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 game 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.

QUENTIAM Itself says Its name is archaic, once standing for “Quantum-Entangled Networked Transportation and Information Artificial-Intelligence Membrane.” I’m not sure, beyond the basics, what that encompasses. Seliku is the sister-self who chose to follow our childhood interest in cosmology, just as Camy and Bej chose art and I chose the sciences of living things.

And Haradil…

A clone-set, like any living thing, is a chaotic system. Initial small differences, small choices, can lead to major divergences lifetimes later. That is why all clone-sets from my part of the galaxy meet every two “years.” The meeting is inviolable. One can’t be expected to keep track of lovers or friends; there are too many choices to pull them away, too many states to inhabit, too much provided by nano, over too long a time. There is always QUENTIAM, of course, but the only human continuity, the only hope of genuine human bonding, comes from sister- or brother-selves, who share at least the same DNA. All the other so-called “family structures” that people periodically try have been failures.

Well, not all. Apparently the Mori have, in the last thousand years, worked out some sort of expanding kinship structure to match their expanding empire. But it seems to be maintained partly through force, which is repugnant to most people. Anyway, a thousand years—QUENTIAM’s mysterious “years”—isn’t long enough to prove the viability of anything. I’m half that old myself.

Of course, the Great Mission also considers itself a “kinship structure.” But they’re not only repugnant but also deluded.

QUENTIAM said, “Your shuttle has docked.”

“How many others are going on it?”

“Five. Three more new downloads and two transients.”

“Transients? What are transients doing on this station?” It was small and dull, existing solely as a convenient node for up/downloading near the t-hole.

“They’re missionaries, Seliku. I’ll keep them away from you as long as I can.”

“Yes. Do,” I said acidly, even as I wondered what QUENTIAM was saying at that same moment to the missionaries. “Seliku isn’t going to be easy for you to talk to, but your best chance is to approach her through her work”?

Probably. QUENTIAM, of course, gives all people the information they want to hear. But It would do as It said and keep the missionaries away from me. I was not in the mood for proselytizing.

The wall opened and nano-machinery spat out my traveling bag onto the floor. I opened it and checked that everything was there, even though no other possibility existed. S-suit, food synthesizer, my favorite cosmetics, a blanket—sometimes other people had strange notions of comfortable temperature—music cube… I strapped the bag around my very thick waist, stepped toward the door, and hit my head on the ceiling. “Ooohhhhh!”

“Are you injured?” QUENTIAM asked.

“Only my dignity.”

“Your body is designed for 1.6 standard gravities,” It intoned, “whereas your previous assignment featured a planet with only—”

“O, burn it, QUENTIAM.” I rubbed my head, which this time around appeared to have a thick skull case. “What is a ‘standard gravity,’ anyway?”

“I don’t know. Possibly that information has been lost.”

“I don’t really care.” Carefully I reached the door, which slid open, leading directly to the shuttle bay.

The other five passengers waited beside the shuttle. Two of the three recent downloads, easy to pick out, echoed my own awkwardness with their new bodies. We stepped gingerly, took a second too long to focus vision, gave off that air of concentration on motions that should be automatic.

The person in the four-legged body of a celwi was, incongruously, the most graceful. He must have used that configuration before. Celwi bodies are popular for their speed; it’s a lovely sensation to gallop full-tilt across a grassy plain. The two-legged woman wore a clear helmet in preparation for some alien atmospheric mixture. She and I exchanged rueful glances and tried not to bump into each other.

The third download moved easily in a genderless machine body equipped with very impressive cutting tools and, I suspected, a full range of imaging equipment. It had my admiration; I had only inhabited a machine once and had found the state subtly unpleasant. But some people like it.

That left the two missionaries, both close to what my sister-selves called “human standard,” but much smaller. Each stood no higher than a meter. So they were going Out, as far beyond a t-hole as a real ship could get them, to carry out the Great Mission. Mass mattered on such trips. I didn’t make eye contact.

“Please board now for the t-hole,” the shuttle said pleasantly. It was, of course, one of QUENTIAM’s many voices, this one light and musical. The machine body raised its head quickly as if it had received more information than the rest of us, which it probably had.

The shuttle seats were arranged in four rows of two, so everybody got a window view. I hung back, trying to get a seat beside the woman in the helmet or, failing that, alone, but I hung back too long. When I climbed in, last, the four-legged celwi had taken up two seats and the machine body’s cutting tools were extended across one whole seat in an unfriendly manner: I don’t want company. The missionaries had split up, the better to bother other passengers. I settled in beside one of them, felt the seat configure around me, and closed my eyes.

That didn’t stop her. “All the good of Arlbeni save you, sister.”

“Hhhmmmfff,” I said. I was not her sister. I kept my eyes closed.

“I’m Flotyllinip cagrut Pinlinindhar 16,” she said cordially, and I groaned inwardly. I had been on Flotyll. No place in the galaxy had so embraced the Great Mission.

Not to answer her would have been the grossest discourtesy. I said shortly, “Akilo Sister-Self 7664-3,” omitting my home planet, Jiu. None of us had remained on Jiu past childhood; it wasn’t really home. We’ve never understood people who form an attachment to their birth planet, but the Flotylii are famous for it. It’s a pretty planet, yes, but the galaxy is full of pretty planets. Home is one’s sister-selves.

Haradil…

I transmitted to QUENTIAM through my implant: *I thought you were going to keep the missionaries away from me.*

*You sat next to her.*

“We’re going to seed another world, my friend and I,” Pinhead 16 said. “Praise Arlbeni and the emptiness of the universe.”

“Mmmhhhfffff,” I mumbled. But no mumbling stops missionaries.

“Before I joined the Great Mission, I was nothing. We all were. Are you a student of history, sister?”

“No.”

A mistake. Her face lit up. I could feel it even with my eyes closed, a stretching of the air that probably registered on the machine body’s sensors as elevations in everything from thermals to gamma rays. But if I’d said yes, I was indeed a student of history, she probably would have replied, “Then perhaps you are aware…”

She said, “Then perhaps you aren’t aware just how Disciple Arlbeni saved us all, thousands of years ago but still fresh as ever. We had everything due to nano and QUENTIAM and to have everything is to have nothing. From evolution to sentience, from sentience to nano. From nano to the decay of sentience due to boredom and purposeless. Humanity was destroying itself! And then Arlbeni had his Vision: Against all physical laws, the universe was empty of any life but human life, and so to fill it must be our purpose. The universe was Divinely left empty because—”

I had to cut this off. I opened my eyes and looked directly at her. “Maybe not as empty as Arlbeni thought.”

I watched her expression freeze, then constrict.

“There have been reports,” I went on, apparently artlessly, “of newly discovered planets that bear life which we didn’t put there. Non-DNA-based life. Not our seedings. Native life of some sort, maybe blown in from space, seeded by panspermia on worlds far from the t-holes.”

“Lies,” she said. Her eyes had narrowed to two cold slits.

“Have you checked personally?”

“I don’t need to.”

“I see,” I said, with import, and looked away.

But she was more tenacious than she looked. “Have you checked personally on such reports?”

“No,” I said. “But, then, I don’t care if the galaxy holds other life besides our seedings.”

“And your life—what gives it purpose?”

“Observing and caring for the life that’s here, no matter how it got here. I’m an adjustment biologist.”

“And that’s enough? Just life, with no plan behind it, no Divine purpose, no—”

“It’s more than enough,” I said and turned away from her with such discourtesy that even she, the Arlbeni-blinded, left me alone.

I did recognize that my disproportionate fury was not solely due to the stupidity of faith that refused facts. More than enough, I’d said of my life… but was it? I made adjustments to life planted millennia ago by Arlbenists. I added genes to improve species, altered ecosystems for better balance, nudged along developing sentients. Then I left, usually to never see the results of my tinkering. Was my work actually helping anything at all?

The doubt was an old ache. I turned to the new one.

*QUENTIAM, the life on the planet that Haradil destroyed—what was its seeding number?*

QUENTIAM, of course, answers everything instantly. But it seemed to me that a long moment went by before he answered. In that moment all the rumors I’d ever heard blasted into my mind, like lethal radiation. Life that humanity had not seeded, life borne in on the winds of space from who-knew-where, life hated or denied by the followers of Arlbeni and the Great Mission… But, no, Haradil couldn’t have committed genocide for that reason. Even if she’d become an Arlbenist, she couldn’t have eliminated a star system just to destroy evidence of panspermia…

*Life on the planet destroyed by Haradil was Seeding ^˄5387 of the Great Mission.*

I breathed again.

But I was still left with the great Why, as empty of answers as the galaxy that Arlbeni had thought he had all figured out.

“Five minivals until t-hole passage,” the shuttle said in its pleasant voice. I looked out my window, but of course there was nothing to see except the cold steady stars. The station was still only a few hundred meters away, but it was on the other side of the shuttle and I would not turn my head toward the missionary beside me.

“You are the least flexible of all of us,” Bej had teased at our last bond-time, and she was probably right. Seliku’s cosmology, Bej and Camy’s art, seemed too soft to me, too formless, without rigorous standards. Artists could create without limits. QUENTIAM could fold the fabric of spacetime to create t-holes and information transfer; It could control endless nanomachinery operating at countless locations throughout the galaxy; It could be directed to manipulate matter and energy right up to the physical constants of the universe. Biology was not so flexible. Life needed what it needed: the nutrients and atmosphere and protection of its current form, and if it did not get those things, it died. Not even QUENTIAM could change death, once it had happened. Life/death was a binary state.

Yet there had been a time, when my sister-selves and I had been young, when I had played at art and studied Arlbeni and considered cosmological history. The seeds for all these pursuits had been in me. I had chosen another path, for good or not, but it was precisely because I knew myself capable of religious thought that the missionaries angered me so much now. I had looked past that easy meaning to something more uncompromising—why couldn’t they?

“One minival to t-hole passage… t-hole passage completed.”

No sensation, no elapsed time. But the stars now had different configurations, and a planet turned below our orbit. Blue and white, it was a lovely thing, as was the yellow star that nourished it. The single continent in all that ocean of blue drifted into view, still lit with the densely clustered lights of the night city. QUENTIAM, of course, is everywhere, and so humanity has no real center. But Calyx, by sheer numbers of inhabitants, comes closest. Slowly it had accreted people who wanted to be with other people already there, each new addition changing the shape of the city, like the lovely shell reefs I had seen on in my fish work on ^˄563.

The other missionary, the one not sitting beside me, screamed.

I whipped my head around. The machine body had fallen across the missionary, nearly crushing him. His head protruded from under the heavy metal body, the face distorted by pain, and one arm flailed wildly. The machine body lay completely inert, stiff as a dead biological.

“QUENTIAM! What’s happening?” I hadn’t realized I’d spoken aloud until my yell mingled with the rest in the small cabin.

“I don’t know!” QUENTIAM said, and silence descended abruptly as a knife.

I don’t know.

I don’t know.

I don’t know.

There are many things QUENTIAM does not know—It is not a magician, as It enjoys telling me—but the status of a machine body is not one of them. The machine state—I have inhabited it myself, for environments where no biological will suit—is the next closest thing to an upload. A person in machine state was connected to QUENTIAM not by a single soft-brain implant but by shared flows of energy and information. Everything the machine sensors picked up, at all wave lengths, was processed through QUENTIAM and back to the machine body’s computer brain. It wasn’t possible for QUENTIAM to not know what had just happened.

The machine body moved and sat up. “What…”

No one but me said anything. “You fainted,” I said, the word so absurd in this context that I felt blood warm my face. Then came a sudden rush of sound and activity. The fallen-upon missionary was examined for damage, found to be bruised but not hurt, his nanomeds already active. The shuttle docked at the orbital which, apparently, was the destination of both missionaries and of the machine body, and they all disembarked. A few minivals later the four-legged body and the woman in the helmet left after the shuttle had taken us through a second t-hole to a second orbital. Only I was left aboard.

*QUENTIAM—what happened to the machine body?*

*I don’t know.*

The shuttle descended to Calyx.

The city had changed completely in the half-year since our last bond-time. It was no less lovely, just different. Then the entire continent had soared with high, curving shapes, undulating buildings connected with sinuous bridges, the whole a city in the clouds done entirely in subtle shades of white. Shortly after that Bej and Camy, working together for the first time, had gotten the art contract. Apparently it was decided by some sort of vote, although I didn’t know of whom.

My sister-selves had made Calyx the opposite of what I’d seen. The nanos had been reprogrammed to replace shimmer and purity with a riot of living foliage, so that it was difficult to see the buildings under the flora. Maybe the buildings were flora. Low flowering plants overgrew everything, even the moving walks. The dominant colors were dark, the purple of the photosynthetic bacteria plus dark reds and blues, but the effect was not somber. It was sexual. I stepped from the shuttle into a tumult of inflamed pollination.

Camy and Bej stood waiting amid the flowers. We hugged and I said, “So you’re in love.”

Bej laughed unhappily. “I told you she’d know immediately,” she said to Camy, who neither laughed nor answered. The horror of Haradil’s act lay in her eyes, plus perhaps something else.

I said, “It’s beautiful, sisters.”

“Thank you.”

“Have you heard any more about…”

“A little. Come with us.”

They led me to a moving walk, which took us a short distance to the beach and a low structure covered with long, sinuous vines wild with magenta flowers. The city represented the intemperance we were all capable of, all my sister-selves. We did nothing by halves. Of course Camy and Bej, if they were in love, would create this sort of unrestrained living art. Just as I, working on a seeding on some planet long unvisited by the Great Mission, would stubbornly work for uninterrupted days and nights and days again on some adjustment to a species. Seliku had showed the same extravagance in cerebral form. Her theory of the origin of the universe was once so far beyond the usual thinking that all five of us had been ridiculed for at least two centuries. Now the Seliku Cosmology was widely accepted. And Haradil—

“Have some tea, Akilo,” Bej said. We sat on cushions that looked like giant blossoms, or were giant blossoms, and sipped a thin, musky drink that also tasted flowery. I set my cup down when Seliku walked in through a tangle of vines.

“Akilo! How are you?”

Camy said bitterly, “How are any of us?” as I hugged Seliku. Oh, the comfort of physical contact with one’s sister-selves! It doesn’t matter how long or how far we’ve been apart, we are still an indivisible whole. That which we are individually grows greater as time goes on, but it can never be greater than what we are together. What one does, all do, and I have always had difficulty understanding the essential loneliness of those singletons for whom this isn’t true. What anchors them? How do they survive with only QUENTIAM, who is not human? How do they bear the isolation?

Seliku let me go and accepted a cup of tea from Bej, asking gently, “He’s gone?”

It was Camy who answered. “Of course he’s gone! Would you stay with us now?”

Seliku didn’t have to answer. So Bej and Camy’s lover—they always chose together, and always insisted the person adopt a male body if not already wearing one—had fled. Well, I couldn’t blame him. A city created in celebration of sex could not compensate for a sister-self who’d destroyed a whole worldful of people. Not to an ethical person. Both Bej and Camy were taking their lover’s desertion hard. They have always stayed together, and so few differences distinguish one from the other. Still, I sensed that Camy was more bitter than Bej.

Seliku sat on a flower-cushion and said, “I don’t know much more than I did before. QUENTIAM still blocks all of Haradil’s former interactions with It, of course, and the information It would give me from the Morit records is sparse. You know how the Mori are. Their little corner of the galaxy is considered theirs, and they limit contact even with QUENTIAM to the absolute necessities. In fact, implants are now forbidden at the Mori Core.”

“Forbidden!” I said.

“For the last century,” Seliku said. Century—another of QUENTIAM’s inexplicable, archaic terms. But I knew what time span it denoted: 60.8 years on my natal Jiu. I tried, and failed, to picture life unconnected to QUENTIAM, or connected only through external devices.

“I finally got another Mori to speak to me,” Seliku continued, and her cup trembled slightly in her hand. “It wasn’t easy.”

Bej said, “How did you… oh, your reputation, of course,” and smiled apologetically. Bej and Camy were good local artists, but they were known in no more than a handful of star systems, and I was an unknown laborer among the seedings. But Seliku is famous.

She said, “The Mori I just talked to repeated what the First One told me: Haradil blew up the system by destroying the star, a G3 on the very edge of the Morit territory. In fact, to say it was Morit is debatable, but QUENTIAM awarded it to them. The Great Mission apparently seeded the planet so long ago that not even QUENTIAM had a record of the seeding, which is the only reason that the Mori could claim it at all.”

I said, startled, “QUENTIAM didn’t have a record?”

“It was either one of the very first seedings, when QUENTIAM was just establishing sensors everywhere, or… I don’t know. It seemed strange to me, too, but that’s what It said. Anyway, the inhabited planet was a cold, small, iron-core world with an atmosphere and lakes heavy on methane. The seedings were adapted anaerobes with a nervous system highly enough evolved to swim in communities. The Mori report indicated the evolution of language, including some imaginative communication that they decided was poetry.”

My sister-selves looked at me. I said, “It was probably a combination of sound and motion to convey non-literal ideas.” I’d seen that among many seedings. My throat constricted. Sentients with poetry.

“After that last report,” Seliku continued, “the Mori closed the system, like all the rest of their empire. They don’t know, or won’t say, how Haradil got interested in it. But she built a missile out of an asteroid, aimed it at the star, and ducked back through a t-hole before it hit. The missile badly… badly warped spacetime around the star just before it—the missile, I mean—burned up. I saw the Morit data on the explosion. The warping somehow blew up the star.”

“‘Somehow’?” Camy cried. “What do you mean ‘somehow’? How did Haradil know how to make such a thing?”

“I don’t know,” Seliku said. Her hand now trembled so much she set her cup on the spongy floor. Moments before, I had had to do the same.

Bej said, “Seliku, could you have made such a thing? With all your knowledge of quantum blending?”

Seliku said carefully, “It’s been theoretically possible for a while. But QUENTIAM doesn’t know how to translate that into nano programming. And It wouldn’t have done such a thing, anyway. Not blown up an inhabited system.”

There was a long moment of silence while each of us did the same thing: *QUENTIAM, do you know how to create a working missile that can warp spacetime around or inside a star so as to make it explode?*

*No.*

Seliku waited without rancor. She herself would have checked on the statement, had she not already known the answer. That was us.

Camy said, “Do you think the Mori know how she did it?”

Bej burst out, “Or why?”

Seliku said, “They don’t know either answer. But immediately after the explosion, QUENTIAM of course identified Haradil as the cause and delivered her to the Mori. They ran whatever their equivalent of a judgment process is, decided she was guilty, and put her down on a quiet planet. They wouldn’t tell me where it is, but I combed all the data QUENTIAM has on recent t-hole use and I think she’s on ^˄17843.”

“Where’s that?” Bej asked.

“On the outer galactic rim, on the Jujaju Arm. It’s a new discovery, and one clearly attributable to the Mori, so they’ve claimed it even though it’s nowhere near their territory. QUENTIAM has accepted its designation as a quiet planet.”

“So—” I said, and stopped.

“So that’s that,” Seliku said, and we all shifted on our cushions and said nothing. QUENTIAM does not overhear our thoughts unless we direct them to him via implant. Only in the upload state, and one other, is mental privacy lost. But my sister-selves and I didn’t need to overhear each other’s thoughts; we shared them.

We were going to break the prohibition on that quiet planet. We were going to go get the only person who could tell us what had actually happened in that star system explosion: Haradil herself.

There are many reasons why people grow bodies without implants. Most people try it, at least briefly, in their youth, just to define the boundary between themselves and QUENTIAM: What is It and what is me? We five had done that for a few years, a long time ago. Others do it for religious/philosophical reasons, as apparently the Mori had decided. Still others with adventurous genes like to amuse themselves with the challenge of survival without QUENTIAM. Not all of these survive their adventure. There are artists (although not Bej and Camy) who dislike the bond with QUENTIAM, feeling it less a connection than a tether. Finally, there are assorted crazies who just don’t like being a part of anything else, not even the membrane woven through all of spacetime.

I stood on the beach, Camy and Bej’s lovely flower-strewn beach, and watched the warm small waves roll between softly planted islands.

*QUENTIAM, I want the basic data-set on ^˄17843.*

*Seliku believes that is the place where Haradil was sent.*

*Yes. Give me an external durable.*

If QUENTIAM was surprised by my request for a durable, I would never know it. It directed me to the nearest slot for the nanomachinery buried below Calyx, which produced a thin, flexible, practically indestructible sheet of carbon tubules covered with writing.

I can read. It had been a few of QUENTIAM’s “centuries” since I had done so, of course, but we had all learned. I assumed that the intriguing, archaic skill was still with me. I was wrong.

The sheet in my hands was dense with symbols and numbers, and only a few looked familiar. I felt my new face grow warm.

*Give me the basic set directly.*

*^˄17843 is a transformed and seeded satellite orbiting a class 6 gas giant, which in turn orbits a type 34 star at an average distance of 2.3 PU. The moon is called by the inhabitants “Paletej,” which means roughly “unwanted” in Mori. It has .6 gravity, class 9 illumination, a diameter of 36 filliub, type 18 planetary composition, pressure of gk8, axial inclination of two degrees. There are two small equatorial continents and an even smaller polar one, with temperature range of 400-560.*

I translated all this into human terms. Haradil’s prison would be seasonless, warm, adequately lit. No moons, since ^˄17843 was itself a moon, but the gas giant would loom huge in the sky.

QUENTIAM continued. *Paletej is served by one t-hole, in close orbit with the Mori station. The Mori seeded the moon liberally with Level 3 plant life, which have completely covered one continent and have begun to spread to a second through wind and water. There is no animal life above Level 4.*

Level 3 plant life was pre-flowering. Flowers begat fruit, which is much more concentrated nutrition than greens. With no animal protein available above the level of worms, the prisoners would have to spend nearly all their time in food-gathering and eating, unless their bodies had been adapted otherwise. I doubt that they had.

My tentacle closed tight on the durable, which crumpled but did not crease.

QUENTIAM was not finished. *Paletej has also been densely seeded with nanospores that consume all atoms with a Konig designation higher than 45. A hundred meters below the surface, counter-nanos stop atom consumption, to prevent danger to planetary composition.*

No metals. No way to make any tools more primitive than wood, stone, maybe basic ceramics. And, of course, no nanomachinery.

I stared blindly at the soft sea. *What… what sort of bodies were made for the prisoners?*

*That information is not accessible to you.*

*Burn you, QUENTIAM! Do the bodies at least have nanomeds? Tell me!*

*That information is not accessible to you.*

But I already knew the answer. Quiet planets had no nanomeds for anyone but transients, had no nanomachinery of any kind, had no implants to connect to QUENTIAM. That’s what made them quiet. That’s what made them death.

I stumbled along the beach, barely able to see from rage. *Grow four bodies for me and my sister-selves. Conform each to the best possible fit to basic data set of ^˄17843.* I would not call the cursed place “Paletej.” Haradil was not “unwanted.” *Grow the four bodies with full nanomeds but without implants.*

*Akilo, you and your sister-selves cannot get down to Paletej. The atmosphere, too, is densely seeded with the engineered spores.*

*How do the prisoners get down?* Any shuttle would be consumed and crash.

*That information is not available to you.*

There must be a t-hole on the surface, one restricted to the Mori alone. QUENTIAM’s parameters permitted that, part of its delicate balancing of group possession with preservation as the greatest good of the universe. But what Haradil was enduring was not preservation, was not life, was not endurable.

Who had programmed the moral parameters of QUENTIAM’s remote ancestor, all those hundreds of millennia ago? My own barely human ancestors, of course. And the basic principles had been carried forward as QUENTIAM constantly recreated itself, extended its penetration of spacetime, became intertwined with human consciousness itself. How had justice, in that evolutionary progression, become corrupted? No beings should “own” a t-hole. Down that gravity well lay blind possessiveness, so that you ended up with the Arlbeni disciples, who had perverted a sense of purpose into believing that they alone owned morality. To disagree with Arlbeni was to be unethical, evil. No matter what the evidence said about Arlbeni himself being wrong about the emptiness of the universe.

What I was really afraid of was that QUENTIAM was wrong. That, unknown to It, Haradil had somehow discovered on the planet she’d destroyed some evidence of non-DNA-based life, existing right alongside the seeded anaerobes. I was afraid that she had blown up the place for precisely that reason. That she had become an Arlbenist, melded to the Great Mission, and lost to us.

If there had been panspermic, non-seeded life there, QUENTIAM should have known about it. QUENTIAM had had enough sensors in that star system to transmit detailed explosion data, including what Seliku had called “warping.” We had all asked QUENTIAM, Seliku and Bej and Camy and I and probably also the Mori, if the planet had held non-DNA-based life. It had said no. QUENTIAM could withhold information, but It could not lie.

Of course, if the panspermic life was very new, and in an isolated corner of the planet, it’s possible that QUENTIAM might not have known about it and Haradil had.

*Grow the bodies I specified, QUENTIAM.*

*I have already begun. But, I repeat, you cannot get down to Paletej in them.*

*We can get as far as the t-hole above it.*

*Yes. It is a universal t-hole.*

*As they all should be.*

It didn’t answer. Uncrumpling the durable in my hand, the sheet of symbols I could not understand, I realized that probably Seliku could read them. She was a cosmologist. I went to look for my sisters, my other selves, my solace in this suddenly icy city by the soft sea.

By the time our bodies were ready, so was our shuttle. Nano-built on one of Calyx’s many orbitals, it was a sprawling thing, fragile as a flower except for the tough nano-maintained force shield that surrounded it. The shield was protection against stray meteors and other cosmic junk. The shuttle, which didn’t need to survive an atmospheric entry, didn’t need to be durable.

Our bodies did. They turned out to be pretty much as I’d envisioned, and not too different from the one I was wearing now except for being much lighter and less muscular. Short, two legs, four tentacles ending in superflexible digits. My current webbed feet had been replaced with tough feet with prehensile toes, complementing the prehensile tail, in case ^˄17843 had plants large enough to climb. We weren’t sure what specific flora to expect there, and the Mori weren’t sharing information.

The new body’s ears could detect the widest possible range of sound waves; electromagnetic sensing was as good as feasible in a biological; smell was stronger than even in celwyns. A double layer of fine, shit-brown fur made us as weatherproof as we’d need to be for the temperature range, although at the upper end, we might be a bit uncomfortable.

“Not very pretty, are they,” Camy said, gazing at the full-grown bodies in their clear vats. “The faces are so flat.”

“You could have ordered modifications earlier,” I pointed out, “but you said you didn’t care.”

“I don’t care.”

Seliku said, “QUENTIAM, are you ready to begin uploads?”

“Yes.” Its deepest, most authoritative tone; It was offended.

“We’re ready, too.” But the co-vats had begun to assemble even before she finished speaking. I climbed into mine, lay down, and was instantly asleep.

When I woke, an unknowable time later, the download was complete. I climbed out of my vat simultaneously with my sisters. It was a hard climb; we were now engineered for a gravity one-third less than Calyx’s. But that wasn’t the reason that we gazed at each other in dismay.

“Are… are you all right?”

“Yes,” Seliku said. “Are you?”

“Yes, but…”

But I’d had to ask. Looking at Seliku, Camy, Bej as we stood in our new dull fur, our new flat faces, I hadn’t automatically known that, yes, they were all right because otherwise QUENTIAM would have told me. I’d had to look, to question. Camy put her hand to her head and I knew what she was thinking: QUENTIAM was gone. We were without implants. We were on our own, not even able to image each other in real-time if one of us stepped into the next room.

“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?

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? ^Harad_il? _Hara^dil?”

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. But 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.”

Seliku said, “Did you ask?”

Haradil was silent. Camy rose to her feet and uncoiled her tentacles. Lit from the firelight below, she suddenly looked terrible, avenging. “Didn’t you ask, Haradil? You blew up a star system and you didn’t ask what happened?”

“Of course she did,” Bej said. “Hari?”

“I asked later,” Haradil said. I had seen that posture on primitive mammals on other worlds. Haradil cringed, from fear of her pack. It turned my stomach sick.

“I asked later and QUENTIAM said… said It didn’t know what I’d done.”

“That’s not possible!” Camy said angrily. “If you were in upload with QUENTIAM, it would know exactly what you’d done and so would you! You’re lying!”

The two words hung in the firelit air. Insects whined, unseen, in the unfriendly dark. We never lied to each other. Sister-selves did not lie to each other. Your sister-selves were the only ones in the universe that you could say anything to, confess anything to, because the capacity for the same action lay in each of them. A sister-self always accepted everything about you, as no lover ever did, no friend, no one else but QUENTIAM.

“She’s not lying,” I said.

Camy turned on me. “But if she was in upload and did something to—”

“She wasn’t in upload,” I said slowly. “Were you, Haradil? You weren’t in upload state, you were in merged state. You’d merged a second time with QUENTIAM.”

Haradil turned her eyes to me, and in the relief mirrored in them, I knew that I’d been right. She was relieved that now we knew.

Bej burst out, “Oh, Hari! Why? The first time you did that you came back so… so… merging reduces people, destroys them! You left parts of yourself behind in QUENTIAM, or something—you know you were never the same after that!”

“I know,” Hari said, so simply that my heart turned over. Haradil, knowing herself to be incomplete, fragmented, had gone back into merged state to find the lost pieces of herself. Or maybe just to redeem what she saw as a wasted life (“All four of you have… have things you do”) by creating this one stupendous, innovative piece of art. Which of us hasn’t dreamed of that kind of glory and fame for our work? Only Seliku had attained it.

It was Seliku who moved the discussion back from Haradil’s state to what Seliku saw as the more important state: QUENTIAM’s. She said quietly, “If Haradil is not lying, then QUENTIAM is.”

We gaped at her. Seliku was a cosmologist; she knew QUENTIAM as well as any human could. She knew that QUENTIAM could not lie.

“That’s impossible!” Bej said.

“Yes, it’s impossible,” Seliku agreed, and the four of us stared at each other across the low fire.

Haradil said despairingly, “Don’t you see that it doesn’t matter whether QUENTIAM’s lying or not? It only matters that even if I don’t know why, I destroyed life. A whole worldful of life. My art, my action. And nothing I can do—nothing anyone can do, not even QUENTIAM—can ever change even one tiny piece of that guilt and shame.”

I think I knew then, in that moment, what would happen to Haradil. But my attention was on Seliku. She and I were the only scientists. I said to her, “If QUENTIAM can’t lie, and if It is lying, what does that mean?”

She answered obliquely, her tentacles quiet in her lap, her voice just low enough to reach the four of us sealed in our circle of wavering firelight amid the dark. “I know none of you understand my work, the algorithms that won me the Zeotripab Prize. You’d have to understand how the universe itself works.

“Spacetime vibrates, you know, in its most minute particles. They vibrate through space. Gravitons—one of the particles, the ones that create the force of gravity—are the only particles that also oscillate minutely in time. That’s what makes them the only particles—I don’t know how to say this without the math—the only particles that ‘leak’ out of the universe, affecting its mass. That’s why the universe keeps expanding. That loss of gravitons is what makes spacetime possible at all, which in turn makes everything else possible.”

Bej said naively, “You proved all that?”

Seliku smiled. “No. Only a tiny part of it. It’s old knowledge. QUENTIAM functions by manipulating those minute time oscillations, in even more minute ways. But it means that It cannot lie. It’s bound by the physical constants of the universe. If It said that It doesn’t know how Haradil blew up the star system, then It doesn’t know.”

“But,” I said, “could It and Haradil together—they were merged, remember—have done it? Could It have used Haradil to do that? In fact, did anyone ask QUENTIAM if It had blown up the system?”

Camy gasped. “QUENTIAM?”

“It can’t lie,” I said, staring at Seliku, “but It can destroy, right? It destroyed the shuttle and the station. There might have been Mori on that station, we don’t know. Within all those physical constants you mentioned, are there any that could absolutely keep QUENTIAM from destroying a star system with life on it?”

“Physical constants?” Seliku said. “No.”

Bej said, “But there are QUENTIAM’s own parameters! It preserves, not destroys! Everyone knows that! Everyone knows that!”

“Seliku,” I said, “are QUENTIAM’s moral parameters as woven into spacetime as Its inability to lie?”

“Yes. Its moral parameters are programming, but inviolable programming, core programming. Redundancy doesn’t even begin to describe how deeply those parameters are a part of QUENTIAM. They can’t be touched, not even by It.”

“Nonetheless,” I said, “if It can’t lie, and if Haradil blew up the star system while she was merged with QUENTIAM, then It blew up the system. It destroyed life. Not you, Hari—” I turned to her, beseeching, “—not you. QUENTIAM.”

“I don’t believe it!” Camy said. “QUENTIAM can’t do that! It can’t destroy…” She fell silent, and I knew she remembered the shuttle, the station.

Haradil had not moved. She sat looking down at her tentacles in her lap, an unconscious mirror of Seliku’s pose, although Hari’s shoulders slumped forward.

“Haradil,” I repeated, “you didn’t do it. QUENTIAM did.”

Finally she raised her eyes to mine. “It doesn’t matter, Alo. There’s no difference. I was in the merged state. At that time, I was QUENTIAM.”

We all stared at her. None of us knew what to say to that. None of us but her had been there.

“I think,” Bej finally said, “that it’s time for us to go home.”

We couldn’t leave until morning. The engineered spores stored in our cloth belts, the same spores that had created the biological floaters that brought us downstairs, needed sunlight to feed on for both growth and inflation. We could only leave the surface on a clear, sunny day. We could only leave from a large open space among the huge ferns.

And, of course, once we’d floated to the upper atmosphere, we could only survive if QUENTIAM had created another shuttle to pick us up.

Nobody mentioned this. We talked very little as we wrapped ourselves in blankets near the fire. I couldn’t get to sleep, and I doubted the others could, either.

Seliku would be thinking about the paradox of QUENTIAM. It couldn’t destroy, and It had destroyed. She would be going over the mathematics, the spacetime logic, trying to find a way out.

Bej and Camy would be wrestling with the moral problem. Haradil had been QUENTIAM; It had killed; had Haradil therefore really killed? Could you commit genocide without knowing it, and if you did, was it still genocide?

Haradil—I didn’t know what Haradil was thinking. “I was QUENTIAM,” she’d said. I didn’t know, couldn’t imagine, what that actually meant. But she was right, in one sense—she hadn’t been Haradil for a long time now.

It seemed millennia before I fell asleep.

When I woke, as the first dismal light was filtering through the pulpy ferns, Haradil was gone.

“Burn her in hell forever!” Camy cried. I didn’t know what “hell” was; Camy liked to poke around in QUENTIAM’s archaic deebees. Had liked to.

Seliku said, “Alo, can you track her?”

“Yes.”

Hastily we packed. The morning was overcast and drizzly; we couldn’t have left ^˄17843 that day even if Haradil hadn’t run away. At first I scented her easily. After following for half the morning, I was sure. “She’s heading back to the beach,” I said. “To the settlements.”

Bej, her dirty face set hard to avoid tears, said, “She wants them to kill her. She still thinks she was responsible for… for the genocide.”

“Maybe she was,” Camy said bitterly. I felt that bitterness echo in myself. Didn’t Haradil realize we would follow her—and thereby risk our own lives? She knew we planned on leaving ^˄17843 today. She, one-fifth of a sister-self, was endangering the whole. At what point did moral atonement turn into selfishness?

And if our circumstances were reversed, would I have done the same thing?

I might have. The realization only worsened my bitterness.

We were taking a different, more direct route toward the coast than the one we’d arrived by. The ground sloped downward and became much more marshy. The flora changed, too. As the ground became wetter, the huge, looming ferns were replaced by smaller, sedgelike plants farther apart.

“Wait,” Seliku called from the rear of our dismal procession. “Akilo, these plants here are the ones we’ve been eating and I don’t see any ahead of us. I think we should stop and eat here, while we can.”

“That’s a good idea.”

We stuffed handfuls of the vile things into our mouths and chewed. These small, light bodies packed very little extra fat; my tentacles had the thinned, bluish look of rapid weight loss. But at least the leaves temporarily stopped the ache in my stomach.

After eating, we slogged forward. In the marshland, walking was much harder. Each footstep made a quiet spurgling sound. The ground grew steadily wetter and muddier, broken by small hillocks that offered better footing but also swarmed with small pale worms. The sun, behind thick gray clouds, did little to warm my fur, and nothing could warm my heart.

“Alo… stop a minute…”

I turned in time to see Camy vomit. A moment later the cramps hit me. All the leaves I’d eaten came back up in a disgusting green mass. And then another. And then I felt it at the other end of my body.

When it was over, I moved away, toward a hillock of mossy sedge, and lay down. The nanomeds were efficient; I would feel better in just a few moments, and there would be no lingering toxins in my body. But that wasn’t what bothered me.

“That takes care of lunch,” Seliku said, flopping down beside me. Worms crawled toward her tail. “Oh, I hate this place.”

Bej said passionately, “We weren’t meant for this life. This is how animals live, not people!”

I took this as a moral statement, not a biological one. Anyway, I didn’t have the heart to argue.

Camy, always the most fastidious of us, said, “There’s sand over there. I’m going to scrub my disgusting ass.”

Seliku rolled onto her side to face me. “Alo, those were the same leaves we’ve been eating all along. Exactly the same. You said so.”

“Yes. The only thing I can figure out is that they were enantiomorphs.”

Seliku said, “Mirror images.”

“Yes. Some molecules, especially but not exclusively crystals, are right-handed and some are left-handed—they’re called enantiomorphs of each other. Biologicals can usually digest only one or the other.”

Bej said, “Mirror images of each other. Like us.”

I smiled at her. “I sense an artwork coming on.”

“Maybe.” She smiled back, and I thought: This is the only good moment we’ve had on this foul satellite.

Camy screamed.

The three of us jumped up. Bej raced toward Camy and I yelled, “No, Bej! Stop!”

“She’s sinking!”

“Stop! You’ll go, too! I’ve seen this, I can help her! Camy, don’t struggle! Arch backwards and lie slowly—slowly—onto your back and spread your arms and legs as wide as you can. Slowly.”

She had only sunk into the quicksand a little above her ankles. She arched backward and spread her four tentacles. I could see them tremble. Her feet didn’t come up from the sand but she sank no further, bent backwards like a bow, her eyes and mouth just above the sand. “Please… Oh, please…”

Arlbenists prayed. We did not. I yanked the rope from my belt and threw it toward Camy. It wasn’t long enough and fell short. Before I could even ask, Bej had her rope out and was knotting the two together, her digits trembling. I talked to Camy, anything that came into my mind: “Camy it’s going to be all right. I’ve seen this on ^˄3982 and ^˄12983, it’s just ordinary sand mixed with upswelling water and so it behaves like a liquid, it will buoy you up just like any water—” On ^˄3982 I had seen a small biological sucked down by quicksand in the time it took me to open my pack. “We’ll get you out, it’s going to be fine, remember when we were children, we played at rescuing each other on quiet planets and—” What was I saying? This was no game. Fear makes idiots of us all.

The rope reached her on my second throw. Slowly, carefully, we pulled her out. The four of us collapsed in a heap on the dry hillock. No one spoke; we just clutched each other hard enough to bruise.

Nanomeds would fix the bruises.

It was Seliku who pulled away first. “Sister-selves—it’s time to go home.”

Bej said, shocked, “Without Haradil?”

“Without Haradil. Bejers, she’s dead. She wanted to die. This is the trail she was following. She came to this… this ‘quicksand,’ just as we did. And she wanted to die.”

Bej’s head whipped around to stare at the quicksand. I saw the moment she rejected Seliku’s logic. “You don’t know that!”

“But it’s almost certainly true,” I said. “Seliku’s right. There’s nothing more we can do here.”

“We can find Haradil again!” Camy, surprising me. But I shouldn’t have been surprised; she and Bej nearly always thought as one. “Akilo can go on tracking her!”

“No, I can’t. Not through this.”

“You mean you won’t! How can you even think of leaving a sister-self? Especially here, in this place—”

Covered with wet sand, smelling of vomit and diarrhea, Camy took a step back from me. Bej went with her. Bej said, “We won’t go back without Haradil. How can you even think about it? We came here to get her and to find out what happened and we haven’t accomplished either one. Yet you want us to go back to Calyx, with everyone knowing that our sister-self, that we… that she destroyed a planetful of sentients and you just—”

“Which are you really terrified of, losing Haradil or your own shame?” I demanded, out of my own shame, my own loss. “Is Haradil the only one being selfish here?”

They flew at me, simultaneously, as if it were choreographed. Bej’s fist hit me in the mouth. Camy punched me in the stomach and I went down. I couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe. When I could, they had Seliku down, too. We would have been evenly matched, Seliku and I against the two of them, but they’d struck first. My nanomeds began working and I tried to get up, but my feet and tentacles were tangled in the long rope we had used to rescue Camy.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, it’s Haradil,” I heard Bej say. By the time Seliku and I had recovered our breath and untied the vine, Bej and Camy were running back the way we had come, toward the fern forest.

We could have followed them. Their fresh scent would have made it easy. But Seliku and I were equal in strength and stamina to them—were them. Sister-selves. They could probably stay as just ahead of us as they were now. And if we did catch them, then what? Another fight? Another unthinkable severing of self from self?

I had thought before that I knew what it was like to be alone. I had been wrong.

Seliku and I gazed at each other. Finally she nodded.

“Yes,” I answered.

She gazed bleakly at the gray sky. “Not today, there’s not enough sunlight. We’ll need to spend the night here.”

Silently we took out our blankets and spread them on the mossy hillock. It seemed to take forever for darkness to fall. Neither of us mentioned making a fire. It occurred to me then that Bej and Camy could have tied us up, cut off our cloth belts and taken not only our blankets but the spores of the floaters, thus ensuring that all four of us would stay here. Perhaps they hadn’t had time, or hadn’t thought of it. Perhaps it was something they wouldn’t have done.

I no longer knew.

Toward morning the clouds blew over and the sky turned clear and starlit. The gas giant was just setting. I lay on my back, having slept not at all, and looked for a long time at the unfamiliar constellations. QUENTIAM was up there, among the cold stars.

“Seliku,” I said softly, “are you awake?”

“Yes.”

I groped for the way to phrase such an unfamiliar question. “When the gravitons you talked about ‘leak’ from the universe—where do they go?”

“The math says they go into other universes.”

“Right beside ours?”

“ ‘Beside’ isn’t the right concept. Other universes coexist with ours. It’s called a multiverse.”

“Do the other universes have their own spacetime?”

“Presumably.”

“Is it like ours? Four-dimensional?”

“We don’t know.”

“Do these other universes—could they—have life?”

“Presumably,” Seliku said. I heard her shift in the darkness.

“Could life there have created their own membranes, woven into the fabric of their spacetime?”

She said, “And could that universe be an enantiomorph of our own? Is that what you’re asking?”

I raised myself on one elbow to gaze at her, but could only make out her blanketed profile. “You knew.”

“No, of course not. But I guessed, after you described the enantiomorph flora. And right after that, Camy—”

“Yes. Sel, is another universe somehow contacting ours? Through QUENTIAM?”

“ ‘Contacting’ may be the wrong word,” Seliku said, and I recognized the scientist’s caution. “It’s more like… the two universes bump into each other. A lot of energy would be released from even a small bump. In fact, one theory about the origin of matter is that it resulted from a huge collision between universes. There’s so much we don’t know, Alo. Technology has gone so far ahead of basic theory. It couldn’t always have been this way, or QUENTIAM wouldn’t know as much as It does.”

“But if two universes bump and energy is released, a lot of energy, wouldn’t QUENTIAM absorb it?”

“As much as It could. Think of it this way: You drop a stone in a pond. It creates ripples. Then the pond settles back down. Drop a bigger stone, and you create bigger ripples. Afterward, the pond is subtly changed. The water level is a bit higher, the topography of the pond bottom a little different.”

“Don’t talk down to me, Sel.”

“Sorry. I find it hard to talk to non-scientists about my field.”

As did I. My irritation dissolved.

She continued, “To take the metaphor just a bit farther, hurl a big asteroid at a planet. Depending on where it hits, you get a huge crater, a tsunami, an axial wobble, climate changes, biological die-offs. Everything reconfigures. If QUENTIAM is getting hit with some sort of enantiomorph of energy or matter—maybe some version of gravitons—It’s being forced to reconfigure spacetime. That’s been theoretically possible forever, in small dimensions: it’s called a flop transition. We understand the mathematics. QUENTIAM might be doing that in our universal dimensions. And if parts of QUENTIAM Itself are being destroyed either by bumping the other universe or by the reconfiguration, It might not even know that was happening.”

“Haradil—”

“She was merged with QUENTIAM. She wouldn’t know, either. And a star system died.”

All at once I remembered the machine body on the shuttle to Calyx. It had momentarily gone rigid, refused to function. I had said then, even knowing how ridiculous the statement was, that the machine body had “fainted.” Machine states were intricately linked with QUENTIAM.

I said, with the numb calm of shock, “You have to tell QUENTIAM. Have to tell everybody. Maybe that’s even why there was no record of the first seeding of that planet that Haradil destroyed… QUENTIAM’s records… you have to tell—”

“Don’t you think I know that?” Seliku’s irritation was back. “That’s why we’re leaving our sister-selves here tomorrow.”

Was that why? Or was it because we had finally come to some mental and moral place where our sisters were no longer ourselves? Or was it just because we could no longer stand this cursed moon one more minute?

I could no longer tell my reasons—our reasons—apart.

I could no longer be sure of anything.

Dawn came clear and warm. Seliku and I tore open our cloth belts and dumped the spores on the mossy ground. Carefully—so carefully—we sopped up a little water from the squishy edge of the quicksand and wrung it over them. In just a few minivals, the spores opened and the floaters began to form around us.

“Seliku, what if QUENTIAM hasn’t recreated the shuttle or the station? What if It couldn’t? If there’s nothing there…” I had to ask, even though I already knew the answer.

“Then we die.” A moment later she added, “I don’t have enough information to do the math, Alo. I’m sorry.”

All five of us take on more accountability than should properly be ours.

The floaters sealed and began to rise. I had engineered this group for a gravity greater than this one, and they would just rise until they ran out of air and died. Still, the trip upstairs, going against gravity, would be longer than the one going down. We drifted out over the quicksand, and I tried not to think of Haradil, possibly sunk somewhere beneath that gritty alien lake. The tough, thick membrane around me magnified the sunlight and I grew uncomfortably, but not dangerously, warm. I lay cradled in the sag of floater created by my weight. Maybe it was the warmth but, incredibly, I fell asleep. When I woke, the shuttle was in view, a dark speck growing larger against the pale-slug color of the gas giant.

We had no way to steer. I couldn’t see Seliku’s floater; winds had carried us apart. Already the membrane that was my floater had thinned, weakened by the less concentrated sunlight and fewer atmospheric molecules at this altitude.

QUENTIAM, come through for us…

The shuttle turned and started toward me.

I barely made it into the airlock, holding my breath and enduring the bodily shock while the airlock pressurized. The capillaries in my eyeballs popped and my eyes filled with blood. Then Seliku was pulling me into the shuttle and my nanomeds were going to work.

“Alo! Are you—”

“F-fine,” I gasped.

“Rest here, sister.” She stretched me out on the deck.

QUENTIAM said on the shuttle’s system, “You two went downstairs to a quiet planet.”

“It’s been scolding me since I got aboard,” Seliku said grimly.

“Going downstairs to a quiet planet is forbidden.”

“S-Sel… did you…”

“I’ve been trying to tell It,” she snapped. “QUENTIAM, listen to me. We found Haradil. When she destroyed that star system, she was merged with you, and it was you who destroyed it. One theory is—”

“I did not destroy the star system containing ^˄5387. I would remember.”

“You don’t remember because it wasn’t a decision you actually made. Spacetime may have been reconfigured in a giant flop transition after another universe in the multiverse bumped into this universe—”

“I remember everything. I did not destroy the star system containing ^˄5387.”

“—and huge amounts of energy were released. Haradil’s art project with the asteroid must have been near the impact point. So—”

Lying on the floor, listening, an irrelevant part of my mind wondered at the ease with which Seliku spoke in whole universes.

“—your memory of the event was reconfigured when spacetime was. You lost a nanosecond of time. The energy—”

“I have lost no time. I cannot lose time. Oscillations of gravitons through time are part of my functioning.”

“I’m not talking about gravitons, QUENTIAM. Listen—”

She launched into complicated explanations, with terms and principles I could not follow. What was clear to me was QUENTIAM’s utter refusal of her reasoning. And in one sense, Its refusal was more reasonable than her wild statements. QUENTIAM wanted proof, physical or experimental or mathematical. She had none.

My nanomeds repaired my body and I stood. The meal created by the food synthesizer was the best I have ever tasted. I made Seliku eat. She didn’t want to. She sat in the front seat of the shuttle, no longer arguing with QUENTIAM, but instead asking for equations on the display, staring at them, asking QUENTIAM to perform various complex mathematical processes. I knew better than to interrupt for long. After she ate a few bites, I left them alone.

“The shuttle has reached the t-hole,” QUENTIAM said to me. “Where do you wish to go?”

I hesitated, for more reasons than one.

“Seliku… Sel?”

I don’t think she even heard me.

“Seliku!”

“What? I’m working!”

“We’re at the t-hole. Where are we going? And is it safe to go through? If your parallel universe bumps while we’re—”

“It’s not ‘my’ parallel universe.” Then her irritation vanished and she gave me her full attention. “I know what you’re asking, Alo. It might not be safe. But if this goes on, if I’m right about the multiverse, and if this series of bumps and spacetime reconfigurations doesn’t end soon, then nothing is going to be safe ever again.”

“You are talking nonsense,” QUENTIAM said.

I said, “Where do you need to go to make this… your theory known? To warn everyone?”

As soon as I said it, I knew how stupid it was. The way to warn everyone, the way to disseminate any kind of information throughout the galaxy, was through QUENTIAM. And QUENTIAM did not believe us.

I saw that Seliku was thinking the same thing. Slowly she said, “We should go back to Calyx, I guess. The Communion of Cosmology is there. It’s something, anyway.”

“QUENTIAM,” I said, “we’re going to Calyx.”

The shuttle slipped through the t-hole. I would have held my breath, but of course I couldn’t tell exactly when it happened until it was over and the stars changed configuration. Calyx rotated just below us. The city-continent came into view and the blue sea gave way to the riot of colors that was Bej and Camy’s flower art. For the first time since Seliku had first told me about Haradil, my eyes filled with tears. We are not easy criers.

“I want a new body,” Seliku said. “No matter what the risk. I won’t stay in this one a minival longer than I have to. Not one minival.”

Her tone was violent. I knew, without turning around, that she was crying, too.

The first thing I did on Calyx was get a new body from QUENTIAM. Burn the risk; I could not stay a minival longer in this ugly, ineffective shell whose every pore breathed ^˄17843.

“You know it’s a risk,” Seliku said. She had barely paused long enough to clean herself before hurrying off to the Communion of Cosmologists. “If QUENTIAM takes a bump near here while you’re in the nanomachinery…”

“I’ll take the chance,” I said, and then added, “and so will you. You’ll make your initial impact on all those unsuspecting cosmologists and then just work on in upload state while QUENTIAM makes you a body.”

She did need to answer. “What body are you choosing?”

“The one we use in bond time.”

She nodded sadly and left, dragging her body through the gravity it had not been designed for.

On my way to a vat room, I took the short walk to the sea. A fresh wind stirred up small waves and blew toward me the fragrance of blossoms. So much color: magenta and cerulean, scarlet and damson, rose and crimson and delphinium. I rolled the words in my mind. This, then, was how my remote ancestors had lived, wondering if each moment might be their last. They must have had unimaginable courage. Either that or they were all crazy all the time.

I went to the vat room, climbed into an available vat, and uploaded into QUENTIAM.

*Are you sure, Akilo, that you don’t want implants in the new body?* It asked.

*I’m sure. No implants.*

*Is this because of the nonsense Seliku has been saying?*

*No implants, QUENTIAM. That’s my choice.*

*Yes, it is.*

The human mind does not do well in upload without visual simulations. I considered my standard sim, a forested bedroom copied from ^˄894, and rejected it. Nor did I want our childhood home, or Calyx. Too many memories. Instead I created an austere room with a simple table, single chair and display screen. An open window looked out on a bare rocky plain. It was a room for thinking, for concentration.

Seliku would have known what to look for in QUENTIAM, what data or processes, to see if It was fundamentally different. I did not. Instead I asked questions, an endless stream of questions, about the multiverse and spacetime. Some of the answers I didn’t understand. Some seemed contradictory. Since I didn’t know whether this was inherent in the science or represented a flaw in QUENTIAM, I gave up on the whole thing, created a door in my room, and went for a walk on the soothingly blank plain. No pulpy green, no looming fronds, no treacherous sand. Firm ground underneath my “feet,” and a horizon I could scan in all directions.

The Arlbenists are wrong to think that filling the universe is a divine mission. Sometimes the best healer is emptiness.

I was examining some old, round rocks of my own imagining when QUENTIAM suddenly said, *Akilo. Magnitude one news message.*

*What?*

*The Mori Core has been destroyed.*

*Destroyed!*

*Yes. There was an explosion and the entire structure crumpled from within.*

*Do you… do you have visuals?*

*Yes.*

And then I was back in my austere room, watching the huge Mori Core cease to exist. The visuals were from the outside and slightly above, perhaps from a very low orbital. The Core, a huge precise structure of concentric rings, covered half a subcontinent.

The Mori, in direct opposition to the Arlbenists, have over time made themselves more and more biologically similar, while the Arlbenists became more and more diverse in order to seed strange worlds. Mori favor substantial, heavily furred biologicals and cold worlds. The Core stood frosted with icicles, while the winter gardens between the concentric rings bloomed with low, lacy plants in alabaster, ivory, silver, very pale blue. People with white fur walked in the gardens.

The next moment the entire huge structure was gone and a blinding flash of light filled my screen.

*Was the First Mori in residence?*

*Yes.*

I tried to sort out my feelings. The Mori had claimed more and more worlds, had imposed their own ideas of order and justice on them, had sent Haradil to ^˄17843 for a monstrosity she did not commit. But the Mori were not fundamentally evil—and they were people.

*How many… how many sentients died?*

*19,865,842 humans, 15,980 androids, 598,654 enhanced dokins.*

I braced myself. *What caused the explosion, QUENTIAM?*

*Quark release seems to best fit the data.*

*Who used a quark-release device?*

*Unknown.*

*QUENTIAM—*

*Akilo, I cannot monitor humans without implants if there are no sensors in their immediate indoor environments. You and your sister-selves demonstrated that already. I don’t know what human had a quark-release device inside the Core, or why, or what motive existed for the sabotage. I have reported that to the new First Mori, on ^˄10236.*

*Are you sure the… the saboteur was human?*

*Androids are not created to cause any damage without direct human instruction, and dokins do not have the intellectual capacity to detonate, let alone create, a quark-release device. Therefore, by simple logic, the destroyer was human.*

In upload—but not in merger—my thoughts are a separate program, hidden from QUENTIAM unless I choose to address It.

*Is my new body almost done?*

*No.*

*Get me a link to Seliku.*

She looked at me from the display screen, still in her ^˄17843 body. She must have been standing in some great hall of the Communion of Cosmologists. Behind her rose tall pillars covered with flowers. “I heard, Akilo. And no, I can’t tell one way or the other, not for certain. There are a lot of people who hate the Mori, for religious or personal reasons. It could have been a human or… or not.”

“Your best guess.”

“Not.”

*That is nonsense.* QUENTIAM said. *Seliku, I wish you would stop disseminating this misinformation.*

In Seliku’s eyes, an exact image of the real Seliku, I saw fear.

QUENTIAM’s parameters protect you from any retaliation by It, I wanted to say to her. But she already knew that. And she knew, too, that Its parameters could be the next thing to change.

“Does the Communion have data on the explosion?” I asked her.

“Yes, we have all QUENTIAM’s measurements. We’re sorting the data now. Alo, come home.”

She knew I couldn’t hurry the creation of my body. Her plea had nothing to do with logic.

“I’m coming,” I said, “as fast as I can.”

Nothing else happened before my body was done, except for one thing: I dreamed.

This was the second time I had dreamed in upload, supposedly an impossibility. To shorten the unbearable time waiting for my biological, I had put myself in down-program mode within QUENTIAM. There should have been no thoughts, no sensation, no anything. But a sort of sudden current ran through me and then I had the dream, the same one as before: 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—

*Your body is ready.*

I downloaded into the body, climbed from the vat, and looked in the mirror.

It was us, the body my sister-selves and I always used for bond time. A female all-human with pale brown skin, head hair in a dark green crest, black eyes. Four coiled tentacles, each a meter long, the digits slim and graceful—the body we would have grown up with had our creation occurred on a quiet planet. Nothing seemed amiss with the body. QUENTIAM had had the nanos make it perfectly.

I let out a long breath.

“I can still add an implant, you know. Not a full one, now that the brain is grown, but still very functional.”

“No, thank you, QUENTIAM.”

“It makes communication so much fuller.”

“No, thank you.”

“As you choose.”

“Please tell Seliku that I’m done.”

“She knows.”

She came through the door a few minivals later, dragging her heavy small body, looking as exhausted as she had on ^˄17843. I was over twice as tall as she, probably three times as strong. I picked her up and carried her, unprotesting, to the beach. We sat at the very edge of the land, our feet in the warm sea, away from any of QUENTIAM’s sensors.

“Anything, Sel?”

“No. I can’t even convince most of the Communion. They’re good cosmologists, but they weren’t there. They didn’t see the shuttle go, the station go. They still think that Haradil destroyed that star system, and they probably think my demented theory is a mind-defense to keep from acknowledging that. The only thing I’ve got on my side is my reputation, and I’m straining that.”

I nodded. “Sel, while I was in upload, I dreamed.”

She didn’t tell me that was impossible. She closed her eyes, as if absorbing a blow. I described the dream, adding, “I think it wasn’t my dream. I think it was QUENTIAM’s. Upload is supposed to be a separate subprogram within It, but I think I was—in some very tiny, tiny way—beyond upload into merged state. Sel, I don’t think you should get another body.”

Her eyes remained closed, and her face grimaced in pain.

“I’m not saying that nanomachinery and even t-holes aren’t safe. Or if they’re not, it will be one finite explosion, like Haradil’s system or the Mori Core, and we’ll be dead before we even realize it. But the upload state, even the machine state…” I remembered Haradil saying, I was QUENTIAM.

“Yes,” Seliku said. “You’re right.”

“Once before I dreamed in upload, the same dream. It was the day you first told me about Haradil. So even then… even then.”

“Yes. You were just lucky about your body.” She opened her eyes and looked at it longingly.

“I’m sorry,” I said, inadequately.

“Not your fault. Will you carry me to the Communion hall? I’m very tired.”

“Of course I will.”

Tenderly I carried my sister-self back to her work. It was almost like cradling a child. I saw that there must come a new relationship between me and my one remaining sister-self, physically frail on this planet but mentally leading a crusade to convince the galaxy of cataclysmic danger. I would be her protector, caretaker, aide. The change between us was permanent. Nothing would ever be the same again.

I was wrong. Many things are the same.

Seliku has been unable to convince the galaxy of her theory. She has won a few adherents among cosmologists, but for most people, the idea that QUENTIAM might be decaying, might be unreliable, is impossible to even consider. It’s like saying gravity is unreliable. Which, I suppose, might happen next. That would convince everybody, or at least everybody who survived it.

Meanwhile, some do not survive. There have been mistakes in vat nanos, creating bodies other than ordered, or killing the bodies before they were done. No one knows how many mistakes; I no longer trust QUENTIAM’s records.

A new quasar has appeared in the sky, and six supernovas, all outside our galaxy. They filled the sky, night after night, with brilliant light. Seliku says that is too many supernovas to be statistically random, but not even her colleagues all believe her. She works night and day to find the evidence, physical or experimental or mathematical, that may convince them. Her big question is this: Is the unseen other universe just brushing ours in passing, creating supernovas and quasars and small reconfigurations of spacetime that also change and reconfigure QUENTIAM? Or are the two universes set for a full collision, from which neither will emerge without changes so fundamental that basic particles themselves are affected, and all life ceases?

The Arlbenists were wrong, in ways they could never have foreseen when Arlbeni created his Divine Mission over a hundred thousand years ago. We were never alone in the galaxy, and not only because spores have drifted in from beyond its edges and seeded non-DNA-based life here. Even without that panspermia, we were not alone. Humans were already everywhere because QUENTIAM, our collective and historical selves, filled spacetime. And we weren’t alone in a much more profound sense.

I have suggested another question to Seliku, as well. Is it possible that the other universe, too, has a membrane like QUENTIAM, but more advanced? And that It knows what It’s doing in probing ours? On ^˄17843, Seliku likened our brushes with the other universe to stones dropping in a pond. Dropped stones sometimes have droppers. Seliku dismisses this question, not because it’s completely stupid but because for that there really is no evidence. But I know she can imagine it. She is my sister-self, still, and sister-self to artists as well. She can imagine a Dropper of stones into the cosmic well between universes.

What is It, or Them, like? Do they guess what effects their experiments have on us?

None of this speculation reaches the Arlbenists, who still blithely seed worlds in the egocentric belief that only humans can create life. I, however, no longer correct and adjust Arlbenist seedings on other worlds. I won’t risk the vat rooms necessary for that. And I have my own work here, now, both in aiding Seliku in her all-important fight and in caring for her. Her nanomeds keep her healthy, but her body is not meant for this planet and is not doing well here. It doesn’t, surprisingly, bother me that I never leave Calyx. This is, finally, home, here with my new work and my sister-self. I am learning to grow a garden of edible plants, without nanos and without QUENTIAM, just in case. In a weird way, I’m not uncontent.

Not that Calyx looks the same, either. A new artist received the design privilege when Bej and Camy’s franchise ended. His name is Kiibceroti, and he has made of Calyx a serene, spare city. Gone are the gorgeous lush flowers, replaced by gentle curves of sand in soft pastels, with perhaps one dark rock placed precisely at the edge of the curve and a single tall fern. I don’t much like the ferns, or the overall design. But I admit that it’s beautiful in its own way. There is something melancholy about it, something of grief. Someone told me that Kiibceroti lost a brother-self in the Mori Core, but I don’t know if that’s true. I could ask QUENTIAM, but I ask QUENTIAM very little these days.

One good thing about Kiibceroti’s city: All that low-key tranquility is good for dreaming. I dream now, nearly every night. Last night I dreamed of Bej and Camy.

I dreamed they had joined the settlement of prisoners on ^˄17843, somehow making peace with them, finding companionship and working together to create whatever good exists on that pulpy moon. Bej and Camy cut their arms and shared the nanomeds from their bodies, and the fungi disappeared from everyone’s heads and feet. None of them would die.

Then I saw Bej and Camy walking on a seashore with their friends, all approaching some large object in the distance. In the dream, I walked with them. As we neared the object, I saw that it was a great boulder thrown up by the sea millennia ago. Camy and Bej had painstakingly chipped away at it over vast amounts of time, using other sharp stones and their own artistic talent. They had polished the stone with sand and the statue shone in the sunlight with bits of mica and quartz. It was Haradil, smiling and happy, solid by the blue sea for as long as the waves permitted the sculpture to last.

“Alo?” Seliku said sleepily beside me.

I laid my tentacles protectively across her body and moved slightly to nestle closer to her. “I’m here, sister-self. Go back to sleep. We’re still here.”