“Nonetheless,” I said, “if It can’t lie, and if Haradil blew up the star system while she was merged with QUENTIAM, then It blew up the system. It destroyed life. Not you, Hari—” I turned to her, beseeching, “—not you. QUENTIAM.”
“I don’t believe it!” Camy said. “QUENTIAM can’t do that! It can’t destroy…” She fell silent, and I knew she remembered the shuttle, the station.
Haradil had not moved. She sat looking down at her tentacles in her lap, an unconscious mirror of Seliku’s pose, although Hari’s shoulders slumped forward.
“Haradil,” I repeated, “you didn’t do it. QUENTIAM did.”
Finally she raised her eyes to mine. “It doesn’t matter, Alo. There’s no difference. I was in the merged state. At that time, I was QUENTIAM.”
We all stared at her. None of us knew what to say to that. None of us but her had been there.
“I think,” Bej finally said, “that it’s time for us to go home.”
We couldn’t leave until morning. The engineered spores stored in our cloth belts, the same spores that had created the biological floaters that brought us downstairs, needed sunlight to feed on for both growth and inflation. We could only leave the surface on a clear, sunny day. We could only leave from a large open space among the huge ferns.
And, of course, once we’d floated to the upper atmosphere, we could only survive if QUENTIAM had created another shuttle to pick us up.
Nobody mentioned this. We talked very little as we wrapped ourselves in blankets near the fire. I couldn’t get to sleep, and I doubted the others could, either.
Seliku would be thinking about the paradox of QUENTIAM. It couldn’t destroy, and It had destroyed. She would be going over the mathematics, the spacetime logic, trying to find a way out.
Bej and Camy would be wrestling with the moral problem. Haradil had been QUENTIAM; It had killed; had Haradil therefore really killed? Could you commit genocide without knowing it, and if you did, was it still genocide?
Haradil—I didn’t know what Haradil was thinking. “I was QUENTIAM,” she’d said. I didn’t know, couldn’t imagine, what that actually meant. But she was right, in one sense—she hadn’t been Haradil for a long time now.
It seemed millennia before I fell asleep.
When I woke, as the first dismal light was filtering through the pulpy ferns, Haradil was gone.
“Burn her in hell forever!” Camy cried. I didn’t know what “hell” was; Camy liked to poke around in QUENTIAM’s archaic deebees. Had liked to.
Seliku said, “Alo, can you track her?”
“Yes.”
Hastily we packed. The morning was overcast and drizzly; we couldn’t have left ˄17843 that day even if Haradil hadn’t run away. At first I scented her easily. After following for half the morning, I was sure. “She’s heading back to the beach,” I said. “To the settlements.”
Bej, her dirty face set hard to avoid tears, said, “She wants them to kill her. She still thinks she was responsible for… for the genocide.”
“Maybe she was,” Camy said bitterly. I felt that bitterness echo in myself. Didn’t Haradil realize we would follow her—and thereby risk our own lives? She knew we planned on leaving ˄17843 today. She, one-fifth of a sister-self, was endangering the whole. At what point did moral atonement turn into selfishness?
And if our circumstances were reversed, would I have done the same thing?
I might have. The realization only worsened my bitterness.
We were taking a different, more direct route toward the coast than the one we’d arrived by. The ground sloped downward and became much more marshy. The flora changed, too. As the ground became wetter, the huge, looming ferns were replaced by smaller, sedgelike plants farther apart.
“Wait,” Seliku called from the rear of our dismal procession. “Akilo, these plants here are the ones we’ve been eating and I don’t see any ahead of us. I think we should stop and eat here, while we can.”
“That’s a good idea.”
We stuffed handfuls of the vile things into our mouths and chewed. These small, light bodies packed very little extra fat; my tentacles had the thinned, bluish look of rapid weight loss. But at least the leaves temporarily stopped the ache in my stomach.
After eating, we slogged forward. In the marshland, walking was much harder. Each footstep made a quiet spurgling sound. The ground grew steadily wetter and muddier, broken by small hillocks that offered better footing but also swarmed with small pale worms. The sun, behind thick gray clouds, did little to warm my fur, and nothing could warm my heart.
“Alo… stop a minute…”
I turned in time to see Camy vomit. A moment later the cramps hit me. All the leaves I’d eaten came back up in a disgusting green mass. And then another. And then I felt it at the other end of my body.
When it was over, I moved away, toward a hillock of mossy sedge, and lay down. The nanomeds were efficient; I would feel better in just a few moments, and there would be no lingering toxins in my body. But that wasn’t what bothered me.
“That takes care of lunch,” Seliku said, flopping down beside me. Worms crawled toward her tail. “Oh, I hate this place.”
Bej said passionately, “We weren’t meant for this life. This is how animals live, not people!”
I took this as a moral statement, not a biological one. Anyway, I didn’t have the heart to argue.
Camy, always the most fastidious of us, said, “There’s sand over there. I’m going to scrub my disgusting ass.”
Seliku rolled onto her side to face me. “Alo, those were the same leaves we’ve been eating all along. Exactly the same. You said so.”
“Yes. The only thing I can figure out is that they were enantiomorphs.”
Seliku said, “Mirror images.”
“Yes. Some molecules, especially but not exclusively crystals, are right-handed and some are left-handed—they’re called enantiomorphs of each other. Biologicals can usually digest only one or the other.”
Bej said, “Mirror images of each other. Like us.”
I smiled at her. “I sense an artwork coming on.”
“Maybe.” She smiled back, and I thought: This is the only good moment we’ve had on this foul satellite.
Camy screamed.
The three of us jumped up. Bej raced toward Camy and I yelled, “No, Bej! Stop!”
“She’s sinking!”
“Stop! You’ll go, too! I’ve seen this, I can help her! Camy, don’t struggle! Arch backwards and lie slowly—slowly—onto your back and spread your arms and legs as wide as you can. Slowly.”
She had only sunk into the quicksand a little above her ankles. She arched backward and spread her four tentacles. I could see them tremble. Her feet didn’t come up from the sand but she sank no further, bent backwards like a bow, her eyes and mouth just above the sand. “Please… Oh, please…”
Arlbenists prayed. We did not. I yanked the rope from my belt and threw it toward Camy. It wasn’t long enough and fell short. Before I could even ask, Bej had her rope out and was knotting the two together, her digits trembling. I talked to Camy, anything that came into my mind: “Camy it’s going to be all right. I’ve seen this on ˄3982 and ˄12983, it’s just ordinary sand mixed with upswelling water and so it behaves like a liquid, it will buoy you up just like any water—” On ˄3982 I had seen a small biological sucked down by quicksand in the time it took me to open my pack. “We’ll get you out, it’s going to be fine, remember when we were children, we played at rescuing each other on quiet planets and—” What was I saying? This was no game. Fear makes idiots of us all.