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.