Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  “She’s a good doctor,” Plibix said impatiently. Spencer leaned closer to sniff the dragon’s breath: nothing. Plibix wasn’t eating. Since the plasma bomb and the death of the fanged green fairy, Plibix looked scrawnier, and his scales had begun to molt. Spencer had never seen a more dangerous look in any being’s eyes.

  “I know she’s a good doctor, Plib. I want to know what else she is.”

  “For God’s sake, it’s just a plastic plate. You had it imaged, didn’t you? Let it rest, Spencer.”

  “I want to talk to her.” Unbidden, his hand rose to finger the back of his head. He felt all three textures: the thick rough hair giving way to the stubble where his scalp had been shaved giving way to the slick smooth plastic. Yes, he’d had it imaged, and the image had shown a uniform thickness of regular plastic polymers, nothing else. Nothing embedded in the plastic, nothing leading from it deeper into his skull, not even nanofilaments. Spencer still didn’t like it.

  “You want to talk to her, talk to her,” Plibix said. “Do I look like I care? But I told you, she doesn’t get back until late this afternoon and we leave early this evening.”

  “I want to talk to her.”

  Plibix snarled something no human vocal chords could have uttered, flicked his leathery wings, and stomped from the room.

  Spencer was waiting for Dr. Roper when she cleared Decon. She emerged from the last chamber dressed in loose, disposable pants and tunic of soft yellow. Despite himself, Spencer blinked.

  He’d seen her picture, of course. But no holo could capture the impact of her presence. Six feet tall, with deep black eyes and skin the color of caramels, Jen Roper had the curves and walk of an ancient African goddess. She radiated pure, musky, have-to-have-it sex. And since no woman looked like that except by choice, Spencer’s wariness about her shot abruptly upward, along with his attraction.

  “Commander Spencer,” she said. Her voice was husky, pitched low, and the word “Commander” delivered with a playful smile that said she knew exactly how much he disliked it. Who was this woman?

  “Dr. Roper,” he said formally. “I’d like to talk to you.”

  “Certainly. My office is this way.”

  He followed her down the hall, trying not to watch the sway of her buttocks under the thin cloth. Her office was spare, utilitarian, but with framed holos of a grassy savannah dotted with low trees, each holo taken at a different time of day. The savannahs could have been located on innumerable planets, but Jen Roper’s history said she hadn’t been on numerous planets. Goldmeadow, Talianta, and Terra. That was all. The savannahs were probably Terran.

  Although there were also green, grassy savannahs on Leonardo.

  “Coffee? Juice?” she asked.

  “Nothing, thank you. Doctor, why have I got this plate in my head?”

  “Because otherwise you’d be going around with a gaping hole and your considerable brains would spill out.” She smiled. He did not. More seriously she added, “There was no time to clone your own bone and skin—I was told you needed to be in optimum possible condition in three days, max. I had skin and bone on hand that I could have used, but immunosuppressors need to be monitored, and I was told you would be leaving. Of the available materials for a plate, this polymer is the lightest, least susceptible to insertion infections, and the easiest to remove once you do stay long enough in a medical facility to clone your own skin and bone.”

  “At the atomic level, this polymer also forms intricate, fractal-like structures rather than, say, regular, crystalline lattices.”

  “Yes,” said Spencer. “That’s its basic structure.”

  “Such a basic structure can be used to encode messages.”

  Her dark eyes widened in shock. Spencer watched closely; the shock seemed genuine. “Are you accusing me of . . . what are you accusing me of, Commander? And whatever the hell it is, you damn well better be able to substantiate it!”

  “I’m not accusing you of anything. I’m merely reciting an inherent quality of the plate you’ve chosen to put into my head.”

  “I’m as loyal a member of this organization as you are!”

  “Let’s hope so.” He made his tone skeptical, egging her on, watching carefully for every nuance of her reaction.

  “I don’t have anything more to say to you!” she snapped, and suddenly, in the strain in her voice, Spencer remembered waking during surgery:

  Cold and pain: distant pain, as if it were happening to someone else. But Spencer knew it was happening to him, was—

  “He’s awake!”

  “Damn it, I’m not done! Put him out again!”

  “Please leave my office,” Jen Roper said, and he did. She’d been perfect, nothing amiss in her reactions except that indefinable strain, and of course anyone would feel strain when implicitly accused of being an infiltrator, or in the middle of a difficult surgery. Her strain was normal, her reactions perfect . . . so why didn’t Spencer trust her?

  What exactly was it that hadn’t been “done” when he’d awakened on the operating table?

  Walking back down the corridor toward his room, weaker still than he’d like to admit, Spencer put his hand to his head and fingered the plastic plate. Smooth, even, slick. It told him nothing.

  An hour later, he and Plibix left for MacDougal II.

  “It threatens the very foundations of the galaxy!” the garrison officer with Ktonga’s face cried, He turned into a blue bellflower covered with blood, and then—

  “Wake up, mon cheri,” Patsy Klein said sleepily in French, “you’re having a nightmare.”

  “I don’t . . . have nightmares,” Spencer mumbled.

  “Well, you’re having one now,” she said and then she was asleep again, snoring softly, her sharp hip bone pressing uncomfortably into his side.

  It had been a long time since his last nightmare. But Patsy was right—he was having them now.

  He lay beside her in the opulent stateroom on the J.D. Peterson and stared at the ceiling. He and Plibix had changed crafts and identities three times on the journey from Goldmeadow. Now Plibix had vanished to take care of his part of the operation, and Patsy had joined him for the last stage of the journey to MacDougal.

  They were Monsieur and Madame Jacques Aubert-Bertin, based on Argent Trois, owners of a firm that searched out interesting plant genetics useful for enhancing food crops. Spencer had grown up speaking Terran French with his mother, and Patsy could pick up any language, human or alien, yet discovered. Jacques and Giselle Aubert-Bertin traveled in the most luxurious style, partying every night with the other wealthy passengers aboard, listening to all the gossip and business deals and political speculation. The Aubert-Bertins said little themselves, but then they weren’t well, poor elderly dears, and as long as they provided the most scrumptious drinkables in their stateroom . . . and did you hear what that fascinating Colonel Matic said about his tour of duty on Leonardo, it was absolutely outrageous, it seems that in the middle of the night certain citizens had just disappeared, and—

  Spencer had learned a lot on the J.D. Peterson, although most of it confirmed what he already knew rather than adding anything fresh. He still had no idea who had set off the plasma bomb in Goldmeadow. His superiors, including Parapara, swore they didn’t know. Plibix, before he had parted from Spencer, said he hadn’t learned anything more, either.

  Plibix might or might not have been telling the truth. The answers, whatever they were, lay on MacDougal or on Leonardo. Maybe.

  Ktonga had told Spencer, at their meeting that now seemed so long ago (last week) that there “was something happening on Leonardo.” Ktonga had had a gift for understatement. Leonardo had been humanity’s most conspicuous failure in human-alien relationships. On every other planet with sentient life—well, almost every other planet—colonizers had been able to use negotiation, trade, or intimidation to settle on worlds already inhabited by some other race. But Leonardoins didn’t negotiate, weren’t impressed by any technology they were shown, and didn’t
intimidate. Tall, blue, proud, and unfriendly, they had followed their warrior-wanderer lives for millennia and planned on doing it for millennia more. Twenty years ago, they flat out refused to have humans on the one inhabitable continent of Leonardo, and they flat out refused to say why. The few anthropologists the Leonardoins didn’t murder reported that this isolationism seemed to be a religious taboo. Something about a goddess and a native animal—Spencer hadn’t paid much attention to this part. Primitive goddesses didn’t interest him.

  Turning over in the stuffy stateroom, pushing away Patsy’s bony shoulder, he suddenly saw an image Jen Roper. Impatiently he pushed the thought away.

  With no choice under galactic law, the colonists had prepared to leave Leonardo. If they had, the whole venture might have ended right there and nobody would have ever heard of Leonardo again. Which would have been fine with Spencer, then a junior officer in Space Intelligence. However, just before the colonists had taken off, the Leonardoins had attacked and wiped out the entire encampment.

  Which had been under a dome impenetrable by any weapon not operating at an atomic level.

  Simultaneously, the colonists’ ship in orbit had blown up, along with seventeen widely scattered orbital probes, a shuttle in transit from the surface, and the Space Navy Belsen-class warship Julius Caesar.

  Simultaneously.

  Then the Leonardoins had hurled their spears at the rubble left from the dome.

  The Navy sent an investigative team. Then another. In twenty years, they had not found out who or what had destroyed the colonists and their military clockwork. But the same thing had happened again, and again. By the third time it was clear to everyone that the Leonardoins had secret champions and that the champions possessed the ability to destroy things that were nowhere near them, or each other. Quantum-entangled weaponry, the physicists called it, because they had to call it something. “Entangle” your target’s particles with those physically somewhere else, and blow up things from halfway across the galaxy. Humans could not make such weapons.

  So whose weapon was it?

  Why was it being used to defend a Godforsaken place like Leonardo?

  And what would happen to whatever human group discovered the answers first?

  Of the three questions, Spencer could imagine the answer only to the last one. Unimaginable power. No scholar, Spencer nonetheless remembered what Lord Acton had said about power five hundred years ago. It was still true.

  Three bells chimed musically. Patsy woke, yawned, and said, “Nous avons arrivées.”

  They were docking at the station above MacDougal II. Spencer washed, dressed, and added a few last-minute items to his suitcases, which after a few hours he would never see again. The largest suitcase asked if it should lock and depart. He told it yes. The only item that mattered wasn’t even with Spencer; Plibix had taken the egg-shaped package with him.

  Dressed, Patsy looked like what she was supposed to be: a gray-haired, very old, very rich woman who still enjoyed a good laugh. That was, of course, nothing like her genuine self, and sometimes Spencer had the sensation that he hadn’t been traveling with Patsy Klein at all, or with anyone. Even the carefully managed, sedate sex, suitable for such unrejuvenated ancients, had felt unreal. He didn’t worry about that sensation. It was a normal part of working undercover with a good agent.

  But what happened next was not part of anyone’s plans.

  “Allons, cheri,” Patsy said, opened the stateroom door—and gasped.

  MIRROR IMAGE

  When the message from Seliku reached me, I was dreaming in QUENTIAM. No, not dreaming, that can’t be right—the upload state doesn’t permit dreaming. For that you need a biological, soft tissue of one sort or another, and I had no biology until my next body was done. I had qubits moving at c, combining and recombining with themselves and, to the extent It will permit, with QUENTIAM. I should not have been dreaming.

  Still, the subprogram felt like a biological dream. Something menacing and ill-defined chased me through a shifting landscape, something unknowably vast, coming closer and closer, its terrifying breath on my back, its—

  *Message from Seliku, magnitude one,* QUENTIAM “said” to me and the dream vanished. The non-dream.

  *From Seliku? Now?*

  *Yes.*

  *It’s not time for Seliku.* And certainly not at a magnitude one.

  QUENTIAM didn’t answer. It gave me an image of Seliku gazing at an image of me from out of a mirror, a piece of rococo drollery I was all at once too apprehensive to appreciate. It was nowhere near time for me to hear from Seliku, or from any of my sister-selves.

  “Akilo,” she said in agitation. Her image had the faint halo of real-time transmission. Seliku wore the body we all used for our bond-times, a female all-human with pale brown skin, head hair in a dark green crest, black eyes. Four coiled superflexible tentacles were each a meter long, the digits slim and graceful. It was the body of the woman we would have become had our creation occurred on a quiet planet—not that we could have been created on a quiet planet. We called the body “human standard,” to QUENTIAM’s great amusement. We didn’t understand that amusement, and It had declined to explain.

  For my image, QUENTIAM had used my last body, grown for my fish work on ˄563, just before this upload. Four arms, tail, gills. I’d never liked the body and now I tweaked its image to a duplicate of Seliku’s. We gazed at each other within my usual upload sim, a forested bedroom copied from ˄894, where I’d once adjusted a particularly appealing species of seedings. It had been some of my best work. I’d been happy there.

  Seliku said, “Akilo, you must come to Calyx. Now. Immediately.”

  “What has happened?” She was scaring me.

  “I don’t know what happened. I mean yes, I do, we do, it’s Haradil—you must come!”

  I recognized fear in her jerky, elliptical blurtings—we all spoke that way when genuinely terrified. “Bej—”

  “Bej and Camy are here.”

  “Where is Haradil? Seliku, tell me!”

  “I . . . sorry, I’m sorry, I thought I . . . Haradil is at the Mori Core. Or she was there. They arrested and tried her already—”

  “Tried her? For what?”

  “The Mori First One called me. The First One himself. He said that Haradil destroyed a star system.”

  Stunned, I tried to assimilate this. A star system—an entire star system. How? Why?

  “Why?”

  Seliku was more coherent now, calmed a bit by sharing the disaster. That, too, I recognized. She said, “The First One wouldn’t tell me except in person. You know how they are. Akilo, the star system was inhabited. There was life there.”

  “Sentient?”

  “Yes, although primitive. And Haradil . . . they’ve exiled her to a quiet planet for life.”

  For life. For taking life. “I—”

  “Come now, Akilo. We’re waiting for you. Please come now.”

  “I’m in upload, my new body isn’t done—”

  “I know you’re in upload! Come when the body’s done!” Anger, our habitual response to helplessness. Seliku’s image vanished without waiting for agreement; she knew that of course I would come.

  I turned my share of our anger on QUENTIAM. *Why didn’t you tell me about Haradil when it happened?*

  *You didn’t ask.*

  *We have a group flag on anything significant involving any of us!*

  *Haradil overrode it half a year ago,* QUENTIAM said.

  Overrode it. Haradil hadn’t wanted her sister-selves to know what she’d been doing.

  What had she been doing? Who were the sentients that Haradil had given over to death? How had she, who was genetically I, done such a thing? Destroyed a star system . . . exiled for life . . . a quiet planet. Where now Haradil, too, would die.

  As children we had played at “death.” One of us would lie absolutely still while the others whispered above her, kicked her softly, pretended to walk away and leave her alone forever. The ga
me had left us breathless and thrilled, like playing “nova” or “magic.” Children enjoy the impossible, the unthinkable.

  I said to QUENTIAM, *When will my next body be done?*

  *At the same moment I named when you last asked me that.*

  *Can it be sooner?*

  *I cannot hurry bio-nanos. I am a membrane, Akilo, not a magician.*

  How had she, who was I, done such a thing?

  I stood before a full-length mirror in the vat room of the station, flexing my new tentacles with distaste. This body had been designed for my next assignment, on ˄1864. After Seliku’s message arrived, QUENTIAM had directed the nanos to make some alterations, but I’d been unwilling to take the time to start from scratch. On ˄1864 the gravity was 1.6 standard and the seedings I’d been going to adjust were non-sentient, semi-aquatic plants. This body had large webbed feet, heavy muscles in the squat lower body, and relatively short tentacles ending in too many digits of enormous flexibility. Most of QUENTIAM’s last-minute alterations had occurred in the face, which was more or less the one Seliku had worn in her transmission, although 1.6 gravity dictated that the neck was practically non-existent.

  “I hate it,” I said.

  “It’s very practical,” QUENTIAM said. Now that I had downloaded, his voice came from the walls of the small room, furnished only with the mirror and the vat from which my body had come. “Or it would have been practical if you were still going to ˄1864.”

  “Are you sending someone else?”

  “Of course. It’s been nearly a thousand years since their last adjustment.”

  No one knows what QUENTIAM calls a “year.” It doesn’t seem to correspond to any planetary revolution stored in Its deebees, which suggests that the measure is very old indeed, carried over from the previous versions of QUENTIAM. Some of the knowledge in those earlier versions appears to have been lost. I can’t imagine any of the versions; QUENTIAM has been what It is in the memory of everyone I’ve ever met, no matter how many states they’ve inhabited. It’s just QUENTIAM, the membrane of spacetime into which everything else is woven.