*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.