“It feels very strange,” Bej said softly. “How will we . . .”
“We will,” Seliku said. “Because we must.”
I felt myself nodding. We would, because we must.
QUENTIAM said, “The shuttle can take you up to the orbital now, and your t-hole shuttle is ready there.”
“Not yet,” I said, not without pleasure. It’s hard to surprise QUENTIAM, but I guessed that we were doing it now. ‘There’s more things I want to prepare.”
“More things?” Definitely offended. I saw Bej grin slightly at Camy.
“Yes,” I said, savoring the moment. “We’ll be ready to go soon.”
The four of us waddled laboriously—curse this gravity—to my lab. I had set it up days ago in a room grown near the vat room. Ostensibly the lab’s purpose was to study the microbiology of the flowers Bej and Camy had designed and QUENTIAM had created for Calyx, just as if they were biologicals or cyborgs that had naturally evolved from seedings. And I had done some of that work, storing the data in QUENTIAM, carefully packing and storing both specimens and experimental materials in opaque canisters for any future biologists who might want them. But that was not all I had done.
*QUENTIAM, give me—*
Give me nothing. It couldn’t hear me. I had no implant.
The eeriest sensation came over me then: I am dead. It was a thousand-fold-stronger version of what I had felt moments before, in the vat room. I was detached, unconnected, alone, in the supreme isolation of death.
But of course I was not. My sister-selves were there, and I clutched Bej’s hand. She seemed to understand. We were not alone, not cut off, not dead. We had each other.
This must be what Haradil felt. And she did not have the rest of us.
For a brief moment I hated QUENTIAM. It had done this, It and Its parameters for permissible human behavior. QUENTIAM had gone along with this brutal Morit “justice,” and now Haradil . . .
Camy said quietly, “It must be even worse for her. Because . . . you know.”
We all knew.
There are five possible states for a human being. Without implants, as we were now. Implanted, which is the normal state. A machine body, which is really just a much heightened version of implants plus a virtually indestructible body. Upload, which is bodiless but still a separate subprogram within QUENTIAM, with its own boundaries. And merged, in which individual identity is temporarily lost in the larger membrane-self of QUENTIAM. Few humans merge, and most never return. Those that do are never really the same.
Haradil, three bond-times ago, had merged with QUENTIAM.
It had been after a bad love affair. We all took those hard; I thought of Camy and Bej’s ravaged looks when I’d landed on Calyx. We were all intemperate, single-minded in romance as in all else. But Haradil, who had never really chosen a field of work, had been the one who tried to handle the emotional pain by merging with QUENTIAM. And she had come back calmer but almost totally silent, unwilling to tell us what it had been like. “Not unwilling,” she’d finally said. “Unable. It’s an experience you can’t put into words.” It had been the longest speech she’d made since returning.
I’d been afraid for her then. We’d all been afraid. But she had continued calm, silent, remote during the next two bond-times. With us and not with us. Neither happy nor unhappy, but somehow beyond both.
“Not human,” Bej had finally said, and we’d turned on her in anger, because we’d all thought it ourselves.
But not destructive, either. In fact, the opposite. Gradually we’d come to sense optimism of some kind under Haradil’s silence, and our anxiety had been at least partially allayed, and then Haradil had blown up a star system containing sentient life.
Now Seliku said, “Let’s get to work.”
We had the nanomachinery create a cart. The cart loaded onto itself the canisters I indicated. Seliku, Bej, and Camy hadn’t been able to make their lesser preparations until after they were without implants, and there were things I wanted to add to the cart as well, so we dragged around in the monstrous gravity for another day. QUENTIAM observed everything, of course, but It had no reason to stop us. And it asked no questions about anything we had the nanos manufacture.
There were many moments when I started to ask It something: *QUENTIAM, is the—* and then I remembered. But there were no more moments like the terrible, deathlike one in the lab. All day my sister-selves and I worked beside each other, tentacles reaching out to touch and pat, and at night we slept in a heap, tails and legs tangled together in the too-warm, fragrant air of Calyx.
“I hope I never see another flower again,” Seliku said when we were finally aboard QUENTIAM’s shuttle on our way upstairs. And then, “Oh, sorry, Bej and Camy, I didn’t mean—”
“I don’t want to see flowers, either,” they said in unison, and then laughed unhappily. Below us the planet dwindled to a soft blue-and-white bauble.
We would see no flowers on ˄17843.
The gravity on our orbital-grown shuttle was a relief; it matched ˄17843’s. “QUENTIAM,” Seliku said, “take us through the t-hole to ˄17843.”
I thought It might speak to us for the first time since we’d left the vat room, but It didn’t. The shuttle moved away from the orbital toward nothing, apparently went through nothing, and emerged into a different sky.
A huge gas giant, ringless and hazy, filled half the sky. Ugly—the pale planet looked as ugly as the fuzzy tumors of a seeding biology gone very wrong. As I watched, a large moon emerged from behind the planet. Clouds, oceans, but none of the beauty of Calyx. To my present state of mind, those feature, too, looked like primitive biological deformities, the clouds crawling like parasites across a landscape diseased with what did not belong there.
The shuttle was equipped with full orbital sensors. I imaged the continent with flora as it turned repeatedly below us. Large animal activity showed up on half a dozen different readings. And there was only one large animal on ˄17843. I gave Seliku the right coordinates.
Seliku said calmly, “QUENTIAM, take this shuttle as low as is safe.”
“This is as low as is safe. You are within the upper atmosphere.”
“All right. Sister-selves?”
“Yes,” Camy said, speaking for all of us.
And so it began.
We unpacked the canisters we’d brought with us. Each of us tied on cloth belts containing non-metallic tools, blankets, rope, concentrated food pellets, collapsible ceramic cups, the rest of our prepared items. Then we pushed the remaining four opaque canisters toward the airlock.
“What are you doing?” QUENTIAM said. “It is not permitted to descend to Paletej.”
Seliku said, “It is not permitted for you to take us through a t-hole to the surface. It is permitted for us to leave the shuttle to go into space.”
“You will die,” QUENTIAM said. Did I hear regret in Its voice, or anger?
Seliku merely repeated, “It is permitted for us to leave the shuttle. We have nothing that can be destroyed by the metal-eating spores in the atmosphere. And we have nothing with us that connects us to you, QUENTIAM, or anything else forbidden on the surface of a quiet planet.”
“Your bodies contain nanomeds.”
“They are not forbidden to visitors to quiet planets.”
“This quiet planet never has visitors.”
“Until now.”
“You will die outside the shuttle. We are well within the gravity well. You will fall to your deaths.”
Seliku opened her canister, laid the lid on the floor, and stepped inside. “You will open the shuttle door over these coordinates, as soon as feasible after seventy-five millivals.”
“But—”
“You will open the door.”
“Yes,” QUENTIAM said. It had no real choice. A human being may destroy herself, although not others, if she so chooses.
Bej, Camy, and I opened our canisters, laid the lids on the floor, and stepped inside. Our gazes all met. “I love you
,” Camy said, for all of us, as the membranes in the canister began to grow around us.
Biological membranes, not the spacetime that is QUENTIAM.
I had found them on ˄22763, a planet seeded back in the very beginnings of the Great Mission, when humans had been willing to subject living things to a far greater range of environments than they did later on. So many of those hapless seedings died, and so many suffered. ˄22763 had been lucky, winning the blind lottery of evolutionary mutation. They were light, air-filled creatures, non-sentient, floating through a world with no sustenance except sunlight, in temperatures just high enough to keep their atmosphere from freezing. All my data on them had of course been stored in QUENTIAM, but I had memorized it, too, because it had been so interesting.
On Calyx, with the help of programmable nanos, I had recreated the floaters and stored them as spores in opaque canisters. The mature floaters, biologicals, were not forbidden on ˄17843, although they would die there. But first, unless I had misremembered data, they would get us down to the surface. If I had misremembered, we would die along with the creatures.
The membrane sealed around me just before the shuttle door opened.
When did QUENTIAM realize what we were doing? It’s possible It knew from the very beginning. It may have had no choice but to permit this because of its “parameters,” or because preservation is the first law, or even because of “love.” Who can understand the mind of QUENTIAM? It moves in mysterious ways.
As the air left the shuttle, the four floaters were blown into space. The shuttle orbited as low as possible without encountering the metal-consuming nanos. The floaters, which had fed voraciously on the light inside the shuttle, now fed on the abundant reflected light from the gas giant. They swelled with the breathable gases that were its carefully re-engineered waste products. I had held my breath for too long; now I breathed.
In the clear living bubbles, which were already dying, my sister-selves and I began the long float down to the surface of the transformed moon.
###
Pain. Fear. A rushing in my head like rapids, water that would sweep me away, kill me . . .
The rushing receded, although the pain did not. There was no water. I hung at a steep incline, head lower than my legs, in the fronds of a giant, prickly fern. The rushing became the voices of Bej and Camy somewhere below me in the eddies of green.
“Akilo! Akilo, answer us!”
“I’m . . . here. I’m all right,” I said, although clearly I was not. As sensation clarified, the pain localized to my head and one leg.
“You’re only three or four meters above the ground,” Bej called. “Drop and we’ll catch you.”
I did, they did, and the world blackened for a moment, then returned. I lay on a forest floor, a bed of thick, damp, pulpy plants as unpleasant to lie on as a dung heap. Not that any of my sister-selves had ever seen a dung heap. I was the biologist, and a fine job I’d done of adapting the floaters that had died and disintegrated before we’d actually reached ground.
“I’m sorry,” I croaked up at Bej and Camy. “Seliku?”
“I’m here,” she said, striding into my circle of sight. “You’re the only one hurt, Akilo. But it’s all right; we can stay here quietly until your nanomeds fix you.”
I closed my eyes. The nanomeds were already releasing painkillers, and the hurting receded. Sedatives took me. My last thought was gratitude that ˄17843 had no predators. No, that was my second-last thought. The last was a memory, confused and frightened, from the moment before I crashed: a flash of light bright enough to temporarily blind me, light as silent and deadly as a distant nova.
Then I slept.
###
“You’re back,” Bej said. “Akilo, you’re back.”
A campfire burned beside me. My body, wrapped in two of the superthin blankets from our toolbelts, was warm on the fire side, slightly chilled on the other. A strange odor floated from the fire. I sat up.
“How long have I—”
“Three days,” Bej said. “We’ve made quite a little camp. Here, drink this.”
She held out to me a cup of the odd-smelling liquid. It tasted worse than it smelled, and I made a face.
“At least it’s not poisonous,” Bej said cheerfully. “Local flora. We’re trying to conserve the food pellets as long as we can. How do you feel?”
“All right.” I flexed my leg; it was fine. Thanks to the nanomeds that Haradil had to do without.
“Seliku and Camy are out gathering more food. We had to do something while you were out, so we gathered leaves, tested them with our nanomeds for biocompatibility, and boiled them down to make that drink.”
“Boiled them in what?” I finished the drink and stood, working my muscles. Without the blankets, the air was cold.
“That,” Bej said, pointing at a rickety arrangement of bent wood and huge leaves. “It’s remarkably effective, but ready to fall apart, so it’s a good thing you’re ready to travel. You can eat those same leaves raw, too, but they taste even worse that way.”
“Travel to where?” I said. Bej seemed too cheerful. Didn’t she realize that we might all die here? Of course she did. Her cheerfulness was a kind of bravery, sparing me not only her fear but also her share of the intense shame we all felt over Haradil’s crime.
“We haven’t seen any prisoners yet,” Bej said, “but Seliku came across a campsite—old ashes, that sort of thing. The scent is long gone but Camy thinks we can track them. Do you think we can?”
“Bej,” I said irritably, “I’m an adjustment biologist. Of course I can track, probably much better than Camy can.”
“That’s good, because she said you’re going to do it. Jump around a bit. It gets much warmer here when the star is higher.”
In the dim filtered green of dense forest, I hadn’t realized it was early morning.
Seliku and Camy returned. Seen together, I became aware of the changes that three “days” (how long was each?) had made in my sister-selves. Their dung-colored fur was matted and dirty, especially Camy’s, who didn’t smile at me as she walked into camp. For the first time, she and comparatively cheerful Bej, standing side by side, did not look alike. It was unsettling.
They packed up our few bits of equipment: blankets, boiled-down food wrapped in more leaves, ceramic knives. Seliku lead me to the abandoned camp. Following the trail from there was easy compared to the seedings I had tracked on other worlds. These prisoners had nothing to hide and no predators to confuse, and they’d left a blindingly obvious trail of broken ferns, missing edible leaves, and old shit. A child could have found the settlement.
˄17843 proved to have stretches of open ground within the fern forests. But even these low-lying “meadows” were overgrown with pulpy green, so that everywhere our feet sunk onto squishy vegetation and stagnant water. The green was unrelieved by any color of fruit or flower. In the sky the gas giant loomed oppressively, blocking the sun. The only sound was a low, unceasing hum from insect-analogues, monotonous and dulling. I hated the place.
At midday, which seemed to come very quickly on this small world, we reached the top of a fern-crested hill, and suddenly before us, down a steeper slope, was the welcome blue of the sea.
“Wait,” I said, when Bej would have rushed down the hill toward huts built on the seashore.
“Wait for what? Haradil’s down there!”
I pulled her back into the thick fronds. Seliku and Camy, dirty and sweaty, watched us. “Bej, listen to me. These people have been sent here by the Mori for crimes. Some of them may have only violated some idiotic Mori custom, but some might be truly dangerous. They may have destroyed or killed.”
As Haradil had.
Seliku said, “Alo is right.” She drew her ceramic knife and looked at us.
Camy stared back in disbelief. “The knives are for work, not . . . you can’t expect me to . . . Sel, I don’t want to!”
“None of us want to,” I said. I shared Camy’s distaste, shared Seliku�
�s reluctant foresight, shared Bej’s eagerness to see Haradil. These were my sister-selves. After a moment, Camy, Bej, and I drew our knives.
Together, with me in the lead, we started toward the settlement.
As we got closer, details emerged, all of them sickening. The flimsy huts, which looked as if a good wind would blow them over, were built of woody fern trunks topped with broad fronds. Among them burned two or three open fires ringed with stones and topped with leaf cauldrons. People, including some children, skittered around frantically as soon as they glimpsed us.
We halted halfway down the hill, smiling painfully, and waited.
Eventually two prisoners started toward us. Seliku glanced at me, and I gestured helplessly. I had guessed as well as I could without data. Still, I’d gotten the bodies wrong.
The two coming toward us were even smaller and lighter than we, which on reflection made sense: less mass to support with food gathering. Fragile, tailless, thickly furred to conserve heat and discourage insect bites, they walked on two legs but had only two thick tentacles, which ended in clumsy opposable digits. But the faces were human. One of the prisoners had been infected with some sort of local fungus that covered its head and part of its back. I saw Camy gaze at it in horror. The other had a scar along the left side of its face. I don’t think I’d ever seen uglier sentients, or more pathetic ones.
Silently, simultaneously, we put our knives back into our toolbelts. Any one of us could have smashed both of these sad people into jelly.
Then came the worst.
Seliku said, “Hello. We are looking for our sister-self, Jiuinip Haradil Sister-Self 7664-3. Is she here?”
Both creatures stared at us. Then one chattered incomprehensibly. Bej gasped. “They don’t have translation capability!”
Of course not. Translations went through QUENTIAM by implant, so simultaneously that hardly anyone noticed it happening. These poor beings had no implants. And neither did we. So they lived here, unable to talk even to the other pathetic prisoners, deprived even of the solace of words to share the unendurable. It seemed the worst cruelty yet. Wouldn’t death have been better than this?
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