by Paul Melko
Leto in control of a new Community would plunge the world into chaos. He has no desire save power, no goal but the accumulation of more. The OG was just one thing in his way. The Earth rebuilt in his image was not a palatable thing.
“Yes. Malcolm Leto has to be stopped,” Meda says.
We spend the afternoon explaining to Colonel Krypicz what we had learned from Dr. Baker and the research we took with us. He holds the data unit from Dr. Baker’s lab in his hand and looks at Mother Redd.
“Are you looking into this?”
“As soon as I clear a few other projects off my lab bench,” she replies.
“Then it’s in good hands,” he says. He looks back at her. “Assume I don’t understand the implications.”
Mother Redd smiles. “Faster consensus. Larger pods, unlimited size really. All species, not just the few we’ve figured out.”
“Really. Hrm.” He turns back to us. “We’ve found Leto. We sent a duo into the Congo. Smart fellow. He arranged a meeting with some folks; his chip showed him going into the desert, toward the east. Two days later, it stopped moving. We sent a team in on camels and found him dead in the desert. Not pretty.”
He pulls out a map of the Congo Desert. “We’re hampered here in the Congo. The singletons lobbied for it and we gave it to them, and never realized what a perfect bolt-hole it is for the lawless peoples. But they do what they say, let the Ecologist Department in to inspect. It’s all on the up-and-up. They’re dedeserting the whole thing. Slow work.”
“And Leto is there,” Meda says.
“Oh, yes. After his run-in with you. After Khalid set that up.” The colonel’s face hardens. “Hrm, yes. He fled to Green Idaho, had to hoof it after his aircar auto-landed in Grisholm.”
That was me, Quant sends with pride. She had disabled Leto’s aircar when we had chased him off.
“His legal machinations led to nothing. No way we’d give that man the Ring. Heavens. It’s the high ground. No one knew he was a psychopath, Apollo. No one guessed he was defective.”
Meda nods.
“He found some like minds in Idaho, and they smuggled him to the Congo Free Zone, where he’s built up quite a following. An interface jack cult. Wire addiction. Pre-Community efforts at mind control and population exploitation with a sadist’s flair. He’s got a few thousand followers and access to Community tech.”
“Why hasn’t he taken the high ground already?”
Strom is assessing the military strength of the Ring. His mind runs scenarios with missiles, glider bombs, pieces of the Ring itself, rocks.
Rocks? Meda asks.
The Ring has potential energy on its side. By the time anything dropped from the Ring reaches the Earth, it has a lot of kinetic energy.
Quant draws us pictures: anything directly under the Ring is a target for a dropped weapon. Anything on Earth is a target of a missile fired from the Ring. It could be all explosives and minimal fuel, since it would be born ballistic, at the top of its arc.
Not to mention the energy weapons, Strom adds.
Confusion scent erupts. We have never heard of the Ring having energy weapons. Strom explains.
The Earth depends on the solar energy collected by the Ring and beamed down to collection stations around the Earth. Each one of those beams is a high-energy microwave beam. If it doesn’t land on a collection station, the beam would destroy what it touches.
We have seen the collection stations, even played with them by tossing sticks into the parabolic collector and watching them ignite. Only Strom has considered them as weapons.
The colonel lets us think it through. He nods when Meda looks at him again.
“We don’t know why. We sorely want to find out. Everything we’ve tried has failed.”
“Why not force?”
“If it comes to that, we will. But I’m not eager to do it. He has Community tech, like I said, stuff our people don’t have. The Gene Wars were nasty, and we don’t want to go back there again. We thought it had all been destroyed, but he’s dug up a cache. So that’s why militarily. Then there’s politics.”
“The singletons.”
“Yes, you have it right. We pods sorta were all that was left standing after the Exodus, but the singletons aren’t gone, though it’d be a simpler thing if they were.”
“Colonel,” Mother Redd says with a voice we know well from childhood.
“I’m just hypothesizing, not wishing, Madame Redd,” he says. “The enclaves have lobbied long and hard against their second-class citizenship. So we gave them the Congo Desert. And a fair amount of autonomy. We can’t go in there with guns blasting like they can’t deal with their problems.”
“Why are you here, Colonel?”
He wants us to infiltrate the singletons.
He wants us to stop Malcolm Leto.
Meda shudders and clamps down hard on her memories.
“I just need your help,” he says. “We don’t know how this Leto thinks. We need some information to help us get close to him.”
“You have everything we know,” we say. “We were debriefed thoroughly after the event.”
“I know. I know,” he says. “But if we don’t come up with something soon, the only option will be military. And no one wants that. Leto could have nano or virus weapons, and we don’t know where he is.”
We could go, Strom sends.
We have an interface jack, Manuel sends.
It can gain us access, Quant sends.
We’re a pod, Moira replies, her thoughts etched with concern for her sister. We’ll stick out like a pink bear.
It’s okay, Meda sends, a thought directed at Moira. To the rest, she adds, He has to be stopped and if we can help …
The consensus is strong, as if we have been waiting to make this decision our whole lives.
“We’re willing to go,” Meda says.
“I’m not asking—”
“It’s all right, Colonel. We’ll go. It’s necessary.”
Mother Redd shakes her head. “Children, you don’t have to.”
“We do have to.”
The colonel nods, his face heavy with emotion. “We appreciate what you’re doing. You won’t be alone. You’ll be part of a team.”
“We’re a pod, and it’ll be obvious,” we say.
“Yes and no. They’ve recruited a number of our ecologists and geneticists. You’d be placed in the next immigrant group to go over.”
“But not as a quintet.”
“Well, that would give you away.”
“We’ve had practice acting as a trio and a duo. We’ve also had practice acting alone.”
The colonel nods. “We know.”
It’s necessary.
“We’ll do it.”
We take a suborbital from the Institute to Rabat, one of the only pod domains on the African continent. Nearly all of Africa is uninhabited, and that which is populated is by singletons. In Rabat, we stop acting like a quintet.
Surprising how easy it is, Strom sends.
It is a conversation among the boys, and the girls can still hear it, though we do not react or respond.
“Zeus Rhinefaust?” the woman asks. She is a singleton.
“Yes?” Strom says. “I am Zeus.”
“And who is your friend?”
We think she is referring to Meda, Moira, and Quant, but she is looking at Manuel.
Together the two of them say, “I am Zeus Rhinefaust.”
The singleton looks flustered. Then she rips up the form she has been filling out—paper, not electronic.
“You’re a cluster. I have to use a different form.” Her manner has cooled. We and one more pod of three are the only two in line at the CDS, the Congo Dedesertification Sodality. It is a small building not far from the airport. It is one of only two entry points into the Sodality, and inappropriately small.
“How many people come through here to the CDS?” Strom asks.
The woman looks at him, then pushes a pamphlet forwa
rd. Manuel takes it and reads it for all of us. One hundred twenty-four thousand members, six years into a twenty-five-year plan to recover the Congo River and its ecosystems. All things that Colonel Krypicz had told us. The pamphlet has nothing on the flow through Rabat.
“So you don’t know?” Strom asks.
“I’ll need your medical reports.”
Strom hands over the two stamped papers. The woman staples several things together then hands over two booklets. “These are your visas.”
“There’s just one of us,” Strom says.
“I see two.”
Strom takes the visas. The visas are labeled Zeus Rhinefaust I and Zeus Rhinefaust II
Manuel sends, I’m Zeus II.
Meda goes through the same process for her, Moira, and Quant. They are Aphrodite Innanocia, Aphrodite I, II, and III.
“These visas are good for sixty days. If you wish to stay longer, you must be sponsored by a full member of the Sodality. You may not stay longer than sixty days or you will be expelled from the enclave with loss of all property. You may not bring or extract biological material from the enclave. You may not send or receive electronic communication from outside the enclave. You may not violate the CDS Constitution, a superset of OG laws and prohibitions. Failure to comply will result in expulsion and loss of property. The shuttle to Atrakan will leave the shuttle port in three hours. These are your tickets.”
She doesn’t expect us to stay longer than sixty days, does she? Manuel sends.
She is a bureaucrat. She sees things in triplicate.
Just like a pod.
Not at all.
“Thank you,” Meda says, but the singleton is already absorbed in her paperwork. The triplet behind us steps forward. We give Duchess Monahan a bland smile. She is a biologist, also recruited by Colonel Krypicz, who will be our contact in the Congo.
The aircar to Atrakan is filled with young singletons who stare at us as if we are aliens. Their raucous talk ceases as we climb into the aircar.
Spoiled their party, didn’t we, Manuel says.
We stifle our chemical thoughts, let our minds trickle to a stop. What pheromones we can choke off, we do. We know that the smell of it is what singletons complain of the most. We think these things alone and gather them later, when we can in groups of two, three, or five. The day is hazy in our recollection, but still we remember Quant’s thought:
They are alone, so alone. Each of them.
For her it is worse. She drifts in and out of consciousness. No, not consciousness. She is always conscious. But her awareness fades away.
The other thing we remember is the boy, just a teenager, looking over at Manuel from the chair in front and whispering, “Freak.”
Manuel shakes his shoe off his foot and waves at the boy with his prehensile foot.
Moira touches his wrist and sends, Don’t antagonize the natives.
We use a public terminal to find a youth hostel near the airport; the goal is for us to find temporary work while we search for any signs of Leto. The terminal is local only; we can find no way to access the OG networks. Colonel Krypicz has told us that the CDS is cut off from the rest of the world.
Wearing our sleeves long in the cooling night and our collars up, we check in with a long-haired boy who doesn’t notice we’re a pod. The hostel is a common room with several cot-filled adjacent rooms. We find one that we can share and when we shut the door it is as if we can think again. As if we have been holding our breath underwater and now we break through the surface and swallow air.
That feels good, Quant sends.
We consense, determining a course for the next day. The colonel has given us a contact, a singleton, who might be able to help us find work. But Strom is reluctant. Other agents have entered the CDS and died. The possibility that Malcolm Leto or other forces have compromised the colonel’s agents is real.
We traveled from the Amazon to the Rockies by ourselves. We can do this, Moira says.
Plus thirty-six thousand kilometers from GEO, Quant adds.
The Amazon was a different river, Manuel sends.
But we were still outside the pod community and on our own.
We should continue on our own.
We should find a job as far in-country as possible.
If Leto is anywhere, it’s there.
Agreed.
The consensus is quick. In the morning we will find work in one of the sodalities or guilds working upriver. We clear the floor, cover it with the mattresses and blankets from the cots. We are tired from the flight. Soon we fall asleep.
At dawn, loud music from the main room wakes us.
They want us out of here early, Manuel mutters.
For a bit of singleton scrip, we buy the meager breakfast: toast, jam, and coffee. The other guests eye us, but none appear hostile. There are two girls and two boys, teenagers, sitting in the main room with us. They are dressed in dungarees and armless jackets, with various material hooked to their vests. The circles under their eyes speak of late nights imbibing and smoking.
Hostel, not hostile, Quant sends.
It’s too early for hostility, Manuel replies.
Singletons abuse their bodies, Strom sends. Tattoos mark their necks, crude moving symbols, fashionable fifty years before. They spell out kanji characters one after another.
There’s no one in a singleton to veto, Manuel sends.
“The consensus of one is always false,” Moira whispers. It is a tenet of pod philosophy.
Though they have dark eyes, their hands are rough and callused.
Ask them about work.
“I’m looking to find a sodality to work for,” Meda says to one of the girls.
The other girl laughs, a grunt.
“The girls can work for sure,” one of the boys says. He has dark hair that droops over his eyes.
“Not that kind of work,” Meda says, though she is hiding her first reaction. “Work with the CDS.”
“If you got the money to bribe for work, you don’t need to work,” the girl who laughed says. She is thick all over with muscle such that we think she must use drugs to gain the size.
“Who do we have to bribe?”
“The unions. The foremen. The police. Anyone and everyone. Still may not do any good.”
“Where do we go? Upriver?”
“They don’t hire up there,” the girl replies. “They hire down here and ship the crews up. They hire at the meat market.”
“Helps if you can operate the machinery,” the other boy says. His shirt is pierced in a dozen spots with stainless steel rings that jingle when he eats. “Or drive a boat. Or lift heavy stuff.”
We can fly a starship.
“We can do a lot of stuff. We have biology training too.”
The first girl looks at us, one after the other. There is no smell to let us know what she is thinking. No pheromones that we can detect. We think how lonely singletons must be.
“I’ve never seen a cluster before. Is that what you are? Not five people?”
“We’re two pods,” Meda lies. Moira doesn’t even flinch anymore when she does. “The boys are one, the girls another.”
It’s expedient, Moira explains.
“Weird,” the first boy says. “Very weird.” He looks at Strom. “You have two dicks.”
“And you have six boobs!” the second boy jokes.
Ignoring the comment, Meda asks, “Where do we go to look for work?”
The first girl looks at her watch, passes a nasty look at the boys, and says, “I’ll show you where to go. Come on.”
Her name is Violet. Her companions, trailing after us, are Ramone, Isis, and Ferd. They lead us through the edge of the downtown, through areas we had not seen in the dwindling light the night before. Abandoned, pre-Exodus factories, and others that are still alive, billowing smoke into the air. Steel plants, refineries, concrete factories. Raw materials sit in piles. Finished products file past on the robotransports, always east.
So m
uch destruction and anger just to rebuild a jungle, Strom sends.
Not a jungle. They are building a country, Moira replies.
“You don’t want to work in the factories,” Violet explains. “They lose a few every week. No safety rules, except what the guilds allow in exchange for kickbacks.” As we pass factories, she explains why each is dangerous. “This one is run by the Bantu Mafia. Don’t know why they’re called the Bantu Mafia, not an African among them.”
“Where do you work?” Meda asks.
“The Hillside Arboretum,” Isis says from behind. “But there ain’t no work there for you.”
“Yeah, the Arboretum,” Violet says. “We plant trees and water them, then dig them up for the head-in of the river. But there’s no room on the squads for you. Sorry.”
“We don’t want to stay at the ocean. We want to go east.”
“Then there’s probably room for you on one of the planting crews,” Ferd says. “Well, maybe one of you, or three of you. Whatever.”
The industrial region circling the city ends abruptly at the crest of a hill. Below us is the Congo. Terraced gardens descend the kilometer to the river, interspersed with residential condos. These are the first of the reclaimed areas, and the trees are ten years old, ten meters high.
Violet leads us down the street toward the river. Water gurgles in troughs on both sides of the street. Quant spots the pumphouses, one every one hundred meters along the crest, each one pulling water from the river to feed the hundreds of gardens. The air is suddenly humid and wet.
Violet cuts through an alley parallel to the river, and beyond the houses are rows and rows of saplings lining the hill. The Arboretum covers two large blocks. Mist hangs in the air from sprayers. In some places, tarps drape over the trees to block the equatorial sun.
“See that hut there?” Violet says. “That’s the Tree Guild House. Ask there. Say you want to do tree planting.”
The other three are already walking away, so we just thank Violet.
A small line queues at the door of the hut, which looks vacant. We take our place at the end of the line. The others, haggard and twitchy with desperation, eye us warily.
Are there any pods as desperate as these people? Strom asks.