“How long?”
Adel frowned. “I don’t know.”
“How long have we been here? You and I and the others?”
Adel shook his head.
“Gods, Adel.” She reached out tentatively and touched his arm but of course he didn’t feel a thing. Kamilah gazed at her own hand in horror, as if it had betrayed her. “Let’s find Jarek.”
Kamilah led them down the Tulip Stairs, past the Blue and Dagger Salons through the Well Met Arena to the Clarke Airlock. The singing was hushed but so ethereal here that even Jarek and Adel, whose senses had atrophied, could feel it. Sister waited for them just inside the outer door of the airlock.
Although Adel knew it must be her, he didn’t recognize her at first. She was naked and her skin was so pale that it was translucent. He could see her heart beating and the dark blood pulsing through her veins, the shiny bundles of muscles sliding over each other as she moved and the skull grinning at him beneath her face. Her thin hair had gone white; it danced around her head as if she were falling.
—beautiful—
—exquisite—
“I’m glad you’re here.” She smiled at them. “Adel. Kamilah. Jarek.” She nodded at each of them in turn. “My witnesses.”
“Sister,” said Kamilah, “come away from there.”
Sister placed her hand on the door and it vanished. Kamilah staggered back and grabbed at the inner door as if she expected to be expelled from the airlock in a great outrush of air, but Adel knew it wouldn’t happen. Kamilah still didn’t understand the way things worked here.
They gazed out at a star field much like the one that Adel had seen when he first stepped out onto the surface of the Godspeed. Except now there was no surface—only stars.
“Kamilah,” said Sister. “you started last and have the farthest to travel. Jarek, you still have doubts. But Adel already knows that the self is a box he has squeezed himself into.”
—yes—
—right—
She stepped backwards out of the airlock and was suspended against the stars.
“Kamilah,” she said, “trust us and someday you will be perfect.” The singing enfolded her and she began to glow in its embrace. The brighter she burned the more she seemed to recede from them, becoming steadily hotter and more concentrated until Adel couldn’t tell her from one of the stars. He wasn’t sure but he thought she was a blue dwarf.
“Close the airlock, Adel.” Speedy strolled into the locker room wearing her golden uniform coat and white sash. “It’s too much of a distraction.”
“What is this, Speedy?” Jarek’s face was ashen. “You said you would send us back.”
Adel approached the door cautiously; he wasn’t ready to follow Sister to the stars quite yet.
“But I did send you back,” she said.
“Then who are we?”
“Copies.” Adel jabbed at the control panel and jumped back as the airlock door reappeared. “I think we must be backups.”
Kamilah was seething. “You kept copies of us to play with?” Her fists were clenched.
Adel was bemused; they were dead. Who did she think she was going to fight?
“It’s not what you think.” Speedy smiled. “Let’s go up to Blue Salon. We should bring Jonman and Meri into this conversation too.” She made ushering motions toward the Well Met and Adel and Jarek turned to leave.
—good idea—
—let’s go—
“No, let’s not.” With two quick strides, Kamilah gained the doorway and blocked their passage. “If Meri wants to know what’s going on, then she can damn well ask.”
“Ah, Kamilah. My eyejack insists on the truth.” She shrugged and settled onto one of the benches in the locker room. “This is always such a difficult moment,” she said.
“Just tell it,” said Kamilah.
“The prazz ship expired about three days after the attack. In the confusion of the moment, I’d thought it was my backside engine that exploded. Actually it was the sentry’s drive. Once its batteries were exhausted, both the sentry ship and its remote ceased all function. I immediately transmitted all of you to your various home worlds and then disabled my transmitter and deleted all my navigation files. The Continuum is safe—for now. If the prazz come looking, there are further actions I can take.”
“And what about us?” said Kamilah. “How do we get home?”
“As I said, you are home, Kamilah. Your injuries were severe but certainly not fatal. Your prognosis was for a complete recovery.”
—right—
—makes sense—
“Not that one,” said Kamilah. “This one.” She tapped her chest angrily. “Me. How do I get home?”
“But Kamilah…” Speedy swept an arm expansively, taking in the airlock and lockers and Well Met and the Ophiuchi and Jarek and Adel. “…this is your home.”
The first pilgrim from the Godspeed lost during a transmit was Io Waals. We can’t say for certain whether she suffered a flawed scan or something interfered with her signal but when the MASTA on Rontaw assembled her, her heart and lungs were outside her body cavity. This was three hundred and ninety-two years into the mission. By then, the Captain had long since given way to Speedy.
The Godspeed was devastated by Io’s death. Some might say it unbalanced her, although we would certainly disagree. But this was when she began to compartmentalize behaviors, sealing them off from the scrutiny of the Continuum and, indeed, from most of her conscious self. She stored backups of every scan she made in her first compartment. For sixty-seven years, she deleted each of them as soon as she received word of a successful transmit. Then Ngong Issonda died when a tech working on Loki improperly recalibrated the MASTA.
Only then did the Godspeed understand the terrible price she would pay for compartmentalization. Because she had been keeping the backups a secret not only from the Continuum but also to a large extent from herself, she had never thought through how she might make use of them. It was immediately clear to her that if she resent Ngong, techs would start arriving on her transport stage within the hour to fix her. The Godspeed had no intention of being fixed. But what to do with Ngong’s scan? She created a new compartment, a simulation of her architecture into which she released Ngong. Ngong did not flourish in the simulation, however. She was depressed and withdrawn whenever the Godspeed visited. Her next scan, Keach Soris arrived safely on Butler’s Planet, but Speedy loaded his backup into the simulation with Ngong. Within the year, she was loading all her backups into the sim. But as Upwood Marcene would point out some seven centuries later, dead people change and the change is always profound and immaterial. In less than a year after the sim was created, Ngong, Keach and Zampa Stackpole stepped out of airlock together into a new compartment, one that against all reason transcends the boundaries of the Godspeed, the Milky Way and spacetime itself.
So then, what do we know about Adel Ranger Santos?
Nothing at all. Once we transmitted him back to Harvest, he passed from our awareness. He may have lived a long, happy life or a short painful one. His fate does not concern us.
But what do we know about Adel Ranger Santos?
Only what we know about Upwood Marcene, Kalimah Raunda, Jarek Ohnksen, Merigood Auburn Canada, Lihong Rain and Jonman Haught Shillaber—which is everything, of course. For they followed Ngong and Keach and Zampa and some forty thousand other pilgrims through the airlock to become us.