Allotropes (an Ell Donsaii story #8) Read Online Free

path in the dust trailed off down the ring-crossing road toward the central sea.
    Querlak stepped down into the field to examine the damaged delan plant. She could see the disruption in the bedding surface and pellets where it had been pulled up. It had been the nearest plant to the road intersection.  Several leaves had been pulled off the plant and its fat stem broken to let the nutritious white sap spill onto the road above.
    Even with the increased mental acuity from the TS, Querlak could not imagine why anyone would have damaged the plant. Perhaps someone had been rendered isol and no one had recognized it?
    Anyone whose immediate ancestors and descendants all died could be left isol, completely unbound from the network of their clade. Almost all such persons soon went insane. If the clade they had been isolated from cared deeply about the isol, the clade would try to find someone from within their own clade yet genetically unrelated to the isol who might be willing to mate with the isolated one. Such mercy matings were permitted despite the current extreme restrictions on reproduction. The clade’s hope would be that a child would come quickly enough that the fetus would bind the isol back into the original clade. When sigmas recognized that someone had been cut off and they didn’t have a clade member that was willing to mate with them, the sigmas at least took such an isol to a reserved area to live with other isols. There the hope was that they would mate with another isol and have a child quickly enough to at least be bound into a group of three. A clade of three was far from ideal but it would often restore their sanity. With a few more children they would have a large enough clade to return to productive society. Unfortunately, many isols died before they produced a fetus that could bind them, even if someone in their clade did care enough to mate with them and try to bind them back to their home clade.
    The dreadful fear of becoming an isol acted as a powerful driver of procreation for the sigmas. They considered cladeless isolation to be a fate much worse than death.
    Thus, s igmas didn’t just have the evolutionary need to reproduce that drove other animals. Their intelligence and clade binding had also given them an overwhelming desire to be bound to the others in their clade through many children, thus minimizing their chances of becoming a desolate isol.
    This desire had driven the massive overpopulation of their home planet.
    Querlak looked around a little more without finding any other clues to what had happened. For a minute the TS widely expanded itself by adding more members to see if even more intelligence could elucidate the event, but without success. Whatever had torn up the plant and left the trail was a mystery, whether it was a sigma, a device, or a natural phenomenon. However, the high intelligence TS concluded that understanding what had happened was important enough to be worth sending Querlak after it. With a mental shrug Querlak rose into the air and began to follow the strange trail blown from the dust on the ring crossing road. As that task required little cleverness, the TS disbanded as she flew along the roadway. The loss of the TS again left Querlak with a vague pang of regret over her loss of intellect.
     
    ***
     
    Ell’s AI Allan said, “Sigwald has encountered fields with a different crop.”
    Ell glanced up at her HUD and saw that the fields were indeed a lighter green. The plants looked like large grass, reminding her of grain crops on earth. Again there was a trough of rotting matter just rimward of the field. “Let’s stop and look at it.” Ell’s car was nearly to the little house Shan shared with Ryan. There she wouldn’t have access to a waldo controller for direct control of Sigwald. She could go back to her house or to D5R but didn’t want to.
    Allan let Sigwald coast to a stop and shut off the compressed air jets on the bottom of his feet. The hovercraft effect