“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.