Singularity's Ring - Softcover

Melko, Paul

Softcover

ISBN 10: 076535702X ISBN 13: 9780765357021

Verlag: Tor Books, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

There is an artificial ring around the Earth and it is empty after the Singularity. Either all the millions of inhabitants are dead, or they have been transformed into energy beings beyond human perception. Earth's population was reduced by ninety per cent. Human civilization on Earth is now recovering from this trauma and even has a vigorous space program. Apollo Papadopulos is in training to become the captain of the starship Consensus. Apollo is a unique individual in that he/she/it is not an individual at all, but five separate teenagers who form a new entity. Strom, Meda, Quant, Manuel, and Moira are a pod, as these kinds of personalities are called, genetically engineered to work as one and to be able to communicate non-verbally. As a rare quintet, much relies on the successful training of Apollo, but as more accidents occur, the pod members struggle just to survive.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Paul Melko lives in Ohio.  This is his first novel.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Singularity's Ring

ONE

Strom

I am strength.

I am not smart, that is Moira. I cannot articulate, like Meda. I do not understand the math that Quant does, and I cannot move my hands like Manuel.

If to anyone, you would think I am closest to Manuel; his abilities are in his hands, in his dexterity. But his mind is jagged sharp; he remembers things and knows them for us. Trivial information that he spins into memory.

No, I am closest to Moira. Perhaps because she is everything I am not. She is as beautiful as Meda, I think. If she were a singleton, she would still be special. If the pod were without me, I think, they would be no worse off. If I were removed, the pod would still be Apollo Papadopulos, and still be destined to become the starship captain we were built to be. We are all humans individually, and I think my own thoughts, but together we are something different, something better, though my contribution is nothing like the others'.

When I think this, I wall it off. Quant looks at me; can she smell my despair? I smile, hoping she cannot see past my fortifications. I touch her hand, our pads sliding together, mixing thoughts, and send her a chemical memory of Moira and Meda laughing as children, holding hands. They are three or four years old in the memory, so it is after we have pod-bonded, prior to Third State, but still in the creche. Their hair is auburn, and it hangs from their heads in baloney curls. Moira has a skinned knee and she isn't smiling as largely as Meda. In the memory, from the distant past, Meda reaches for Quant, who reaches for Manuel, who touches my hand, and we all feel Meda's joy at seeing the squirrel in the meadow, and Moira's anger at falling down and scaring it off. Here on the mountain, there is a pause in our consensus, as everyone catches the memory.

Moira smiles, but Meda says, "We have work to do, Strom."

We do, I know we do. I feel my face redden. I feel my embarrassment spread in the air, even through our parkas. No one needs to touch the pads on my wrist to share it.

Sorry. My hands form the word, as the thought passes among us.

We are somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. Our teachers have dropped us by aircar, here near the treeline, and told us to survive for five days. They have told us nothing else. Our supplies are those we could gather in the half hour they gave us.

For seven weeks we and our classmates have trained in survival methods: desert, forest, jungle. Not that we will see any of these terrains in space. Not that we will find climates of any kind whatsoever except for deadly vacuum, and that we know how to survive. But these are the hurdles that have been placed before us. The prize is the captaincy of the starship Consensus; it is what we have been built to do, as have our classmates.

On the first day of survival training, our teacher Theseus had stood before us and screamed in volleying bursts. He was a duo, the most basic form of pod, just two individual humans.

"You are being taught to think!" yelled Theseus on the left.

"You are being taught to respond to unknown environments, under unknown and strenuous conditions!" continued Theseus on the right.

"You do not know what you will face!"

"You do not know what will allow you to survive and what will kill you!"

Two weeks of class instruction followed, and then week after week we had been transported to a different terrain, a different locale, and shown what to do to survive. But always with Theseus nearby. Now, in our final week, we are alone, just the students on this mountain.

"Apollo Papadopulos! Cold-weather survival! Twenty kilos per pod member! Go!" one of Theseus yelled at us from our dorm-room doorway.

Luckily the parkas were in the closet. Luckily we had a polymer tent. Hagar Julian has only canvas coats with no insulation, we know. They will have a harder time of it.

Twenty kilograms is not a lot. I carry sixty kilos of it myself and distribute the rest to my podmates. In the aircar, we note that Hagar Julian and Elliott O'Toole have split the load evenly among themselves; they are not playing to their strengths.

Strom! Once again Meda chastises me, and I jerk my hands away from Manuel's and Quant's, but they can still smell the embarrassment pheromones. I cannot stop the chemical proof of my chagrin from drifting in the frigid air. I reach again for my place in the consensus, striving to be an integral part of the pod, trying to concentrate. Together we can do anything.

Chemical thoughts pass from hand to hand in our circle, clockwise and counterclockwise, suggestions, lists, afterthoughts. I stand between Moira and Quant, adding what I can. This is our most comfortable thinking position. If we rearrange ourselves, me holding Manuel's hand perhaps, or Moira and Meda together, the thoughts are different. Sometimes this is useful.

Ideas whir past me and I feel I am only a conduit. Some thoughts are marked by their thinker, so that I know it is Quant who has noted the drop in temperature and the increased wind speed, which causes us to raise the priority of shelter and fire. Consensus forms.

We have to rig our shelter before dark. We have to start a fire before dark. We have to eat dinner. We have to dig a latrine.

The list passes among us. We reach consensus on decision after decision, faster than I can reason through some of the issues: I add what I can. But I trust the pod. The pod is me.

Our hands are cold; we have removed our gloves to think. In the cold of the Rockies our emotions--the pheromones that augment our chemical thoughts--are like lightning, though sometimes the wind will whisk the feeling away before we can catch it. With gloves on our touch pads and parkas over our noses and neck glands, it is hard to think. It is almost like working alone, until we finish some subtask and join for a quick consensus, shedding gloves.

"Strom, gather wood for the fire," Moira reminds me.

The tasks that require broad shoulders fall to me. I step away from the others, and I am suddenly cut off from them: no touch, no smell. We practice this, being alone. We were born alone, yet we have spent our youth from First State to Fourth State striving to be a single entity. And now we practice being alone again. It is a skill. I look back at the other four. Quant touches Moira's hand, passing athought, some shared confidence. The spike of jealousy must be the face of my fear. If they have thought something important, I will know it later when we rejoin. For now, I must act alone.

We have chosen an almost flat tract of land in a meager grove of wind-stunted pines. The rock slopes gently away into a V-shape, a catch for wind and snow. The shallow ravine drops sharply into a ledge of rock, the side of a long valley of snowdrifts and trees that the aircar passed over as we arrived. Above us is a sheer wall, topped with a mass of snow and ice. I cannot see the peak from here; we are many hundreds of meters below it. Stretching in either direction are lines of jagged mountaintops, their white faces reflecting the afternoon sun. Clouds seem to bump against their western sides.

The snow is thin enough on the ground here that we can reach the rocky earth beneath it. The trees will shelter us from the wind and provide support for the tent lines, we hope. I walk down the gentle slope, along the line of pines.

We have no axe, so I must gather fallen logs and branches. This will be a problem. We cannot have a good fire with half-decayed logs. I file the thought away for later consensus.

I find a sundered pine branch, thick as my forearm, sticky with sap. I wonder if it will burn as I drag it back up to...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Tor Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 076535702X
• ISBN 13: 9780765357021
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar