*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.