Camy took a step backward and brought up her tentacles to cover her face. Seliku pressed on, her voice quavering slightly, in several other languages; I hadn’t realized she’d learned so many. No response.
Finally I said, very slowly and with a variety of pitches and inflections, “Haradil? Har . . . a . . . dil? HARadil? HaraDIL? HarAdil? Haarrrraaadddiiilll? Haradil? Haradil?”
One of them worked. The prisoner with fungus made a quick snapping gesture with his digits, a gesture I didn’t understand, as he repeated “Haradil” in a guttural tone with a rising inflection. The other prisoner watched dully. I nodded and smiled, and the first man pointed toward the forest we’d just left. I made helpless gestures and he rose to his full stunted height, scowled fiercely, and gestured for us to follow. The four of us trailed behind him laterally along the edge of the forest until, about half a blinu from the settlement, he turned into the ferns.
We seemed to walk a long way into the forest. Finally, in a small hacked-out clearing, in front of the flimsiest hut yet, crouched another of the ugly creatures. As we approached, it raised its eyes to us and they were filled with despair and anguish and, then, recognition.
Haradil.
Bej burst into tears. But Camy rushed forward and with all the strength of her superior body, slammed a fisted tentacle into Haradil’s weeping face. “How could you, Hari? How could you do it, to all of us?”
###
I understood Camy’s fury, Bej’s sorrow, Seliku’s distaste. I shared all three. But I was the biologist. After Seliku had pulled Camy off of Haradil, I knelt beside her to examine her wounds. Our prisoner guide had oozed back into the forest. The light bones of Haradil’s face didn’t seem broken, but she was obviously in pain, and my anger turned from her to Camy.
“You could have killed her! This body is really fragile!”
“I’m sorry,” Camy choked out. She didn’t cry. We were not easy criers.
Haradil said nothing, and that was at first oddly reassuring because it was the way she’d been ever since her merger with QUENTIAM, was at least a token of the Haradil we’d known.
“Haradil,” I said as calmly as I could manage, “I’m going to give you nanomeds.”
She shrank back under my hands. Seliku said, too harshly, “Hari, the Mori won’t know, nor QUENTIAM. It has no sensors here. No one will know what we do in this place.”
“No nanomeds!” Haradil cried, and somehow her voice was still her own, horrifying in that awful body.
“Why not?” I said, but I already knew. Holding her delicate, filthy face between my hands, I saw the start of the same fungal infection that the other prisoner had, and I shuddered.
“Nanomeds will keep me alive!”
“And you want to die,” Seliku said, still in that same harsh voice. “Burn that, Haradil. You live. You owe us that, and a lot more.”
“No!” Haradil cried, and then she was gone, squirming out from under my gentle clasp. Bej caught her with a flying tackle that might, all by itself, have broken bones. Haradil screamed and flailed ineffectually.
Horrified, furious, and determined, we set on her. Bej and Camy held her legs and the one set of arms. Seliku unwound a long superfine rope from her toolbelt and we tied Haradil. The others looked at me; I was the biologist. I drew my knife, sliced into Haradil’s arm and then my own, and pressed them firmly together. Nanomeds flowed from me to her. Haradil began a low, keening sound, like a trapped animal.
It took a long time for enough nanomeds to replicate within Haradil to achieve sedation. Until nightfall we had to listen to that terrible sound. Finally she fell asleep, and we carried her into the forest and lay down under our blankets.
We didn’t need much sleep, but there wasn’t anything else to do. I had never known such blackness. No starlight penetrated the overhang of fronds. My infrared vision was, except for my sister-selves, a uniform and low-key haze of plant and insect life. We didn’t build a fire for the same reason we’d left Haradil’s hut. Not all the prisoners on ˄17843 might be as scowlingly cooperative as the one that had brought us to Haradil. Some of these people had killed.
As she had.
“I’m sorry I hit you,” I heard Camy whisper in the dark to Haradil’s sedated form, and I knew that Camy both was and was not sorry.
But the strangest thing in that dark night was the absence of QUENTIAM. I hadn’t expected to feel so completely bereft. My sister-selves lay so close to me that their breathing was mine, the scent of their bodies filled my mouth, their tentacles clutched patches of my fur. Yet it was QUENTIAM I missed. That voice in my head, always there, knowing what I was doing without being told, knowing what I wanted next. Support and companion and fellow biologist. I missed It so fiercely that my throat closed and my body shuddered.
“Are you cold, Alo?” Seliku whispered. In the dark she pushed more of her own blanket onto me. But it brought no warmth, brought no comfort, was not—shockingly, horrifyingly—what I needed, not at all.
###
Haradil slept for days, during which we did nothing except move farther inland, gather leaves, and consume them to supplement and conserve our pellets of concentrated food. It was an exhausting, endless, boring process. The bodies I had asked for were too big for the available nourishment, with too little storage capacity. We all lost weight, and each time it was my turn to carry the sedated Haradil, she seemed heavier on my back. Despite our efforts, we had to use some of the food pellets, and our supply diminished steadily.
The farther we moved away from the other prisoners, the more I could see why they’d camped on the shore. There may have been some edibles, plankton or small marine worms, in the sea; that would be compatible with Level-4 fauna. More important, on the beach it would have been possible to see the sky, hear the waves. Under the fern cover we saw nothing but pulpy green in half-light, alien and silent. The only sound was the high-pitched drone of insects that stung constantly. Occasionally, when the wind was right, a stench of rotting plants blew toward us, fetid and overpowering. I had been on many ugly worlds, but none I hated as much as this one.
On the sixth day, we camped just past noon in a small, relatively dry clearing. We were so tired, and even the huge blob of the gas giant overhead was better than yet more oppressive green. Bej and Seliku made a fire, despite the risk of smoke rising above the ferns and giving away our positions. We sat around it and ate, by unspoken agreement, twice our usual ration of food pellets, washed down with water from a muddy stream.
“What’s that?” Seliku asked Camy.
Camy held up a particularly thick section of woody fern trunk, which she was carving with her ceramic knife. She’d sculpted a pattern of beads along its length, smooth ovals gracefully separated in the CeeHee intervals, loveliest of proportions in both art and mathematics. Even here, Camy had to be an artist.
The sight inexplicably cheered me. “Camy—” I began, and the sky exploded.
Some of us screamed. There was no noise, but the sky opposite to the gas giant grew bright, then even brighter. Bej threw herself across Camy, I did the same with Haradil, and Seliku fell to the ground. In a moment it was over. Seliku gazed upward.
“What . . . what was that?” Camy, but it might have been any of us.
“I don’t know,” Seliku said, and her voice held even more strain than Camy’s. “But I think the station just blew up.”
“The station?” Bej said. “The Mori station? QUENTIAM’s station?” All the stations were, in one sense, QUENTIAM’s. It created and maintained and ran them. “How could that be?”
“I don’t know,” Seliku said. “It can’t be. Unless QUENTIAM did it.”
“Why?”
“I said I don’t know!”
“Sel,” I said, “I saw something like that when we landed, just before I fell into that giant fern, only not as bright. A flash of light. Could that have been the shuttle blowing up, too? No, I know you don’t know, but did you see a flash then as well?”
“No. Bu
t we all landed before you, and we were below the fronds—that first flash wasn’t as bright as this?”
“No, not as bright. But I saw it.”
Seliku said, with a reluctance I didn’t understand, “If that big flash was the station, then I suppose what you saw could have been the shuttle. But there’s no reason for QUENTIAM to blow up either of them.”
“Maybe It didn’t,” Camy said.
We all looked at Haradil, still deeply sedated. If there were answers, they must come from her. But if the shuttle and station really had blown up—
“I think,” Camy began, “that we better—” Men burst from the dense pulpy foliage.
Twelve prisoners, all armed with longer, thicker, sharper versions of Camy’s carved wood. Spears—my mouth tasted the archaic, slimy word. So the exiles had known all along where we were. They had experience in tracking, just as I had, and they’d stayed upwind of us.
I said quietly, “Draw your knives and make a circle facing outward around Haradil.”
We did, four comparatively large women against a dozen frail pygmies. Only then did I see that the tip of the spear closest to me was sticky with something thick and green.
These people had had years of exile to learn about the flora here, as well as to develop warfare unrestrained by QUENTIAM’s parameters. The spear could easily be tipped with some local poison. Our nanos could handle it, but while the nanos worked we would probably be automatically sedated, completely vulnerable.
A sense of reality swept over me. I stood here—I, Jiuinip Akilo Sister-Self 7664-3, who had adjusted sentient seedings not dissimilar to these on scores of worlds—facing an enemy armed with spears, while I myself held only a ceramic knife. And the most unreal part was that these people, too, at least the ones not born here, had come from my same universe of nano, of abundance, of peace. Of QUENTIAM, who would never have permitted this.
Seliku said in a voice I didn’t recognize, “Do . . . do any of you speak Standard?”
To my surprise, the closest prisoner answered, in a strange whining accent. “You do this! You and your magic! You destroy clouds and now we never have no rain!”
Magic. Five little girls, playing at “magic” and “death” and “nova.” Knowing, secure in QUENTIAM, that for us such things did not exist.
I said to the pygmy, who must be third- or fourth-generation to be so ignorant, “The clouds will return. But we did not destroy them. We are not destroyers.”
He waved his spear at Haradil. “She is. She say it.”
Oh, what had Haradil said? That she was a destroyer, perhaps that she wanted to die. She might have been trying to make them kill her. Suicide by fellow outcast.
Camy said, “But you did not kill her. You knew that if you killed her, all her bad magic would come to you.”
I saw on his face, on all their diseased and debased faces, that it was true. They feared Haradil’s powers of destruction too much to kill her. So what were they doing here now?
I said, “You want us to go far away.”
“Yes! Go!”
That was why Haradil had lived apart from what could have been the comfort of shared misery. But, of course, she hadn’t wanted comfort. She wanted death and suffering, as atonement for what she’d done.
Seliku said, “It could be a trick, to make us put down our knives.”
I looked again at the pathetic creatures before us. Two, I saw now, had legs actually shivering with fear. I said quietly, “It’s not a trick. Bej, carry Haradil. We’ll move even farther inland. Move slowly but purposefully . . . now.”
The prisoners watched us go. In just a few moments the sight of them was blocked by the everlasting spongy green.
###
So again we walked, all the rest of that day and the next, taking turns carrying Haradil. We saved the last of our concentrated nutrients for Haradil and ate only a safe kind of raw leaf snatched from plants as we marched. The leaf tasted vile. Nanomeds help with neither taste nor hunger; in any civilized place, both are enjoyable human sensations. I could feel my body shift into energy-conservation mode, which made it harder to keep going but easier to not think. That, now, was my hope. To not think.
Finally, as darkness fell, we made camp in another small clearing. A fire, the blankets from our belts, stars overhead but not, I saw with exhausted gratitude, the gas giant. And as we sat around the fire, too dispirited to talk, Haradil awoke.
“What—”
“You’re with us. You’ve had nanomeds. Sit up,” Camy ordered.
Haradil did. She looked around, and then at us. Maybe Camy and Bej, the artists, could have imagined such a tormented expression, but I could not have.
Seliku said, neither gently nor harshly, “Haradil, we’ve forced our way onto this planet, and now we—”
“QUENTIAM let you come? The Mori let you come?”
“No,” Camy grated. “Sel just told you—we forced our way down. And now it looks as if our way home has just closed for good.”
“What do you mean?” Haradil cried. At least she was talking.
I said, from sudden pity, “Camy, don’t. QUENTIAM will rebuild the shuttle, you know that.”
“We don’t know anything!” Camy said.
Seliku said, still in that carefully neutral voice, as if she were addressing a skittish child, “Haradil, we’ll talk about getting home in a moment. Right now, we’re saying that we came all this way, with all this danger—we don’t have implants now, you know, none of us—to find out what happened. Why you destroyed that inhabited star system.”
Haradil looked at us hopelessly, her gaze moving from one face to another around the fire. In its flickering light, her gaunt face in its pygmy body looked older than QUENTIAM Itself.
Bej said, “Was it the Great Mission, Hari? Did you become an Arlbenist, and did that system include a planet with non-DNA life on it? There’s documentation now, you know, the Arlbenists were wrong, the galaxy wasn’t empty before humans began to fill it. If you became an Arlbenist—”
“I don’t know whether any planet in the system had non-DNA life,” Haradil said bleakly.
“So you—”
“I wasn’t an Arlbenist.”
Camy said, “Then why?” I saw her ferocity drive Haradil back into silence.
Seliku broke it. “And how! How could you turn an asteroid into a missile powerful enough to blow up a star? Even QUENTIAM said It didn’t know how to do that!”
“It didn’t,” Haradil said.
I burst out, “Then what happened?”
“Light happened,” Haradil said. “Pieces of light.”
“Pieces of what?” Camy demanded angrily. “What are you talking about?”
“Photons,” Seliku said. “Is that right, Haradil? You mean photons?”
“Yes.” She looked down at her ugly hands, the digits so thick that even in her thinness, firelight did not shine through them. “I was transforming an asteroid, more of a planetoid, in orbit around the star. I was—”
“You couldn’t have been,” Seliku said. “I’ve seen the Morit data on the explosion. That asteroid was in a deeply eccentric orbit—it had been captured by the star’s gravity only about a half-million years ago and was spiraling in to the stellar disk. Just before the explosion, the asteroid was very close to the star, getting a slingshot gravity assist. There’s no way even a machine body could have survived on it.”
“I know,” Haradil said. “I wasn’t on the asteroid.”
Seliku said, “Where were you?”
Instead of answering, Haradil said, “I was transforming the asteroid—trying to transform the asteroid—into a work of art. Light art. To be an artist like you, Bej. Like you, Camy. All four of you have . . . have things you do. I only had QUENTIAM.”
Bej said, “That’s where you were. Not on the star, but in upload with QUENTIAM. Directing the artwork through It. We’ve done that.”
Haradil didn’t look at Bej, and all at once I knew that she hadn’t been in
upload, either. Haradil said, “The art was merged photons. You know, to create increased energy.”
“Yes,” Seliku said, but she looked a little startled. The rest of us must have looked blank because she said, “It’s how QUENTIAM operates, in part. It merges photons with atoms to create a temporary blend of matter and energy. It also forces shared photons between quantum states, to create entanglement. It’s how QUENTIAM makes the t-holes, how It moves around information—how it exists, actually. The whole process is the basis for QUENTIAM’s being woven into spacetime. That’s just basic knowledge.”
Not to me, it wasn’t, and from Bej and Camy’s faces, not to them, either. But Haradil had apparently learned enough about it.
I said, trying to keep my voice soft enough not to push Haradil into more opposition, “Is that what happened, Hari? You were directing QUENTIAM to create this ‘art’ and somehow you massed enough photon energy or something to blow up the star?”
“QUENTIAM wouldn’t permit that to happen,” Seliku said. “Anyway, the energy you’d need would be huge, more than you’d get from any light sculpture.”
Bej said, “Was it a sculpture, Hari?”
“No. It was . . . was going to be . . . what does it matter what I was making! I couldn’t make it and I killed a star system!”
I said gently, “The sculpture doesn’t matter if you don’t think it does, my sister-self. What matters is how the system blew up. What happened?”
“I don’t know!” Haradil cried. “I was there, working on the art, and all at once the asteroid slipped away from my control and sped toward the star, and I don’t know how!”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Bej said. “If you were in upload with QUENTIAM and that happened, then It would tell you what happened the moment you asked.”
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