to shrug before turning away.

  Come.

  I start to follow, but fear emanating from the three stops me. I realize they have not tasted the bear’s thoughts.

  “Come on,” I say. “They aren’t going to eat us.”

  “You … you can understand it?” David asks.

  “A little.”

  “They’re a pod,” he says wonderingly.

  My shock has faded with recognition. On the farm with Mother Redd, we have swum with the bioengineered beavers. We have ourselves modified clutches of ducks into clusters. Now that I know, I can see the glands on the backs of the bears’ arms. At the neck are slits that release the chemical memories. And to receive them, the olfactory lobe of their brain will have been enhanced.

  That they are bears, that they are wild things, seems at first incongruent. The experiments on composite animals have been all on smaller, manageable beasts. But why not bears?

  They amble along the riverbed, and I jog to follow them, though my ribs hurt. In a moment I am among them, and I smell their thoughts, like silver fish in the river. Intelligent, not simple at all.

  Sending Friendship, I reach out and touch the side of the bear who confronted us.

  His fur is wet from his splashing at fish, and the smell is thick, not just pheromones and memories, but a wild animal’s smell. I think I must smell worse. His mane is silver-tipped; his claws click on the stones.

  I rub his neck just above the memory glands, and he pushes against me in response. I smell his affection. I sense deepness of thought and playfulness. I feel the power of his body. This is strength.

  I catch images of topography, of places where fish swarm, of a dead elk. I see assessments of danger, and choices of path and best approach. I catch the consensus of decision. These three are a functioning pod.

  The thoughts swirl through my head, but they shouldn’t. I should not be able to catch their thoughts, but I can. Even humans can’t share chemical memories between pods, just emotions sometimes.

  I send an image of the avalanche.

  The bears shudder. I understand their fear of the river of snow. They have seen it; it is part of their memories.

  I ask them where the camp is. They know, and I see it on the edge of this river, near the rotten stump with the tasty termites.

  I laugh, and they echo my joy, and for a moment I forget that I am alone.

  Come on, they send.

  “Come on,” I call back to the three. Hesitantly they follow.

  The bears lead us through the trees, and abruptly we push through onto a trail, smashed flat by hikers’ boots, a human trail. They sniff once, then amble across it and vanish into the brush.

  I want to follow. Why shouldn’t I? I have fulfilled my duty to Hagar Julian. Surely the bears would allow me to join them. My body shudders. I would still be a singleton. I would still be alone.

  Goodbye, I send, though I
doubt they are close enough to catch it. The chemical memories cannot travel far.

  I lead Susan down the trail, supporting her. I hear the sounds of camp, the voices, the whine of an aircar, before we round the last curve of the trail. We all stop. David looks at me, perhaps with pity, perhaps with thanks, then he leads the remainder of his pod into the camp.

  I stand alone.

  I fall to my knees, so tired, so weak. My strength can get me no farther.

  Then I feel a push at my back, and it is the bear. He nudges me again. One arm around his steel-like neck, I stand, and we walk together into the camp.

  The camp is awhirl, twice as many tents as when we left it, a bevy of aircars, and everyone stops to watch me and the bear.

  Everyone but my pod, who are rushing at me, alive, and I feel them before I touch them, and we are one. Sweet consensus.

  I see everything that has happened, and they see everything that I have done, and in one moment it is I who surfed the avalanche, dangling on the line Strom tied to a tree trunk, and it is we who walked down the mountain and communed with bears.

  You saved us, Strom, Moira sends. Quant shows me how the tent, dangling on my line of spider-silk, rides the top of the cascade of snow instead of plunging down the mountain. I hug Meda and Manuel to my chest, squeezing. It hurts my ribs, but I do not let go.

  “Careful!” Meda says, but she buries her face in my chest.

  I am strength again, I think, as my pod helps me to the infirmary, not because they are weak, but because we are all strong.

  TWO

  Meda

  We spent a week in the Rockies searching for the bears in all the wrong places. Of course we couldn’t tell the military duo that flew in to head the search that we knew their territory because Strom had shared memories with the bear pod. The duo didn’t even believe the bears had been a pod, mostly likely “an escaped, partially domesticated grizzly.”

  We helped search anyway and tried mining the databases for bear pod information in the evenings. There was nothing.

  How could someone hide a whole line of research regarding carnivore pods? I asked.