I did, they did, and the world blackened for a moment, then returned. I lay on a forest floor, a bed of thick, damp, pulpy plants as unpleasant to lie on as a dung heap. Not that any of my sister-selves had ever seen a dung heap. I was the biologist, and a fine job I’d done of adapting the floaters that had died and disintegrated before we’d actually reached ground.
“I’m sorry,” I croaked up at Bej and Camy. “Seliku?”
“I’m here,” she said, striding into my circle of sight. “You’re the only one hurt, Akilo. But it’s all right; we can stay here quietly until your nanomeds fix you.”
I closed my eyes. The nanomeds were already releasing painkillers, and the hurting receded. Sedatives took me. My last thought was gratitude that ˄17843 had no predators. No, that was my second-last thought. The last was a memory, confused and frightened, from the moment before I crashed: a flash of light bright enough to temporarily blind me, light as silent and deadly as a distant nova.
Then I slept.
“You’re back,” Bej said. “Akilo, you’re back.”
A campfire burned beside me. My body, wrapped in two of the superthin blankets from our toolbelts, was warm on the fire side, slightly chilled on the other. A strange odor floated from the fire. I sat up.
“How long have I—”
“Three days,” Bej said. “We’ve made quite a little camp. Here, drink this.”
She held out to me a cup of the odd-smelling liquid. It tasted worse than it smelled, and I made a face.
“At least it’s not poisonous,” Bej said cheerfully. “Local flora. We’re trying to conserve the food pellets as long as we can. How do you feel?”
“All right.” I flexed my leg; it was fine. Thanks to the nanomeds that Haradil had to do without.
“Seliku and Camy are out gathering more food. We had to do something while you were out, so we gathered leaves, tested them with our nanomeds for biocompatibility, and boiled them down to make that drink.”
“Boiled them in what?” I finished the drink and stood, working my muscles. Without the blankets, the air was cold.
“That,” Bej said, pointing at a rickety arrangement of bent wood and huge leaves. “It’s remarkably effective, but ready to fall apart, so it’s a good thing you’re ready to travel. You can eat those same leaves raw, too, but they taste even worse that way.”
“Travel to where?” I said. Bej seemed too cheerful. Didn’t she realize that we might all die here? Of course she did. Her cheerfulness was a kind of bravery, sparing me not only her fear but also her share of the intense shame we all felt over Haradil’s crime.
“We haven’t seen any prisoners yet,” Bej said, “but Seliku came across a campsite—old ashes, that sort of thing. The scent is long gone but Camy thinks we can track them. Do you think we can?”
“Bej,” I said irritably, “I’m an adjustment biologist. Of course I can track, probably much better than Camy can.”
“That’s good, because she said you’re going to do it. Jump around a bit. It gets much warmer here when the star is higher.”
In the dim filtered green of dense forest, I hadn’t realized it was early morning.
Seliku and Camy returned. Seen together, I became aware of the changes that three “days” (how long was each?) had made in my sister-selves. Their dung-colored fur was matted and dirty, especially Camy’s, who didn’t smile at me as she walked into camp. For the first time, she and comparatively cheerful Bej, standing side by side, did not look alike. It was unsettling.
They packed up our few bits of equipment: blankets, boiled-down food wrapped in more leaves, ceramic knives. Seliku lead me to the abandoned camp. Following the trail from there was easy compared to the seedings I had tracked on other worlds. These prisoners had nothing to hide and no predators to confuse, and they’d left a blindingly obvious trail of broken ferns, missing edible leaves, and old shit. A child could have found the settlement.
˄17843 proved to have stretches of open ground within the fern forests. But even these low-lying “meadows” were overgrown with pulpy green, so that everywhere our feet sunk onto squishy vegetation and stagnant water. The green was unrelieved by any color of fruit or flower. In the sky the gas giant loomed oppressively, blocking the sun. The only sound was a low, unceasing hum from insect-analogues, monotonous and dulling. I hated the place.
At midday, which seemed to come very quickly on this small world, we reached the top of a fern-crested hill, and suddenly before us, down a steeper slope, was the welcome blue of the sea.
“Wait,” I said, when Bej would have rushed down the hill toward huts built on the seashore.
“Wait for what? Haradil’s down there!”
I pulled her back into the thick fronds. Seliku and Camy, dirty and sweaty, watched us. “Bej, listen to me. These people have been sent here by the Mori for crimes. Some of them may have only violated some idiotic Mori custom, but some might be truly dangerous. They may have destroyed or killed.”
As Haradil had.
Seliku said, “Alo is right.” She drew her ceramic knife and looked at us.
Camy stared back in disbelief. “The knives are for work, not… you can’t expect me to… Sel, I don’t want to!”
“None of us want to,” I said. I shared Camy’s distaste, shared Seliku’s reluctant foresight, shared Bej’s eagerness to see Haradil. These were my sister-selves. After a moment, Camy, Bej, and I drew our knives.
Together, with me in the lead, we started toward the settlement.
As we got closer, details emerged, all of them sickening. The flimsy huts, which looked as if a good wind would blow them over, were built of woody fern trunks topped with broad fronds. Among them burned two or three open fires ringed with stones and topped with leaf cauldrons. People, including some children, skittered around frantically as soon as they glimpsed us.
We halted halfway down the hill, smiling painfully, and waited.
Eventually two prisoners started toward us. Seliku glanced at me, and I gestured helplessly. I had guessed as well as I could without data. Still, I’d gotten the bodies wrong.
The two coming toward us were even smaller and lighter than we, which on reflection made sense: less mass to support with food gathering. Fragile, tailless, thickly furred to conserve heat and discourage insect bites, they walked on two legs but had only two thick tentacles, which ended in clumsy opposable digits. But the faces were human. One of the prisoners had been infected with some sort of local fungus that covered its head and part of its back. I saw Camy gaze at it in horror. The other had a scar along the left side of its face. I don’t think I’d ever seen uglier sentients, or more pathetic ones.
Silently, simultaneously, we put our knives back into our toolbelts. Any one of us could have smashed both of these sad people into jelly.
Then came the worst.
Seliku said, “Hello. We are looking for our sister-self, Jiuinip Haradil Sister-Self 7664-3. Is she here?”
Both creatures stared at us. Then one chattered incomprehensibly. Bej gasped. “They don’t have translation capability!”
Of course not. Translations went through QUENTIAM by implant, so simultaneously that hardly anyone noticed it happening. These poor beings had no implants. And neither did we. So they lived here, unable to talk even to the other pathetic prisoners, deprived even of the solace of words to share the unendurable. It seemed the worst cruelty yet. Wouldn’t death have been better than this?
Camy took a step backward and brought up her tentacles to cover her face. Seliku pressed on, her voice quavering slightly, in several other languages; I hadn’t realized she’d learned so many. No response.
Finally I said, very slowly and with a variety of pitches and inflections, “Haradil? Har… a… dil? HARadil? HaraDIL? HarAdil? Haarrrraaadddiiilll? Haradil? Haradil?”