“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.