“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.
*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.