I’d been afraid for her then. We’d all been afraid. But she had continued calm, silent, remote during the next two bond-times. With us and not with us. Neither happy nor unhappy, but somehow beyond both.
“Not human,” Bej had finally said, and we’d turned on her in anger, because we’d all thought it ourselves.
But not destructive, either. In fact, the opposite. Gradually we’d come to sense optimism of some kind under Haradil’s silence, and our anxiety had been at least partially allayed, and then Haradil had blown up a star system containing sentient life.
Now Seliku said, “Let’s get to work.”
We had the nanomachinery create a cart. The cart loaded onto itself the canisters I indicated. Seliku, Bej, and Camy hadn’t been able to make their lesser preparations until after they were without implants, and there were things I wanted to add to the cart as well, so we dragged around in the monstrous gravity for another day. QUENTIAM observed everything, of course, but It had no reason to stop us. And it asked no questions about anything we had the nanos manufacture.
There were many moments when I started to ask It something: *QUENTIAM, is the—* and then I remembered. But there were no more moments like the terrible, deathlike one in the lab. All day my sister-selves and I worked beside each other, tentacles reaching out to touch and pat, and at night we slept in a heap, tails and legs tangled together in the too-warm, fragrant air of Calyx.
“I hope I never see another flower again,” Seliku said when we were finally aboard QUENTIAM’s shuttle on our way upstairs. And then, “Oh, sorry, Bej and Camy, I didn’t mean—”
“I don’t want to see flowers, either,” they said in unison, and then laughed unhappily. Below us the planet dwindled to a soft blue-and-white bauble.
We would see no flowers on ˄17843.
The gravity on our orbital-grown shuttle was a relief; it matched ˄17843’s. “QUENTIAM,” Seliku said, “take us through the t-hole to ˄17843.”
I thought It might speak to us for the first time since we’d left the vat room, but It didn’t. The shuttle moved away from the orbital toward nothing, apparently went through nothing, and emerged into a different sky.
A huge gas giant, ringless and hazy, filled half the sky. Ugly—the pale planet looked as ugly as the fuzzy tumors of a seeding biology gone very wrong. As I watched, a large moon emerged from behind the planet. Clouds, oceans, but none of the beauty of Calyx. To my present state of mind, those feature, too, looked like primitive biological deformities, the clouds crawling like parasites across a landscape diseased with what did not belong there.
The shuttle was equipped with full orbital sensors. I imaged the continent with flora as it turned repeatedly below us. Large animal activity showed up on half a dozen different readings. And there was only one large animal on ˄17843. I gave Seliku the right coordinates.
Seliku said calmly, “QUENTIAM, take this shuttle as low as is safe.”
“This is as low as is safe. You are within the upper atmosphere.”
“All right. Sister-selves?”
“Yes,” Camy said, speaking for all of us.
And so it began.
We unpacked the canisters we’d brought with us. Each of us tied on cloth belts containing non-metallic tools, blankets, rope, concentrated food pellets, collapsible ceramic cups, the rest of our prepared items. Then we pushed the remaining four opaque canisters toward the airlock.
“What are you doing?” QUENTIAM said. “It is not permitted to descend to Paletej.”
Seliku said, “It is not permitted for you to take us through a t-hole to the surface. It is permitted for us to leave the shuttle to go into space.”
“You will die,” QUENTIAM said. Did I hear regret in Its voice, or anger?
Seliku merely repeated, “It is permitted for us to leave the shuttle. We have nothing that can be destroyed by the metal-eating spores in the atmosphere. And we have nothing with us that connects us to you, QUENTIAM, or anything else forbidden on the surface of a quiet planet.”
“Your bodies contain nanomeds.”
“They are not forbidden to visitors to quiet planets.”
“This quiet planet never has visitors.”
“Until now.”
“You will die outside the shuttle. We are well within the gravity well. You will fall to your deaths.”
Seliku opened her canister, laid the lid on the floor, and stepped inside. “You will open the shuttle door over these coordinates, as soon as feasible after seventy-five millivals.”
“But—”
“You will open the door.”
“Yes,” QUENTIAM said. It had no real choice. A human being may destroy herself, although not others, if she so chooses.
Bej, Camy, and I opened our canisters, laid the lids on the floor, and stepped inside. Our gazes all met. “I love you,” Camy said, for all of us, as the membranes in the canister began to grow around us.
Biological membranes, not the spacetime that is QUENTIAM.
I had found them on ˄22763, a planet seeded back in the very beginnings of the Great Mission, when humans had been willing to subject living things to a far greater range of environments than they did later on. So many of those hapless seedings died, and so many suffered. ˄22763 had been lucky, winning the blind lottery of evolutionary mutation. They were light, air-filled creatures, non-sentient, floating through a world with no sustenance except sunlight, in temperatures just high enough to keep their atmosphere from freezing. All my data on them had of course been stored in QUENTIAM, but I had memorized it, too, because it had been so interesting.
On Calyx, with the help of programmable nanos, I had recreated the floaters and stored them as spores in opaque canisters. The mature floaters, biologicals, were not forbidden on ˄17843, although they would die there. But first, unless I had misremembered data, they would get us down to the surface. If I had misremembered, we would die along with the creatures.
The membrane sealed around me just before the shuttle door opened.
When did QUENTIAM realize what we were doing? It’s possible It knew from the very beginning. It may have had no choice but to permit this because of its “parameters,” or because preservation is the first law, or even because of “love.” Who can understand the mind of QUENTIAM? It moves in mysterious ways.
As the air left the shuttle, the four floaters were blown into space. The shuttle orbited as low as possible without encountering the metal-consuming nanos. The floaters, which had fed voraciously on the light inside the shuttle, now fed on the abundant reflected light from the gas giant. They swelled with the breathable gases that were its carefully re-engineered waste products. I had held my breath for too long; now I breathed.
In the clear living bubbles, which were already dying, my sister-selves and I began the long float down to the surface of the transformed moon.
Pain. Fear. A rushing in my head like rapids, water that would sweep me away, kill me…
The rushing receded, although the pain did not. There was no water. I hung at a steep incline, head lower than my legs, in the fronds of a giant, prickly fern. The rushing became the voices of Bej and Camy somewhere below me in the eddies of green.
“Akilo! Akilo, answer us!”
“I’m… here. I’m all right,” I said, although clearly I was not. As sensation clarified, the pain localized to my head and one leg.
“You’re only three or four meters above the ground,” Bej called. “Drop and we’ll catch you.”