Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  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.

  I went to the vat room, climbed into an available vat, and uploaded into QUENTIAM.

  *Are you sure, Akilo, that you don’t want implants in the new body?* It asked.

  *I’m sure. No implants.*

  *Is this because of the nonsense Seliku has been saying?*

  *No implants, QUENTIAM. That’s my choice.*

  *Yes, it is.*

  The human mind does not do well in upload without visual simulations. I considered my standard sim, a forested bedroom copied from ˄894, and rejected it. Nor did I want our childhood home, or Calyx. Too many memories. Instead I created an austere room with a simple table, single chair and display screen. An open window looked out on a bare rocky plain. It was a room for thinking, for concentration.

  Seliku would have known what to look for in QUENTIAM, what data or processes, to see if It was fundamentally different. I did not. Instead I asked questions, an endless stream of questions, about the multiverse and spacetime. Some of the answers I didn’t understand. Some seemed contradictory. Since I didn’t know whether this was inherent in the science or represented a flaw in QUENTIAM, I gave up on the whole thing, created a door in my room, and went for a walk on the soothingly blank plain. No pulpy green, no looming fronds, no treacherous sand. Firm ground underneath my “feet,” and a horizon I could scan in all directions.

  The Arlbenists are wrong to think that filling the universe is a divine mission. Sometimes the best healer is emptiness.

  I was examining some old, round rocks of my own imagining when QUENTIAM suddenly said, *Akilo. Magnitude one news message.*

  *What?*

  *The Mori Core has been destroyed.*

  *Destroyed!*

  *Yes. There was an explosion and the entire structure crumpled from within.*

  *Do you . . . do you have visuals?*

  *Yes.*


  And then I was back in my austere room, watching the huge Mori Core cease to exist. The visuals were from the outside and slightly above, perhaps from a very low orbital. The Core, a huge precise structure of concentric rings, covered half a subcontinent.

  The Mori, in direct opposition to the Arlbenists, have over time made themselves more and more biologically similar, while the Arlbenists became more and more diverse in order to seed strange worlds. Mori favor substantial, heavily furred biologicals and cold worlds. The Core stood frosted with icicles, while the winter gardens between the concentric rings bloomed with low, lacy plants in alabaster, ivory, silver, very pale blue. People with white fur walked in the gardens.

  The next moment the entire huge structure was gone and a blinding flash of light filled my screen.

  *Was the First Mori in residence?*

  *Yes.*

  I tried to sort out my feelings. The Mori had claimed more and more worlds, had imposed their own ideas of order and justice on them, had sent Haradil to ˄17843 for a monstrosity she did not commit. But the Mori were not fundamentally evil—and they were people.

  *How many . . . how many sentients died?*

  *19,865,842 humans, 15,980 androids, 598,654 enhanced dokins.*

  I braced myself. *What caused the explosion, QUENTIAM?*

  *Quark release seems to best fit the data.*

  *Who used a quark-release device?*

  *Unknown.*

  *QUENTIAM—*

  *Akilo, I cannot monitor humans without implants if there are no sensors in their immediate indoor environments. You and your sister-selves demonstrated that already. I don’t know what human had a quark-release device inside the Core, or why, or what motive existed for the sabotage. I have reported that to the new First Mori, on ˄10236.*

  *Are you sure the . . . the saboteur was human?*

  *Androids are not created to cause any damage without direct human instruction, and dokins do not have the intellectual capacity to detonate, let alone create, a quark-release device. Therefore, by simple logic, the destroyer was human.*

  In upload—but not in merger—my thoughts are a separate program, hidden from QUENTIAM unless I choose to address It.

  *Is my new body almost done?*

  *No.*

  *Get me a link to Seliku.*

  She looked at me from the display screen, still in her ˄17843 body. She must have been standing in some great hall of the Communion of Cosmologists. Behind her rose tall pillars covered with flowers. “I heard, Akilo. And no, I can’t tell one way or the other, not for certain. There are a lot of people who hate the Mori, for religious or personal reasons. It could have been a human or . . . or not.”

  “Your best guess.”

  “Not.”

  *That is nonsense.* QUENTIAM said. *Seliku, I wish you would stop disseminating this misinformation.*

  In Seliku’s eyes, an exact image of the real Seliku, I saw fear.

  QUENTIAM’s parameters protect you from any retaliation by It, I wanted to say to her. But she already knew that. And she knew, too, that Its parameters could be the next thing to change.

  “Does the Communion have data on the explosion?” I asked her.

  “Yes, we have all QUENTIAM’s measurements. We’re sorting the data now. Alo, come home.”

  She knew I couldn’t hurry the creation of my body. Her plea had nothing to do with logic.

  “I’m coming,” I said, “as fast as I can.”

  Nothing else happened before my body was done, except for one thing: I dreamed.

  This was the second time I had dreamed in upload, supposedly an impossibility. To shorten the unbearable time waiting for my biological, I had put myself in down-program mode within QUENTIAM. There should have been no thoughts, no sensation, no anything. But a sort of sudden current ran through me and then I had the dream, the same one as before: Something menacing and ill-defined chased me through a shifting landscape, something unknowably vast, coming closer and closer, its terrifying breath on my back, its—

  *Your body is ready.*

  I downloaded into the body, climbed from the vat, and looked in the mirror.

  It was us, the body my sister-selves and I always used for bond time. A female all-human with pale brown skin, head hair in a dark green crest, black eyes. Four coiled tentacles, each a meter long, the digits slim and graceful—the body we would have grown up with had our creation occurred on a quiet planet. Nothing seemed amiss with the body. QUENTIAM had had the nanos make it perfectly.

  I let out a long breath.

  “I can still add an implant, you know. Not a full one, now that the brain is grown, but still very functional.”

  “No, thank you, QUENTIAM.”

  “It makes communication so much fuller.”

  “No, thank you.”

  “As you choose.”

  “Please tell Seliku that I’m done.”

  “She knows.”

  She came through the door a few minivals later, dragging her heavy small body, looking as exhausted as she had on ˄17843. I was over twice as tall as she, probably three times as strong. I picked her up and carried her, unprotesting, to the beach. We sat at the very edge of the land, our feet in the warm sea, away from any of QUENTIAM’s sensors.

  “Anything, Sel?”

  “No. I can’t even convince most of the Communion. They’re good cosmologists, but they weren’t there. They didn’t see the shuttle go, the station go. They still think that Haradil destroyed that star system, and they probably think my demented theory is a mind-defense to keep from acknowledging that. The only thing I’ve got on my side is my reputation, and I’m straining that.”

  I nodded. “Sel, while I was in upload, I dreamed.”

  She didn’t tell me that was impossible. She closed her eyes, as if absorbing a blow. I described the dream, adding, “I think it wasn’t my dream. I think it was QUENTIAM’s. Upload is supposed to be a separate subprogram within It, but I think I was—in some very tiny, tiny way—beyond upload into merged state. Sel, I don’t think you should get another body.”

  Her eyes remained closed, and her face grimaced in pain.

  “I’m not saying that nanomachinery and even t-holes aren’t safe. Or if they’re not, it will be one finite explosion, like Haradil’s system or the Mori Core, and we’ll be dead before we even realize it. But the upload state, even the machine state . . .” I remembered Haradil saying, I was QUENTIAM.

  “Yes,” Seliku said. “You’re right.”

  “Once before I dreamed in upload, the same dream. It was the day you first told me about Haradil. So even then . . . even then.”

  “Yes. You were just lucky about your body.” She opened her eyes and looked at it longingly.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, inadequately.

  “Not your fault. Will you carry me to the Communion hall? I’m very tired.”

  “Of course I will.”

  Tenderly I carried my sister-self back to her work. It was almost like cradling a child. I saw that there must come a new relationship between me and my one remaining sister-self, physically frail on this planet but mentally leading a crusade to convince the galaxy of cataclysmic danger. I would be her protector, caretaker, aide. The change between us was permanent. Nothing would ever be the same again.

  I was wrong. Many things are the same.

  Seliku has been unable to convince the galaxy of her theory. She has won a few adherents among cosmologists, but for most people, the idea that QUENTIAM might be decaying, might be unreliable, is impossible to even consider. It’s like saying gravity is unreliable. Which, I suppose, might happen next. That would convince everybody, or at least everybody who survived it.

  Meanwhile, some do not survive. There have been mistakes in vat nanos, creating bodies other than ordered, or killing the bodies before they were done. No one knows how many mistakes; I no longer trust QUENTIAM’s records.

  A new quasar has appeared in the sky, and six supernovas, all outside our galaxy. They fi
lled the sky, night after night, with brilliant light. Seliku says that is too many supernovas to be statistically random, but not even her colleagues all believe her. She works night and day to find the evidence, physical or experimental or mathematical, that may convince them. Her big question is this: Is the unseen other universe just brushing ours in passing, creating supernovas and quasars and small reconfigurations of spacetime that also change and reconfigure QUENTIAM? Or are the two universes set for a full collision, from which neither will emerge without changes so fundamental that basic particles themselves are affected, and all life ceases?

  The Arlbenists were wrong, in ways they could never have foreseen when Arlbeni created his Divine Mission over a hundred thousand years ago. We were never alone in the galaxy, and not only because spores have drifted in from beyond its edges and seeded non-DNA-based life here. Even without that panspermia, we were not alone. Humans were already everywhere because QUENTIAM, our collective and historical selves, filled spacetime. And we weren’t alone in a much more profound sense.

  I have suggested another question to Seliku, as well. Is it possible that the other universe, too, has a membrane like QUENTIAM, but more advanced? And that It knows what It’s doing in probing ours? On ˄17843, Seliku likened our brushes with the other universe to stones dropping in a pond. Dropped stones sometimes have droppers. Seliku dismisses this question, not because it’s completely stupid but because for that there really is no evidence. But I know she can imagine it. She is my sister-self, still, and sister-self to artists as well. She can imagine a Dropper of stones into the cosmic well between universes.

  What is It, or Them, like? Do they guess what effects their experiments have on us?

  None of this speculation reaches the Arlbenists, who still blithely seed worlds in the egocentric belief that only humans can create life. I, however, no longer correct and adjust Arlbenist seedings on other worlds. I won’t risk the vat rooms necessary for that. And I have my own work here, now, both in aiding Seliku in her all-important fight and in caring for her. Her nanomeds keep her healthy, but her body is not meant for this planet and is not doing well here. It doesn’t, surprisingly, bother me that I never leave Calyx. This is, finally, home, here with my new work and my sister-self. I am learning to grow a garden of edible plants, without nanos and without QUENTIAM, just in case. In a weird way, I’m not uncontent.