“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.