Bej burst out, “Oh, Hari! Why? The first time you did that you came back so… so… merging reduces people, destroys them! You left parts of yourself behind in QUENTIAM, or something—you know you were never the same after that!”
“I know,” Hari said, so simply that my heart turned over. Haradil, knowing herself to be incomplete, fragmented, had gone back into merged state to find the lost pieces of herself. Or maybe just to redeem what she saw as a wasted life (“All four of you have… have things you do”) by creating this one stupendous, innovative piece of art. Which of us hasn’t dreamed of that kind of glory and fame for our work? Only Seliku had attained it.
It was Seliku who moved the discussion back from Haradil’s state to what Seliku saw as the more important state: QUENTIAM’s. She said quietly, “If Haradil is not lying, then QUENTIAM is.”
We gaped at her. Seliku was a cosmologist; she knew QUENTIAM as well as any human could. She knew that QUENTIAM could not lie.
“That’s impossible!” Bej said.
“Yes, it’s impossible,” Seliku agreed, and the four of us stared at each other across the low fire.
Haradil said despairingly, “Don’t you see that it doesn’t matter whether QUENTIAM’s lying or not? It only matters that even if I don’t know why, I destroyed life. A whole worldful of life. My art, my action. And nothing I can do—nothing anyone can do, not even QUENTIAM—can ever change even one tiny piece of that guilt and shame.”
I think I knew then, in that moment, what would happen to Haradil. But my attention was on Seliku. She and I were the only scientists. I said to her, “If QUENTIAM can’t lie, and if It is lying, what does that mean?”
She answered obliquely, her tentacles quiet in her lap, her voice just low enough to reach the four of us sealed in our circle of wavering firelight amid the dark. “I know none of you understand my work, the algorithms that won me the Zeotripab Prize. You’d have to understand how the universe itself works.
“Spacetime vibrates, you know, in its most minute particles. They vibrate through space. Gravitons—one of the particles, the ones that create the force of gravity—are the only particles that also oscillate minutely in time. That’s what makes them the only particles—I don’t know how to say this without the math—the only particles that ‘leak’ out of the universe, affecting its mass. That’s why the universe keeps expanding. That loss of gravitons is what makes spacetime possible at all, which in turn makes everything else possible.”
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.