Free Singularity's Ring by Paul Melko

to leave me there by the cottage.
    Still a fool, Moira chided. Strom touched the tender interface jack on my neck.
    All’s forgiven, Meda. The consensus was the juice of a ripe fruit, the light of distant stars.
    All’s forgiven.
    Hand in hand in hand, we returned to the farm, sharing all that had happened that day.

THREE
    Quant
    When we returned to the farmhouse, Dr. Khalid was there. One of him stepped into our space and lifted Meda’s hair from her nape. The skin there was raw, the outer jacket of the interface silver in a patch of red.
    “What has been done to you, child?” Khalid whispered.
    Meda flushed, and I felt her embarrassment as my own. He was our doctor, and yet we did not want to talk about what Malcolm Leto had done to us.
    “It was Leto,” Mother Redd said. She stood aside; she often examined us as well, but when Dr. Khalid was present, she deferred to him.
    One of Khalid whirled on her, and a sharp expression crossed his face. “You knew the danger!”
    One of Mother Redd took a step back, and then her interface shook her head.
    “Do not lecture me on risk, Doctor,” she said.
    We had not seen this clash between them before, and we did not know what to make of it. Dr. Khalid made no
reply, but turned back to Meda and scanned the base of her skull with his portable MRI.
    “It’s embedded in her cerebellum,” he murmured. “This is not good.”
    “Will it come out?” Meda asked.
    All four of Khalid pursed his lips before answering, and we knew that it would not.
    What about our practicum? I sent. The culmination of our years of training was the ten-week space-tour. Would this delay it?
    Strom touched my shoulder, and he passed a thought between us. This is about Meda.
    I flinched. He was right, and I felt guilty for thinking of what I wanted above Meda’s trauma.
    But Meda glanced at me, and then said to Dr. Khalid, “I don’t want this to affect the practicum.”
    “I don’t think—” Dr. Khalid began.
    “That’s nothing to worry about now,” Mother Redd interrupted and again a dark look passed between one or two of each of them.
    Worry, however we did, especially when the full MRI at the Institute confirmed that the nanofilaments of the interface were far into Meda’s brain and impossible to remove. Furthermore, we saw via e-mail that other of our classmates were getting their assignments.
    Where’s ours? I sent, as we read the smarmy letter from Elliott O’Toole regarding his lunar posting.
    Willow had a peach of an assignment at the Rift Observatory, where several telescopes were pointed through the hole in space in hopes of mapping as much of the remote location as possible. They had already found a G4 star less than half a light-year away.
    How’d Elliott get the moon? Manuel asked.
    It’s not the Consensus, Moira replied. He didn’t get assigned to L4.

    That would have been the worst, a fait accompli for him.
    We fretted the rest of the day, but finally the message came. Meda read it as I hid my face, but I felt the elation and I knew.
    GEO! Meda sent. We’re going to Columbus Station!
     
    “Let’s go! We have cargo to unload, and we have to turn this barge around in sixty minutes!”
    The words were just sounds, but the pod moved, and I followed, mesmerized. Not by the shouts, but by the subtlety of motion I could achieve with the slightest force or pressure. As I glided into the wall, I stopped myself with a touch of my finger. I had been experimenting during the shuttle ride over, and I knew that I could use a palm to rotate my body. A solid grip on a bar gave me pitch and yaw control over my torso.
    It was wonderful.
    “Quant!” Manuel whispered at me. He was the last of us, except me, to exit the barge, and I realized that I was alone, save a muttering duo scrubbing vomit from an air vent’s debris trap. It wasn’t ours; we’d been in zero-gee before. It was poor Anderson McCorkle’s, a fresh space dog duo who’d had a bad time of it. He’d managed to