Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  QUENTIAM Itself says Its name is archaic, once standing for “Quantum-Entangled Networked Transportation and Information Artificial-Intelligence Membrane.” I’m not sure, beyond the basics, what that encompasses. Seliku is the sister-self who chose to follow our childhood interest in cosmology, just as Camy and Bej chose art and I chose the sciences of living things.

  And Haradil . . .

  A clone-set, like any living thing, is a chaotic system. Initial small differences, small choices, can lead to major divergences lifetimes later. That is why all clone-sets from my part of the galaxy meet every two “years.” The meeting is inviolable. One can’t be expected to keep track of lovers or friends; there are too many choices to pull them away, too many states to inhabit, too much provided by nano, over too long a time. There is always QUENTIAM, of course, but the only human continuity, the only hope of genuine human bonding, comes from sister- or brother-selves, who share at least the same DNA. All the other so-called “family structures” that people periodically try have been failures.

  Well, not all. Apparently the Mori have, in the last thousand years, worked out some sort of expanding kinship structure to match their expanding empire. But it seems to be maintained partly through force, which is repugnant to most people. Anyway, a thousand years—QUENTIAM’s mysterious “years”—isn’t long enough to prove the viability of anything. I’m half that old myself.

  Of course, the Great Mission also considers itself a “kinship structure.” But they’re not only repugnant but also deluded.

  QUENTIAM said, “Your shuttle has docked.”

  “How many others are going on it?”

  “Five. Three more new downloads and two transients.”

  “Transients? What are transients doing on this station?” It was small and dull, existing solely as a convenient node for up/downloading near the t-hole.

  “They’re missionaries, Seliku. I’ll keep them away from you as long as I can.”

  “Yes. Do,” I said acidly, even as I wondered what QUENTIAM was saying at that same moment to the missionaries. “Seliku isn’t going to be easy for you to talk to, but your best chance is to approach her through her work” ?

  Probably. QUENTIAM, of course, gives all people the information they want to hear. But It would do as It said and keep the missionaries away from me. I was not in the mood for proselytizing.

  The wall opened and nano-machinery spat out my traveling bag onto the floor. I opened it and checked that everything was there, even though no other possibility existed. S-suit, food synthesizer, my favorite cosmetics, a blanket—sometimes other people had strange notions of comfortable temperature—music cube . . . I strapped the bag around my very thick waist, stepped toward the door, and hit my head on the ceiling. “Ooohhhhh!”

  “Are you injured?” QUENTIAM asked.

  “Only my dignity.”

  “Your body is designed for 1.6 standard gravities,” It intoned, “whereas your previous assignment featured a planet with only—”

  “O, burn it, QUENTIAM.” I rubbed my head, which this time around appeared to have a thick skull case. “What is a ‘standard gravity,’ anyway?”

  “I don’t know. Possibly that information has been lost.”

  “I don’t really care.” Carefully I reached the door, which slid open, leading directly to the shuttle bay.

  The other five passengers waited beside the shuttle. Two of the three recent downloads, easy to pick out, echoed my own awkwardness with their new bodies. We stepped gingerly, took a second too long to focus vision, gave off that air of concentration on motions that should be automatic.

  The person in the four-legged body of a celwi was, incongruously, the most graceful. He must have used that configuration before. Celwi bodies are popular for their speed; it’s a lovely sensation to gallop full-tilt across a grassy plain. The two-legged woman wore a clear helmet in preparation for some alien atmospheric mixture. She and I exchanged rueful glances and tried not to bump into each other.

  The third download moved easily in a genderless machine body equipped with very impressive cutting tools and, I suspected, a full range of imaging equipment. It had my admiration; I had only inhabited a machine once and had found the state subtly unpleasant. But some people like it.

  That left the two missionaries, both close to what my sister-selves called “human standard,” but much smaller. Each stood no higher than a meter. So they were going Out, as far beyond a t-hole as a real ship could get them, to carry out the Great Mission. Mass mattered on such trips. I didn’t make eye contact.

  “Please board now for the t-hole,” the shuttle said pleasantly. It was, of course, one of QUENTIAM’s many voices, this one light and musical. The machine body raised its head quickly as if it had received more information than the rest of us, which it probably had.

  The shuttle seats were arranged in four rows of two, so everybody got a window view. I hung back, trying to get a seat beside the woman in the helmet or, failing that, alone, but I hung back too long. When I climbed in, last, the four-legged celwi had taken up two seats and the machine body’s cutting tools were extended across one whole seat in an unfriendly manner: I don’t want company. The missionaries had split up, the better to bother other passengers. I settled in beside one of them, felt the seat configure around me, and closed my eyes.

  That didn’t stop her. “All the good of Arlbeni save you, sister.”

  “Hhhmmmfff,” I said. I was not her sister. I kept my eyes closed.

  “I’m Flotyllinip cagrut Pinlinindhar 16,” she said cordially, and I groaned inwardly. I had been on Flotyll. No place in the galaxy had so embraced the Great Mission.

  Not to answer her would have been the grossest discourtesy. I said shortly, “Akilo Sister-Self 7664-3,” omitting my home planet, Jiu. None of us had remained on Jiu past childhood; it wasn’t really home. We’ve never understood people who form an attachment to their birth planet, but the Flotylii are famous for it. It’s a pretty planet, yes, but the galaxy is full of pretty planets. Home is one’s sister-selves.

  Haradil . . .

  I transmitted to QUENTIAM through my implant: *I thought you were going to keep the missionaries away from me.*

  *You sat next to her.*

  “We’re going to seed another world, my friend and I,” Pinhead 16 said. “Praise Arlbeni and the emptiness of the universe.”

  “Mmmhhhfffff,” I mumbled. But no mumbling stops missionaries.

  “Before I joined the Great Mission, I was nothing. We all were. Are you a student of history, sister?”

  “No.”

  A mistake. Her face lit up. I could feel it even with my eyes closed, a stretching of the air that probably registered on the machine body’s sensors as elevations in everything from thermals to gamma rays. But if I’d said yes, I was indeed a student of history, she probably would have replied, “Then perhaps you are aware . . .”

  She said, “Then perhaps you aren’t aware just how Disciple Arlbeni saved us all, thousands of years ago but still fresh as ever. We had everything due to nano and QUENTIAM and to have everything is to have nothing. From evolution to sentience, from sentience to nano. From nano to the decay of sentience due to boredom and purposeless. Humanity was destroying itself! And then Arlbeni had his Vision: Against all physical laws, the universe was empty of any life but human life, and so to fill it must be our purpose. The universe was Divinely left empty because—”

  I had to cut this off. I opened my eyes and looked directly at her. “Maybe not as empty as Arlbeni thought.”

  I watched her expression freeze, then constrict.

  “There have been reports,” I went on, apparently artlessly, “of newly discovered planets that bear life which we didn’t put there. Non-DNA-based life. Not our seedings. Native life of some sort, maybe blown in from space, seeded by panspermia on worlds far from the t-holes.”

  “Lies,” she said. Her eyes had narrowed to two cold slits.

  “Have you checked personal
ly?”

  “I don’t need to.”

  “I see,” I said, with import, and looked away.

  But she was more tenacious than she looked. “Have you checked personally on such reports?”

  “No,” I said. “But, then, I don’t care if the galaxy holds other life besides our seedings.”

  “And your life—what gives it purpose?”

  “Observing and caring for the life that’s here, no matter how it got here. I’m an adjustment biologist.”

  “And that’s enough? Just life, with no plan behind it, no Divine purpose, no—”

  “It’s more than enough,” I said and turned away from her with such discourtesy that even she, the Arlbeni-blinded, left me alone.

  I did recognize that my disproportionate fury was not solely due to the stupidity of faith that refused facts. More than enough, I’d said of my life . . . but was it? I made adjustments to life planted millennia ago by Arlbenists. I added genes to improve species, altered ecosystems for better balance, nudged along developing sentients. Then I left, usually to never see the results of my tinkering. Was my work actually helping anything at all?

  The doubt was an old ache. I turned to the new one.

  *QUENTIAM, the life on the planet that Haradil destroyed—what was its seeding number?*

  QUENTIAM, of course, answers everything instantly. But it seemed to me that a long moment went by before he answered. In that moment all the rumors I’d ever heard blasted into my mind, like lethal radiation. Life that humanity had not seeded, life borne in on the winds of space from who-knew-where, life hated or denied by the followers of Arlbeni and the Great Mission . . . But, no, Haradil couldn’t have committed genocide for that reason. Even if she’d become an Arlbenist, she couldn’t have eliminated a star system just to destroy evidence of panspermia . . .

  *Life on the planet destroyed by Haradil was Seeding ˄5387 of the Great Mission.*

  I breathed again.

  But I was still left with the great Why, as empty of answers as the galaxy that Arlbeni had thought he had all figured out.

  “Five minivals until t-hole passage,” the shuttle said in its pleasant voice. I looked out my window, but of course there was nothing to see except the cold steady stars. The station was still only a few hundred meters away, but it was on the other side of the shuttle and I would not turn my head toward the missionary beside me.

  “You are the least flexible of all of us,” Bej had teased at our last bond-time, and she was probably right. Seliku’s cosmology, Bej and Camy’s art, seemed too soft to me, too formless, without rigorous standards. Artists could create without limits. QUENTIAM could fold the fabric of spacetime to create t-holes and information transfer; It could control endless nanomachinery operating at countless locations throughout the galaxy; It could be directed to manipulate matter and energy right up to the physical constants of the universe. Biology was not so flexible. Life needed what it needed: the nutrients and atmosphere and protection of its current form, and if it did not get those things, it died. Not even QUENTIAM could change death, once it had happened. Life/death was a binary state.

  Yet there had been a time, when my sister-selves and I had been young, when I had played at art and studied Arlbeni and considered cosmological history. The seeds for all these pursuits had been in me. I had chosen another path, for good or not, but it was precisely because I knew myself capable of religious thought that the missionaries angered me so much now. I had looked past that easy meaning to something more uncompromising—why couldn’t they?

  “One minival to t-hole passage . . . t-hole passage completed.”

  No sensation, no elapsed time. But the stars now had different configurations, and a planet turned below our orbit. Blue and white, it was a lovely thing, as was the yellow star that nourished it. The single continent in all that ocean of blue drifted into view, still lit with the densely clustered lights of the night city. QUENTIAM, of course, is everywhere, and so humanity has no real center. But Calyx, by sheer numbers of inhabitants, comes closest. Slowly it had accreted people who wanted to be with other people already there, each new addition changing the shape of the city, like the lovely shell reefs I had seen on in my fish work on ˄563.

  The other missionary, the one not sitting beside me, screamed.

  I whipped my head around. The machine body had fallen across the missionary, nearly crushing him. His head protruded from under the heavy metal body, the face distorted by pain, and one arm flailed wildly. The machine body lay completely inert, stiff as a dead biological.

  “QUENTIAM! What’s happening?” I hadn’t realized I’d spoken aloud until my yell mingled with the rest in the small cabin.

  “I don’t know!” QUENTIAM said, and silence descended abruptly as a knife.

  I don’t know.

  I don’t know.

  I don’t know.

  There are many things QUENTIAM does not know—It is not a magician, as It enjoys telling me—but the status of a machine body is not one of them. The machine state—I have inhabited it myself, for environments where no biological will suit—is the next closest thing to an upload. A person in machine state was connected to QUENTIAM not by a single soft-brain implant but by shared flows of energy and information. Everything the machine sensors picked up, at all wave lengths, was processed through QUENTIAM and back to the machine body’s computer brain. It wasn’t possible for QUENTIAM to not know what had just happened.

  The machine body moved and sat up. “What . . .”

  No one but me said anything. “You fainted,” I said, the word so absurd in this context that I felt blood warm my face. Then came a sudden rush of sound and activity. The fallen-upon missionary was examined for damage, found to be bruised but not hurt, his nanomeds already active. The shuttle docked at the orbital which, apparently, was the destination of both missionaries and of the machine body, and they all disembarked. A few minivals later the four-legged body and the woman in the helmet left after the shuttle had taken us through a second t-hole to a second orbital. Only I was left aboard.

  *QUENTIAM—what happened to the machine body?*

  *I don’t know.*

  The shuttle descended to Calyx.

  The city had changed completely in the half-year since our last bond-time. It was no less lovely, just different. Then the entire continent had soared with high, curving shapes, undulating buildings connected with sinuous bridges, the whole a city in the clouds done entirely in subtle shades of white. Shortly after that Bej and Camy, working together for the first time, had gotten the art contract. Apparently it was decided by some sort of vote, although I didn’t know of whom.

  My sister-selves had made Calyx the opposite of what I’d seen. The nanos had been reprogrammed to replace shimmer and purity with a riot of living foliage, so that it was difficult to see the buildings under the flora. Maybe the buildings were flora. Low flowering plants overgrew everything, even the moving walks. The dominant colors were dark, the purple of the photosynthetic bacteria plus dark reds and blues, but the effect was not somber. It was sexual. I stepped from the shuttle into a tumult of inflamed pollination.

  Camy and Bej stood waiting amid the flowers. We hugged and I said, “So you’re in love.”

  Bej laughed unhappily. “I told you she’d know immediately,” she said to Camy, who neither laughed nor answered. The horror of Haradil’s act lay in her eyes, plus perhaps something else.

  I said, “It’s beautiful, sisters.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Have you heard any more about . . .”

  “A little. Come with us.”

  They led me to a moving walk, which took us a short distance to the beach and a low structure covered with long, sinuous vines wild with magenta flowers. The city represented the intemperance we were all capable of, all my sister-selves. We did nothing by halves. Of course Camy and Bej, if they were in love, would create this sort of unrestrained living art. Just as I, working on a seeding on some planet long unvi
sited by the Great Mission, would stubbornly work for uninterrupted days and nights and days again on some adjustment to a species. Seliku had showed the same extravagance in cerebral form. Her theory of the origin of the universe was once so far beyond the usual thinking that all five of us had been ridiculed for at least two centuries. Now the Seliku Cosmology was widely accepted. And Haradil—

  “Have some tea, Akilo,” Bej said. We sat on cushions that looked like giant blossoms, or were giant blossoms, and sipped a thin, musky drink that also tasted flowery. I set my cup down when Seliku walked in through a tangle of vines.

  “Akilo! How are you?”

  Camy said bitterly, “How are any of us?” as I hugged Seliku. Oh, the comfort of physical contact with one’s sister-selves! It doesn’t matter how long or how far we’ve been apart, we are still an indivisible whole. That which we are individually grows greater as time goes on, but it can never be greater than what we are together. What one does, all do, and I have always had difficulty understanding the essential loneliness of those singletons for whom this isn’t true. What anchors them? How do they survive with only QUENTIAM, who is not human? How do they bear the isolation?

  Seliku let me go and accepted a cup of tea from Bej, asking gently, “He’s gone?”

  It was Camy who answered. “Of course he’s gone! Would you stay with us now?”

  Seliku didn’t have to answer. So Bej and Camy’s lover—they always chose together, and always insisted the person adopt a male body if not already wearing one—had fled. Well, I couldn’t blame him. A city created in celebration of sex could not compensate for a sister-self who’d destroyed a whole worldful of people. Not to an ethical person. Both Bej and Camy were taking their lover’s desertion hard. They have always stayed together, and so few differences distinguish one from the other. Still, I sensed that Camy was more bitter than Bej.