“No. But we all landed before you, and we were below the fronds—that first flash wasn’t as bright as this?”
“No, not as bright. But I saw it.”
Seliku said, with a reluctance I didn’t understand, “If that big flash was the station, then I suppose what you saw could have been the shuttle. But there’s no reason for QUENTIAM to blow up either of them.”
“Maybe It didn’t,” Camy said.
We all looked at Haradil, still deeply sedated. If there were answers, they must come from her. But if the shuttle and station really had blown up—
“I think,” Camy began, “that we better—” Men burst from the dense pulpy foliage.
Twelve prisoners, all armed with longer, thicker, sharper versions of Camy’s carved wood. Spears—my mouth tasted the archaic, slimy word. So the exiles had known all along where we were. They had experience in tracking, just as I had, and they’d stayed upwind of us.
I said quietly, “Draw your knives and make a circle facing outward around Haradil.”
We did, four comparatively large women against a dozen frail pygmies. Only then did I see that the tip of the spear closest to me was sticky with something thick and green.
These people had had years of exile to learn about the flora here, as well as to develop warfare unrestrained by QUENTIAM’s parameters. The spear could easily be tipped with some local poison. Our nanos could handle it, but while the nanos worked we would probably be automatically sedated, completely vulnerable.
A sense of reality swept over me. I stood here—I, Jiuinip Akilo Sister-Self 7664-3, who had adjusted sentient seedings not dissimilar to these on scores of worlds—facing an enemy armed with spears, while I myself held only a ceramic knife. And the most unreal part was that these people, too, at least the ones not born here, had come from my same universe of nano, of abundance, of peace. Of QUENTIAM, who would never have permitted this.
Seliku said in a voice I didn’t recognize, “Do… do any of you speak Standard?”
To my surprise, the closest prisoner answered, in a strange whining accent. “You do this! You and your magic! You destroy clouds and now we never have no rain!”
Magic. Five little girls, playing at “magic” and “death” and “nova.” Knowing, secure in QUENTIAM, that for us such things did not exist.
I said to the pygmy, who must be third- or fourth-generation to be so ignorant, “The clouds will return. But we did not destroy them. We are not destroyers.”
He waved his spear at Haradil. “She is. She say it.”
Oh, what had Haradil said? That she was a destroyer, perhaps that she wanted to die. She might have been trying to make them kill her. Suicide by fellow outcast.
Camy said, “But you did not kill her. You knew that if you killed her, all her bad magic would come to you.”
I saw on his face, on all their diseased and debased faces, that it was true. They feared Haradil’s powers of destruction too much to kill her. So what were they doing here now?
I said, “You want us to go far away.”
“Yes! Go!”
That was why Haradil had lived apart from what could have been the comfort of shared misery. But, of course, she hadn’t wanted comfort. She wanted death and suffering, as atonement for what she’d done.
Seliku said, “It could be a trick, to make us put down our knives.”
I looked again at the pathetic creatures before us. Two, I saw now, had legs actually shivering with fear. I said quietly, “It’s not a trick. Bej, carry Haradil. We’ll move even farther inland. Move slowly but purposefully… now.”
The prisoners watched us go. In just a few moments the sight of them was blocked by the everlasting spongy green.
So again we walked, all the rest of that day and the next, taking turns carrying Haradil. We saved the last of our concentrated nutrients for Haradil and ate only a safe kind of raw leaf snatched from plants as we marched. The leaf tasted vile. Nanomeds help with neither taste nor hunger; in any civilized place, both are enjoyable human sensations. I could feel my body shift into energy-conservation mode, which made it harder to keep going but easier to not think. That, now, was my hope. To not think.
Finally, as darkness fell, we made camp in another small clearing. A fire, the blankets from our belts, stars overhead but not, I saw with exhausted gratitude, the gas giant. And as we sat around the fire, too dispirited to talk, Haradil awoke.
“What—”
“You’re with us. You’ve had nanomeds. Sit up,” Camy ordered.
Haradil did. She looked around, and then at us. Maybe Camy and Bej, the artists, could have imagined such a tormented expression, but I could not have.
Seliku said, neither gently nor harshly, “Haradil, we’ve forced our way onto this planet, and now we—”
“QUENTIAM let you come? The Mori let you come?”
“No,” Camy grated. “Sel just told you—we forced our way down. And now it looks as if our way home has just closed for good.”
“What do you mean?” Haradil cried. At least she was talking.
I said, from sudden pity, “Camy, don’t. QUENTIAM will rebuild the shuttle, you know that.”
“We don’t know anything!” Camy said.
Seliku said, still in that carefully neutral voice, as if she were addressing a skittish child, “Haradil, we’ll talk about getting home in a moment. Right now, we’re saying that we came all this way, with all this danger—we don’t have implants now, you know, none of us—to find out what happened. Why you destroyed that inhabited star system.”
Haradil looked at us hopelessly, her gaze moving from one face to another around the fire. In its flickering light, her gaunt face in its pygmy body looked older than QUENTIAM Itself.
Bej said, “Was it the Great Mission, Hari? Did you become an Arlbenist, and did that system include a planet with non-DNA life on it? There’s documentation now, you know, the Arlbenists were wrong, the galaxy wasn’t empty before humans began to fill it. If you became an Arlbenist—”
“I don’t know whether any planet in the system had non-DNA life,” Haradil said bleakly.
“So you—”
“I wasn’t an Arlbenist.”
Camy said, “Then why?” I saw her ferocity drive Haradil back into silence.
Seliku broke it. “And how! How could you turn an asteroid into a missile powerful enough to blow up a star? Even QUENTIAM said It didn’t know how to do that!”
“It didn’t,” Haradil said.
I burst out, “Then what happened?”
“Light happened,” Haradil said. “Pieces of light.”
“Pieces of what?” Camy demanded angrily. “What are you talking about?”
“Photons,” Seliku said. “Is that right, Haradil? You mean photons?”
“Yes.” She looked down at her ugly hands, the digits so thick that even in her thinness, firelight did not shine through them. “I was transforming an asteroid, more of a planetoid, in orbit around the star. I was—”
“You couldn’t have been,” Seliku said. “I’ve seen the Morit data on the explosion. That asteroid was in a deeply eccentric orbit—it had been captured by the star’s gravity only about a half-million years ago and was spiraling in to the stellar disk. Just before the explosion, the asteroid was very close to the star, getting a slingshot gravity assist. There’s no way even a machine body could have survived on it.”
“I know,” Haradil said. “I wasn’t on the asteroid.”
Seliku said, “Where were you?”