Ten Sigmas & Other Unlikelihoods (7 page)

THE SUMMER OF SEVEN

I
n the summer of our fourteenth year, we weren’t the only one to live with Mother Redd on the

farm in Worthington. That was the year the Seven came to stay.

“After lunch, you’ll need to clean out the back bedroom,” Mother Redd said that morning at breakfast. One of her was busy frying eggs at the stove, while another was squeezing orange juice. Her third was setting the table. We had just come in from chores — picking diamond flowers, plucking sheep cloth, and, secretly, milking the beer bush for a few ounces of lager — and were lounging around the kitchen table.

Meda, my true sister and our pod’s interface, asked the question we were thinking. “Who’s coming to stay?” It wasn’t a visit. For a visit, we wouldn’t bother to clean out the bedroom; we’d just pull out the beds from the couch in the downstairs den and let the visitor sprawl around the first floor. Or, if it was more than one person, we’d lay quilts and pillows in the great room.

One of Mother Redd gave us a look that said we asked too many questions. “A guest,” she said.

We all shrugged.

We spent the morning on calculus and physics. We were doing word problems: if you fired a cannonball from a train car and it lands on another train car, how fast are the train cars traveling apart after five seconds. Stuff like that.

Why would anyone mount a cannon on a train car
? I sent.

Strom laughed. Bola, who understood force and motion intuitively, flashed us the image of the cannonball and its graceful trajectory. Then he added air currents, and gravity perturbations and other second-order forces. As he added in tidal effects and the pull of Jupiter, Quant sent,
Seven and a half centimeters per second.

“At least let me write something down before you give me the answer,” Meda said. She had the pencil, but Quant was solving the problems in her head.

“Why?”

“For the practice!”

“Why?”

Meda groaned. My sister is always so expressive; there’s never any doubt what she’s — or we’re — feeling. That’s why she was our interface.

“We have to show our work on the tests! We can’t just write down the answer.”

Quant shrugged.

Sometimes Quant won’t be with us
, I sent.

Moira
!

I felt Quant’s surprise and a moment’s fear; we’d been together for almost fourteen years. Being cut off from the rest of us was what we most often had nightmares about. And if one of us had a nightmare, we all had it.

“Okay.” I sent a smile and reassurance to Quant, and she relaxed and returned focus to the problem set. We worked through the rest of them on paper, Quant guiding us through the equations to the answer she already knew.

After lunch, we trudged up to the back bedroom and started moving boxes. We couldn’t just throw the junk out the window and then haul it to the trash heap; Manuel had found a pipette set, and there were frames and pictures in some of the boxes. We had to be careful.

“What’s this?” Meda asked, holding up a photo in an old plastic frame.

We saw the image through her eyes, well enough for me to recognize Mother Redd, a younger woman than she was now, and a quartet. Her hair was brown and bobbed, not long as she wore it now. And she was slender in the picture, not anything like the plump, huggable women we knew.

“That was before —” Meda said.

Yes
.

Mother Redd was a trio now, but once, a long time ago, she had been a quartet. She had been a medical doctor, a famous one; we’d read a few of her papers and barely understood them, even though we were the highest order — a sextet — and specialized in math and science. Then one of her had died, leaving her three-quarters of what she had been.

Again, the fear of separation rippled through us, emotions that we would have to learn to check. Strom shivered, and I touched his hand. To lose one of ourselves, to become a quintet . . .

Meda looked closely at the picture. I knew what she was wondering, though I could only taste the curiosity. Which one of Mother Redd had died? I didn’t think we could tell; she had been identical quadruplets. Meda put the picture away.

“Look at this,” Quant said. She held up a tattered and old biology book. The date inside was 2020.

“That is so old!” Meda said. “Older than pods. What could that have that’s any use?”

Quant thumbed through the pages and it fell open at a colored plate, a bisection of the female body.

“Now that’s sexy,” Manuel said. Arousal mingled with embarrassment. The stupidest things triggered desire in our male components. I sometimes wished that we were an all-female pod like Mother Redd, instead of an equally mixed sextet.

He turned the page, and there was a dissected frog, with overlays, so that you could flip from the skin, into the musculature, and then the internal organs.

“The spleen’s in the wrong place,” Bola said.

We had built frogs in biology class last year. Ours had been the best jumper.

As we were stowing the last of the boxes in the barn loft, we heard the whine of a jet car.

“Folsom 5X,” Bola said. “Six-prop hydrogen burner.”

It was actually a Folsom 3M, a converted older skybus, but we didn’t have time to razz him for his mistake. The skybus landed on the airpad behind the farm house, and we ran to meet it.

Mother Redd waved us back, and we saw why. The bus had already discharged its passenger and was whining back into the sky. Another pod stood there next to Mother Redd, its interface shaking hands.

“Hi, I’m Apollo Papadopulos,” Meda said. “Welcome to–”

The newcomer turned to us, and we counted: a seven-person pod, a septet. Our greeting hung in Meda’s mouth. We gaped in wonder, stunned by the sight. We were a sextet; our order was only six.

*

“Everyone knows that the higher the order, the stronger the pod,” Quant said.

“That’s not true,” Meda said.

We’d gotten over our voicelessness and had managed a polite greeting to Candace Thurgood. Meda had shaken hands with the leader of the septet, one of six identical females, skinny, blonde-haired, green-eyed girls. The seventh member was a male, taller, just as skinny and pale in skin and hair. We’re three females and three males; Meda and I were identical female twins, while our other pod mates were of different genetic stock.

Then Strom came up with the idea that we still had chores in the barn, and we made a quick exit, watching as the seven of Candace and the three of Mother Redd walked to the house.

Yes, it is
!

No, it isn’t
!

I shushed them with a whiff of baby pheromone, a poke at their childish behavior.

We all knew the history. The first pods had been duos, created almost fifty years ago, the first to use the chemical memory and pheromones to share feelings between two separate humans. Since then, the order of the pods and complexity of the chemical signaling had grown. We were a sextet, the largest order we’d ever seen. All our classmates were sextets. Everyone in the space program was a sextet.

“Because sextets are the largest order. They’re the best,” Strom said.

Not anymore! Candace is a seven, a septet
!

It made sense. Genetic engineers were always trying to add to the power of an individual. Why wouldn’t they try to build a seven? Or an eight?

“They succeeded in building one, finally.”

“How old is she?”

“Younger than us. Maybe twelve.”

I hope she’s not staying all summer
.

But we knew she was. We wouldn’t have turned out the guest room if she wasn’t.

Maybe we can make her leave
.

I said, “We have to be nice. We have to be friends.”

We have to be nice, but we don’t have to be friends.

Why be nice
?

I looked at Meda, and she said, “Oh, all right. Let’s go be nice. At least there isn’t eight of her.”

Though how far away would
that
be?

*

We tried to be nice.

I was the one who’d advised it, and even I chafed at the manners of that arrogant septet.

“Fifteen point seven five three,” Candace said, while we were still scribbling the problem. One of her was looking over Quant’s shoulder as we sat at the great room table.

I knew that
, Quant sent.

Still Meda wrote the problem down and we worked through to the answer, while Candace tapped seven of her feet.

“Fifteen point seven five three three,” Meda said.

“I rounded down,” she said. “One of us —” She nodded at the identical girl to her left — “is specialized in mathematics. When you have seven, you know, you can do that. Specialize.”

We were specialized too, we wanted to say, but I sent,
Humble.

She’s specialized at being a git
.

“You’re very smart,” Meda said diplomatically. I hadn’t even had to remind her.

“Yes, I am.” She was standing so close that the pungent smell of her chemical thoughts tickled our noses and distracted us. It was almost rude to stand so close that our memories mingled. We couldn’t understand her thoughts, of course, just a bit of self-satisfaction from the pheromones. The chemical memories that we passed from hand to hand, and to some extent by air, were pod-specific, most easily passed by physical touch at the wrists where our pads were. Pheromones were more general and indicated nuance and emotion. These were often common across all pods, especially those from the same creche. So even though our thoughts didn’t mix together, it felt weird for her to be so close.

She doesn’t know any better
, I sent, touching the pad on Manuel’s left wrist.
She’s young.

We knew better at that age
.

We should try to be friendly
, I sent.

“Do you want to go swimming this afternoon?” Meda asked.

Candace shook her head quickly, then she paused for a consensus. We smelled the chemical thoughts, pungent and slick in the air, and wondered why she had to consense on going swimming.

“We don’t swim,” she said finally.

“None of you?”

Another pause. They touched hands, tap, tap, tap, pads sliding together. “None of us.”

“Okay. Well, we’re going swimming in the pond.”

The smell was stronger. The heads turned inward, and they held palms together for ten seconds. What was so complicated about going swimming?

Finally, she said, “We’ll come and watch, but we won’t swim in dirty water.”

Meda said, “Okay,” and we shrugged.

After physics, we studied biology, and, in that, Mother Redd instructed us closely. The farmhouse was not just a farmhouse; attached were a greenhouse and a laboratory with gene-parsers and splicers. The hundred hectares of woods, ponds, and fields were all Mother Redd’s experiment, and part of it she let us work on. We were rebuilding the local habitat, reintroducing flora and fauna in a close facsimile to what had been there before the Exodus and the Gene Wars. Mother Redd was building beaver pods. She was letting us build pods of ducks.

Candace followed us to observe our latest version of duck: a clutch of ducklings that had been gengineered to share chemical duck memories, supposedly. There’d been success in modifying some mammals for chemical memories, but none for other classes of
Chordata
. We were trying to build a duck pod for the Science Fair at the end of the summer.

We’d released our ducklings — two different modified clutches — by a pond on the farm, and every morning we went and watched how they worked together.

Bola slid between the reeds while the rest of us hunched down and listened to his thoughts on the wind. The chemical memories were fragile and diffused over distance, but still we could understand what he was seeing and thinking if we concentrated.

“Where are the ducks?” Candace asked.

“Shh!”

“I don’t see them.”

“You’re going to scare them!”

“Fine.” The seven of her folded her arms across her chests.

An image flitted across from Bola of the ducklings poking at the edge of the pond with their bills. They were still covered in yellow fluff that wasn’t quite feathers yet.

“See? One of them saw that patch of moss and the others came over right away!”

Maybe she signaled with sound.

Maybe it was random.

We’d mounted pheromone detectors around the pond to pick up any intrapod memory-sharing among the ducks. So far we’d measured nothing, so we were using observation to try to prove that the ducks were thinking as one.

“Here, ducky, ducky!”

“Candace!” Meda yelled.

The duck, about to climb into her hand, scattered with its siblings.

“What?”

“Will you leave our experiment alone?”

“I was just going to hold it.”

“We want them to be wild, not bonded to a human.”

“Fine.” She turned and left, and, in disbelief, we watched her go. This was supposed to be where we spent
our
summers. This was our farm.

It’s going to be a long summer
, Strom sent.

*

We went swimming by ourselves that day, and, when we got back, we found Candace in the lab building her own duck.

Great
.

“Look!” she cried. “I’m building a duck too!”

We didn’t want to look, but I suggested we at least feign interest.

She showed us the gene sequence she was using, a modified string used with the beavers.

“We’ve tried that already,” Meda said.

“Yeah, I know. I looked at your notes. But I’m adding a different olfactory sequence.”

She looked at our notes
! Our notes were on our locked desktop.

I advised calm, but Meda’s face twitched with rage.

“Good luck,” she grated, and we left.

In the barn, Meda railed, too angry for chemical thoughts. Her emotions filled the loft and caused the pigs Mother Redd was building to oink and stamp at us. “She’s stealing our project, and she’s stealing our notes! She has got to go!”

“She just wants to fit in,” I said.

No one else was buying that.

“We should give her the benefit of the doubt,” I said.