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Authors: Paul Melko

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BOOK: Singularity's Ring
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Strom’s memories boiled for a moment, and we recalled the avalanche that nearly destroyed us. If Strom had not left the tent to help Hagar Julian, he would not have been able to tie off the spider silk line that kept us from plunging into the abyss. But that second avalanche, the one that had taken our tent, had been preceded by a flash on the mountainside. Strom had assumed, and we had always agreed, it had been the rescue aircar. But what if it was actually an attempt on our lives, explosives to start the second avalanche.
Before the interface jack,
Quant sent.
Paranoia,
I sent.
False consensus.
I didn’t really mean it. I was angry, tired, and, looking at the jungle, scared.
It is not!
Meda sent.
We can’t just run as if the world is against us,
I replied.
We’re not!
Stop,
Moira sent.
Manuel has a point. What are we doing?
Running.
To Mother Redd’s.
She won’t want us. We failed.
Not the starship,
Quant sent wistfully.
The bears,
Strom sent.
As Strom thought it, there was a hum of consensus. The bears had helped us. The bears were part of no conspiracy against us, yet they were a puzzle. Who had built them, and why?
A scientific mystery,
Meda sent, her thoughts bubbling with excitement.
Strom’s thoughts turned darker.
The explosion on the mountain,
he sent.
Evidence for this conspiracy.
There are two reasons now to travel to the Rockies,
Quant sent.
Wrong continent,
I pointed out.
It’s a goal, a task, something still ours,
Moira sent.
Consensus rippled through the group. Valid consensus, and I couldn’t fight that. I nodded and stood. Already Quant was calculating paths and transit times. Numbers leaked from her head.
Can we steal a suborbital?
she asked.
Unlikely.
Let’s move,
Strom sent impatiently, urgently, now that we had a goal.
The path led into the jungle, and as soon as we stepped out off the apron, we were engulfed in emerald green. The cacophony of bird and insect sounds cluttered our ears.
The smell!
The air was fetid and thick, a soup of alien smells.
This place is alive.
They had taught us that the Earth was a devastated world, that its ecology was bankrupt and in need of constant tending. Yet it was clear that the Amazon was alive and vibrant.
And it stinks,
I added.
We passed a squat tree, marked with crisscross lines in its trunk. A white sap oozed from the bark.
Rubber tree,
Quant said.
Isn’t it just easier to build a rubber plant? Why rely on this old method of harvesting?
The path opened onto a riverbank without seeming to drop any lower. The Amazon was muddy brown, slow and turgid. Silt slid across the surface. Fog hung in the middle of the river and we could not judge its width. Islands or peninsulae jutted abruptly from the fog.
At least it isn’t the rainy season,
Strom sent.
Boats.
Up the river, following the bank, was a small village with a dock. An old boat was moored to the dock.
“This is all natural rain forest,” Quant said. She knelt and peered closely at a small flower growing from the mud. “None of this is modded. These people are poor.”
The path to the village wound along the river’s edge. Once we passed a nearly stagnant tributary about two meters across. Strom, placing one boot in the muck, helped each of us across, half-tossing us to the far side. Then he jumped across himself, clearing the stream by half a meter.
The elevator blocked the morning sun for a moment, and then we came into the village, a conglomerate of ramshackle huts. No one was in sight until we reached a hut built on stilts. A man sat on the raised porch drinking from a rounded cup. He was old, with wispy white hair on a brown head. His belly sat on his thighs, which were covered in crimson shorts.
He looked at us with brown eyes as we approached, his face blank. When we reached his hut, he stared down at us from on high.
“Og flunks, huh? Og don’t need to come round here.”
Og?
O-G.
Overgovernment.
“We’re not from the Overgovernment, sir,” Meda said.
Not any more,
I added.
“Yeah? Still Og flunks, eh?”
“We’re not OG flunkies. We want transport to Belem.”
“What ya want to go there for? Smells.”
Tell him.
“We’re trying to get to North America. We hope to find a ship to get us there.”
The old man laughed. “Ain’t no freighters in Belem. Why freighters stop at the Amazon? Gonna ship our water to North America? Ha!”
“There’s no ocean-going vessels to and from South America?” Meda asked.
I need a downlink,
Quant sent.
I need data!
The downlink would have given her better options for our trip to the Rockies. I began to realize how naïve we were.
“Maybe Rio. Yeah, probably Rio. Everyone live in Rio.”
“Except for you.”
He laughed again. “’Cept me and the rest of me brothers and sisters.”
“How can we get to North America?”
“By river. What else you think?”
But there’s no ships at Belem. The river won’t take us anywhere!
I guess we can go back up the elevator,
Quant sent.
No!
Meda sent quickly.
I glanced upriver. The fog was lifting, and the day was even more muggy than before. Upriver was more rain forest, thousands of kilometers of rain forest, until it reached the Andes.
The North-South Highway,
I sent.
Of course!
The highway went from old Calgary to Buenos Aires, ten thousand kilometers of multilane road for robotrucks. We could hitch a ride there.
“Can you take us to the Highway?”
“Highway, sure. We leave tomorrow!”
“Great.”
“As soon as you pay me.”
Great.
 
By noon, the village was awake. Fishing boats that had pushed off into the river before we’d come down the elevator returned laden with fish and sometimes caimans. The fishermen eyed us, but kept their distance. The women of the village went about their chores. The children, gap-toothed, skinny things, watched our every move, until Meda got annoyed and led us back to the elevator.
“What are we going to pay him with?” Meda asked. Our pod was too spread out for chemical thoughts, the air too thick with pollen and jungle odors.
Faintly from Quant,
We can give him Strom.
“Sure,” chuckled Strom.
The little brown man had climbed down from the hut and disappeared into the jungle. “For supplies,” he said, leaving us standing in the middle of the village.
“How much do we pay him?”
“What sort of money do singletons use?”
We stopped at the base of the elevator, on the far side from the door.
They’re hunter-gatherers, a rain-forest tribe.
I doubt our credit chit means anything to him. Nor do we want to use it.
The air was still muggy in the shadow of the elevator.
Food,
Strom sent.
If we give Strom to the old man, it would cut our food intake by half,
Quant sent.
Fish, I think.
Strom cut a small sapling with his utility knife, passing it to me. I started sharpening the end. Strom cut another and passed it to Meda.
We walked down to the river and continued downstream until we reached a spot where the brown silt was sucked away as the water washed across a tree trunk. Meda climbed out across the tree and stood there, watching the river.
An image of the river as a wall of momentum flitted among us.
Quant took a point at the other end of the log, Moira upriver. Together, the three of them built a map of the river, triangulating ripples, bubbles, and flashes of silver scale. The river teamed with fish.
Strom and I stood with eyes closed, using the map built by the other three.
Strom threw first and speared a black catfishlike fish that he tossed onto the bank. It was thirty centimeters long, from tail to whiskers.
That’s Strom’s appetizer.
I cast my spear, and before long we had a dozen fish flopping on the bank.
It was a struggle to find dry wood for a fire; the rain forest and river soaked everything. We found a kind of reed near the river that burned easily and began cooking the fish on stones massed around the fast-burning fire.
“Maybe we can pay the old man in fish,” Meda said.
What’s that?
Quant had heard it first, and, when Meda pointed it out, identified it as an aircar.
Here,
Strom sent. We huddled under a tree.
They’ll see the smoke.
They’ll think it’s a singleton fire.
The aircar moved across the sky at a moderate speed, from the south and the far side of the river, banking around the elevator once, and then north above the rain forest.
“Are they looking for us?”
They know where we’ve gone.
Food.
Danger could not keep Strom’s stomach from growling.
The fish was flaky and pungent, the flesh marbled with grey splotches. It had an odd taste, but it filled our bellies.
We threw the carcasses into the river.
What was that?
The water seethed, then settled.
Caiman. Alligator. Piranha.
Meda shuddered.
I’m glad I didn’t know that before I climbed out on that tree.
“What ya cooking?”
The old man peered at us from the bank.
“Catfish,” Meda said, holding up a half-eaten fillet.
“Shitfish,” the old man replied. “You got toilet paper?”
“Um.”
“Don’t use the lipo leaves. Worse than the shitfish.”
“What do you want to take us to the highway?”
“What you got?”
Strom held out his utility knife.
“Got one of those.”
Quant reluctantly unpinned her spider-head pin from her shirt and held it out to the man.
“Nah.”
“We don’t have anything.”
“Huh. Then I guess we don’t go. Besides, your friends
in the aircar be here in the morning. They take care of you.”
“Aircar?”
“Yeah, they land at the field up there where it don’t flood. Then walk down.”
“We’d like to leave before they get here.”
“Nobody leaving if you don’t got nothing for me.”
The man giggled then sauntered away.
Let’s just take his boat,
Quant sent.
No!
Moira replied.
Just kidding.
Strom groaned. “I need a bathroom.”
“There’s one in the anchor building.”
I was closest to Meda and felt her reluctance to go back to the elevator, anything that had to do with the Ring. She clamped down on it fast. I placed a hand on her shoulder anyway.
Quant and I helped guide Strom, who was doubled over with stomach pain. We all felt a touch of it, a lingering of the intensity of his pain if not the pain itself. But Strom had eaten more of the fish than the rest of us; luckily none of us but he were sick.
The gate to the elevator garden opened to Meda’s interface, and we raced into the building, guiding Strom to a stall in the huge unisex bathroom, where he expelled his three-catfish lunch.
“Ugh,” he moaned.
He’ll need paper.
BOOK: Singularity's Ring
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