Instead of answering, Haradil said, “I was transforming the asteroid—trying to transform the asteroid—into a work of art. Light art. To be an artist like you, Bej. Like you, Camy. All four of you have… have things you do. I only had QUENTIAM.”
Bej said, “That’s where you were. Not on the star, but in upload with QUENTIAM. Directing the artwork through It. We’ve done that.”
Haradil didn’t look at Bej, and all at once I knew that she hadn’t been in upload, either. Haradil said, “The art was merged photons. You know, to create increased energy.”
“Yes,” Seliku said, but she looked a little startled. The rest of us must have looked blank because she said, “It’s how QUENTIAM operates, in part. It merges photons with atoms to create a temporary blend of matter and energy. It also forces shared photons between quantum states, to create entanglement. It’s how QUENTIAM makes the t-holes, how It moves around information—how it exists, actually. The whole process is the basis for QUENTIAM’s being woven into spacetime. That’s just basic knowledge.”
Not to me, it wasn’t, and from Bej and Camy’s faces, not to them, either. But Haradil had apparently learned enough about it.
I said, trying to keep my voice soft enough not to push Haradil into more opposition, “Is that what happened, Hari? You were directing QUENTIAM to create this ‘art’ and somehow you massed enough photon energy or something to blow up the star?”
“QUENTIAM wouldn’t permit that to happen,” Seliku said. “Anyway, the energy you’d need would be huge, more than you’d get from any light sculpture.”
Bej said, “Was it a sculpture, Hari?”
“No. It was… was going to be… what does it matter what I was making! I couldn’t make it and I killed a star system!”
I said gently, “The sculpture doesn’t matter if you don’t think it does, my sister-self. What matters is how the system blew up. What happened?”
“I don’t know!” Haradil cried. “I was there, working on the art, and all at once the asteroid slipped away from my control and sped toward the star, and I don’t know how!”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Bej said. “If you were in upload with QUENTIAM and that happened, then It would tell you what happened the moment you asked.”
Seliku said, “Did you ask?”
Haradil was silent. Camy rose to her feet and uncoiled her tentacles. Lit from the firelight below, she suddenly looked terrible, avenging. “Didn’t you ask, Haradil? You blew up a star system and you didn’t ask what happened?”
“Of course she did,” Bej said. “Hari?”
“I asked later,” Haradil said. I had seen that posture on primitive mammals on other worlds. Haradil cringed, from fear of her pack. It turned my stomach sick.
“I asked later and QUENTIAM said… said It didn’t know what I’d done.”
“That’s not possible!” Camy said angrily. “If you were in upload with QUENTIAM, it would know exactly what you’d done and so would you! You’re lying!”
The two words hung in the firelit air. Insects whined, unseen, in the unfriendly dark. We never lied to each other. Sister-selves did not lie to each other. Your sister-selves were the only ones in the universe that you could say anything to, confess anything to, because the capacity for the same action lay in each of them. A sister-self always accepted everything about you, as no lover ever did, no friend, no one else but QUENTIAM.
“She’s not lying,” I said.
Camy turned on me. “But if she was in upload and did something to—”
“She wasn’t in upload,” I said slowly. “Were you, Haradil? You weren’t in upload state, you were in merged state. You’d merged a second time with QUENTIAM.”
Haradil turned her eyes to me, and in the relief mirrored in them, I knew that I’d been right. She was relieved that now we knew.
Bej burst out, “Oh, Hari! Why? The first time you did that you came back so… so… merging reduces people, destroys them! You left parts of yourself behind in QUENTIAM, or something—you know you were never the same after that!”
“I know,” Hari said, so simply that my heart turned over. Haradil, knowing herself to be incomplete, fragmented, had gone back into merged state to find the lost pieces of herself. Or maybe just to redeem what she saw as a wasted life (“All four of you have… have things you do”) by creating this one stupendous, innovative piece of art. Which of us hasn’t dreamed of that kind of glory and fame for our work? Only Seliku had attained it.
It was Seliku who moved the discussion back from Haradil’s state to what Seliku saw as the more important state: QUENTIAM’s. She said quietly, “If Haradil is not lying, then QUENTIAM is.”
We gaped at her. Seliku was a cosmologist; she knew QUENTIAM as well as any human could. She knew that QUENTIAM could not lie.
“That’s impossible!” Bej said.
“Yes, it’s impossible,” Seliku agreed, and the four of us stared at each other across the low fire.
Haradil said despairingly, “Don’t you see that it doesn’t matter whether QUENTIAM’s lying or not? It only matters that even if I don’t know why, I destroyed life. A whole worldful of life. My art, my action. And nothing I can do—nothing anyone can do, not even QUENTIAM—can ever change even one tiny piece of that guilt and shame.”
I think I knew then, in that moment, what would happen to Haradil. But my attention was on Seliku. She and I were the only scientists. I said to her, “If QUENTIAM can’t lie, and if It is lying, what does that mean?”
She answered obliquely, her tentacles quiet in her lap, her voice just low enough to reach the four of us sealed in our circle of wavering firelight amid the dark. “I know none of you understand my work, the algorithms that won me the Zeotripab Prize. You’d have to understand how the universe itself works.
“Spacetime vibrates, you know, in its most minute particles. They vibrate through space. Gravitons—one of the particles, the ones that create the force of gravity—are the only particles that also oscillate minutely in time. That’s what makes them the only particles—I don’t know how to say this without the math—the only particles that ‘leak’ out of the universe, affecting its mass. That’s why the universe keeps expanding. That loss of gravitons is what makes spacetime possible at all, which in turn makes everything else possible.”
Bej said naively, “You proved all that?”
Seliku smiled. “No. Only a tiny part of it. It’s old knowledge. QUENTIAM functions by manipulating those minute time oscillations, in even more minute ways. But it means that It cannot lie. It’s bound by the physical constants of the universe. If It said that It doesn’t know how Haradil blew up the star system, then It doesn’t know.”
“But,” I said, “could It and Haradil together—they were merged, remember—have done it? Could It have used Haradil to do that? In fact, did anyone ask QUENTIAM if It had blown up the system?”
Camy gasped. “QUENTIAM?”
“It can’t lie,” I said, staring at Seliku, “but It can destroy, right? It destroyed the shuttle and the station. There might have been Mori on that station, we don’t know. Within all those physical constants you mentioned, are there any that could absolutely keep QUENTIAM from destroying a star system with life on it?”
“Physical constants?” Seliku said. “No.”
Bej said, “But there are QUENTIAM’s own parameters! It preserves, not destroys! Everyone knows that! Everyone knows that!”
“Seliku,” I said, “are QUENTIAM’s moral parameters as woven into spacetime as Its inability to lie?”
“Yes. Its moral parameters are programming, but inviolable programming, core programming. Redundancy doesn’t even begin to describe how deeply those parameters are a part of QUENTIAM. They can’t be touched, not even by It.”