So again we walked, all the rest of that day and the next, taking turns carrying Haradil. We saved the last of our concentrated nutrients for Haradil and ate only a safe kind of raw leaf snatched from plants as we marched. The leaf tasted vile. Nanomeds help with neither taste nor hunger; in any civilized place, both are enjoyable human sensations. I could feel my body shift into energy-conservation mode, which made it harder to keep going but easier to not think. That, now, was my hope. To not think.
Finally, as darkness fell, we made camp in another small clearing. A fire, the blankets from our belts, stars overhead but not, I saw with exhausted gratitude, the gas giant. And as we sat around the fire, too dispirited to talk, Haradil awoke.
“What—”
“You’re with us. You’ve had nanomeds. Sit up,” Camy ordered.
Haradil did. She looked around, and then at us. Maybe Camy and Bej, the artists, could have imagined such a tormented expression, but I could not have.
Seliku said, neither gently nor harshly, “Haradil, we’ve forced our way onto this planet, and now we—”
“QUENTIAM let you come? The Mori let you come?”
“No,” Camy grated. “Sel just told you—we forced our way down. And now it looks as if our way home has just closed for good.”
“What do you mean?” Haradil cried. At least she was talking.
I said, from sudden pity, “Camy, don’t. QUENTIAM will rebuild the shuttle, you know that.”
“We don’t know anything!” Camy said.
Seliku said, still in that carefully neutral voice, as if she were addressing a skittish child, “Haradil, we’ll talk about getting home in a moment. Right now, we’re saying that we came all this way, with all this danger—we don’t have implants now, you know, none of us—to find out what happened. Why you destroyed that inhabited star system.”
Haradil looked at us hopelessly, her gaze moving from one face to another around the fire. In its flickering light, her gaunt face in its pygmy body looked older than QUENTIAM Itself.
Bej said, “Was it the Great Mission, Hari? Did you become an Arlbenist, and did that system include a planet with non-DNA life on it? There’s documentation now, you know, the Arlbenists were wrong, the galaxy wasn’t empty before humans began to fill it. If you became an Arlbenist—”
“I don’t know whether any planet in the system had non-DNA life,” Haradil said bleakly.
“So you—”
“I wasn’t an Arlbenist.”
Camy said, “Then why?” I saw her ferocity drive Haradil back into silence.
Seliku broke it. “And how! How could you turn an asteroid into a missile powerful enough to blow up a star? Even QUENTIAM said It didn’t know how to do that!”
“It didn’t,” Haradil said.
I burst out, “Then what happened?”
“Light happened,” Haradil said. “Pieces of light.”
“Pieces of what?” Camy demanded angrily. “What are you talking about?”
“Photons,” Seliku said. “Is that right, Haradil? You mean photons?”
“Yes.” She looked down at her ugly hands, the digits so thick that even in her thinness, firelight did not shine through them. “I was transforming an asteroid, more of a planetoid, in orbit around the star. I was—”
“You couldn’t have been,” Seliku said. “I’ve seen the Morit data on the explosion. That asteroid was in a deeply eccentric orbit—it had been captured by the star’s gravity only about a half-million years ago and was spiraling in to the stellar disk. Just before the explosion, the asteroid was very close to the star, getting a slingshot gravity assist. There’s no way even a machine body could have survived on it.”
“I know,” Haradil said. “I wasn’t on the asteroid.”
Seliku said, “Where were you?”
Instead of answering, Haradil said, “I was transforming the asteroid—trying to transform the asteroid—into a work of art. Light art. To be an artist like you, Bej. Like you, Camy. All four of you have… have things you do. I only had QUENTIAM.”
Bej said, “That’s where you were. Not on the star, but in upload with QUENTIAM. Directing the artwork through It. We’ve done that.”
Haradil didn’t look at Bej, and all at once I knew that she hadn’t been in upload, either. Haradil said, “The art was merged photons. You know, to create increased energy.”
“Yes,” Seliku said, but she looked a little startled. The rest of us must have looked blank because she said, “It’s how QUENTIAM operates, in part. It merges photons with atoms to create a temporary blend of matter and energy. It also forces shared photons between quantum states, to create entanglement. It’s how QUENTIAM makes the t-holes, how It moves around information—how it exists, actually. The whole process is the basis for QUENTIAM’s being woven into spacetime. That’s just basic knowledge.”
Not to me, it wasn’t, and from Bej and Camy’s faces, not to them, either. But Haradil had apparently learned enough about it.
I said, trying to keep my voice soft enough not to push Haradil into more opposition, “Is that what happened, Hari? You were directing QUENTIAM to create this ‘art’ and somehow you massed enough photon energy or something to blow up the star?”
“QUENTIAM wouldn’t permit that to happen,” Seliku said. “Anyway, the energy you’d need would be huge, more than you’d get from any light sculpture.”
Bej said, “Was it a sculpture, Hari?”
“No. It was… was going to be… what does it matter what I was making! I couldn’t make it and I killed a star system!”
I said gently, “The sculpture doesn’t matter if you don’t think it does, my sister-self. What matters is how the system blew up. What happened?”
“I don’t know!” Haradil cried. “I was there, working on the art, and all at once the asteroid slipped away from my control and sped toward the star, and I don’t know how!”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Bej said. “If you were in upload with QUENTIAM and that happened, then It would tell you what happened the moment you asked.”
Seliku said, “Did you ask?”
Haradil was silent. Camy rose to her feet and uncoiled her tentacles. Lit from the firelight below, she suddenly looked terrible, avenging. “Didn’t you ask, Haradil? You blew up a star system and you didn’t ask what happened?”
“Of course she did,” Bej said. “Hari?”
“I asked later,” Haradil said. I had seen that posture on primitive mammals on other worlds. Haradil cringed, from fear of her pack. It turned my stomach sick.
“I asked later and QUENTIAM said… said It didn’t know what I’d done.”
“That’s not possible!” Camy said angrily. “If you were in upload with QUENTIAM, it would know exactly what you’d done and so would you! You’re lying!”
The two words hung in the firelit air. Insects whined, unseen, in the unfriendly dark. We never lied to each other. Sister-selves did not lie to each other. Your sister-selves were the only ones in the universe that you could say anything to, confess anything to, because the capacity for the same action lay in each of them. A sister-self always accepted everything about you, as no lover ever did, no friend, no one else but QUENTIAM.
“She’s not lying,” I said.
Camy turned on me. “But if she was in upload and did something to—”
“She wasn’t in upload,” I said slowly. “Were you, Haradil? You weren’t in upload state, you were in merged state. You’d merged a second time with QUENTIAM.”
Haradil turned her eyes to me, and in the relief mirrored in them, I knew that I’d been right. She was relieved that now we knew.