Free Ten Sigmas & Other Unlikelihoods by Paul Melko Page A

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