Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  Seliku sat on a flower-cushion and said, “I don’t know much more than I did before. QUENTIAM still blocks all of Haradil’s former interactions with It, of course, and the information It would give me from the Morit records is sparse. You know how the Mori are. Their little corner of the galaxy is considered theirs, and they limit contact even with QUENTIAM to the absolute necessities. In fact, implants are now forbidden at the Mori Core.”

  “Forbidden!” I said.

  “For the last century,” Seliku said. Century—another of QUENTIAM’s inexplicable, archaic terms. But I knew what time span it denoted: 60.8 years on my natal Jiu. I tried, and failed, to picture life unconnected to QUENTIAM, or connected only through external devices.

  “I finally got another Mori to speak to me,” Seliku continued, and her cup trembled slightly in her hand. “It wasn’t easy.”

  Bej said, “How did you . . . oh, your reputation, of course,” and smiled apologetically. Bej and Camy were good local artists, but they were known in no more than a handful of star systems, and I was an unknown laborer among the seedings. But Seliku is famous.

  She said, “The Mori I just talked to repeated what the First One told me: Haradil blew up the system by destroying the star, a G3 on the very edge of the Morit territory. In fact, to say it was Morit is debatable, but QUENTIAM awarded it to them. The Great Mission apparently seeded the planet so long ago that not even QUENTIAM had a record of the seeding, which is the only reason that the Mori could claim it at all.”

  I said, startled, “QUENTIAM didn’t have a record?”

  “It was either one of the very first seedings, when QUENTIAM was just establishing sensors everywhere, or . . . I don’t know. It seemed strange to me, too, but that’s what It said. Anyway, the inhabited planet was a cold, small, iron-core world with an atmosphere and lakes heavy on methane. The seedings were adapted anaerobes with a nervous system highly enough evolved to swim in communities. The Mori report indicated the evolution of language, including some imaginative communication that they decided was poetry.”

  My sister-selves looked at me. I said, “It was probably a combination of sound and motion to convey non-literal ideas.” I’d seen that among many seedings. My throat constricted. Sentients with poetry.

  “After that last report,” Seliku continued, “the Mori closed the system, like all the rest of their empire. They don’t know, or won’t say, how Haradil got interested in it. But she built a missile out of an asteroid, aimed it at the star, and ducked back through a t-hole before it hit. The missile badly . . . badly warped spacetime around the star just before it—the missile, I mean—burned up. I saw the Morit data on the explosion. The warping somehow blew up the star.”

  “ ‘Somehow’ ?” Camy cried. “What do you mean ‘somehow’ ? How did Haradil know how to make such a thing?”

  “I don’t know,” Seliku said. Her hand now trembled so much she set her cup on the spongy floor. Moments before, I had had to do the same.

  Bej said, “Seliku, could you have made such a thing? With all your knowledge of quantum blending?”

  Seliku said carefully, “It’s been theoretically possible for a while. But QUENTIAM doesn’t know how to translate that into nano programming. And It wouldn’t have done such a thing, anyway. Not blown up an inhabited system.”

  There was a long moment of silence while each of us did the same thing: *QUENTIAM, do you know how to create a working missile that can warp spacetime around or inside a star so as to make it explode?*

  *No.*

  Seliku waited without rancor. She herself would have checked on the statement, had she not already known the answer. That was us.

  Camy said, “Do you think the Mori know how she did it?”

  Bej burst out, “Or why?”

  Seliku said, “They don’t know either answer. But immediately after the explosion, QUENTIAM of course identified Haradil as the cause and delivered her to the Mori. They ran whatever their equivalent of a judgment process is, decided she was guilty, and put her down on a quiet planet. They wouldn’t tell me where it is, but I combed all the data QUENTIAM has on recent t-hole use and I think she’s on ˄17843.”

  “Where’s that?” Bej asked.

  “On the outer galactic rim, on the Jujaju Arm. It’s a new discovery, and one clearly attributable to the Mori, so they’ve claimed it even though it’s nowhere near their territory. QUENTIAM has accepted its designation as a quiet planet.”

  “So—” I said, and stopped.

  “So that’s that,” Seliku said, and we all shifted on our cushions and said nothing. QUENTIAM does not overhear our thoughts unless we direct them to him via implant. Only in the upload state, and one other, is mental privacy lost. But my sister-selves and I didn’t need to overhear each other’s thoughts; we shared them.

  We were going to break the prohibition on that quiet planet. We were going to go get the only person who could tell us what had actually happened in that star system explosion: Haradil herself.

  There are many reasons why people grow bodies without implants. Most people try it, at least briefly, in their youth, just to define the boundary between themselves and QUENTIAM: What is It and what is me? We five had done that for a few years, a long time ago. Others do it for religious/philosophical reasons, as apparently the Mori had decided. Still others with adventurous genes like to amuse themselves with the challenge of survival without QUENTIAM. Not all of these survive their adventure. There are artists (although not Bej and Camy) who dislike the bond with QUENTIAM, feeling it less a connection than a tether. Finally, there are assorted crazies who just don’t like being a part of anything else, not even the membrane woven through all of spacetime.

  I stood on the beach, Camy and Bej’s lovely flower-strewn beach, and watched the warm small waves roll between softly planted islands.

  *QUENTIAM, I want the basic data-set on ˄17843.*

  *Seliku believes that is the place where Haradil was sent.*

  *Yes. Give me an external durable.*

  If QUENTIAM was surprised by my request for a durable, I would never know it. It directed me to the nearest slot for the nanomachinery buried below Calyx, which produced a thin, flexible, practically indestructible sheet of carbon tubules covered with writing.

  I can read. It had been a few of QUENTIAM’s “centuries” since I had done so, of course, but we had all learned. I assumed that the intriguing, archaic skill was still with me. I was wrong.

  The sheet in my hands was dense with symbols and numbers, and only a few looked familiar. I felt my new face grow warm.

  *Give me the basic set directly.*

  *˄17843 is a transformed and seeded satellite orbiting a class 6 gas giant, which in turn orbits a type 34 star at an average distance of 2.3 PU. The moon is called by the inhabitants “Paletej,” which means roughly “unwanted” in Mori. It has .6 gravity, class 9 illumination, a diameter of 36 filliub, type 18 planetary composition, pressure of gk8, axial inclination of two degrees. There are two small equatorial continents and an even smaller polar one, with temperature range of 400-560.*

  I translated all this into human terms. Haradil’s prison would be seasonless, warm, adequately lit. No moons, since ˄17843 was itself a moon, but the gas giant would loom huge in the sky.

  QUENTIAM continued. *Paletej is served by one t-hole, in close orbit with the Mori station. The Mori seeded the moon liberally with Level 3 plant life, which have completely covered one continent and have begun to spread to a second through wind and water. There is no animal life above Level 4.*

  Level 3 plant life was pre-flowering. Flowers begat fruit, which is much more concentrated nutrition than greens. With no animal protein available above the level of worms, the prisoners would have to spend nearly all their time in food-gathering and eating, unless their bodies had been adapted otherwise. I doubt that they had.

  My tentacle closed tight on the durable, which crumpled but did not crease.

  QUENTIAM was not finished. *Palet
ej has also been densely seeded with nanospores that consume all atoms with a Konig designation higher than 45. A hundred meters below the surface, counter-nanos stop atom consumption, to prevent danger to planetary composition.*

  No metals. No way to make any tools more primitive than wood, stone, maybe basic ceramics. And, of course, no nanomachinery.

  I stared blindly at the soft sea. *What . . . what sort of bodies were made for the prisoners?*

  *That information is not accessible to you.*

  *Burn you, QUENTIAM! Do the bodies at least have nanomeds? Tell me!*

  *That information is not accessible to you.*

  But I already knew the answer. Quiet planets had no nanomeds for anyone but transients, had no nanomachinery of any kind, had no implants to connect to QUENTIAM. That’s what made them quiet. That’s what made them death.

  I stumbled along the beach, barely able to see from rage. *Grow four bodies for me and my sister-selves. Conform each to the best possible fit to basic data set of ˄17843.* I would not call the cursed place “Paletej.” Haradil was not “unwanted.” *Grow the four bodies with full nanomeds but without implants.*

  *Akilo, you and your sister-selves cannot get down to Paletej. The atmosphere, too, is densely seeded with the engineered spores.*

  *How do the prisoners get down?* Any shuttle would be consumed and crash.

  *That information is not available to you.*

  There must be a t-hole on the surface, one restricted to the Mori alone. QUENTIAM’s parameters permitted that, part of its delicate balancing of group possession with preservation as the greatest good of the universe. But what Haradil was enduring was not preservation, was not life, was not endurable.

  Who had programmed the moral parameters of QUENTIAM’s remote ancestor, all those hundreds of millennia ago? My own barely human ancestors, of course. And the basic principles had been carried forward as QUENTIAM constantly recreated itself, extended its penetration of spacetime, became intertwined with human consciousness itself. How had justice, in that evolutionary progression, become corrupted? No beings should “own” a t-hole. Down that gravity well lay blind possessiveness, so that you ended up with the Arlbeni disciples, who had perverted a sense of purpose into believing that they alone owned morality. To disagree with Arlbeni was to be unethical, evil. No matter what the evidence said about Arlbeni himself being wrong about the emptiness of the universe.

  What I was really afraid of was that QUENTIAM was wrong. That, unknown to It, Haradil had somehow discovered on the planet she’d destroyed some evidence of non-DNA-based life, existing right alongside the seeded anaerobes. I was afraid that she had blown up the place for precisely that reason. That she had become an Arlbenist, melded to the Great Mission, and lost to us.

  If there had been panspermic, non-seeded life there, QUENTIAM should have known about it. QUENTIAM had had enough sensors in that star system to transmit detailed explosion data, including what Seliku had called “warping.” We had all asked QUENTIAM, Seliku and Bej and Camy and I and probably also the Mori, if the planet had held non-DNA-based life. It had said no. QUENTIAM could withhold information, but It could not lie.

  Of course, if the panspermic life was very new, and in an isolated corner of the planet, it’s possible that QUENTIAM might not have known about it and Haradil had.

  *Grow the bodies I specified, QUENTIAM.*

  *I have already begun. But, I repeat, you cannot get down to Paletej in them.*

  *We can get as far as the t-hole above it.*

  *Yes. It is a universal t-hole.*

  *As they all should be.*

  It didn’t answer. Uncrumpling the durable in my hand, the sheet of symbols I could not understand, I realized that probably Seliku could read them. She was a cosmologist. I went to look for my sisters, my other selves, my solace in this suddenly icy city by the soft sea.

  By the time our bodies were ready, so was our shuttle. Nano-built on one of Calyx’s many orbitals, it was a sprawling thing, fragile as a flower except for the tough nano-maintained force shield that surrounded it. The shield was protection against stray meteors and other cosmic junk. The shuttle, which didn’t need to survive an atmospheric entry, didn’t need to be durable.

  Our bodies did. They turned out to be pretty much as I’d envisioned, and not too different from the one I was wearing now except for being much lighter and less muscular. Short, two legs, four tentacles ending in superflexible digits. My current webbed feet had been replaced with tough feet with prehensile toes, complementing the prehensile tail, in case ˄17843 had plants large enough to climb. We weren’t sure what specific flora to expect there, and the Mori weren’t sharing information.

  The new body’s ears could detect the widest possible range of sound waves; electromagnetic sensing was as good as feasible in a biological; smell was stronger than even in celwyns. A double layer of fine, shit-brown fur made us as weatherproof as we’d need to be for the temperature range, although at the upper end, we might be a bit uncomfortable.

  “Not very pretty, are they,” Camy said, gazing at the full-grown bodies in their clear vats. “The faces are so flat.”

  “You could have ordered modifications earlier,” I pointed out, “but you said you didn’t care.”

  “I don’t care.”

  Seliku said, “QUENTIAM, are you ready to begin uploads?”

  “Yes.” Its deepest, most authoritative tone; It was offended.

  “We’re ready, too.” But the co-vats had begun to assemble even before she finished speaking. I climbed into mine, lay down, and was instantly asleep.

  When I woke, an unknowable time later, the download was complete. I climbed out of my vat simultaneously with my sisters. It was a hard climb; we were now engineered for a gravity one-third less than Calyx’s. But that wasn’t the reason that we gazed at each other in dismay.

  “Are . . . are you all right?”

  “Yes,” Seliku said. “Are you?”

  “Yes, but . . .”

  But I’d had to ask. Looking at Seliku, Camy, Bej as we stood in our new dull fur, our new flat faces, I hadn’t automatically known that, yes, they were all right because otherwise QUENTIAM would have told me. I’d had to look, to question. Camy put her hand to her head and I knew what she was thinking: QUENTIAM was gone. We were without implants. We were on our own, not even able to image each other in real-time if one of us stepped into the next room.

  “It feels very strange,” Bej said softly. “How will we . . .”

  “We will,” Seliku said. “Because we must.”

  I felt myself nodding. We would, because we must.

  QUENTIAM said, “The shuttle can take you up to the orbital now, and your t-hole shuttle is ready there.”

  “Not yet,” I said, not without pleasure. It’s hard to surprise QUENTIAM, but I guessed that we were doing it now. ‘There’s more things I want to prepare.”

  “More things?” Definitely offended. I saw Bej grin slightly at Camy.

  “Yes,” I said, savoring the moment. “We’ll be ready to go soon.”

  The four of us waddled laboriously—curse this gravity—to my lab. I had set it up days ago in a room grown near the vat room. Ostensibly the lab’s purpose was to study the microbiology of the flowers Bej and Camy had designed and QUENTIAM had created for Calyx, just as if they were biologicals or cyborgs that had naturally evolved from seedings. And I had done some of that work, storing the data in QUENTIAM, carefully packing and storing both specimens and experimental materials in opaque canisters for any future biologists who might want them. But that was not all I had done.

  *QUENTIAM, give me—*

  Give me nothing. It couldn’t hear me. I had no implant.

  The eeriest sensation came over me then: I am dead. It was a thousand-fold-stronger version of what I had felt moments before, in the vat room. I was detached, unconnected, alone, in the supreme isolation of death.

  But of course I was not. My sister-selves were there, and I clutc
hed Bej’s hand. She seemed to understand. We were not alone, not cut off, not dead. We had each other.

  This must be what Haradil felt. And she did not have the rest of us.

  For a brief moment I hated QUENTIAM. It had done this, It and Its parameters for permissible human behavior. QUENTIAM had gone along with this brutal Morit “justice,” and now Haradil . . .

  Camy said quietly, “It must be even worse for her. Because . . . you know.”

  We all knew.

  There are five possible states for a human being. Without implants, as we were now. Implanted, which is the normal state. A machine body, which is really just a much heightened version of implants plus a virtually indestructible body. Upload, which is bodiless but still a separate subprogram within QUENTIAM, with its own boundaries. And merged, in which individual identity is temporarily lost in the larger membrane-self of QUENTIAM. Few humans merge, and most never return. Those that do are never really the same.

  Haradil, three bond-times ago, had merged with QUENTIAM.

  It had been after a bad love affair. We all took those hard; I thought of Camy and Bej’s ravaged looks when I’d landed on Calyx. We were all intemperate, single-minded in romance as in all else. But Haradil, who had never really chosen a field of work, had been the one who tried to handle the emotional pain by merging with QUENTIAM. And she had come back calmer but almost totally silent, unwilling to tell us what it had been like. “Not unwilling,” she’d finally said. “Unable. It’s an experience you can’t put into words.” It had been the longest speech she’d made since returning.

  I’d been afraid for her then. We’d all been afraid. But she had continued calm, silent, remote during the next two bond-times. With us and not with us. Neither happy nor unhappy, but somehow beyond both.

  “Not human,” Bej had finally said, and we’d turned on her in anger, because we’d all thought it ourselves.