Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  Bej said naively, “You proved all that?”

  Seliku smiled. “No. Only a tiny part of it. It’s old knowledge. QUENTIAM functions by manipulating those minute time oscillations, in even more minute ways. But it means that It cannot lie. It’s bound by the physical constants of the universe. If It said that It doesn’t know how Haradil blew up the star system, then It doesn’t know.”

  “But,” I said, “could It and Haradil together—they were merged, remember—have done it? Could It have used Haradil to do that? In fact, did anyone ask QUENTIAM if It had blown up the system?”

  Camy gasped. “QUENTIAM?”

  “It can’t lie,” I said, staring at Seliku, “but It can destroy, right? It destroyed the shuttle and the station. There might have been Mori on that station, we don’t know. Within all those physical constants you mentioned, are there any that could absolutely keep QUENTIAM from destroying a star system with life on it?”

  “Physical constants?” Seliku said. “No.”

  Bej said, “But there are QUENTIAM’s own parameters! It preserves, not destroys! Everyone knows that! Everyone knows that!”

  “Seliku,” I said, “are QUENTIAM’s moral parameters as woven into spacetime as Its inability to lie?”

  “Yes. Its moral parameters are programming, but inviolable programming, core programming. Redundancy doesn’t even begin to describe how deeply those parameters are a part of QUENTIAM. They can’t be touched, not even by It.”

  “Nonetheless,” I said, “if It can’t lie, and if Haradil blew up the star system while she was merged with QUENTIAM, then It blew up the system. It destroyed life. Not you, Hari—” I turned to her, beseeching, “—not you. QUENTIAM.”

  “I don’t believe it!” Camy said. “QUENTIAM can’t do that! It can’t destroy . . .” She fell silent, and I knew she remembered the shuttle, the station.

  Haradil had not moved. She sat looking down at her tentacles in her lap, an unconscious mirror of Seliku’s pose, although Hari’s shoulders slumped forward.

  “Haradil,” I repeated, “you didn’t do it. QUENTIAM did.”

  Finally she raised her eyes to mine. “It doesn’t matter, Alo. There’s no difference. I was in the merged state. At that time, I was QUENTIAM.”

  We all stared at her. None of us knew what to say to that. None of us but her had been there.

  “I think,” Bej finally said, “that it’s time for us to go home.”

  We couldn’t leave until morning. The engineered spores stored in our cloth belts, the same spores that had created the biological floaters that brought us downstairs, needed sunlight to feed on for both growth and inflation. We could only leave the surface on a clear, sunny day. We could only leave from a large open space among the huge ferns.

  And, of course, once we’d floated to the upper atmosphere, we could only survive if QUENTIAM had created another shuttle to pick us up.

  Nobody mentioned this. We talked very little as we wrapped ourselves in blankets near the fire. I couldn’t get to sleep, and I doubted the others could, either.

  Seliku would be thinking about the paradox of QUENTIAM. It couldn’t destroy, and It had destroyed. She would be going over the mathematics, the spacetime logic, trying to find a way out.

  Bej and Camy would be wrestling with the moral problem. Haradil had been QUENTIAM; It had killed; had Haradil therefore really killed? Could you commit genocide without knowing it, and if you did, was it still genocide?

  Haradil—I didn’t know what Haradil was thinking. “I was QUENTIAM,” she’d said. I didn’t know, couldn’t imagine, what that actually meant. But she was right, in one sense—she hadn’t been Haradil for a long time now.

  It seemed millennia before I fell asleep.

  When I woke, as the first dismal light was filtering through the pulpy ferns, Haradil was gone.

  “Burn her in hell forever!” Camy cried. I didn’t know what “hell” was; Camy liked to poke around in QUENTIAM’s archaic deebees. Had liked to.

  Seliku said, “Alo, can you track her?”

  “Yes.”

  Hastily we packed. The morning was overcast and drizzly; we couldn’t have left ˄17843 that day even if Haradil hadn’t run away. At first I scented her easily. After following for half the morning, I was sure. “She’s heading back to the beach,” I said. “To the settlements.”

  Bej, her dirty face set hard to avoid tears, said, “She wants them to kill her. She still thinks she was responsible for . . . for the genocide.”

  “Maybe she was,” Camy said bitterly. I felt that bitterness echo in myself. Didn’t Haradil realize we would follow her—and thereby risk our own lives? She knew we planned on leaving ˄17843 today. She, one-fifth of a sister-self, was endangering the whole. At what point did moral atonement turn into selfishness?

  And if our circumstances were reversed, would I have done the same thing?

  I might have. The realization only worsened my bitterness.

  We were taking a different, more direct route toward the coast than the one we’d arrived by. The ground sloped downward and became much more marshy. The flora changed, too. As the ground became wetter, the huge, looming ferns were replaced by smaller, sedgelike plants farther apart.

  “Wait,” Seliku called from the rear of our dismal procession. “Akilo, these plants here are the ones we’ve been eating and I don’t see any ahead of us. I think we should stop and eat here, while we can.”

  “That’s a good idea.”

  We stuffed handfuls of the vile things into our mouths and chewed. These small, light bodies packed very little extra fat; my tentacles had the thinned, bluish look of rapid weight loss. But at least the leaves temporarily stopped the ache in my stomach.

  After eating, we slogged forward. In the marshland, walking was much harder. Each footstep made a quiet spurgling sound. The ground grew steadily wetter and muddier, broken by small hillocks that offered better footing but also swarmed with small pale worms. The sun, behind thick gray clouds, did little to warm my fur, and nothing could warm my heart.

  “Alo . . . stop a minute . . .”

  I turned in time to see Camy vomit. A moment later the cramps hit me. All the leaves I’d eaten came back up in a disgusting green mass. And then another. And then I felt it at the other end of my body.

  When it was over, I moved away, toward a hillock of mossy sedge, and lay down. The nanomeds were efficient; I would feel better in just a few moments, and there would be no lingering toxins in my body. But that wasn’t what bothered me.

  “That takes care of lunch,” Seliku said, flopping down beside me. Worms crawled toward her tail. “Oh, I hate this place.”

  Bej said passionately, “We weren’t meant for this life. This is how animals live, not people!”

  I took this as a moral statement, not a biological one. Anyway, I didn’t have the heart to argue.

  Camy, always the most fastidious of us, said, “There’s sand over there. I’m going to scrub my disgusting ass.”

  Seliku rolled onto her side to face me. “Alo, those were the same leaves we’ve been eating all along. Exactly the same. You said so.”

  “Yes. The only thing I can figure out is that they were enantiomorphs.”

  Seliku said, “Mirror images.”

  “Yes. Some molecules, especially but not exclusively crystals, are right-handed and some are left-handed—they’re called enantiomorphs of each other. Biologicals can usually digest only one or the other.”

  Bej said, “Mirror images of each other. Like us.”

  I smiled at her. “I sense an artwork coming on.”

  “Maybe.” She smiled back, and I thought: This is the only good moment we’ve had on this foul satellite.

  Camy screamed.

  The three of us jumped up. Bej raced toward Camy and I yelled, “No, Bej! Stop!”

  “She’s sinking!”

  “Stop! You’ll go, too! I’ve seen this, I can help her! Camy, don’t struggle! Arch backwards and lie slowly�
�slowly—onto your back and spread your arms and legs as wide as you can. Slowly.”

  She had only sunk into the quicksand a little above her ankles. She arched backward and spread her four tentacles. I could see them tremble. Her feet didn’t come up from the sand but she sank no further, bent backwards like a bow, her eyes and mouth just above the sand. “Please . . . Oh, please . . .”

  Arlbenists prayed. We did not. I yanked the rope from my belt and threw it toward Camy. It wasn’t long enough and fell short. Before I could even ask, Bej had her rope out and was knotting the two together, her digits trembling. I talked to Camy, anything that came into my mind: “Camy it’s going to be all right. I’ve seen this on ˄3982 and ˄12983, it’s just ordinary sand mixed with upswelling water and so it behaves like a liquid, it will buoy you up just like any water—” On ˄3982 I had seen a small biological sucked down by quicksand in the time it took me to open my pack. “We’ll get you out, it’s going to be fine, remember when we were children, we played at rescuing each other on quiet planets and—” What was I saying? This was no game. Fear makes idiots of us all.

  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 reme
mbered 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?

  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.