I could no longer tell my reasons—our reasons—apart.
I could no longer be sure of anything.
Dawn came clear and warm. Seliku and I tore open our cloth belts and dumped the spores on the mossy ground. Carefully—so carefully—we sopped up a little water from the squishy edge of the quicksand and wrung it over them. In just a few minivals, the spores opened and the floaters began to form around us.
“Seliku, what if QUENTIAM hasn’t recreated the shuttle or the station? What if It couldn’t? If there’s nothing there…” I had to ask, even though I already knew the answer.
“Then we die.” A moment later she added, “I don’t have enough information to do the math, Alo. I’m sorry.”
All five of us take on more accountability than should properly be ours.
The floaters sealed and began to rise. I had engineered this group for a gravity greater than this one, and they would just rise until they ran out of air and died. Still, the trip upstairs, going against gravity, would be longer than the one going down. We drifted out over the quicksand, and I tried not to think of Haradil, possibly sunk somewhere beneath that gritty alien lake. The tough, thick membrane around me magnified the sunlight and I grew uncomfortably, but not dangerously, warm. I lay cradled in the sag of floater created by my weight. Maybe it was the warmth but, incredibly, I fell asleep. When I woke, the shuttle was in view, a dark speck growing larger against the pale-slug color of the gas giant.
We had no way to steer. I couldn’t see Seliku’s floater; winds had carried us apart. Already the membrane that was my floater had thinned, weakened by the less concentrated sunlight and fewer atmospheric molecules at this altitude.
QUENTIAM, come through for us…
The shuttle turned and started toward me.
I barely made it into the airlock, holding my breath and enduring the bodily shock while the airlock pressurized. The capillaries in my eyeballs popped and my eyes filled with blood. Then Seliku was pulling me into the shuttle and my nanomeds were going to work.
“Alo! Are you—”
“F-fine,” I gasped.
“Rest here, sister.” She stretched me out on the deck.
QUENTIAM said on the shuttle’s system, “You two went downstairs to a quiet planet.”
“It’s been scolding me since I got aboard,” Seliku said grimly.
“Going downstairs to a quiet planet is forbidden.”
“S-Sel… did you…”
“I’ve been trying to tell It,” she snapped. “QUENTIAM, listen to me. We found Haradil. When she destroyed that star system, she was merged with you, and it was you who destroyed it. One theory is—”
“I did not destroy the star system containing ˄5387. I would remember.”
“You don’t remember because it wasn’t a decision you actually made. Spacetime may have been reconfigured in a giant flop transition after another universe in the multiverse bumped into this universe—”
“I remember everything. I did not destroy the star system containing ˄5387.”
“—and huge amounts of energy were released. Haradil’s art project with the asteroid must have been near the impact point. So—”
Lying on the floor, listening, an irrelevant part of my mind wondered at the ease with which Seliku spoke in whole universes.
“—your memory of the event was reconfigured when spacetime was. You lost a nanosecond of time. The energy—”
“I have lost no time. I cannot lose time. Oscillations of gravitons through time are part of my functioning.”
“I’m not talking about gravitons, QUENTIAM. Listen—”
She launched into complicated explanations, with terms and principles I could not follow. What was clear to me was QUENTIAM’s utter refusal of her reasoning. And in one sense, Its refusal was more reasonable than her wild statements. QUENTIAM wanted proof, physical or experimental or mathematical. She had none.
My nanomeds repaired my body and I stood. The meal created by the food synthesizer was the best I have ever tasted. I made Seliku eat. She didn’t want to. She sat in the front seat of the shuttle, no longer arguing with QUENTIAM, but instead asking for equations on the display, staring at them, asking QUENTIAM to perform various complex mathematical processes. I knew better than to interrupt for long. After she ate a few bites, I left them alone.
“The shuttle has reached the t-hole,” QUENTIAM said to me. “Where do you wish to go?”
I hesitated, for more reasons than one.
“Seliku… Sel?”
I don’t think she even heard me.
“Seliku!”
“What? I’m working!”
“We’re at the t-hole. Where are we going? And is it safe to go through? If your parallel universe bumps while we’re—”
“It’s not ‘my’ parallel universe.” Then her irritation vanished and she gave me her full attention. “I know what you’re asking, Alo. It might not be safe. But if this goes on, if I’m right about the multiverse, and if this series of bumps and spacetime reconfigurations doesn’t end soon, then nothing is going to be safe ever again.”
“You are talking nonsense,” QUENTIAM said.
I said, “Where do you need to go to make this… your theory known? To warn everyone?”
As soon as I said it, I knew how stupid it was. The way to warn everyone, the way to disseminate any kind of information throughout the galaxy, was through QUENTIAM. And QUENTIAM did not believe us.
I saw that Seliku was thinking the same thing. Slowly she said, “We should go back to Calyx, I guess. The Communion of Cosmology is there. It’s something, anyway.”
“QUENTIAM,” I said, “we’re going to Calyx.”
The shuttle slipped through the t-hole. I would have held my breath, but of course I couldn’t tell exactly when it happened until it was over and the stars changed configuration. Calyx rotated just below us. The city-continent came into view and the blue sea gave way to the riot of colors that was Bej and Camy’s flower art. For the first time since Seliku had first told me about Haradil, my eyes filled with tears. We are not easy criers.
“I want a new body,” Seliku said. “No matter what the risk. I won’t stay in this one a minival longer than I have to. Not one minival.”
Her tone was violent. I knew, without turning around, that she was crying, too.
The first thing I did on Calyx was get a new body from QUENTIAM. Burn the risk; I could not stay a minival longer in this ugly, ineffective shell whose every pore breathed ˄17843.
“You know it’s a risk,” Seliku said. She had barely paused long enough to clean herself before hurrying off to the Communion of Cosmologists. “If QUENTIAM takes a bump near here while you’re in the nanomachinery…”
“I’ll take the chance,” I said, and then added, “and so will you. You’ll make your initial impact on all those unsuspecting cosmologists and then just work on in upload state while QUENTIAM makes you a body.”
She did need to answer. “What body are you choosing?”
“The one we use in bond time.”
She nodded sadly and left, dragging her body through the gravity it had not been designed for.
On my way to a vat room, I took the short walk to the sea. A fresh wind stirred up small waves and blew toward me the fragrance of blossoms. So much color: magenta and cerulean, scarlet and damson, rose and crimson and delphinium. I rolled the words in my mind. This, then, was how my remote ancestors had lived, wondering if each moment might be their last. They must have had unimaginable courage. Either that or they were all crazy all the time.