The rope reached her on my second throw. Slowly, carefully, we pulled her out. The four of us collapsed in a heap on the dry hillock. No one spoke; we just clutched each other hard enough to bruise.
Nanomeds would fix the bruises.
It was Seliku who pulled away first. “Sister-selves—it’s time to go home.”
Bej said, shocked, “Without Haradil?”
“Without Haradil. Bejers, she’s dead. She wanted to die. This is the trail she was following. She came to this… this ‘quicksand,’ just as we did. And she wanted to die.”
Bej’s head whipped around to stare at the quicksand. I saw the moment she rejected Seliku’s logic. “You don’t know that!”
“But it’s almost certainly true,” I said. “Seliku’s right. There’s nothing more we can do here.”
“We can find Haradil again!” Camy, surprising me. But I shouldn’t have been surprised; she and Bej nearly always thought as one. “Akilo can go on tracking her!”
“No, I can’t. Not through this.”
“You mean you won’t! How can you even think of leaving a sister-self? Especially here, in this place—”
Covered with wet sand, smelling of vomit and diarrhea, Camy took a step back from me. Bej went with her. Bej said, “We won’t go back without Haradil. How can you even think about it? We came here to get her and to find out what happened and we haven’t accomplished either one. Yet you want us to go back to Calyx, with everyone knowing that our sister-self, that we… that she destroyed a planetful of sentients and you just—”
“Which are you really terrified of, losing Haradil or your own shame?” I demanded, out of my own shame, my own loss. “Is Haradil the only one being selfish here?”
They flew at me, simultaneously, as if it were choreographed. Bej’s fist hit me in the mouth. Camy punched me in the stomach and I went down. I couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe. When I could, they had Seliku down, too. We would have been evenly matched, Seliku and I against the two of them, but they’d struck first. My nanomeds began working and I tried to get up, but my feet and tentacles were tangled in the long rope we had used to rescue Camy.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, it’s Haradil,” I heard Bej say. By the time Seliku and I had recovered our breath and untied the vine, Bej and Camy were running back the way we had come, toward the fern forest.
We could have followed them. Their fresh scent would have made it easy. But Seliku and I were equal in strength and stamina to them—were them. Sister-selves. They could probably stay as just ahead of us as they were now. And if we did catch them, then what? Another fight? Another unthinkable severing of self from self?
I had thought before that I knew what it was like to be alone. I had been wrong.
Seliku and I gazed at each other. Finally she nodded.
“Yes,” I answered.
She gazed bleakly at the gray sky. “Not today, there’s not enough sunlight. We’ll need to spend the night here.”
Silently we took out our blankets and spread them on the mossy hillock. It seemed to take forever for darkness to fall. Neither of us mentioned making a fire. It occurred to me then that Bej and Camy could have tied us up, cut off our cloth belts and taken not only our blankets but the spores of the floaters, thus ensuring that all four of us would stay here. Perhaps they hadn’t had time, or hadn’t thought of it. Perhaps it was something they wouldn’t have done.
I no longer knew.
Toward morning the clouds blew over and the sky turned clear and starlit. The gas giant was just setting. I lay on my back, having slept not at all, and looked for a long time at the unfamiliar constellations. QUENTIAM was up there, among the cold stars.
“Seliku,” I said softly, “are you awake?”
“Yes.”
I groped for the way to phrase such an unfamiliar question. “When the gravitons you talked about ‘leak’ from the universe—where do they go?”
“The math says they go into other universes.”
“Right beside ours?”
“ ‘Beside’ isn’t the right concept. Other universes coexist with ours. It’s called a multiverse.”
“Do the other universes have their own spacetime?”
“Presumably.”
“Is it like ours? Four-dimensional?”
“We don’t know.”
“Do these other universes—could they—have life?”
“Presumably,” Seliku said. I heard her shift in the darkness.
“Could life there have created their own membranes, woven into the fabric of their spacetime?”
She said, “And could that universe be an enantiomorph of our own? Is that what you’re asking?”
I raised myself on one elbow to gaze at her, but could only make out her blanketed profile. “You knew.”
“No, of course not. But I guessed, after you described the enantiomorph flora. And right after that, Camy—”
“Yes. Sel, is another universe somehow contacting ours? Through QUENTIAM?”
“ ‘Contacting’ may be the wrong word,” Seliku said, and I recognized the scientist’s caution. “It’s more like… the two universes bump into each other. A lot of energy would be released from even a small bump. In fact, one theory about the origin of matter is that it resulted from a huge collision between universes. There’s so much we don’t know, Alo. Technology has gone so far ahead of basic theory. It couldn’t always have been this way, or QUENTIAM wouldn’t know as much as It does.”
“But if two universes bump and energy is released, a lot of energy, wouldn’t QUENTIAM absorb it?”
“As much as It could. Think of it this way: You drop a stone in a pond. It creates ripples. Then the pond settles back down. Drop a bigger stone, and you create bigger ripples. Afterward, the pond is subtly changed. The water level is a bit higher, the topography of the pond bottom a little different.”
“Don’t talk down to me, Sel.”
“Sorry. I find it hard to talk to non-scientists about my field.”
As did I. My irritation dissolved.
She continued, “To take the metaphor just a bit farther, hurl a big asteroid at a planet. Depending on where it hits, you get a huge crater, a tsunami, an axial wobble, climate changes, biological die-offs. Everything reconfigures. If QUENTIAM is getting hit with some sort of enantiomorph of energy or matter—maybe some version of gravitons—It’s being forced to reconfigure spacetime. That’s been theoretically possible forever, in small dimensions: it’s called a flop transition. We understand the mathematics. QUENTIAM might be doing that in our universal dimensions. And if parts of QUENTIAM Itself are being destroyed either by bumping the other universe or by the reconfiguration, It might not even know that was happening.”
“Haradil—”
“She was merged with QUENTIAM. She wouldn’t know, either. And a star system died.”
All at once I remembered the machine body on the shuttle to Calyx. It had momentarily gone rigid, refused to function. I had said then, even knowing how ridiculous the statement was, that the machine body had “fainted.” Machine states were intricately linked with QUENTIAM.
I said, with the numb calm of shock, “You have to tell QUENTIAM. Have to tell everybody. Maybe that’s even why there was no record of the first seeding of that planet that Haradil destroyed… QUENTIAM’s records… you have to tell—”
“Don’t you think I know that?” Seliku’s irritation was back. “That’s why we’re leaving our sister-selves here tomorrow.”
Was that why? Or was it because we had finally come to some mental and moral place where our sisters were no longer ourselves? Or was it just because we could no longer stand this cursed moon one more minute?