“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 remembered 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.
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—”