One of them worked. The prisoner with fungus made a quick snapping gesture with his digits, a gesture I didn’t understand, as he repeated “Haradil” in a guttural tone with a rising inflection. The other prisoner watched dully. I nodded and smiled, and the first man pointed toward the forest we’d just left. I made helpless gestures and he rose to his full stunted height, scowled fiercely, and gestured for us to follow. The four of us trailed behind him laterally along the edge of the forest until, about half a blinu from the settlement, he turned into the ferns.
We seemed to walk a long way into the forest. Finally, in a small hacked-out clearing, in front of the flimsiest hut yet, crouched another of the ugly creatures. As we approached, it raised its eyes to us and they were filled with despair and anguish and, then, recognition.
Haradil.
Bej burst into tears. But Camy rushed forward and with all the strength of her superior body, slammed a fisted tentacle into Haradil’s weeping face. “How could you, Hari? How could you do it, to all of us?”
I understood Camy’s fury, Bej’s sorrow, Seliku’s distaste. I shared all three. But I was the biologist. After Seliku had pulled Camy off of Haradil, I knelt beside her to examine her wounds. Our prisoner guide had oozed back into the forest. The light bones of Haradil’s face didn’t seem broken, but she was obviously in pain, and my anger turned from her to Camy.
“You could have killed her! This body is really fragile!”
“I’m sorry,” Camy choked out. She didn’t cry. We were not easy criers.
Haradil said nothing, and that was at first oddly reassuring because it was the way she’d been ever since her merger with QUENTIAM, was at least a token of the Haradil we’d known.
“Haradil,” I said as calmly as I could manage, “I’m going to give you nanomeds.”
She shrank back under my hands. Seliku said, too harshly, “Hari, the Mori won’t know, nor QUENTIAM. It has no sensors here. No one will know what we do in this place.”
“No nanomeds!” Haradil cried, and somehow her voice was still her own, horrifying in that awful body.
“Why not?” I said, but I already knew. Holding her delicate, filthy face between my hands, I saw the start of the same fungal infection that the other prisoner had, and I shuddered.
“Nanomeds will keep me alive!”
“And you want to die,” Seliku said, still in that same harsh voice. “Burn that, Haradil. You live. You owe us that, and a lot more.”
“No!” Haradil cried, and then she was gone, squirming out from under my gentle clasp. Bej caught her with a flying tackle that might, all by itself, have broken bones. Haradil screamed and flailed ineffectually.
Horrified, furious, and determined, we set on her. Bej and Camy held her legs and the one set of arms. Seliku unwound a long superfine rope from her toolbelt and we tied Haradil. The others looked at me; I was the biologist. I drew my knife, sliced into Haradil’s arm and then my own, and pressed them firmly together. Nanomeds flowed from me to her. Haradil began a low, keening sound, like a trapped animal.
It took a long time for enough nanomeds to replicate within Haradil to achieve sedation. Until nightfall we had to listen to that terrible sound. Finally she fell asleep, and we carried her into the forest and lay down under our blankets.
We didn’t need much sleep, but there wasn’t anything else to do. I had never known such blackness. No starlight penetrated the overhang of fronds. My infrared vision was, except for my sister-selves, a uniform and low-key haze of plant and insect life. We didn’t build a fire for the same reason we’d left Haradil’s hut. Not all the prisoners on ˄17843 might be as scowlingly cooperative as the one that had brought us to Haradil. Some of these people had killed.
As she had.
“I’m sorry I hit you,” I heard Camy whisper in the dark to Haradil’s sedated form, and I knew that Camy both was and was not sorry.
But the strangest thing in that dark night was the absence of QUENTIAM. I hadn’t expected to feel so completely bereft. My sister-selves lay so close to me that their breathing was mine, the scent of their bodies filled my mouth, their tentacles clutched patches of my fur. Yet it was QUENTIAM I missed. That voice in my head, always there, knowing what I was doing without being told, knowing what I wanted next. Support and companion and fellow biologist. I missed It so fiercely that my throat closed and my body shuddered.
“Are you cold, Alo?” Seliku whispered. In the dark she pushed more of her own blanket onto me. But it brought no warmth, brought no comfort, was not—shockingly, horrifyingly—what I needed, not at all.
Haradil slept for days, during which we did nothing except move farther inland, gather leaves, and consume them to supplement and conserve our pellets of concentrated food. It was an exhausting, endless, boring process. The bodies I had asked for were too big for the available nourishment, with too little storage capacity. We all lost weight, and each time it was my turn to carry the sedated Haradil, she seemed heavier on my back. Despite our efforts, we had to use some of the food pellets, and our supply diminished steadily.
The farther we moved away from the other prisoners, the more I could see why they’d camped on the shore. There may have been some edibles, plankton or small marine worms, in the sea; that would be compatible with Level-4 fauna. More important, on the beach it would have been possible to see the sky, hear the waves. Under the fern cover we saw nothing but pulpy green in half-light, alien and silent. The only sound was the high-pitched drone of insects that stung constantly. Occasionally, when the wind was right, a stench of rotting plants blew toward us, fetid and overpowering. I had been on many ugly worlds, but none I hated as much as this one.
On the sixth day, we camped just past noon in a small, relatively dry clearing. We were so tired, and even the huge blob of the gas giant overhead was better than yet more oppressive green. Bej and Seliku made a fire, despite the risk of smoke rising above the ferns and giving away our positions. We sat around it and ate, by unspoken agreement, twice our usual ration of food pellets, washed down with water from a muddy stream.
“What’s that?” Seliku asked Camy.
Camy held up a particularly thick section of woody fern trunk, which she was carving with her ceramic knife. She’d sculpted a pattern of beads along its length, smooth ovals gracefully separated in the CeeHee intervals, loveliest of proportions in both art and mathematics. Even here, Camy had to be an artist.
The sight inexplicably cheered me. “Camy—” I began, and the sky exploded.
Some of us screamed. There was no noise, but the sky opposite to the gas giant grew bright, then even brighter. Bej threw herself across Camy, I did the same with Haradil, and Seliku fell to the ground. In a moment it was over. Seliku gazed upward.
“What… what was that?” Camy, but it might have been any of us.
“I don’t know,” Seliku said, and her voice held even more strain than Camy’s. “But I think the station just blew up.”
“The station?” Bej said. “The Mori station? QUENTIAM’s station?” All the stations were, in one sense, QUENTIAM’s. It created and maintained and ran them. “How could that be?”
“I don’t know,” Seliku said. “It can’t be. Unless QUENTIAM did it.”
“Why?”
“I said I don’t know!”
“Sel,” I said, “I saw something like that when we landed, just before I fell into that giant fern, only not as bright. A flash of light. Could that have been the shuttle blowing up, too? No, I know you don’t know, but did you see a flash then as well?”