by Paul Melko
It was easier than we expected. A truck stop, run by a clan of singletons, served as a bunching point for the long-haul trucks. We asked around until we found someone willing to give us a lift up the Isthmus of Panama into central North America. A jovial duo was glad to have us: a duo and a trio on a walkabout before starting new jobs. We figured the OG would be looking for a quintet, not two simpler pods.
In hours, we were out of the Amazon basin, rising toward the Andes, Quant listening to the driver drone on while the rest of us tried to sleep in the back.
Safe, Manuel whispered.
North, Meda replied.
We’ll find the bears, Strom sent.
As I listened to our dozing thoughts, I kept my own concerns to myself. Sooner or later we would have to face what we had done, and what had been done to us.
The base camp was barren, the buildings grey and dilapidated, as if they had been abandoned for years instead of months. We had seen no one in our hike up from Old Denver, and here was more of the same. Above us loomed the summits, visible through the trees. Not far away was the river Strom had hiked down with Hagar Julian. It was still turgid with spring rains even though the snow had mostly melted from the peaks.
Nothing, Quant sent. No sign of them.
Strom looked away, surveying the landscape, keeping his thoughts to himself. He had grown more silent the farther we hiked. The bears were gone.
Deer, squirrels, rabbits we had found in abundance as we climbed, all unmodified. Even smaller carnivores were present; one night we had heard the howl of coyotes. Strom’s bears remained hidden, and Strom took it personally.
The OG spent weeks looking for them. What chance do we have? Manuel sent.
Strom did not reply, his gaze on the peaks.
I, sensing stress in our unity, said, Strom found them once, he can do it again. As it came out, I realized how much pressure my words placed on Strom. But I couldn’t take my thoughts back, and Quant’s halfhearted consensus faded away unanswered.
Strom sent me a quick thought, Thanks, Moira.
We had been running for weeks, since we’d left Columbus Station, to the Ring, down the elevator, up the Amazon, and finally through Central America along the North-South Highway. I had known this could be a fool’s errand, yet I had accepted consensus. Looking for the bears was a goal, some quest, some respite while we healed our sundering.
In the distance a waterfall caught the sun’s afternoon rays scattering the light.
It’s not like the Amazon at all, Manuel said. His thoughts still felt muffled, his emotions distant, but every day he was closer and stronger. The drug he had been administered in Bolivopolis was slowly wearing off. A wave of relief passed among us as I thought this. It had not been easy for the four of us to watch as Manuel drifted farther away.
It’s almost desolate, Meda agreed.
We had passed great swaths of empty land on our trip north, areas where biological agents or radiation had destroyed everything in huge radii of death. These mountains were the first wild areas we had seen, yet the diversity was nothing compared to the Amazon.
Strom gazed across the shallow valley behind us. Bears cover a large area, Strom sent. He was now an expert on bears, though he had no more knowledge than the rest of us. What one of us knew, another could access. They travel far.
These aren’t really bears, Quant pointed out. They are gene-modded bear clusters. Bear behavior will be overridden by the intelligence built into the pod.
We still have human patterns of behavior, Strom argued.
Overridden by pod behavior.
Let’s rest, I said, wanting to deflect the argument.
While the rest of us sat, Strom remained standing. His gaze followed the river into the mountains. We sat silently for a moment, as we passed a water bottle around.
He said three times, Strom sent, staring at the mountains.
I thought he miscounted, Quant replied.
Confusion for a moment as our thoughts circled and I tasted what we were thinking: Anderson McCorkle had said we’d evaded him three times.
Quant counted for us. Once on Columbus Station, once in the Amazon.
Twice in the Amazon, Manuel countered.
He could have counted that as one, Quant replied.
Strom’s memory of the avalanche whisked between us. A flash of light on the mountain before the second avalanche. He had always assumed it was another aircar that had come to rescue the rest of us.
But the first had already landed. Why would they send two? Quant asked.
If they had it would have landed right then, I said.
It was the flicker of moonlight on moving snow, Strom sent.
Or an explosion meant to kill us, Quant replied, saying what we had been avoiding.
No, I can’t believe that, Strom sent.
I started thoughts in the other direction, distraction. Are we camping here?
But Strom was already adding, We’ll check. We’ll go see for ourselves.
Our plan became twofold as we followed the river into the higher elevations: first, to find the bears, to understand what they were, and, second, to prove our consensus wrong, to prove the avalanche that had killed one of Hagar Julian had no human attribution.
Our course meandered as Strom and Quant tried to find the best path up, back and forth through foothills and valleys, but ultimately higher and higher into the mountains. The summer heat had melted most of the glacial ice around the summit, but still the weather was chill at night, causing us to find heat among ourselves in the tent.
Of the bears we saw no sign. Though Strom thought nothing publicly, I knew he had expected to find them immediately, to discover their secret by only looking once.
We did find houses, pre-Exodus buildings, decrepit and aged, many reclaimed by the forests. One such building appeared as we climbed a cliff face, scooting up a dihedral into a clearing, the backyard of a mansion. It was larger than the creche, larger than Mother Redd’s farm, yet we knew such places usually housed single families.
I guess we could have taken the road, Manuel sent. He glanced at us, and we saw the image of ourselves, covered in dust. Quant was biting at a hangnail. Meda’s hair hung across her face. We shared a laugh, the first in a while.
Explore? Quant asked. She spit out her nail and took a step toward the house. Uplink dishes adorned the roofline, tastefully hidden in the gables.
No, I sent. Kilometers to go today. That and I didn’t want to come across any signs of Community tech. All of these reminders had been left behind us for weeks. Meda needed no new reminders.
Why not? Quant asked, nettled.
I tried to share a private thought with Quant, so that she would drop it, but Meda must have caught some of it. She cast me a look, but Quant dropped it, and we moved on.
We turned away from the river then, climbing into forests of deciduous trees. A rain shower doused us before we could find shelter under an overhang of rock.
Strom stood in the rain, looking into a ravine.
Strom.
Rain washed the thoughts from the air.
He turned back to us.
I know this place, he sent. That’s where we spent the night. He corrected himself, Not us, but Hagar Julian and I.
I nodded, and I pulled him tighter into our huddle. I wondered again whether we should have been searching here.
Three days later we reached the treeline. Clumps of snow covered the ground in shaded places, but mostly the mountain was rock-covered barrenness. Here and there, misshapen pine trees jutted from the ground.
Quant spotted the pattern first, pointing out the chutes where the two avalanches had flowed.
There and there, she sent. You can see the path where the trees are gone and the rocks are turned over.
Through her eyes, it was obvious where the rubbled chutes ran: no trees, eddies around large boulders, rock that was just starting to weather. Following them up with my eyes, I saw the ledge some three hundred meters up where they had started.
An outcropping of rock split the streams.
If there’s any evidence, Strom sent. It’s there.
We camped near our campsite of a year ago, though the pines that had shielded us had been whisked away. During the night, the wind sang in the ropes of our tent, and I’m not sure that any of us more than dozed.
At dawn we attacked the slope, using our spider silk rope and the few anchors and carabiners we’d purchased in Old Denver with the scrip we’d taken from McCorkle. Manuel led the way, though he could have climbed it by himself in minutes. I found myself lost in the game of hand holds and path optimization.
Cold as the air was, we were sweating, removing coats and tying them at our waists. Around noon we reached the summit of the outcropping, a tabletop of granite around which the avalanches had flowed. From there, the river valley spread out below us, a green cut in the mountains.
Base camp, Manuel sent, pointing to a patch of grey near the river kilometers away.
I looked down the chutes, and the destruction was clear from this vantage. From below, it had taken Quant to see it. From above, the trails of destruction were swaths of dark grey rubble.
Those avalanches took a lot of rock with them, Meda sent.
Claw marks, Quant sent. An aircar deployed its stabilizing claw here.
She squatted on the stone, stuck her finger in a groove of punched stone. Manuel found the second, and then paced off the distance to the third hole in the triangle.
Ten meters, he said, giving us an estimated body width.
Conojet or a Thalit, Quant replied.
Military uses Thalits.
Strom erupted in veto. We don’t know when this car was here. It could have been afterward, during the search.
I agreed, and our consensus derailed.
Manuel scrambled up the wall a few more tens of meters, right up to the top of the sheer.
“Careful,” Strom said.
Manuel didn’t bother to reply and began sliding along the edge.
He stopped, hanging at a slight corner in the wall.
“Found it,” he said.
“What?”
“Someone drilled a hole here.” He stuck his hand into the wall. He sniffed at his fingers, then slid-climbed his way back to us.
He held up his fingers, covered in white dust. We all shared his conclusion based on the odor.
Explosives.
We spent the night on the windy outcropping, our tent spiked into the rock. There was nothing I could do to fight the depression that swirled around us. It seemed that when we could confront our nemesis—Anderson McCorkle—face-to-face we were more willing to accept someone trying to destroy us, but this new evidence that someone had wished us dead even before our internship on Columbus Station crushed us. An invisible hand was more sinister.
We have to go back now, Meda sent.
What does this change? Manuel asked.
It’s proof of conspiracy against us.
We are safer here from any attacker.
Isn’t it our duty to go back and report this? Meda asked, looking at me for support.
I shrugged, unsure of what responsibility we had to anyone.
Meda frowned at me, then crossed her arms across her chest.
Then what? Stay out here until winter? I’d like a shower at some point.
In the silence following, Strom sent, We’ve only just started looking for the bears.
The bears, Meda replied, are just someone’s science project.
So? Strom replied. They saved me. I owe them.
Then let them be.
Strom looked away, cowed by Meda’s anger. I knew I should step in and deflect this argument, but I was unsure which direction we should take. There was no safe course.
I turned to find Quant and Manuel looking at me.
Can it wait till morning? I asked.
What will be different tomorrow, or the next, or the next? Meda asked. She was pushing for consensus. Yet our bonds were still weak. Manuel had only just shaken the effects of the cluster buster drug. Meda’s own psyche was tender.
Do you forget why they want us destroyed? I asked, harsher than I should have.
Quant shook her head. This happened before Malcolm Leto, she sent. It’s not because of what he did to us. It’s something else. I couldn’t understand what it could be, but I was certain now that we were too fragile to face what would come with our accusations.
This evidence has waited months, I added. It will wait more if necessary. The bears are important to Strom, but they are more important to pod science. If we can find them, we should.
Consensus shifted among us, until even Meda acknowledged it, though she wouldn’t meet my eyes.
The den was old: musty and scentless, but bits of fur clung to the walls and floor. Bears had wintered here, it was clear, but not this last winter.
We had been following the bear trails, from dead log to beehive to stream, for two weeks, searching for some sign of them, but all we had found were a few old footprints in some dried mud by a stream and this cave.
It smells like thought, Strom sent. He breathed deeply, taking in the odors of the cave. He played his flashlight over the walls.
“Anything?” Meda yelled from the cave mouth.
“No,” I shouted back. It had been too small for all five of us to enter. So Meda, Quant, and Manuel had stayed at the cave mouth.
I sniffed too, but all I smelled was stale bear.
They’re long gone, Strom.
He shrugged and we climbed up the gentle-sloped, rubbled mouth to the outside. We shared the images and sat down to eat lunch. Quant had found a blackberry patch with fruit the size of Strom’s knuckles. We’d been eating off the land as often as we could: wild strawberries, trout, blackberries, raspberries. Once we saw a herd of deer, but the idea of eating mammals disgusted us. If beavers and bears could be sentient pods, why not deer. Fish we were comfortable with eating. Even chicken, though we knew avian flocks could be cluster-modified. But not mammals. We had loyalty to our class if not our phylum.
We’ve trudged over these bear trails for days, Manuel sent. Perhaps they’ve moved on.
To where? Strom asked. They must have gone somewhere.
Whoever made them relocated them to somewhere where no one was looking for them.
Strom looked sadder than I had ever seen him. I sat down next to him and squeezed him. He was a large man, but I managed to get my arms around him.
Thanks, Moira, he sent, squeezing back.
We’ll find them.
We camped there that night, not bothering to go any farther. Where would we have gone? These mountains were barren of large animals. Around the fire, we sang. We all knew the words, of course; they were part of our shared memories.
When the sun had set, and we had sung all our songs twice, all of us except for Strom filed into the tent.
“Coming?” I asked softly.
He shook his head. “I want to …” The image he painted was one of communion, one of meditation.
Are you ready to give up? I asked.
He looked at me, startled.
Sooner or later, we need to face the rest of the world, I added.
He nodded. Not yet. I feel like I should know where they are.
I knew how he felt. It wasn’t uncommon for us to have intuitive knowledge or sudden thoughts just beyond our grasp. Our tandem brains seemed to dangle such things before us without making them understood by our singleton minds. Together, our mind could make great leaps, but sometimes it leaped beyond us.
I sat in front of him.
“I can stay with you,” I said. I leaned in close to him, my arms around his neck. This close, his thoughts were like thunderheads, anvils of swirling consciousness. I could barely think this close to him, he was so enveloping.
You’re growing a beard, I sent.
The words “beard” and “bear” twisted in my mind, becoming superimposed.
You’re becoming a bear.
I g
iggled, and he laughed. My face brushed his, and I felt the roughness of it.
“Are you two coming inside?” Meda or Quant said, I couldn’t tell who, my mind and ears muffled.
“No,” Strom said, answering for both of us.
“Okay.”
I felt the boundary between us crumble. We were wires coiled around a magnet, so tightly bound that we might as well have been one to the electrons that coursed through us.
I sighed, glad to be so close, glad to lower all my barriers.
Within Strom’s mind I saw the bears’ map, the chemical topography that marked their territory. They had shared it with Strom, and he had it in his mind, just as they had passed it to him.
I found myself falling into it as if I were free-falling from an aircar. Memories of our own trekking through the mountains superimposed themselves upon what the bears knew and understood. The significance of a termite-filled tree trunk flickered against the streams where we had filled our canteens. The cave, where the bears had lived for a winter, was beside us now.
Elevations and slopes, derivatives and topologies. To the bears, the mountains were not an area, but a linear composite: destinations strung together. Looking on high I saw the crisscross lines. Within the map, I saw the long itinerary of travels from start to finish, the finish being the camp where they had left Strom, where we had seen him.
But the start …
I felt myself peeling the map, following the threads back and forth, finding older and older lines, and points that had been faint memories to the bears: a salmon the length of one’s arm, as thick as a neck, a beehive where the youngest had learned a nasty lesson, a fire raging through a dried-out section of trees. Faint memories, but all leading back to a start, years ago, years ago.
Through a mountain pass, through a rock-strewn ravine, to the house. The master’s house.
I opened my eyes, staring straight into Strom’s, aware suddenly of the cold, the dampness in my clothes. The moon had moved across half the sky while we sat. My teeth began to chatter.
He lifted me up, not even an armful.
Thank you, Moira, he sent. I know where they went.